Chapter 3
Chapter
Three
MINERVA
We’re silent for a few minutes. Claudia busies herself with repacking the donation crates, taking care to rewrap everything in rags.
When that’s done, she finds a spot of bare wall to lean against, her knees up to her chest. I fold myself into a roost, needing the comfort.
It’s getting harder to ignore my surroundings now that I don’t have the task of looking through the crates to focus on.
“Hey,” Claudia says. “Are you well? You seem…uncomfortable.”
“Obviously, this cupboard isn’t where I intended to spend the rest of my day,” I say acidly.
“No, it’s more than that.” She gives me a considering look. “You really freaked out when the door locked behind us. You were trying to bust it down with your bare claws.”
I shuffle my arm feathers, looking anywhere but into her eyes. “I don’t like enclosed spaces.”
“But you were needling me about being afraid of the dark?” Claudia lifts an eyebrow, her smile telling me it’s a gentle tease.
“You were right, by the way. I may be a big, strong, brave adventurer, but I can’t stand having four walls and a ceiling separating me from the sky.
Makes me want to break down the door, too. ”
Trailing one claw through the crack in the floor stones, I say, “Many of my people have a deep hatred of being caged. I’ve gotten comfortable living inside human buildings, but it’s the locked door that terrifies me.
It’s like…” The words bubble out before I can stop them.
“It reminds me of a time when I was a child. My siblings locked me in a farmer’s vegetable cellar.
I was there for days before someone found me. ”
Claudia’s jaw drops. “Minerva…”
I turn my head away from her. If there’s one thing I can’t stand, it’s being pitied.
But turning away from the light toward the locked door makes my muscles tense up. Reluctantly, I turn back.
Claudia’s not even looking at me. She’s examining her left hand, holding it up to the light. “Wanna know how I got this scar?”
“Was it embarrassing?”
“Totally,” she says, flashing a grin. “You see, there was this beach covered in razor-sharp shells, and three hapless explorers who didn’t see the spinosaurus fishing around the bend until it was too late…”
Claudia launches into recounting a series of mishaps.
One story blends into another. The cave coral dims low, so I sprinkle it with another helping of dried bugs.
Claudia hesitates, but I urge her to keep going.
Her adventures with her colleagues Cassian and Eudora are riveting, and she has an impeccable sense of comedic timing. Before I know it, we’re both laughing.
“I can’t believe you thought you needed inspiration for your thirty-year art presentation,” I say.
“Just write down some of these stories! Not only would the library be proud to display them, but I’m sure you could get the microraptors over at Balexonia Press to distribute them for the public. People love funny travel memoirs.”
But Claudia shakes her head, fiddling with the end of her braid. “I don’t know. I don’t have much of a filter when it comes to my stories. What if people think they’re too vulgar?”
I sit up on my haunches. “Most people? They’ll love that.”
“Not my family.” Claudia swallows hard. “For my twenty, I wrote an erotic poem for a woman I was infatuated with at the time, and my parents…they didn’t like it.
They said I was crass and an embarrassment.
They complained that their friends in Rume society were talking about how they hadn’t raised me as a proper lady.
So…” She lets out a long, heartfelt sigh.
“I left. Started picking up mercenary work in different towns and never went back. Rume didn’t want me as I was, but I couldn’t change for them. ”
Now it makes sense why she didn’t seem interested in presenting her thirty-year project to her township first. “Family,” I mutter. “Always our worst critic.”
“Tell me about it.” Claudia sighs again. “You didn’t see any wine in those crates? I don’t usually talk about this sober.”
“I don’t talk about my family at all,” I say, examining my foreclaws.
“But if it makes you feel better…” My breath comes short.
I can’t believe I’m about to tell this story to another sentient being.
“I used to love taking long hunting trips in the forest. Deer and rabbits, of course,” I add hastily, “not humans. Anyway, remember my awful siblings who locked me in the cellar? They were my half-siblings, in truth. Mother had me much later. I came from a different mating than the one that produced their clutch. They didn’t see me as a real nestmate, only as a competitor for Mother’s time.
They killed the rest of my clutch in their eggs, but I survived because my egg rolled underneath the hay.
” Deep breath in. Out. “One day, when I went hunting, my siblings followed me. They attacked. I only escaped because a tyrannosaur heard the commotion and came looking for an easy kill. We all ran, them in one direction, me in another. I never stopped running until I made it to the city. I was barely out of my adolescence.”
Even my fellow librarians have no idea. I never told them that I lived in the temple poorhouse for weeks, shunned by humans and herbivores alike, until my daily wanderings took me into the library.
I remember how enchanted I was by the peaceful gardens out front, the glimmering glass windows of the reading room.
I remember thinking, My family will never look for me here.
By the following week, I’d talked myself into my first job running errands and reshelving manuscripts.
“Smart move,” Claudia says, when I pause for breath.
“You’re probably right. Boneheads like your siblings would never be caught dead in this place.
Even if they did attack you here, lawkeeping is a lot more strict in the city than in rural townships.
If they think putting you in the cellar was torture, imagine how they’ll like prison. ”
“I’m sorry,” I mumble. Now that I’ve blabbed everything, shame washes over me in sickening waves. “I shouldn’t have dumped all that. I don’t know why I—”
“I started it,” Claudia says ruefully. “Hey. Minerva. Look at me.”
She scoots closer, reaching out a hand to touch my arm lightly. It’s just a bare brush of fingers against feathers, but the tingling spreads through my whole body.
“Bad shit happens to people.” Claudia’s gazing into my eyes now, nose inches from the tip of my snout.
“To me, to you, to everybody. I promise, this doesn’t make me think less of you.
The opposite, in fact. You’re a survivor.
A fighter, except your weapon is knowledge.
” Her smile is slightly crooked. “Me, I just use regular old knives and crossbows.”
I let her hand run down the length of my arm to take hold of my clawed one. “Don’t let your small-minded township stop you from writing,” I say. Even a whisper feels loud in this intimate space between us.
She leans closer. I breathe in her scent, heart pounding…
And then the door flies open, letting in a rush of cool air. Claudia jerks backward. I surge to my feet, nostrils flaring in a relieved gasp.
“What is this?” Alexander brandishes the HELP note, badly smudged from being shoved under the door. “What were you doing in here, Min—oh, gods, is that a patron?” He narrows his eyes at Claudia. “Hang on, you were the one who disappeared on me earlier. Were you two—”
“Kissing,” says Claudia breezily.
I gasp my outrage. “We were not. I was trying to show her where the coral food was, and my tail—”
“Oh, don’t be shy, sweetheart.” Claudia runs a hand across the downy feathers on my cheek. I shiver.
“She’s joking,” I tell Alexander sternly. “Do not believe a word she says.”
He gives me a suspicious look. “Well, escort her out,” he says. “Sundown is in twenty minutes, and we’re about to start clearing the stacks.”
I chuff through my nostrils, prickling all over with embarrassment and something else. Something uncomfortably like arousal.
Maybe half of why I’m so indignant about Claudia’s lie is that I wish it weren’t one.
CLAUDIA
Staring at the wooden beams of an unfamiliar ceiling that night, listening to the murmur of voices through the inn walls, I can’t stop thinking about Minerva.
She’s got the most gorgeous feather patterning I’ve ever seen—sapphire blue streaked with reds and greens. And those eyes, greener than the shallow sea, sharp and perceptive, and the way she watched me when she thought I wasn’t paying attention…
That’s a lady who begs to be teased. Whose outrage sparks like desire, whose annoyance feels like flirtation. I always did pine for the princess type, and she’s not just a princess, she’s a queen. The way I’d worship her, if she’d let me…
Restless and horny, I toss my covers off and reach for the cup of water on the nightstand.
Then I change my mind and pull my pack toward me.
I rummage to find the oilcloth-wrapped wooden box containing my precious letter-writing supplies: wood-pulp paper and charcoals.
An expensive luxury on the road, but it was the only way I had left to connect with my brother.
He’d been my only supporter during that last, awful fight with my parents.
They may have been embarrassed by my earthy humor and lack of verbal filter, but Demetrius loved my poetry.
Even after he wed a sweet local girl who may as well have been tailored for him at a shop called Appease-Your-Parents Bespoke Marriage Prospects, he never stopped sending me letters and eagerly encouraging me to write back.
It’s already been weeks since my last missive. I owe him another, but it’s with a wider audience in mind that I flatten out a sheet of paper on the wobbly nightstand. I whittle my charcoal pencil to a fine point, pull the candle closer, and begin to write.
MINERVA
The door of my scriptorium slamming open startles me enough to dash a catastrophic blot across the page I’ve just spent fifteen minutes transcribing. I whirl toward the intruder, a threat to bite Alexander’s head off on the tip of my tongue, but it’s not the junior librarian. It’s Claudia.
My heart misses a step and tumbles down my ribcage.
“Look at this!” She’s grinning ear to ear, brandishing a sheaf of the kind of flimsy paper people use for pigeon messages. Her fingers are smudged up to the first knuckle in charcoal dust. There’s a smear of the stuff across her cheek.
“Might I remind you that patrons are still not allowed in this room?” I say waspishly.
Claudia ignores me. “I wrote the full story of my encounter with the spinosaurus on the beach. And as I was writing, I thought of at least three more stories I could write down. I just imagined I was telling them to my brother, or to you, and the words wouldn’t stop coming!
Talking it through yesterday made it all make sense.
I’ve always loved writing. Cassian and Eudora and my brother tell me I’m good at it.
I can’t believe I let my parents get in my head for so long.
Who cares if they think I’m embarrassing?
I’m going to write a travel memoir so juicy that they’ll never be able to show their faces in town again. ”
I can’t stay annoyed when her brown eyes sparkle this way. “And to think, you found all that inspiration in a closet full of dead worms.”
“Don’t forget the crystal phallus,” says Claudia mischievously. “I found that item very inspirational.”
My feathers prickle. I shake myself, trying to convince them to lay flat again. “Does this mean you’ll be staying at the Great Library for awhile yet?”
Claudia shuffles her papers, her small flat teeth denting her lower lip.
“Actually, I was hoping to ask a favor. My penmanship isn’t so great.
” She shows me her charcoal scribbles. It’s not the worst handwriting I’ve ever seen—local officials whose job it is to record important documents seem to love writing in barely decipherable scrawl—but it doesn’t even approach aesthetically pleasing.
“I noticed your lovely script yesterday. Do you think you could teach me some of your tricks? When I bind this all together into a book, I want it to look nice.”
I’m alarmed at how quickly I want to say yes. My copy queue grows by the day. Burning any amount of daylight on tutoring a patron’s penmanship would have sounded like an egregious waste of my time yesterday morning.
But then I spent hours in a closet with this woman. Somehow, her stories, her scent, her eyes, and her laugh have overridden all reason. She occupies my mind as thoroughly as crumbling historical texts usually do.
“Meet me in the reading room one hour before sunset,” I tell her.
She grins, and my heart stutters again.