Chapter Forty-Six Polly
When she first entered the library, Polly felt as though the walls were watching her.
They had passed a bored policeman at the front, checking Artisan brands with a cursory glance at each person’s wrist, then shuffled through revolving glass doors into the foyer.
The library was brimming with visitors, many of them Scribblers, but other scholars, too.
Some seemed to have come to view Tanner’s architecture.
They stood with guides and gawked at the ceiling fresco, the statues, the passages from the Book of Belavere etched into the stone.
Polly and Theo didn’t stop to admire these things with the rest. They walked on at a forced casual pace into the maze of stacks. Hundreds of thousands of books looming down over them.
“Well,” said Theo, looking overwhelmed at the collection. “Where should we start?”
“Fiction,” Polly said immediately. “Fantasy and mythology. Anything pertaining to Crafter folklore will be there.”
Off they went, arm in arm. The shelves towering into the vaulted ceiling, great ladders rolling of their own accord with Artisans atop them. Balls of fire Charmer light floated without candelabra or sconce.
The fantasy and mythology collection, Polly knew, was extensive.
It seemed to go on for row after row. They would lose an hour just searching for the cypher.
Polly only remembered the color of the spine and the shape of the lettering.
She let her eyes skim off the titles as they walked, as though simply perusing at her leisure.
Polly heard her name in every whisper, felt every pair of eyes on the back of her neck, and prepared her body to bolt.
But the half hour depressed and no one approached.
Theo left to reassure Patrick, then returned.
The Artisans whispered their idle gossip.
The Scribblers carried out their work peacefully.
Their eyes passed over her and Theo just as they would any other.
She remembered she wasn’t a fugitive in the way Nina and Patrick were, only something discarded by the House.
These Artisans might pass straight through her.
Not a single one knew or cared for her name.
Finally, in the last row, the spine of the cypher leaned, waiting for her, against a book titled Mr. Kipper’s Clumsy Canary. The cypher looked ludicrously oversize among a set of books for children.
She lurched forward and pulled it out on an exhale. “Here.” She smiled, looking down at it. It bore no title. In the corner were initials—her grandfather’s. “This is it.”
Theo, too, seemed relieved. He had grown pale again, his hand clutching his side.
With the Stewards’ book and her notes tucked into her coat, they found a table and lamp in a small study corner between classical poetry and music.
She set out her things just like any other scholar—binding, parchment, and no quill or inkwell, of course.
Polly even nodded politely to a few passing Artisans as she set down the cypher and sat.
“Top of the hour,” Theo mumbled to her after a while. “I’ll be back in a moment.” He left, winding into the shelves.
Polly looked up at the ceiling fresco and sighed outwardly, flexing her fingers.
The idium left in her throbbed like an overused muscle, the way it did just before another dose was due.
She felt a thrill of disquiet at that—that after this, no more idium would run through her.
She would use these final dregs to complete the translation, buy her ticket out of the Trench, and start anew on some continent that didn’t harvest magic from the ground and consume it.
She’d be no different, then, from any other.
Polly smiled wanly. A trade worth making, she thought. If it meant she could go where she pleased without her blood pounding in her ears, without looking over her shoulder wherever she went. To be without fear, there was nothing she wouldn’t sell.