The Lost Books

by Sarah Prineas

  Charlie was sitting at one of the reading tables, not reading, of course, or doing anything useful, but tipped back in his chair, tossing a balled-up mitten into the air and catching it, over and over. It was getting on Alex’s nerves.

  Trying to ignore Charlie, he focused on the map. He’d drawn an X on every place where he’d found one of the marked books. Was there a pattern to it? He couldn’t tell. If there was, he might be able to predict where the next marked book would appear.

  Hmmm, Alex thought. If there was a pattern, what would it mean? He got up and walked around to crouch on the other side of the map, studying it carefully.

  A balled-up mitten bonked Alex in the head and fell onto the map. Startled, he glared at Charlie. “The books didn’t like it, you said,” Charlie said.

  The prince’s broad face looked suspiciously benign. “You told my sister that the books didn’t like the cold. How do you know they didn’t?”

  Alex picked up the mitten and hurled it back at Charlie. Missed. Then he gave the prince his best you are an idiot stare, the one that had been known to make grown men and women armed with swords tremble in their boots.

  The stare missed Charlie too, because he only grinned in response. “I know, I know,” the prince said. “It’s because you’re a . . .” He lowered his voice, making it portentous. “A librarian.” With a thump, he set all four legs of his chair on the floor again. “But how did you know they didn’t like the cold?”

  Well now. That was an interesting question. Alex got to his feet and went to fetch the mitten. Finding it behind the card catalog, he brought it back, dropping it onto the table beside Charlie. “How do I know,” he repeated. Absently he rubbed the bracelet of words printed around his left wrist.

  Charlie leaned over and handed him the mitten-ball. “You’ll need the thinking-mitten for this.”

  “Thinking-mitten,” Alex repeated dubiously as he tipped back in a chair. He tossed the mitten-ball up, caught it, then tossed it again. He sat looking up, five stories up, to the shadowed ceiling of the library’s main room. The bird books were flapping around up there again. He wouldn’t be surprised if they’d built nests atop the very highest shelves. “How do I know?” he muttered again.

  Closing his eyes, he thought about the books. Shelf after shelf, room after room, the whole library, at least what he’d mapped so far. And he could feel it. The books were uneasy. They were frightened—it was like a tremble in the air, a slightly creepy feeling. It was something only a librarian could sense. Like an itch. The books were out of place. There was no order. And that wasn’t all. He could feel the marked books, too, and something else that felt almost . . . rotten. It was all wrong.

  This wasn’t something he could explain to Charlie, of all people. Opening his eyes, Alex tossed the balled-up mitten back to him. “Because I’m a librarian,” he said.

  Charlie rolled his eyes.

  Before Alex could explain further, three of his pages zipped out of a passageway on the fourth level and shot down like swooping hawks to place themselves in front of Alex’s eyes.

  “Yipes,” Charlie said. “Scary when they do that.”

  Ignoring him, Alex grabbed the first page and read the message that was spilling out in ink across the white paper.

  Found, the page wrote. Found.

  “Found what?” Alex demanded.

  The second page floated closer, edging the first page out of the way. Bug, it wrote.

  Alex frowned. “You found a bug?”

  “Is that a bad thing?” Charlie asked.

  Gah. “Yes. Bugs are worse than bad.” Alex jumped to his feet. “They eat paper, glue, bindings. Could be roaches. Or silverfish. Or biscuit beetles. Ugh, I hope it’s not biscuit beetles.” He grabbed the third page. “What kind of frass have you found?”

  BUG! the page wrote.

  “No help at all,” Alex muttered, tossing the page behind him.

  “What’s frass?” Charlie asked.

  “Bug droppings,” Alex said briefly, crossing to the stairs. Charlie followed him up toward the fourth level. “Tells you what kind of bugs you’ve got.” Then Alex stopped short, almost falling when Charlie bumped into him from behind. “Oh, blast it. Into a hundred thousand bug-infested pieces.”

  “What?” Charlie asked, righting himself.

  “The cold.” He turned to face the other boy. “If there are bugs in the books it’s my own stupid fault.” He clenched his fists. “One way to deal with insects in a library,” he explained, “is to freeze the books. Kills the bugs. By asking your sister to heat the library, I practically invited the bugs in.” He turned to hurry up the stairs again.

  At the fourth level, the three pages led them along the curving balcony to a passageway that Alex hadn’t had time yet to explore very carefully. The passage wound around and grew more and more narrow until they were edging sideways past shelves of books. Alex squeezed through until he came to the passage’s end.

  “Alex,” Charlie said from behind him, his voice muffled. “I’m stuck.”

  “Just wait there,” Alex told him, and took a light-well from one of his pages. Lifting it, he examined the dead end. The top of his head brushed the ceiling. Taking a book off a shelf at random, Alex checked it for traces of bug infestation. The paper was yellowed and crumbling, and smelled rather alarmingly damp, but there were no nibbled holes, no sign of insects, no frass.

  A page carrying another light-well fluttered past his shoulder and down to Alex’s knee level. The light glinted on metal. Crouching, Alex saw brass hinges. Carefully he wedged his fingers between the edge of the shelf and the wall, and pulled. With a hiss, a knee-high, square door slid out, and then aside. Alex peered in.

  On the other side of the small door was a cave, a rather cozy round room carved from the rock. Its ceiling was lined with light-wells. It contained a nest of blankets and pillows, a few boxes, and hundreds of books.

  Squatting like a cricket in the middle of the room, staring at him, was a person—a little, impossibly ancient, female person. She was dressed in layers of rags, and her feet were bare; she had a snarl of cobweb-white hair, and wore spectacles with lenses an inch thick. They made her eyes look huge in her small, wizened face.

  “Let me guess,” Alex said. Instead of crawling into the cave, he stayed in the low doorway. He didn’t want to frighten her. “You’re Bug.”

  He heard Charlie’s voice from the passageway beyond. “Who’re you talking to?”

  At the sound, the old woman’s magnified eyes blinked rapidly. Her bony hands gripped each other.

  “Never mind him,” Alex said to the old woman. “He’s an idiot.”

  “I heard that,” came Charlie’s muffled voice.

  Alex settled down to sit cross-legged in the low doorway, and examined the cave-room. It was stacked with books. “I see you’re interested in gardening,” he said to her. He tilted his head so he could see the titles of some of the other books. “And astronomy. And . . . huh. Love poetry.”

  The big bug-eyes widened.

  “I’m a librarian,” he told her.

  The old lady’s lips moved. “Librarian?” Her voice was so faint, he almost couldn’t hear it.

  “Yep.” Alex noted the two nearly transparent pages that floated behind her shoulder. They must have brought her supplies so that she didn’t shrivel up and die in here. “And I’m guessing you’re the old librarian’s assistant. The steward told me you’ve been lost in here for years.”

  “No.” Her eyes blinked rapidly. “Not lost,” she whispered. “Hiding.”

  “Hiding from what?” Alex asked.

  “You know.” Her lips moved again. Alex waited, keeping a grip on his patience, until she went on. “It burns them with its mark.”

  “What?” he said sharply. “Its mark? The symbol?” He leaned closer. “Is it the L.B.?”

  Bug’s bony hands clutched each other. “The Lost Books, yes.”

  “Lost Books,” Alex breathed. So that was it.
/>   “The bad books,” she whispered. “The bad bad books.”

  “What are they?” Alex asked. “Besides Lost and bad. Be specific, if you can. I don’t want to hear any vague, dire warnings.”

  “But if you are a librarian,” Bug said, and her little wizened face crinkled into a frown, “how can you not know?”

  Alex held on to his temper with both hands. “Tell me.”

  “All right,” she whispered. “A proper librarian would know this already, but I will tell what I know, which isn’t much because I am a lowly assistant.” Her big eyes blinked accusingly at him. “Not a librarian.” She made herself more comfortable, wrapping skinny arms around her legs and resting her chin on her knees. “Long ago—” she began.

  “Sixty years ago?” Alex interrupted.

  She gave him a long, buglike stare.

  To his own surprise, Alex found himself apologizing. “Sorry, sorry. Go on. Tell what you know.”

  “Long ago,” the old lady went on, “sixty years ago, the libraries were open. All the people read books. The people were curious. They looked out at the world, and traveled, and asked questions, and that made them want to read more books, and write them, too. Then some special books were written. The Lost Books. The people who wrote them had exceptional talents. A king, I think, and a warrior, and a whatsit, the one with the locks, and were there . . .” Her voice faded until Alex had to lean closer to hear her next words. “Three of them? Or were there four. Or five. Were there five?”

  “Stay focused,” Alex ordered.

  Bug blinked her magnified eyes. “Yes. I don’t know how many. The Lost Books were written with magical ink, magical paper, magical pens, and when they were finished, the . . . the . . . the . . .”

  “The what?” Alex prompted.

  “I don’t know what to call it,” Bug whispered. “The spirit, maybe. The self. The magic killed the body of each writer and drew the self of each writer into the books they were writing. They became trapped there.”

  “Wait,” Alex interrupted. He rubbed his forehead, trying to get his brain to think it through. “You’re basically saying that each of these books—the Lost Books—is alive?”

  “All books are alive,” Bug pointed out.

  “I know that,” Alex shot back.

  “Good,” Bug said primly. “Because that’s something a librarian would know. But these books are different. Ordinary books do not do. Their purpose is to be read, that is all. The Lost Books do. They are powerful. Whoever reads them gets their power. It is why they were made.”

  “Alive and powerful,” Alex repeated. “A king, you said, a warrior, a whatsit with the locks, and two more?” he asked.

  Bug nodded. “Or three.” She counted on her fingers, her lips moving.

  “So one of these Lost Books must be hidden in the royal library,” Alex concluded. “And, what, it’s woken up? Did the librarians put them to sleep, then?”

  “It wasn’t that easy,” Bug put in. “They had to fight.”

  Alex studied her. “Did you fight?”

  She curled more tightly into herself and nodded. “The librarians had to settle all the books, not just the Lost Books. They put all the books to sleep.”

  “Sixty years ago,” Alex finished for her. “The librarians won their fight against the Lost Books and closed the libraries. They became guardians.” He felt a deep satisfaction, finally knowing the answers to the questions that had been plaguing him ever since the Red Codex in his father’s library had marked him. Was it a Lost Book? It hadn’t had the symbol on it, and it hadn’t been about Kings or Wars or Lockpicking . . .

  The Red Codex was a mystery. Still, he wasn’t going to show the mark it had made on his wrist to Bug, at least not now. It would frighten her, he was sure, just as it had frightened Merwyn Farnsworth.

  “One of the Lost Books has woken up,” he repeated, thinking it through. “No wonder the other books are so uneasy.” Plus, he felt almost certain, Lord Patch was searching for the Lost Book, maybe making the library even more uneasy. He frowned and kept talking, thinking aloud. “Why is the Lost Book marking other books with a symbol? It’s like . . . it’s turning them into weapons. Why would it do that?”

  Bug gazed at him, her eyes wide, magnified by her spectacles. “The Lost Book is dangerous. It turns the other books evil.”

  “Books are not evil,” Alex said.

  “Yes, they are. They came for my librarian. They will come for you, too.” Bug was trembling so much that her voice shook. “Hide. You should hide. Don’t let them find you.”

  Her fear felt almost contagious in the small space. The cave didn’t seem cozy anymore, but confining. “Maybe you didn’t hear me properly before,” Alex said, getting to his feet. He crouched and peered back into the cave to fix Bug with his most inimical glare. “I’m a librarian. It’s my job to deal with the Lost Books. And you, Miss Bug, are my new assistant.”

  She gulped, and her eyes grew even wider.

  “You decide,” he said. “You can stay here if you absolutely can’t make yourself come out. But I need your help, and I am definitely not hiding from the Lost Books. They are hiding from me. And I am going to find them.”

  19

  “And then he said,” her brother said, lowering his voice, making it sound deeply ominous, “‘I am a librarian.’” Charlie rolled his eyes. “As if any of us could ever forget it.”

  “You weren’t even there talking to Miss Bug,” Alex grumbled from over by a shelf of seedlings. He had paused to answer, and then started pacing again. “You were wedged into the passage, you muscle-bound lump.”

  They were in Kenneret’s favorite place in the entire sprawling palace, especially in the wintertime—her greenhouse, a two-story glass building in the middle of the royal gardens. Like most people of Aethel, she loved plants and green, growing things. Some people cultivated roses, or exotic cactuses, or apricot and lemon trees in pots. All lovely, of course, but what she grew was vegetables. Ordinary potatoes, for example. Was there anything better than digging up a row of potatoes? Like hunting treasure in the dirt, she thought, better than gold. In her greenhouse she grew lettuces, leeks, cucumbers, and beets, and an herb garden with pale green sage, tiny thyme leaves, frondy parsley, and bulging heads of garlic.

  Since becoming queen a few months ago, she hadn’t had as much time to get dirt under her fingernails, but the steward had made sure that her greenhouse remained well heated, and the vegetables harvested and distributed in the poorer sections of the city.

  Gardening made a nice excuse, too, for anyone who noticed the calluses on her fingers.

  She couldn’t weed and dig anymore, but she could take tea. She loved walking through the dormant garden outside, the ground frozen and hard, and stepping into the humid, warm air of the greenhouse, where she’d claimed a corner and had a simple wooden table set up, with chairs, and a stove with a kettle on it, and a tray of cakes and toast, teacups and a teapot.

  Kenneret poured out tea, added a dollop of cream and a spoonful of sugar, and handed the cup to Charlie, who was still grinning at being called muscle-bound. “I do have a lot of muscles,” he said confidingly.

  “I’ve noticed,” Kenneret said. “Alex, how do you like your tea?” she called.

  He glanced toward the greenhouse door, as if he had somewhere else to be. “I don’t want any.” Then he stooped and pulled something from under a pot of parsley. A book, of all things. “What are you doing here?” she heard him mutter at the book as he stood, turning a few pages.

  She turned to her brother. “So you like working for the royal librarian?”

  “Like isn’t exactly the word,” Charlie said. “But it’s interesting. I can see why he’s so good at the sword.”

  “Why is that?” Kenneret asked. She kept an eye on Alex, who stood by the door, looking jittery.

  “Focus,” Charlie answered. “When you fight, you can’t be distracted by anything, or worried about what’s going to happen, you just . . .�
� He waved the knife he was using to butter a piece of toast, as if it were a sword. “Fight. He’s the same way about being a librarian.”

  “Focused,” Kenneret said.

  “Yes,” Charlie said, nodding. “If his pages didn’t remind him, I think he’d forget to eat or sleep. I asked him to come out here for tea just now, but he didn’t want to. ‘Shut up and go away, Charlie’ were his exact words.”

  Shooting Charlie a quelling look, Alex crossed their corner of the greenhouse and flung himself into a chair, where he set the book he’d been examining onto the table next to him. “Charlie,” he said, nodding at her, “haven’t you noticed that your sister is the same way about being queen?”

  Kenneret choked on a sip of tea. He wasn’t wrong. She was surprised, though, that he had noticed.

  Charlie’s grin widened. “Kennie, the only reason he left his precious library was because I told him that he needed to talk to you about what happened in the room with the weather books.”

  She nodded, and took a deep breath of the rich, earth-scented air. “I am concerned about it,” she said with forced calm. “Is that kind of thing likely to happen again?”

  “Yes.” Alex leaned forward, putting his elbows on his knees. “Next time it’s likely to be worse. It’s because of the Lost Books. Book, in this case,” he corrected himself. “I think.” He frowned.

  “Lost Books,” she repeated. “That’s new. Tell me what you know about them.”

  “I don’t know much,” he answered. “Librarians don’t like passing along their secrets. Sixty years ago these Lost Books were made—they’re books of power, made with magic. I don’t know exactly how many of them there are, and I don’t know enough about what they do. Sixty years ago, libraries were open, and people read books all the time. It’s because of the Lost Books that libraries have been closed. At least one of them is hidden in the royal library.” He gazed down at the damp slate floor of the greenhouse and rubbed his left wrist—something, Kenneret realized, that he did a lot. After a silent moment, he shot her a quick glance. “Kenneret, how well do you trust your uncle?”