The duke's face was incredulous. "What," he said in a slow, low rumble, "could you possibly have to offer me?"
Vera took a breath, straining for the words to make the situation appear like less of a disaster than it was. "I know where your book is. Well, more specifically, I know where it's not." She gestured around the corridor. "Here."
"Do elaborate," he demanded.
"You know the storm last night? Wind, rain, thunder, surges of magical energy? We have to send some particularly volatile books from the Archive so they don't run away, spontaneously combust, summon any demons, what have you. Last night, before you arrived, I sent out the Blackfire Codex with a few others. It's no longer within the Archive's walls."
"So where is it?"
"A protective cache out on Witherstone." She tried not to grimace. "Most likely."
"Which is…"
"I don't know."
The duke stepped forward. "Pardon?"
Vera bit her tongue. This next part would be the worst to explain.
"I may have… failed to log the transfer correctly. There are a dozen caches across the island, and I've only been able to rule out one. I don't know which other cache it's in."
The duke took another step forward, forcing Vera to inch back into the corridor. "Well, start searching the others."
Vera sighed, waving a hand over her damp, mud-stained appearance. "Do I look like a monster hunter to you? A mistmaw nearly took my skin off when I checked the cache closest to here."
"Then ask someone else," he said.
She shook her head. "No, thank you. My promotion is precarious enough as it is. I don't want to make up for this with yet more overtime." She folded her hands across her abdomen in an effort to exude confidence she didn't feel. "That's why I've come with a deal."
The duke's eyes narrowed in suspicion. "I still don't see what you could offer me."
"Access," she said. "To everything. Not just the Blackfire Codex, but whatever else you want. No questions asked, cross-references be damned. Want the incantations to summon golems? The blueprints for a wheel that spins straw into gold? It's all yours. I'll even go so far as to make copies you can take with you from the Archive."
"In exchange for…"
"You made it through Witherstone practically alone. I'm confident you'll survive a few more days out there." Vera knotted her fingers together, heart pounding as if she was still being chased. "Help me check the other caches to find your book, and consider its copy yours along with everything else I've offered."
The duke had gone very, very still. He once again looked more ghost than man, The silence stretched out long between them. It was all Vera could do not to flinch.
"Let me get this straight," he said at last. "You misplaced the book, you refuse to ask the other librarians for help retrieving it, and now you want me to risk my life once again fighting swamp monsters to find it for you."
Vera huffed. "Well, when you phrase it like that, it doesn't sound great. But I can get some of the Archive's equipment, so it shouldn't be quite so perilous."
Abruptly, the duke shoved past her and began to stalk down the hall. "I'll have someone else retrieve it."
Icy panic shot through Vera's limbs. She ran after him, mind scrambling for purchase on some piece of information she could use. There had to be something. She already seemed to know more about the book than he did, even from just the precursory description in the ledger––
The ledger. It had described the tome to contain shadow and fire practices tied to his bloodline, as well as astronomical tables, beast taming techniques, and instructions for completing the Blackfire Pact. Whatever that was.
"Wait––"
She quickened her pace, ducked around him, and held out her arms to block his path. It was useless, really. He towered over her. But she had one last opportunity to stand her ground, and she took it.
"––Wait. This book, you need it for your conquest, right? You think if you complete the Blackfire Pact, victory will be yours?" Her words seemed to strike a nerve, and the duke halted in his tracks. Vera inhaled. "Well, if another librarian finds it, they'll chain it back up where it belongs. You can read its pages as many times as you wish, even copy them yourself, but whatever magic is in the ink will not leave this Archive. Most other librarians can't make a copy with the exact same properties. If you plan to cast some grand war-ending spell from the pages of that tome, you can't."
Another beat of silence.
"What are you saying?"
"There's a reason I earned this troublesome promotion," Vera said. "I can make good copies, ones with the same properties as the original. Any other archivist will make you wait weeks just approve your copy request, never mind the time it takes to make it." She fixed him with her most unwavering stare. "I won't. Help me find the Blackfire Codex, and I'll skip the bureaucracy and make you replicas of anything you want."
The duke blinked at her for several long moments. "Or," he said, "I could report your error right now, and you'll never shelve a book again."
He moved to push past her, but Vera moved with him. In her mind's eye, she replayed their first encounter. The anger, the weariness, the way he behaved like breaking down doors was the only way to go through them. How he loathed being unable to do that with her. She vividly recalled his frustration with the mirror-maze atrium, given how long it took him to get there.
"You've been looking for this book for three months already," she said, voice low. "Can your war really wait any longer?"
This made him pause. For just a moment, the storm in his expression flickered to give way to bone-deep exhaustion.
"You are… infuriating."
She shrugged. "And your best chance at victory. So what will it be?"
She looked up to match his stare, fighting with everything in her to hide the desperation clawing down her throat. She wasn't even sure if she could deliver on her promise. Her copying skills were indeed good, but skipping the bureaucratic process to make exact replicas of such dangerous texts would be a stretch of her authority, even as an archivist.
It didn't matter, though. She'd cross that bridge when she got to it. For now, she only needed him to agree.
"Fine." He said at last. "We'll leave now."
Vera shook her head. "We'll leave once I put in for time off and get the right equipment." She glanced back to the open door of the Red Room, which revealed a space empty of all belongings other than the allocated bed. "Unless you want to sleep out in the rain for days?"
The duke's frown deepened. "How long will that take?"
"I'll do it tomorrow, and we can leave the day after."
"At dawn."
Seriously? she thought. It seemed like every person in the world was allergic to letting her sleep in, but she swallowed down her distaste.
"Dawn, sure." She held out a hand. "Deal?"
The duke went still again. So still that she could not tell if he was breathing. Then his hand inched towards hers. Blood roared in her ears as he took it. It was calloused and warmer than she'd expected. Hers was cold and grimy with dirt from the tunnel wall.
"Deal," he said.
The moment his grip loosened, Vera pulled her hand from his grasp.
"Now if you'll excuse me," she said. "I'm going to bathe, eat, and go sleep for the next fourteen hours. Good night."
Her heart still in her throat, she spun and walked down the hall before he could respond.
・・・・・
Vera did just that, making a beeline up to the women's bathing chamber on the fifth floor. It was an odd time of day, not yet dinner time, and not yet time to wrap up afternoon shifts and lessons. As such, the extensive bathhouse was all hers.
The water was clean and heated with the Applied Thaumaturgy magic that ran the rest of the Archive. She made haste to disrobe, slid into the steaming water, then dunked her head beneath the surface over and over again as if she could wash away the entire encounter with the duke. She wished she'd never met him. Ignorance to her mistake was preferable to the mess in which she presently found herself. The more she dwelled on it, the more nauseous she became.
A few hours later, when she had dressed and dried her hair, she was the first to the dining hall. Instead of heading to the table she usually ate at with Sybil, Vera found an empty seat in the corner. Perhaps the isolation would clear her mind. She felt sorry for leaving Sybil alone, but Vera knew her friend would be brimming with questions she did not yet want to answer.
The ceramic bowl before her refilled with every spoonful she took of soup. Tonight's dinner was some sort of vegetable and potato medley. Filling, but plain and unseasoned. Conservancy magic could only be so creative when it was producing meals at such large volumes. When Vera was done, she simply dumped the used bowl into a washbasin, so the table's sensors would know to replace it with a clean one.
Unfortunately, the soup did little to ease her queasy stomach. Vera returned to her room, determined to sleep it off. Tomorrow was her last free day for the next two weeks, and she had a long day of preparations ahead of her.
Sleep, as always, was patchy. Her dreams were filled with choking mist, red candlelight, and pools of shimmering, magic-infused ink. When at last the sun rose on a new day, Vera awoke in a lurch, blinking away a nightmare of the tunnel.
Realization hit her all at once. What have I done?
Vera, in the aftermath of her chase with the mistmaw, had been operating on frayed nerves and instinct. She'd been banking on the duke being equally as desperate. Aspiring tyrant or not, perhaps the horrors of war had overridden his logic.
What she had told him––that another librarian would chain up his tome as soon as they found it––was true. But it had opened up another opportunity for him. If he agreed to help her find it, she'd lead him straight to its cache. He wouldn't have to request a replica. He could take the Blackfire Codex right from where it lay and leave her stranded on the island, still down a tome and now alone to face the monsters.
"Oh gods," she said aloud. "Bad idea. Horrible idea. He's going to leave me for dead."
If she was lucky.
She flung herself to her wardrobe, then paused. The deal she'd made with the duke wasn't the only rash thing she'd done the previous day. She'd been rather quick to assume the tome was in an outside cache. Could she have merely shelved it incorrectly? Or could someone have touched it after her, but neglected to record their name in the ledger?
All were possibilities she'd failed to consider, but it was a marvel what a proper meal and enough sleep could do for mental clarity. It wasn't too late to retrace her steps.
She gave a firm nod, then began to pull on a fresh gray dress. She wasn't quite ready to condemn herself to the duke's betrayal. There was one more day to find the truth of the tome. It was time to do what she did best.