Free Paper and Fire (The Great Library) by Rachel Caine Page A

Santi at Jess and Glain. “What did you have to tell me?”
    Santi quickly leaned forward and grabbed the chain of his manacles tightly to pull Wolfe toward him. “No,” he said flatly. “Stop. For the love of the gods, don’t you understand that someone just tried to kill you out there? The Archivist wants you dead. I trust today finally hammered the point home, since it was written in the blood of others this time instead of your own!”
    “Captain,” Jess said, and Santi actually flinched, as if he’d forgotten them in his intensity. “Why did you bring us here if you won’t let me answer?”
    “Because I want you to understand, too,” he said, and turned to stare at them. “Leave Wolfe alone. Don’t contact him. Don’t try. You see what happens—you’re the reason he came out of seclusion, to talk to
you
. He could have been killed. The Archivist is burning for an excuse to see him dead.”
    Wolfe’s smile this time was strangely warm. It nearly looked normal. “The Archivist needs no scrap of an excuse to do that. No, Nic, be honest: you brought them here because you thought they’d take one look at me and leave me alone out of sheer pity.”
    “Chris . . .”
    Wolfe didn’t appear to regard his lover at all. He kept looking right at Jess and Glain. “I’m not insane,” he said. “I’m not on the verge of it. I may be stretched to my limits—my limits being admittedly lower than they should be—but you have something to tell me, and that thing is important enough that despite all the well-meaning captivity Nic has put around me, I will continue to risk my life until you
tell me
. He can’t stop that, and he knows he can’t.”
    Santi gave a wordless shout of frustration and fury, knocked his chair over backward, and stalked around the room. His face was tense and pallid, and there was something else there—real fear, Jess thought.
    “All right,” Wolfe said. “Ask.”
    “It isn’t so much a question as something I need to tell you. All of you, I suppose, though I hadn’t thought it would go quite this way.” Heswallowed, because he’d drawn Santi’s attention now, too. The weight of their stares felt heavy as an elephant on his chest. And speaking of his chest, the harness beneath his shirt seemed to pull even tighter on his bruised skin.
    He silently unbuttoned his uniform jacket and shirt beneath. Both were sodden with sweat, and the kiss of cooler air on damp skin made him shiver. No one said a word as he pulled aside the fabric to reveal the smuggling harness, and then unsnapped the pocket to pull out one of the two books inside.
    “Your life is on a thin edge right now,” Santi told him softly. “I’m still an oath-sworn member of the Library High Garda. That contraband had better be worth your risk, Brightwell.”
    Jess’s hand felt cold and sweaty as he gripped the battered, flexible leather of the cover, and for a long moment he said nothing. Couldn’t think how to begin to tell them. Then he said, “This is the last confession of one of the Archivist’s personal guards. The man killed himself a couple of months ago. In it, the man gives detailed records about who he arrested, who was tortured, who was released. Who was executed and how.” He swallowed. “Your name is in here, Scholar Wolfe.”
    No one moved. Jess raised his gaze from the book to meet each of theirs in turn.
    “There’s another name in here. Thomas Schreiber’s.”
    Glain took in a breath, then slowly let it out, and bowed her head. “Does it say how he died?” she asked. “What they did to him?”
    “It has a record of Thomas’s arrest,” Jess said. “And they did . . . they did hurt him.” He didn’t want to think about that. He’d read the entries, forced himself to do it, and he’d hurt for days after, like his mind and body had been cut and torn by it. “But Thomas wasn’t executed.”
    None of them seemed to quite grasp what he’d said at first. Not even Wolfe, who was