Epilogue
One year later
The new Patron was going to be just fine, I could tell—she’d taken in my rundown with barely a hitch, and she already knew which book she wanted to live in.
“Phantom of the Opera,” breathed the lanky chorus singer who’d walked from a dinner theater production of Les Mis into the Astral Library via a company library of musical theater scores.
“I’ve always wanted to live in Belle Epoque Paris! ”
“You’re aware the book world won’t look exactly like the musical, right?” I asked, steering her toward the big oak counter, where the Librarian was finishing up an irritated memo to the Programmer. “For one thing, no one’s going to go around bursting into song—”
“What have we here?” My boss looked up, swiping a pencil out of her gray bun where she’d jabbed it—she looked considerably more dashing these days even in her cardigan and tweed skirt, since Beau had made her an entire wardrobe of sequined eye patches to wear over her scarred eye.
Today was the deep emerald-green eye patch, which made her look like a pirate queen if pirate queens were dressed by Galliano. “New Patron?” she rasped.
“Read in and ready,” I replied, and gave the new arrival’s arm a squeeze. “This is the Librarian.”
“I thought you were the librarian?”
“Nope, just a Page.” I’d be a Page for decades, and I was fine with that.
It took time, learning the ropes of a place like the Astral Library.
I was still barely wrapping my head around the concept, introduced last week, of the Cloud Codex (apparently that’s where the whole idea of downloading to the cloud comes from).
And don’t even get me started on the Wordsmithing Forge.
(A smithy where the muses who inspired poets and novelists actually beat metallic blocks of words out into sentences on anvils with hammers.
I work for Kate Quinn, one haggard-looking muse said, dripping sweat onto her blacksmithing apron, and that bitch runs a sweatshop.
“Kate who?” I’d asked, but the muse just went back to hammering and swearing.)
I passed the newest Patron off to the Librarian for any clarification on her new existence and marked the transfer off on my sapphire-blue tablet.
(Much less touchy and temperamental than the Librarian’s; it only changed the password on me when I used the wrong your for you’re while taking notes too fast, and really, who could blame it?) After that, I headed for the Wardrobe Department.
“You’ve got a new Patron to dress,” I called, swinging through the doors.
“She’s heading to Belle Epoque Paris circa Phantom of the Opera. ”
“I’ve got a dress at the shop inspired by Emmy Rossum’s mourning outfit from the Phantom movie.
” Beau materialized from behind a mannequin where he was draping a turn-of-the-century evening gown for another Patron set to head into a Henry James novel in two days.
“Inspired by, but more historically accurate. Less cleavage, more pleating and tucking.” He had one of his Brummell suits on, pearl-gray waistcoat and billowy-sleeved shirt and skintight trousers, and my God, was he a snack.
I was so over modern clothes that could just be yanked off in a few tugs.
All that exquisite frustration when you had nine hundred mother-of-pearl buttons to undo and period corsets to be painstakingly unlaced and intricately tied cravats to be unwound .
. . Let me tell you, it’s highly underrated.
“Come here, you.” I reached for the measuring tape around Beau’s neck, using it as a rein to draw him in for a kiss.
I wasn’t the only one who’d been offered a job around here: Beau had taken over the Astral Library Wardrobe Department.
Because these sad racks of old theater costumes are just depressing, he’d groaned, getting one look at the room where our Patrons were made over before heading into their book worlds.
Sending people off to their new lives in slapdash cotton-blend replicas?
Oh, honey, no. Besides, it feeds my soul, doing real period stuff and not just movie-costume stuff.
You wouldn’t think Beau would have time to dress the Astral Library’s Patrons, not with all the new commissions he was getting after the star of Belle landed on a dozen gushy best-dressed lists following her red-carpet walk at the premiere—but he could afford to be picky about the commissions he chose these days (not to mention hike up his prices).
And with his sewing machine and workshop now living in the Astral Library, where he commuted with me every day through the BPL Reading Room stacks, he had all the time in the world to get the historical details right when working in a room where time didn’t pass.
All the time he needed to finish a dress, pull together a historically accurate outfit for a new Patron, get a nap in, and head back to his shop, where it would still be morning and he could photograph his newest creation for social media or head to one of those glitzy events his latest few hundred thousand Instagram followers couldn’t get enough of on his feed.
I broke the kiss, gripped by a sudden clutch in my stomach—the lurking awareness that this couldn’t go on forever, this enchanted time where I had the Astral Library and the Boston Public Library, the Librarian’s world and Beau’s.
Sooner or later I’d have to start spending more and more time in this world so I could take over from the Librarian, whenever she was ready, and Beau would have to decide if he wanted Brummell’s on Newbury Street and the world he’d been born into, or the Astral Library Wardrobe Department and me.
But that decision was just a melancholy shadow on the horizon for now, so I let it go with a long, steadying breath.
“Thought I’d go to the Boston Ballet tonight,” Beau was saying, not noticing my sudden shaft of foreboding. “Opening night of Firebird, and the costumes are supposed to be out of this world, very Persian inspired. Want to come, czarina? Wear my latest?”
“If I get back from my afternoon appointment in time, yes, please.” Because his latest was a creation fit to banish any attack of the blues: a stark black skirt with a complicated cage of a bodice in sapphire-blue silk satin he’d fitted high and tight around my neck and down to my wrists, but left completely open down the back, from the nape of my neck to the base of my tailbone—all to showcase the line of iridescent blue that had started coming in down the line of my spine.
Most people thought it was some kind of bedazzled tattoo when they saw it, but it wasn’t. It was scales.
“Your dragon form’s coming in,” the Librarian had said matter-of-factly when I pulled up my hair to show her the sapphire flash at my nape.
“Don’t get too excited, you won’t be able to full-form shift for at least another eighty years—” But, hell yes, I was excited.
Eight-year-old me wanted to jump on a dragon’s back and fly, fly, fly.
Grown-up me was going to do the flying herself.
I gave Beau another lingering kiss and swung out of the Wardrobe Department, stashing my blue tablet at the long oak counter and running a fingertip over the bumper sticker, which the Librarian had, to my surprise, allowed to remain stuck to the front like a proud-flying flag.
My mom’s bumper sticker finally finding its home, just like me.
She wasn’t ever going to see it, and I didn’t think she was ever going to see me either.
I’d done a lot of quiet thinking over the last year, wondering if I should try to make contact with her out in San Diego .
. . I’d decided no. Maybe someday I’d feel differently, but right now I thought I’d leave her to her Etsy shop and the family she’d picked over me. Her loss, not mine.
Though I thought I’d keep a long-distance eye on my little half sister, just in case Mom ever decided to walk out on her too. If that happened, she wasn’t going into foster care like I had.
Dennis flew at me as I turned toward the library door, brandishing his latest book angrily.
“Yes, Dennis, I know Fourth Wing ends on a cliff-hanger. Let me get you the sequel.” Dennis fluttered along agitatedly behind me as I went to the shelves; Iron Flame flew down to my hand as soon as I raised it, and I concealed a grin as I passed the book over.
I’d persuaded Dennis to give Tolstoy a rest, and now he was plowing through all my favorite fantasy series.
(You should have heard the spectral gasping and muttering when he hit the spicy bits.) At this rate Dennis was never going to get back to War and Peace, much less finish off his Tbr stack and ascend to wherever it is ghosts ascend.
But, maybe that was just fine. Some people would rather spend eternity reading than go to heaven anyway.
I’d gotten to know all the library ghosts by now, the more reticent ones who didn’t corporealize: Ethel, who was trying to catch up on all the Reese Witherspoon Book Club picks; Sajidah, who had just gotten into sci-fi and was plowing through Ursula K. Le Guin . . .
I left the Library and hopped the T out to the Boston suburbs for my afternoon appointment.
I’d been hoping the Librarian would take it on, but she’d thrown the ball back into my lap: Your proposal, she’d said, you spearhead it.
Besides, I’ve got my hands full restructuring the Library Board.
All the old members who had come to the annual meeting had been summarily fired (one or two just fled), and she was in the process of restructuring the bylaws to make sure the Library was protected, not just from external dangers but from internal bureaucracy .
. . But that left me alone with my proposed new plan, which made me equal parts proud and terrified.
“You said you were from a library initiative of some kind?” The ponytailed woman who let me into her home office had a keen gaze behind glasses with blue-green frames. “What’s that got to do with my books?”
“I love the whole series,” I couldn’t help saying.
The Five Queendoms by G. R. Macallister: one of my favorite fantasy worlds with its ruthless sorceresses, its resourceful queens, its warrior women, and its world of magic rites and desert sands—a world I’d have loved to visit, but it wasn’t in the public domain, because G.
R. Macallister herself was alive and standing right in front of me.
Hence the new program I’d proposed to the Librarian. Can’t we get around copyright issues if we have legal permission from the author to utilize their books as living worlds for our Patrons?
I had Zoom calls next week with Eloisa James, Julia Quinn, and a whole slew of historical romance authors, because hist-rom provided just the kind of prettied-up world (low on the violence and bad dental hygiene, heavy on the royal balls and handsome men) that I could imagine hundreds of readers wanting to escape into.
And I’d emailed the C. S. Lewis estate, heart in my throat, asking for a meeting.
They hadn’t answered yet . . . but might I one day get permission to walk through a door and see a lamppost gleaming in the middle of a snow-hung forest?
Might I one day walk the deck of the gilt-prowed Dawn Treader, where the waves rolled sweet all the way to the utter East?
I hoped so.
But for today, I had my first face-to-face presentation to get through.
“What if I told you,” I said to the wordsmith in front of me, “that you could visit the world you write about? If readers who loved it could visit it . . . or even live in it?”
I expected skepticism. I expected laughter, derision, outright disbelief.
But writers are a different breed, aren’t they?
Their heads are already off in the clouds, those clouds I saw drifting past the Astral Library’s green windows every day, sweeping in words from distant winds and collecting stories from all corners of the earth and raining them down gently into the parchment sea.
Writers already know the sound of those winds bringing them stories.
Writers already know about far-off worlds lying just a tornado ride or a wardrobe door away from our own.
G. R. Macallister’s eyes gleamed, and I knew she was seeing the world she’d written: its citadels piled with scrolls, its bone-beds and arcane sacrifices, its matriarchal women who dueled and clawed and fought to make their own fates.
I couldn’t wait to lead her there, and I felt sure I’d get the chance because that gleam in her eye told me she was ripe for the invitation—the invitation every bookworm child wants to hear when they devour stories and get lost in library stacks, when they dream of sailing the length of an endless bookshelf on a library ladder like Belle.
I smiled and asked, “Have you ever wanted to live inside a book?”