Chapter 4
The Astral Library. The words echoed around the inside of my head as I stood there, heart thudding like a cannon. Smart-ass Alix Watson for once utterly speechless as I looked at the woman in the cardigan.
“Um,” I finally managed to say. Brilliant.
All the words at my disposal, and the best I could manage was um.
“Um,” I said again, like a moron. “Astral Library? Astral Library. Okay. Gotcha.” I blinked, feeling a smile starting to break over my face.
A dazed, blitzed, utterly ecstatic grin. “Who are you, exactly?”
“I’m the Librarian.” Her voice implied a capital L.
“Obviously.” Her appearance only included every single librarian cliché in the book. “Is that a title here, or a calling?”
She shrugged. “I’ve been petitioning the Library Board to change it to Book Dragon for a hundred years or so. Maybe in another hundred they’ll get around to a vote.”
Ageless guardian of magical space; got it. “All right, let’s hear it,” I said, suddenly dizzy with delight. I nearly bounced on my toes in my eagerness. “Monologue time!”
She stared at me over her rectangular spectacles. “Excuse me?”
“This is where you lay it all out, right? The world, the mission, what I’m supposed to do. Is there a quest?” Now that the words had started, I couldn’t stop them pouring. “Do I get to be a queen? Are there dragons? Please tell me there are dragons—”
“Oh, shut up,” said the Librarian.
I snapped my mouth shut with an effort. I really wanted to know if there would be dragons. I’d been reading a lot of Rebecca Yarros lately.
The Librarian pushed her glasses farther up her nose. “Are you under the impression that this is your world, and I’m some sort of wise mentor figure?”
“Um,” I said again. I’d dated an aspiring screenwriter once, not one of my better choices—the entire six months we were together I hadn’t been able to watch a single movie without him pausing nearly frame by frame to mansplain the story beats, no matter how many times I tried to tell him that I just wanted to watch the damn film straight through for once.
He broke up with me to head to Hollywood with his Matrix knock-off script, but he did leave me with an excellent understanding of the Hero’s Journey.
And yes, this was the point when the wise mentor figure (Obi-Wan, Aslan, Glinda) shows up to shepherd the hero onto their path. So— “Aren’t you?” I managed to ask.
“For gods’ sake,” the Librarian muttered, and marched straight around me and down the stairs.
I hesitated a moment and then plunged after her, feeling a lot more like a lost duckling than a hero.
“I’m not anybody’s wise old mentor, least of all yours,” she called back over one shoulder.
“I’m not going to pat you on the head, stuff your rucksack for the road, or offer sentimental little aphorisms.”
“I wasn’t—”
“I’m not finished. Please divest yourself of the idea that you are the main event around here, Miss Watson.”
“Wait, how did you—”
“Hundreds pass through the Astral Library every year, and you are just the latest. There is no quest.”
“I can work with that,” I told her, still trying to catch up. For someone so much shorter, she moved fast.
“Kind of you,” she said dryly. Her voice was a raspy alto, with a tinge of an accent I couldn’t place. Less like she came from somewhere I didn’t know; more like she came from everywhere I didn’t know.
“Hey, I don’t mean to sound ungrateful here.
I’m in a new world. That’s enough for me.
” Tipping my head back to look at the tall green-glassed windows, nearly tripping over the last stair.
“I don’t need a quest. I don’t need to be the capital-H Hero.
I mean, isn’t it better if I’m not? Heroes tend to get killed in battles or eaten alive by magic rings.
” If I was one of hundreds who’d come through here, didn’t that up my chances for survival?
Even if she’d said no, I don’t think I’d have tried to go back. I didn’t have anything to go back to.
“How do you know my name?” I asked as she marched up to a wide oak counter tucked against one wall.
The kind where you checked out your library books, only there was no computer here to log your library card, just an old-fashioned stack of cards and stamps—and a tablet in an emerald-green case, sitting in a long-armed frame clamped to the counter’s edge.
I jumped a little as the tablet turned on its frame to look at me. “What the—”
She ignored me, plucking the tablet out of its clamps and swiping through the touch screen.
“You infernal machine,” she muttered, and it beeped spitefully at her.
“Kick her name up, I know she’s here—ah.
” She turned the tablet around, and there I was, picture and all.
For an instant I wondered if it was going to say Libby Bibb, but— “Alexandria Watson of Boston, yes?”
I swallowed. “Yes.”
“I know your name because the Astral Library invited you in—” The Librarian paused, swiping her glasses off as a sob burst out of me. “You’re not going to start blubbering every time I try to impart information, are you?”
“No,” I gulped, wiping my eyes. “The Astral Library—it invited me? Chose me?” Because the first thing that came to my mind was that small, perennially bleating voice insisting, There must be some mistake—no one chooses me.
How broken and pathetic was I, that that was the first thing that came to mind as I stood in the middle of a demonstrably magic library?
“This place chooses a great many booklovers,” the Librarian said, looking as if she knew every jumbled word going through my head. “The lost and the desperate. Is that you?”
In a goddamn nutshell. I wiped my eyes, realizing I didn’t give a crap if I wasn’t the chosen, as long as I was a chosen. I’d been invited. A door had opened. Someone had finally picked me.
I smiled, gazing down at the Librarian, who wasn’t looking too patient. “What is this place?”
Okay, I thought, now it’s monologue time.
But no. The huge brass clock on the wall chimed a mellow tone, and the Librarian glanced up at the staircase.
“Masako should be here any minute,” she murmured.
“The rundown will have to wait, Miss Watson. If you wouldn’t mind entertaining yourself for the next hour—”
“What should I do?” Because bad things tend to happen to characters in books when they go wandering off into new worlds before they learn the rules. Just ask Edmund Pevensie in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.
“You’re in a library.” The Librarian waved a hand, heading back toward the stairs. “May I suggest you read a book?”
“Fantasy section?” I called after her.
“Shelves 422 through 698,” she called without looking back.
The door at the top of the stairs opened, the same door that had admitted me, but this time I didn’t see the Boston Public Library Reading Room behind it.
This time I saw what looked like shelves of scrolls, a sliding screen, and then a woman strolled in who could have stepped right out of a scroll herself: tall, fortyish, a book tucked under one arm.
She was swathed in wafting layers of embroidered silk robes in shades of green and pink, her hair drifted to her hips in a sheet of black satin, and she addressed the Librarian in a warm flood of Japanese, bowing.
The Librarian bowed back, answering in the same language, and my God, did I have questions, but I knew I wasn’t getting answers yet.
So I browsed Shelf 533, and somehow I wasn’t surprised to see that alongside all the Song of Ice and Fire books was the next one in the series, the one that hadn’t even been published yet.
And I was in a fantasy world myself but I was still a bookworm, so what did I do?
I let out a tremendous yelp of delight, yanked the book off the shelf, and sank right down on the floor.
The book seemed to nearly sigh as I cracked the cover open, pages giving a little shimmy along their edges as I stroked them.
“I think you want me to read you,” I whispered.
The books along their shelves, the book in my lap, all gave a rustle as if to say, Of course, you silly thing.
It took another mellow chime of the huge clock to bring me out of Westeros.
I blinked, looking up to see the Japanese woman taking her book back from the Librarian, who was tapping away at her tablet.
“Renewed for another year,” the older woman was saying in English.
“Do tell Genji hello for me. He’s a darling boy even when he’s being annoying. Which he usually is.”
The two women bowed again, the Librarian reversed for the big oak counter, and I scrambled upright.
“Wait—” I called to the Japanese woman as she began to glide up the staircase in her butterfly-wing layers of silk.
Beau would have swooned over her court robes—he’d have pounced on those trailing sleeves in a heartbeat, turning them over to examine the back side of the embroidery: Oh, honey, you are nailing it.
Couching stitch or long-and-short stitch here . . . ?
The woman turned toward me, rice-powdered face serene as a moon, and I realized I had no idea if she spoke English.
The Librarian had addressed her in both languages, but was there a translation spell or something going on?
Jesus, I needed a manual. “Um. Ohayo gozaimasu,” I said, trying to remember the few words of Japanese I’d learned from a fellow coffee-shop clerk last year.
“Don’t stress, I was born in Detroit.” The Japanese woman grinned, and I saw that her teeth were black—not bad nutrition, I realized with a closer look, but because they’d been meticulously painted with some kind of cosmetic.
A little startling at first, but then I realized it was to set off her ivory-pale skin.
“Let me guess,” she went on, her flat American English at stark odds with her elegant scroll-painting appearance.
“You’ve only just come through the door? ”