Xara Zynthar's Arc

Chapter 2 of 16

Xara Zynthar left the small stone shelter before the fire had gone cold. Word had reached her at dusk: a palace steward was hiring in a tavern at the edge of the market, and the library post would be filled by nightfall. The servants' gate could wait. If someone else took the post first, her plan died on the threshold. She wrapped a scarf over her green scalp, tucked the eel's water flask against her ribs, and walked. She reached the tavern door and stopped. Her silver dress pulled tight across her shoulders. She counted three breaths, opened the door, and stepped in as if she belonged there. The hostess looked up from a ledger. "Here for the position?" Xara smiled and nodded. The woman waved her toward a curtain at the back. The back room smelled of ale and wet wood. The steward sat behind a plank table, a thin man with ink on two fingers and a permanent squint, as if the world kept showing him things he did not want to read. He did not stand. He did not smile. He looked at her scalp, then her hands, then her scalp again. "You're not from the valley," he said. "No." "Not from anywhere I know." "No." She sat without being asked. "I can read four scripts. I can catalog by author, by subject, or by the prince's own shelving order, which favors the month a book was acquired. I know the private books because I studied them on the crossing. My planet and my skin are not the job. The job is the library." He tapped his ink-stained finger on the plank. "Show me." He slid a scrap of parchment across. Six lines of court script, half of it faded. She read it aloud, then translated it, then pointed to a copyist's error in the fourth line. He listened without moving. Then he set a small locked book on the table. "Name the author." She turned it, checked the binding stitch and the mark burned into the spine. "Ovric of Hallen. The second volume. The first was lost in a fire the prince's grandfather set on purpose." The steward's squint eased by a hair. He wrote something in his ledger. He turned the ledger so she could see her own name, freshly inked, above a line that read: library, probationary, six days. "Servants' gate at first bell," he said. "Late once and you're out. Touch a book without gloves and you're out. And the prince asks about every new face inside his walls. Be ready for that." Xara walked back to the small stone shelter with her hands steady and her stomach not. She had the post. She had six days. And now the prince himself would ask who she was, and she would have to answer before she was ready.