Chapter 11
W ind whirls around me, whipping my hair into my face as the serpent and I make our descent into the earth.
As soon as the serpent’s tail submerges, it uncoils from around me so that it can fit through the tunnels.
I slip, my hand digging into one of the serpent’s scales just in time, lest I be swept away with the wind and plummet through the tunnels.
There’s a cracking turn to the right, and as I look around me through watering eyes—berated by the wind due to the speed at which we’re traveling—I realize we’re traveling through the roots of the tree itself.
By the time we come to a halt, my fingertips are bleeding from clinging onto the serpent’s sharp scales. At the force of the halt, I’m slung off the serpent’s back, my palms splayed out against the bark floor to keep my face from smashing into the ground.
There’s a strange pressure at my fingertips, and a sudden wooziness in my belly. I yank my hands away from the bark, realizing just in time that the bark is sucking the blood from my fingertips.
I stand to my feet, swaying a bit, and wipe my bloodied hands on my trousers. The tree has had enough of my blood.
We’ve arrived in a vaulted foyer. In front of us is a colossal door, its designs made of curling roots.
For a moment, I worry I’ll have to give my blood again to get the door to open, but as if reading my mind, the serpent says, “Admittance to the library requires a sacrifice.”
“I take it that’s one of the rules,” I say.
“Astute,” the serpent says, its tone implying the opposite.
“What kind of sacrifice?”
“A possibility.”
I frown, turning toward the terrifying creature. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Exactly what it sounds like. To gain admittance into the library, you must give up a future possibility.”
“Do I get to pick?”
The serpent’s mouth curves.
I didn’t think so. “So what possibility would you have me give up?”
“Something precious.” The serpent slithers toward me, though its back half is still obscured by the tunnel. Again, it licks the air, but only once it gets close.
John once told me that animals can taste fear. I have the eerie suspicion that this serpent’s taste is even more honed than that. It brings its tongue back into its mouth, its eyes darting upward.
“Mm,” it says, as if my fear possesses notes of a fine wine.
“Your fear is not what I would expect, for a girl whose Mate is dying.”
I swallow, my hands trembling. Please don’t take away my future with him.
The serpent bares its sharp teeth. “You may enter the library, should you forfeit the possibility of nursing your firstborn at your breasts.”
My mind freezes, my heart pounding. Can the serpent taste my bargain with the Sister, can it read exactly what I bargained away? Or can it taste my desire to be a mother? The hope I’d thought I’d quashed.
“If I agree, I’m just giving up the possibility of something? Not causing it to happen?”
The serpent nods.
I bite my lip. It’s better than it could be. Since I’m determined not to have children anyway, it’s of little risk to me. Little does the serpent know that I’ve already given up that possibility.
Still, the words hurt on the way out. “I accept these terms.”
A rumbling, and the double doors slide open before me, scraping against the ground and causing it to tremble. It’s dark inside the library, and even a few paces away from the entrance, I can see nothing.
I take a step forward, but the serpent hisses yet again. “Just one more rule.”
I turn over my shoulder and stare down the terrifying creature.
“One does not steal from the library.”
“And what happens to those who do?”
The serpent smiles. “You mean those few who managed to escape spending a mealtime with me?”
“Yes, them.”
“Let’s just say the punishment was fitting, given the crime.”
As soon as I set foot into the library, the doors slam shut behind me, blanketing me in darkness. A sinister chill sneaks through the cavern, and when I take another step forward, the patter of my boot against the floor echoes multiple times, fading into the vast distance.
The sense that something isn’t right gnaws on my belly, but after a few more steps, a light appears in the darkness. It’s small, but it swells with time. Once it’s reached me, I realize it’s a lantern, and a few more steps reveal that holding the lantern is some sort of apparition.
It’s hooded in white and pale itself, its fingers long and sickly as they grip tightly onto the lantern. It stands before me, the hood covering its face, but as it nears, I hear no footsteps.
“I’m looking for a book that will tell me the whereabouts of the Youngest Sister,” I say, hating how each tremble of my voice stretches out to fill the cavernous space that, as far as I know, could go on for eternity.
The creature nods, then beckons with the hand not holding the lantern for me to follow.
Following what appears to be the undead into the darkness is likely a poor decision, but given my only other option is to turn around and face the serpent on the other side of the door, I stick close behind the creature.
I have a sneaking suspicion there are more rules the serpent hasn’t told me, and because the library itself is in charge here, leaving it without reading any of its books seems like an efficient way to offend my host.
I follow, shivering in the cold and listening to the only sound in the place—my own footsteps.
“Do you keep the library dark to preserve the books?” I ask. “I heard light can damage the pages, especially of particularly old texts.”
The creature doesn’t answer. Doesn’t make any change in its movement to indicate that it heard me. Oh, well. My theory makes me feel better about the darkness, anyway.
Eventually, we reach a section of the cavernous space where the light from the lantern illuminates small sections of bookcases.
We wind through them, and though I can only glimpse sections of them at a time, I get the sense they could reach all the way to just below the surface of the earth.
Dried bark makes up the bookcases, as if the roots of the Tree curved perfectly to craft them.
The books themselves are odd. For one, they’re all white, and their casing is unlike that of any book I’ve ever seen, smooth and hard.
Not at all like the cloth and leather-bound books of my parents’ library.
After what feels like a half hour of winding through the place, the apparition comes to a sudden halt. I have to dig my heels into the earth to keep from running into it, which I’m grateful I manage, because I don’t want to chance spooking it.
The creature holds its lantern up to the bookcase, the light illuminating a single volume set apart from the rest. I pick it up, and the book itself is colder than the room, no title in sight. The texture of the blank cover is familiar, and it takes me a moment to realize what it is hewn from.
It’s white and pearly and certainly made of bone.
My skin crawls, but I thank the creature all the same. Its only response is to keep walking. After a few moments, it stops at another shelf and indicates yet another book. I grab this one as well, trying not to squirm at the feel of what I very much hope is not human bone.
It continues on until my arms are piled high with books, and I have to use my chin to keep them balanced.
“Is there someplace I could set these down?” I ask.
The creature turns its neck to look at me, though I’m not sure how it sees me with its hood drawn like that. But then it drifts forward.
I’m relieved to find it’s led me to a wooden table, which appears to have grown straight from the ground. There’s a lantern atop, which the creature lights with its own.
“Thank you,” I say, relieved to give my heavy arms a rest and set the books down on the table. But by the time I glance around, the creature is gone.
A chill settles through my bones, and the dreadful question of how I’ll get out of here if the creature doesn’t come to fetch me. Then again, there’s something about this place—the serpent, the creature, the library itself—that seems to know what one needs.
Or, at least, what one wants.
That thought isn’t as comforting as I hoped it would be.
Since there are no titles on the covers, I start with the book on the top of the pile.
It appears to be a history of the world, and though it tells the origin of the Three Sisters, daughters spun by the Creator himself and set as stewards over the realms, it provides no indication of their current whereabouts.
The second book I have more hope for. It’s a set of folk tales regarding the Three Sisters.
There are several about the Youngest Sister, and while they chronicle situations in which she came behind her two Sisters to right their wrongs, none provide much clue to how to contact her.
It also includes the story that ended up with Nolan and me in this mess to begin with, but aside from a few minor changes—the Middle Sister’s lover being a fisherman instead of a mason—there’s nothing helpful in that one either.
The third book is much like the first, repeating the Sisters’ origins, though with a focus on how the Youngest Sister was regarded as the favored child of the Creator’s, at least by the elder two Sisters’ estimation.
This was the wedge that initially kept the elder two Sisters knit at the heart, while the Youngest was excluded out of envy.
This book’s author had doubts, though, of whether the Youngest was truly the favorite, or if she received fewer rebukes due to wreaking less havoc than her Sisters.
What’s odd is that the next two books don’t mention the Youngest Sister at all.
They’re religious texts, and they speak of the eldest two Sisters, but strangely omit the Youngest. One of them is a record of witness accounts of the Sisters, most of them mortals who entered bargains that went wrong, but none of them mention meeting the Youngest Sister.
I flip back to the beginning of each of the books, and find the ones excluding the Youngest Sister to be more modern by three hundred years.
A strange unease settles in my gut, but I find my curiosity piqued.
With only two books left, my anxiety builds. What if I dragged Nolan all this way, had him travel an extra month by sea to get here, which we’ll have to repeat on the way back, just to waste an entire two months of his life on a false lead?
His plea with me from earlier sticks in my mind, that perhaps we should just enjoy our time together. But no. I can’t accept that.
I open the next book and find myself immediately confused. After flipping through it, I find it’s not a book about the Sisters at all, but a book about the history of the library itself.
I search through the concordance. There are entire sections on the dangers of the library. Figuring any information I find on the Youngest Sister will do me little good if I end up dying down here and unable to bring the information back to Nolan, I flip to the marked page.
The first section details information about the serpent, though most of it I already know from the serpent itself.
Basically, the serpent is tasked with allowing visitors entrance into the library, collecting a future possibility as payment, and is commanded to do the visitors no harm as long as the rules remain unbroken.
Well, that’s comforting, at least.
I scan down, looking for the rules, lest the serpent had purposefully omitted one, but as far as the book says, the serpent has been open with me.
But there’s another section that catches my eyes.
While most visitors are distracted by the serpent, the darkness, and the eerie spirits set to watch over the library and direct its guests, these so-called dangers prove most dangerous in that they distract from the true danger of the library.
My heart races, my mind scouring all the details of the library, wondering what I must have missed, and I turn the page.
The library itself is a lonely entity. Tucked away and isolated, it receives so few visitors for the amount of knowledge it holds. As a library’s one wish is to cultivate knowledge, it pains this being that so few traverse its halls, spread the pages of its books, take advantage of its secrets.
But the library has a way of keeping those who wander inside its doors.
A shiver runs through my body.
Time itself works differently in the library, or, at least, the guest’s perception of it.
A visitor might pore over books for days, thinking they only set foot in the library a half hour before.
A guest might become so caught up in the knowledge held in the library, they spend years within its walls without ever noticing a day has passed.
A cold sweat breaks out on my forehead.
In fact, some stay in the library for so long, by the time they emerge in the world above, they find their life has passed them by, their loved ones dead, their dreams having already been lived out by another.
Those select few almost always return to the library, realizing their only life lies between its walls, underneath its roots.
There the library keeps them alive. They spend their existence drowning the pain of their lost life in the knowledge of books, until eventually, they lose all resemblance to their former selves, their singular purpose to preserve the knowledge of the library and lead others to it.