“No, I haven’t told him yet. And I’m not going to,” Claire said to the reproachful look Bird gave her. She hadn’t said a word about the whispers to anyone yet. It wasn’t that she feared Brevity, Rami, or even Hero wouldn’t believe her. It was just, given her history, the presence of voices no one else could hear after a dramatic event like a near-death staining might raise some alarms. Alarms were fussy things. Claire couldn’t get a smidge of work done with them.
She found a broken biscuit behind a bottle of ink that satisfied Bird long enough for Claire to reclaim her chair. The sigh that pushed past her lips as she flopped into the dim of the alcove was not entirely intentional. Her stained hand came to rest, palm up, in her lap. It didn’t feel different, besides a perpetually damp, chilly sensation that had her rechecking that she wasn’t leaving wet fingerprints of ink on everything she touched. She hoped she still had fingerprints; it was rather hard to tell under all the black.
Bird resettled on the edge of the open drawer, biscuit crumbling between her scaly claws. Her feathers were fluffed into a dusty storm cloud that said she had no intention of taking the bribe and leaving Claire in peace. Bird destroyed the biscuit industriously, then set to snapping up a pen cap and rapping it against the desk. At least her random blats and gravel-filled squawks were anchors of solid, weighty things. Real things. Claire put aside the question of whispers and focused on the more productive question of the ink.
“Back to work,” Claire muttered to Bird and the whispers.
No two of Andras’s logbooks were the same. Claire drew one down from the shelf at random. The cover was bound in some kind of hide that was too heavy and metallic to be from any creature on earth. She found the index quickly and looked for any log entry dealing with an artifact or speculation of ink. When that came up empty, she broadened her search to any magical liquids, and that got somewhere at least. Claire spent the next three hours wading through Andras’s spidery handwriting and parsing out his thoughts on chimera blood, arcane brews, ifrit tears, aqua vitae, and even the observable properties of holy water. An entry that was brief at best. What she wouldn’t have given to have that in her inventory at any point of her tenure in Hell, Claire thought wryly.
There were entries on divine paints, dark visceral slurries, arcane potions, cosmic floods, and the blood of every impossible realm creature one could think of. But no ink. There was not a single record of any artifact of ink-like nature passing through the Arcane Wing.
Claire fell back into her chair and rubbed the grit out of her eyes with her good hand. The utter absence of a thing was nearly as telling as anything else she could have dug up. Telling what, though? A hot feeling threatened to well up in her eyes, and, damn it all, Claire hated to cry when she was frustrated. Crying, in general, was an indignity, but tears that came because she felt powerless to do anything else were the worst kind.
If she could just find a fulcrum, find a point to stand where the world made sense again, she felt she could manage. But everything had felt wildly askew from true since the Library fire. A slow, festering wound had opened between the Unwritten Wing and the Arcane Wing. And left unattended, it had burst—through the floorboards, through the tentative quiet—into the mayhem and confusion of ink that shouldn’t exist.
And there was the wound. Claire mentally poked at it. It wasn’t that she desired to be librarian again—she didn’t want the Unwritten Wing back from Brevity—it was simply that she wanted to understand what had happened. It had never made sense, and her lack of understanding was threatening everyone. Everyone expected Claire to solve the riddle. Knowledge was what she excelled at. Yet she hadn’t even been clever enough to keep from touching the stuff.
“. . . naught is lost.”
Claire sat up in her chair and glanced at the raven. “Did you hear that?”
Bird gave her a slow blink and released a rain of crumbs into her lap. She squatted into a fluffed ball and appeared to be considering relieving herself over the edge of Claire’s desk. Birds really were awful pets.
But Claire had heard something. Or she thought she had. It was a bit like when you’d been startled out of sleep and your brain was still rewinding to catch up. It always left Claire with the sensation that she’d been jolted awake by a sound she more remembered hearing than heard directly.
This particular sound was a memory of a voice, young and with a formal accent that really only existed in Arthurian melodramas. Moreover, it was no voice Claire recognized. She pushed away from the desk—Bird cursing at her for the disruption—and emerged from her alcove.
The Arcane Wing was not entirely silent. Somewhere, far flung toward the entrance, she could hear the methodical thumps of Rami occupied with his work. She almost went toward the sound, but something, or the memory of something, made Claire turn and squint into the shadows of the rookery.
A figure crouched against the wall but slowly unwound itself as Claire’s eyes adjusted to the gloom. A flash of brocade made her freeze and imagine for a ridiculous moment it was Andras, escaped and back in his old kingdom. But, no, Andras—or at least the idea of him—was imprisoned in a dagger Claire kept buried in the bottom of her own desk drawer, neglected and ignored. She blinked, and the figure resolved into a lanky blond man in a pit-sweated velvet suit that had been popular on the rock stars of
