This room had been gorgeous once, that much Dev could tell. He wondered why thieves had taken the time to painstakingly loot the gold off the bulbous turrets and all the other places, but had left all these beautiful books and instruments just sitting here. And then, after a minute, he didn’t wonder anymore. The furniture and large items couldn’t fit down that hole of an entrance. Ashguard must have built that trapdoor after everything was already up here. Perhaps he did it when he lived alone, fearing attack.

Not to mention that, as a practiced thief, Dev knew that people who would loot an entire palace full of priceless decor weren’t the types of people who would steal books. A book thief was likely either in search of acutely necessary information or in need of mental or emotional escape. Not monetary profit. They were desperate rather than greedy.

Dev had stolen a book once. Of all the things he’d stolen, it was the only one that he regretted. Probably because books had souls. They weren’t inanimate and uncaring, like nuggets of gold or jewels. Books had feelings. But the stolen book had helped him learn to read when he was forced to sit through Shanti’s lessons with her, so he could almost forgive himself for tucking it inside his cloak one day and keeping it in his tiny, cold room near the dungeon to give him comfort whenever he’d had a spare minute. It had probably burned up in the castle fire, he realized suddenly. The thought of that put him in a melancholy mood.

“Have you seen this place?” Dev called down to Astrid a while later. “It’s amazing up here! I think this is where Ashguard must have lived after everything else was destroyed.” He ventured over to the desk and ran his forefinger over a few of the volumes that were open and faceup. He was surprised to find almost no dust had collected on the pages. “Some of these books have been opened recently,” he shouted. As Astrid had suspected, someone had indeed been here, but only the books knew who it was. Dev gazed at the pages, startled and disappointed to find them written in a language he didn’t know how to read. The font was fancy and full of curls, and because of that the letters were hard to decipher, in addition to the words. After a minute of trying to pronounce a few of them, Dev shrugged and gave up. Hopefully not all the books were written like that. He went to the east window and looked out over the path Astrid had trampled for them and beyond.

“I can see the crater lake from up here!” he reported. Astrid hadn’t been answering, so he wasn’t sure exactly where she was or if she could hear him from this distance. His voice echoed through the empty spaces. “This is a really great lookout tower. These windows have glass in them.” He hesitated, and fear seized him. “Where are you? Astrid?”