As soon as he’d said them, the words took on a familiar echo from Chinvat bridge. The wind had dragged its nails through his coat and across his skin. He’d balanced on his toes, terror in his throat, and told himself he would not play their game. He’d spite the gods; he wouldn’t play their game, and he’d choose to fall.
As if anyone chooses gravity.
“You are a help,” Lucille said while precisely not saying a thousand other pitying things. “But when someone stays with you because they don’t have any other choice, that’s not a kindness. The damsel suite is always open to you, when you need a home.”
It was strangling; it was falling; it was enough ripping sensations to tear Hero apart. His ink-smeared fingers clenched under the desk, but just then the logbook chimed a reprieve. “I’ll make my own way, thank you,” Hero said with every bit of acid stored up in his throat. He bent over the desk and studied the inventory with far more scrutiny than the single line—all books accounted for—required. It gave him the moment of privacy he needed to stop the twisting fear building in his chest.
“Nothing missing?” Lucille said after the silence turned awkward.
“None. Does that satisfy you?” Hero drew himself up to his full height. It was so much easier looking at people from the narrow parapet of his nose. “Rami!” he called, without turning to look.
After a few moments, he could hear the familiar heavy trod of angelic work boots. Hero tried to not let the relief play on his face.
“I couldn’t find the tea cart,” Rami apologized as he left the long shadows of the stacks.
“You’re a sweetheart for looking. Never you mind.” Lucille rose slowly with dignity, playing up her age in a way that made Hero strain to not roll his eyes. “There will be a kettle on in the suite.”
“Oh . . .” The heavy brows on Rami’s olive face did a complicated twitch as he stepped aside for Lucille to leave and glanced at Hero. He was canny enough to step carefully over the frost in the air. “But the inventory?”
“Satisfactory.” Lucille patted the angel’s arm as she passed. “The rest of it is no business of mine, of course. You boys tell the librarian I’d appreciate a visit when she gets back.”
Hero’s lip was curled. It took an effort to straighten out his expression as Lucille left and Rami turned a questioning gaze back to him. He took a tentative step on his injured foot and was pleased that only the rotation of his ankle twinged in protest. He could work with that. “Rami, I do hate to be a bother, but—”
“What can I do to help?” Rami asked, as Hero knew he would.
Hero rewarded him with a warm smile that was shockingly earnest. Some of the doubts Lucille had left in his chest began to recede. Choices, and the power to make them—Rami lived his life so effortlessly that way. It would be impossible for Hero to keep up, at least as he was. His smile brightened. “Could you do me a favor and mind the desk for a bit—in case Brevity comes back? I would hate to miss her in the hallways.”
Rami frowned. “I thought you were to rest—”
“And I shall. But first, I just have one small errand.” And Hero forced his aching feet to walk straight and true, out of the Library.
23
CLAIRE
The story and the storyteller are never far apart, in my experience. Authors and their books maintain a relationship that is the best and the worst of us.
Once a book is out in the world, the author pretends to let go. Stories, after all, are for the people who need to hear them. We have to let go of a story, give up the reins, when we ask it to be read. We pretend it’s like making any other product, bread for the hungry or coats for the cold. But what no author admits is that it’s not like that at all. Stories are not made of flour or wool. Stories, real stories, are made with a sliver of yourself.
The purpose for stories is what readers will make of them. But the reason, the desperate need, is a splinter in the author alone. A good story gets under your skin, because that’s where all good stories start.
Librarian Bjorn the Bard, 1313 CE
IT WAS A HABIT of the Library to keep count of days in a mortal fashion. Hell had nothing so simple or precious as sunrises and sunsets, but it felt late when Claire finally looked up from her reading. She’d found a dusty historical in the back of Andras’s cluttered shelves. Some sixteenth-century creation that appeared to confuse demonic summonses and keys of Solomon and faerie poppets, of all things, into one volume of nonsense. However, it must have had a grain of truth, powerful truth, to end up down in the Arcane Wing. Claire had set herself about finding it, on the off chance it related to the ink.
Reading garbled conspiracy theories by long-dead Scotsmen; this was how far Claire had fallen. But the ink held no answers, Walter had no answers, and the Library shunned her. As tragic as it was, this was the best lead she had in the time left.
The shimmer of blue itched above the curve of her arm. It had thinned to no more than a width of fine yarn, and frayed to scratchy, twitching threads. Claire rubbed an idle hand over it, but it did nothing to quell the itch or the hourglass running empty in her mind. The border on her skin was growing more distinct, ink-stained skin south of the line chill, with a dry clamminess that its northern counterpart didn’t
