Page 76

Arthur was sitting at the counter, poring over a ledger. Every so often he would frown and circle something with a red pen.

Dan’s book was open to page two-hundred-and-fourteen, to a question about an Eastern European proverb.

Beneath his published words, running into the margin, were handwritten notes. Tiny letters, penned in dark blue ink.

No known remedy? There it is, just sitting there uncontested like a stamp on a carton of milk. Death and taxes and dairy expiration dates.

You’ve just described the problem like a coroner filing a report, Dandelion. Cause of death: forgetting. Time of death: now unto forever.

But what about the people who refuse to let the threads drop? What do you say to the folk who spent centuries copying down manuscripts by hand in cold candlelit rooms? What of the “countless millions” who carried their ancestors’ songs onto boats and taught them to children who would never see the shores they came from? What if those children, or their children, put pen to paper one day and wrote those allegedly lost names down? Is that not a sort of remedy?

Books carry more than facts. They carry the names and stories of entire communities of people who will never meet, who are nonetheless still engaged in conversation across centuries.

Every unread book is a second death waiting to happen. Every reader is a stay of execution.

“There is no known remedy.” Except, of course, for the one you yourself seem to be unknowingly engaging in. You wrote an entire chapter proving it and somehow missed the point.

(I say this with love, Dandelion. Your sourcing is otherwise impeccable.)

Dan snorted. He had written his part of that entry six years ago, and he had thought he was being profound as well as precise. Poetic, even.

She had disassembled his logic like a broken watch.

He turned back to the beginning of the chapter. Her handwriting was everywhere: in the margins, underlining entire passages. She drew exclamation points where she agreed with him. He felt each one like a small burst of applause meant for nobody else. He kept arriving at the same thought, over and over.

I’ve never thought of it that way.

There were so many things he had never thought of at all.

For Dan, a fact was a tangible thing. Currency. You acquired it, stored it, produced it when required. He could tell you the population of every major city in the Roman Empire at its peak, the specific gravity of most common metals, and the full genealogy of every English monarch from Alfred to the present. But he had never once considered whether those facts were conspiring with each other in the dark while he wasn’t looking.

Tempest seemed to think they were. For Tempest the past wasn’t something that was settled. It was still alive, still talking and still a part of the conversation.

He found this idea deeply uncomfortable.

He also could not stop thinking about it.

“What are you so engrossed in over there?”

Arthur had drifted closer without Dan noticing.

“My own book, actually,” Dan admitted.

Arthur took in the margins, the thicket of annotations, the sticky notes bristling from the pages. “Planning a massive revision?”

“Someone else beat me to it.” Dan slid the book across.

Arthur leaned over the table, studying the notes with a half smile pulling at his face. He was quiet for a moment. Then he tapped one finger on the page. “Book witch,” he said, with the confidence of a man making an obvious diagnosis. “A clever one. She’s properly schooled you.” He pulled the book closer for a second look, pressing his lips together against the smile. “I’ve known a few of them. Remarkable scholars. Brilliant legal minds, some of them. They argue with a text the way other people argue with a person. Like it’s a conversation that isn’t finished yet.”

He pushed the book back to Dan and stood.

“Can I grab you a fresh coffee on my way out? Yours has gone cold.”

“I’ll get my own,” Dan said. “I need to stretch.”

After he’d refilled his cup and sat back down, he turned to the front of the book, looking for a bookplate, an inscription, anything. There was nothing besides her notes. He tried to pull her surname from the tournament roster. He could still see the page clearly in his mind. No surname. No address.

She was just Tempest. Trivia-in-a-Teapot Tempest.