Read Valentine for Free Online Page B

Valentine at the albino. “You wouldn’t be interested. Quite common.”
    “It’s not a white-throated needletail, is it?” Brother Wyn insisted. “I’ve males but no female.”
    “Shocking!” one of the twins gasped, and then the brothers twittered and snickered.
    “How precious,” Adrian slurred as he pushed his food around his trencher. “The pair of you can take your birds for air together, tuck them in at night, sing them lullabies. . . .”
    Now Valentine wished they had been forced to keep their silence. “It is only a pilgrim, Adrian, insisting Victor hear her confession in the red—”
    But before he could finish his sentence, Roman had swung his beefy left forearm into Valentine’s chest, knocking him backward from the bench to land on the stone floor. His cup went flying from his hand, his robes up around his knees.
    “What the—” Valentine began, but Roman was already at his side, helping him to his feet.
    “My apologies, Brother,” he said, and then as he yanked Valentine from the floor, Roman turned his back to the table. Shut up, he mouthed. “My arm must have slipped. It still pains me at times.”
    Valentine was straightening his robes when his eyes caught sight of Adrian between the snickering twins. Adrian looked as though it had been he who had been knocked on his arse. Valentine shook off Roman’s attempt at help.
    “Pilgrims are quite common,” Brother Wyn agreed, waving his hand and dismissing the whole display as uninteresting.
    Before Valentine and Roman could take their seats once more, Stan came striding through the hall toward them. He slid his still-laden tray of fruit onto a table but did not look at his friends.
    “Let’s go,” he said in a low voice as he passed.
    Across the table, Adrian stood up and limped away without a word, and Vladislav and Ladislav descended upon Adrian’s abandoned trencher like vultures.
    “Brother, you must take this food.”
    “No, you most certainly should have it.”
    “I could not sleep knowing you had gone without. I insist—”
    “No, I insist.”
    Valentine looked to Roman, who wore a grim expression as he said, “You heard Stan. Let’s go.”
    “What is this about?” Valentine demanded as he and Roman followed Adrian’s hitching gait through the passageways of the abbey. Certainly their destination was the library, but why would Stan call them from the meal so conspicuously?
    “You shouldn’t have spoken of the red confessional in the hall,” Roman admonished.
    “And Stan has enchanted hearing that he would know of my indiscretion?” Valentine scoffed. “It is a confessional in an abbey—why is that a secret?”
    “Do you hear nothing Victor says?”
    “I try no to,” Valentine admitted.
    Before his friend could chastise him further, they reached the double doors at the end of the long corridor. Adrian had already pulled one open just enough to slip inside, and Valentine and Roman followed, the latter being certain to close both doors behind them.
    They moved through the long, silent room that was the abbey’s official library. Perhaps sixty feet in length and thirty in width, the ceiling reached upward of twenty feet at the height of its arch. The walls were lined with shelves from the richly carpeted floors to the elaborate ceiling, and contained thousands of tomes in a hundred languages. In this room one could find material on any subject imaginable, and many had been transcribed by Melk’s brethren.
    Between the laden shelves were long, narrow floor-to-ceiling windows, leaded and cased with stone, the panes tinted in various colors similar to those in a cathedral, to protect the library’s interior from the harsh light of the sun while still being bright enough to allow for reading without the danger of open flames. The effect was such that the room’s atmosphere was as muted as the light, hushed by the upholstered chairs, the dim gleam of the tables.
    It was suppertime at the abbey, and so the library