The next morning, Cyrus and Dell had already left for the Representatives' meeting hall by the time I had dressed and eaten breakfast. I had a strange sense of being loose and untethered, since I had no real job here. I'd thought I would be needed to convince Emorial to make the alliance, but from what Joshua and Dell said it seemed nearly certain already. Surely signing treaties and such was just a formality; what would take time was working out how to attack and secure Solangia for the revolution.
All of that was out of my depth. As long as this ended with Magali unable to control us, I'd be happy.
Well. As long as no one worse ended up in charge.
I trusted Ysmay to be fair, even though we'd never gotten along. While Roman and I got along better, I'd be much more uneasy with him on Solangia's throne. It all came down to that damn prophecy... Roman might become king, or I might kill the king. I disliked King Aeric enough that I didn't think I'd mind doing it, but it was one thing to imagine it and another thing to kill a man.
Rather than continue with that line of thought, I picked up the map Representative Liora Chanson had left for us and went looking for the library.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The morning air was cool and the rain had mostly dried up, leaving the stone buildings around me pale gray, but the stone beneath puddles in the sidewalks still shimmered a faint blue. The city woke up slowly as I walked through this affluent section. Flags with blue and black designs hung from some windows and balconies. Store signs in Emorian were mostly unreadable to me. The two languages were close, but not close enough to understand the other automatically.
I found a large square that was labeled Plaza of the Queen on the map, which must have been made for Solangian tourists. But the street sign for it hanging over my head was carved of pale new wood, and the Emorian words on it didn't seem to match. Based on similar words in Solangian, I guessed it said "Freedom Square". I wondered how many places in Solangia would be renamed when the Phoenix took over.
The square was completely hemmed in, like a dead end. Where it seemed that the street should have continued on the other side, a small building had been squeezed in instead. The cut of its stone seemed newer than the other, larger, grander buildings around the square.
I guessed from the huge flags unrolled over the sides of these buildings that they housed the government. But one building, next to the office blocking the road, had no flags. Columns stretched across a covered walkway before it, graceful shapes belying the strength it must take to hold up the massive stone work that was the roof.
I paused before it, staring up at the carvings on the flat front of the roof. It looked like several people — no, just two people, repeated over and over, I realized from the repetition of their faces. A man standing over what might have been a cradle, then a panel of him holding a book and appearing to read to a young girl. Then the girl, older, holding a book as the man looked over her shoulder. Then the girl as a woman now, a crown on her head, the man kneeling next to her. And finally the woman laid down as if in a coffin, the man standing with his head bowed.
The carved figures were boxy and stiff, but there was a heavy sort of precision in the way the carver had made the girl recognizable throughout her life. The only thing they had neglected was showing how the man aged as well. Perhaps they simply hadn't cared. This was clearly a remnant of Emorial's monarchy; perhaps the carver had only cared about depicting his queen.
In any case, the use of the book in the carving reassured me that I had read the carved words between two columns correctly: this was the library.
My footsteps echoed in the arched ceiling of the entry hall as I stepped past the heavy door. The air had a subtly dusty scent. The walls were covered in murals painted either in pastels or once-rich colors that had faded with age. I had to fight with myself not to sneeze.
Hand over my nose and mouth as I breathed slowly, I examined the paintings. They were like the carvings outside: an unchanging woman watched over a cradle, then demonstrated weaving on a loom to a child. On the opposite wall, the woman watched as the boy wove by himself, then bowed as he stood before a throne as a king. Positioned on the wall in front of me, above the arch into the rest of the library, the woman watched over the king's deathbed with folded hands and an unchanging face.
Now this was just laziness, I thought. The carvings outside were more ambiguous, but this painter had no excuse for not alluding to the woman's growing age by making her hair gray or adding wrinkles to her face.
Perhaps these un-aging mentors were displayed this way for a reason. I wondered if they were Emorian gods. I didn't know if their religion was very different from ours, but it was possible.
I walked under the unnervingly lifelike painted gaze of the woman keeping death vigil and into the library.
Stairs spiraled up on either side of me to higher floors. Ahead, shelves spread out in rows, desks and chairs clustered here and there. It was all thick carpeting, polished wood, and the scent of old paper and faint perfume.
I hesitated, unsure where I might find this book I wanted. Libraries were not my forte.
"What are you waiting for?"
I flinched, and then grimaced. When did everyone start startling me instead of the other way around? "Hello, Ari."
She sat in a comfortable seat nearby, cane leaning against its arm. A book rested in her lap. "Morane."
"I'm looking for the book you mentioned, about Guardians. Do you know what shelf it's kept on?"
"I do, but you won't find it there." She flicked a finger toward the side table next to her, which was piled with books. "It'll be in this pile."
I approached warily. "Why's that?"
"I reference it often, and it's simply easier to keep all my materials in one spot."
A drop of coldness ran down my spine as I placed my hands on her pile of books. "You have an interest in Guardians, do you?" I'd known a man who had an unusual interest Guardians, and it had gone nowhere good.
Ari shrugged. "They're one aspect of the subject I am interested in, so I suppose you could say that. You may look through the pile, but please don't disturb the order."
I was still wary, but less so since she seemed so casual about it. I lifted each book until I found one bound in leather with a green tinge to it, the embossed title barely readable. The Guardians of Solangia. I put it aside and replaced the other books. "Can I ask what subject it is that you're researching?"
"You may as well, since I was going to bring it up if you didn't."
I decided I liked Ari's strange frankness, even if I didn't quite trust her. "I don't see how these books all fit together. You've got one on every country on the continent, except Emorial. What are you looking for?"
She drummed her fingers on the open pages of her book. "For their Guardians, I suppose. Yes, that's the best way to put it. Given how little other scholarly work there is on the subject, there's no set vocabulary for this."
I tensed. "Other country's Guardians? There's no such thing. Solangia's the only country that has—"
"That has Guardians born with golden marks on their shoulder on the same day as the Heir to the country? That has Guardians who fit into certain roles designated by the position of the stars on that day? That has Guardians who cause natural disasters if they die unnatural deaths on Solangian soil? Oh, yes, certainly; Solangia is the only one."
I stared at her, unable to tell if she was being sarcastic. Ari held up the book on her lap so I could see the title — Defenders of Arcadina Throughout the Ages. "From what I can gather about Arcadina's equivalent of the Guardians, they're called the Divine and they're really more spirits than anything else. They might have once been people — it's really quite hard to find anything concrete on their origins — but for at least a thousand years they've been merely wisps consciousness that inhabit pure-hearted defenders of Arcadina when the country is in peril, investing them with unnatural strength and skill. Of course, it's so hard to tell which people throughout Arcadinian history were truly inhabited by the Divine and who merely claimed to be, especially when mythological beliefs get involved."
I sank into a chair and tried to think for several minutes, unsuccessfully. Ari waited, reading her book, apparently unconcerned with my speechlessness.
"Are you telling me every country has Guardians?" I finally asked. Unable to process this information, I tried for simply forcing it in and seeing if it fit.
"No," she said. "I'm telling you nearly every country I've looked at has either living or legendary examples of magical beings, some more human than others, who are invested with special abilities to defend that country."
"But I'm real," I said. "The Guardians are real. We're not myths, like those Divine things are."
"I wouldn't be so quick to write them off." She pinned her sharp gray stare on me. "There are people beyond Solangia's borders who believe the Guardians are exaggerated reports of common soldiers. Who can say whether in Arcadina right now there are not two Divine speaking to each other through human mouths, debating whether the Guardians are real or made up?"
"First of all," I said, trying to maintain some kind of firm grasp on the conversation, "that's creepy as hell. And I don't... I mean, the Divine sound very different from Guardians. Why do you think there's a connection at all?"
"There has to be," Ari said sharply. "There's too much evidence. The Divine are one of the stranger examples, I'll grant you, but there are too many examples overall to discredit."
"Yeah? Then how come this isn't common knowledge? How can every country think that the not-Guardians of countries on the other side of the continent are myths, while those countries think the same in the other direction? How can you be the only one to figure it out? You're like, fourteen." It was a deliberate undershot to needle her, but she couldn't have been older than sixteen so I felt validated.
A slight clench of her jaw was the only sign I'd gotten a rise out of her. "You need to ask fewer questions at once. Why don't we start by you opening that book?"
I rolled my eyes, but opened it to a random middle page to humor her. Reading aloud, I drawled, "Chapter six: the weaknesses of Guardians. Here the author wishes to outline the major known magical weaknesses of Guardians, that is, the defenses against them that are known to debilitate them or sap their powers, such as the blacking out of the Guardian Mark on their shoulders with soot as they sleep, which will surely cause that Guardian to remain unconscious until the soot is washed away — what the hell? That's not true." I looked at Ari. "There's no way that's true."
"It does sound rather unlikely."
"It's fake," I said hotly. "We don't have magical pressure points that make us sleep —" I paused at the slight grin that was not so much on Ari's mouth as in her eyes. "I mean, alright, fine, there's the Guardian Sleep, but that's unrelated and only happens once in a lifetime!"
"So I've learned from carefully parsing truth from fiction in every mention of the Guardians I can find. But legends of those kind fill works written about the Guardians even by notable scholars. It's what naturally happens to phenomena not much is known about, and it's also a bit intentional in this case. Solangian royalty purposefully spread misinformation about their Guardians far back in your history in order to keep enemies from being able to understand your kind and fight back against you."
"Caer mentioned something like that," I admitted. "My tutor, Caer Solentude, I mean. He talked about how they did that to confuse Englescroft."
"Solentude?" Ari asked, intrigued. "I've read a dozen books written by Solentudes. You were lucky to have one for a tutor."
"I don't think I appreciated him all that much, to be honest." Caer was painful to talk about. I wasn't sure if Ari sensed that somehow, or simply wanted to move on.
"Well, you see what happens to those like us. Misinformation spreads, its sounds unbelievable because it is unbelievable, and then people just don't believe you exist."
"People like us?" I said slowly.
Ari sat back, hands clasped over the book in her lap. "Of course, Morane. People like us."