Chapter 4: The Black Book

The Keep's healer was a thin man who said very little and moved fast.

He had Eli on a nebulizer inside ten minutes, in a room with a fire and a window that looked over the pines.

By noon my brother's lips were pink again, and he was sitting up in the bed eating toast the housekeeper had cut into triangles.

"The crusts are off," Eli told me. "She asked if I wanted them off. Nobody's ever asked."

"What do you say to her?"

"Thank you, ma'am," he said, with his mouth full. "And that her toast is better than the clinic's."

The housekeeper in her gray cardigan went pink and found something to straighten on the shelf.

Torin stood in the doorway with his hands in his pockets.

He had not come all the way into the room.

"There's a library on the second floor," he said to Eli. "You can have any book in it you can reach."

Eli's eyes went wide.

"Any book?"

"Any you can lift. The heavy ones are on the bottom."

"That's backwards," Eli said.

"I know," Torin said. "My father arranged it. I never saw a reason to change it."

Eli studied him with his head on one side.

"You're not scary," he said. "You just look like you are."

"That's what I've been telling people for eleven years," Torin said, and I saw the corner of his mouth move before he turned away.

He took me to his study after Eli fell asleep.

It was a small room with a desk and a map of the mountains pinned to the wall, and no windows.

He took a black book out of a locked drawer and set it on the desk between us.

"Read it," he said. "Take as long as you want."

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