always had such vivid dreams. I've started drawing them out to help remember them by.'
'How can you draw a dream?'
Her color was high, and her hands were clenched. 'I had to try to make some sense of them because the details haunt me! 1 don't even know why, and it doesn't matter, but I can't bear to have people looking- I can't explain it. I didn't even show them toyou' Tears welled in her lovely eyes. I knew when Bee was bluffing, and this wasn't it.
I grasped her hands. 'When he comes back in, you cause a distraction, anything to get him to put the book down and shift his attention elsewhere. I'll sneak it into my schoolbag.'
Nodding, she let go my hands and wiped her cheeks. The longcase clock's pendulum ticked. Ticked. Ticked. Ticked. Bee stared at the poet's head as if daring Bran Cof to open his eyes. I couldn't bear looking in case he did, so I let my gaze wander to the chalkboard. It had been recently erased, but I could still read traces of figures and words as a geologist can read down through layers of sediment and rock. The Hibernian Ice Sheet Expedition: Lost, no bodies or wreckage recovered. The Alps Ice Cap Expedition: Turned back by ice storms. The First Baltic Ice Sea Expedition: Remnants rescued after a year missing. The Second Baltic Ice Sea Expedition: Lost, no bodies or wreckage recovered.
'I wonder who that lesson was for,' said Bee. 'It's strange to look at that and remember that both your father and your mother were members of the First Baltic Ice Sea Expedition.
That they were the 'remnants rescued after a year missing.'
Them and, what, ten others?'
'Three others. Only five survived out of the twenty-eight who set out. I think I've read my father's account of the opening months of that expedition a hundred times. 'No man has ever crossed the tempestuous Baltic Ice Sea or set foot on the towering and inhospitable Skandic Ice Shelf No woman, either, for that matter. Fifty-four journals he wrote and numbered. That's the only time he mentions my mother.'
She made a face. 'Probably because the next two volumes are missing.'
'Yes,' I said peevishly, 'the very ones covering the rest of the expedition, when any idiot who can do math-'
'That would be you.'
'— can draw the conclusion that I was conceived in the latter months of that very expedition.'
'It is curious,' she agreed. 'You would think a man falling in love would write paeans about the fine eyes of his beloved. But perhaps it was later, in the midst of the crisis on the ice, that they-'
A tremor in the floor alerted me. I lifted a hand to warn her. I heard, as she did not yet, the halting step-tap of the headmaster approaching the door. We composed our faces and pretended to be looking out the windows at the bare branches of autumn trees in the rose court. The door opened. The servant entered first, holding the door for the headmaster, who limped in with a preoccupied frown on his face. He seemed surprised to see us.
'Are you still here?' he asked. 'Forgive me. I meant to dismiss you. Did I speak to you about the wisdom of not antagonizing the mage Houses, maestressas? Even in so small a way as imprudent speech?'
Bee's eyes had gone wide as china plates, and her chin trembled. The headmaster was no longer carrying her sketchbook.
'You did, maester,' I responded promptly, seeing Bee was in no condition to speak. 'I'll guard my tongue. It was ill-considered of me. I beg pardon.'
'Ah, well, then. Best you go down to luncheon.' A smile flitted and vanished on his seamed face. 'I believe there is yam pudding. My favorite!'
The servant had crossed the chamber already and opened the outer door for the headmaster. We had to follow him down the path offered.
5
But that did not mean that, once out in the corridor, I could not feign a broken ribbon on my slipper, pretend to lose my footing, and therefore be obliged to kneel and fuss to make things right. Bee, leaping at once into the gaps between my beat, begged the headmaster to go on ahead and we would catch up as soon as the torn ribbon had been jury-rigged.
He and his servant went on, leaving us behind just as we'd hoped.
'We have to get back in and find it.' Bee used the tone of voice that, like a stake, always impaled me to the wall.
'Both the headmaster's office and the formal library are specifically off-limits to unchaperoned pupils. We already know that the headmaster's dog is roaming loose among the books.' I rose. With my height, I towered over her. 'Can you imagine what will happen if we're caught in either place?'
'I'll go alone.' She pressed her left hand to her bosom but fixed her right around the door's handle and misquoted the famous words of the great general Hanniba'al: ''I will either find a way, or make one.''
'Very pretty,' I muttered. 'Too bad the even more decorative Maester Amadou is not here to admire your fetching pose. Only, you should have your right hand raised in the manner of an ora-tor declaiming.'
She looked at me, all honey. 'It's not locked.'
I could smell luncheon's distant promise. I was so hungry. But there was no one in the corridor. Either find a way, or make one.
'It will be on your head,' I muttered.
I adjusted my schoolbag's strap so it wouldn't shift. Then I bent to listen at the keyhole, hearing no sound from the chamber beyond except the ticking of the clock like the swing of fortune: triumph, disaster, triumph, disaster. I lifted a hand, she turned the handle, and we slipped inside. She closed the door and let the handle rise with a faint snick. The chamber lay eerily empty. The poet's head looked merely like a remarkably lifelike carving. Even so, I kept thinking its eyes were about to pop open and spot us sneaking where we weren't allowed. We slid quietly across the polished floor-many years of fencing practice had honed our ability to move smoothly-and at the far door, I again listened at the keyhole.
At first hearing: nothing.
I shut my eyes and listened more deeply, letting my cat's hearing creep through the unseen room on the other side of the door to the shift of air and temperature that betrayed a larger chamber beyond, in which one male voice asked a curt question and another replied in a cramped monotone I was sure belonged to the headmaster's dog. I could not quite hear distinct words: a map of Adurnam? The Rail Yard? Gas?
Was everyone in the academy discussing the newly arrived airship?
There was no point in waiting. We must be as bold as the didos of our people, the queens who had founded cities, battled the Romans to a standstill, and commanded voyages of discovery across the Atlantic Ocean and around the horn of Africa. I nudged Bee's foot with my own. She slid the door open a crack, wedged a foot in, peered inside. Like lightning, she flashed through the gap and vanished. I slipped after her, and she shut the door behind us.
Fiery Shemesh!
We stood in a chilly chamber of aisles, alleys of shelves that reached floor to ceiling, all crammed with books of every height, width, and thickness, some old and others new, more books than I had seen in one place in my life: This was a storage library. The polished wood floor caught streaks of light from the courtyard windows rising to our left, but mostly the light was broken up by the high shelves. We stared straight down a central aisle lined with pillars, each of which marked a side alley of shelves running perpendicular to the shadowed edges of the room. At the other enaVof the space, one side of a double door had been propped open against a stack of books so new their leather bindings gleamed. The vast formal library beyond had a vaulted ceiling and ample sunlight.
A man spoke, a brusque request for 'that document you mentioned.' Although we could not see him, I heard, almost felt, his feet shifting on the floorboards. Another pair of feet clip-clapped toward the open door.
I yanked Bee into the shadows to our right. We shivered like mice while the headmaster's dog walked briskly down the central aisle and into the headmaster's office. Its door closed behind him. We darted along the back aisle to the other end of the room. Creeping, we ventured up this alley, books leering at us from either side, to the door that opened into the library hall. From this angle, we could get a look only into the left-hand sweep of the huge
