Stalking Darkness

right at home, though. Alec watched as his companion went busily to and fro with his ladder, muttering under his breath as he went, or exclaiming happily over old favorites.
    Alec had already extracted half a dozen suitably slim volumes when the ornate binding of a thicker one caught his eye. Wondering if it had illustrations, he pulled it out. Unfortunately, this one served as a sort of keystone, for the ones on either side of it let go and most of the shelf cascaded to the floor at Alec’s feet.
    “Oh, well done!” Seregil snickered from somewhere beyond the next shelves.
    Alec set his books aside with an exasperated sigh and began replacing the others. He hadn’t been
all
that interested in the war in the first place; his simple query was turning out to be considerablymore trouble than it was worth. As he slid a handful of books back into place, however, he noticed something sticking out from behind some others. Curious, he carefully pulled it free and found that it was a slim, plainly bound book held shut with a latched strap. Encouraged by its size more than anything else, he tried to open it, but the catch wouldn’t give.
    “How are you making out?” asked Seregil, wandering back with a book under his arm.
    “I found this in back of some others. It must have fallen in behind.” On closer inspection, he saw that it was actually a case of some sort. There was no writing anywhere on it to suggest what its contents might be. “I can’t get it open.”
    Alec jiggled the catch a last time, then handed it to him.
    Seregil glanced it over and passed it back. “There’s no lock; the catch is just corroded good and tight. It can’t have been opened for years. Oh, well, it probably wasn’t anything very interesting anyway.”
    He gave Alec a challenging grin, one Alec had seen often enough before.
    “What, here?” he whispered in surprise.
    Seregil leaned against a bookcase and gave a careless shrug. “It’s not much good to anyone that way, is it?”
    After a quick, rather guilty look around to make sure the custodian hadn’t returned, Alec drew the black-handled poniard from his boot and worked it under the strap. The deadly sharp blade cut easily through the leather. Sheathing it again, he gently opened the cover and found a loose sheaf of parchment leaves inside. They were badly stained and scorched along the bottom edge, some burned half away. Small, close-packed script covered each on both sides.
    “Aura Elustri!”
Grinning excitedly, Seregil lifted out the first sheet. “It’s in Aurënfaie. It looks to be a journal of some sort—” He read a few lines. “And it’s definitely about the war.”
    “It’s so weathered I can hardly make it out,” said Alec, taking up another page. “Not that my Aurënfaie’s all that good to begin with.”
    “Anyone would have a hard time making this out.” Seregil squinted down at the cramped text a moment longer, then closed it and tucked it under his arm with the other book he’d chosen. Sorting through the ones Alec had selected, he discarded all buttwo and hurried Alec upstairs again, obviously eager to tackle the journal.
    Back at Wheel Street again, they retreated to Seregil’s chamber with a supply of wine and fruit. When the fire had been replenished and the lamps lit against the early evening gloom, they began sorting through the sheets on the hearth rug.
    Taking up a page, Seregil studied it closely. “Do you know what this is?” he exclaimed with a smile of pure delight. “These are fragments of a field journal kept by an Aurënfaie soldier during the war. Alec, it’s an eyewitness account of events six centuries old! Just wait until we show Nysander. I’ll bet no one even knew this was there, or it would have been in a different vault.”
    The pages were badly shuffled in places and it took some doing to sort them out. The translation from Aurënfaie to Skalan was easy enough; deciphering the crabbed and often smeared writing while searching through mismatched pages was another matter. Seregil finally found what appeared to be the earliest entry and settled back in a nest of cushions on the floor to read it aloud.
    They soon pieced together that the author had been a young archer, part of a regiment of well-to-do volunteers raised by a local noble. He’d been a faithful diarist, but the entries dealt mostly with skirmishes and fallen comrades. It was clear that the Aurënfaie had hated their Plenimaran adversaries, who were