“How’s that?” Mychael’s voice was a bare whisper, a deep, rich, wonderful whisper. It was his spellsinger’s voice. I closed my eyes and let it work its magic.

“Good,” I murmured. “Perfect even.” I might end up in a puddle on the floor, but I was fine with that. Puddles couldn’t have headaches, or not be trusted, or worry about kidnapped girls, or connections to soul-sucking stones.

I took a breath and let it out on a sigh. “So what do you think Banan wants with—”

“Shhhhh. Relax.”

I smiled a little. “That’s easy for you to say.”

“Apparently it’s not easy for you to do.” I heard the humor in his voice.

I opened my eyes. Mychael’s eyes were close to me— and so was the rest of him. I remembered what had happened last week at the goblin king’s masquerade ball when we were this close and my face was cradled in Mychael’s hands. My heart did a double thump at what we had done next.

“This isn’t relaxing,” I breathed.

Mychael’s blue eyes had darkened. “No, it’s not.” His voice was deeper, huskier.

I swallowed. “Relaxation’s way overrated.”

Mychael was close enough to kiss for the second time today. This morning we had Ronan Cayle and four Guardians watching us. No kiss then. No one was watching us now.

Mychael bent his head until his lips barely brushed mine. I felt the warmth of his breath and the rapid pulse of his wrists against my face. We stayed that way, breathing, barely touching. Then Mychael slowly moved his lips to my forehead, resting them there in a lingering kiss, a kiss that banished my headache, erased my tension, exiled my fatigue, and made my toes tingle. Spellsinger and healer. Nice combination.

“You’re a really good kisser,” I whispered, kind of dazed.

I felt Mychael’s lips curl into a smile. He gently tilted my face up to his.

“You should go to bed.” His voice was low and vibrant.

“Bed?” I was dazed, but I was liking it. Actually what I felt was a little tipsy. If this was what a master spellsinger could do to a girl, he could keep right on doing it.

“Bed,” he repeated, like he thought he wasn’t getting through to me. “You need to rest.”

I felt a giggle bubbling up. “Whose bed?”

Mychael blushed and lowered his hands from my face to my shoulders. Much to my disappointment, the tipsiness immediately started to go away.

“That would be your bed,” he told me.

I grinned crookedly at him. It might have been leftover tipsies, but I do believe I detected regret in that yummy voice.

Mychael took his hands off of my shoulders. “I’ll have Vegard bring your dinner to you there.”

Chapter 7

Thanks to Mychael’s attentions, and my own exhaustion, I slept all night, and way later than I’d planned the next day. It was early afternoon before I left the citadel for the Conclave Scriptorium armed with a full Guardian escort and a letter from Mychael to get me past the front doors.

I could have easily found my way there by myself, but I played by Mychael’s rules and took Vegard, Riston, and a ridiculous number of additional Guardians with me. Vegard and Riston were uniformed, armed, and virtually plastered to my sides. If I had to draw a blade in a hurry, I’d have to knock one of them out of the way first.

The rest of my Guardian escort was there to keep anyone who might be after me from getting through their outer perimeter and into my immediate vicinity. They were keeping watchful eyes on the faculty, parents, students, and various visitors crowding Mid’s winding streets this time of year. Not surprisingly, everyone gave us a wide berth.

The Conclave Scriptorium never failed to make me stop and gawk like a tourist. Light reading was not something you came to do in the Scriptorium. Inside those granite walls was the largest and most complete collection of books, scrolls, tablets, and anything else you could write, scratch, or engrave words on in the seven kingdoms. Impressive would be an understatement. Overwhelming sounded about right. Not to mention the place stank to high heaven, magic-wise. I’d spent time in some mages’ private libraries, and while their bedtime reading material could pack quite a magical punch, it had nothing on the Scriptorium. Too long in this place could send a sensitive into magic overload that’d make your worst hangover pale in comparison.

I must have winced or something because Vegard nodded in understanding.

“Yeah, it gives me a headache, too,” he said. “Nontalents do most of the book retrieval in the stacks. The reading rooms are separate. Only certain mages are allowed to spend time in the stacks themselves. Though I don’t see why they’d want to.”

We passed through massive, iron-banded doors into a cavernous, cool interior lit by lightglobes recessed into the walls. The counter at the far end was a wall-to-wall monolith of black marble manned by librarians who looked less like academics and more like a black-robed line of defense for the precious books that lay beyond. There was a single opening in the center to allow mere mortals to pass into what the librarians no doubt considered their inner sanctum. I didn’t think trying to stroll through without permission would be a good idea.

Something moved above us, and I looked up.

There was a kid stuck to the ceiling.

I blinked. “What the…?”

Riston and Vegard looked up. Riston winced; Vegard chuckled.

“It’s a student,” Vegard told me.

I gave him a look. “I can see that. How the hell did he float up there like a human balloon?”

“He didn’t float,” Riston told me. “It’s detention.” He didn’t sound like he approved of it. “He was put there by a librarian, probably Lucan Kalta.”

“Lucan who?”

“Kalta. The chief librarian.”

“What’d the kid do?” Whatever it was, he didn’t look all that sorry that he’d done it. He grinned and waved at me. I did a little finger wave back.

“Could be anything,” Vegard said. “But usually ceiling tacking is reserved for trying to take a book without checking it out. Kalta takes that personally.”

“So take the book to the desk and check it out—what’s the problem?”

“Certain books can’t be checked out,” Riston explained.

“And other books students aren’t qualified to get their hands on, for their own safety.”

Vegard grinned. “Everyone coming and going can see you up there—it’s one hell of a deterrent.” He looked up and chuckled again. “Let’s hope the kid paid attention during levitation classes. When the librarians release you, sometimes they catch you before you hit the floor; sometimes they don’t.”

I was careful not to walk directly under the dangling student. “You have Mychael’s letter saying we can be here, right?”

Vegard followed in my footsteps. “I wouldn’t have set foot in here without it.”

Since I wasn’t a Conclave mage or faculty, I needed a sponsor to vouch for me. Vegard had a letter from Mychael that should get me access to the books I needed.

A black-robed, bespectacled man virtually scrambled around the edge of the massive counter to greet Vegard.

“Sir Vegard. It’s good to see you again. How are you?”

“Doing fine, Nelek. Doing fine.”

“How may I assist the paladin today?” Nelek asked.

I muffled a smile. It’s all about who you know.

Vegard passed him an envelope. I noticed it carried the seal of the Guardian paladin. Apparently Mychael wasn’t taking any chances on the Scriptorium’s staff giving us the cold shoulder. The librarian glanced at the seal and surreptitiously secreted it in an inner pocket of his black robes.

“Follow me, please.”

We were in.

The looks that met us as we passed through the opening in the counter were curious at best and downright hostile at worst. I felt like I was violating sacred territory. Once inside, there was a lot of marble and granite, with doors that looked suspiciously like vaults. Drawers slid out of stone walls on silent rollers. Then there were the stacks—long, tall, dark shelves arranged in narrow rows containing bound volumes. I wouldn’t want to be anywhere around if one of them suddenly decided to fall. The place reminded me of a mausoleum. It definitely set my teeth on edge. Though what probably made my teeth hurt was the undercurrent of a nearly overwhelming scent of parchment, old leather, and magic. It wasn’t the sense of stagnant magic, of just words or runes written on parchment; it was waiting magic, sometimes not patiently, for the leather covers containing them to be opened and read and given life beyond what already pulsed impatiently against their parchment restraints. I sensed spells shifting restlessly against the animal hides they had been written on. The outside of the Scriptorium had given me a headache; the inside made my skin want to crawl.

Nelek the librarian strode purposefully ahead of us. He must have been a nontalent. If I had to work here, I know I’d want to be.

“Uncomfortable?” Vegard asked me.

“To say the least.”

“We’ll be working in a shielded room,” he assured me.

“You won’t be able to sense the manuscripts out here in the vault.”

I glanced around. “It’s actually called that?”

“Not officially, but that’s what it looks and feels like, so that’s what we call it.”

I had a thought, and it wasn’t comforting. “What’s going to shield us against what we’ll be reading?” If level-twelve wards hadn’t held against the Saghred, I didn’t know what’d work against the probably insane scribbling of the goblin shamans who had spent their short and mad lives living and working with the Saghred.

“There’s plenty of security precautions in the reading rooms,” he assured me.

Right. Now where had I heard that before?

The reading room the librarian unlocked for us was just a room with a table and four chairs. That was normal. What was not normal was a clear cubicle next to the table. It looked like glass, though I suspect it wasn’t. It was tall and wide enough that a man could have stood upright in it. Inside was a sturdy lectern to hold a manuscript or document being examined. I sensed a charge in the air surrounding the cubicle. Containment wards. Not level twelve, but still impressive. They were inactive now, but then the cubicle was empty. No menacing manuscripts inside whose mere touch would turn the staunchest mage into a cackling lunatic bent on an island-wide killing spree.