“Stefan,” Professor Altschuler said. After my outburst last night, I was no longer his pet, but I didn’t care—I had no desire to be separated out from the others, envied and isolated.
“We have to determine which way the words run,” Stefan said. “Left to right, right to left, up to down, or vice versa.”
“Excellent. How can you tell?” He gestured at Yael.
“By the alignment of the text,” she said. “Where it’s even and where it’s crammed.”
He nodded. “And what have you seen?”
“Right to left,” we chanted in unison. The characters on the right side of the scrolls were full and round, as though the writer had all the space in the world, but on the left margin the characters squeezed together.
“Excellent. We will begin with an analysis of individual words and characters. We will number each scroll, each line, each word, each character, and track how many of each appears in each individual scroll and the scrolls combined.” He turned to the classroom easel. “Here is the breakdown of who will work on each scroll.”
The difficulty with deciphering Language X was twofold; first, we didn’t know the alphabet, and secondly, even if we did, we’d need to translate the words.
Most countries around the Long Sea used the same letters, meaning people could sound out foreign words even if they couldn’t understand them. But we didn’t know the phonetics of Language X characters, and we’d yet to identify a language family it belonged to. It seemed likely that before we could translate words, we would focus on phonetics.
We dove in. This was the moment we’d waited for and been warned about: for the puzzle we were trying to solve to be the text, not the material. We’d been told a thousand times how hard it would be, how lost languages didn’t give up their secrets easily—especially not when they’d held them close for so long.
We didn’t care. We were hungry for discovery and desperate to prove ourselves. In the first week, we whipped through the sixteenthousand words in the scrolls and created a master list containing all of them. The scrolls contained thirty-five hundred unique words, half of which were used only once. Twenty-two were used over a hundred times—articles, we expected. The language had thirty-two characters, for which we were writing a finding spell that would count and categorize each.
It felt like both so much information and none at all. It was like a sea, and we were adrift upon it. The more we looked at the scrolls, the more water our tiny boat took on. We drowned again and again, sank to the bottom, and cried in defeat. Yet we shared the ability to resurrect ourselves. Not to keep from drowning in the first place—that would have been too much to ask—but to come back to life, to claw our way to the top of the sea. And if we found the surface frozen over, well, we’d scrape our nails against it, ignore the chips of ice, persevere.
“This is a very elaborate and slightly melodramatic metaphor,” Daziel said when I shared it one Saturday morning two weeks in. He was happy for me but also bored. This, evidenced by him whining, “I’m bored.” The rain had finally let up, swept away by the arrival of the Clo, the first and most common of the Trio Winds.
The Clo signaled winter, drier and chillier than autumn, and with winter came preparations for the Lumière Festival. The residents of Testylier House strung up twinkling lights and ornaments in the common spaces. Gilli and Leah physically dragged me from my books to participate. We scattered candles around the common room and loaded up the sofas with blankets. Someone was always mulling wine or cider in the kitchen, and one of the fourth-floor girls, Marie, left out day-old croissants and the occasional tart from the bakery where she worked.
“I thought you were learning to bake donuts,” I murmured to Daziel absently. We were in the common room, and I was rushing through my Tzorybia language worksheets so I could get back to the scrolls. A mug of apple-cinnamon tea steamed on the table before me.
“I’ve already mastered donuts.”
I looked up, warned by his petulant tone that I wouldn’t be able to brush him aside. “Wasn’t Gilli showing you a new crochet stitch?”
“I don’t want to crochet. I don’t want to bake or play knockball. I want to do something with my betrothed, who isn’t paying me any attention at all.” He crossed his arms. “Besides, you need a break. You haven’t slept more than five hours all week.”
An exaggeration, but I saw his point. My brain wouldn’t be sharp if I didn’t rest. “Okay. What do you want to do?”
He brightened so much I felt bad; he clearly hadn’t expected me to give in. “The Lyceum’s winter holiday market starts today.”
Within an hour, we’d collected Gilli, Jelan, and Leah and were headed to the school’s peninsula for the fair, passing shops and pubs charmingly decorated for the Lumière Festival. Windows held candles and glowing ornaments; the scents of hot cocoa and cookies wafted through the air.
The holiday fair had been set up in the central courtyard of the Lyceum, right inside the gates from the land bridge. Dozens of stalls ringed the perimeter, selling sweaters and mulled wine and cinnamon buns and spelled hand warmers. Overnight, a skating rink had sprung up. An exorbitant amount of neshem must be needed to keep the water frozen. I wondered how the spell worked, since natural elements were so difficult to affect—a massive spell written on the bottom of the rink?
“Don’t overthink it.” Leah tugged my arm. “Let’s go!”
We rented skates and laced them up, laughing nervously and leaning against each other as we tottered onto the ice. None of us had ever skated much—here in the south, all rinks were artificial, and even up north, it didn’t often get cold enough for water to freeze. Giggling and shouting, we wobbled around the packed rink, smiling at classmates and trying not to take anyone with us whenever we fell.
Daziel took my hand, lacing his fingers through mine. A jolt ran through me, my stomach swooping. In the nearly four months he’d been here, I’d become used to Daziel touching me to get my attention; I was used to smacking his shoulder when he said something ridiculous. This was different, touching only to touch. Scarier. His palm was warm, and his body beside mine radiated heat in the chilly afternoon.
I was paying more attention to the feeling of our hands against each other than to staying upright on skates. I stumbled, and yanked on Daziel’s hand to stabilize myself, spinning to an awkward stop before him. My gaze flew to his in apology for pulling him briefly off balance. I was almost afraid, as though it would remind him we were holding hands, like if he remembered he might want to stop.
Gold slid across his eyes, his expression soft in a way I’d never seen before. Like he was looking at me not to deliver a retort but just to look, full of delight and familiarity and tenderness. My breath quickened, and my heart started pounding. I was so aware of how close we were, how easy it would be to close the space between us. How warm his hand was and how warm the rest of him would be.
Then our friends returned from their latest loop, almost colliding with us. Daziel’s hand fell away. I felt its loss, my lungs constricting as though the air had thinned.
“Let’s get hot cocoa!” Gilli cried, looping her arm through mine. Trying to smile and not look as shaky as I felt, I clambered out of the rink with her. Daziel dropped behind to talk to Jelan.
I stretched my hand, though, the physicality of Daziel’s fingers laced through mine lingering. Their heat, his strength.
