“So you use these to remind yourself of where you’ve been and what you did in case you forget.”
He nodded and pointed to the memory in her hands. “I’ve found that the memory is available to anyone who holds it. Through testing we’ve found that even Petre can use them, so long as someone is nearby to keep the memory pressed against the glass. Go on, try it.” He mimed bringing the small red sphere to his forehead. “The effect should be immediate.”
She smiled and touched the stone to her forehead, and a whole scene flashed by at the speed of
mem
She sat at her desk, reading a book. She looked up and saw her dear daughter, Alphetta, stretched in front of the fireplace, reading a book about a traveler to far-off lands. Her crystal ball sat in its usual place on the large desk.
or
She felt a swell of love toward her daughter, and she closed her own reading. Her hands were large and indelicate, though not without nimbleness. She stood up and walked around the desk. She wrapped her daughter up in her arms, and her daughter giggled and yelped for her daddy to put her down, and she never wanted to do that in a thousand thousand years, never.
y.
It was over in an instant, but the image was clear to Skate. The sights, sounds, textures, emotions, names—they had all been as real to her as if she’d been there herself.
She offered the gemstone back, and her breathing faltered. That sensation of love for her daughter—for Belamy’s daughter—had been overpowering. She looked into his old eyes and recognized the pain within them. The loss of her must have felt like dying to him. Even though Skate had felt all of the emotions out of order (learning of her loss only to catch a glimpse of love for her after she’d long been dead), it still hurt her, if only lightly and momentarily, to think of her as gone now.
She cleared her throat to paper over her discomfort. “So if you think you’re having trouble remembering something, you’ll have a way to keep everything…alive for yourself.”
Belamy took the stone and placed it back in its spot within the jewelry box and closed the lid. “That’s right. So far, it has hardly seemed necessary. I can still recall each scene in the glass before I have used the magic within. Even though, as you’ve seen, the experience is incredibly vivid, my own natural recollections are not far removed from the events within. I fear the day that the memory seems entirely new to me; at that point, I do not know how helpful these tools will be. I can only hope to forestall the deterioration.”
Skate considered the jewelry box as Belamy snapped it shut. He did all this after his meeting with the dragon. It can’t be the thing that holds his soul. “What will you do if it doesn’t work? Gonna try something else?”
He nodded and set the box on the arm of his chair. “Yes, I’ll have to. I don’t know what that something else would be.”
“I hope it works.” She looked over at Petre’s globe. His prison was as cloudy as ever. She didn’t know what he was doing or where he was looking. Belamy’s recollection had described a very unpleasant and oddly personal moment in the man’s life. She didn’t know what she’d say to him when they next talked.
“I do, too. Oh, that reminds me,” Belamy said, rising from his seat and stepping into the kitchen. He said something to Rattle and came back in. “Starting next week, we’ll begin actually reading a text as part of your lessons. Shall we begin your reading for the day?”
“After breakfast,” Skate said, smiling before gazing into the fire.
“Of course.” The old man pulled Petre to him through the air and made for the stairs.
“I’m sorry.” Skate wasn’t sure what made her say the words, but it felt like the right thing to say. She didn’t turn around, but heard Belamy halt his progress and turn, the bannister creaking as he put more weight on that side. “I’m sorry about what happened to Alphetta. I’m sorry you…” Her mind was filled with the memory of Alphetta, and the love that Belamy had felt for the girl as she got lost in her reading in front of the fireplace. “I’m sorry you didn’t get more time with her.”
There was silence from the staircase for a moment, and the only sounds were of the fireplace, the odd moving locks, and Rattle’s banging in the kitchen. Belamy finally spoke, and his voice sounded like it had come from the end of a long tunnel. “We only have the time we are given. We must learn to make the most of it.” His footsteps echoed through the house, seeming to fill her ears with their slow, sad rhythm, making her think of families, and friendships, and discarded trinkets.
Skate thought of the crystal ball on the desk, and smiled as the kitchen door swung open and the smell of fatty bacon filled the room. “I only have what time I’ve been given,” she said to Rattle, who set the plate down with a clink. “I guess eating bacon by a fire is worth the time, isn’t it?”
Rattle clicked in response and floated back into the kitchen.
The meat was flavorful, and her feet were warm by the flames. It is, Skate decided, well worth the time. Her concerns tried to press in on her again—
What will I do about the Ink? How can I be sure that the statuette is the thing I’m looking for? Do I have enough time to really learn to read before I leave forever?
—but she pushed them aside, and she was able to enjoy her breakfast.
Chapter 22
In which reading begins, a conversation is surveilled, and the Big Boss appears.
The days passed pleasantly. An entire week went by, in the course of which Skate began trying to read written words on a page. It just so happened that the book she was given was the book she’d chosen as practice days before, though on that occasion, she hadn’t gotten past the title: The Last Dragon of the Lost Brink Islands. She took ages on each sentence, and even then, she only knew two words out of every three.
“More will come with time and practice,” Belamy told her when she complained about the matter, and she decided to trust his judgment. He’d taught people to read before, and probably knew enough about the process to tell whether it would come to her or not. So, Skate continued, and spent time talking with Petre in the meantime.
The first conversation was awkward, as both of them tiptoed around the fact that Skate knew the story of Petre’s imprisonment. Eventually, though, the tension eased as they wordlessly agreed not to mention it. Between meals and lessons, Skate talked with him about the reading and about other stories Petre knew. This pattern would have continued had Belamy not found something of interest in his spying glass as Skate came down for breakfast.
“Aha!” He laughed triumphantly and clapped his hands above his head. “I got him. I got him! Ha!” He was staring intently into his glass sphere, which contained within it a tiny moving image that Skate had no chance of discerning from her vantage point. His immediate return to silence after his outburst told her he had not even been talking to her, but making a general announcement to the house or to himself. He doesn’t know I’m on the stairs.
“Got who?”
“Hush.” Belamy was staring into the sphere, the golden enhancer buzzing away to his left.