I couldn’t go back, not right away, and I did need to study. I was a week behind in all my classes. Maybe the library had a transmutation for beginners book.
Yet, when I got there and tried to concentrate, I couldn’t.
My thoughts whirled, piling even more regrets and frustrations on the heap that had become my life.
Eventually, I faceplanted in one of my textbooks and gave up.
Maybe tomorrow would be better?
With my luck, that didn’t seem likely.
KOARTHANDRIS
Saldrea had excusedme for the evening, bringing in one of her other guards for the night. Apparently, just looking at me made her upset, even after she’d carved her mark into my face. I was thankful for the reprieve from her madness.
I’d headed to the archives, deep beneath the library. A niggling curiosity had been eating at me these last few days, ever since I’d seen Izzy’s handwriting and taken her notebook. I’d been pulling folios of handwritten decrees and writs from across Seial, trying to find where I’d seen scrawls like that before.
I couldn’t quite explain my desperate drive to figure this out, but some deep part of me pushed and pushed, so I’d been spending all my — limited — free time here, searching.
I’d gone back a hundred years and still nothing.
I carefully returned the documents I’d already reviewed to the shelves and pulled more.
An hour later, halfway through the next stack of documents… I spotted it. A signature at the bottom of a document. It wasn’t quite the same as Izzy’s writing, but there was enough of a resemblance for me to look closer.
I inspected the signature with a magnifying glass, comparing it to Izzy’s writing. Yes, there were definite similarities. The tilt of the “t”, the flourish on the bottom of a “y”, the curve of an “s”.
Curious.
Whose signature was this?
Queen Leastrine Anadendyra.
I blinked.
No.
Why would Izzy’s handwriting have any similarities to the dead queen?
My heart gave a heavy, hard thump.
No… it can’t be.
I immediately rose and searched farther back in time, over a hundred and twenty years ago… there wouldn’t be any handwritten documents from the lost princess until prior to that. These archives might not evenhaveany handwritten documents from the princess, but she had attended school here at Veilblood Academy, so I had to hope…
I finally found a research paper handed in by Princess Ysania Anadendyra and brought it back to the table, studying it.
More similarities to Izzy’s writing. In fact, at a quick glance the two were nearly identical. Handwriting wasn’t necessarily genetic, but certain similarities might be taught or passed on from a parent to…
To a child…
My throat went dry.
My heart skipped several beats, and when it resumed, it pounded an erratic tattoo in my chest.
No…
As far as anyone knew, the princess had never had a child, but she’d been in the human realm. And if the princess had had a daughter, she’d be half-nymph, since Ysania’s consort had been a nymph.
