It shouldn’t have made me happy that he cared so much about my safety, but it did.
“Start at the universities and museums,” Yael said. We made a list of everything we knew in Sorae, despite it being very little. We made him a card with the characters of Language X so he could recognize them, then a letter with an official seal we stole from Professor Altschuler’s office requesting to borrow materials. Apparently we all had very flexible morals by this point. Besides, we all agreed the professor would have let us had he been here.
“Not likely you’ll run into anyone at this hour, is it?” Gidon said. It was nearing eleven bells; we had just put another pot of coffee on. None of us had any intention of sleeping soon.
“It’s morning in Sorae,” Daziel said absently. After tucking everything up his sleeves, he touched my cheek and was gone.
I pressed my hand to my cheek, the ghost of his touch lingering. Despite my anger, I worried about him gallivanting around a foreign land on his own. I wished I’d been able to go with him.
~~~
The next day, thefour of us were so antsy Professor Altschuler sent us away, dryly promising he and his staff could handle thescrolls without us for a day. I couldn’t concentrate without knowing whether Daziel was safe. I should have insisted on at leastattemptingto go with him.
Between classes, I passed through the front courtyard, where the winter fair had been. Now beetle corpses littered the grass matted by red dust. The school’s brass gates, with their book and tree emblem, no longer gleamed. The Maestril should be arriving any day now, and everyone was wound tight with its absence. If it came, it would wipe the city clean of red dust and insects. If it didn’t come, the harvests would fail.
I returned to the Keep around the same time as the rest of my cohort, and we stayed past ten bells, when Professor Altschuler finally left, shaking his head. “Your minds won’t do any of us any good if you insist on exhausting yourself.”
“Yes, sir,” Yael said, but none of us went anywhere. Instead, we fiddled with more words, trying to guess Language X character phonetics and unsurprisingly making no breakthroughs.
Near midnight, Daziel returned. And he brought a trunk.
“What?” Yael said.
I jumped up, instinct telling me to fling my arms around Daziel, I was so happy he’d returned safe. But he wasn’t mine to hug. I clasped my hands together instead.
He met my gaze with his obsidian one, and there was a pained sorrow in his smile, as though he could tell I’d wanted to embrace him but held myself back. Then he adjusted his expression with his inhuman quickness, turning to my friends with a showman’s panache and sweeping his arms at the trunk. “They were very agreeable. Said these were found on an ancient Cinnaian ship excavated from a silted-up harbor some fifty years back.”
He lifted the lid. Inside, a dozen scrolls nestled against a purple velvet interior.
“You wouldn’t believe the amount of people I talked to,” Daziel told our dropped jaws. “I had tea with a professor at his daughter’s house, and he directed me to a very small university halfway across the country—anyway. A preservation spell snapped over the ship’s library when water came onboard and saved the texts.”
“We need the highlighting spell,” Gidon choked out. My own hope and excitement were reflected in him, in all of them. If this batch of Language X included proper nouns withZandI, we could finally theorize more of the alphabet.
Before using the finding spell, we made copies of the new texts, so we could spread neshem on the copies instead of the originals. We worked quickly, fumbling and laughing, all of us bundles of nerves barely held together. When the copies were made, we cast the highlighting spells for words containing bothand.
Two words glowed on the parchment.
Hope so fierce it almost hurt speared me. Stefan jumped up in the air, whooping and squeezing a smiling Yael’s shoulders. Gidon made a pleased noise. I stopped trying to control every movement and whirled around and hugged Daziel tightly. I breathed him in, his familiar scent, his blazing and comforting heat. I held him tightly, as though I could use this embrace to take a print of his body. Then I let go, leaving him with wide eyes.
And then we all leaned forward.
The first of the two highlighted words glowed in the beginning of a ten-page manuscript. I blinked because I recognized it. I recognized it because it was the two letters we knew arranged in a way we’d seen before. My brain stuttered, confused and almost disbelieving of the word highlighted before us.
Ziz.
The five of us exchanged bewildered looks. “How likely is it we’ve foundanotherspell for the Ziz?” Gidon said.
“Not likely,” Stefan said.
We turned to the second word. This one was much longer, with seven characters.ZandImade up three of them, scattered throughout the middle of the word:?Z?I?I?
I wanted to vomit or cry. I felt like I was playing trivia at a pub. I knew this one, Iknewit, and if it was right, we would have so many letters. “Tzorybium,” I choked out.
Yael grabbed a pen, scribbling letters into our blanks:TZ (O/R?) (I/Y?) BI (U/M?).
“It’s not perfect,” Yael said. “There’s only seven characters in the Language X word and nine in ours. They might use the same character for bothYandI, but it’s not a one-to-one match.”
But it wasso close, I could feel it, how painfully close we were, how we were almost at the place where we could start matching our letters to Language X. “Maybe it’s Tzorybia, the adjective and language, instead of the place name.” Which addedAas an option for the last character, as well asUandM.
