Grandmother was a hundred and nine years old.
Chapter Twenty
Olympia
Ihad to bring an entire stack of books from the library of House Avus to offer Jude in exchange for access to his House’s genealogy records over the last thousand years. He scrutinized our offering almost as thoroughly as the acolytes who’d stayed up all night sifting through them to redact any private House business had, but he didn’t ask any questions when I sent Paxon off with the acolyte to continue their work copying Eximius’ journal. Meanwhile, I sat myself down at another desk and waited for Jude to return with a thousand years’ worth of the records his House kept of births and deaths throughout the whole of Sanctuary.
“You’re lucky,” he informed me in that vague monotone I was beginning to get used to. “Records for the High Houses are far easier to come by than those of the lower rings. We try but not every birth and death are reported down on the Third, and especially not on the Deck.”
I nodded, reaching for the volumes before he could deposit them on the wooden table before me. I flipped the cover open before the dust had settled. Jude watched me for a momentlonger, frowning with suspicion, but then shuffled off to go about his other duties and left me to my work.
Milo and I had spent the whole night we’d discovered the strange aging phenomenon flipping through the family records as well as Adelaide’s journals. Then he’d gone to Isla who’d requested her own family’s records without having any idea why. Milo had gone through them as well only to find that no such phenomenon existed in her House’s history. It was only Avus and had only started around the same time our Patriarch had gone mad, therefore opening himself up to fall to the worst uprising in recorded history.
I wasn’t a scholar and I certainly didn’t see the appeal in living with my nose stuck in a book more often than not, but this was a mystery that surpassed academia, that existed outside of the library, and that might have affected me as well if I’d been the one Nascha named Heir.
With a shiver, I flipped through the pages, running my finger along the columns that held the year, going back all the way to 1891. Then I began. Names and dates and information floated upon the page as I scanned them as quickly as I could. The House of Harlowe’s data was more detailed. They didn’t just have a name, birth date, and death date. They also listed the associated ring, close family members, and cause of death. It was the last of these that had me feeling nauseous as I reviewed the records from the time of the uprising.
Beheaded, burned, executed by hanging, strangled after torture.
It was barbaric. And yet, I couldn’t argue we were much better off now. The cycle seemed to be repeating itself.
Cosmo had beheaded a fifteen-year-old boy for his brother’s refusal to obey the call of our absent gods and had set off a chain reaction I knew was responsible for the increased vandalism down on the lower rings. That spiderwebbed symbol of therebellion was popping up more and more. I couldn’t be the only one who’d noticed it. Maybe this would bring us answers or maybe it would only create more questions. Either way, we needed to understand our past if we were going to have any hope of dealing with our future, or so Milo said.
So I scanned through page after page of names long forgotten, people who weren’t recorded anywhere else from every ring, those whose lives had borne our own and we’d never even know them. It was only halfway through the second book of records, midway through the early 2000s, that I took a break. My vision was blurring from spending so long staring down at the tiny, crooked handwriting that had changed so often over the decades, but I’d found what Milo had suspected I would. Or rather, it was what I didn’t find that was more of an indication of what we sought.
No one, in all of Sanctuary’s history up to the early 2000s since that was as far as I’d made it already, had ever lived for over a hundred years. Except nearly every one of our female ancestors going back five centuries. It defied all logic and yet, here it was in black and white. Something was happening in House Avus, something that had begun nearly five hundred years ago, but how did one unravel a mystery so old?
“Is this what it’s going to be like during his reign as Patriarch?” a voice spoke suddenly beside me.
I turned in time to see Paxon perch on the edge of my desk. His gaze remained on the lone acolyte he’d left copying Simi’s sane journal several desks over for a moment longer before swiveling to me.
“Will we be spending all our time in libraries and dusty old alcoves researching obscure journals and textbooks?” he asked.
“Maybe,” I replied with a shrug, barely listening to my cousin’s complaints as I returned to the book before me and flipped another page.
“What does he have you working on?”
Pax leaned over my shoulder, peering down at the tome in my hands. I snapped it shut with a glare directed up toward him.
“Not everything is your business, Paxon,” I barked.
He held his hands up in surrender and took a step back but didn’t return to his own desk.
“That guy who barged in on Milo’s wedding,” he started instead and every muscle in my body tensed at the vague mention of Harrison. “Who is he?”
“Why does it matter?”
“The Bexleys, I get. Milo and Adrian got along. He wants to look out for them now that she’s gone. But who is he?”
“Her former roommate,” I muttered, standing up and pushing all the books in front of me back into a neat pile. “Her friend.”
“That’s it?”
My gaze snapped back to Pax and narrowed. There was no way he knew. Paxon didn’t leave the First Ring unless he had to. He hated working down here on the Second with Harlowe bad enough. He wouldn’t slum it down on the Third for any reason other than being told to do so, and he hadn’t. I was sure of it.
“If you have something to say, just say it,” I ground out instead, crossing my arms and glaring at him.
“He came right to Milo,” Pax replied slowly. “Not the Guardians.”
