RECORDS
Written on July 11, 2021 (♋︎)
Author's Notes: Please enjoy my invention of The Ronkan Guide to Aerial Carnality. I'm very proud of it.
Simon supposed that there was a sort of poetry that the damp summer air should afflict his bones and his books in equal measure—that his joints should fail him at the same moment that the volumes in the second the sub basement were in peril. There was a good measure of humility to be had in seeing the sympathies present—to remember that with a bit of boiling, a man was much the same stuff as vellum and glue. It nevertheless was quite a thorny predicament when novice Galfryd drew his attention to the spreading mold just as Simon was worst prepared to manage it.
The issue—of course—was not one of technique, but manpower. With most of his brethren gone east to meet the overwhelming need for healers following the catastrophe at Viura, Simon had few hands available to carry Orbonne's treasures to safety—least of all his own. Galfryd and Sevrin did what they could, but burdened as they were with all the chores the priests turned medics had left them, it was excruciatingly slow moving business. It was not lightly that Simon decided to enlist the help of his charges, but he reckoned that neither the royal princess nor Lord Beoulve's daughter should be tutored properly were the library gone to rot. Ovelia, as he had come to expect, was remarkably understanding. Alma eventually complied.
For the first week of the excavation, Simon watched them closely, worrying that if he were not exceedingly careful, something would be dropped and an irreplaceable tome or hand would be lost for it. When the girls fell into a regular rhythm free of any casualties, however, he grew comfortable in allowing them to work at their own pace and with minimal supervision. For all the botheration the preservation project entailed, it was a good opportunity to make an inventory, and he could make his hands hold a quill sometimes even if he couldn't make them carry codices.
It was a very long July for them all under such conditions. Simon did his best to be understanding that two noblemen's daughters should at times prove slow in days full of storms and swelter. Still, as the days crept on, he grew more and more suspicious as to their output. He took more care in his tallies, and it seemed suspect to him that they had only gotten through three large manuscripts and the reprints of Montesto's Complete Verse the day prior. He determined to make an inspection.
As he lowered himself, step by excruciating step, down the long staircase, it occurred to him that there were any number of dangers unforeseen in trusting the pair to their own devices. They both were fine pupils; they both loved to read. When a scandalized shriek rang through the stone hall, he tried very much to recollect just what might be on the shelves to catch the eye of a curious maid, and said a quick prayer that he hadn't misremembered where he'd left those volumes for which he'd had to bargain with the Office of the Censor. It would be dire business indeed to have to explain to either the king or the general why their daughters were making a study of Palcono's Accounts of Heathen Rites or The Ronkan Guide to Aerial Carnality.
There were—of course—books he wanted still less for them to discover.
By the time he'd recognized he should have asked this of Galfryd, he was already over half the way down, and he pushed on despite the agony of his knees. It was a long, hellish trek for the end to be nothing so dangerous as two girls pouring over a completely mundane legal guide—an octavo print regarding the treatment of malefactors.
Alma gasped to see him when he descended the last stair. Ovelia turned quite pale.
"It seems the two of you have lost your way in seeking out the rhetoric guides I asked after," he said in as firm a voice as he could muster. "I'll be happy to take this volume off your hands in the meantime."
It was handed to him silently, and he found it had been opened to a page with a large woodblock print. A woman was being led to a high stack of firewood. A double tongued devil was dancing high over the unlit pyre.
"Alma said it was a fiction," Ovelia whispered. "That witches are in stories, and that nobody really burns them."
They looked at him then, and he recognized that they were waiting for the reassurance of a former Examiner. As it became clear to them none was coming, Simon realized that he must have turned quite pale himself—for all the ache in his bones now felt like a fire in its own right.
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