Red Cloak could walk in at any moment, and I didn’t want to get caught. Once the books were crated up, I started working on the tree, cutting up the branch so that we could cart it out. After a while one of my co-workers and I carried the crate around to the back of the garrison, off the alley near the stables, and then we started working on the tree itself, clearing it so we could repair the building. It had gotten dark by the time we were done, and as I was walking home, I walked by the crate. I looked around to see if anyone was looking, but no one was near. I went up to the crate, popped the top and grabbed one of the books written in Latin. It would be a while until they were shipped out, I reasoned, so I had time to read it and return it, and no one would be the wiser.
After dinner, I excused myself as soon as I could. I told my folks I was tired from work and needed to go to bed right away, but then I snuck out of my window and into the barn with the book, the primer and a candle. The book was a history of Marie Chenault, the Gran Mater, detailing how she rode with the wolves during the Bellum Mammonum, rode with Ysengrim on the assault on Moloch, the living stronghold in the desert, rode down into the depths of the screaming machine and destroyed the heart of the demons to free us from their curse forever. A lot of it I didn’t understand, and a lot of the words were beyond the range of my primer, but it didn’t stop me from sitting up in the barn night after night.
My père apparently became suspicious that I was seeing Henri Ribeau. Henri and I used to be friends. We’d grown up together, gone to school together, played together in the fields around the village, and had been assigned into the carpentry trade together. We were now working together everyday.
One night we were lying on our backs in a field by my house, looking up at the stars. We were talking, just idly chatting. I remember being aware of how close he felt, our shoulders and arms touching. I felt nervous and excited.
We started kissing. It was nice at first, but then he became more insistent, and I got uncomfortable and pushed him away. We lay there for a while, staring at each other, then he said he was tired and wished me good night. After that, we were awkward and uncomfortable around each other. I think he went out of his way to avoid me.
Marie Chenault, I learned, fought so often with her husband Gustave in public that most believed she had no love for him. Their arguments in the Consiligm over the Lycanis Problem were bitter and caustic. Their servants gossiped of chill silences punctuated by screaming fights. Yet when he was ambushed by wolves and killed, she took up his cause and became the leader of the movement to constrain the wolves, where before she had been their staunch supporter and ally. When questioned in the Consiligm about her dramatic shift in stance, she merely replied, “He was my husband, and I loved him.” She would go on to lead the Red Cloaks into a war with the wolves that nearly tore Raioume apart.
I didn’t feel that way for Henri. I had never felt that way for anyone. The whole thing confused me.
My père didn’t know about Henri and the kissing and the cold silence that was between us, but he knew I was acting strange. I wasn’t getting a lot of sleep, so I started trying to sneak in reading sessions during the day. I was constantly making up excuses to be out of the house, and was haunting all of the solitary nooks and crannies in our small village.
One night, when I had snuck out after going to bed early, my père came up to ask me something and found that I was gone. He caught me in the barn, thinking he would find me with Henri. Instead, he found me with the book.
I had grown up thinking that my père was the nicest, sweetest man in all of Raioume, who would love me to the end, so I was unprepared for the sheer terror in his eyes when he saw that I was reading a book. He called for the guard, backing away from me and holding up his hands to defend himself. I tried to explain, but as I got up, his hands curled into fists, and he yelled at me not to move. My father was about to strike me for the first time in my life. The shock hit me harder than a punch to the stomach.
Fortunately, the guard on watch arrived then. My father stumbled backwards as she strode into the barn, yelling, “It’s her! Stop her!” She took the book from me, looked at it, then looked at me. She bound me by the Covenant and took me back to the garrison. I tried to talk to my père as they led me away, but he wouldn’t meet my eye. I would never see him again.
The garrison commander made me read a part of the book out loud to her. She told me this was very serious. I was going to be sent to the prison mines at Benton until I was ready for rehabilitation. I started crying.
Then she asked me, “Do you have remorse for the crime which you have committed against the Covenant?” And I sobbed, “Yes, yes, yes.”
“Stop sniffling,” she said. “The cat is out of the box, and we can’t put it back in. There is a way you can prove your remorse to the Coven and be returned to the fold.”
The wagon train had arrived, and the crate of books had been loaded on it. When the wagons rolled out of the village the next morning, I was loaded next to it. I left the place I’d known for all of my sixteen years, and quickly found myself further away from home than I’d ever been before.
The train took me to Inverness, the seat of the Order of Lore. The village nestles around the fortress, which sits along the banks of the Mupiscah as it winds its way though the wooded northern hills. Within the fortress, the crate and I were unloaded before the Bibliothecae, the library of the Grey Cloaks. On its many shelves sits a copy of every book known to exist, including the Tabularium, the archive of works that survived the Bellum Mammonum.
The Bibliothecae actually consists of a collection of low buildings, hastily constructed and connected together. I was led along a series of twisting passages lined with books to a small workshop in the back. There I was handed over to a young witch, Pierre-Louis Lefèvre.
“Ah,” he smiled. “You must be the carpenter. We have a unique task in front of us.”
He produced a book and placed it on the table in front of me. “Go ahead,” he said. “Open it.”
It was filled with plans and instructions, diagrams and details. It seemed to be about building a small box about the shape of the number eight, and then attaching an arm with some strings across it. I flipped through it and then looked up at him.
“It’s called a violin,” he said. “It’s a musical instrument that was used before the Great War. We have reams of music that we’ve never been able to reproduce because none of them survived. But we have this book. And we have your skills. And we have this workshop.”
“I don’t understand,” I said.
“Sophie,” he replied, “We need you to make a violin.”
I was taught how to read and speak Latin and French, properly, though I had done most of it on my own. Pierre-Louis was a patient teacher. I impressed him with how much I had learned by myself. I would spend the morning working in the workshop, building prototypes, trying to learn techniques, but the afternoons Pierre-Louis reserved for language and reading.
And so the weeks passed, and I couldn’t have been happier. Not only was I doing a task for the Coven, but I was basking in the attention of a handsome young witch. To be specific, Pierre-Louis was an enchanter, a witch with the talent of imbuing material items with magical properties. He was good with his hands, and as eager to talk about carpentry with me as I was to talk about magic with him.
In my downtime I was allowed to peruse the library, within limits. I would ask Pierre-Louis for a book on a subject, and the next day he would bring one to me. I was fascinated by the histories, particularly those of the early days of Raioume, after the demons had been driven away. I had never thought about how hard it would have been to create the society I had grown up within from whole cloth.
As my wood-working skills grew, my prototypes began to look more and more like the violins in the diagrams and pictures. One day Pierre-Louis came into the workshop beaming, a large flat book in his hands.
“I found it, So
phie.” He couldn’t stop chuckling as he laid it before me. It was a manual on playing the violin, how to hold it, how to get it to produce sound, what notes were what. And it was written in French! My last few prototypes had been playable, but the screeching sounds they produced had put us off. The power of books overwhelmed me as I realized that we might be able to reconstitute a lost art because it had been preserved in text.
Pierre-Louis brought some sheet music, and the two of us started learning to play the violin. He had some musical training, and had an ear for notes. We would stay up late in the night, trying to play. Eventually our heads would fill with words and music, and we’d sit by the small fireplace, sipping tea and talking about anything but violins and music.
That was when he told me about his wife, about how their marriage had been arranged when they were young, a union devised and divined by the augurs to deliver magical progeny. For ten years they had been wed, but still had not produced a child.
“But you do love her,” I asked, my thoughts filled with the story of Marie Chenault and the death of Gustave. He sighed and looked at me for a long while. “I