gods, beliefs? How can a good solid Norseman end up in a wing located in the Christian ideal of damnation? It doesn’t seem to matter what the librarians believed when they were alive—here we are.
Maybe what makes a librarian is not what they believe. Maybe what makes a library isn’t what it has, but what it does.
Bjorn the Bard, 1433 CE
IN PEACEFUL MOMENTS, THE Library played. Books didn’t wake into characters. No one stirred off their shelves, but the Library had its own kind of ecosystem and sense of balance. When it felt all was well, it bloomed in ways only Brevity could see.
Brevity had checked on the damsels—Rosia, especially, who still stared at her in ways that made Brevity’s stomach flutter. Brevity had done her duties, and then she had promptly decided to hide. She’d made a blanket fort of her desk and chair. From her nest, she could see the colors stretch and yawn out of the stacks like seeking tendrils. Aquamarine pooled out of the topmost rows like a mist, gently eddying around an energetic, spiky carmine that was probing the air. Lower to the floor, a book had industriously stretched a vine of butter yellow, almost mimicking a pat of sunshine on the rug as it reached for the other side. The books on the other side must not have felt sociable, because they held their muddled rainbows close to their covers.
It was almost peaceful, if you didn’t know what you were looking at.
She’d been reading a book, pretending to read a book. There was a reason people read in corners. It was a room made of one. Spine curved, arms bracketed, and the remaining walls made of the reassuring weight of a book. A self-constructed universe, for as long as you needed it. Or as long as the story lasted.
Brevity isolated that thought with a meditative mood, which meant she noticed the troubled storm-cloud presence at the door before seeing him. “Rami?” Brevity unburied herself a little from the blanket. “What are you doing up here?”
“Claire and Hero are fine,” Rami reassured her, answering the unspoken question. He crossed the carpeted expanse of the lobby with that plodding kind of silence he used to mask his nature. Brevity couldn’t help but notice the books didn’t reach toward him. In fact, they withdrew a little, as if sensing the former angel’s purpose. “I left them asleep on the couch, though I’m fairly certain Hero was faking exhaustion merely to pin Claire in place. I came to see how you’re doing.”
There was reproach in his gentle tone. He was a natural sheepdog, with his need to keep them together. There were differences—Brevity knew something unique had knit between those three—but still, Brevity was firmly part of his flock. He didn’t approve of her coming back up to the Unwritten Wing alone instead of recuperating with the others.
She didn’t know quite how to explain that she needed it. Needed to be here. Needed to see, knowing what she knew now. She tilted her head back to eye the ceiling. It was about the only place not loaded with books and colors. “I feel like a three-day-old turd.”
The honesty was precisely calibrated for the grimace that appeared on Rami’s face. “All the more reason you should rest. There’s no lingering . . . ?”
His voice trailed off to an effective arrow that drew Brevity’s gaze back down to her lap. Her left arm had emerged out of the blankets enough to see it. She could almost still make out where the inspiration gilt had rested for years, leaving a paler cornflower line against her blue skin. But scrawled over the top was a new jagged line of pure black, rimmed by bone white skin. Brevity resisted the urge to touch it. It was faintly raised, like a scar. If Brevity paid too much attention to it, she could almost swear she felt it run with a pulse that was just slightly out of sync with her own.
She tucked her arm under the blanket again. “Whatever ink is left in that seems happy where it is.”
“The ink needed something to anchor to. It was the only solution I could think of,” Rami said apologetically.
“It was the best of our crappy options.” Brevity turned her attention back to the ceiling again. Had there always been a parquet inlay behind the arching beams? She could swear that was new. “It’s not like I hadn’t stolen it to begin with.”
“You cherished it, though.