“Damn.” I tried very hard not to let my mind wander the path of how I could transfer the binding from Cecily to Isa. Stuck in the form of a cat as I was, the first option felt so wrong to contemplate, even if I imagined myself as human in those fantasies. Like every other time my mind had wandered such avenues, I reminded myself to save that thought for after the curse was already broken.
The other obvious way to confer the aspekts of binding on Isa wasn’t much better. Finding someone to perform a marriage between a cat and a woman probably wasn’t impossible—especially not when the cat was also a duke—but if I let myself believe it was a step toward breaking the curse, then the contract binding Isa would force her to cooperate. I had to remind myself that Cecily had already made use of the node. I didn’t need to break her node-tie, just the curse.
I would not force Isa to do anything against her will ever again.
Twenty-Five
Isabel
???
I spent hoursporing over the aspekts of binding scroll, looking for hidden clues about the node. Even in the lush comfort of Felix’s spire room, the time had left me with a stiff neck and sore back. The scroll had answered the question of how Lady Cecily had used the node to cast her curse, but nothing more. The euphoria of having one question answered quickly faded when we realized it didn’t help us break the curse.
The next morning, I decided to search the archives. Without the need to hide from Marc, I could take my time and use my magical senses to locate more Truth scrolls. As I had told Felix, Valois seemed to be the type of person to cast dozens of variations of a single spell, testing all parameters. There might be other scrolls relating to the aspekts of binding. Or a scroll that explained why Felix could create his own Truths, but not reverse Lady Cecily's, despite being the primary node-tie holder.
Finding a Truth scroll was easier said than done. I could sense the magic and know what I held without unrolling it, but I still essentially had to stumble across the scroll by accident first. Whatever system organized the scrolls was not chronological or based on signatories. I refused to believe there wasn’t a system in place, though. One that had made sense to Valois. One probably outlined in one ofthe Truth scrolls scattered throughout the archives, if I only knew how to find the one I needed.
Whatever the system was, odds were the library was organized the same way. Noticing a pattern would be easier there.
With a burst of optimism, I left the archives and made my way to the southeast tower. An hour spent just on the first level wilted my optimism. Every time I thought I identified a pattern, the next book or shelf broke it. As I had noticed on my first time through the library, the books were grouped by genre at first glance, but not fully.
I stepped back from the shelves, looking over them from the center of the room by the staircase and mulling over what I had seen. Histories, biographies, cookbooks, treatises, and the occasional novel. If I recalled correctly, I had found a similar range of books on the third floor during my initial inspection. A similar range but not the same balance between genres.
I made my way up the stairs, wanting to confirm. Looking over the first shelf, I knew my memory was accurate. Up here, novels filled the majority of the space, but there was still a history book tucked here and a biography there. I spotted a history of Gostet between a volume of poetry and a playscript and pulled it from the shelf. I had seen a similar book down on the first level.
Book in hand, I made my way back downstairs and hunted for the tome I remembered. Once I found it, I carried both books to the spire room. By that point, I would have preferred to collapse on the floor and compare them without climbing three flights of stairs, but I was afraid the castle would whisk the books back to their shelves before I finished.
I placed both books on the table next to the chaise and opened them. I didn’t know what I was looking for. The books had different authors and had been written nearly a century apart. I already knew those differences didn’t explain how they were sorted. I turned pages, skimming, wondering what I thought I’d find.
“Are you planning to eat?”
I yelped, Felix’s question catching me completely off-guard. My eyes were gritty, like I had forgotten to blink as I tried to take in every word in the books in front of me. I looked at them, seeing the books instead of the words. I had flipped through about a third of the pages in one book, half in the other. Nothing had triggered any recognition in me.
Felix hopped onto the table. “What has you so engrossed?”
He looked down, reading, and scoffed. “Did you find this drivel in my library? I doubt you could even read it aloud on castle grounds; it is so wrong.”
I blinked. Then blinked again. “What about the other book?”
Felix shifted and read from the volume that I had only made it a third of the way through. “This one looks fine.”
“That’s it,” I gasped. I hadn’t read carefully enough. The books were structured differently, so the discrepancies hadn’t jumped out at me. The few I had noticed I had attributed to the authors’ biases. But if one history was fundamentally false, and the other true . . .
Well, the node was locked to truth magic, wasn’t it? “I can’t believe I didn’t think of that before.”
Felix tilted his head. “What’s it? Think of what?”
“I bet I can use the node to test it. Come on.”
I closed both books and carried them over to the trapdoor.
Felix leapt after me. “Are you going to explain anything?”
“When we get to the great hall.”
I paused on each level of the library, pulling a couple books from the shelves, careful to stack them based on where I had found them. Felix watched me in bemusement but refrained from asking for any more explanations.
I stopped when I stood next to the node. I didn’t expect my test to take long enough that the castle would shelve the books while I worked, but I also didn’t want to take the chance. Calling in the table from the spire room—an option that hadn’t occurred to me while in the library—I set down my pile of books.
