“Whee! I’m on it!” shouted the bird, pedaling hard. Its bronze cycle shot forward, swiveled neatly around a burning book that otherwise would have fallen on top of it, and bounced right up the stairs. That part was quite impressive, but I didn’t have time to admire.
No, instead I had to grab my book, wrap it up in both arms to make sure I held onto it, and hop down the steps to the ground outside as fast as I could.
Sandy was already waiting for me. In fact, as soon as I came in arm’s reach, she snatched me up and threw me! A long second of whirling in the air later, I landed in the squishy wetness of one of the nearest ponds.
I was aware of a certain hissing noise. Was my book okay? I held it up in arms suddenly heavy as lead. It was hard to move soaked through like this!
There were lots of black marks on the cover, and the pages looked damp around the edge, but this was one seriously tough journal, built for adventure.
Also, there was a black spot on my arm. And a small hole in my dress with char around the edges. Oh, my. I had been on fire!
I tried to stand up, and failed. My whole lower body was too heavy and soaked-through to move. Instead, I looked up and saw a couple of marionettes, with their clothlings hanging onto their shoulders, parachuting down from the highest branches using the oversized papers of the tree’s own books.
My warning seemed to have worked. Excellent.
Sandy ran over to me, pulled me out of the water, and twisted my body in a spiral, wringing me out.
Ow. But it was a good pain, and when she put me back down on my feet, I was merely wobbly and bottom-heavy.
“What about Tumbles?” Sandy asked, but the answer was coming to us. The very last person to escape, in no hurry because he was probably fireproof, the dargon waddled down the last of the stairs and over to us. He looked quite dazed.
“Did you see me? Did you? I was terrifying! I set the…” He looked up at the Library Tree. Green flames were still spreading up its length, roaring out of windows, sending books and papers spiraling high into the clouds. The ground around it was already black with ash. “Oh.”
Kneeling down, Sandy took him in her arms for a soft hug. “It’s okay, Tumbles. I’ll find a way to make you a scary dragon without hurting innocent people.”
Tucking my book under one arm, I crept around Sandy, putting my hand on her forearm, and peering up at her face. I was already learning that she was prone to disappointment. “Are you okay, Miss Sandy?”
She sniffed, but showed no other signs of incipient tears. Instead, she stood up straight, Tumbledown still in her arms, and declared, “I’m fine. I have a quest now, after all. I’m going to find Charity and get this fixed. This has to be a mistake.”
Chapter Nine
The Library Tree was still burning. Not that I had wanted it to burn at all, but how long was it going to take? Clearly, there was a great deal about fire that I didn’t know yet.
I did know that my feet were squishy, but as Sandy had pointed out, we wanted to be far away from the flaming tree and surrounded by water. A giant branch had fallen off as she said this, and hit the ground in an explosion of sparks and steam. That reinforced the urgency of her wisdom.
Now Sandy was deep in conversation with Butterscotch Wisdom and Grammatical. I assisted the clothling librarians sorting pages recovered by industrious marionettes.
“Will we have time to finish scouting this area? I mean, will Princess Charity let us?” asked a young clothling in a sharply starched black dress.
The oldest librarian let out a “Ha!” and slapped a third page down on two that had been identified as the same book. Her triumph, er, triumphed, she squinted up through her stitched glasses. “That is for Butterscotch Wisdom and the human to decide.”
We all nodded at that, and sighed in relief as the bundlish librarians dragged up another table that had fallen out of the library. Flat dry space was at a premium!
Propriety lay atop a pile of pile of pages, only her body weight keeping them from blowing away in the gusts from the burning tree. Her legs kicked in frustration as she wailed, “I’m going crazy without any covers, or clips, or binding glue. How do we even keep what we’ve sorted together?!”
A more senior librarian shielded a page with her body for a moment, then slipped it into a book they actually had most of. “We sort everything into stacks and weigh those down. When it’s time to sort again, it will be much easier to identify books whose pages are next to each other.”
She sounded firm and authoritarian, and I hesitated, but… well, I did have glasses. Trusting them, I said, “Book plants have long, thin leaves. I’m sure they can spare quite a few of them. You can use those, reeds, and perhaps dried roots from water plants to bind stacks and separate important items within stacks. That will free up some labor for packing, as well.”
Everyone nodded. Yay for me!
Standing on her partly-reassembled book, the oldest librarian put the blunt end of her arms on her hips. She didn’t even have thumbs, and yet she was a dexterous as anybody. I hoped my heart wasn’t glowing. If I didn’t have a hero already, she would be mine.
But, um, what she said was, “I don’t know how we’ll move all these.”
“Tinkers?” offered a curly-haired librarian hopefully.
“Shriveners?” suggested Mark.
I waved my hands in urgent negation. “Not a good idea! You’ll be accepted over There before the shriveners are your friends.”
Propriety pouted petulantly. “Carts would be nice.”
“Covered wagons. They’d look mysterious and romantic,” said the curly-haired clothling.
“They would?” asked the one in the black dress.
This was my cue. I laid my book on Propriety’s stack of papers, and flipped around until I found a picture of some covered wagons pulled by rocking horses. Everybody crowded around.
“Practical. Lots of storage space,” noted the oldest librarian, rubbing her chin.
“I’d feel totally nomadic riding that!” squeaked curly-hair.
Mike nodded, his smile dreamy. “Kicking my feet over the edge, singing traveling songs.”
Curly hair raised her arm. “Don’t forget the bumping around! They bump around.”
“Ooooooooooh,” went everyone in unison.
“We’ll have to get rocking horses,” mused the oldest clothling, but she was definitely smiling.
The nomad-enthused librarian suggested, “Or camels!”
Propriety frowned. “Do rocking camels exist?”
I subjected this to stern logical reasoning. Thank you, glasses! “They must, or we wouldn’t know what they are.”
Everyone nodded at the sense of that.
A stubby, ragged, worn grey hand moved atop mine. The oldest clothling, her mouth a flat, barely visible line, leaned close to me and said in her scratchy voice, “We never did get to introduce ourselves properly. My name is Card.”
“Propriety!” chirped Propriety, not looking up from my book.
The curly-haired nomad enthusiast curtseyed. “Volume Twelve, Chapter Eight, Sentence Two: At Last, Some Sunshine! But you can call me Sunshine.”
The one in the black dress bowed. Her cap wasn’t sewed on, so she had to grab it to keep it on. “Stiff Back Sue.” She did have an awfully stiff back, as well as her skirt. Maybe it had a stick in it? In her back. Not her skirt. Her skirt wasn’t that stiff.
“You know me,” mumbled Mike, rubbing his foot over the wooden table we all stood on.
A very round librarian managed to squeak out, “Rolly—” before Card held up her hand to shush the others.
Solemn again, practically nose-to-nose with me, except of course that neither of us had noses, Card said, “I wanted to thank you for trying to drag us out of the fire.”
That did it. Everyone got quiet, clasping their hands behind them as the oldest librarian went on. “It took you and Sandy both to get us out of there. I didn’t want to die, but without the Library Tree… losing it seem
ed like everything. I had no hope. I couldn’t…”
As she struggled for words, I took both her hands in mine, and said softly, “I completely understand. I lost my home, too.”
Everyone sighed, then looked up. That meant I also had to look up, and behind me, to see Sandy standing right there!
She crouched down, balanced on the ends of her own feet. Human legs fold neatly. Their hands fold neatly as well, and she laced her fingers together over her knees. “I want to apologize for everything.”
Card spoke for all of us. “It was not your doing, Miss Sandy.”
Sandy’s mouth tightened, her pale eyebrows pressed together. Her expression wasn’t sadness, exactly, or guilt. More like bitter concentration. “It was, but not the way you think. I’ve been treating you all like toys—” As she spoke, her hand reached out toward my head, but stopped. Her words didn’t, and as she kept talking, I stepped forward and pressed my cap into her palm. “I’ve treated your whole world like toys. You look like toys—I’m sorry. That’s not a nice thing to say, is it?”
The worn brown librarian looked around at her fellow clothings, and a few marionettes who had paused around the edges of the table to listen. “I don’t believe any of us feel offended, Your Humanity.”
Sandy digested that silently for a few seconds, then went on. “I have so much power over you all, and I was using it for fun. Maybe I mostly helped, or maybe I didn’t, but just because I can make you what I want doesn’t mean I have the right. When the library caught fire and you wouldn’t leave, I thought—I’m sorry. I thought a lot of things, some of them bad, but now I know that’s how important books are to you.”
Out of the corner of my eye—and it was a relief to be getting used to this button eye, finally—I saw some of the librarians hug their stacks of paper. Even grave, stoic Card laid a hand reflexively atop the papers she’d worked so hard to match up.
Hugging my—oh, my. I had picked up my own book and squeezed it against my chest without realizing it. Well, I hugged it more, then, and said, “I think you like books too, Miss Sandy.”
Half a smile tilted up one side of my heroine’s mouth. “Well… yes. Who doesn’t? Everything has been exciting here, but back home books are my biggest hobby. Mom and Dad think it’s great. They get me books whenever I need new ones, but I don’t make them buy me a book if I can go to the library back home and check it out. The town library, I mean. I can’t use the school library, because there’s always someone who’ll start trouble.” Her lips pursed sourly at that thought.
Card curtseyed, and in a wave, the other librarians, clothling and marionette and a bundlish in the background, all curtseyed or bowed. “Believe in us, Your Humanity, and we will spread our library all across Here, and you can borrow or keep any book you want, at any time.”
As they tended to do now, a question popped into my head, and seemed quite urgent. “What kind of books do you like Miss Sandy? I’m too new to reading to know for myself, but I understand preferences are a thing.”
She looked startled by my question, which was certainly a step up from all the guilt. “Oh. You mostly seem to have history and geography and informative books here, and I like those, but my big thing is science fiction. Charity reads a lot of fantasy, not the kind with elves, but older fantasy. I’m sorry, I mean not fantasy for older people, but books written decades ago about magic kingdoms, that kind of thing. She must be in heaven here.”
The question revived her so well, I almost felt magical. She straightened back her shoulders and lifted her face, smiling as she looked around the horizon, like Princess Charity would show up and they would fix things together any moment now.
Even when Charity failed to appear, the cheer remained. Her hand settled—with a moment’s hesitation that I had to fill in with another head nudge—on my cap. “What books do you like to read, Heartfelt? Oh, I’m sorry, you just said—you don’t know.”
Holding up the battered, charred blue-grey tome I had wrestled from fiery peril, I answered, “For the moment, I like this book, because it makes me useful to you.”
Her smile and eyebrows went crooked. “You get to like things for yourself, you know.”
“I certainly do, and what I like for myself is being smart. I enjoy thinking about things, and I want to know more things so I can think about them.”
She giggled, then looked back over her shoulder. She only had to raise her voice and say “Tumbles?” for the dargon to come waddling over. His feet splashed in the shower puddles, and paddled when they got more than a few inches deep. No one floats like a dargon. Well, perhaps a flops. That seemed likely, but I had never seen it happen to test the theory.
His tail wobbled as she stroked back the pointier scales on the top of his head. Soft hesitation still lurking in her voice, she asked, “What do you like to read?”
He blinked. “I don’t know. I don’t know if I can read.”
“Well, that’s easy to test, isn’t it? Try!” I opened up my book, holding it out for him in both arms.
He craned his neck forward, squinting at the handwritten journal entry. “Be…ware the witch in… her maze… of…” Jerking back upright, he grinned proudly. “I can read!”
Sandy giggled, and now she put her hands on her knees, pushing herself up to merely bend forward over us. “Well, if you don’t like reading, what do you like?”
The fat, brightly colored dargon made eager clawing motions in the air. “I liked breathing out that huge flame! I was really scary!”
“Oh, you were!” confirmed Stiff Back Sue.
“Definitely,” agreed the half-introduced Rolly.
All the librarians nodded, very impressed. Should we clap? Hmmm.
Before I had a good answer, Sandy pressed on. “But what else do you like?”
He stared up at her, baffled. It took him some time to think about the question. When he answered, his voice came distantly, lost in unaccustomed revelation. “I like… I liked the Perky Piebald Punkin Picker. I liked her a lot. I hope I get to see her again someday.”
Giving him a warm, encouraging smile, she said, “Maybe we all will. Is this Punkin Picker on our way, Heartfelt?”
Turning my book around, I flipped through it. The major obstacle was that I didn’t have a map of Everywhere, I had at least a dozen maps of parts of Here or There. Ah, there was one that with the Punkin Patch on it. Surely a Punkin Patch and a Punkin Picker went together. Where else would she pick the punkins to make into dargons?
Oops. I was supposed to be giving directions. “Oh, my. I’m sorry, it looks like that’s on the other side of the capitol.”
With that, Sandy stood up straight, mouth setting in flat determination. “We have to see Charity first. I know when she hears about the Library Tree burning, she’ll take care of this herself, but I can’t take the chance. How do we get to the capitol?”
Time to search through my maps again. This was fun. Hmmm.
A rapid, excitable voice exclaimed, “I know how to get to the capitol, and it’s right past where I want to go, so if you take me with you, I can show you the way while you take me home!”
We all looked around at the source of that voice, and a bundlish librarian shuffled forward bashfully. But the voice didn’t come from him. Instead, he held an open, intact book out to us. It showed one page of text, and one page with a black and white picture of a mountain made of candy, with lollipop trees. The voice, however, belonged to the yellow and blue girl running up and down and around the mountain, and sometimes over into the text to peer at us through the letters. Wherever she went, she got bigger or smaller, but she never stopped moving. “The easiest way is to follow the river to the wall, and that will get me home, and then you can keep following the river over the wall, or you can follow the road from Port Rait, if you don’t like traveling over water. Oh, and my name is Girl Running!”
That made Sandy laugh. “I can see that.”
His voice a mumble, scarf-wrapped face turned down under his hats, t
he bundlish held out his book at arm’s length. “When the flames rose, I knew I could save but one tome from the consuming fire. What choice was there but the volume containing our guest?”
Flipping around in my own book, I found a loose piece of paper, and held it out like a bridge between the two. Girl Running climbed up the lines of text, jumped onto the blank loose page, wiggled a hand over it onto the picture of Magnificent Mikey on the steps of Murder Mansion. She was much bigger in the blank page, but her hand shrank again in Mikey’s picture until it matched his. She had just barely enough room to run in circles around the edge of the blank page, but she did just that, so it must have been enough. This way, she was just big enough to make out, a flowing shape of streaked colors that resembled a human girl when she moved, but just looked like a mess if she held still.
That, I speculated, would not be a frequent problem.
“If you’re leaving…” Having gotten my attention, Card paused and turned to the other librarians. They passed forward a pile of cloth, which the oldest clothling unfolded into a faded but sturdy-looking bag. It had once been red, but now was mostly grey, and had a strap on either side. “Take this, Heartfelt. If you’re going to carry a book all over Here—”
“—or even There!” chirped Sunshine.
“—you’ll need one of these,” Card finished as if she hadn’t been interrupted.
I slid Theodoseus Q. Flapwaddle’s journal into the bag. It fit perfectly, with the loose sheet of paper sticking out the open end. That was an experiment, and it was immediately rewarded as Girl Running peeked up over the edge and looked around.
Of course, two seconds later her feet were dancing around the edge instead.
Sliding my arms into the straps, I bounced my shoulders, and… yes. It fit like a backpack, but far more stylishly, because it had a book in it!
Smiling the smile that would make my heart glow if I smiled that way, Sandy said, “I’m sorry, Heartfelt. I’m glad you’ve made friends, but we need to get walking. I have to find someone with food before night falls. I can’t live on butterscotch candy.”
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