—
Solterra is remarkably peaceful for a kingdom with no leader.
Martell has heard of its bloody history in passing. It is a credit to Orestes, perhaps, that the streets aren’t erupting in violence now; from what he’s been told all the desert-born are prone to quick tempers and the love of a fight. Maybe they are all cowards underneath, though - maybe they have no interest in a throne whose previous holders had brief reigns that ended in death or disappearance.
It is hard not to wonder of his own city, his own people. Isra had left them with the rebels in charge, but how well would newly-freed slaves govern? It would not surprise him if they, too, had been slaughtered in the streets. Perhaps one of the lesser dukes had seized control; perhaps chaos gripped Elettra still.
His thoughts chase themselves down darker paths like dogs on rats as he moves through the narrow shelves of the royal library. He calls them to heel and out of habit they obey, but only just; he can still feel their breath, their teeth worrying their lips, when he stops before a book that lays open on a table. One of the attendants had pointed him here, to pages of history where the ink was still fresh enough to carry a scent. Still being written.
Martell turns each page, the papyrus so thin that sunlight shines through. He stops at the year marked 503.
But he cannot read the words.
Foreign markings, black-eyed, look up at him, sinuous as snakes and sharp as barbed arrows. The script is different than what he’d studied on the ship, by dim candlelight in the hold, by sunlight on the deck. He can only make out the names: Raum. Seraphina. Isra. Isra. Isra.
Inwardly he seethes. The letters swim before him, darkening, as a wasps-nest hum rises in his mind. The unicorn lifts his head before he can plunge his horn through the heart of the pages and swallows, hard. Out of the corner of his eye there is movement - a buckskin with spots of white, a dangerous-looking woman. Martell forces his voice to be calm as the surface of a mirror, his expression to be pliant.
“Excuse me,” he says to her, belly hot with fury and humiliation, a burning in his emerald eyes. “Could you tell me what this says, please? I - I can’t read it. But I need to know.”
@Apolonia
Martell has heard of its bloody history in passing. It is a credit to Orestes, perhaps, that the streets aren’t erupting in violence now; from what he’s been told all the desert-born are prone to quick tempers and the love of a fight. Maybe they are all cowards underneath, though - maybe they have no interest in a throne whose previous holders had brief reigns that ended in death or disappearance.
It is hard not to wonder of his own city, his own people. Isra had left them with the rebels in charge, but how well would newly-freed slaves govern? It would not surprise him if they, too, had been slaughtered in the streets. Perhaps one of the lesser dukes had seized control; perhaps chaos gripped Elettra still.
His thoughts chase themselves down darker paths like dogs on rats as he moves through the narrow shelves of the royal library. He calls them to heel and out of habit they obey, but only just; he can still feel their breath, their teeth worrying their lips, when he stops before a book that lays open on a table. One of the attendants had pointed him here, to pages of history where the ink was still fresh enough to carry a scent. Still being written.
Martell turns each page, the papyrus so thin that sunlight shines through. He stops at the year marked 503.
But he cannot read the words.
Foreign markings, black-eyed, look up at him, sinuous as snakes and sharp as barbed arrows. The script is different than what he’d studied on the ship, by dim candlelight in the hold, by sunlight on the deck. He can only make out the names: Raum. Seraphina. Isra. Isra. Isra.
Inwardly he seethes. The letters swim before him, darkening, as a wasps-nest hum rises in his mind. The unicorn lifts his head before he can plunge his horn through the heart of the pages and swallows, hard. Out of the corner of his eye there is movement - a buckskin with spots of white, a dangerous-looking woman. Martell forces his voice to be calm as the surface of a mirror, his expression to be pliant.
“Excuse me,” he says to her, belly hot with fury and humiliation, a burning in his emerald eyes. “Could you tell me what this says, please? I - I can’t read it. But I need to know.”
@
