"You're awfully quiet," Jess said, flying up at his left wing. "What are you thinking about?"
And he smiled, feeling the flex of his new stone wings, the wind fresh and cool on his pebbled scales. "The future."
Epilogue
Since his sister left and his parents died, Mace had lived alone in the big house, rattling around in its vast stone silence with only the occasional company of a handful of villagers who came up to do part-time housekeeping and cooking. His social life had consisted mainly of visiting friends like Gio, but he had never thought of bringing anyone back to the house with him.
It was strange to have permanent housemates again. Strange ... but pleasant. He had thought that he might find it awkward, particularly since he wasn't sure how Reive would react to living in a house with gargoyle magic embedded in its very foundation stones.
But it had worked out far better than he'd hoped. Reive and Jess were good company, keeping to themselves for the most part, but joining him for occasional meals in the dining room with the big windows looking out over the harbor. He had been teaching Reive to play chess some nights, beside a roaring fire with sleet rattling against the roof tiles. Jess was helping him in the library.
With plenty of room available, Jess and Reive had taken over one wing of the big house, with several suites of rooms. Reive was renovating one of them for some kind of rock collection, and Jess had been talking about converting another to a nursery. They had several bathrooms and their own kitchen rather than needing to use the main house kitchen. Jess also had her own small library for her own books. As winter settled on the island, Mace found himself more contented than he had been in a long time.
On this particular winter day, he was puttering around in the library with Jess, working on her project to sort, categorize, and inventory the library's vast and disorganized collection.
Frost crusted the edges of the library's windows. Outside, wind lifted snow in small swirls above the Newfoundland hills. The harbor was locked in ice. Wind pounded the sturdy stone walls of the old house.
Despite the cold, it was warm enough inside, with just a little draftiness around the edges to make the fireplace pleasant. The entire house was geothermally heated. Mace didn't know exactly how it worked. His great-grandparents had done it when they built the house, the first of the family to come to this new land, and those secrets were lost now along with the earliest gargoyles, who knew how to do things their descendants could only guess at.
In any case, it made for a pleasant winter experience and cheap heating costs.
"Uncle?" Jess said, looking up from a stack of books. He still got a little thrill of pleasure when she called him that. "I was thinking about going flying with Reive today, while it's still light outside, if you don't mind."
"Of course I don't mind. You've been spending far too much of your time shut up in this dusty old library."
"I love this dusty old library. It's wonderful here. Just let me put these away." Jess got up and stretched. Her hair was pulled back in a thick braid, with wisps of irrepressible brown curls trying to escape. That hair had never been a MacKay family trait. It must come from her father, that long-dead human, Lizzie's mate, who he never had a chance to meet.
He put his own book aside and went to help Jess reshelve the catalogued books.
"I wish I could have brought more of the gargoyle books from the Ossowa library," Jess said. "But those were for the library, not for me. You have an amazing collection here, though. I feel like I've barely seen a fraction of what's here."
"This isn't all of it either," Mace said. "The entirety of our family library doesn't fit in this room, large though it is. There are boxes of books in the attic too."
Jess's eyes went round. "More books? How many more?"
"A lot," Mace said with a laugh. It was easier to laugh these days, too. He felt less rusty at it. "Imagine generations of long-lived bibliophile gargoyles living in this old house, and you might have some idea of how bad the problem is."
The smile faded from her face. "Do you think there could be more copies of the book up there?"
She didn't have to specify which book. "I think the book was one of a kind," Mace said. "Fortunately for all of us. The secret of gargoyles, the making and unmaking of us, is much too powerful to even risk letting it falling into human hands again."
"I know," Jess said. She frowned, looking down at the book in her hands, then quickly shoved it onto a shelf. "It just seems like a shame. All that knowledge, lost."
"Some knowledge isn't meant to be found."
"Knowledge isn't evil on its own," Jess argued. "It's what you do with it that matters."
"Yes, well," Mace said, "with people like Black Robe out there, I'm just as happy to let it stay lost."
He had picked up the young people's nickname for the magician, since they still didn't know any more about him than they had before. Mace had feelers out with Gio and everyone else he knew in the antique book collector market, but so far no traces had surfaced. The magician was gone. Mace was too cynical, or perhaps realistic, to expect that he wouldn’t be back, though.
"You're sure he can't come here?" Jess asked.
"Positive. The defenses of this place will not let him."
Jess looked back at the bookshelves, trailing her fingertips along the spines. "You know what I've been thinking about? It might be nice to set up a library down in the village. Especially now that I know there are boxes upon boxes of books up here that we don't even have room to display. Of course I wouldn't take out any of the really valuable ones, or any that you're sentimentally attached to. But it's my dream, you know ... running a little library. And they all read a lot here, even the old fishermen. There just isn't much else to do in the winter. I think a library, maybe with an attached bookstore, might be really fantastic for the people here."
"If it makes you happy," Mace said quietly, "I would be delighted to offer up my library to stock your shelves."
Jess left the room with a skip in her step, off to find Reive and bursting with ideas for her new library. Mace looked after her with a smile, then stirred up the fireplace and went over to his desk.
Most of the drawers in the desk were unlocked and contained nothing of value. But there was a locked drawer at the back of the desk's rolltop. Mace took out a small gold key and unlocked it. He pulled out the thick sheaf of handwritten notes and laid them on the desktop for perusal.
He had been working on this project intermittently. He could only do it when Jess wasn't in the house.
He did not plan to tell Jess, Reive, or anyone else that the secret of making gargoyles was not entirely lost. He had done the entire ritual himself, after all, and with his sharp memory, he was confident he could recreate it if he needed to.
Since that night at the rock pool, he had been noting down all he could remember, annotating and adding, carefully reconstructing it.
He had meant what he said to Jess. Some knowledge ought to be lost. But he still wasn't quite ready to let go of this particular secret. Not with people like Black Robe out there. His people's survival might someday hinge on it.