talk about that? As Nathaniel and Silas left the study, she sank back onto the couch, sandwiching her hands between her knees.
“Are you all right?” Katrien asked. “You look like you have indigestion. Anyway, I’ve been thinking about your resistance to magic. Where it might have come from, and so forth.”
Elisabeth slumped into the pillows. She felt as though her organs were liquefying with relief. “Did you come up with any ideas?”
“Well,” Katrien hedged, “there must be a reason why you’re the only person who’s been able to get inside the Codex, and it has to be related.” She paused. “Do you remember that time you fell off the roof, and you didn’t break anything?”
Elisabeth nodded, thinking back. She had been fourteen at the time, and had climbed two stories to avoid being seen by Warden Finch. “I got lucky.”
“I don’t think so. That fall should have hurt you, but you only walked away with a few bruises. Stefan swears you cracked one of the flagstones. Then there was the incident with the chandelier in the refectory—it practically landed on you. And the time you got strawberry jam all over—”
“I know!” Elisabeth interrupted, flushing. “I remember. But what does any of that have to do with me being able to get inside the Codex?”
Katrien gnawed on her lip. “You aren’t just resistant to magic. You’re also more physically resilient than a normal person. You’ve survived things that would have killed anyone else.”
Elisabeth started to object, then remembered her battle with the Book of Eyes. The Malefict had squeezed her until she thought her lungs would pop, but as far as she knew, she hadn’t so much as cracked a rib. In retrospect, that did seem strange.
“I was thinking about how those qualities might be connected,” Katrien went on slowly, “and something occurred to me. Do you remember those experiments I did when we first met?”
“The ones with booklice?”
Katrien nodded. Her eyes grew slightly misty. “Fascinating creatures, booklice. They spend all day scurrying around in parchment dust, eating and breathing sorcery, but it doesn’t harm them. They’re gigantic, and hard to kill. I thought they were a different species at first, unrelated to normal booklice. But after studying them, I realized that wasn’t the case. They start off normal when they hatch. It’s the exposure to the grimoires that changes them.”
For a moment, Elisabeth couldn’t speak. Her head spun. She imagined herself as a baby, crawling between the shelves. As a little girl, sneaking through the passageways. She could hardly remember a time in her childhood when she wasn’t covered from head to toe in dust. “Do you mean—are you saying I’m a booklouse?”
“The human version of one, at least,” Katrien said. “As far as we know, you’re the only person to have ever grown up in a Great Library. By the time most apprentices arrive at age thirteen, we must be too developed for any changes to occur. But you . . .”
Elisabeth felt as though she had been struck over the head with a grimoire. She had lived sixteen and a half years with a case of double vision, and suddenly, for the first time, the world had snapped into focus. This was why she had woken the night of the Book of Eyes’ escape. This was why she had been able to resist Ashcroft, and why the volume in the archives had called her—what had it called her?
A true child of the library.
Ink and parchment flowed through her veins. The magic of the Great Libraries lived in her very bones. They were a part of her, and she a part of them.
• • •
At the Royal Library that week, Elisabeth thought of little else. She went about her work as if lost in a dream, observing countless things she hadn’t noticed before. Grimoires rustled on the shelves when she walked by, but remained still and silent for the librarians. Bookshelves creaked. Rare volumes tapped on their display cases to get her attention. Her route to and from the storage room took her past a Class Four that was infamous among the apprentices for its foul temper—they fled down the hallway, shrieking, as it spat wads of ink at their heels—but all she had to do was nod at it every morning, and it left her alone. In one particularly memorable incident, a section of shelving sprang open unprompted, knocking Gertrude from her feet in its eagerness to beckon Elisabeth toward a secret passageway.