“This is stupid,” Roy said. “This is utterly impractical. Apart from our not knowing when the Old Ones will decimate Northgard, which could be a matter of weeks, not months, I think it’s ludicrous you’ve completely discarded the arrangements originally set out for us. It’s hard to come to terms with, I know, but the Governor—”
“The Governor doesn’t know what’s best for us,” Percival cut in. “He doesn’t know what is in our best interest because he’s too preoccupied with his own motivations. Sure, we might get this done ahead of schedule, but I would rather use the... bond, for a lack of a better term, that we’ve made as momentum than the fear of extinction. I work best when I am hated, not when I am doomed to die.”
“I don’t hate you,” Roy said, frowning. “I have no reason to.”
Percival smiled, but it was cold and dismal. “Give it time, darling.”
Roy shifted the conversation back to the topic at hand. “So, you want us to compete in a race.That’swhat this game is?”
Percival shrugged. “I suppose so, yes, but anyone can claim they’re a scholar without irrefutable proof of their dedication.” He mulled this over for a moment. “What about this? Whichever of us first unmasks the Old Ones shall display their findings, with indubitable evidence, in a practical demonstration. That way, there’ll be no question as to who the winner is.” Roy’s face must have betrayed his suspicion, for Percival poked him in the sternum and said, “Conceding defeat before the game has even begun, are you?”
“No,” Roy said, a tad too austere. “No, it’s only... What would this demonstration entail?”
“Whatever befits the winner’s conclusion, but that’s not nearly as important as ensuring the opponentbelievesthe research explained in the demonstration. Which is to say, of course, that this game caters not to liars but to the strong-minded. A battle of wills.”
From somewhere deep within himself, Roy mustered the courage to smile. “Strong-minded, am I?”
Percival rolled his eyes and rubbed the back of his neck with apparent nonchalance, but his cheeks were burning red. “You’re missing my point.”
While Percival cleared the frazzled expression from his face, Roy deliberated upon the proposal offered to him. Two propositions in as many days, he thought, yet this one seemed somehow more intrinsically tied to his sense of identity than the Governor’s assignment.This is what I wanted,Roy thought.To prove my worth... But to Percival? Why would I need his approval?
Although Roy knew he would never find it in himself to care for Percival—apart from, maybe, the fleeting flares of attraction his irritatingly striking looks induced—Roy could not repudiate his deeper curiosities. What could Percivalpossiblygain from this “race,” as he called it? Had there been some ultimatum in the Governor’s proposition that Percival was deliberately keeping from Roy? Or was he simplythisobnoxious,thisstarved for attention and validation?
Roy doubted it. Gabriel had chosen Roy as his victim because he was weak, helpless, a flailing, brittle-winged bird whose dream to fly out of its cage was as lackluster as its ability to retaliate. Roy had shown none of the physical attributes that Gabriel had attained over the course of his twenty-seven years, and he’d been beaten and bloodied for it. Percival might not be so cruel as that, but from experience alone, the only guess Roy could hazard as to why this game was so crucial to Percival was that he wanted something from him.
“I don’t know if this is what I want,” Roy said now, and again, hoping it would cement his uncertainty: “I don’tknow. I like burying myself under books, not pressure. We have already bent to the Governor’s whims. Why add to the weight?”
“Oh, don’tfightit, darling,” Percival said with tired but not dispassionate exasperation. He sounded like they’d had this argument many times before. “I know you like the craving. I know you long for that rush you get when you’re fighting for something you love. Hell, isn’t that why you’re here? That’s what ledmehere, at any rate. A chance to use what I know best, rather than scrabble for freedom in a city where my existence meansnothing.” His voice did not break, but it came quite close. Roy flexed his hands, fighting the compulsion to reach out for Percival. “That’swhat this little game between us is about, Dawnseve. You can try to hide it, but that fire in you will never die out.”
Roy tensed, wanting with all the half-spent strength in his voice to express his denial, to show Percival’s claims were unsubstantiated, but as Roy thought it over, his convictions were not altogether wrong. Somehow, PercivalsawRoy. He knew what he felt, as bone-shakingly frightening as it was to admit, because it was exactly what Percival had experienced in the reading den on their first day in the Orphic Basilica, exactly what Northgard had dissuaded them from feeling: the fire of determination, ignited by academia. But although Roy and Percival were like-minded, their motivations were far from adjacent. Percival might’ve even initiated this game to feed his own ego, though Roy suspected that there was something else there inside Percival, a stolen part of himself that he hoped, through this assignment, he could reclaim.
“You can feel it, can’t you?” Percival said. “I know you can. The Elder Scribes held that same flame in their souls. It was what moved them,pushedthem toward the finish line of every novel, every thesis, every report and article and letter.” He shook his head, his features tender and morose. “Darling, it was never about the obscurities, not the connotations or the contextual background. It was aboutambition.”
Percival’s verdict held water. Around two millennia ago—in the middle of the old world, a period of literary enlightenment—Northgard hadn’t yet possessed the military strength to quash the academic community. But as the years passed, Northgard, the Northgard Roy had grown up in, gained the upper hand. They built war machines, ranging from vessels to explosives and, eventually, muskets. They went on weeks-long gruesome campaigns to weed out, publicly condemn, and then eviscerate as many scholars as their weapons could harm. According to a variety of historical reports Roy had found in Dawnseve Manor, those whose mythical beliefs hadn’t been deeply entrenched had been brainwashed by the Radiant Droves, though the details of these brutal practices were undisclosed. Then, fifteen years ago, the Governor instituted a systematic raiding and purging of the havens to which those scholars had once flocked.
“Northgard destroyed every single establishment within the Hasdan Isles in which literature was praised,” Percival said, as if to confirm Roy’s historical musings. He looked around the room, then back to Roy. “Only this remains. If you ask me, our higher powers werefrightenedby the impact that scholars might have on their government because the Governor and his precious allies were so worried for their own survival, their ownlives, that they spared no time to consider the people they’re supposed to protect. Now what are we?”
Roy whispered, “Ostracized.”
“Condemned.”Percival nodded, licking his lips. “We are shunned, mocked, and, at the end of the day, killed for what we believe in, for what we think is right. We hide in our holes, hope our secret correspondence isn’t with one of the Governor’s agents”—Roy swallowed at this—“and eke out the existence of our minds. But we can’t help it, can we? Our ambition is our downfall. We don’t have the privilege to avoid responsibility. Damn, nobody does in this world anymore, but unlike the rest of Northgard, we aren’tfighters.” He scoffed. “We aren’t meant to be on the battlefield. How can we go on like this, Dawnseve? Who would we be if we didn’t defend ourselves? I don’t want to find out. I’ll give this life, this legacy I made for myself... I’ll give it my all. I’ll make myself heard, loud and clear, just to know that the Governorseeshis blunder, where he was at fault for destroying all those precious books. All those preciousminds.” There was such misery in his eyes that Roy felt a chill. “I need it. Don’t you? Or are you satisfied with this life?”
Roy inhaled deeply. He feared, for a split second, that he might smell remnant wisps of smoke from the burnings, orchestrated when he was only ten, on the day of reckoning when the Governor had dispatched a squadron of Droves across the archipelago to immolate the archives throughout the Hasdan Isles. Cold terror laced through Roy’s bones at the grim reminder of Northgard’s barbaric crimes, all committed before the construction of the Edict of Containment.
“I do,” Roy whispered. “I need it more than I thought I did.”
“Nobodycould protest those burnings, Roy,” Percival said softly. He shifted his gaze away, but before he could, Roy glimpsed the tears shining in his eyes. “Granted, there were more scholars then, but they knew any attempt at rebellion would be transient. Even if they’d had access to weapons, they werecreatives;they didn’t fight, just like the Elder Scribes.”
Roy recalled an account he’d discreetly gotten ahold of, passed through several of his correspondents—Clive Lortan’sNeither Sword Nor Shield,a historical analytical essay on the Elder Scribes’ code of nonviolence. “‘Although schisms of faith and opinion are inevitable within a community, it must be noted that the Elder Scribes, and their disciples, all stood firm on this: Neither sword nor shield were they to wield.’ ”
Percival gave a slow, sad nod. “So too did the scholars of fifteen years ago adhere to this code, paying respect to the ancients. They watched—wewatched—as the world that we had come to love, and all whom we loved in it, burned. Some of us died in the wreckage; some years later from the smoke caught in their lungs. Both fared better than the survivors.”
Against his best wishes, Roy’s harrowing memories of the burnings reared up before his mind’s eye like a nightmare augury in some dark sorcerer’s crystal ball: parchment pages scattered on bloodstained streets; students and artists and highbrow classicists kneeling before bookshops engulfed in flame; years upon years of accumulated research, turned to ash after days of endless fire.
And now, Roy thought,Northgard has fallen victim to a similar fate.
He remembered the military reports from Matron Dimestra’s meetings with her soldiers. After storming Northgard’s southern coast three years ago, the Old Ones had set upon the city in a blazing warpath, tearing towns asunder, scorching noble manors to piles of debris, butchering civilians, infant and grown and elderly, without mercy or reason.
Roy despised the higher powers of Northgard, sometimes so fiercely he could barely breathe, but if the Old Ones laid waste to this city, the guilt—which his mission had made Roy responsible for carrying—would be insurmountable. He dared to imagine the outcome, and when he did, he thought of the rubble in the wake of war, the scholars trapped within it, choking on the ashes of their own, waiting for a respite, however temporary, so that they might fight back.
