by Nibedita Sen
It’s my job to keep Books like this out of the hands of desperate high-school kids with red backpacks. Our school-mistresses called it “preserving the hallowed and hidden arts of our foremothers from mundane eyes.” Our professors called it “conserving rare/historic texts.”
Both of them mean the same thing: We give people the books they need, except when we don’t. Except when they need them most.
He racked up $1.50 on The Count of Monte Cristo and returned it with saltwater splotches on the final pages. They weren’t my-favorite-character-died tears or the-book-is-over tears. They were bitter, acidic, anise-scented: tears of jealousy. He was jealous that the Count and Haydée sailed away from their world and out into the blue unknown. That they escaped.
I panicked and weighed him down with the first three Harry Potters, because they don’t really get good until Sirius and Lupin show up, and because they’re about a neglected, lonely kid who gets a letter from another world and disappears.
• • •
GEORGE, JC—THE RUNAWAY PRINCE—J FIC GEO 1994
Agnes always does the “we will be closing in ten minutes” announcement because something in her voice implies that anybody still in the library in nine minutes and fifty seconds will be harvested for organ donations, and even the most stationary patrons amble towards the exit.
The kid with the red backpack was hovering in the oversize print section (gossipy, aging books, bored since the advent of e-readers with changeable font sizes) when Agnes’s voice came through the speakers. He went very still, teetering the way a person does when they’re about to do something really dumb, then dove beneath a reading desk and pulled his dark hoodie over his head. The oversize books gave scintillated squeals.
It was my turn to close, so Agnes left right at nine. By 9:15 I was standing at the door with my NPR tote on my shoulder and my keys in my hand. Hesitating.
It is very, extremely, absolutely against the rules to lock up for the night with a patron still inside, especially when that patron is a minor of questionable emotional health. It’s big trouble both in the conventional sense (phone calls from panicked guardians, police searches, charges of criminal neglect) and in the other sense (libraries at night are noisier places than they are during the daylight hours).
I’m not a natural rule-follower. I roll through stop signs, I swear in public, I lie on online personality tests so I get the answers I want (Hermione, Arya Stark, Jo March). But I’m a very good librarian of either kind, and good librarians follow the rules. Even when they don’t want to.
That’s what Agnes told me five years ago, when I first started at Maysville.
This girl had started showing up on Sunday afternoons: ponytailed, cute, but wearing one of those knee-length denim skirts that scream “mandatory virginity pledge.” I’d been feeding her a steady diet of subversion (Orwell, Bradbury, Butler), and was about to hit her with A Handmaid’s Tale when she suddenly lost interest in fiction. She drifted through the stacks, face gone white and empty as a blank page, navy skirt swishing against her knees.
It wasn’t until she reached the 618s that I understood. The maternity and childbirth section trilled saccharine congratulations. She touched one finger to the spine of What to Expect When You’re Expecting (618.2 EIS) with an expression of dawning, swallowing horror, and left without checking anything out.
For the next nine weeks, I sent her stories of bravery and boldness, defying-your-parents stories and empowered-women-resisting-authority stories. I abandoned subtlety entirely and slid Planned Parenthood pamphlets into her book bag, even though the nearest clinic is six hours away and only open twice a week, but found them jammed frantically in the bathroom trash.
But I never gave her what she really needed: A Witch’s Guide to Undoing What Has Been Done: A Guilt-Free Approach to Life’s Inevitable Accidents. A leather-bound tome filled with delicate mechanical drawings of clocks, which smelled of regret and yesterday mornings. I’d left it locked in the roll-top desk, whispering and tick-tocking to itself.
Look, there are good reasons we don’t lend out Books like that. Our mistresses used to scare us with stories of mortals run amok: people who used Books to steal or kill or break hearts; who performed miracles and founded religions; who hated us, afterward, and spent a tiresome few centuries burning us at stakes.
If I were caught handing out Books, I’d be renounced, reviled, stripped of my title. They’d burn my library card in the eternal mauve flames of our sisterhood and write my crimes in ash and blood in The Book of Perfidy. They’d ban me from every library for eternity, and what’s a librarian without her books? What would I be, cut off from the orderly world of words and their readers, from the peaceful Ouroboran cycle of story-telling and story-eating? There were rumors of rogue librarians—madwomen who chose to live outside the library system in the howling chaos of unwritten words and untold stories—but none of us envied them.
The last time I’d seen the ponytailed girl her denim skirt was fastened with a rubber band looped through the buttonhole. She’d smelled of desperation, like someone whose wait-and-hoping had run dry.
Four days later, her picture was in the paper and the article was blurring and un-blurring in my vision (accidental poisoning, viewing from 2:00-3:30 at Zimmerman & Holmes, direct your donations to Maysville Baptist Ministries). Agnes had patted my hand and said, “I know, honey, I know. Sometimes there’s nothing you can do.” It was a kind lie.
I still have the newspaper clipping in my desk drawer, as a memorial or reminder or warning.
The boy with the red backpack was sweating beneath the reading desk. He smelled of desperation, just like she had.
Should I call the Child Protective Services hotline? Make awkward small-talk until his crummy caseworker collected him? Hey, kid, I was once a lonely teenager in a backwater shithole, too! Or should I let him run away, even if running away was only hiding in the library overnight?
I teetered, the way you do when you’re about to do something really dumb.
The locked thunked into place. I walked across the parking lot breathing the caramel-and-frost smell of October, hoping—almost praying, if witches were into that—that it would be enough.
• • •
I opened half an hour early, angling to beat Agnes to the phone and delete the “Have you seen this unaccompanied minor?” voicemails before she could hear them. There was an automated message from somebody trying to sell us a security system, three calls from community members asking when we open because apparently it’s physically impossible to Google it, and a volunteer calling in sick.
There were no messages about the boy. Fucking Ulysses County foster system.
He emerged at 9:45, when he could blend in with the growing numbers of other patrons. He looked rumpled and ill-fitting, like a visitor from another planet who hadn’t quite figured out human body language. Or like a kid who’s spent a night in the stacks, listening to furtive missives from a thousand different worlds and wishing he could disappear into any one of them.
I was so busy trying not to cry and ignoring the Book now calling to the boy from the roll-top desk that I scanned his card and handed him back his book without realizing what it was: The Runaway Prince.
• • •
MAYSVILLE PUBLIC LIBRARY NOTICE: YOU HAVE (1) OVERDUE ITEMS. PLEASE RETURN YOUR ITEM(S) AS SOON AS POSSIBLE.
Shit.
The overdue notices go out on the fifteenth day an item has been checked out. On the sixteenth day, I pulled up the boy’s account and glared at the terse red font (OVERDUE ITEM: J FIC GEO 1994) until the screen began to crackle and smoke faintly and Agnes gave me a hold-it-together-woman look.
He hadn’t even bothered to renew it.
My sense of The Runaway Prince had grown faint and blurred with distance, as if I were looking at it through an unfocused telescope, but it was still a book from my library and thus still in my domain. (All you people who never returned books to their high school libraries, or who bought
stolen books off Amazon with call numbers taped to their spines? We see you). It reported only the faintest second-hand scent of the boy: futility, resignation, and a tarry, oozing smell like yearning that had died and begun to fossilize.
He was alive, but probably not for much longer. I don’t just mean physical suicide; those of us who can see soulstuff know there are lots of ways to die without anybody noticing. Have you ever seen those stupid TV specials where they rescue animals from some third-rate horror show of a circus in Las Vegas, and when they finally open the cages the lions just sit there, dead-eyed, because they’ve forgotten what it is to want anything? To desire, to yearn, to be filled with the terrible, golden hunger of being alive?
But there was nothing I could do. Except wait and hope.
Our volunteers were doing the weekly movie showing in Media Room #2, so I was stuck re-shelving. It wasn’t until I was actually in the F DAC-FEN aisle, holding our dog-eared copy of The Count of Monte Cristo in my hand, that I realized Edmund Dantès was absolutely, one-hundred-percent full of shit.
If Edmund had taken his own advice, he would’ve sat in his jail cell waiting and hoping for forty years while the Count de Morcerf and Villefort and the rest of them stayed rich and happy. The real moral of The Count of Monte Cristo was surely something more like: If you screw someone over, be prepared for a vengeful mastermind to fuck up your life twenty years later. Or maybe it was: If you want justice and goodness to prevail in this world, you have to fight for it tooth and nail. And it will be hard, and costly, and probably illegal. You will have to break the rules.
I pressed my head to the cold metal of the shelf and closed my eyes. If that boy ever comes back into my library, I swear to Clio and Calliope I will do my most holy duty.
I will give him the book he needs most.
• • •
ARADIA, MORGAN—A WITCH’S GUIDE TO ESCAPE: A PRACTICAL COMPENDIUM OF PORTAL FANTASIES—WRITTEN IN THE YEAR OF OUR SISTERHOOD TWO THOUSAND AND TWO AND SUBMITTED TO THE CARE OF THE ULYSSES COUNTY PUBLIC LIBRARY SYSTEM.
He came back to say goodbye, I think. He slid The Runaway Prince into the return slot then drifted through the aisles with his red backpack hanging off one shoulder, fingertips not-quite brushing the shelves, eyes on the floor. They hardly seemed sorcerous at all, now; merely sad and old and smoke-colored.
He was passing through the travel and tourism section when he saw it: A heavy, clothbound book jammed right between The Practical Nomad (910.4 HAS) and By Plane, Train, or Foot: A Guide for the Aspiring Globe-Trotter (910.51). It had no call number, but the title was stamped in swirly gold lettering on the spine: A Witch’s Guide to Escape.
I felt the hollow thud-thudding of his heart, the pain of resurrected hope. He reached towards the book and the book reached back towards him, because books need to be read quite as much as we need to read them, and it had been a very long time since this particular book had been out of the roll-top desk in the Special Collections room.
Dark fingers touched green-dyed cloth, and it was like two sundered halves of some broken thing finally reuniting, like a lost key finally turning in its lock. Every book in the library rustled in unison, sighing at the sacred wholeness of reader and book.
Agnes was in the rows of computers, explaining our thirty-minute policy to a new patron. She broke off mid-sentence and looked up towards the 900s, nostrils flared. Then, with an expression halfway between accusation and disbelief, she turned to look at me.
I met her eyes—and it isn’t easy to meet Agnes’s eyes when she’s angry, believe me—and smiled.
When they drag me before the mistresses and burn my card and demand to know, in tones of mournful recrimination, how I could have abandoned the vows of our order, I’ll say: Hey, you abandoned them first, ladies. Somewhere along the line, you forgot our first and purest purpose: to give patrons the books they need most. And oh, how they need. How they will always need.
I wondered, with a kind of detached trepidation, how rogue librarians spent their time, and whether they had clubs or societies, and what it was like to encounter feral stories untamed by narrative and unbound by books. And then I wondered where our Books came from in the first place, and who wrote them.
• • •
There was a sudden, imperceptible rushing, as if a wild wind had whipped through the stacks without disturbing a single page. Several people looked up uneasily from their screens.
A Witch’s Guide to Escape lay abandoned on the carpet, open to a map of some foreign fey country drawn in sepia ink. A red backpack sat beside it.
The Court Magician
by Sarah Pinsker
The Boy Who Will Become Court Magician
The boy who will become court magician this time is not a cruel child. Not like the last one, or the one before her. He never stole money from Blind Carel’s cup, or thrashed a smaller child for sweets, or kicked a dog. This boy is a market rat, which sets him apart from the last several, all from highborn or merchant families. This isn’t about lineage, or even talent.
He watches the street magicians every day, with a hunger in his eyes that says he knows he could do what they do. He contemplates the tawdry illusions of the market square with more intensity than most, until he is marked for us by his own curiosity. Even then, even when he wanders booth to booth and corner to corner every day for a month, begging to learn, we don’t take him.
At our behest, the Great Gretta takes him under her tutelage. She demonstrates the first sleight of hand. If he’s disappointed to learn that her tricks aren’t magic at all, he hides it well. When he returns to her the next day, it is clear he has practiced through the night. His eyes are marked by dark circles, his step lags, but he can do the trick she taught him, can do it as smoothly as she can, though admittedly she is not as Great as she once was.
He learns all her tricks, then begins to develop his own. He’s a smart child. Understands intuitively that the trick is not enough. That the illusion is in what is said and what isn’t said, the patter, the posture, the distractions with which he draws the mark’s attention from what he is actually doing. He gives himself a name for the first time, a magician’s name, because he sees how that, too, is part of the act.
When he leaves Gretta to set out on his own, the only space granted to him is near the abattoir, a corner that had long gone unclaimed. Gretta’s crowd follows him, despite the stench and screams. Most of his routine is composed of street illusions, but there is one that seems impossible. He calls it the Sleeper’s Lament. It takes me five weeks to figure out what he is doing in the trick; that’s when we are sure he is the one.
“Would you like to learn real magic?” I send a palace guard to ask my question, dressed in her own clothes rather than her livery.
The boy snorts. “There’s no such thing.”
He has unraveled every illusion of every magician in the marketplace. None of them will speak with him because of it. He’s been beaten twice on his way to his newly rented room, and robbed neither time. He’s right to be suspicious.
She leans over and whispers the key to the boy’s own trick in his ear, as I bade her do. As she bends, she lets my old diary fall from her pocket, revealing a glimpse of a trick he has never seen before: the Gilded Hand. He hands it back to her, and she thanks him for its safe return.
By now he’s practiced at hiding his emotions, but I know what’s at war within him. He doesn’t believe my promise of real magic, but the Gilded Hand has already captivated him. He’s already working it out as he pockets the coins that have accumulated in his dusty cap, places the cap upon his head, and follows her out of the marketplace.
“The palace?” he asks as we all near the servants’ gate. “I thought you were from the Guild.”
I whisper to my emissary, and she repeats my words. “The Guild is for magicians who feel the need to compete with each other. The Palace trains magicians who feel compelled to compete against themselves.”
It’s perhaps the truest thing I’l
l ever tell him. He sees only the guard.
The Young Man Who Will Become Court Magician
Alone except for the visits of his new tutor, he masters the complex illusions he is shown. He builds the Gilded Hand in our workshop, from only the glimpse I had let him see, then an entire Gilded Man of his own devising. Still tricks.
“I was promised real magic,” he complains.
“You didn’t believe in it,” his tutor says.
“Show me something that seems like real magic, then.”
When he utters those words, when he proves his hunger again, he is rewarded. His hands are bound in the Unbreakable Knot, and he is left to unbind them. His tutor demonstrates the Breath of Flowers, the Freestanding Bridge. He practices those until he figures out the illusions underpinning them.
“More trickery,” he says. “Is magic only a trick I haven’t figured out yet?”
He has to ask seven times. That is the rule. Only when he has asked for the seventh time. Only then is he told: if he is taught the true word, he has no choice but this path. He will likely not return to the streets, nor make a life in the theaters, entertaining the gentle-born. Does he want this?
Others have walked away at this point. They choose the stage, the street, the accolades they will get for performing tricks that are slightly more than tricks. This young man is hungry. The power is more valuable to him than the money or the fame. He stays.