“Hero’s making the best of it.” Probity hadn’t precisely said anything malicious, but Brevity felt a surge of protective instinct. “He’s learning fast.”
“And moving farther and farther away from his story.” Probity shook her head with a distant look in her eyes. “It’d almost have been kinder if he’d burned.”
Brevity’s stomach recoiled and brought her out of her chair. “Don’t say that.”
“I’m sorry. I know it’s not what anyone wants to hear, but the truth rarely is,” Probity reminded her, a pitying look in her eyes. “Think of it, sis. He’ll never be written, and now he doesn’t even have the company of his own kind in his story. He exists simply as a reminder of the Library’s failure to protect him.”
That pierced a little too close to the darker spots in Brevity’s heart. “I’m trying to take care of everyone,” she said softly.
“Oh, sis, not you.” Probity looked far more abashed than she had when talking about Hero. She stood and touched Brevity’s arm apologetically. “You are doing everything right. You are setting so much right. You shouldn’t even be here. I simply meant he’ll never have his story, a character without an ending. What kind of life is that? At least loss is decisive.”
The oily feeling in Brevity’s gut was a mix of horror and old wounds. There was some truth in what Probity said—there was always some truth, but Brevity had learned long ago that some truth was not all truth. “Stop it. You weren’t there. The fire, when it took the books . . .” She gulped down the bile that threatened to rise and squeezed her eyes closed until her stomach behaved itself.
“You saw one fire,” Probity said quietly. “I’ve seen them all.”
Brevity opened her eyes to question that but stopped. Probity was already lost in thought, looking into the shadows of the Library but seeing something else.
“They burn them first, the stories. Humans always come for the stories first. It’s their warm-up, before they start burning other humans. It’s their first form of control, to burn the libraries, to burn the books, to burn the archives of a culture. Humans are the stories they tell. If you want to destroy your enemy, destroy their stories. Even if the people survive, it will be as if they never existed at all.”
Brevity chewed on her lip. “Humans do a lotta terrible things during war—”
“War,” Probity said, and it was caught somewhere between amusement and agony. “Shall we revisit the peacetime burning, then? Libraries censored and burned, the stories that died and were forgotten by accident, by neglect, by ignorance, by—and here, the most notorious peacetime murderer of all—by piety. Books burned because they threatened Bronze Age beliefs and scared old men in long robes. I’m not sure if humans have sacrificed more ink than blood to their gods over the years, but if not, it has to be a near thing.”
No one liked to speak about the books that were lost, especially muses. Brevity knew it, had mourned along with the others as each precious story they’d ushered to the page was destroyed. Each story that’d managed to get out of the Unwritten Wing only to fall to nothing. It was like a midwife losing entire villages of children to war and ignorance. At least while they’d remained in the Unwritten Wing, they’d been possible. After a story was written and burned . . . there was only one fate for that. Each one hurt. And then each one had raged, and then . . . somewhere along the way . . .
“It’s why you did what you did, wasn’t it?” Probity glanced up, and it wasn’t accusation in her eyes now; it was understanding.
To her credit, Probity’s gaze didn’t waver, didn’t drop to Brevity’s folded arms. The ghostly scars of gilt twitched, as if knowing it had been summoned. Brevity still remembered it, remembered when the loops and curls of magic hadn’t been on her skin but in her hands, strands of pure inspiration, a human’s inspiration. The giddy feeling of holding the seeds of a story. She had delivered it to unknowing humans a thousand times before, but that time . . .
That time she hadn’t.
The betrayal had taken only an instant. Hands clutching, feeling the cool-warm flutter under her palms as she pressed the inspiration close to her chest. It’d fluxed, a bare moment of protest before finding her skin and flowing. No flash of brilliance hit her, no genius inspiration of her own—of course not; it wasn’t hers—but the strands of inspiration had wrapped seamlessly over the skin of her arm and stayed.
There wasn’t a law against stealing inspiration from a human, but then again, there wasn’t a law only because it was unthinkable. Not just a crime; a moral travesty. Brevity had been expelled, the first muse to ever have her duty revoked. She’d been cast out and sent to the Unwritten Wing, where she could perhaps do no more harm and, the muses had likely thought, be tortured by the presence of stillborn stories she couldn’t touch.
“So, you know,” Probity was saying at barely a whisper, as if knowing she was intruding on Brevity’s worst memories. “You have to know. We should serve the stories, not the humans. They’ve been a necessity for a long time, but they’re flawed. Humans aren’t worthy of the stories we bring them.”
“What?” Brevity shook her head. “That’s not—”
“You can’t think of a different way it could be, but look at it, at least! The whole system is wrong. Why do we expend realms’ worth of effort—the Library, the books, the muses, all of us—to try to entrust our most precious gifts to the most callous, plodding, destructive mortal creatures? Tell me how that makes sense!”
Brevity hesitated. “Humans are special; they can create stories—”
“And destroy them.”
“But humanity, creation, takes a human soul.”
“Does it?” Probity asked, and the question had such a fine razor point that Brevity stopped.
“What do you mean, ‘Does it?’”
“Does it really take humans
