Salestia Witrose had always suspected the moon was more beautiful from Earth.

The Iron Citadel wasn't a small city by any means, but it did stand alone on the moon's surface. Its metal spires and imposing walls and black skies were all Salestia had ever known; any memory of her brief few years on Earth as a child had long abandoned her. Now, all she had of her true home was the sight of the ringed planet suspended in the void outside.

That, and books.

Reading was the easiest way to spend her time at the Iron Library's front desk while she waited for visitors. Under the violet glow of the building's burning lamps, mixed with the golden soulspeaker-crafted light spilling in through the windows, Salestia browsed books written by Earth's most daring explorers, its brilliant historians, its naturalists and academics and cartographers.

Around her, narrow iron staircases spiraled up columns of books. Black shelves and walkways intersected at the upper levels. Maps of the solar system's planets and moons and distant constellations painted the ceilings. The library was a beautiful piece of architecture that had become a prison to Salestia.

Today, she kept herself distracted with the pages of a book on soulspeakers—human wielders of elemental magic. The book's artist clearly favored the most powerful. The soulspeakers whose magic had fundamentally altered their appearance.

Among those in the order of earthspeakers—the most diverse order, by far—were plantspeakers with vines tangled in their hair and thorns sprouting from their skin, jewelspeakers with gems embedded in their bodies, metalspeakers with limbs and claws of iron. Steel. Gold. Waterspeakers with drenched hair and ocean eyes, icespeakers with frosted lips. Soilspeakers, sandspeakers, stonespeakers, woodspeakers... They shaped the world.

Most specialties could be narrowed. Refined. Some plantspeakers learned to cultivate a single flower to perfection and grow them for royal palaces, rosespeakers and lilyspeakers and the like. Jewelspeakers could get rich growing a specific gemstone. Salestia had even heard of a glasspeaker queen in the Yanjenese desert.

Skyspeakers were close behind the earth order in diversity of magic, boasting lightningspeakers whose hair stood on end as they lit up the sky, airspeakers with a perpetual windswept appearance, starspeakers with the cosmos glittering in their eyes. Meteorspeakers brought fiery space debris raining down on battlefields, while spacespeakers closed the distance that ships had to cover to reach the moon and Mars.

The other two elementally opposed orders were the moonspeakers and the sunspeakers. Wielders of darkness and light. For the sunspeakers, that meant firespeakers and lightspeakers.

Salestia lifted her hand and studied her palm. Powerful lightspeakers often had a glow to them, or their eyes, or at the very least a radiating warmth. However, while it was exhausting and required an ongoing redirection of their magical energy, a talented soulspeaker could prevent their magic from altering their appearance.

But the more likely reason for a soulspeaker to appear as an ordinary human was that they were weak. Or unpracticed.

Footsteps hurried down the grand staircase behind Salestia, pulling her from her thoughts. She threw a glance over her shoulder and frowned. "Aza?"

Azadorna Asterades was one of the library assistants. And the governor's younger sister. Working here seemed to be the governor's idea more than hers, but she did a fine enough job.

Her expression was twisted with worry as she approached Salestia's desk. She halted next to Salestia and wiped her dark brown hands on the sapphire skirt of her dress. The top half of her hair was pulled up in its usual twin buns, while the rest of her dark curls were free to fall around her neck.

"Is something wrong?" Salestia pressed.

"I was shelving books in the potions section when I heard a thud on the other side of the wall." Aza threw a nervous glance upward. "It sounded like someone was in the northwest tower."

"You want to be a fairy hunter, but you're too scared to investigate a thud upstairs?" Salestia raised an eyebrow.

Aza's arms folded. "At least I know a fairy's weakness."

Fair enough. Salestia chuckled. "All right, I'll go take a look." She reached under her desk to grab the quarterstaff hidden just out of sight.

"Do you want me to come with you?" Aza asked as Salestia rose to her feet.

"I'll handle it," Salestia assured her. "Watch the front desk for me."

Aza had good reason to be concerned. The library, as surprising as it sounded, required some security. It housed more than just books, and there were things inside that might tempt a thief. Or someone more dangerous.

The northwest tower was closed to the public and full of valuable artifacts. Though it was meant to be a temporary storage space, many objects had been there since before Salestia's arrival. Apparently, there were plans to build a museum in the citadel, but they had yet to come to fruition.

Salestia climbed several sets of stairs before she reached a door near where Aza would have heard the thud, roughly halfway up the tower. A break-in would have likely occurred on ground level, meaning the intruder was moving up. Salestia had a decent chance at cornering them.

She took a steadying breath, tightened her grip on the staff, and slipped into the tower.

Not a soul on this floor. Salestia crossed to the stairwell on the other side, her gaze darting between pieces of art as she passed them. This room mostly held fragments of the original Iron Cathedral that had been built by sunspeakers to resemble the churches in their homelands. Statues, paintings, and most prominently, a stained-glass window depicting angels: beings from the four gas planets collectively called the Heavens in sunspeaker and skyspeaker mythologies.

The lightspeakers depicted the beings as ethereal humans with wings and halos. Other myths called the same creatures 'celestials' and tended to imagine them as something far more menacing. But there was no hint of that malice here.

Salestia's foot hit the first step. She ventured up to the next floor.

The silence was becoming unsettling, but Salestia refused to let her heart quicken, refused to let her hands shake. Her reflection moved with her as she passed a fractured mirror, its wooden frame carved into mountains and sun rays and soaring eagles. She only had a few fleeting moments walking side-by-side with herself. Her waves of blonde hair, half pulled up. Her blue eyes. Her light skin and white knuckles and the dark wood of the staff in her grasp. The golden chain around her neck, its pendant hidden beneath the neckline of her white shirt. Her black trousers, her boots.

The next floor was the last one. The highest room in the tower.

Salestia took the corner out of the stairwell slowly, staff held out in front of her. Thewalls of the final room were packed to the brim with iron shields and weaponsand armor, too battered and rusted for fairy hunters to use anymore.

And...

A man.

He stood in a patch of light in front of the window, his back to Salestia. And yet, he seemed to sense the moment she entered. He turned, slowly, his short black cloak moving with him, the light glinting off his green eyes. He looked young. But the way he carried himself, the calculating expression on his tanned face, it all suggested he had more experience than a common thief.

Still, there was a politeness to the way he lifted his hands. "My apologies for the intrusion, but this will go more smoothly if you act as though you never saw me at all. I'm not here for any of these artifacts."

"Then what are you looking for?" Salestia lifted an eyebrow. "You know the books are free, right?"

The corner of the man's mouth turned up in a slight smile. "Not the ones I'm looking for."

There was one other thing he could be after, then. The northeast tower. The books not available to the public.

Salestia smirked. "You're in the wrong tower, aren't you?"

"It seems I was given bad information," the man replied.

"Maybe you're just bad with directions."

The man chuckled.

Salestia began a slow approach. The staff twirled in her hand. "Why don't you tell me what you're after? Maybe we can come to an agreement."

"I'm afraid I'm here on private business." Judging by the thin smile that followed, he knew as well as Salestia did that she wouldn't be letting him get away with vague excuses.

Let's see what you're made of, then. Salestia lunged.

The man dodged her first few swings. As she readjusted her grip on the staff and prepared to strike again, he lifted a hand and muttered something under his breath. Green magical energy took form in the air between them. The magic shaped itself into a circle. Geometric symbols lined the shape's outer edge.

Witch sigils. Well, now Salestia was intrigued.

She smacked the magical shield with her staff. The sigils fractured into nothingness. Her next blow was aimed at the man's chest, but she moved slow enough for his hand to dart out and grab the staff. With one twist of his arm, he sent her stumbling into the wall.

Even as her back collided with stone, Salestia was lifting her fists. The man tossed her staff aside, not yet realizing it wasn't her only weapon.

"Really, I mean you no harm," the man said as he stepped toward her. "I just need information." Green flames danced on the skin of his raised hand. "It's for the greater good."

Greater good. Salestia snorted. Not that she didn't believe he was pursuing some noble cause or another, but it was a silly line to use when you had someone backed into a corner with witchfire.

She let him take another step forward, narrowing the gap between them to a couple of feet. The way he towered over her might have been alarming to someone else, but Salestia was still firmly in amused territory. Time to bring out her real weapon.

A blinding glow exploded from her clenched fists. Salestia drew back her arm and swung. With the man caught off guard, it was easy to land a hit this time.

The blow sent the man staggering back. He let out a short laugh as he straightened up, rubbing his jaw. "Lightspeaker."

"Witch."

Salestia took a moment to better examine his features. Their brief fight had disturbed his slick black hair, leaving a few pieces to fall around his face. She'd ordinarily expect her punch to leave a bruise on his sharp jawline, but he surely had a spell to magic any minor injuries away.

The man sized her up, seemingly taking her a little more seriously, now. "I suppose you'd have a chance at beating me if you could keep me blind. It would only be a matter of how long it would take me to put a counterspell in place." Witha raised eyebrow, he added, "Perhaps we should revisit that agreement you mentioned."

Salestia laughed. "Well, let's start with your name, witch."

A heartbeat passed before she got her answer. "Ellias."

"Salestia." Salestia held out her hand. "Now, if you'd kindly return my staff, I'd be happy to escort you to the northeast tower. Under a few conditions."

Ellias picked her staff up off the ground and tossed it her way. She caught it with ease.

"Most books in that tower are kept away from the public because they're old and fragile." Salestia started toward the stairs. "But information in those books could be found elsewhere. I suspect what you're really after are the extensive details of the fae caverns, which have been locked away under the governor's orders." The reasoning was to discourage aspiring fairy hunters from getting themselves killed. Salestia wasn't sure how well it actually worked.

Ellias followed her down the stairs without saying a word. No response to her explanations, no hint of what he might be seeking in those caverns.

Salestia shot a glance back at him. "I won't ask too many questions about what you're looking for, but I can't let you take any books out of the tower. You'll have to do your research here."

"I can accept that." Ellias quickly looked her up and down. "But I imagine even you would have some difficulty getting into that tower, given its restrictions."

They exited the tower through the same door Salestia had entered and headed toward the east side of the library. Ellias fell into pace at Salestia's right.

"I know where the key is," Salestia told him.

"I'd hate to get you in trouble with your boss."

"Lucky for you, I am the boss around here." Her hand slid into her pocket to draw out an iron key. She grinned as she held it up for Ellias to see.

Surpriseflashed across his face. "You're in charge of the library?"

"I know, I look too young for the job." Salestia waved her hand. "The head librarian passed away rather abruptly last month, and the governor's been too busy to hire a replacement. I was trained well enough to keep things from falling apart, so she's letting me run the place, for the time being."

"When did you start training?" Ellias asked.

"I was adopted by one of the librarians as a child. I think they started letting me do real work when I was twelve."

"I trust I'm in competent hands, then."

Salestia laughed.

They reached the northeast tower. Salestia unlocked the door and led Ellias inside, past the carefully preserved historical texts to the top room, where fae research deemed too dangerous for the main floor was kept.

"Now, given your initial approach, I'm sure you can understand why I still harbor some distrust for you," Salestia told Ellias as he began examining the shelves. She flicked her wrist and summoned a narrow beam of light across the window. A second appeared in the doorway. "If you pass through either of these beams, I will sense it immediately."

Salestia's eyes narrowed, her playful demeanor fading away. "Before you leave, you will come to me and I will make sure you haven't taken anything you shouldn't have," she continued. "Otherwise, I will come and find you, and you will see how I fight when I'm actually trying to win."

There were better ways to keep him from leaving without her permission, but this would do for today.

"You were going easy on me?" Ellias asked. Was that skepticism in his tone?

"I was assessing my opponent," Salestia replied smoothly. "Determining what I was up against."

Ellias glanced at the light beams. "You must be a talented lightspeaker, to know how to do that."

"Oh, well, no one's trained me," Salestia admitted. She traced a finger against the gold chain around her neck. "I know a couple of good tricks, though. Picked them up from books."

Ellias slid a book off the shelf and examined its cover. "I appreciate your assistance." He glanced at her. "And if it's any reassurance at all, I did plan on returning any books I took."

"Hm. Sure." With a sly smile, Salestia moved to exit the room. She paused in the doorway. "You know, there are nearly a hundred books here. If you're looking for specific information, I might be able to narrow things down for you."

Ellias surveyed the shelves. "I'll start on my own. But I'll let you know if I need assistance."

"Well, then, take your time. We close at ten o'clock." Salestia slipped out of the room and pulled the door shut.

She most definitely should have kicked him out, but she couldn't resist a good mystery. Especially when she had her own interests in the fae caverns. Ellias may not have wanted her knowing what he was after, but there were only so many things someone could be chasing down there, if not the fae themselves.

Salestia already had a hunch. And whether Ellias wanted her help or not, he was going to get it.