“Did you finally find it?” a deep voice rumbled from across the room.
Isa kicked herself internally. She had forgotten he was there, as he had been completely quiet all day. So quiet, in fact, that she hadn’t even heard a page turn.
She decided not to reply. Ignoring the beast had worked thus far on the days he spent with her in the library.
She carefully set the scroll on a side table behind her and returned to the same spot on the shelf. Her father kept his books meticulously organized, so it was likely that any other Floutast would be on the same shelf.
She was in luck! The next three scrolls were exactly what the councilors had requested.
A weight she had not realized she’d been carrying slipped from her shoulders as she surveyed her finds.
They were in poor condition, but they had been found. She could handle everything from here on out. Her father’s life was safe.
She carefully opened the latch on the first scroll she had found and gently nudged it open. A section of the outer parchment broke away from the rest of the scroll. “Curses,” she swore.
“Present,” the deep rumbling voice of the beast sounded behind her.
“Go away.” She did not have time for this.
“What happened?” he asked.
“What are you? Blind?” she snapped.
“Well, actually—”
“These are in worse shape than I thought,” she muttered to herself, remaining focused on the problem at hand. She wanted to unroll the scroll further, but she knew better than to aggravate it.
It was time to get to work.
Wanting all the surface area she had available, she started clearing off the largest table in the library.
“Where do you want these?” the beast asked.
She looked up to see him holding a stack of books. “There.” She pointed across the library to a shelf that still had some space on it.
With his help, the table was cleared in a few short moments.
“Grab those chests and stack them on this side,” she said, pointing to the chests by the library door. Macklin might have laughed at her for bringing every possible tool for every possible eventuality, but she was glad she had done so. This was a full-on emergency makeover.
As the beast brought over the chests, Isa opened them, unpacking their contents into a pile of organized chaos on the newly cleared table.
Her heart still felt fluttery. Seeing the all-important Floutast disintegrate in her fingers had been unnerving. What would the Council do if she found the information they needed and then proceeded to ruin it? She reminded herself that the worst thing she could do was allow the scrolls to travel in their current state. She had seen firsthand what that had done to Brother Elias’s library.
Looking up, she realized the beast was standing on the other side of the table, staring down at her. “Thank you for your help,” she said dismissively. She truly was thankful, but she also hoped that he would leave. His staring made her uncomfortable.
“This seems like a stressfully fixated effort for an ancient writer who is largely disregarded as myth or fancy.”
Surprised, Isa looked back up at him. He had not moved from his side of the table. “You know Floutast?”
“Of course. He’s a primary source of ancient battle tactics. Although, to be honest, the only real reason I read him was because everyone said he was so useless. I had to read it for myself just to prove my professor wrong.”
Isa walked across the room to where she had left the three Floutast scrolls. She picked one up and carried it to her newly prepared workspace. “Did you?” she asked.
“What, read it? Yes.” His eyes followed her careful progress across the room.
“No, prove your professor wrong.” She set the first scroll on the table and returned for the next.
“Oh. Sadly, no. I found the writing rather dull and uninspired. Just boring accounts of daily details and such. In the few battles Floutast actually wrote about, he spent most of the time cataloging the number of barrels of wheat each army had and how many wagons of fuel were brought in each day. If you are going to tell the story of a battle, the least you could do is actually talk about the battle.” He stopped speaking as she approached the table with the second scroll. “Have you read him?”
