Chapter Text
Mother has one rule: the Tower of Tomes is not to be entered. It is a silhouette so commonly seen throughout their chambers in the Great Hall that you might liken it to dangling keys in front of a fussy baby. Spell after spell is copied from Agott’s books to her journal in the hope that the next spell she makes will astound her family yet again, perhaps enough that her mother will finally let her enter those walls.
After all, she is to be a librarian one day, and how can she fulfil that role without knowing her way around the library?
Adina is ever-placating, shushing her and smoothing a hand over the curls atop her head. “Be still, my daughter.” She'll say when she gets too excited, “Your time will come once mine is done.”
It takes months for her second chance to come. The first had gone fine, her spell a rousing success among the Arklaum family, and she swore she even saw a smirk on her mother's face. That kind of blatant show of emotion felt monumental, like Agott had achieved something never done before. She had pleased her mother, something even the adult witches fail to do so often with their lacklustre spells and their boring educational pursuits at the tower. Her mother liked her spell. Hers.
So, the second one has to be bigger. Better. At night, Agott sleeps at her kneeling desk more than in her own bed, waking up with a blanket draped over her shoulders more than a few times. Something in her wants to believe her mother had tugged it up and over her shoulders, but it's often the family butler who takes the blanket away once she has tossed it aside.
The night before her second showcase, she spends every last minute practising to draw the spell on the spot. It has to be spontaneous, something new and surprising. Something her mother has never seen before from any other witch. Agott might be twelve, but she completed her first Pentagram test at ten and the second at eleven. A test like this between family, so rudimentary, should feel laughable—if only her mother weren't the judge responsible for deciding her future in the family.
If she fails, she only gets cast out. Abandoned. Left to beg for another master to pick up her washed-up, no-good, hopeless apprentice self. That won't happen — it would never happen. Agott would never allow herself to be such a letdown.
Outside the grand wooden door almost three times her height, Agott bundles herself into her cloak to hide her anxieties from the witches passing by to meet with her mother. They regard her so highly, the promising daughter of the great librarian Adina Arklaum. The next prospective witch to take her post, and yet, Agott feels so small next to them. Even to the other kids, she's shorter, scrawnier, and her mother is always telling her she was the same at her age. Agott has seen the paintings lining the walls of her mother in her youth, but she dares not call her out on the lies regarding her stature.
Agott is grateful for the velvety purple cloak the Arklaums don, for it hides the way she picks at her nails and scratches at the ink stains on the calloused pads of her fingers. As soon as the witches are inside and she stands in the corridor alone, staring a fancy, golden-framed portrait of her mother at her age in the eye across the hall, she wastes no time scratching seal after seal into her palm quire beneath her cloak. Every so often she'll peek the notebook out to check her own work, reviewing it.
The spell has to be helpful. It has to be able to benefit the witches around her, something her mother could use in day to day work that she hasn't already thought of.
“Agott,” Adina's voice calls from within, as refined and regal as ever. Agott can practically hear her position, sitting in her velvety armchair with a cup of tea steaming on the table beside her, one leg crossed over the other, palms folded in her lap. “You may enter.”
Every nerve in the young witch’s body freezes over at that moment, like a tear turning to ice in a blizzard. Hands find both sides of her neck, hoping the ink staining her fingers doesn't smudge along her flesh or, at least, that if it does, her long curls will hide the clumsy, childlike mishap. A deep breath is whisked into her lungs and it feels colder than she's ever been, the sound of her mother's compelling voice like a shot of ice has been injected into her veins.
She stifles a childish whimper and stills her quivering bottom lip, because Arklaums do not cry.
Reaching out to the doorknob at eye level, she twists it, trying to make as little sound with the knob as possible, as though one tiny sound out of turn could have her thrown to Adanlee as penance. The door cracks open just slightly, the warm light from the hearth she's about to stand in front of bleeding into the hallway she's on the cusp of leaving. Without opening the door much more, she side-steps, scooting into the room and quickly shutting it behind her. No words are exchanged as she pitter-patters over to her rehearsed position in front of the fireplace, feeling the heat at her back warm the ice adamant about chilling her bones.
For the first time since entering the room, her eyes lift up from her own flowing cloak, meeting the eyes of the witches in the room. One of the other librarians, who she can't remember the name of for the life of her. Vinanna, the Wise in Principles and captain of the Knights Moralis, with her deputy Easthies standing vigil by her chair – Adina has drilled these particular names into her for how often they come by to speak of the Tower. Usually, her mother makes a big show of bringing the highest-standing witches she knows, probably to create some sort of an audience. It works to add pressure, but truthfully, the pressure was already mounted on her from simply showing her spell in front of her mother alone. This just makes it all the worse: look at who will ridicule you if you mess this up.
So she takes a breath, feeling the cold air in her lungs betray the warmth of the room.
“My name is Agott, and it's my pleasure to be presenting my spell to you today.”
Adina hums, as she so often does, with an air of affirmation. “You may begin whenever you're ready.”
Swallowing her pride, Agott dares to offer a disclaimer, fidgeting beneath her cloak with the confidence that the witches before her are none the wiser. She clears her throat and stills the shakiness in her voice. “My spell was created after watching the attendants in the Great Hall struggle to clean not just the floors but also the ceilings.”
From within her cloak, Agott pulls out a sack from a large pocket she’d sewn into the inside of her cloak herself. The sack is made of fabric, which she quickly turns inside out to reveal the seals within. Four sigils on the inside line the sides, with a different one on the bottom.
“The seal is activated with these holes on the side, which makes the seals incomplete.” Agott shows by sticking a finger through the hole cut in the fabric. “But the bag comes with four rings that slot like buttons into the holes.” Shifting the sack into one hand, she reveals two rings placed on the thumb and ring fingers of her right hand, mirrored on her left. “When the rings are inserted into the holes, it completes the seal, and it activates a twisting wind seal that pulls any dirt, dust and debris into the sack.”
To simulate this, Agott points the bag to the indented, patterned ceiling of the room, which she'd taken care to ensure the family attendants had not dusted for the past week. Due to the nature of the hearth illuminating the room, ash and dust have collected around the ceiling easily, so she wastes no time pointing it up at a nearby gathering of dust on the mantle. Rings inserted into the slots, the seals activate, all four grasping wind sigils whirring out towards the ash to pull it into the bag. Thankfully, it doesn't spray or dissipate anywhere thanks to the trial and error of her studies and the choice to include four sigils to allow the wind to be concentrated and strong – no dirt is given the chance to be pushed elsewhere by the strength of the wind pulling it into the sack.
With the ash in the bottom, Agott turns back without a smile – not yet. She can't celebrate before her mother confirms it. She lifts the sack up with one hand and pinches the bottom of the bag, pulling it down. Despite the hand grasping the top not moving, the bottom pulls down as if elasticised.
“I made sure to add the seal on the bottom of the inside of the sack, which uses enlarging sigils to expand the fabric down to accommodate larger loads of rubbish, like potential rock debris from the Great Hall walls or floors.” The bag’s stretch reaches a limit at the full width of both of Agott's arms outstretched at her sides. “It goes this far before it stops stretching, which would be a sign to empty the sack. It returns to its original form once emptied, using signs of repetition.”
Clutching the top of the bag in both of her hands and allowing the bottom to return to its original form, she looks out at the witches before her. The librarian across from her mother is regarding her with a raised brow. Vinanna is sitting forward in intrigue, a pushed-up lip of pleasant surprise. Then, there's Adina.
Adina, her mother, looking at her with her usual tilted head and unreadable expression; it always renders Agott to the thing she fears to be most, a bumbling child, flailing and waiting, hoping her mother will close this chapter without expecting Agott to do so herself.
But then, a tiny smirk upturns a corner of her mother's lips, so carefully lined with lipstick, as neat as the day prior and the day before that. “Agott, you have passed.”
Behind her, Vinanna laughs, patting her own knee as she sits back in her armchair and looks up at Easthies, as if for his own take on what has unfolded before his eyes. “Bet the cleaners of the Great Hall would love to see your invention," She turns back to Agott, smiling, and it feels genuine. “Little witch.”
Pressing her lips together into a thin line and biting back the need to burst into tears of relief where she stands, Agott bends at the waist in a bow because it's what she did the first time a test like this happened, and she didn't get in trouble for it then.
Mother has one rule: the Tower of Tomes is not to be entered, except for today.
“The other librarians,” Though she doesn't say that, she lists their names, though Agott doesn't bother remembering them; she's tried and given up. Learning spells is more vital than names. “Are preoccupied today and will not be able to tend the Tower as I had expected. As a result, Agott,”
A fish swims beyond the window, catching up to its school ahead, very nearly being left alone. For some reason, a weak, stupid reason, Agott feels a pang of sympathy that she squashes beneath her heel the moment her mother calls her name again.
“Agott, are you listening to me?”
Her head whips around, brows raised.
“Of course, mother.”
“Good.” Adina merely murmurs, as regal as ever, before turning around and picking up her tall cap and placing it atop her head. Agott's near-identical cap sits beside it, smaller, less detailed. It's modelled after her mother's: the base is red with a white base, white ribbons are attached by a bronze button, and the pointed cap is topped with a few black tassels. It feels like a heavy honour to wear the cap atop her head, like the shadow of her mother looms over her. Everyone knows that cap, and she misses the way people who didn't know her used to look at her like any other person, rather than gawking at her like she's one of the Wise herself. “When we get there, I implore you to be on your best behaviour. This is a large step in your training, and I can't imagine you'd wish to squander it.”
“No, mother.”
“That's what I thought.” Spoken so matter-of-factly, Adina picks up Agott's cap and walks over to her seat by the window, setting it on her daughter's head. “Come – oh, and Agott?”
Mid-hop from her perch next to the watery window, Agott lifts her head, a smile of thinly veiled anxiety riddling her face. “Yes, mother?”
“When we are there, you do as I say and touch nothing without permission. Is that clear?”
Nodding her head, Agott presses her smile thin. “Always, mother.”
The inside of the Tower has been something she could only see in her dreams, through speculation and the few descriptions she could glean from pressing her ears to doorways, listening in on the chatter of the other three Librarians when they would come over. At the very least, she had gotten the golden wood arches right and the tall, towering silverwood tree snaking up the middle of the structure. Floors all around the building are like balconies, each one at least five times as big as the library in the Great Hall. Books float around the space from floor to floor, and Agott can't help but tilt her head back uncomfortably far just to look up at the bright light at the top, bleeding sunlight into the space as books float by in steady streams. It saves her from the no doubt brief conversation between her brother and the other librarian, whom she has seen so many times before.
The librarian brushes past her with a fleeting greeting, lifting her cap to ruffle her hair before placing it back down lopsided on the crown of her head. A warmth rushes through her at that, but she pays it no mind, because her mother is looking at her in a beckoning way. Rushing over and realigning her cap, Agott falls in line at her mother's heel, like a loyal pup or a dutiful assistant, ready and willing to learn what it takes to live up to such grandeur.
“Do not open a single book, Agott.” Her mother told her as she sat down at her desk. “Some hold forbidden magic, but it is not for us to destroy them.”
The very idea of storing forbidden magic books, here, in a place meant to be a sacred collection of magical knowledge, is simply blasphemous in Agott's mind. Truly, she rattles the thought around in her skull for a good ten minutes before the scratching of her mother's quill on parchment begins to drive her mad.
“Forgive me, mother, I just—”
“Hm?”
Swallowing thickly, Agott steels her confidence, trying to remain steadfast. “I don't quite understand why we would… keep these books around. What if someone who wanted that knowledge got inside the library and made it widespread?”
Though her mother isn't looking at her while she talks, Agott can read every little movement and the emotions attached to them. The result of calculating what does and does not please a mother who is so keen on hiding what she feels and preventing it from presenting outwardly.
A small chuckle does escape her, though, as she eventually turns to her daughter with an amused look on her face. Agott rarely gets the chance to see such an expression. “Darling, all of these books are already out there, somewhere. There is no need to get in here to get them when so many are up for purchase in the darkest corners of our world.”
As her daughter, Agott has no reason to refuse or claim her mother's answer is void. However, there is something she just can't get behind: the fact that this is a brimmed cap's treasure trove. Every single spell they could ever hope to get their hands on is within these walls, written down and immortalised for their perusal should they wish to breach these walls.
The final book in the stack Adina had given Agott to sort alphabetically floats away from her in the direction of the thirteenth balcony floor, drifting almost vertically upwards above her head. A childlike curiosity piques in her at the intricacies that must have gone into each spell to keep this place running on its own, even in the event of a librarian’s brief absence.
“Ah, you've finished.” Adina hummed, looking over at Agott’s setup and the lack of books on her smaller desk. “In that case, feel free to wander for a while. I shan't be long; I don't have much left to do.”
“I— I can just… go look around?” Agott gapes at her, eyes wide, glistening with the golden light that ebbs into the tower from above, like honey trickling from a dipper.
“Yes.” Adina nods, brows slightly pinched, as if this place no longer holds wonder or beauty in her eyes. “Oh, but again, do not open any books. You need a library pass, and you have not been given one.”
Undeniably a little forlorn at not being able to gaze upon the endless knowledge found in the tower, Agott still agrees, if only for the chance to explore the tower just this once.
Agott runs so fast she's sure her shoes might not be able to keep up, eager to get upstairs, yet unable to find a single staircase on the entire ground floor until finally she runs past a stream meant for the books. It's like gravity itself is pulling on her arm as it grazes the wave, causing her to double back and stick her hand in it curiously. As if her hand were being held and pulled away from her, it drifted away, causing Agott to tug back quickly to stop herself from going with it.
“That's how you get upstairs, dear. Don't be afraid to use it.” Adina spoke, the echoing chamber carrying her voice from her desk a little ways away. This morning, she made sure to put her sylph shoes on, so the fear of falling was negated.
With nothing holding her back from the floors she one day will have to watch over, Agott wastes no time walking directly into the stream of gravity, letting it swoop her off the ground – she can't help flailing just a little as she gets used to the pulling sensation as she flies ten, twenty, thirty metres off the ground below. Beyond sylph shoes, it's the closest anyone can get to flying.
From above, the full scope of the tower is on display. The silverwood tree snakes up, a beacon or pillar in the middle of the structure providing a perfect central point. Each floor is individualistic, its own size, its own height, with its own capacity for books for whatever topic they're to do with, alphabetically ordered for easy scrutiny if a book ever needed to be taken for review, something she's told the Knights Moralis sometimes come to do for cases of forbidden magic activity. Barriers line each balcony with oak branches, adorned with gold foil patternings done by librarians over time. Her heel catches on the barrier, and she clumsily falls flat on her face on the wood boards of the thirteenth floor, grumbling disgruntledly while heaving herself off the floor with the assistance of some sort of contraption as help.
Once upright, she gets a better look at it. While floating over, she'd seen an extremely intricate seal burnt into the back, which she hadn't the time to make heads or tails of before being dumped on the floor in a heap. It's impossible to see the seal now since it's located on the back, on the overhang of the balcony. Before her is a spectrum of buttons, so many that Agott finds herself lost for choice – every single button is a different floor, all the way up to fifty.
If only she knew the theming of each floor or the knowledge stored there. Even memorising the names of certain books written on their binding would help give her the chance to get her hands on them when back home at the Great Hall. Sacrificing one or two pages in her palm quire to jot down their titles couldn't possibly do any harm; there are far worse issues in this world than this.
Closing her eyes, Agott waves her hand over the terminal and pokes randomly, letting the stream carry her up to a random floor. To her amusement, she finds herself on the forty-eighth, right by the skylight, bleeding warm sun rays into the tower. As she crests to the higher point of the tower, the light grows blinding and the heat begins to burn a little, but the fiftieth floor awaits her just beyond where she's heading to now.
A quick scan of the forty-eighth only provides more rudimentary forms of magical education, a section dedicated more to the teaching of basic magic to younger children.
“It's like a floor of parenting books.” Agott can't help but chuckle as she jogs back to the terminal, beaming as the fiftieth floor button alights beneath her fingertip, feeling that gradual pull whisk her up once again.
From up here, the canopy of the silverwood tree speckles the golden floors below with dappled sunlight, beaming down. As she floats across the gap and up two floors, pivoting around the leaves of the silverwood that block her view of the highest point, Agott reaches out, that same childlike wonder that bleeds into her daily attempts to refine herself and be more like her mother, hoping to graze the branches of the only silverwood tree she's seen apart from the Magic Stationers in the Great Hall.
Tugged along by the gravity stream, she reaches out, out, out—her index finger stretches so far she can feel the joints in her wrist and elbow straining with the action, and just as the calloused pad of it manages to brush along the chalky bark of the branch, her entire world comes crashing down.
A touch, a crash, and suddenly she's being rained on from above; the expectation of rain is not something Agott is privy to living on the sea floor, and so the shattering of glass above her screams danger as she throws herself flat in the gravity stream to look up at what's causing such a ruckus, only to see two silhouettes and a storm of jagged glass from the shattered window shooting her way.
Time stills. Looking up at the glare of the midday sun, now unshielded by the sunroof, Agott's eyes strain, and yet she perseveres by peering through at the shadowy figures looming above. One petrifying thing about their forms comsumes the air in her lungs as she readies herself to scream, a silent plea running through her mind for her mother to hear, some fifty floors away.
“Brimmed Caps!”
The piercing yell still burning the back of her throat, Agott barely has time to propel herself into the canopy of the silverwood tree before the two figures are falling past her, completely ignoring her warning signal in favour of whatever is below.
Mother. Agott thinks, clinging to the trunk of the silverwood as glass rains down on her; she can feel it embedding in her scalp, carving into her flesh like rivers through the land, warm blood trickling down her skin — but she bites her lip hard and wastes no time letting go of the bark in favour of flying down once the glass has passed. Hands find the quill and palm quire she'd tucked into her inside pockets, scrawling spell after spell she can manage with her quivering hands as she floats down to the lower floors.
There's yelling, accusations, and threats, unintelligible by proximity but only by tone and delivery. Agott finds ground on the second floor, peering down over the balcony at her mother's form, and even from here, there's a fearful look in her eye that Agott has never, ever seen before.
Her mother is scared of nothing. She's never faltered, never shaken. Agott's pretty sure she's never even seen her get sick before. But her voice betrays her, shaking beneath the weight of the brimmed cap who approaches her.
In contrast to her mother, Agott is anything but that. Agott is bedbound by cold whenever winter rolls around; she is overcome by emotions at the prettiest of spells, and she's pretty sure she has bitten her nails down to bleeding stumps more times than she can count. Agott's mother is a hero to her, a standard to live up to, and yet—
And yet Agott is nothing of the sort. She is no hero, no unshakeable, unfaltering witch who baulks in the face of danger. Agott is terrified.
But then the Brimmed Cap, clad in an eye mask, knocks her mother clean out—and without even thinking, Agott propels herself off the balcony down to the other figure who stood some metres away from him, her sylph shoes engaged, fully intent on obliterating this witch with a grasping wind and fire spell ready to activate in her quire.
She smacks into the witch right as she turns, the proximity to her revealing a girl, but Agott doesn't have time to think on split-second moments when her mother is unconscious on the floor.
They tumble head over heels across the floor until the form skids beneath her, the hard cap of her knee pressed harshly into the stomach of the witch beneath her. A thumb doused in fresh ink hovers over the open outer ring of the fire spell in her quire, loathing consuming her entire being as she looks down, the brimmed hat cast aside as the two of them had fallen, revealing—
A girl. At first impact, she'd presumed her to maybe be the age of the other witch in the eye mask, but this is… Agott wouldn't be surprised if she were around her age, but an exhaustion highlights sunken eyebags and a hopelessness, devoid of any childish quality in her eyes. This girl, green hair shorn into a bob and fading freckles from sun-kissed skin, sitting under a brim for too long, could be the same as any apprentice she passes in the Great Hall, only adorned in a brim.
“Well now, Coco! I see you've found a new friend.” Snapped quickly out of her curious daze, Agott pivots her head to the side, brows furrowed and angled with a feral need to protect, lighting a fire in her eyes. When she looks, he's uncomfortably close already, bending with an inhuman quality at the waist to ensure the eye mask consumes her entire line of sight. “Ah, and presumably a similar age to you. My, my! What a fine friend she shall be.”
“Leave her.” Coco, as he'd called her, speaks up with the same monotonous tone that she just can't stop feeling completely gutted at the sound of. “All we need is what we came for. She and the librarian can spread word of what we did here.”
Before she can get out the flurry of anger brewing in her chest, Agott is shoved to the side by the girl, leaving her to flounder on the wooden floor sprinkled with glass for but a moment until she can clamber clumsily to her feet.
“What a shame. Well, this one is an Arklaum, so I'm sure we'll know where to find her should you get lonely.”
That sparks a fear within Agott, but at the very least, they're talking about her as if she'll live beyond this encounter, so she holds onto that with a vice grip and scrambles over to her mother's side, where she lies slumped on the floor. Firmly, she begins to shake her, but the trickle of blood from a blow to the side of the head betrays all hope that she'll be waking anytime soon. The library is in her hands.
But she knows next to nothing that could possibly halt two brimmed caps in their pursuit.
Two claps bring her attention over her shoulder, not bothering to hide her rage at the sight of the eye-masked man and the girl, replacing her thick-brimmed witch hat on the crown of her head.
“Now, now. It's our first time here, so we need some help tracking down a book. Be a good little librarian, won't you now, Arklaum?” He's teasing her, she immediately notices, the back of her throat burning with bile, threatening to make itself known.
Agott is in charge of the library in her mother's absence, but she is powerless to stop two witches armed with forbidden magic as a mere apprentice.
“How many books?”
"One," the girl says. “I remember it well, but it has no title.”
“You break into the Tower of Tomes." She can't help the growl in her voice as she stands, cuts from glass littering her palms. “And you—you want one book. One measly little book."
The taller witch nods, flourishing his cloak with a playful air that only adds to Agott's irritation. “Mm-hm! Shouldn't be too hard to find, now should it?”
“No.” Agott clenches her jaw so hard that her skull pulses with her own pounding heartbeat. “Then, you'll leave?”
Amongst the mess of the sunroof they've made, he laughs in a way that makes the young witch's skin crawl. “Like we were never here!”
Agott begs to differ.
It's hardback, the cover leather-bound, with a press-button clasp that wraps around the outside. No title on the binding. Forbidden spells inked without the use of conjuring ink to ensure none of the spells would activate. Agott can only hope that if they find the book, they'll let her duplicate it like her mother had briefly shown her upon entry to the tower earlier in the day. If not, it means the tower will lack a copy of that book entirely, and the chance to make another will be gone the moment they depart the building.
Masking her fear as a genuine wish to help them track down the book, Agott looks through the untitled books without a single bit of hesitancy, just trying to find the one they'd described to her. Unfortunately, a few match, though they're not filled with forbidden magic and are seemingly just personal educational books made for individual scholars when they need to be refreshed on their basics, rather than ones used to petrify, as they'd said.
Even with the description of said spell, Agott can't say she has any idea what such a spell would look like anyway.
“Ah. Master.” The girl speaks, as level and monotone as everything else she's said, beckoning the taller witch over. So they're master and apprentice, the same system working in the forbidden magic world as it does in the normal one. Something about that sickens her, only adding to the nausea already plaguing her. “It seems I've found it.”
“Wonderful!” The teacher claps his hands together, and Agott dashes out from her row of bookcases in time to see them emerge from theirs, the master's arm linked with his apprentice’s as she has the leather-bound book firmly in her grasp. “Well then, little librarian, it's time for us to go. I do hope you and my apprentice here can be—”
“Wait!” Agott yells, reaching out a hand, “Let me—let me duplicate that book. We need—it's… It's my duty to ensure each book on magic is kept here, and by taking that, it means we won't have a copy, and—”
“All the more reason for us to never see each other again, wouldn't you say?” Coco murmurs.
“...What?” Agott stares, not having considered any reason like that for the book to not be duplicated, but rather thinking about how best to ensure the librarians are not troubled.
“If we take this book, and, for example, we lose it…” The girl begins to explain, which makes Agott feel like she's back in her early magical school, being spoken to like she knows nothing of magic at all. It infuriates her, kindles a fire in her stomach that builds and builds— “... Then we will never have to return. You nor your mother will have to deal with such trouble from us again.”
Agott opens her mouth to retort, anger bubbling and boiling within her, but… what the hell would she even do? They're refusing, outright, to do as she is asking, and she is in no position to insist they stick around while she does such a menial (to them) task, for only Agott's benefit and not their own, while putting themselves at further risk of capture — perishing the thought of even bothering to continue this exchange, Agott wordlessly takes a step back, her shoulders slumping.
Playfully laughing at her defeated form, the tall witch speaks in a way that only proves to Agott that he's smiling beneath that stupid mask. “Good. I'm glad we're in agreement.”
No more words are exchanged before their sylph shoes activate and they fly towards the light above, where Agott watches them until the blinding glare of the sun blots out their forms when they crest beyond the hole the window above has left. Leaning over the balcony to look up, as soon as they're gone, a sob unwillingly tears itself from her throat, followed by a gasp and then a wail. Shame should creep in on this cue, but it stays away, and for the first time in years, she cries without an edge of dread, for all of her horror has been bled dry.
Even when she hears her mother's voice pulling her close, Agott doesn't stop herself and allows herself to cry into her shoulder for the first time in years.