I’d woken early, so I flipped through the newspaper Dad had left on the kitchen table. Outside, snow fell at an alarming rate, the first real storm we’d had this year. Winter in the high plains meant cold, stark nights, stars bright as diamonds, and thin air sharp in your lungs.
I wrapped myself in a cozy wool blanket and sipped ginger tea to stave off the cold. The logs in the fireplace crackled, the charred wood glowing with deep red embers, sending the scent of ash and fire into the air. The scent of demons, Grandma said. I’d never met a demon, only seen them at a distance at the border market, so I’d have to take her word for it.
I flipped through the paper. Most of it covered local happenings of Port Naborre and the small villages around it, but I skipped to news beyond our small corner of the country. Dad had been a sailor before he met and married Mom, and he’d instilled in me a longing to see the greater world, especially the capital city of Talum on the other side of Ena-Cinnai. Built on a hilly riverine island in the middle of the Lersach River, the Talum was famed as a seat of culture, education, and government.
A headline caught my eye. Professor Discovers Ancient Scrolls, declared one article. My brows rose with curiosity.
Professor Altschuler of the Lyceum of Talum led an expedition to the southern part of Ena-Cinnai, where he and his team discovered buried urns filled with parchment scraps. The parchment is consistent with material used in the area two thousand years ago, and preliminary testing confirms these artefacts and their containers surpass the two millennia mark.
“We are unfamiliar with the written language,” Professor Altschuler said in a statement put out by the Lyceum. “But we have an excellent linguistics team here at the Lyceum. We plans to put all our energy into reconfiguring and translating the scrolls. A discovery like this could reshape what we know of ancient Ena-Cinnai; we have rarely found texts from so long ago.”
I reread the article until my tea went cold, my heart thumping so aggressively I could feel it in my wrists. Some people wouldn’t care at all about ancient scrolls, especially ones torn apart and in an unknown ancient language. But I’d always been delighted by puzzles, and I loved a challenge. I always wanted to know more. At the village school, I asked so many questions it annoyed the other students, but my curiosity ran deep and vast and I had no idea how to sate it. I loved languages too, captivated from childhood by Grandma’s distinct sing-song dialect, and fascinated by all the different tongues spoken by sailors in Port Naborre. I loved peeling languages apart and discovering their rules, figuring how they connected to each other and how they morphed and differed.
“What are you looking at?” My sister Adina waltzed into the kitchen, fully dressed in a blue skirt and white blouse, while I still wore the clothes I’d slept in.
“This article.” I pushed it towards her, watching as she read it. I had three younger sisters, and all four of us shared the same dark curls of our mother and Dad’s strong features, but on Adina everything fit together with a precise beauty. I tried not to be jealous – who wants to envy their sister? – but I wished, just once, someone would notice me the way everyone noticed her. It wasn’t just her looks; she could flirt and laugh with people in an open way I’d never managed. I was too serious, too studious.
She skimmed the article and made a face. “Let me guess, you want to piece it back together yourself.”
“It would be interesting, wouldn’t it?” I looked wistfully outside the window, as though I could see beyond the falling snow and white-blanketed plains. Past the wilderness in the center of Ena-Cinnai where the demons lived in their strange shifting lands, all the way to the country’s eastern edge, where the Lersach River flowerd from north to south, and where the great city of Talum rose. Where the Lyceum stood, filled with ten thousand students from all over the world studying at one of the five schools of knowledge, learning so much more than I would ever learn here.
I looked back at the article. “The man who found the scrolls is a professor at the Lyceum,” I mused aloud.
“And?” Adina pulled out yesterday’s loaf of bread and cut a thick slice, then opened a jar a raspberry preserves and applied a smear of ruby red to the crumb.
An idea slowly took root in me. It raised the hairs on my nape and sent a shiver through my body. It felt like I’d seen a rock buried in the sand and understood it hinted at something much larger and more powerful below. Something that might answer to the yearning sensation I carried around, the desire to see the rest of the world, to learn more about hidden things. “Professors have students.”
Adina bopped my head with her hand. “A regular genius over here.”
I looked at her. I could feel how wide my eyes were, how my breath came fast. “What if I went there?”
Adina stopped bustling around the tiny room. “What?”
“What if I applied to the Lyceum? To study with the professor? I’m good with languages, and with puzzles… What if I asked him if I could study under him?”
Now Adina’s eyes were as wide as my own, and then she shook her head and scoffed. “You want to study at the Lyceum? With what money? And why, on a whim because of some article you read?”
I looked back at the paper. A discovery like this could reshape what we know of ancient Ena-Cinnai.
A whim, maybe. But I was also driven by a hunger. A hunger to do more with my life, to see more, to stretch my mind and to travel and to drink in the whole world. To uncover something no one had ever seen before, to solve the puzzle of an ancient language. To bring the past to life.
Outside, the snow fell, cold and fast and endless. The wind whistled its uneasy song. Maybe I wouldn’t apply to the Lyceum. Even if I did, I might not get in. I was just an ordinary village girl from a rural part of the country, as far from the capital as you could get. I might be considered smart here, but who knew how I’d hold up measured to applicants from all over the world.
But maybe…
Maybe my life was about to change.