Claire had been so determined to keep the ink from the Unwritten Wing, but she’d been going about it wrong. It was important to keep the ink out of harm for the librarian. Not the wing.
“Books know stories. Walter, you’re a genius.” Claire had to speak to the damsels immediately.
Claire straightened from her slump and grabbed several empty sample bottles. It was a risky experiment and would require fresh bottles. “Bird, watch the artifacts for a spell.”
Bird croaked and tilted her head at Claire’s hurried movements, bleak eyes tracking her hands for any sign of an edible treat. “Later,” Claire reassured her. If the damsels held the answers she sought, she’d give Bird the whole cracker box.
* * *
THE DOORS OF THE Unwritten Wing drew her to a stop, yet again. It was a ridiculous hang-up. Claire needed to obliterate her memory of them in her mind. She stopped down the hall from the doors, and a shiver of cold drew across the nape of her neck like a clammy hand. Surely the doors hadn’t been this towering. Brevity must have darkened the stain, giving it a glow of amber and red that only served to remind Claire of fire. She could almost still smell the ghost of smoke on the air, the grit and sulfur presence of never afters and poor ends. Lost stories. She had a visceral memory of how the wood boards had squelched ever so slightly under her feet as she left, waterlogged with the last-ditch efforts to save the stacks.
If the doors had been closed, Claire would have turned around right then. It would have been too much to reach out and touch, to relive the feeling of blasting through those doors into a sanctuary invaded. The sear of ash, the fetid exhale of demons, ink, and blood.
But the doors were open, as they should have been. Claire forced a purposefully deep breath and caught the scent of old leather, paper, and the faint not-unpleasant ripple of anise that existed in the background of all of Hell. No ash, no rot.
It wasn’t a hard task to slip into the Library, once Claire could get past her own ghosts. Claire kept her eyes carefully focused ahead, diverting them only long enough to ascertain that the librarian’s desk was empty. Brevity must have been somewhere in the labyrinth of stacks, deeper in the Library and perhaps in comfortable conversation with Probity. Recalling old times. Claire would be here and gone before she could bother them.
The stacks had remained largely organized the same, thank goodness. If Claire focused very carefully on the end of each row, she could pretend not to notice all the little differences. Like the reflection of cheerful faerie lights off warm cherrywood. Or the things that remained so achingly the same, like the soft constant susurrus of sleeping unwritten books. It was constant and soothing, like waves on a smooth shore.
It was impossible to tell which hurt worse.
If there was one thing with which Claire was experienced, it was the alchemy of turning pain to usefulness. By the time she reached the small frosted door of the damsel suite, the ache had become a stone, and stone had become certainty. The more it hurt, the surer she was. This was the right choice, the correct path of action. She would get answers here. She would know, and in her knowing, the world would make sense again.
And if the world made sense again, she could fix it. For Hero, Rami, Brevity. For all of them.
It was the resolution Claire needed to place her hand on the latch. The metal was cool, grounding as the ache of stone. She rapped her knuckles twice on the frosted glass before letting herself in.
A pocket of air heavy with tea and fresh linen enveloped her with warmth. The damsel suite had always been several degrees more to the side of cozy than the rest of the Library, and Claire marveled again at how even this had changed under Brevity’s care. She’d had the opportunity twice before, but now she had the luxury of being neither injured nor harried. She stepped into a well-appointed sitting room. Well, perhaps the sitting rooms of Claire’s era wouldn’t have been quite so lined, wall to wall, with bookshelves, but it was still decidedly homey. A glimpse of small hallways and open doorways said there were even bedrooms now, which had never before occurred to Claire as something an unwritten book would need. A small fire licked the hearth in the corner, and the sight of it made Claire’s heart constrict for longer than she would admit. Flames, in such proximity to the book-lined wall, opened up a scab in her chest that had never quite healed.
When she’d woken up earlier, she’d been preoccupied with her hand, but now she was here with a goal in mind. A few damsels were scattered in pockets of activity through the lounge. Repeatedly, gazes flickered up, taking Claire in with a guarded glance, then turning back to their focus. At one point, Claire had felt more boogeyman than librarian. Now she felt like neither.
“Child.” Claire turned to see a damsel finally extract herself from conversation. The woman who approached was not the typical cut of damsel—young, pretty according to the standards of her era, with a blank look in her eyes that quickly rubbed off like bad varnish after a taste of the independence that the damsel suite offered. The woman who approached was older, silver hair cut into a businesslike pixie and stout body swathed in a kind of housedress that was meant for comfort.
“Claire,” she corrected automatically. Andras had been fond of pet names, and Claire had developed a distaste for them. “Just Claire is fine.”
“Of course, Claire.” The woman took the correction with good grace. “They call me Lucille. Granny Lucy, mostly, but I don’t imagine you allow yourself such luxuries as elders.” Claire wasn’t allowed more
