The Forbidden Library

by Django Wexler

  Alice sat on a ridge in the banyan’s complicated root system, tapping her foot and trying not to jump up and pace. Technically, she was sneaking out after hours again—Vespidian had agreed to meet her at midnight—but somehow the looming dread of breaking the rules had lost some of its sting. Instead, she was worried that the fairy would smell a trap and not turn up at all, and she was worried about what she would say to him if he did.

  And whether my “friend” will do her part. Alice strained her eyes staring at the shadows, hoping to catch a glimpse of movement. She said she’d be here. It irked her that, after everything, she had to put her trust in Ending once again.

  A flicker of color caught her eyes. Yellow-and-black striped wings, the bold, ugly colors of something poisonous and unpleasant. Vespidian pulled himself out of a crack between bookcases and took to the air with a drone, looking around with a curious, unhurried attitude. He was just as Alice remembered him from that night in the kitchen, in what seemed like another lifetime: a few feet high, with a flat, nose-less face and huge wings that beat so fast, they were an insectile blur.

  He caught sight of her and drifted over, threading his way easily between the hanging fronds and vines. Alice got to her feet, and Vespidian stopped in midair slightly above her head, so she was forced to crane her neck to look at him.

  “Well, well, well,” he said, in the nasal voice Alice had heard a hundred times in her dreams. “Here you are. Not such a goody two-shoes after all.”

  “You don’t know anything about me,” Alice snapped. “But I know that you want the Dragon. And I know how to get it.”

  “So I’m told,” Vespidian drawled. “My friend Mr. Black informed me that you wanted to make a deal.”

  “Something like that.” Alice put one hand on the tree, steadying herself.

  “So what is it you want? Charms? Books? I can be very generous, I assure you.”

  “What did you offer Mr. Black?”

  Vespidian cackled. “Him? All he wants is a way out of his service to Geryon.”

  “That’s it?” Alice frowned. “Just freedom? Are you going to give it to him?”

  “Of course not. He couldn’t deliver what I asked for. Besides, turn him loose on the world and the next thing you know he’ll be snatching children from their beds and devouring them whole. Some people have no grasp of the modern world.” The fairy sniffed. “That sort of thing is so old-fashioned. But don’t be shy, girl. What do you want?”

  “I want you to answer some questions.”

  Vespidian frowned, and hovered a little lower. “I’m not sure I like the sound of that.”

  “I don’t care,” Alice said.

  “Now listen to me, girl. Just because Geryon has taken you as his apprentice is no reason to put on airs. You have a long way to go before you’re a proper Reader.” He backed away from Alice. “I think this was a bad idea. I wouldn’t trust you to steal a book, anyway. Tell Mr. Black—”

  Alice yanked on the tree-sprite thread, wrapping it around herself until she could feel the vast bulk of the banyan tree beside her, pulsing with life like a beating heart. Compared to the tiny, bedraggled thing she’d used in the Dragon’s realm, the banyan was a monster, huge and bursting with energy. It was the easiest thing in the world to force a few of the hanging tendrils into action. They lashed out like whips, wrapping around the fairy’s midsection and holding him fast.

  Vespidian jerked to a halt, wings straining but unable to make any headway against the vegetable strength of the vines. He struggled, spitting and cursing, and she gave him a moment to calm down.

  “Look,” he said, after a few moments. “This isn’t going to get you what you want.”

  “You don’t know what I want,” Alice said, willing the vines to pull him down toward her. “The night you came to my house, I saw you speaking to my father.”

  There was a long pause. It was hard to read much expression on the fairy’s small face, but Alice thought he looked worried.

  “So that’s it, is it?” he said. “This is something . . . personal.”

  “You turned up in my kitchen,” Alice said. “Four days later, my father was dead.”

  “I didn’t have anything to do with that!” Vespidian protested. “I was only delivering a message.”

  “A message for who? Who are you working for, and where can I find them?”

  “I can’t tell you that,” he said, sounding offended. “Do you have any idea what he’d do to me?”

  “Fair enough.” Alice stepped forward.

  There was a copper band hanging loosely around Vespidian’s left ankle. It looked out of place, and Mr. Black had confirmed her suspicion. This was the charm that gave him the run of the library, protecting him from Ending’s near-omniscient oversight. His eyes stayed fixed on Alice and she put her hand up and grabbed it.

  “Wait,” he said. “What are you doing? That’s nothing important, I don’t know what you—”

  Alice pulled the charm free. It was a tawdry little thing, just a ring of beaten copper with some words inscribed on the inner face. But Vespidian’s eyes instantly went wide with panic.

  “Give that back.” His voice had gone high and shrill. “Please. Put it back on.”

  “Answer my questions.”

  “I can’t! You don’t know . . .”

  “You’re right. I don’t know what your master will do to you.” Alice tapped the copper band against her palm. “I don’t know what Ending will do to you, either. Which do you think would be worse?”

  “I don’t . . . You don’t know what you’re doing. Please.”

  “Tell me.”

  The fairy’s mouth worked silently for a moment, then words burst out of him like a dam breaking. “Esau! My master is Esau-of-the-Waters.”

  “What did he want with me and my father?”

  “To take you as his apprentice, the same as Geryon. We knew the others were watching you, so we couldn’t just snatch you. I tried to convince your father to give you up.”

  “There has to be more to it than that. Father went off to try and protect me, somehow. What happened to him? What happened to the Gideon?”

  “I don’t know!” the fairy wailed. “All I did was make the offer!”

  “Who would know?”

  “Only the master would know for certain.” Vespidian strained against the vines. “Please, put it back on. It’s not too late . . .”

  “Oh, yessss.” Ending’s voice rumbled around the tiny forest. “It’s far too late.”

  She moved through the underbrush like a living shadow, black fur rippling momentarily in the light from Alice’s lantern before slipping back into darkness. Only her eyes were always visible, yellow and shining.

  “I’m sorry!” Vespidian yelled. “That’s all I know! Please, girl, let me go—”

  Alice willed the vines to release their grip. Vespidian wriggled free and buzzed into the air, zipping around the tree and away from Ending, gibbering madly all the while. He found a gap between bookshelves, pressed himself into it, and was gone.

  “You’re not going to chase him?” Alice said.

  “I don’t need to,” Ending said. “Without his little toy, he has nowhere to hide from me. This is my labyrinth, after all.” Her eyes went to the copper band, and disgust crept into her voice. “Give me that.”

  Alice tossed the trinket on the ground. A heavy black paw came down on it, and the metal broke with a crack.

  “Vile thing,” Ending said. “I will make him tell me where he got it.”

  “Remember that you promised to let him go,” Alice said.

  She’d thought a long time about that. The banyan could have crushed Vespidian for her, if that’s what she’d wanted. But Alice had eventually decided that he’d only been doing his job, after all, even if that job involved threatening people’s families. Scaring him
a little was one thing; killing him would be quite another.

  If it had been him that hurt Father . . . But she was fairly certain he’d been telling the truth about that, and she was a little relieved she wouldn’t have to face that particular choice. At least, not today.

  “I will,” Ending said. “Eventually.” She padded off into the undergrowth, her voice slowly fading away. “But it can be so hard to find your way out of here, you know . . .”

  It was the small hours of the morning before Alice returned to the house, passing by Emma standing as blank as ever in the front hall, and made her way to her bedroom.

  She stripped down and got into her nightshirt, folding everything neatly and lining up her boots beside the door. One of the ancient rabbits had slumped over against the window frame, so Alice straightened it up and gave it a wistful pat on the head. After scrubbing her face with a tag-end of soap and the water from the basin, she blew out her candle and lay down on her small bed in the warm, dusty darkness.

  She was desperately tired, but sleep wouldn’t seem to come. Her mind kept going back to Vespidian’s terrified face, and the feeling of strength in the vines as they’d coiled around him.

  It hadn’t gotten her very far. Another name, someone else who might know what had really happened aboard the Gideon. But this one was a Reader, and Alice had no idea how she was going to go about getting her answers out of him.

  Esau-of-the-Waters. Alice didn’t even know what the name meant, really, and she didn’t know who to ask. Geryon would know, or Ending, or even Ashes, but she wasn’t sure whether she could trust any of them. She felt suddenly, profoundly alone.

  She closed her eyes and put a mental hand on the tight, unyielding thread that led to the Dragon. She’d told Mr. Black that she’d bound the Dragon. But what she hadn’t told him was that the Dragon thread remained unresponsive to any of her attempts to pull on it.

  Once again, she felt the odd sense of connection, and she realized that somewhere, in some other hidden corner of the world, Isaac was reaching out to the Dragon thread at the same time. She trusted him least of all, of course, but somehow it was comforting, nonetheless.

  Bit by bit, she felt herself relax. She had a direction to go in, that was the important thing. Once you had that, getting there was just a matter of hard work.

  And then, on the very edge of sleep, she heard the voice of the Dragon. A memory, perhaps, echoing through her mind.

  “Little sister . . .”

  End

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  This project started as something of a lark. Most of my writing to date has been in the genre sometimes called “doorstop fantasy,” where something isn’t considered a real book unless you could use it to deflect small-arms fire. After finishing one of these efforts, I decided to try and write something a little bit shorter and cleaner. Alice and The Forbidden Library were the result.

  As usual, Elisabeth Fracalossi was my reader of first resort, keeping me encouraged and on the right track. Once the first draft was finished, my fearless cadre of beta readers jumped in. My thanks, in no particular order, to Carl Meister, Dan Blandford, Janelle Stanley, Amanda Davis, and Prentice Clark.

  Special thanks are owed to Lu Huan, who not only did beta reading, but produced some spectacular artwork as well. (You can take a look at www.djangowexler.com.)

  My agent, Seth Fishman, once again performed his standard set of miracles. It’s begun to seem almost routine, as though I had Gandalf for a frequent dinner guest, so it’s worth reminding myself from time to time what wonders he can accomplish. My thanks as well to the team at the Gernert Company: Will Roberts, Rebecca Gardner, and Andy Kifer, and in the UK Caspian Dennis at Abner Stein.

  Kathy Dawson, my editor, deserves a double dose of thanks for this one. In addition to an editor’s usual duties, she was faced with an author who didn’t really know what kind of book he’d written, and wouldn’t have known anything about it if he had. She handled it with aplomb, and showed a lot more patience than I would have in her shoes. Thanks for putting up with me.

  Alexander Jansson’s amazing cover blew me away, and I’m so happy to have his work in the interior of the book as well. He’s done a wonderful job of capturing the feel of Alice and her world.

  Finally, as always, my thanks to all the people who don’t get to put their names on the cover but worked hard to make the book shine.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Django Wexler graduated from Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh with degrees in creative writing and computer science, and worked for the university in artificial intelligence research. An unrepentant geek, he migrated to Seattle to work for Microsoft, but eventually discovered that writing fantasy was a lot more fun.

  He is the author of an epic fantasy novel for adults, The Thousand Names. The Forbidden Library is his first children’s book. When not writing, he wrangles computers, paints tiny soldiers, and plays games of all sorts. He lives with two cats, Tomo and Sakaki, who generously assisted the writing process by turning part of one draft into confetti.

  Learn more at djangowexler.com and djangowexler.com/forbiddenlibrary

  Twitter: @DjangoWexler | Facebook: AuthorDjangoWexler