Brevity’s world flipped. She took a shaky breath and shook her head. “No, when I stole the inspiration I didn’t get any of the story. It’s not possible.”
“Maybe not from the inspiration. It’s too distilled, the wrong form to work with. We’d need something closer to the end goal,” Probity said thoughtfully.
Brevity stared at her. “The ink. That’s why you were so excited about the ink. I already told you, it’s impossible.” When Probity said nothing, Brevity’s brow furrowed. “But how would that even work?”
Not could but would. Brevity realized the mistake after she said it. Probity met her gaze cautiously, hopefully. “It would just take a small sample to try. I have some ideas, if you’d help me. You and me, Brev. Don’t you remember how that used to be?”
That was the difficult part: of course Brevity remembered. She’d always felt better working with someone rather than alone. And helping train Probity had been the best of her memories as a muse. Working together, struggling together, wondering together. Probity had been so studious and good at anchoring down Brevity’s wild leaps of ideas, the same way—oh, and there it was. Memories blurred from working with Probity to working with Claire in the Library.
“No,” Brevity said, more to herself than anyone else. Even her own ears didn’t believe it. “That’s not what the Library is for.”
“Sis.” Probity touched her shoulder, looking at her with all the worship and steady belief of a child reunited with her hero. But they weren’t the eyes of a youth anymore. Probity looked at her with the certainty of hope. “But what if it’s what you are made for? Librarians have always been revolutionaries, right?” Brevity thought of the logbook, of Poppaea’s rebellion and Gregor’s skeptical pragmatism and Fleur’s unorthodox means. She had to nod. Probity smiled. “Maybe this is your revolution. The system is broken; it’s got to change. Maybe you’re the one to fix it.”
It was an alluring thought, one of stories and quests, but Brevity’s anxiety was quick to remind her of the other way those stories ended. “But what if it breaks instead?”
“You can’t break something that’s already broken. Stop protecting things you could make better.” Probity’s hand slid down her arm, then dropped, hesitantly. She gave her a slip of a smile to soften her frustration. “Please. Think about it, at least.”
8
CLAIRE
Remake the Library. That’s what they tell me, as if it should be so simple. They tossed out the old librarian, as if chasing off a wild dog, but left all the books. There you go: have at it. Ha! As if books are all that’s needed to make a library. My people, we know libraries.
Stories are more than ink on pages. Libraries are more than scrolls stacked upon shelves. There is something untold here.
Librarian Madiha al-Fihri, 603 CE
QUARANTINE, CLAIRE HAD SAID, and she would have sworn it echoed differently against the flat oak shelves of the Arcane Wing. Alone, repeated back to her unsettlingly. It was a small mercy when Rami set about the inventory and Claire could retreat to her desk.
The Arcane Wing hadn’t had a proper office under Andras. The demon had appeared to enjoy conducting the entire place like a lab. He did any record keeping from the expanse of worktables at the front of the collection. Or, more likely, foisted the more tedious tasks off onto the abominations he called assistants. One of the very first changes the wing had made for Claire’s comfort, after lightening the aesthetic gloom, was developing a small alcove along the back wall, past the empty rookeries. It was a cubby, really, just enough space for Claire’s battered desk, chair, and row of shelves on the wall above that seemed to always hold precisely the record necessary.
It was a tiny space Claire could feel was entirely her own, in a place and routine that decidedly weren’t. When she turned her chair just so, she could almost imagine she was in the corner of some distant library. It was usually a place to be alone.
Usually, when there wasn’t a disgruntled-looking giant raven lurking on the back of her chair.
“Bird.” Claire sighed and pulled a drawer open to scavenge some self-defense bread crumbs.
Andras had kept ravens—as experiment subjects, as hostages, perhaps both—when he’d been Arcanist. Not just any ravens—Odin’s ravens. Ravens of Valhalla. Ferocious warrior-spies for the Norse realm. Gods knew what Andras had planned. Claire had been happy enough to free them in exchange for help reclaiming the Unwritten Wing. The raven women were welcome allies, and lethal and merciless against Andras’s demons.
Afterward, they’d left with their leader, back to Valhalla. All except one old, lazy she-raven. She roosted in the rafters and showed up occasionally to peck at Claire and be a nuisance. She delighted in causing chaos. Claire had taken to just calling the creature Bird, since she’d never seen her transform into a human shape. Perhaps she had forgotten how. Perhaps she couldn’t. Perhaps Andras had kept one regular, boring, mortal raven from the human world in the cages, just to have a go at everyone. That would have been his kind of humor.
Trapped and cornered in a cage, everyone’s the same feral animal, pup. Remember that. The voice in her head was still there, her memory of Andras the Benevolent Mentor, not Andras the Buggered Traitor.
Claire fed the raven anyway, though she would deign to talk to it only when Rami wasn’t around. He already worried about her sanity, after she’d survived witnessing Uriel face-to-face. He really was a
