My laughter verged on hysterical. “You’re kidding.”
“No.” His eyes were wide and nervous. “I’m trying to be honest with you.”
“So—no one knows you’re here? I thought the high shedim court wanted to save the Ziz.”
“I hate to disappoint,” he said. “But at home, I’m just a student. With a high-ranking family, yes, but I’m not a spy. You’re fed up with having no agency? Me too. I’m fed up with no one doing anything about the worsening magic. I learned about the Ziz and about the scrolls, and I thought—if the adults weren’t going to do something, I would.”
“But—you’ve been saying ‘we’ this whole time.”
“Ah.” He scratched his ear. “Yes. I suppose the pluralization was…an evasion. I am trying not to do deceit by evasion, given your dislike of it.”
I needed a nap. I needed to plant myself face first on the bed. Grabbing my mug, I headed out of the garden courtyard back into my aunt’s house. “We’re doomed.”
“We’re not.” He followed, his next words coming out tentative as our footsteps echoed against the marble floors. “Was I right to tell you?”
I turned. The afternoon light spilled in from one of my aunt’s tall windows to paint Daziel in stark shadows. Worry etched lines in his brow. I softened slightly. Daziel didn’t care if someone told a lie or two, but he knew it mattered to me. He was trying to be honest for me.
The tight knot in my chest loosened just a little. “Yes,” I said. “You were.”
Twenty-one
We returned to the Lyceumafter classes finished.
Yael, Stefan, and Gidon looked up when we entered the scroll room. “We were wondering when you would return,” Yael said mildly. “Everything all right?”
I tried to smile, but it felt tight. Everything was not all right. The boy who I’d been living with for almost half a year had lied not only about his reason for coming to Talum but also about his core identity. “It’s been a busy few days.”
“I’ll bet.” Stefan inspected Daziel. “A high demon, huh?”
Daziel smiled sharply.
“What have we missed?” I asked.
“We’ve pulled all the words in the scrolls containing the characters we’re callingZandIand cross-referenced them with our list of ancient names containing either,” Yael said. “The only noun we’ve thought of with both is Tzorybium. Unfortunately, no Language X words look like a match.”
“So we’re experimenting with words separately containing theZandIcharacters,” Stefan said. “There’s a word starting withZ, with five letters—if that’s the Tribe of Zebulun, we’d have a few more letters, but it would also mean the letters aren’t a one-to-one match.”
Endless trial and error. That was how decipherment often went, until you had more keys.
Which. We might.
“We have news too.” I glanced at Daziel, twisting my amulet nervously, unable to get the words out.
“Do you want us to guess?” Stefan finally snarked. “Get on with it.”
While the boys stared at me, Yael followed my gaze to Daziel. Then she gave me a small, comforting nod.
I steeled myself. Daziel had lied because he believed if he told the truth, he’d be excluded from the scrolls’ decipherment. I didn’t want that to happen. Ideally, I wanted to prove his fear had been unfounded.
I wasn’t sure it had been. “Daziel has…information.”
“Information about the scrolls,” Yael confirmed.
I nodded. “We’re going to tell you. You’ll want to tell Professor Altschuler, and maybe others. But they might decide we shouldn’t have clearance to work on the scrolls. Daziel needs to be kept involved, so every time we tell someone, we need to make them swear they’ll keep Daziel involved.”
“You’re a fucking tease, Bat Yardena,” Stefan said, throwing his infernal juggling balls from hand to hand. He looked at Daziel. “She always like this?”
“Shut up, Stefan,” Gidon said, squeezing his head with both hands, as he often did when he was stressed.
