Questor grimaced. “If I know Dirk—and I do—he will not have gone very far away. You have to understand. A Prism Cat is a fairy creature, and his motives are his own. But he always does things for a reason, and bringing you here was not accidental. He brought you here for a purpose. You just don’t know what it is yet.”
He gave her a reassuring smile. “Now tell me everything else that happened.”
Well, she wasn’t about to do that, of course. And she didn’t. But she did tell him some of it: her arrival at Libiris and Rufus Pinch’s refusal to admit her; Thom’s intervention; His Eminence’s decision to let her remain and work with her “brother” in the Stacks; the terrible impossibility of the task to which she and Thom had been set; the ways in which they were spied upon and mistrusted by both His Eminence and Pinch. Finally, she worked her way around to the two questions that weighed most heavily on her mind and to which she was hoping he might provide the answers.
“A couple of very strange things happened during the last few days, Questor,” she began. “Yesterday, I heard a voice calling out to me. Or to someone, at any rate. I heard it clearly. Thom heard it too, both tonight and several weeks earlier, before I got here. We talked about it. We don’t think we were mistaken.”
She chose her words carefully. She had no intention of revealing too many details. If Questor thought she was in any real danger, he would take her away at once, and she wasn’t yet ready to go. For starters, things with Thom were just getting interesting. Besides, she didn’t think that she was in any real danger.
Questor nodded as if he understood. “You probably did hear something.”
“All right,” she continued, wanting to get the rest of it out before she heard what he had to say on the matter. “The other thing is that while I was lying on the floor, just resting for a moment”—she was making it up as she went—”I put my cheek against the wooden boards and felt a pulse and a warmth that reminded me instantly of Sterling Silver. But I don’t understand how that could be.”
She waited for his response, which wasn’t given immediately. Instead, the wizard pursed his lips, cocked first one and then the other eyebrow, narrowed his eyes, and then drew in and let out a long, sustained breath.
“Well,” he said, as if that pretty much covered it.
“Well, what?”
“If you had not gone off on your own, so determined that none of what has already happened
He held up one finger in warning as she was about to object. “I just think you need to hear how difficult you have made things for people who love you before I tell you what you want to know. You caused us all a great deal of worry, Mistaya. It isn’t as if you didn’t know we would wonder whether something had happened to you. We have all been thinking of little else since you disappeared. If your grandfather had not sent word that you came to see him, we might not even have known that much.”
“I know,” she said. She had left them dangling, running off like that. But what choice did she have? Still, an apology couldn’t hurt. “I’m sorry,” she added, only half meaning it.
He gave an emphatic nod. “Then we shall put this behind us. Let me tell you a few things about Libiris that you do not know. Things, I would point out again, that I would have told you much earlier had you agreed to come here voluntarily with me as your companion. But it is not too late to rectify that now.”
He paused. “I suppose I should start by telling you that you are not mistaken in believing that Libiris feels like Sterling Silver. It does, and there is a good reason for it. The buildings share a commonality that you know nothing about. Sterling Silver was constructed of materials and magic in equal parts in a time long since forgotten. She was created to be a sentient being, a caregiver for Landover’s Kings and Queens, a protector for their families. You know all this from your studies. Libiris shares something of those same characteristics, though to a lesser extent. When the old King had her built, back in the years before your father became ruler, he did so using materials taken from Sterling Silver. He did so in hopes that Libiris, like Sterling Silver, would take on a life of its own and become a living organism that would care for its books just as the King’s castle cared for its royal family.”
He gave her a knowing look. “Why could this be so? Because the Kings of Landover had discovered over the years that left to her own devices and occupied by a true king, Sterling Silver would take care of herself without human or fairy assistance. She could repair damage, brighten tarnish, clean off dirt and grime, and generally revitalize herself all on her own. It only became a problem for her to perform when no King sat upon the throne and the central purpose of her existence was undermined.
“The old King, then, instructed the court wizard to remove shelving throughout the castle to form the foundation for the Stacks and to take some stone from the battlements and ramparts to cap the walls of
