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not to be shared.”
    “I just wanted to ask,” Elaine said, hating just how vulnerable she sounded. “Do you know who my parents were?”
    Dread, for a moment, looked almost kindly. “I’m afraid that that piece of knowledge isn’t known to the Inquisition,” he said. “If there had been something...scandalous about your birth, we might have had a record, but there was nothing that my predecessors knew about when you were born.”
    Elaine flushed. Of course there hadn’t been. It wasn’t as if she was the secret love child of the Grand Sorcerer and the Dark Witch. Her magical talent was so weak that it was quite likely that her parents had had no magical talent of their own. And if she’d been born to a prostitute in the Golden City, her mother might have believed that she would have a better life in the orphanage than on the streets. But that wouldn’t have attracted the Inquisition’s attention. Why should it have?
    “Thank you,” she said, and sank back into the covers.
    The next thing she realised was that Daria was standing beside her bed. “You look much better,” her friend said. “The druids said that you could go home in a day or two. I’ve missed you dreadfully...”
    “You missed having me to help clean up after your latest boyfriend,” Elaine said, and tried to tell herself that she wasn’t bitter. She could have had a boy of her own, if it wasn’t so completely inconceivable that a boy would be interested in her. “You should get him to help with the cleaning.”
    “You can’t ever trust a guy to do the cleaning,” Daria said, dryly. “Besides, he only wanted one thing and didn’t even bother to attend to my needs, so I dumped him. I should have taken him shopping first before inviting him to bed.”
    “I didn’t think that you had the money to go shopping,” Elaine said, trying to sit up. Her head was threatening to split open again. “Or did you happen to find something so interesting that they gave you a bonus?”
    “I can still go look,” Daria said. “You should try looking at clothes instead of those books you love to read. Clothes make the woman, don’t you know?”
    She shrugged. “Anyway...what happened to you?”
    Elaine opened her mouth to say what little she knew, just before she felt something unlocking itself in her mind. She let out a yelp as new knowledge flooded her brain, leaving her feeling as if she’d finally understood something she should have realised all along. The curse that had been used to secure the book...hadn’t been intended to secure the book. It had been waiting for someone to pick up the book in the right place...
    ...Each of the steps involved with crafting the curse flooded into her mind. A simple spell to deflect anyone without enough magic to energise the rest of the curse, followed by a series of complicated incantations that seemed to have been designed for the Great Library. As if the first realisation had been enough to unlock the second, she realised that the curse had somehow reached out, using her magic, to absorb the entire collected knowledge of the Great Library. Millions of books, hundreds of thousands of spells...all crammed within her skull. She screamed out loud as the knowledge blazed through her mind, knowledge that the senior wizards had locked away long ago. Spells so dangerous that even the Witch-King would have blanched at the mere thought of using them floated inside her mind...
    ...Knowledge that was forbidden on pain of death.
    “Elaine,” Daria said. Her voice seemed to come from a very far distance. “Elaine!”
    “I’m...I’m all right,” Elaine lied. The druids hadn’t known how to deal with her, if only because they hadn’t realised that the curse had been far more than just a simple murderous incantation. She knew now how it had worked, and what would transpire if Dread realised what had happened to her. “I think I’m all right.”
    “I think you need more potion,” Daria said. “I’m