Rami raised his thick brows in apology and pitched his voice low. “Did Brevity have external business when you left?”
“Not that I knew of. She was chattering away with that traitorous muse. The stacks have been quiet and she’s been so preoccupied I wouldn’t think—” Hero’s gaze fished over the long shadows of the Library. It was possible Brevity was on some errand deep in the stacks, so deep she hadn’t heard Hero call. But he trusted the instinct that told him that wasn’t the case. The wing wasn’t just quiet. Quiet had a mild flavor, a pause. Vacancy, abandonment, was heavy and deep. The back of Hero’s neck prickled. “I should check on the damsels.”
He made it two limping steps before Rami caught his elbow and used his momentum to spin him away from the stacks. “No, I’ll check on the damsels. Perhaps Brevity left some kind of note in the logbook.”
“I am the librarian here,” Hero objected in a mostly confident tone. Assistant librarian. Technically.
“And only librarians can make sense of that grotto you call a desk,” Rami said simply. He had that implacable Watcher look; that I’ve waited millennia; what’s another one? placid stare that made Hero want to dig in his heels. If one of his heels didn’t hurt right now.
Hero straightened his shoulders toward the desk, chin too high in the air to notice when Rami was satisfied enough to disappear between the rows of books. His ankle was a brittle complaint by the time he reached the desk, and Hero flopped down in Brevity’s armchair gladly and let out a slow, measured sigh.
The quiet was less forbidding, just knowing Rami was there among the aisles. It was funny, how companionship did that. Like how just knowing there was a campfire to return to made the night feel less dark, even when you were far from it. Hero had spent enough cold nights stumbling around in the dark to know. Or had he? He’d been a rebellion leader, and then an ill-prepared king, then a bad one, in his story. Did it count? Were those memories any fainter, less accurate, less painful, for having happened between pages he could no longer return to? Just because something—supposedly—didn’t really happen didn’t make it less real.
It wasn’t worth consideration, as things stood now. And Hero prized his consideration highly as a means of survival. He straightened and reached for the logbook, even as he kept an ear tuned to the quiet of the stacks. Certainly he would hear a scream or whatnot if something was amiss. A barrel-chested brute like Rami would have to have good lungs and all.
Leather scraped against wood as Hero pulled the logbook into his lap. It was heavy, heavier than its size suggested. Heavy with ink and paper and an eon of librarians. Hero still felt like an impostor flipping the cover open, and he resented it. Why shouldn’t he read the nattering chicken scratch of librarians long dead? Sure, they were human, but he was a character, which counted for something. He hoped it counted for something, beyond the fraying thread of doubt in his gut.
The most recent entry had been Brevity’s, reporting the existence of the ink and the arrival of Probity. It went on, but Hero stopped reading when the paragraph started to be peppered with “I” statements. It was the habit of the librarians of the Unwritten Wing to empty their hearts to the logbook. It was also the habit of the librarians not to pry into the entries of their contemporaries. Hero had scoffed at that, until he happened to read Brevity’s first entry after the destruction of the books during the coup. He hadn’t been able to meet her eyes for days.
He might be a villain, but he wasn’t a sadist to anyone but himself.
Instead his index finger tapped at the blank of the page, where an explanation, an answer, should have existed. There was no one around to judge him when he put his feet on the desk. Brevity hadn’t closed the Library and hadn’t recorded a reason for her absence. That either meant it was too trivial to note or it’d come upon her so suddenly that there hadn’t been time.
Hero would assume the former, at least until the next disaster.
He didn’t have to wait long. Rami emerged from the stack depths, but not alone. “The damsel suite is as it should be,” Rami reported before stepping aside. “Mistress Lucille offered her help—”
“Oh, delightful,” Hero muttered, tilting the logbook up in order to better slouch behind it. The damsels had made overtures after he returned to the Unwritten Wing. He was supposed to feel a kinship, a commonality with them, other characters who had woken up from their books. Other unwitting residents of the Library. But the line from them to their books was unbroken and secure. Hero’s wasn’t. He wasn’t book enough, not really. The damsel suite felt like a pantomime in a foreign land that he was supposed to call home. A language that was supposed to be in his blood but felt borrowed on his tongue. Too much a book to be a person. Too much a person to be a book.
“Hero,” Lucille said in the tone of wearily beset older relatives everywhere. Hero crept a glance over the top of the book. She had narrowed her gaze onto where the heels of his boots rested on the desk.
“Auntie!” Hero rearranged his expression and trilled with a wiggle of his toes. “So good of you to be concerned about my welfare, as always.”
“I understand you were injured.”
“Only a bit twinged. Nothing the restive embrace of the Library won’t fix.” Hero twisted his heel again, just to see the crow’s-feet around Lucille’s eyes deepen. Paper crunched beneath the friction. “I don’t suppose you’ve seen our librarian recently? Puppy-dog eyes, terrifying with a returns cart, blue all over?”
Lucille’s lips thinned. “Not since she chased her predecessor out of here.”
“What would Claire
