The Longest Autumn by Amy Avery

Author:Amy Avery [Avery, Amy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER

EIGHTEEN

For three more days, I shiver and sweat, fretting over the work I’m missing. Do they think me lazy, or that I’m faking this? Every day, I’m letting someone down, some other acolyte who must cover my share of the work.

On the fourth day, the fever passes, though the cough still lingers and I find myself dizzy sometimes. I can’t bear to lie abed any longer, though, so I force myself up and to my duties, slogging through them in a foggy daze.

But my search for answers presses on me still, and even fatigued, I can’t pass up an opportunity that comes. I creep through the halls this evening, preparing to slip into Calder’s chamber. Wren told me she’d sent him into town for spell supplies this afternoon.

His curtain rattles as I pass through, the bell tied onto it a small alarm. But I’ve long since set aside my worry for such things, after prying into other rooms in this quest.

Once inside, I quietly shuffle through his belongings. Disorganized piles of papers, books, and scrolls fill his shelves and cover his desk. Just notes containing mathematical formulas. I may not be an expert, but I know enough to guess they don’t look like spells, only numbers and notations, the work of his lessons. Mundane, harmless. Until one drawer gives me a nasty surprise. I barely brush the handle before a painful sting burns my fingertips.

I yank my hand away and massage it gingerly. This enchantment is too much like the one on Sidriel’s box, though weaker. What does he hide here?

But time is short, and I have no solution for that trap. I return to the rest of his belongings. Papers and books and more papers. Other than his mathematics lessons, some seem like plans for inventions to help with various everyday tasks. Teakettles, something that resembles a shovel.

Then I find it, peeking out of the pages of a book. A crude sketch. The symbols that rest on the Mirror’s frame, once hidden beneath its surface, now marred. The ink is clear, new, unlike the faded, walnut-colored inks of some of the older tomes I peruse in the library.

Tucked in with it are a handful of other notes jotted in the same hand. Numbers, formulas, but on each page, one of the Mirror’s symbols in the center, the notations circling it like water swirling down a drain.

One scrap of paper leaves my breath frozen, my hands trembling.

My name, written beneath several of the symbols. Lines connect the letters of my name to one symbol or another, with numbers beneath each. Computations add them together in a messy scrawl.

I consider stealing this so Wren can analyze it. But no, Calder may notice it missing. Instead, I snatch a loose page from a careless stack on one corner of the desk, in the shadow of a tower of books that looks ready to topple at any moment. Using a nearby pen and ink bottle, I copy the page carefully, then replace everything exactly where I found it and blow on the ink.

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