Ink, ink and blood and the flare of a fire that destroyed everything she cherished. Andras’s laughter, and the dry slide of wyrm scales against crushed pages as the acrid smoke seized her lungs. Blocks of soot black as the Library burned. Heat washed up Brevity’s face, and the memory choked her. Probity was staring at her, suddenly full of concern. She squeezed her eyes shut, but the anger slipped out from her lips. “You don’t get it. You never got it. You don’t even see them!”
Them, the colors. The color of a story, the light that slips through the cracks of all stories. The cracks where the lights slipped out and the reader slipped in. She saw the colors in the books and the colors in the ink. Bile crept up her tongue. What they’d let happen to the books, what Claire wanted to do—to shut them away like they never existed—
A rumble shivered through her feet. The air splintered and groaned. Brevity’s eyes snapped open in time to see the faerie lights detach from the stacks and whizz in a frenzy overhead, stabbing light and shadow down on them. One whipped near enough to Claire’s face to graze a cut across her cheek. In a distant row, something toppled off a high shelf and the impact echoed. The pause frothed with the sound of ruffled pages, disquiet books.
Brevity. Brevity had done that. She’d gotten upset and the Library had responded. She gasped. “I’m sorry—”
“No.” Claire held perfectly still, a stricken look in her eyes. She waited until the air quieted again to speak, voice thin and controlled as a scalpel. “We can speak more of this when—when you’re less . . . emotional. We should go.”
Claire glanced at Rami with a brief nod that was stiff enough to shatter, then turned and strode purposefully toward the doors. Ramiel’s colorless silver gaze skipped over Probity to trace Brevity and Hero with a mournful look, but, ever the soldier, he followed at Claire’s back. The doors of the Unwritten Wing closed behind them, quiet as snowfall.
It felt as if the air deflated out of the room with them. Brevity fell into her chair and looked to see Hero sagging against the desk with a lost look. They both sat heavily in the silence, clinging to the desk as perhaps everything else felt unmoored. “What . . . what just happened?”
6
RAMI
Characters. Boss says “they’re just characters” when I press her about the damsel suite. As if characters are a “just”-ish thing to be. They’re people! Essential, intense, emotional lives, scrubbed down and stripped away and honed to a cutting edge. That’s how you fascinate a reader. Characters are more real than real. That’s what fiction is. Why else do stories make them suffer or make them change? They’re mirrors and foils. Every muse is taught that. We fall a little in love with every character we meet. Maybe the story of humanity is learning to be brave enough to be the character in their own story.
Apprentice Librarian Brevity, 2016 CE
RAMIEL HAD TAKEN TIME over the last half a year to become familiar with the confounding mortal who had upended his chance at eternal rest, and the only thing he’d ascertained for sure was that Claire had precisely two forms of walking. One was purposeful, when she had a destination in mind—and she nearly always did. Back straight, chin forward, heels clicking, long, swift strides that sent the torn edges of her skirts frothing like waves.
And then there was this walk. Claire had barely paid attention to the gargoyle as they’d exited, and now she took the stairs in a silent flutter. No less swift, no less decisive, but it was as if the space she’d taken up had narrowed. Shoulders tugged in, feet placed one in front of the other as if walking on an eternal tightrope. Narrowed, focused, but drifting all the same.
It was her thinking walk. Not when Claire was just thinking—the infernal librarian was always thinking—but when she was thinking without resolution.
It’s not as if Rami knew the resolution to . . . Hell, he wasn’t even sure he was clear about what had happened. They’d discovered an anomaly, Claire had been injured, and in the librarian’s infinite illogic, that meant they’d tested that anomaly in the Unwritten Wing and everything had gone . . . askew.
Ramiel wasn’t used to disorientation. He’d worked in several dimensions of existence, after all, before the Fall. He liked to think he had a reasonably flexible perception of reality. But when Claire had placed the blackened pen point to the page, all hell (to abuse the term) had broken loose.
“Quarantine,” Claire said softly to herself. Rami waited a polite moment to confirm that she was actually addressing him before clearing his throat.
“Ma’am?”
“Yes? Oh yes, Rami. I do not like the idea of leaving a pool of that malicious ink open to the air, but we’ll need to section off that area until I can convince the wing to repair itself,” said Claire as she dropped her pen case on the worktable near the door. “And I’d feel better if we locked up the more . . . porous . . . curio items until this is all settled. Anything cloth or paper should be moved, at the very least.”
“Arcanist.”
“As part of the Library it’s going to be difficult to keep damsels out, but I think we can whip up a ward that will discourage them at the very least. Of course, it would be much easier if the Unwritten Wing had the sense to lock down and turn away visitors, but I don’t suppose we should hope for that much wisdom right now. It is our duty to crack on. We should also take care to watch the door—”
“Claire.” Rami put just enough sharpness in his voice to finally halt Claire’s tightrope pacing. She glanced up at him with an affronted look, which Rami tried to mollify with a raised hand. “What
