Reive had no idea why she would be embarrassed about that. "I didn't go to college at all," he said. He carefully turned another page. Rather than more handwriting, this part of the book was printed, either with a printing press or extremely tidy calligraphy, on cream-colored, very old-looking paper. "What about this?"
Jess pointed to the page, not quite touching it even with her gloves on. "This is a long passage discussing the alchemical elements and their application to—er—magic. But every part of the book is different. This book appears to have been bound from a number of different sources. Some are copies, but some are originals, as if pages from other, older books were collected and stitched together. See?" She turned a page, and the next pages were visibly different yet again, a little bit smaller and printed on yellower paper.
"So this book is made out of pieces of other books? Like a Frankenbook?"
Jess drew a breath. Her eyes sparkled with interest. "It really wasn't that unusual back in those days. Today we think of a physical, printed book as a single item. We buy books new and discard them when the binding falls apart. Bookbinding is no longer a common vocation."
She turned a page carefully, handling it with the tips of her gloved fingers.
"But back in the very early days of printing, books were sold as loose pages—signatures, actually, a group of pages printed together—and the customer would have them bound together in their choice of binding. Books were rare and expensive, and if your book started to fall apart, you could have it rebound. And if you were going to do that anyway, you didn't have to stick with the original contents of the book. You could have more than one book bound under one cover, if you wanted to. Especially if your books were short, like—oh, any kind of thing, pamphlets and broadsides and song lyrics and, in this case, parts of other books. There's even a word for it, sammelband, a book made of individual shorter books bound together as one—" She broke off and dropped her gaze. "Ugh, I'm sorry. I can really go on when I start talking about this kind of thing. I'm probably boring you."
"Not in the slightest." Reive's dragon was in rapture, absolutely captivated by her. Reive was equally fascinated. "It's interesting."
Jess's cheeks turned pink. "I hope you still think that after you've heard me ramble on for an hour about the history of bookbinding." She ducked her head. "Anyway, I've never seen anything else like this book before. It's like someone took a commonplace book—that is to say, a journal; some of these are original handwritten pages—and mashed it up with other published books and treatises, annotated in the margins. It seems to have had different authors, and I don't think the person who wrote the journal pages is the same one who annotated it, because the handwriting is different." She turned the pages again. "See, this is all Greek, a copy of an original Greek manuscript from classical times."
"Don't tell me you read Greek too."
There was a smile, a shy little twitch of her full lips. "Greek, Latin, some French and Italian."
"Wow," he said, honestly impressed. "Have you translated this at all?"
Jess shook her head. "I read all of it, of course, to find out what was in it, but ..." She trailed off, looking pensive, as if she'd started to say something else and changed her mind. "Anyway, no, I never thought of doing an actual, formal translation, since I can read it myself. Well, except the Norse runes. I've contacted a university in Oslo to see if they can help me with those, but I haven't heard back from them yet."
"What about the rest of it? What's it all about?"
Jess pushed aside a large heap of ragged paperbacks to make room on the table. She took the book carefully from Reive's hands and laid it down.
"I mean, broadly, it's an alchemical text, so it's a mix of philosophy and natural history and ritual magic, or what the author believed was magic, and—well, gargoyles. It's funny you mentioned Frankenstein earlier, because that's what this is, basically. It's a book on creating gargoyles, how to make them and bring them to life. I mean, a fantasy about how gargoyles would be created, of course," she added quickly. "Because they're not real. Right?"
"Right," Reive said absently. His heart beat faster. This really did sound like it might have the information he needed to heal himself. He leaned over the book, wishing he could understand it himself. "Do you mean gargoyles are—constructs of some kind? I mean, hypothetically speaking. If living gargoyles were a real thing."
There was a slight hesitation before Jess said, "Well, according to this book, they were created in the Middle Ages using alchemy. I couldn't say exactly how, because the book itself doesn't say precisely. It's so chaotic, and there's so much missing. It's like having a recipe with half the ingredients and instructions missing, and what instructions you do have are out of order."
No. He couldn't come so close, have it at his fingertips, only to fail. "What about the rest of it? There's a lot more here than just a ... a gargoyle recipe."
Jess stifled a laugh. "Whoever compiled this was pulling in every source they could find that had anything at all to do with gargoyles. Medieval manuscripts, myths, poetry ... between the mix of sources and the annotations, it's really a mess. And then there's all the occult stuff."
"Magic."
"Magic according to alchemists, anyway."
Reive said nothing. As far as he had always believed, there was no such thing as true magic. He'd never heard any of the older dragons talking about it. But then again, the list of things he knew for a fact were real included shifters, mate-bond telepathy, and gargoyles capable of turning stone to living statues and moving the earth itself. Who knew what else might exist?
Also, it was hard to concentrate with her heady vanilla perfume filling his senses, making his dragon distracted.
Not to mention the itching-burning of his bad arm. It was as if the proximity to the gargoyle claw was making it worse.
"Can you show me a page with one of the magic rituals?"
"Sure." She flipped carefully, and stopped on a page with a bunch of symbols and circles sketched in brown ink. "I mean, for whatever it's worth, there was a lot of this kind of thing back when alchemists were around. It doesn't mean it actually does anything."
But that doesn't mean it doesn't work, either, Reive mused. His shoulder was almost touching hers. Inside him, his dragon seemed to stretch out as if to touch her.
What's with you, anyway? You said she's not our mate, right?
I don't think so, his dragon said unhelpfully. But she smells nice.
"So these are magic spells we're looking at? What are the ones on this page supposed to do?"
"Hmm." She frowned for a moment, studying the words and diagrams. "This one is ... something involved with binding the element of air to the element of earth, I think? It's complicated, though. There are a lot of steps to it, and—" She flipped a few pages until she found what she was looking for. "See, here's another version of the same thing. It's not like TV special-effects magic where there's a simple spell and you wave a wand and get a fireball or something. There's page after page of this sort of thing."