The Unbroken by C. Clark (ebook reader .txt) 📕

science text of all things, about medicine! I would never have imagined.” Now that they were crammed into his office, Bastien let his ebullience pour out. “See here,” he said. “Travers points out how heavily medical science in Balladaire was influenced by Qazāl ages ago, with these letters. It was an exchange.”

He waved his hands at the oh-so-dismissible past as if it hadn’t led to precisely this moment swelling in Luca’s chest. The page delineated a medical debate. Dr. Ay-yid, a Shālan doctor, maintained that contracting certain diseases could eliminate or lessen the effect of worse diseases. The annotator, Dr. Travers, was clearly on the side of the unknown Balladairan recipient of Ay-yid’s argument, who claimed that this idea was nonsense. Luca was inclined to agree.

She sat and pushed up her spectacles, searching for what had excited Bastien so. It was easy to find, triple underlined. She saw Bastien’s marginalia first, tight, tidy letters that suited him: Our own birthright, abandoned?? Her heartbeat quickened.

But Bastien had underlined none of the theory. He’d underlined a portion of Ay-yid’s letter farther down, an aside: “This is true. My god has given me the gift of understanding this. If Balladaire and Briga were cursed to lose their gifts, that doesn’t fall upon my head.”

The room was so silent that Luca could hear the tinkle of laughter from the youths outside. She realized she was holding her breath, and yet she couldn’t let it out. Beside her, Bastien was nodding hard.

“Bastien.” Luca ran her fingers over the words again. Pointed to his marginalia. “You don’t think—” This was historical evidence. This was more than a manipulative rebel’s goading.

“I do. I do. Balladaire used to—”

“Have our own magic.” This could be true.

A gasp from the side of the room where Guérin and Touraine stood. Touraine stood rigidly, trying and failing to keep her face neutral. Guérin, however, looked as if she was slowly, finally realizing something. Just like Luca was. Like Bastien had.

Maybe the Brigāni woman had been telling the truth. Luca recalled the tapestries in the rest of the Beau-Sang house. The fields of corn, the orchards. A god of the fields. She looked down at the braided-wheat embroidery on her coat.

“How can we find out more? These letters are from the end of my grandfather’s reign.” And Balladairans hadn’t worshipped a god for centuries. She would have to go back home. The Royal Library, her mother’s private collection—how had she overlooked this?

Bastien shook his head. “Here? Not in Qazāl. The First Library would have to have it, though, don’t you think? It’s old enough to have records—historical, political—something that could tell us—” He caught himself. “Tell you what you want to know.”

Luca pulled herself away from the page, pulled the reins on her heart. “Does anyone else know about this?”

“Of course not.” He flushed a pretty shade of pink. “I thought you might want to explore it on your own.”

Oh, but she did. If she could figure out what had happened to Balladairan magic—she would leave more than a mark on the empire. She would shake its foundations and make Balladaire stronger than ever before.

She met Bastien’s wide blue eyes. His blond hair had flopped into his face again, making him look sweet, hapless, a little lost in his books. Luca knew better. This was a calculated trade.

“Thank you, Bastien. This won’t be forgotten. I’ll take this, if I may.” She gathered up the book. She wanted time to read through it in its entirety for context. She also wanted to keep the original on hand so that it couldn’t be used against her. If she was going to dig even deeper into religiosity, she needed to keep her guard up.

In the future, perhaps she could change Balladairan perceptions of magic and gods. In the future, perhaps she would even be able to use magic.

That thought made her stomach churn a little. Too far, too fast. Small steps first.

She glanced at Touraine, whose mouth was tight, as if she already knew what was coming. No matter what the rebels said, Luca was going to the Second City. She would learn about magic without the rebels’ help.

There were moments that defined empires, that determined how a reign would be remembered. Luca would look back on this day, years later, and know that this was one such moment.

A thousand years ago, the First Library, the Scorpion Library, had been built to stand. Built to protect. In fact, saying it had been built was almost a lie. It had been carved out of three massive rocks that overlooked the river. For years, careful masons carved shelves out of the stones, creating a shelter that would stay dark and dry in the hot and humid climate. They were large enough to store all the world’s known knowledge, even as the world grew and grew.

It was not so hard to imagine Brigāni scholars recording what they knew of Balladaire hundreds of years ago.

Luca stood on a precipice. When she crossed the river, she would become one of the first Balladairans to enter the Scorpion Library since the city had been abandoned. Since before the mad Emperor Djaya had gone on her rampage in Balladaire. Luca could hardly imagine what else she would find.

She could barely let herself think about what she really sought.

The river stretched perhaps over a mile wide at this point, and in the distance, the massive stones of the Second City rose like teeth, biting the stars out of the sky. The River Hadd was magnificent enough to create the border for two nations, once part of a single empire. It was the largest river in the world—thus far—and reduced to nothing but a thumb-wide line on her maps. It was easy to forget how it dwarfed so much of her human world, especially when the docks were so far from the city proper and even farther from the Quartier and the compound that she rarely saw it.

Gil hovered close behind her, jaw tight