Page 20

Billie

Pippa had said that I wouldn’t need to use the library, little did she know that I wanted to use the library, and need was not something that would matter in this instance. Libraries were like home to me, especially ones that smelled so similar to the library on Calder Street that it should have been uncanny. Old paper, old glue, dust warmed by lamps, that cold mineral breath all old buildings seemed to exhale.

I stood just inside the doors and breathed it in like an idiot before I remembered where I was, because for one second my body had decided we were back at my regular library and all that was missing was the orange cleaner Ms. Mercer used on the main desk and the checkouts.

Then I smelled something else. Under the paper and the dust there was something the Calder branch had never had. Not money exactly, though money was in it too, under even that was something older. It was stone with centuries in it, leather that had outlived everyone who had first touched it, ink gone brown around secrets that nobody had bothered to check on in a very long time.

I breathed it in anyway, because I couldn’t help it. Some rooms just knew how to reach into a person’s soul.

As I stepped further into the room I realized that the library climbed higher than any room had a right to, higher than the building had appeared from the outside. It was odd and made me a little dizzy as I looked up.

There were galleries stacked above galleries, each one narrower than the last, until the top ones were only a suggestion of railing and shadow. Ladders hung on brass rails that ran the length of the shelves. Narrow bridges crossed the gaps between the higher stacks, no wider than a plank, no railing on some of them, and I looked at those and thought, immediately, no. Lamps floated in green-glass globes that did not seem attached to anything and were certainly not interested in explaining themselves. The ceiling gave up somewhere in the dark, and I had to take it on faith that it existed at all.

For the first time since the gates, nobody was looking at me. That alone was almost worth the trip. Since I’d arrived, being looked at had become a constant background hum in my mind of eyes cataloguing the hair, the shoes, the girl that had hemmed her robe. Here, in the stacks, the eyes let go, and it was like a headache lifting. Suddenly, I could take a deep breath again.

I tore my gaze away from the mind boggling ceiling and looked around. I was there for a reason. The school had a name, one I didn’t understand. If I was honest I had no idea if it was just a standard foreign language or something magical. At least not anymore.

Æscholt.

Places did not get names from nowhere, so I knew there had to be some record of it somewhere. Calder Street had been named for someone who owned land before my family owned late notices. Names came from money, accidents, trees, saints, men who wanted to be remembered, men who did not deserve to be. The list went on. A place this old definitely had a name with bones under it.

I went to the catalogue first, because that was how civilized people found books, and I lost the fight in under ten minutes.

The catalogue was not alphabetical. Or it was, briefly, in a way that turned into something else the second I trusted it. Finally I realized that drawers were marked by Order, then date, then something I was calling discipline, then a symbol system nobody had bothered to translate for people whose grandmothers had not whispered it into their cradles. Half the cards cross-referenced other cards. Those cards cross-referenced bloodlines or family names. The bloodlines and family names cross-referenced house collections. The house collections apparently expected me to already know which ancient family had last hoarded which subject out of spite.

Back home, I could take a library apart by feel, put my hand on a shelf and know the book I wanted was three rows over. This one refused to give up a single one of its secrets.

I pulled open a drawer marked “Etymologies / Institutional / Minor" and found a card that sent me to Founding Toponyms, which sent me to Æsc-forms, which sent me to a locked drawer that hummed when I touched it and would not open.

I knew that hum, because I’d felt it once before, in a reading room with two chairs facing each other, coming off a box of blank cream cards. I pulled my hand back like the drawer had bitten me.

“Of course,” I muttered. The drawer remained smugly shut.

I tried another route. School history. Founding Nine. Early charters. Architectural records. Every path led into a family name I did not know or a shelf-mark that didn’t exist where the catalogue swore it should.

After half an hour I had three useless books, one splinter working its way into my thumb, and a growing certainty that the catalogue had been designed by someone who believed knowledge was improved by being inconvenient.

“You won’t find it there.”

I froze. The voice came from around the other side of the stacks and I had been completely sure that I was alone, that is until I heard him speak. His voice was low and even, barely above a whisper, and yet it made a shiver work its way through my body. There was something intimate about it as well.

As I padded toward the sound I tried to think back to when he might have come in, but I couldn’t place the moment, which was strange considering I was usually more than a little aware of that kind of thing. I knew I had been alone because all I’d been able to hear was the scratch of my pen against my notebook and the flicker of the lamps above me. No one had so much as breathed in the area and now there was a voice.

Being alone in a room was one of the few senses I actually trusted. I could feel when another body took up space near me, and had always been able to sense it.

I hadn’t sensed him.

As I got to the end of the row I peeked around the corner and saw him sitting in one of the armchairs under a tall lamp. He had a book open on his lap that he shut a little too fast when he saw me looking.

Caught, I stepped out from the edge of the row of books and tried to come up with something quippy to say, but nothing would come. He was quiet and unassuming and had the type of face that my gaze wanted to skip over or dart away from for some reason, but the longer I looked at him the more I realized how handsome he was. It wasn’t just the blond hair or hazel eyes, which were currently locked on to me, but the high cheekbones and slight pout to his lips as well.

He was in just his white school shirt, his tie and robe discarded on the chair next to him. For a half a second I wondered if he rejected them for the same reasons I had rejected my robe, but then I remembered that he probably grew up in places like this and that we were vastly different.

We were watching each other and he’d gone so still that I suddenly wasn’t surprised that I’d had no idea he was there. Finally I found my voice and asked, “What won’t I find?”

“What you’re looking for.” He said it as though it was the most obvious answer in the world, but without condescension. He didn’t say anything further so I waited. I was good at waiting, had practiced a lot over the years. My whole childhood had been a class in it, waiting for hold music to end, waiting for a landlord to decide, waiting for a machine my dad was coaxing back to life to either turn over or die.

The problem was that he didn’t explain, didn’t give in to the pressure of the quiet. Apparently silence was his native language.