Wonder finds her stamina, resilience sprouting from the depths of her stomach and sprinting off her tongue. “Does it have to be one or the other? Can’t I be both?”
“Curious. You’ve got the Archives at your disposal…our home, away from home, away from home. What can my saddlebag give you that a million square feet of stacks can’t?”
“Where is my corsage?”
“Christ. Is that all you want to know? Are you sure that’s what you were looking for? Seems to me that you followed the scent of paper instead. Couldn’t help yourself but to help yourself, is that it?”
“You arrived too soon. I had no chance to help myself.”
In a nutshell, denial sounds guiltier. With Malice, it’s better to subvert his expectations by owning up.
He calls the bluff, stalking past her. Wheeling slowly, she watches him squat and pick through the bag. He must have the letters organized in a way that only he can identify, just in case someone with curves decides to snoop.
Wonder steels herself. She’d made sure to place the envelope in its original spot, but pulling a fast one on Malice is a challenging feat.
If he grins, that means he’s going to pounce. Unarmed, she flits her eyes over to the wooden longbow propped against his bed post.
At last, he rises. His shoulders relax, along with that wiry mouth.
Good. She won’t have to use his archery on him.
“Are you satisfied?” she asks.
He runs the plank of his thumb across his lower lip, considering her. “Oh, I will be. Rest assured.”
“Rest? I’m not the one who has trouble resting.”
That’s pushing it. She knows because his features spasm in surprise—right before he fishes a lone peony petal from his pocket. Wonder recognize this small token from her corsage, which he must have carried around, possibly for a moment such as this. Twirling the purple bud in his digits, he says, “And I’m not the one who has trouble doing this.”
Making a fist, he crushes the petal.
“You odious, vile…!” Furious, Wonder bats at his fingers, wrestling with him until he exposes the bloom, still intact.
She stalls, then veers away, remembering herself. For a second, she’d forgotten how robust the Peaks’ flora are. It would take more than his grip to wilt the nature of this land.
Malice had counted on her forgetting. “Your reaction was perfect,” he says, stuffing the petal back into his pocket.
Wonder storms past him, only making it to the open doorway when his voice slithers up her spine. “Wildflower?” he croons, and when she makes no reply but merely glowers ahead, his words lick up her back. “Peek in here again, and I’ll burn those flowers.”
She twists halfway. “Burn them, and I’ll shred the letters while you rest.”
The rebuttal jostles a protective glare from him, one that warns her against it yet dares her to try. But would he really do as he says? Would she?
No. Yes.
She leaves the room. Nevertheless, their mutual threats echo for the rest of the day, well into the afternoon as she resumes her perch in the Hollow Chamber. Sagging into her chair, Wonder hunches, stamps both elbows onto the table, and drops her face into her palms, instructing herself to breathe.
She deserves a medal for that performance. To convince Malice that she hadn’t taken anything from his bag, on the heels of admitting that she tried, is a victory.
Restraining herself from either cupping his jaw or slapping him has a place in the history books: the blooming librarian goddess with intractable willpower. It would make a grand tale.
Speaking of texts, she hazards a peek at her surroundings and then plucks the delicate letter from her bodice. The paper flutters from her fingers like a plume. It lands atop the open book she’d been reading earlier, an anthology about the Peaks’ natural resources, the chemistry and biology of its environment.
She just can’t right now. She can’t bother perusing pages that reveal next to nothing, amounting to gibberish.
Wonder moves to retrieve the letter and then close the book. Clasping the hardback rim, her eyes hook on to the layer of paper overlapping paper. The sepia sheet resting above the volume’s text becomes…transparent.
She straightens, flattening the leaflet, pressing it firmly against the manuscript. What was a yellowing sheet one second ago has turned into a sheer surface. It blots out the anthology’s original text, allowing alternative script to materialize, as if the sepia paper has become a magnet, pulling hidden cursive to the surface.
She scoots closer to the table, its rim pressing into her navel. It’s not that Malice’s paper has its own sort of magic, because his handwriting remains, interfering with this new secret message. She tilts the letter so only its blank areas cover the manuscript, so that it doesn’t obscure the mystery beneath.
Her gaze jumps across the words. As it does, her scalp tingles—a familiar and enticing sensation, fraught with risk and reward. She has lived such a moment twice before, walking a fine line between ignorance and discovery. In this maze of shelves, she experiences it for a third time.
It’s a legend.
She reads fast, then rereads the script, then translates its celestial vocabulary. In Love and Andrew’s story, the secret quest had involved uniting hearts. In Anger and Merry’s story, it had involved winning and breaking hearts.
And what does this new legend share?
Her finger rides across the paper for yet another round.
If a deity releases their own heart, that deity will heal from their greatest mistake.
Wonder’s head snaps up. Only one regret festers within her. Only one person.
So if she releases her heart from the past, she’ll recover from it. She’ll free herself of the guilt and pain. In turn, that will make her stronger, won’t it? It will empower her for whatever battles against the Fates may lie ahead.
And the ache for Malice’s ghost will vanish. She’ll stop hurting, stop loving who he used to be. She’ll stop wanting.
He will mean nothing to her.
Won’t that be a relief? Won’t that be nice?
All she has to do is release her heart. The question is, how?
9
There’s more.
There’s more because she uncovers more.
Sometimes a crack in research becomes a crater. Sometimes the secret has more to say, more clauses to impart. Any respectable Archive diva wouldn’t merely take a legend at face value without making sure this is the extent of it. There might be branches, a family tree of mysteries.
She tries different techniques: twisting the overlapping paper like a knob opening a door, turning it clockwise above the manuscript, then counterclockwise. When that fails to clear a path of new information, she presses down harder and steers the leaflet across the surface, highlighting and obscuring certain parts. She treats the page like a map, sweeping the sepia sheet across its typography, bearing northward and then southward.
Still nothing.
But there is something.
A tremulous sensation passes through her, similar to past visits when she’d uncovered other forbidden scripts. This is her, in her element at last. This is her, remembering what it’s like to ally with these books, privy to their secrets. How she loves this feeling!
There is more, there is more, there is more.