Reeve had dropped her bags in front of a door that she assumed led to her room. Faron stood there staring at them until she got her heart rate to slow down and her skin to stop itching from the memory of the hundreds of stares. After five years, she should have been used to being stared at, but it still unnerved her when she wasn’t expecting it.
“You threw Papa’s dominoes in the gully on a dare,” Elara had said once when Faron had complained about a group of worshippers that had passed through Deadegg just to see her at home. “How can you possibly hate attention?”
Faron hadn’t known how to explain that negative attention was something she could deal with. She encouraged it, in fact. But these people looked at her as if they expected her to do something wonderful, and she didn’t know how to navigate that.
“Do you need help unpacking, Empyrean?”
She jolted. A servant girl stood there in an ivory day dress, her hands folded behind her back.
“Sure,” Faron said. “Where’s Reeve’s room?”
“Mister Warwick’s room is around the corner, but he’s in the library right now.”
“Already?”
She found Reeve sitting in a high-backed chair in Renard Hall’s library, a book open in his lap. The frescoed ceiling bore a fading map of San Irie, the main island, and the southern islets of San Mala and San Obie—all Aveline’s queendom, surrounded by the Ember Sea. White-painted oak bookshelves flowed through the room in wavelike curves, designed to evoke the ocean. Each shelf was bursting with books, but Faron was more interested in the fireplace in front of Reeve’s chair. It would be perfect for calling Elara after she’d spoken to the gods about her predicament.
And the new voice she still hadn’t found an explanation for.
“Getting started already?” she asked as she approached Reeve. He tucked his finger into the book to hold his place, allowing her to see the title:A Concentrated History of the Novan Empires. “I don’t think Elara will mind if we unpack first.”
“Lenox said that he’d do it for me,” said Reeve. “He also said that dinner is in an hour.”
Assuming Lenox was a servant, Faron nodded and drifted over to one of the shelves. It was unlikely to her that the answer to breaking a bond between a dragon and a Rider could be found in any of these books, but Aveline had been right that some of these books were very old, maybe even older than the island itself. One was so ancient that its spine seemed to cave when Faron ran a finger over it. Maybe within these pages there was another person, lost to history, who had once spoken to the gods. Who had once heard voices without origin and had the answers she sought.
Elara and Reeve were the ones who reached for information when faced with a problem they couldn’t solve. Faron liked to blunder around, making it worse until she made it better. But evenif there was no simple, straightforward answer, maybe she might read something that would shake an idea loose.
She grabbed a book about the first two drakes at random and curled up with it on the carpet in front of the fireplace.
Three sentences in, her attention began to wander.
Faron rubbed her eyes, frustrated. She’d never been the best student, and, unlike Elara and Reeve, she didn’t have the patience for books. She likedhearingabout them, if she had to, but reading was not particularly her thing.
“Are you actually going to read that?” Reeve asked.
She made a face. “Apparently not. Thanks for having faith in me, though.”
“We all have our strengths. Yours are elsewhere. There’s nothing wrong with that.”
Faron searched his expression for any sign that he was mocking her and found none. Uncomfortable, she closed the book and pushed herself onto her feet.
“I’ll try the temple,” she said without looking at him. “I didn’t get to go before we left Port Sol, anyway.”
“Good idea.” Reeve disappeared behind his book again. “Make sure you’re back for dinner. I got the impression from Lenox that the servants are so excited you’re here that they’ve put a lot of effort into the meal.”
“I’ll come back when I feel like it,” she snapped. A guilty groan escaped seconds later. “Sorry. Force of habit.”
“Right.”
“So, I’ll just… go then.”
“Okay.”
Faron didn’t run for the door, but it was a near thing.
To her relief, it was easier to get inside a sunroom at the Seaview Temple than it had been at the Port Sol Temple. Like all these hallowed buildings, the Seaview Temple was a palatial single-story structure with glass-covered sunrooms to the east and west. The outer walls were the bright yellow of an egg yolk, with a white wraparound veranda enclosed with ventilated windows. But, regardless of their architectural beauty, Faron generally didn’t like temples.
Like the palace, they required her to stand on ceremony.
