Some by Virtue Fall by Alexandra Rowland

Author:Alexandra Rowland
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Alexandra Rowland

Fifteen days after that first conversation in Saba’s flat, she received a very brief note summoning her to the mes Akhal bookshop. She went under cover of darkness, as instructed, and Nazeya met her at the door. “Grandmother and I have been looking at the book. We might have something for you.”

“Oh?” said Saba, shucking off her coat as she followed Nazeya up the back stairs. “What do you have?”

“Provenance.”

The word seemed to send a tremor through the room, rattling the windowglass faintly. “Provenance,” Saba said, as Nazeya opened the door and gestured her through.

“We’re not completely sure, but—”

“Bah!” said an extraordinarily old woman sitting at a table. “We’re mostly sure.”

“My grandmother, Rayyana mes Akhal,” Nazeya said. “Grandmother, this is Mistress Sabajan Hollant, who owns the book.”

Rayyana’s nod to her was both dignified and dismissive. Saba mentally admired it and tucked it away in her mental catalogue of performable character tics. “Very pleased to meet you, grandmother,” Saba said in Khagri.

“May your own mother and grandmother rest peacefully in the lap of the gods,” Rayyana said. “They must be dead, to let you go around with an accent that bad.”

“Sorry,” Nazeya whispered with a wince, pulling another chair up to the table.

Saba took it, studying Rayyana with delighted curiosity and trying not to mimic her posture and gestures overmuch. “Provenance, you said, grandmother?” she said, now in Avaren.

Rayyana sniffed. “I was a scholar when I was young, back in the old country. Once, my teacher took us to the king’s house of treasures. You pay a coin and you can look at all the wonderful things he owns, sitting in glass cases with guards to watch them. I’m almost certain this book was one of them.”

Saba blinked down at the cloth-and-pasteboard bound book on the table, drab and unassuming. “You recognize it? How? Nazeya said the cover had been replaced.”

“Because I’m a bookbinder’s daughter, girl.” Rayyana picked it up and turned it edgewise. “The headband.” She tapped the colorful band that anchored the stitching at the spine—it was distinctive, now that Saba noticed it. “And the stitching.” Rayyana held the book open to the center of a folio of pages and showed a line of vibrant purple stitching. The threads shone in the light, more brilliant even than silk. “Seawich thread, and cochineal dye. This is a king’s book.”

Saba opened and closed her mouth several times. “Nazeya said there were too many poems.”

Rayyana snorted. “Nazeya was never a good student, never listened to lessons.” Nazeya ducked her head and folded her hands tight in her lap. “Two Moons and Twelve Stars is a Mangarha classic, but copies of it are always abridged. Can you blame them?” She gestured at the book. “No one would buy something like this. No one wants to write all this out by hand—now that we have all these newfangled print shops, perhaps we’ll see complete copies—maybe. An abridged copy typically consists of two of the long works and some assortment of twelve of the poems. This,” she put her hand flat on the book, “is one of the only complete volumes in existence.

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