Drying the Books

His hand had fully healed three days later. During that time, Kasvren had suffered no small amount of inconvenience in every corner of daily life. If Rad Dat had not come to his aid, he would surely have been wandering about unable even to wash his face properly.

"Did Isolde order you to look after me?"

Rad Dat would only offer an ambiguous smile and faithfully go about his work, never once giving a straight answer. Kasvren could have asked Isolde directly, but whether by chance or by deliberate design, he had not caught so much as a shadow of her for three whole days.

And so, on the morning of the fourth day, he could not help but be startled when Isolde appeared, timed precisely to the breakfast hour. Only then did it truly register how long she had managed to remain unseen. However determined she might be to avoid an encounter, they lived under the same roof — could there really not have been a single instant, not one brush of a passing hem?

There was a reason he had failed to notice this sooner. For those three days with an injured hand, Kasvren's attention had been fixed entirely on the notebook he had brought from that empty, sunlit room. He had wanted to open it at once, but an inexplicable prickle of guilt had stopped him, and he had hidden it beneath the mattress instead. Sleeping with another person's secrets laid under one's own body was never an easy thing. At times he dreamed that the notebook had vanished to some absurd elsewhere, and only after slipping a hand beneath the mattress to confirm it was still there could he settle and drift off again — like a child who cannot close his eyes until he has checked that the monster is not real.

Isolde arrived carrying clear soup and soft bread. A modest breakfast, but it suited him well enough. She was, unmistakably, a skilled cook. Rad Dat aside, it was obvious that Isolde, too, had long since worn herself callused on the business of making her own food.

"What's in this soup?"

"Clams. Every now and then, when I go to the market, I can find someone selling fresh ones."

"The market?"

"Yes. You saw it yourself, surely."

He had, of course, passed through the village on his way in and glimpsed a number of shops. Was that what she called a market? It could well be. The clam soup had been a pale, milky white. There was no grit between the teeth, no muddy, earthy taste. Once, his friend Johan had visited an aunt's household and eaten clam soup there, and claimed that when he pried open a single clam, out came a fistful of mud. Johan had sworn never to touch another clam in his life, and as far as Kasvren knew, that oath had never once been broken.

"I take it your hand has healed."

Isolde said. Kasvren flexed and unflexed his unbandaged fingers, showing them off, and nodded.

"The ointment helped."

"It smells foul, but it does its work. Still, you'd best be careful. There are poisons no ointment alone can draw out."

"So even among plants, there are venoms that potent."

"Doesn't it make more sense that a plant would be, *because* it's a plant? The weakest of all creatures, after all."

The plants Kasvren knew were mostly fodder for grazing beasts, or else generous providers of rich eating for humankind. Fruits, of course, but also the tender leaves of spring, flowers, tea... The plants Isolde knew — the ones that sprawled in countless numbers through the Grand Ducal garden — were generous to no one. They were ruthless and cunning.

"What will you do with yourself today?"

Kasvren swallowed a mouthful of bread still faintly tasting of milk before answering.

"I mean to sort out the library. As I mentioned before."

"Ah. The book-drying."

Isolde murmured it with a somewhat lukewairm air, then propped her chin on her hand and stared him straight in the eye.

"Are you truly going to do it? There's hardly any need."

"There is, for me."

"Why? Because you feel you'd look like someone idling away his keep?"

It was a pointed question. Anyone else would have shoved back their chair in offense then and there. But Kasvren had grown accustomed to her, to a degree. He could now tell the difference between the times Isolde set out to be disagreeable, and the times she did not.

"There's something to that, I admit. But the more pressing reason is personal. I want to keep the books in the best condition possible."

"Best condition. I can't quite picture what 'best condition' is supposed to look like. But you're clearly a man with a great deal of feeling for books — that much I do know."

"Books are the treasury of knowledge. Countless experiences, stories, imaginings. You're not much of a reader, I take it, Lady Isolde."

Isolde gave her slight shoulders a small lift and let them fall.

"I enjoyed reading in my own way as a child, but once I grew up there wasn't much joy in it. The ones in the library especially — they're so damp I can hardly bear to touch them. If you manage to put them into 'best condition,' perhaps I'll take a bit of interest then."

With a brief "Well, then," Isolde took her leave first. Kasvren considered tucking the last remaining roll into his jacket pocket — sorting books was grueling work — but thought better of it. All in all, his treatment in this mansion was not yet so bad as that.

Before the books could be brought out into the garden, the first task was to find dry boards wide enough to lay them on. When he asked whether Rad Dat might procure something of the sort, the old man asked him to wait a moment, then returned from somewhere with several broad planks.

"This is birch."

"It is. Do birch boards pose some difficulty for the work, my lord?"

"No, nothing like that. It's only that there are no birch trees anywhere in this region, and it struck me as curious that you'd have planks like these."

Rad Dat answered after a brief silence.

"In the old days, when the household still had many servants, we laid birch across the floors of the servants' quarters."

"So now that the servants are gone, you tore the floors up?"

"That would be the way of it. Should you require more, I shall bring it."

"Two or three more boards will do. Lay out too many and they'll be a chore to gather up afterward."

Rad Dat followed the instruction, and while he fetched the boards and laid them side by side, Kasvren began carrying books out of the library, starting from the right-hand shelves, stacking them one by one atop the planks. The ones with badly damaged covers he set apart on their own.

"I'll need leather, then."

At his murmur to himself, Rad Dat spoke.

"Tanned hides will be difficult to come by anywhere nearby, my lord."

"Then I'll have to place an order?"

"I will look into the houses His Grace once traded with, and report back to you."

"Much obliged."

Rebinding a book demanded tremendous labor, but time was something Kasvren had in abundance. He laid the dry paper he had prepared little by little while his hand was still healing, one sheet at a time across the boards, and then began carefully laying the books face-down to dry, taking care not to strain their spines.

"Would it not be better to move to a spot with stronger sun?"

Rad Dat asked. Kasvren glanced back at him once and shook his head.

"No — direct exposure to sunlight does more harm than good. Right here is perfect, where the shadow of the roof falls."

"I see."

"Truth be told, it can be done indoors as well. Anywhere cool and dry will serve. But the library as a whole is damper than outside, so it's useless for the purpose."

"It was not always so, when people still came and went."

Kasvren stopped mid-motion, a book still in his hands, and sank briefly into thought. It was only natural. When people moved through the rooms, the air circulated; the doors stood open for ventilation; and the maids had tended to the books in passing as they cleaned. But now there was no one at all, was there? A house abandoned by everyone rots and crumbles swiftly. The library of a grand mansion was no exception.

"No one comes or goes, so there's nothing to be done about it. I mean to save whatever can be saved."

"Understood, my lord."

Rad Dat was not a man for glib, empty words. Had he been, Kasvren suspected it would have been *he* who was surprised — and he let out a short snort at the thought.

For hours on end he hauled books out, sorted them, and laid them face-down with care until the boards were packed solid. Sweat streamed down his brow, and each time the wind brushed his soaked-through shirt, a shiver crawled up his spine — but he did not stop. The harder his body worked, the quieter his mind grew. Feeling his head empty out hour by hour was a novel pleasure. He had to empty his thoughts. Thoughts, thoughts — every last thought of them.

His step-parents and half-siblings. His dead godfather. The blood of House Drasken.

And Isolde, the survivor — and the damp, dark earth of Dravenmoor.

To forget all of it, Kasvren worked without pause. When the boards were so full that not another book could fit, his sigh of disappointment came close to escaping him. He looked about for anything else that needed doing, and his gaze settled on a small shed standing as if about to collapse, half-swallowed by overgrown weeds.

"Rad Dat! Where are you?"

When he called out, he heard the sound of birds scattering from the forest. A second-floor window opened, and Rad Dat's face appeared.

"You were calling for me, my lord?"

Kasvren nodded and pointed at the shed.

"What is that place? What's inside it?"