“Talton! Druna! Wait.” Roane sighs.“Fuck.”
CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN
NO APOLOGIES
ADELINE
“Are you all right?” Roane asks softly a little later, as our horse comes to a halt.
I don’t know. I don’t know how I’m feeling after all the fear and blood and death. After seeing two creatures I’ve started to consider my friends die gruesome deaths, only to have them resurrected as I mourned them… and then discover they are monsters who escaped from magical books.
Monsters thatRoanepulled from books.
Why?
“It’s complicated,” he says quietly and only then do I realize I spoke the question out loud.
“You know you’ll have to tell Ardruna the truth,” I say.
“I’m sure Talton has told her already.”
“But why, why would you take them out of their stories when?—”
He whistles, rams his heels into the horse’s flanks and we lurch forward into a full gallop. We race toward the city, the wind stealing my breath and any other sound.
Fine.He doesn’t want to talk about it. But the truth always wants out, sooner or later.
“Only if you keep pushing,” Olm says inside my head. “Not every truth needs to come out, and it often won’t emerge unless someone goes looking.”
“Well, I’m looking and I won’t stop, no matter what you or Roane wish I’d do. You want to bury the truth? I’ll dig it back up.”
“Why?”
“Because I can’t live a lie,” I explain. “Escaping into books is lovely, but I want to write my own story, to control my ending. Isn’t that what everyone wants?”
It’s Olm’s turn to fall quiet and we continue our journey in silence.
The horse falters when we reach the great staircase leading up to the library, so we dismount. Roane helps me down and my knees almost go out from under me.
“I’m fine,” I say when he reaches for me. “Just tired. I’m not used to riding.”
He nods and slaps the horse’s side, sending it cantering away. Then we start up the wide staircase. At some point, he grabs my hand in his and I don’t pull back. It’s an arduous climb up the hill after the day we’ve had. The events and discoveries, the stress and fear and sorrow, they clump together into a mass that feels like it’s hanging around my neck.
The day is fading, the lights coming up on the roof and walls of the cavern. Distant screeches indicate that the griffins are active, but I can’t even look up, my attention focused on putting one foot in front of the other, climbing the steps one by one.
By the time we reach the top, we’re both out of breath, staggering like drunks. It strikes me as kind of funny that heseems as destroyed by today’s events as I am. He’s the mighty warrior guardian of this world and I’m only a bookish human girl.
How dare he.
“If you can take people out of books,” I say, bowing over and trying to catch my breath, “how come you can’t put the monsters back into the pages they escaped from?”
He shakes his head. “It’s different.” Gesturing for me to get moving again, he glances around with a hand on the hilt of a knife. “It will be dark any moment now. We should get inside.”
I nod and straighten, seeing the wisdom in that. I watch as he walks up to the double doors and presses the hidden mechanism. He shoves the doors wide open, pulls me inside, then turns and shuts them with a mighty clank.
“Are they here already?” I belatedly remember to ask. “Talton and Ardruna.”
“I sure hope so.” He takes my hand and leads me to the staircase. “It’s still their home.”
