The Artisan quarters had already started to envelope the Craftsman precinct when Patrick finally spoke. “If you wanted to run away with him, I wouldn’t stop you,” he said. A horseless coach intersected us then, but even when it had passed, my face remained dumbstruck.
“What did you just say?”
“I said, if you feel safer runnin’ off with Teddy,” he spoke with a tick of his jaw, “then you should go.”
I looked across the lane at Patrick like I’d never heard of anything more ridiculous and almost collided headlong with a wagon.
I shook my head and stomped around it, walking too quickly now. “If that’s not the stupidest thing you’ve ever said to me—”
He drew a cigarette and wet the end on his lips. “Well, never claimed I was smart, did I?”
I made a scathing noise. “Maybe Theo and I will laugh about it one day with our many children.”
His eyes flashed momentarily. “If that’s what you want, then you should have it.”
I scoffed. “Shut up, Patrick.”
“He kissed you,” he said now, flicking ash to the pavement.
I quickened my pace. It annoyed me that he didn’t seem to have trouble keeping up. “And?”
He sighed. “And I flew off the handle. It wasn’t my place. I’m tryin’ to apologize for it.” He looked up at the sky, at the roiling clouds. “Damn it if you don’t make it fuckin’ difficult.”
“Me?” I growled, frustrated now. “No, Patrick.You. You make it difficult. My life grew exponentially more difficult the moment you arrived in it.”
He pointed at me with his cigarette. “Now, ain’t that thebloodytruth of it?”
I laughed again, tempted to cross the space and shove him hard enough to make him stumble. “And I suppose I’ve made your life so completely unbearable?”
“Unequivocally,” he said darkly.
“Then we’re a pair. A more intolerable man I’ll never meet.” I spoke like I was spitting rocks. “Every night, every waking minute of the day, I think ofyou. And yet you think you know what I want? I’m so damntiredof men pretending they know what’s best for me.”
We walked silently after that, Patrick seething with something he did not voice, and me stomping down the Artisan quarters toward the library with fire on my heels.
The library was made of stone and ranked in high columns, a verse from the Book of Belavere etched into its cornices, pigeons spilling shit into the lettering. It sat along one side of a town square with a clock tower in its middle. There were Crafters selling newspapers, tea, charm trinkets that gave the beholder good luck, as though an Artisan ever grew short of it.
Theo and Polly were already ascending the stone steps to the library entrance in the distance. One last flash of Theo’s dark hair, and they disappeared inside. A volley of other Artisans swallowed the space they left behind.
Patrick looked to the clock tower at the square’s middle, its face cloudy with salt. “Top of the hour,” he said. “Thirty minutes starts now.”
CHAPTER FORTY-SIXPOLLY
When she first entered the library, Polly felt as though the walls were watching her.
They had passed a bored policeman at the front, checking Artisan brands with a cursory glance at each person’s wrist, then shuffled through revolving glass doors into the foyer. The library was brimming with visitors, many of them Scribblers, but other scholars, too. Some seemed to have come to view Tanner’s architecture. They stood with guides and gawked at the ceiling fresco, the statues, the passages from the Book of Belavere etched into the stone.
Polly and Theo didn’t stop to admire these things with the rest. They walked on at a forced casual pace into the maze of stacks. Hundreds of thousands of books looming down over them.
“Well,” said Theo, looking overwhelmed at the collection. “Where should we start?”
“Fiction,” Polly said immediately. “Fantasy and mythology. Anything pertaining to Crafter folklore will be there.”
Off they went, arm in arm. The shelves towering into the vaulted ceiling, great ladders rolling of their own accord with Artisans atop them. Balls of fire Charmer light floated without candelabra or sconce.
The fantasy and mythology collection, Polly knew, was extensive. It seemed to go on for row after row. They would lose an hour just searchingfor the cypher. Polly only remembered the color of the spine and the shape of the lettering. She let her eyes skim off the titles as they walked, as though simply perusing at her leisure.
Polly heard her name in every whisper, felt every pair of eyes on the back of her neck, and prepared her body to bolt. But the half hour depressed and no one approached. Theo left to reassure Patrick, then returned. The Artisans whispered their idle gossip. The Scribblers carried out their work peacefully. Their eyes passed over her and Theo just as they would any other. She remembered she wasn’t a fugitive in the way Nina and Patrick were, only something discarded by the House. These Artisans might pass straight through her. Not a single one knew or cared for her name.
