Chapter 23
I guess I’d been expecting to hear something poetic or heroic or moving when the Librarian finally opened her eyes and rejoined the land of the living, but the first words out of her mouth were “Where the hell am I?”
“You’re back!” I shrieked, almost dropping the tea tray I’d just maneuvered through the door.
“Don’t you dare drop my Darjeeling,” she said ominously, regarding me one-eyed around the bandage that still crossed her forehead.
It looked even odder now because she’d morphed out of the slumbering human form I’d left her in: the sight that currently greeted me was that of a green-scaled dragon in a head bandage lounging across an oversize four-poster bed, tail lashing crossly, claws flexing across the sheets as she stretched her long neck from side to side.
Somehow she wasn’t too big for the bed, or else the bed and the entire room around it had grown to accommodate her scaly form.
On the other hand it was a very large, very grand room.
“Where am I?” she asked, looking around at the damask-hung walls, the Savonnerie carpets, the marble-topped washstand, and the antique writing desk.
“Downton Abbey,” I said, setting the tea tray down on a satinwood occasional table. “Specifically, Downton Abbey: Mysteries of the Manor. Did you know the show got a video game?”
The dragon stared at me.
“The Programmer hid you in a game to recuperate while we sorted out the Library Board. You started out in Skyrim, but once the danger was past I thought you might like something a little more luxe than the Temple of Kynareth in Whiterun.” No offense to the Temple of Kynareth, which was a perfectly nice wooden-timbered place staffed by a very helpful priestess and acolyte who kept dosing the Librarian with healing potions when they weren’t tending their altar and trying to get me to go on a quest to heal the dying Gildergreen tree.
But the flagged stone floors were arctic, the local wind god kept sending regular blasts through the drafty hall, and all in all I wanted to tuck the Librarian under something a little warmer than a few wolfskin blankets while she recovered from her coma.
“So I asked the Programmer if he had anything a bit more comfortable,” I went on, “and here we are.” In a first-person puzzle game set at the most famous fictional English country house ever to grace the TV screens of Anglophiles everywhere.
“I’ve visited the Programmer’s games before,” the Librarian said, eyeing the outfit the Astral Library had given me when I popped through the encrypted VPN tunnel to check on her.
(Early 1920s afternoon dress in crushed rose-pink velvet topped by hip-length loops of pearl beads—I fit right in around here.) “Are we going to get subsumed into some kind of side quest?”
“No, the main game leaves us pretty much alone. Downton Abbey has been ransacked by an intruder and gamers are trying to restore the stolen objects and find the culprit, but we’re at the top of the house, out of the main areas of play.
” I’d gotten used to the feel of being inside a game, which was very different from being in a book or a painting.
The world around me had a slightly flatter, more two-dimensional feel, and objects sometimes visually popped at me as if they were urging me to start collecting them and join the scavenger hunt—a sort of Quest starts here!
nudge from the world around me. And the conversations tended to happen on repeat with the NPCs (non-player characters, as I now knew to call them).
“Every time I come through, Carson the butler stops to ask if I want a bite to eat sent up to the room, and I say yes, and he has the same line about these sad days we find ourselves in, what is the world coming to, and later Anna the lady’s maid brings up the same cream scones, raspberry jam, watercress sandwiches, and Victoria sponge.
But it’s delicious. Let me tell you, you haven’t lived until you’ve eaten Victoria sponge in actual Downton Abbey. ”
I’d told the Programmer as much after my first few visits, and he grinned and said I really needed to get into gaming. Downton Abbey’s only the start. You want a fantasy world, longships and castles and gryphons flying overhead? I can hook you up with that.
But that was for later. Right now there was the Librarian, actually awake and glaring at me, and oh, how I’d missed her glare.
“Why did you shift back to dragon form?” I asked, pouring out a cup of tea and doctoring it up with two sugars, just the way I’d seen her take it back in the Library.
“I thought it took a lot out of you to change form, and you should be conserving your strength.” No matter how much absurdist delight it gave me: the sight of a green-scaled dragon lounging in an English Stately Home among the hunting prints and Minton china, the end of her twitching tail rattling the fire irons.
“I didn’t know if I’d be waking up straight into some kind of battle.
” The Librarian flexed her injured wing out to the side, careful not to smash out the window on the other end of the room, then delicately peeled off her eye bandage with one claw.
“Wing’s better, but the eye’s still not good for much.
Might take a few decades to heal fully. How long have I been out of action? ”
“It’s been just over a week since I had you moved here.” I perched on the edge of the bed, passing over her Darjeeling and proceeding to fill her in on everything. She listened unblinking, claws folded around her teacup and saucer, one eye still painfully sealed closed, the other long and golden.
“Hmmm,” she said at last. “I owe you a thank-you for taking on my duties in a time of crisis, Miss Watson. You did very well indeed.”
“I’m not sure how much I was really needed,” I confessed, unable to stop myself flushing. How much I’d wanted her approval, and here I was downplaying everything now that I’d gotten it. Because really, what had I done for the Library in the end? “It defended itself.”
“It’s not always aware when it needs to do that. Hence the need for a Librarian.”
“Well, I’m happy to pass that title back to you once you’re feeling fit.
I was only ever granted Acting Librarian status, anyway.
” I slid her green tablet across the counterpane, then hesitated a moment.
“The Library Board . . . do you think they’ll be back to cause more trouble?
” Because if I knew anything about bureaucracy, it was just how hard it was to win against it.
Throw a Board president out the window, they’d just come back with another president and a new bylaw.
The Librarian made another hmmmm sound deeper in her throat, closer to a growl.
“Perhaps. But not, I am guessing, for a very long time. And when they do try to make a run at me again with a meeting memorandum, I shall be more prepared. I have been”—and here her claws flexed against the sheets ever so slightly—“a bit head-in-the-sand about it all.”
I wanted to ask her how she’d let it get so far. Why she hadn’t taken them on earlier. But I couldn’t figure out how to phrase it so it wasn’t an accusation. She answered me anyway, clearly reading my thoughts.
“I did try to take them on, in the early days. They kept boxing me out. And they were all so ridiculous, with their quarterly reports and their stamps and their fussy bureaucracy, it felt impossible to take them seriously. So I left those odious drones to their asinine meetings and assumed they’d leave me to do the real work.
” She prodded painfully at her scarred eye.
“Appropriate, perhaps, to be nearly blinded when I was clearly already blind.”
“Never underestimate bureaucrats,” I said with about as much feeling as I’d ever said anything in my life. “Just because they’re odious drones doesn’t mean they can’t also be evil bastards.”
Another growl from her, this one sending smoke curling up from her snout.
She wanted to know about the Patrons then, and I was able to reassure her that Larry and Masako and Elaine (bless her fangs) and all the rest of them had been restored to their chosen books.
I’d enlisted the capable Sarah to help me escort everyone home, waving her off last of all back into Sherlock Holmes’s London.
I was going back next Tuesday (her time) to meet her for lunch at the Langham hotel.
A knock on the door—Anna, right on schedule with the scones.
“Fresh out of the oven, miss,” she said just as she always did, and then deviated from script by peering around my shoulder to where the Librarian’s green-scaled tail was just visible, coiled around the bedpost. “Is the dragon awake yet?” she asked, sounding interested.
“Um. You can see the dragon?”
“Of course I can see the dragon,” said Anna. “I’m guessing a hack import from Skyrim?”
“You know about video games?” I couldn’t help asking.
“Well, I know I’m in one, but I’m not sure Mr. Carson’s quite caught on.
Gets a bit repetitive, honestly—I wouldn’t mind a visit to somewhere more exciting.
I talk to the gamers sometimes about the other games they play.
” Anna looked briefly wistful. “But at least it’s a lighter workload here, just running around helping the gamers rather than doing all the housework.
A house this size, there’s a lot of housework.
Enjoy your scones, miss—” And off she went to go assist the gameplay.
I brought the tray in, shaking my head a little, and heaped a scone in jam and clotted cream for the Librarian, who was still clearly thinking about the people I’d left behind in the Astral Library.
“What about your Mr. Sato-Jones, what’s his status?”
“Well, he’s not a book-world candidate, truth be told.
He doesn’t want to leave the world he’s in; he just really, really needs a break.
So he’s sort of been living in the Astral Library Wardrobe Department.
” He’d taken it over with his sewing machine and Newbury Street workshop supplies, at my invitation—I’d led him there, still in the book dress, after the shambles of the annual meeting and said, Time doesn’t move here—take the room over and get this dress finished the way you need to.
Beau was bringing the dress to LA soon for the final fitting before the premiere of Belle, and who knew if it was really going to fix every problem he had (the shop’s past-due rent, the loan to his dad) but it was now finished down to the last crystal bead, and he’d had all the paused time in the world to do it.
Though I’m not sure how I’m going to feel, lacing an actress into it, Beau told me two nights ago as he packed it up in its enormous box to take back to Newbury Street.
It’s always going to feel like your dress, czarina.
That moment I watched you stand there in the middle of the Library, with the books rising up behind you like wings .
. . He leaned in, dropping a kiss on the side of my neck. You looked like a Book Dragon.
Now I looked at the real Book Dragon, curled in her green scales on her four-poster bed, eating a scone and sipping from a flowered teacup balanced between her claws with incongruous delicacy.
“What’s next for you?” the Librarian asked me, her one-eyed gaze unnervingly piercing over the teacup’s rim. “Have you chosen a book to live in?”
“I don’t . . . think I want to go live in a book anymore.” I fiddled with my slice of Victoria sponge, finally putting the flowered plate down. “Do I even have a right to go to one? I mean, the Library didn’t actually choose to invite me. The Board hacked the system and put my name in.”
And to be honest that still hurt—just a little.
Maybe the Library had given me full access later, when it needed me to help deal with the Board, but I had been the only person it had on hand.
Being picked from a pool of one during a crisis isn’t the same as being chosen for yourself when there’s time for real consideration.
“Oh, Alix,” the Librarian said in her smoky voice, “what utter rot.”
I blinked. “Pardon?”
She put her teacup down, giving a full-body shake that traveled from her head to her tail tip, and at the end of the shiver she was back to her normal self—just a round little woman of seventyish years, with a gaze considerably older than that, decorously garbed in a long-sleeved linen nightgown but still giving me an exasperated, dragonish glower over the counterpane.
“The Board may have put your name in because they saw an opportunity in you. But do you think a crude hacking job like that can make the Library do anything it doesn’t want to? ”
“Um. Yes? I mean, because it worked. I got my invite that same day.”
“Because the Library saw your name, took a look at you, and chose you. You silly girl.”
“It—it did?” I wobbled.
“If it hadn’t wanted you,” she stated, “you would never have found a way in. It chose you to be a Patron, as it chose so many others. And then it chose you again as a champion, over all the others it’s ever invited over its threshold, because you were the one above all who proved you wanted to fight for it.
Oh gods,” she said at the look on my face, “please tell me you aren’t going to cry. ”
I was absolutely going to cry. I dug a starched linen handkerchief out of my period-appropriate Library-supplied handbag and blubbered for a bit as the Librarian sat there rolling her eyes and slathering more raspberry jam on her scone.
“So you don’t want to go live in Around the World in Eighty Days?” she clarified when my flushed, sodden face emerged from the handkerchief.
I shook my head, blowing my nose. When I first entered the Astral Library I’d wanted to dive headlong into a book and never come out—leave my entire disappointing world behind me forever.
Now I wasn’t so sure. I didn’t want one book world; I wanted all of them.
I didn’t want to leave my world behind either.
The regular world had the Boston Public Library Reading Room, which I was going to miss.
It also had the Boston Public Garden and the sculpture monument to Make Way for Ducklings.
And it had Beau, who had dressed me for the fight of my life and had then undressed me afterward, his fingers unpicking every single lace, tie, and button without once lifting his mouth from mine.
Leave all that behind?
But I didn’t want to leave the Astral Library behind either. Or the live books who had for a brief moment flown at my back like wings.
“Alix,” the Librarian asked me from Downton Abbey’s best guest-room four-poster, “would you like a job?”