by A J Hackwith
“An unknown variable requires caution,” Claire muttered, feeling ridiculous for having a raven as a lab partner. There was nothing to be learned by glaring at her reflection in this bit of ink. She carefully set the dish aside and dug around for gloves to prepare a new sample.
All Claire wished to do right now was hurtle the damn sample into the bin. This was Claire’s problem to solve. The only thing she could do was solve it. If she didn’t understand the ink, then what good was she?
“Enough experiments.” Claire sat back, glaring at the table. She’d put off the thought as long as she could. “Jars, ashes, ink . . . it’s all nonsense. I need a comparison.”
A comparison. The idea lightninged through her, less like an illumination and more like a shock. Sharp, cutting, and then gone. If the ink had once been books, then it had once been damsels too. Rosia had led them here, under a compulsion, a connection. She’d called the ink “they.”
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 than a moment to consider whether that was a compliment or not before Lucille was nodding to the nearest seat. “What brings a former librarian to us?”
Claire preferred to remain standing. If anything, the damsel suite was more homelike, more welcoming than ever, but Claire felt on edge. The vials in her pocket were chilled weights, and her mind noted every crack and hiss from the fireplace like a snake ready to strike. She cleared her throat. “There’s a line of inquiry I believed you all might help me with.”
Lucille had begun to lower herself into an armchair in that ponderous way arthritis sufferers did, but halted midmotion at that. A calculating expression flicked across her face, then was dismissed as she finished settling into the chair. By the time she straightened her baggy skirt, she’d become a picture of grandmotherly care again. “Well then, a welcome change to the rare dramas that brought you to us before. Have a seat, dear. Would you like a cookie? Summer baked brownies, but”—Lucille lowered her voice to a fond stage whisper—“he uses carob. He’s from some hippie romance,” Lucille supplied, as if the unwritten book’s genre explained everything.
“It’s better for you,” a pale young man muttered with a shrug as he set down the plate of chocolate squares she supposed must have been pulled from some unwritten cookbook. Summer gave Claire a single once-over that spoke volumes of judgment before leaving them again.
Claire resisted pointing out the fact that none of them precisely needed to eat in the Library, let alone carob brownies. She
was disliked enough in the damsel suite as it was. Still, the vials clinked restlessly in her breast pocket. “We’ve discovered the source of the disturbance that was drawing away damsels.”
“Oh, well done, Claire dear!” Lucille enthused over her tea.
Using a pet name with her name was just impertinence. Claire bit back a sour response behind a smile. “Yes, I’m collaborating with the . . . the librarian—” She stumbled through the half-truth, glad Brevity wasn’t here to see how difficult that title was for Claire to say. “But I’m reluctant to decide a choice of action until we understand the nature of it.”
“How nice of you to think of us,” Lucille said. She sounded sincere enough, though “nice” wasn’t the mood when Claire took the temperature of the room. None of the damsels met her gaze, but there was a prickle on the back of her neck. It was a paper-cut feeling of unwelcome, despite Lucille’s smile.
Claire was being handled, bugger it all. The realization came on her in a flush of irritation. She was being handled, by this old woman, and she was so tired of being handled. In the Unwritten Wing, Brevity trod around her like an abandoned puppy, and even in the Arcane Wing, supposedly her own domain, she had to deal with Rami’s stoic kind of fussing. Hero poked and prodded with a fraction of the venom he once had. Whether because they considered her dangerous or because they considered her fragile, Claire was always being handled.
And she was tired of it.
“I came here for answers.” Her voice was sharp and discordant over the hum of the room. Things quickly turned silent. Claire withdrew the vials of ink from her pocket and set them down—next to the ridiculous brownies—with a precise, cold clink. “About this.”
Ah yes, they couldn’t ignore her now. A dozen gazes drew to the table. The ink bobbled in each vial like a viscous raindrop, leaving an oil-sheen rainbow in its wake. Claire raised one sample above her head. “Tell me what it is.”
Lucille hadn’t moved. “Why would you think we know more than a librarian, child?”
“Because it’s part of you and your books, as far as I can deduce. I wouldn’t have found it without your meddling,” Claire answered. She paused, seeking but not finding a polite opening for what she needed to ask. “You are the instigators of this situation.”
“Instigator? You make it sound as if we were at fault.”
You were, a seething voice in the back of Claire’s mind raged. You fought, like you were mortal, like you were human. And worse, you were cruel enough to die, you foolish, foolish things. There were many things over the years that Claire had learned to soften on, to forgive. But breaking Brevity’s heart—giving her a foundation for hope and ripping it away—that was never going to be one of them.
It was an ugly, unthinking grudge. So Claire kept it bottled inside her, with other dark things. It leaked out to a razor in her voice now. “I reserve judgment. Fault will be decided, I suppose, by your cooperation with the facts.”
Lucille appeared to take a moment, as if weighing the taste of Claire’s anger on her tongue. She shook her head slightly and busied herself with the platter of ceramic ware beside them. “I have never been afraid of the truth, Claire. Though it has never done me a bit of good. Hiding from an unpleasant fact doesn’t make it go away, does it?” She paused, steel in her eyes as she met Claire’s gaze. “Tea?”
“No, thank you.” It was a testimony to Claire’s mental state that her stomach roiled at the thought of drinking tea with this woman—this character. She’d been a fool to think they might help her. She’d begun to think of them as damsels, as people, like Brevity insisted. But these women weren’t like Brevity, not even like Hero, who’d shed ink like blood to prove his humanness.
Was that what she required? That everyone must bleed for her before they mattered? The memory of black wounds made bile rise in Claire’s throat, but a thought came with it. “Ink,” she muttered.
Lucille’s placid gaze wavered until she sat the teapot back down with a sudden clink. “Ink over tea? You have odd tastes, child.”
“No, you bleed ink.” Claire remembered the way black liquid had seeped through Hero’s velvet coat, too thin and slow drying for blood. She remembered the aftermath, after the fires and ruination, peeling the smoke-ragged clothes off him to inspect his wounds, fingertips coming away smudged with familiar stains. Her lungs were squeezed by a hot, clenching kind of urgency. “Characters in your form bleed ink, not blood. I’ve got an unidentified substance that I need to identify, obviously connected to your people in some way. All I need is a simple sample for comparison.”
The room had gone quite still again. Claire hadn’t noticed how false the room’s quiet murmur was until it died. Perhaps because, at some point during her explanation, she had stood. Her hand had found the work scalpel she kept in a skirt pocket and held it high. It caught the light and shone like a threat.
“Claire,” Lucille said, soft as lead. “There’s no need for that here.”
“I think there is.” Claire’s voice threatened to wobble in her throat. She tried to shore it up with that bottled anger, but all that came to her summons was an increasing sense of desperation. “I need answers. It’s my job to have answers. I can’t protect them without answers.”
“And who protects us?” Lucille didn’t move from the chair but simply finished her tea and folded her hands in her lap.
The question bit, gnawed at the tender, guilty shadow that was Claire’s past. But the possibility—the hope—that the answer was in front of her was too much to ignore. She swallowed and lowered the hand holding the scalpel—not to put it away, but for a slightly less overtly villainous posture. “I’m not the Unwritten Wing’s librarian anymore. Your protection is not my responsibility.”
The lie tasted like ash, but Lucille nodded acceptance. “As you wish. Here. Come, then. If you want blood, you know how to draw it.” She put her hands heavily on the table and pushed to her feet, slow and ponderous. She stretched out an arm and met Claire’s gaze. “Not the first time you’ve hurt a character, is it?”
“I’m not doing this to hurt,” Claire said, trying to feel for the truth as it passed over her tongue. Wasn’t she? She needed answers, but wouldn’t it be a relief to take an answer from a book—willing or unwilling—and for a moment feel like she was certain of her role again? Her fingers wrapped tighter around the handle of the blade to steady her doubts as she reached for Lucille’s arm. “Not that I have to explain my actions to you. You’re certain you’ll be able to hold on to this form?”
Lucille narrowed a level gaze at her in response. Eyes blue and unfilmed by age despite her appearance. “I’m not one of the lost young ones. I’ve known myself for a long time, child. Your little knife doesn’t frighten me.”
Claire nodded once and took hold of Lucille’s arm about the wrist. A distraught murmur shivered through the room, vague distressed words that faded because the damsels followed Lucille’s lead. Her skin felt the age the book was portrayed to be, human and papery thin under her fingertips. As Claire’s would have, had she not died in middle age. Humans turned to paper and stories in the end, given enough time.
But not here. Her fingers were strong, and Lucille held still. She didn’t need to pick a vein on a character—any prick would bleed. Claire glanced up once but received no encouragement from Lucille’s cool gaze.
She brought the scalpel down in a practiced motion, a small diagonal cut. Black liquid welled along the line, and Claire dropped the scalpel to the table so she could snap up an empty vial to catch the bleeding ink.
Claire pointedly ignored the wash of disquiet that started at the sight of spilled ink. It wasn’t squeamishness, no—the damsels who had survived the slaughter of the coup attempt were far beyond that. No, the gazes Claire felt on the back of her neck were hostile. Taking a scalpel to Lucille had brought back too many close associations with Claire’s past treatment of books.
&nbs
p; Mistreatment, she supposed, as she retrieved her instrument to press down harder around the wound to get a viable sample. Which was fair, she brooded, as she examined the black liquid as it dribbled across the glass of the vial—a red sheen, hmm, not exactly like the mystery ink. Not at first glance, in any case, but as Claire stared she felt like more colors bubbled beneath the surface. The others didn’t understand the stakes. Claire needed answers. Needed them for—
“Claire!”
Brevity stood in the doorway, a shadow of a muse at her back. The naked horror on her face made Claire’s hands flinch away from Lucille despite herself. But not before she carefully and precisely corked the sample.
16
BREVITY
The poor boy thinks me mad. Yoon Ji Han is too polite to say it, of course, but he would lose his knickers at the gambling table. It is obvious that he thinks he’s humoring me. Mad . . . now, that’s a peculiar term, and, saints, don’t they love applying it to women. Women have a special facility for madness. We’re encouraged to go mad over the littlest things, because if our anger caught and held on the big things, we’d shape the world.
It’s acceptable to be mad; it’s dangerous to be angry.
The secret is that I am both.
Librarian Fleur Michel, 1792 CE
BREVITY HADN’T NEEDED AN explanation of the situation, when two damsels had stumbled, red-eyed and panicked, out of the depths of the stacks. She’d been idly doing log work while catching up on gossip from the corps that amused Probity, but Chiara and Becca’s entrance stopped the conversation dead. Brevity knew the damsels by sight. Becca’s cheeks were flushed with distress and she had a vise grip on Chiara, who looked prepared to punch someone. Or anyone. That might have been status quo for Chiara, but Becca’s face had Brevity slapping the logbook closed and grabbing for her pen.