Chapter 1
Chapter
One
CLAUDIA
Ifight my way down a crowded sidewalk, jostled on every side by elbows, bags, tails, and spikes. A dilophosaurus-drawn wagon rattles through a puddle, splashing my boots.
This is why I hate the city.
Out in the wild, it’s just me and my companions, no other civilized company for leagues.
Sure, it does get a tad lonely—especially when Cassian and Eudora need alone time and send me to “gather firewood” for hours—but it beats having to duck swinging brachiosaurus tails and getting cursed at by sweaty-faced men when I stumble heavily into the corner of their food stall.
The Great Library of Balexonia comes into view as I round a corner. I have to admit, the city’s centerpiece is a stunning architectural feat. What started out as a palace in the monarchist Dark Age has evolved over time into a celebration of artistic expression and shared human/saurian knowledge.
Centuries ago, the law-defying marriage of King Cyrus to his stegosaurus queen Nyla was the beginning of the end for the ancient kingdom’s warmongering and power-seeking.
Saurians, who formerly shunned human ideas of agriculture and city-building, were welcomed into our walls.
It was primarily plant-eaters who forsook their wild ways, although a handful of carnivorous saurians also chose to give up hunting for a soft life in the city.
A few generations of mingling with the herbivores’ peaceful culture—plus their genius for plant husbandry leading to years of abundant resources—shaped us into the egalitarian culture we know today that celebrates art, beauty, and pleasure above all else.
In said culture, it’s customary for each person to present a piece of art to their community on ten-year milestone birthdays: ten, twenty, thirty, and so on.
These art pieces serve to track an individual’s growth and allow their loved ones and neighbors to celebrate and remember them long after they’re gone.
The Great Library maintains a catalog of all artistic contributions, updated yearly.
And, though the tradition isn’t technically mandatory, they tend to get testy and send a hundred pigeons with passive-aggressive reminders until the citizen caves and slaps together something the librarians can record.
Ask me how I know.
At first it was impressive how the birds kept finding me, even when my cartography team was in the middle of absolutely nowhere.
Then it was annoying—like the time we were hiding from a sabretooth cat and the messenger pigeon blew our cover.
After what must’ve been the seventeenth one, Eudora looked at me and sighed.
“Maybe you should go, Claudia. We were almost done scouting this coastline anyway.”
My thirtieth year is almost over, but I’ve been avoiding the inevitable trip back to civilization to create and register the art representing my third decade.
Mainly because I still don’t know what I’m going to make.
“Just do a nice map,” Cassian urged me, on the last night before I parted ways with my cartography team. We were sitting around the fire, sharing a bottle of whiskey Cassian had been carrying around for months for “a special occasion.” I was flattered that my departure rated cracking it open.
“Yes!” Eudora, her massive pterosaur wings folded into a comfortable roost, leaned against her human husband, eyes half closed in contentment. “Do a map. That represents what you spent your twenties doing, after all.”
It’s true that I’ve spent the better part of the last eight years tramping through the wilderness and swaying on ship decks mapping coastlines and outlining lakes.
But the actual drawing part isn’t my forte.
Eudora, our aerial surveyor, guides Cassian’s hand as he sketches out the curves of the land.
I’m mainly there as their hired muscle, scaring off feral tyrannosaurs, hungry sabretooths, and curious liopleurodons.
They’d protest I do a lot more than that—Cassian taught me a fair bit about map-sketching during the months after he broke his arm falling out of a tree—but any map I’d try to draw on my own would look woeful next to his masterful designs.
“Well, what did you do for your ten and twenty?” Cassian asked when I shot down the map idea.
I poked the fire with a stick. “For my ten, I barely even remember. I think I made a mosaic out of glass? It was supposed to be hung in the front of Dad’s shop, but then my brother cut his hand on one of the pieces I didn’t sand down well enough, and they put it away in storage.
Then for my twenty…” I stopped, wincing.
“What?” Eudora insisted.
“I wrote a poem,” I mumbled, cheeks flushing from more than just the fire. “Don’t laugh.”
Cassian, to his credit, only laughed a little bit. “What was it about?”
“Comparing the moon to a woman’s tit? I don’t know. I was nineteen, all right?”
Eudora lost the battle not to laugh. She tilted her head back, exposing her long neck and the wicked-sharp length of her beak, and screeched hilarity to the night sky.
Cassian elbowed her, but even after she settled, she couldn’t stop chortling deep in her throat, little chuk-chuk-chuk sounds that sounded very close to human laughter.
“I think you’re a lovely writer,” Cassian told me, with generosity I wasn’t sure I’d earned. “I’ve seen your letters. They’re…”
“Descriptive,” Eudora said, with another chuk-chuk. “That one you sent your brother about the dysentery epidemic in Lower Valeria…”
I buried my face in my hands. “I was trying to make him laugh. Probably no one else will ever read that. I can’t write about shit when it’s going on record for all of civilization to read for the rest of time.”
With a grin, Cassian said, “Sounds like you’re fucked, then.”
The next morning, the two of them tramped off into the wilderness with their newly hired temporary guard, a gruff triceratops with a broken horn and tail armor inlaid with long, spear-like spikes.
That left me to hire a pterosaur flight back to Balexonia and, somehow, pull a work of art out of my ass worthy of representing a decade of my life.
Now, as I approach the Great Library, nerves writhe in my gut. I still don’t have any idea what I want to make, except for excuses. On the way here, I decided I should try going through my family’s archives for ideas. Maybe some long-ago piece of art will inspire me.
If plagiarism wasn’t grounds for public shaming, ostracism, and expensive fines, I’d consider straight-up copying somebody’s ancestor. But supposedly the librarians always find out—or so say the rumors.
Even my toned thighs feel the strain as I climb the seemingly unending stairs through the terraced garden in front of the library.
I spot a cluster of volunteer gardeners spreading fertilizer.
A diplodocus, feet planted several tiers down, bends their neck to delicately nip a shrubbery into the perfect shape.
Gardening can be art, I recall. I’ve heard of people submitting a new strain of sweeter, cross-bred fruit, or a perfect rose bloom from the bush they’ve tended for a decade. My friend’s grandfather, for his eighty, presented a tiny potted tree he’d spent decades shaping and pruning.
Still, the idea doesn’t call to me, just as map-drawing didn’t. I continue the climb, relishing the burn in my legs and lungs.
Somewhere in this library, there’s got to be a spark of inspiration waiting for me to find it.
MINERVA
“Another archive request.” Alexander, my fellow librarian, slides the pigeon message across my slant-top reading desk with his weird little human sausage fingers.
In the process, he rumples the ancient scroll I’m meticulously copying.
A corner crumbles away, and I make a clicking sound low in my throat, a warning.
I promised the head librarian I would stop growling at my human colleagues. They make it so hard, though.
“Why don’t you pull it yourself?” I ask through gritted teeth.
“But it’ll take me an hour to find it,” Alexander says. “It’ll take you five minutes. You’re so good at this, Minerva. It’s like you have the whole archive memorized.”
I place my pen down very slowly before turning to face him. “I. Am. Busy.”
“C’mon, Minnie, do it for me?”
“If you call me Minnie again, I will conveniently forget why my ancestors chose to cease hunting humans.”
Alexander’s throat bobs, and I catch a whiff of fear-sweat. “P-please, Minn—erva?”
I slide the pigeon message back to him with a single claw, careful not to let any of my wrist feathers brush against the scroll. “Run your own archive requests, Alexander. You’ll never excel if you don’t practice.”
As he scurries away, guilt nibbles at my stomach. Was I too harsh on him? Maybe. But between the mountain of aging documents needing to be copied and this year’s township reports that I still have to file, I don’t have time to do basic fetch work—no matter how quickly I can complete it.
An hour later, I’m putting the finishing touches on my copy work, relieved that the original scroll held out long enough without crumbling. The door creaks open again and I sense a human’s breathing in the room behind me.
“What, Alexander?” I ask without turning around.
“Hi,” says an unfamiliar human female voice. “I think I took a wrong turn. This isn’t the archives.”
I whip around, startled. The woman holds up her palms in apology. A patron? How did a patron sneak in here? They’re not supposed to access the archives unescorted.
Through narrowed eyes, I size her up. The natural light from the window highlights her tanned skin and throws gold highlights into her braided brown hair. She’s surprisingly attractive for a human.
No. I need to stop using that qualifier.
According to the head librarian, it’s speciesist. She’s beautiful, full stop.
Unconventionally so—she wears the clothing of a peasant man, rough-woven trousers with a creamy linen shirt tucked in.
The sleeves are rolled up, revealing thin pale-pink scars against her tan.
I catch myself inhaling her scent, curious if it will reveal more about her.
She smells like sweat, trees, and woodsmoke.
A tinge of pterosaur. She recently flew in from the wilds, then. A traveler of some kind.
“I’m Claudia of Rume,” she says with a crooked half-smile.
The silence stretches out a beat too long before I say, “Minerva Deftclaw. Senior Librarian. The archives are down the stairs, not up. And you should have an escort.”
“Oh, I did. Fellow named Alexander. He was hovering too much, so I snuck off when his back was turned.” Claudia grins conspiratorially.
“Sorry to barge in on you like this. Can I just say, your script is the neatest I’ve ever seen?
” She gestures to the pages pinned to the drying rack.
I’m suddenly and irrationally self-conscious at someone seeing the book unbound and in pieces like this.
“And that illumination you copied—I have a friend who’s an artist, but even he could learn a thing or two from your work. ”
Well, this Claudia of Rume certainly knows how to flatter. My feathers rise involuntarily with pride before I shake myself to flatten them down again. “This area is off-limits to patrons. You need to go back downstairs.”
Claudia doesn’t seem in a rush to do so. She takes a step forward, admiring my scriptorium. Large windows let in plenty of natural light, allowing me to work from dawn to dusk. Against one wall, a cupboard stands open, revealing my overflowing to-be-copied queue.
Normally, the cupboard wouldn’t contain quite so many crumbling documents. But our best human copyist just gave birth a month ago, and most dinosaur librarians lack the fine motor control to hold a pen properly. That means the work has been falling entirely to me. Small wonder I’m snappish.
“I’m curious,” Claudia says, casually running a finger along my drying rack. “This might be rude, but how did you decide to become a librarian? It’s just that, well, not to stereotype, but most people of your—uh—”
“Species,” I fill in, folding my arms. “Don’t chicken out now. You can go ahead and say it. Most velociraptors live in the wilds and prey on the weak. Our natural state.”
“Whoa, now, I wasn’t going to say that,” Claudia backpedals. “It’s just that all the velociraptors I’ve had the pleasure of meeting have been sailors, explorers, builders, stuff like that. Outdoorsy types.”
“Well, as you can see, we’re not a monolith,” I say tartly. “Some of us like to read.”
In truth, the stereotypes she references aren’t far off. My father ran in a wild pack and my mother worked in a lumber mill. Two of my nestmates followed in her footsteps and became lumberjacks. My oldest sister, last we heard of her, was captain of a pirate ship.
There are reasons why I don’t talk about my family much.
“I like to read too,” Claudia says, “when I get the chance. Out in the wilds, there isn’t much opportunity. Books and scrolls are hard to carry.”
I take the bait. “Out in the wilds? What brings you to the Great Library, then? Desperate to do some reading?”
Claudia huffs out a little half-laugh. “My thirtieth birthday is in a few weeks. The pigeon notes were starting to get annoying. I’m here to do my civic duty and make art.”
“It’s customary to present it to your family and neighborhood first,” I point out.
Grimacing, Claudia says, “All right, you got me. I haven’t come up with anything yet. I came here to browse the archives and get some ideas.”
“That sounds like something Alexander can help you with,” I tell her pointedly.
“Alexander is annoying.”
I can’t disagree.
“Hey, are you busy?” she ventures.
“Yes! Very!” I sweep a clawed hand toward the shelf containing my copy queue. “Now I’m going to have to insist that you leave. This area is full of highly fragile documents, and patrons are not permitted in—”
“Excellent. Then you’ll show me the way to the archives?”
I cross my arms, annoyed at this woman’s attempt to distract me.
My feathers bristle underneath the loose toga I wear draped across my upper body.
Saurian culture doesn’t require clothing, but some of us choose to wear it as a sign of assimilation into human culture.
Gets itchy when my feathers prick up, though.
“Fine,” I say. “I’ll escort you downstairs. Then I really must get back to work.”