Chapter 31: Of Broken Porcelain and Borrowed Silence
Lyria's POV
Immediately I stepped out of the room where Patricia was being kept, I ran—with the precise, clipped urgency of someone who had learned where haste was permitted and where it was not.
The library doors yielded at once beneath my palm.
Warm, dust-soft air greeted me, heavy with ink and old paper and the faint scent of wax from candles long burned down to their final stubs. The high windows were half-veiled against the glare of late morning light, and for one brief, foolish heartbeat, the hush of the place steadied me.
I crossed the floor quickly and slipped the small primer back into its allotted space between two heavier volumes whose spines sagged with age.
My fingers lingered upon it only long enough to feel its familiar thinness vanish from my grasp.
I checked around, just in case the baron showed up, but thankfully he did not.
