Amma led them as Damien fell back a step, walking between the knoggelvi, a hand on each set of reins. They passed out of the center of town, away from the cleanest and widest roads heavily patrolled with guards in their red lion-fish branding.
Down a smaller road, Damien slowed to watch one of them talk with a young woman who was tending to the stall outside an herbal shop. The guard loomed over her while she organized hanging, dried bundles on a rack and replied with seemingly simple answers, her face clearly reading she wanted to be left alone—Damien knew because he made that face himself quite a bit if for different reasons. Someone older came out of the shop and called her in, but the guard stopped her, forcibly, to leave her with some other parting bit of information before she scurried inside.
Damien groaned at the odd discomfort that poked at him then, turning away before his mind would start telling him he was supposed to do something. Amma had come to a stop a few yards ahead, standing before a large board covered in tacked up parchment. “Have the forces here always been so involved with the people?”
Amma spun back to him, looking alarmed. “What?”
He glanced back to the guard who was wandering away, swiping an apple from another stall. “In Aszath Koth, I never have the troops bother with…whatever this is. Aren’t they meant to be for outside obstacles and not harassing the civilians?”
Amma was suddenly right next to him, grabbing the reins of one of the knoggelvi and nudging all of them toward a different street. “I almost got eaten by a snake man in your city, so I wouldn’t call Aszath Koth the pinnacle of safety in or outside the realm, but, no, things have not always been like this here.”
“Not when you were young?” he ventured.
Amma shook her head. “Not even a year ago.”
The sadness in her voice made him refrain from further questions, and they walked on in silence through Faebarrow. Eventually, they crossed over a bridge and came into a district with fewer shops and far more residences, larger and with many windows and entries to suggest shared housing. The streets were lined with benches and trees, though different than the town center’s liathau. Damien assumed Amma could identify them, but she didn’t need distracting, eyes casting about shrewdly from under her hood.
At the end of a row filled with more dense, residential buildings stood a squat but wide structure that rose up from the ground in white marble. It gleamed in the sun, columns along its face and a wide set of stone steps up its front to thick, wooden double doors.
“This is it,” she said, not bringing them any closer, “the Grand Athenaeum.” Guiding them off the main road where others were walking, noses frequently down in books or in deep discussion with others, Amma found a shady spot beneath a tree for them to stop. She dug in her pocket and pulled out more sweets, feeding them to the knoggelvi as she glanced around and spoke in hushed tones. “Anyone can go inside, but there are many books that are off limits without express permission from an academy or the crown. I’m sure the Lux Codex is one of those kinds of books.”
“I imagine it’s difficult to get this permission,” Damien mused.
“Yes, but it’s also unnecessary. For us.”
Damien gave her a look, one he feared was more adoring than he would have liked to let on.
“I’ve been inside many times, places I wasn’t supposed to go.” She turned more fully to the building, her gaze roving over it, pinging from window to window as if pulling the path from her memory and watching what they would do unfold in her mind. “I can get us into the restricted section easily.”
Damien swallowed. He was getting quite warm despite the fall breeze that blew down the road. “Oh?”
She nodded. “But it has to be after dark, we have to sneak in unseen, and you have to cooperate with me.”
Damien was shaken from his long, admiring stare at her when her eyes turned on him, still sharp. He cleared his throat and frowned. “You’re making it very difficult to remain angry with you.”
“Good,” she said, the flicker of a smile there. “So, you’ll actually listen to me for a change?”
“Of course. Is there some place you suggest we go in the meantime? This is your territory, after all.”
“Um?” Amma pressed a finger to her lips, looking around. “Well, I don’t really…I suppose this way.”
He followed her again, and she took him out of the scholarly district, avoiding the main roads, though she did lead him into a few dead ends that made her grumble quietly to herself words that sounded like fluffy replacements for swears.
Eventually, they were in a much seedier place. Even Faebarrow had its dregs, and he assumed she was very familiar, yet she squinted and hemmed and hawed until stumbling upon a tavern and inn, the placard hanging over the door by one chain, the other broken. “Here. Here is probably good,” she announced with all the confidence of a woman who was only half lost. She tipped her head to the side to read the broken sign. “The Too Deep Inn. Yeah, that’s…that’s the one.”
They hadn’t seen a guard in a bit, so Damien was amenable even if she seemed reticent. There was at least a makeshift stable for the knoggelvi to stink up with their infernal gases at the back. Inside, he paid for two rooms and food, and when they had found their lodgings, he told her he would be coming to get her after night had fallen, then cast the words on her to keep her in place in her room.
“Wait,” she said just before he left.
He stopped on the threshold, glancing back.
“You’re, um…you’re staying too, right? You’re not going wandering or anything outside? Leaving me alone?”
Damien looked over her small form squeezing the edge of the cot. She meant staying in the building, surely, and not there, in her room. “I don’t intend to leave. I’ll be across the hall if you…if you need me.Sanguinisui, you can cross the hall if need be.”
She nodded, and then he left, torn with hoping she both would and would not knock on his door.
CHAPTER 25
