The Queen's Librarian (24 page)

“Oh, well, that part’s true,” Slade said, still scowling at the book. “From what I understand, the competition to come collect the offerings used to be quite fierce. We’re very fond of your cider. And those ham buns.” He paused at the resulting silence and peered up. With a quirk of his eyebrows, Slade covered his ears when he noticed Laurie staring at them, then he looked at Lucas, eyes wide and a little worried. “What? Should I not have said that?”

“No, it’s….” Lucas frowned and clutched his own book to his chest. “Um. Don’t…. Just…. It’s fine.”

I think.

Still, Lucas couldn’t lose the frown. He’d only been trying to reassure Slade. He hadn’t meant to poke holes in his own culture’s beliefs and rituals. And now that he sort of had to think about it, what Slade said made too much sense. Lucas had made his offering to the Green Warden the other night, asked for fine harvesting weather, and Mister Scontun had granted it. With conditions, true, but in this particular case, that was academic.

Strange. Lucas fancied himself a scholar, when he wasn’t playing at farmer and landlord. He should be happy when he stumbled across a new bit of information.
Provable
information, at that. Instead, he felt weirdly disappointed, like when he was small and found out it had been his mother putting oranges in his Midwinter basket all along and not the jolly White Bear rewarding him for making sure the swans in the lake didn’t starve.

Although… all right, he’d asked the Green Warden for good weather, and he’d gotten it. His tenants and the rest of Orchard Downs were going to eat well this winter because of it. That really was enough.

Lucas pulled up a smile for Slade. “Just don’t tell us anything we shouldn’t know about the Sentinel Wardens, yeah?” He winked. “Knowing they’re watching is the only thing that keeps Laurie in line sometimes.”

Laurie looked up from his book to make sure Lucas saw him rolling his eyes. “What’s that book, then?” he asked, jerking his chin to the one Lucas held against his chest.

“Ah.” Lucas slid a fond smile over at Alex, which made Alex perk up a little and smile back. “Well, I’ve been thinking about what Parry said down at the Circle. And what you were saying earlier, Alex.” He stepped over to the table and laid the book down over the one that had been making Alex scowl for almost an hour now.

Alex stared down at the book and frowned this time. “I’m beginning to think you have a weird thing for books of lineage and descent.”

Lucas smirked. “It depends on how you define ‘thing’, I suppose. See, part of my job here is to enter deaths and new births and marriages and whatnot, and to make sure the lineage is mapped correctly whenever there’s a claim on a will or something of the sort. And one of the first things I did when I was learning how to do it was to look up the Bookers.”

He blushed a little. It was silly, really, but Alex had been away at the time, and it had seemed like… perhaps a tiny connection, with Lucas here in the Queen’s castle, his finger lightly brushing the ink shaped in Alex’s name, and Alex all the way in Sturnin, or wherever he’d been on his father’s business at the time. Lucas had supposed back then that it was better than writing Alex’s name framed in hearts, like he’d seen Nan do when Huntley had been courting her; now it seemed like one of those silly little romantic things that made the nostalgia ache with a sweet charm he didn’t mind Alex knowing about.

And Alex did, Lucas could tell, because Alex was looking at him with The Eyes again, but there was a warmth behind them that set Lucas’s toes tingling. He let himself just
stare
for a moment, Alex staring back, and Lucas would swear he could hear the distant strains of violins, and the
connection
, the sheer—

“Oh give me strength,” Laurie muttered from his table behind Alex.

Alex turned to glare at him. “We were having A Moment here, do you mind?”

“Only when I have to watch you having sex with your eyes.”

“Can you try not to be a complete boor in front of magical beings from another world?” Lucas snapped. Mouth tight, he turned back to Alex. “
Any
way.” He flipped through the pages until he landed on the one listing Alex’s birth. “Parry said I should go to the Library and find the key to my heart.” He pointed to Alex’s name.

Alex grinned down at it for a moment, eyes sparkling, then he lifted his chin for a kiss. Lucas happily dipped down and obliged, despite Laurie’s grumbling.

“That’s one of the best things you’ve ever said to me,” Alex said when Lucas pulled back. He smirked. “Also, if this is what Parry was talking about, it seems he’s finally admitted he hasn’t got a chance. Unless….” He narrowed his eyes. “He didn’t mean for you to go digging up
his
family’s lines of descent, did he?”

“I’m quite certain he didn’t.”

“Well, then.” Alex nodded and smoothed down the lapels of his waistcoat. “Carry on.”

Lucas snorted. “Don’t look so smug.”

“I look just the right amount of smug.” Alex waggled his eyebrows. “This is a big day for me. Pardon me while I bask.”

“Bask all you like,” Laurie put in. “Although, it will likely make me actually sick up all over Lucas’s precious books, but you feel free if it makes you happy. It still doesn’t tell us where the Key is.”

“It does, though,” Lucas replied. He lifted his eyebrows at Alex.

“But….” Alex paused and looked again at where Lucas’s finger still rested on the page. “I’m not quite sure I’m getting it.” He frowned. “I mean,
I
certainly don’t have the book.”

“No, you don’t,” Lucas agreed. He moved his finger and pointed at the unfamiliar writing just below Alex’s name.

Alex’s frown deepened. “Who’s Ashlar? And why is the Key behind him?” He paused and tilted the book sideways. “Her?”

“You’re joking.” Laurie was shaking his head. “‘Behind the ashlar’? That’s all it says?” He stood and looked around the room. “He couldn’t have. They’re as tall as me and twice as wide. There’s no way they can simply be moved about. And Parry hasn’t got any magic. I’d know.” He turned to Alex. “Ashlar isn’t a who, it’s a what.” He waved at the massive stone blocks that made up the walls. “And there’s simply no way. He couldn’t have. I have magic and
I
probably couldn’t have. I mean, you know, if I knew the proper spells. I doubt even Cráwa could do it. Anyway, the whole castle is lousy with ashlar. How are we supposed to find the one it’s behind?”

“Hmm,” said Lucas and strolled over to the western wall of the Library, where the uneven seams of the stones had prevented the builders from installing more shelves because the masonry jutted out and made anchoring impossible.

Heh, likely some secret passageway back there
, one of the builders had joked to Lucas.
Place like this has got to be riddled with them.

It wasn’t. Lucas knew this because he and Laurie had scoured the castle at every opportunity and had never found a single one. And if anyone would have found something in which to get up to mischief, it would have been Laurie.

So. Not a secret passageway. But that didn’t mean it had no secrets at all.

Alex was scowling. “He only said ‘ashlar’ because he knows you like obscure words, didn’t he? Pretentious, pompous little—”

“
I
knew what it was,” Laurie piped in. “Does that make me smarter than you?”

Lucas ignored them. “If Parry was going this far,” he mused as he tapped along the stone and ran his fingers between the uneven seams, “hiding the book in the first place, and leaving clues specifically for me about how to find it, I think it’s safe to assume he hid it in a place only I ever go. My house is too obvious.”

Laurie’s eyebrow went up. “And a library’s not an obvious place to hide a book?”

“It is,” Lucas agreed. “So obvious, in fact, that I’ll bet it would be the last place anyone would look.” He didn’t find anything that could have been a switch or lever or… anything else an opening to a secret hiding place might have. Lucas waved Laurie over. Slade came up behind him and peered over his shoulder. “If it’s in this room, I’m betting it’s here. It’s the only place the stones aren’t set properly, and I’ve been all over every other inch, believe me.” He stepped back and sighed with a wave at the masonry. “Anything you and your
magic
can do, d’you think?” When Laurie opened his mouth with a too-eager look in his eyes, Lucas cut him off with, “
No
fire. And no explosions.”

Laurie’s mouth flapped for a second, then he scowled. “I wasn’t going to.”

“Not on purpose, surely.” Lucas stepped back with a
be my guest
gesture.

Laurie rolled his eyes but quickly drew Slade up beside him, and they put their heads together and went to work. Lucas prudently made his way back over to Alex. If those two accidentally blew anything up, he didn’t want to be standing so close.

Alex, still sitting at the table, still with a fond smile, slipped his arm around Lucas’s hips and drew him close. He laid his head against Lucas’s ribs.

“So,” he said after a few moments of watching Laurie and Slade argue and bump into each other every time one of them came up with a new approach, “still basking.”

Lucas grinned. He ran his fingers through Alex’s hair, predictably a bit annoyed when it sprang right back to where it belonged. “You’re going to be smug about this forever, aren’t you?”

“A rival has admitted defeat. Apparently admitted it some time ago. And you lurve me so much you like to read my name when I’m not here. ‘Smug’ is putting it mildly.”

“You never had a rival.”

“See, now you’re just encouraging me.”

“Well, how am
I
supposed to know?” came from the other side of the room, Laurie’s voice a tiny bit petulant and rather a lot annoyed. Low murmurs from Slade, then Laurie again: “Yes, well, that’s what I need you for. Prove you’re more than shiny hair and good bone structure—
then
we’ll talk ‘superior skill’.”

Lucas tried not to snicker, but since Alex was already doing it, it was kind of hard not to join in.

Whatever Slade said this time came out in a rather intense hiss, and Laurie snapped, “Hey, just because your hair is prettier than mine doesn’t make you the better magician. Handsome doesn’t get a whacking great stone moved, does it?”

“Lucas?”

Lucas dragged his attention away from Laurie and Slade to see Alex’s grin gone and a bemused frown taking its place. Lucas lifted his eyebrows in question.

“I’ve just been thinking,” said Alex. He let his glance drift over to the other two, still snarking—relatively quietly—at each other and now apparently progressing to attempting actual spells, if the melodious chanting and thin scent of ozone were any indication.

… Wait, scent of ozone?

“Laurie said Parry doesn’t have any magic, right?” Alex went on, eyebrows popping up when a tiny spark from Slade’s fingers zapped Laurie on the backside.

Laurie yelped and snapped around to glare at Slade. Slade lifted his hands innocently with an apologetic “Oops, got away from me.”

After Lucas was done snorting, he gave them both a hard stare. “Do you two think you can behave and work together for five minutes, or do I have to come over there and show you why it would be in your best interests?”

Neither one of them answered, but the surreptitious shoving stopped and the muttering lowered in both key and intensity.

Lucas turned back to Alex. “No, Parry doesn’t have magic. I don’t need Laurie to tell me that. I’ve known him since forever and I think I would know, and Slade certainly would, since they’ve apparently been spending so much time together. The subject surely would have come up.”

“You’d think,” Alex agreed. “But then, if Parry doesn’t have magic, how would he be able to hide the book back there, when you’ve got two….” He peered around Lucas to flick a glance at Laurie and Slade, raised his eyebrows at whatever they were up to now, and turned back to Lucas. “All right, you’ve got one and a half magicians over there working on opening something Parry couldn’t have used magic to close.”

Oh. “That….” Lucas stood up straight. “That’s really very clever of you, Alex.”

“It was, rather, wasn’t it?”

“Still coasting on the ‘smug’, then?”

“Handsome doesn’t get a whacking great stone moved.”

Lucas shook his head with a fond smile then strolled over to Laurie and Slade. The sniping hadn’t stopped, though it was voiced low enough that Lucas had to slide up quite close behind them to hear what they were saying.

“I’m
not
conjuring an earth sprite to ask it to make the stone lighter,” Laurie hissed. “They’re too contrary. What if it decides to lighten every other stone and leave this one right where it is just for spite? Mother would be very cross and she’d never forgive me if the castle floated away.”

“I’ve never found them contrary,” Slade replied easily. “I’ve always found them rather… agreeable.
If
one asks properly.”

“If by ‘properly’ you mean ‘let them seduce you because they’re all sex-starved degenerates’, then no thank you.” Laurie lifted his chin and sniffed. “Once was enough.”

Wow. Lucas was learning a lot more about magic—and Laurie—than he ever wanted to know.

He cleared his throat loudly enough to make them both startle a little. They turned as one, Slade with little bolts of energy still zapping around his fingers, which he quickly tried to hide behind his back, and Laurie with, “It’s not fire! See? It’s just how my magic looks when I’m concentrating it.”

Lucas had to admit that it didn’t exactly
look
like fire. Still, it looked a little more fire-ish than he was comfortable with.

“Can you, um….” Lucas waved at the little glowing orb in Laurie’s palm. “Stop concentrating for a moment? Or… whatever it is you do?”

Strangely, it looked like it took an awful lot of concentration for Laurie to stop concentrating. But after a few seconds of facial contortions and one energetic grunt, the little ball of—oh God, it really was—magic melted into Laurie’s hand and Lucas breathed a tiny bit easier. He looked pointedly at the hand Slade still had behind his back. Slade jolted a little, too obviously held in a yip at which Laurie smirked, then Slade cleared his throat and showed Lucas both of his energy-bolt-free hands.