her. One voice belonged to Master Hargrove, and the other to . . .
The Director.
Her heart leaped. She flattened herself against the floorboards to peer through a knothole, the light that poured through it setting her tangled hair aglow. She couldn’t see much: a slice of desk covered in papers, the corner of an unfamiliar office. The thought that it might belong to the Director sent her pulse racing with excitement.
“That makes for the third time this month,” Hargrove was saying, “and I’m simply at my wit’s end. The girl is half-wild. Vanishing off to who-knows-where, getting into every possible kind of trouble—just last week, she released an entire crate of live booklice in my bedchambers!”
Elisabeth barely stopped herself from shouting an objection through the knothole. She’d collected those booklice with the intention of studying them, not setting them free. Their loss had come as a tremendous blow.
But what Hargrove said next made her forget all about the lice.
“I simply have to question if it’s the right decision, raising a child in a Great Library. I’m certain that whoever left her on our doorstep knew we are in the practice of taking on foundlings as our apprentices. But we do not accept those boys and girls until the age of thirteen. I hesitate to agree with Warden Finch on any matter, yet I do believe we ought to consider what he’s been saying all along: that young Elisabeth might fare better in an orphanage.”
While unsettling, this was nothing Elisabeth hadn’t heard before. She endured the remarks knowing that the Director’s will assured her place in the library. Why, she could not say. The, Director rarely spoke to her. She was as remote and untouchable as the moon, and equally as mysterious. To Elisabeth, the Director’s decision to take her in possessed an almost mystical quality, like something out of a fairy tale. It could not be questioned or undone.
Holding her breath, she waited for the Director to counter Hargrove’s suggestion. The skin on her arms tingled with the anticipation of hearing her speak.
Instead, the Director said, “I have wondered the same, Master Hargrove. Almost every day for the past eight years.”
No—that couldn’t be right. The blood slowed to a crawl in Elisabeth’s veins. The pounding in her ears almost drowned out the rest.
“All those years ago, I did not consider the effect it might have on her to grow up isolated from other children her age. The youngest apprentices are still five years her elder. Has she displayed any interest in befriending them?”
“I’m afraid she’s tried, with little success,” Hargrove said. “Though she may not know it herself. Recently I overheard an apprentice explaining to her that ordinary children have mothers and fathers. Poor Elisabeth had no idea what he was talking about. She quite happily replied that she had plenty of books to keep her company.”
The Director sighed. “Her attachment to the grimoires is . . .”
“Concerning? Yes, indeed. If she does not suffer from the lack of company, I fear it is because she sees grimoires as her friends in place of people.”
“A dangerous way of thinking. But libraries are dangerous places. There is no getting around it.”
“Too dangerous for Elisabeth, do you think?”
No, Elisabeth begged. She knew these weren’t ordinary books the Great Library kept. They whispered on the shelves and shuddered beneath iron chains. Some spat ink and threw tantrums; others sang to themselves in high, clear notes on windless nights, when starlight streamed through the library’s barred windows like shafts of mercury. Others still were so dangerous they had to be stored in the underground vault, packed in salt. Not all of them were her friends. She understood that well.
But sending her away would be like placing a grimoire among inanimate books that didn’t move or speak. The first time she had seen such a book, she had thought it was dead. She did not belong in an orphanage, whatever that was. In her mind’s eye the place resembled a prison, gray and shrouded in damp mists, barred by a portcullis like the entrance to the vault. Terror squeezed her throat at the image.
“Do you know why the Great Libraries take in orphans, Master Hargrove?” the Director asked at last. “It is because they have no home, no family. No one to miss them if they die. I wonder, perhaps . . . if Scrivener has lasted this long, it is because the library wished it to be so. If her bond to this place