The Lost Books

  Still smiling, Lord Patch said, “You have no idea what you’re dealing with, do you?”

  “I know enough to be sure that you shouldn’t be in there.” Alex pointed down the hallway at the library door.

  “Oh, dear boy.” Lord Patch shook his head, mock-sorrowfully.

  “Don’t dear boy me,” Alex snapped.

  Lord Patch looked Alex over from head to toe. And then he looked past Alex’s shoulder and the faintest of frown lines appeared between his invisible eyebrows.

  Alex knew what he’d seen. “Yes, I have pages now,” he said. “Lots of them. I am a librarian.”

  “So you are,” Lord Patch murmured. “So you are.” Then he gave a tiny nod, as if he’d decided something. “You can feel no personal loyalty to the queen,” Patch said in a low voice. “And I understand the library in a way that she cannot. Perhaps you might consider working for me.”

  When he thought about this offer later, Alex realized that he should have pretended to take it so he could figure out what the queen’s uncle was up to. But in the moment, all he felt was outrage. “Not likely,” he snapped. “Why would I want to work for you when I don’t like you or trust you?”

  Lord Patch’s dark eyes hardened. “You are in far more danger than you realize.”

  “Is that a threat?” Alex reached for the sword at his waist—except that he wasn’t wearing a sword, hadn’t worn a sword since he’d left home.

  Lord Patch saw the gesture and knew what it meant. “Not a threat, no,” he said, and then gave his toothless smile that had no warmth in it at all. “Not a threat from me, at any rate. A warning.” Smoothly he stepped around Alex. “Be careful, Librarian. If you can.” And with that, he strode down the hallway.

  Alex frowned, watching him go. He hadn’t told anyone about the book that had attacked him, or about the letter from Librarian Hockett. Somehow Lord Patch knew more than he did about what was really going on in the library.

  The thought rankled.

  And Patch was clearly up to something. He seemed supportive of Queen Kenneret, but what if he wasn’t really?

  Shaking his head, he went down the hallway to the library door, which was locked, of course. He went in and locked it behind him. He couldn’t worry about the queen and her uncle and politics. He had an entire unsettled library to deal with.

  As he crossed the big main room, heading to his office, his pages trailed behind him like a flock of fluttering birds. “We’ve got a lot of work to do,” he told them, setting his bunch of keys on his desk. The letter from Librarian Hockett had made him realize what his new approach to the problem of the marked books would be. Instead of trying to catalog books that were too frightened to stay organized, he would find the thing that was frightening them. He would search the library for books with the symbol on their covers. Those marked books were traps laid for an unsuspecting librarian, which he was not. He was suspecting now, that was for sure. He would pick up every book as if it were a bomb ready to go off.

  Then one of his pages delivered another letter, just a single piece of paper, but it was direly gilded.

  To: Merwyn “Alex” Farnsworth, Royal Librarian Librarian Farnsworth,

  We summon you to our presence in the gold receiving room during the third hour past noon. You will report to us your progress in organizing the books in the royal library.

  Signed,

  H.R.M. Queen Kenneret III

  Alex stared at the note, then read it again. He had three days to figure out what was going on in the library before the queen kicked him out. He didn’t have time for this. Quickly he scrawled a response.

  Can’t. Too busy.

  —A.

  “Page!” he called. One of his pages appeared at his shoulder. Alex held up the note. “Deliver this to the queen.”

  The page wafted away, bringing the note with it.

  Half an hour later, Alex was standing in a remote chamber of the library, one hacked out of the cliff, trying to figure out where a persistent humming sound was coming from. There must be a room full of music books around here somewhere, but he couldn’t find it. It wasn’t really a hum they were making. More of a low chanting sound. It was starting to get on his nerves.

  Then the page he’d sent off before reappeared and dropped the same scrap of paper on the floor at his feet.

  On the back of his note, the queen had written her response.

  Alex, that’s an order. —Q. K.

  “All right, all right,” he muttered. He would just get these music books tracked down and check them for the thing that was making them so nervously noisy—he feared one of them was marked with that mysterious symbol—and then he would go see what the queen wanted.

  Later—much later—he woke up suddenly as the door of the library slammed.

  Sitting up, he rubbed his eyes. He had fallen asleep at one of the long tables in the big main room. Books were piled all around him. The card catalogs were open, and cards were scattered everywhere. It looked random and disorganized, but he had a system for his searching for the marked books. It would look even worse before it got better.

  Had he heard the door slam? It was late. Very late. The main room was cavernous and dark, and chilly. He could almost see his breath, it was so cold. The books were silent.

  A flare of light came from the direction of the door.

  A boy about his own age, broad-shouldered and slouchy, with a clump of wavy brown hair shaved on the sides like a soldier in training, stood at the edge of the big main room looking around. He held a candelabra—four candles all lit up and burning.

  Alex shot to his feet. Candles! In his library!

  “Ah,” the other boy said, in a supercilious voice. “You, boy. I am looking for somebody called Farnsworth.”

  “Put those candles out,” Alex ordered.

  The other boy looked at the candelabra in his fist, then he reached out to set it on the nearest table—and missed.

  “Gah!” Alex cried, and leaped to stamp on the flames as the candles scattered over the floor.

  In the sudden dimness, the other boy looked hulking. Alex was nearly the same height, but the other boy was a lot bigger. Still, Alex stepped closer and poked him in the chest. “How did you get into my library?”

  A big fist seized Alex’s finger and held it. “Your library?”

  “I,” Alex gritted out, pulling his hand away, “am the royal librarian.”

  “But you’re a kid,” the boy protested.

  “Nevertheless,” Alex said. “Now, tell me how you got in here.”

  The pages were bringing light-wells, so he could see the other boy better.

  And the boy could see him. He was examining Alex, from head to foot. “You’re wearing my old coat,” he said slowly. “Kennie said I’d know Farnsworth because he had something of mine.”

  Alex opened his mouth, and then closed it again. Kennie? As in Her Royal Majesty Queen Kenneret? Who was this lout?

  “The steward gave me a key.” The boy held up a key to the library door, then shoved it into his pocket. “And Kennie gave me a note to give to you.” He held out a folded piece of paper.

  When Alex opened it, he saw the gilded crest.

  Librarian Farnsworth—

  This is the new assistant you requested. Keep him occupied and out of trouble.

  —Q. Kenneret III

  Alex crumpled the letter and tossed it over his shoulder. “You’re her brother, aren’t you?”

  “Yep,” the boy said. “You can call me Prince Charleren, or Your Highness.” He looked around the room. With a faintly worried tone in his voice, he said, “Lots of books you’ve got here.”

  “Because it’s a library,” Alex said through gritted teeth. He clenched his fists and glared at the other boy, who stared blankly back at him. Oh, the queen was good at getting what she wanted. Clearly this lout of a brother needed a babysitter, and she’d decided that she could get Alex to do it.

  Well, blast it all to pieces. She was right.
He needed the help, no matter what the source.

  The next morning, Prince Charleren was supposed to start working as Alex’s assistant.

  Alex, who had been up since before dawn, was instructing his pages to search for the charred symbol in a room full of poetry books that kept shifting from one shelf to another. He ignored the other boy as he unlocked the door and came louting into the library an hour late.

  “Try the catwalk off the fifth-level balcony,” Alex was saying to one of his pages. “Aren’t there a few doors around there that we haven’t opened yet?”

  The page fluttered as the prince approached, then flitted off to do Alex’s bidding.

  “Why’s it so cold in here?” Charleren asked.

  Alex, who was wearing his woolly hat, half-fingered gloves, a warm scarf, and the prince’s old coat, was not going to make idle chat with this idle prince. “Go make yourself useful,” he told the other boy.

  “What should I do?” Charleren asked.

  Alex glanced around the big room, looking for inspiration. “Dust. Go and dust the woodwork on the balconies.”

  “I don’t dust,” the prince said, offended.

  “Fine,” Alex said, going back to the papers on his table. He was trying to put together a map of the library so he could mark off the rooms he had searched. “Then I don’t care what you do. Just don’t talk to me while you do it.”

  With a shrug, the prince shoved his hands in his pockets and headed for the windows, scuffing straight through ten piles of carefully organized and alphabetized book cards.

  “Gah!” Alex shouted, his voice echoing in the huge room. “Stop!”

  The prince turned, messing up the cards even more. “What?”

  “Don’t move,” Alex ordered. The cards had taken him hours to organize. “Just—” He looked around. “Go sit over there.” He pointed at a chair at a long reading table.

  Lifting his big feet carefully, the prince crossed the room and slouched into a chair.

  Alex went back to work, reading over his hand-drawn map. He was starting to realize that there were sections of the library that he hadn’t even found yet. Hidden doors, he guessed. Passages behind bookcases. Maybe tunnels under the main room. The marked books—the traps—could be hiding in any of those places.

  “Starkcliffe,” the prince said, interrupting him.

  Alex looked up. The other boy had leaned back in his chair and propped his boots on the table, and was staring up at the ceiling. “What?” Alex asked.

  The prince glanced at him, then back up. “They send me to this military academy called Starkcliffe. Stark. Cliff. Can you even imagine?”

  Yes, Alex could imagine it very well. His own father had gone to school there, and had told him terrifying stories about it. “Why didn’t you run away?” he found himself asking.

  “I have,” the prince answered. “They always send me back. Our uncle doesn’t want me around until I grow out of it, whatever that means.”

  Alex felt a certain amount of sympathy for the other boy. Still, he didn’t want Charleren messing around with his books.

  “He looks at me like I’m stupid,” the prince went on. Then he added, in a quieter voice, as if he was trying to convince himself, “I’m not stupid.”

  Alex didn’t comment. From all he’d seen so far, the prince was, in fact, a royally colossal idiot. But he could do something. With his pages’ eager help, he quickly gathered the cards that the prince had disarranged. “Here,” he said, dumping them on the table before the other boy. “Put these into alphabetical order by title.” Before the prince could protest, Alex pointed toward the fifth level. “I’ll be up there trying to find a missing room. Have it done before I get back.”

  Later, after spending two hours crawling through an icy-cold tunnel that turned out to lead nowhere, Alex came back into the main room of the library to find Prince Charleren still sitting where Alex had left him, still staring at the ceiling, the cards a jumbled mess on the table before him.

  Alex felt his temper begin to fray. “So, Lump,” he said acidly. “Got a lot done while I was gone?”

  “That’s Your Highness to you,” the prince said sullenly.

  The tunnel’s icy dampness had left Alex shivering, his pages had forgotten to bring him lunch, and he’d been too busy to remember it until now. And he only had two days left. He didn’t have time for this. He glared at the other boy. “Your Lumpness, you mean,” Alex spat.

  “How dare you?” The prince got to his feet so suddenly that his chair tipped over behind him, clattering on the stone floor. “I will tell the queen about this disrespect.”

  “Go ahead,” Alex shot back. He liked feeling angry. His temper warmed him right up. “But it’s clear that she already knows that you’re useless.”

  The prince went very pale. He swallowed once, and then choked out a curse. “I’m not—not useless.”

  “Obviously you are,” Alex said, relentless. “Why else would your sister try dumping you on me?”

  “You want to see how useless I am, Librarian?” Charleren stood with his hands clenched into fists.

  “You’ve already demonstrated that,” Alex answered, pointing at the jumble of book cards still scattered on the table. “You won’t dust or sweep. You won’t help put things in order. You’ve barely even looked at the books. What are you even doing here? Hmm? Lump?”

  Prince Charleren spoke through stiff lips, as if the words were being wrenched out of him. “You—you need to be taught a lesson, and I’m the one who’s going to teach it to you.” He pointed at the door to the library. “Practice hall in ten minutes. Swords. With—with edges on them!”

  “What are you even talking about?” Alex scoffed.

  The prince glared furiously at him, but when he answered, his voice had a note of triumph. “I’m challenging you to a duel, Librarian. You’re going to regret calling me useless for the rest of your entire extremely short life!”

  14

  Queens did not run.

  Kenneret could, however, make her legs move very quickly under her woolen skirt and layers of petticoats. It looked like a glide, but it was fast.

  A courtier had burst into her office, interrupting a meeting with her team of diplomats who were working on the Greyling situation. “Your Majesty!” he gasped, bowing, and then bowing again. “His Royal Highness Prince Charleren is about to fight a duel with the royal librarian.”

  She dropped everything and hurried to the practice hall, with the steward, the puffing courtier, and three footmen trailing behind her. She didn’t like the librarian, exactly, but she didn’t want him to get hurt, either, and Charlie had been trained at Starkcliffe, after all.

  When she arrived at the practice hall, she was not at all surprised to find that half the royal court, including her uncle, was there before her. During the long, humid summers, the people of Aethel farmed, growing abundant vegetables and wheat in the kingdom’s rich dirt. During the short, bitterly cold winters, they studied the sword and other weapons. The courtiers who came to spend the winter at the palace loved duels. They were chattering with excitement. As Kenneret came up, the sword master caught her eye and gave her a nod, which she returned. She knew him well, of course. Then two courtiers, girls her own age, curtseyed and stepped aside to give her room at the front.

  Both girls, she noticed, were wearing simple woolen gowns like her own practical dress, instead of the fancily flounced lace and silk of the rest of the court.

  Kenneret smiled at them, and they smiled shyly back.

  She knew what their plain dresses meant, and it made her heart warm toward them. It meant she wasn’t alone. She had allies. Or, at the very least, people who didn’t dislike her simply because she had power and they did not.

  The practice hall was a huge room with a rear wall of hewn stone and a row of windows opposite it. Racks of weapons took up the rest of the wall space, along with padded vests, and targets, and a slate board with chalk for keeping track of the practice schedul
e.

  Her brother was doing stretching exercises, jumping up and down to loosen his muscles. From the look on his face, Kenneret could see that he was furious. But there was something else, too, something that seemed almost desperate.

  She glided—quickly—up to him. “Charlie, what is going on?”

  He hooked his arm behind his head and stretched his neck. “I’m going to poke a lot of holes in the royal librarian, that’s what.”

  “Why?” she demanded. “What did he do?”

  “He insulted me,” Charlie answered.

  Well, that she could believe. “But you can’t kill him for it,” she protested.

  “Yes, I can,” he said, and suddenly his voice sounded miserable. Something was going on.

  “Practice swords,” she said gently.

  Charlie swung around to face her. For a moment she thought he was going to protest, and then he nodded. “All right.” He started unbuttoning his coat.

  Kenneret glanced across the room to where the librarian was standing by himself, arms crossed, looking annoyed. And also unlikely to withstand Charlie’s assault for very long. She saw one of the weapons masters offer him a selection of practice swords; he shrugged and picked one, almost at random.

  “Try not to hurt him too badly,” she said to her brother.

  He gave her a sudden, rather wolfish grin. “I’ll try.” He held out his coat, and she took it; then, before he could pull away, she grasped his hand.

  Turning her brother’s big hand in her own, while he stood looking down at her, she traced the fine white scars on the backs of his knuckles. “Charlie,” she said softly, realizing that the fight might not be as unbalanced as she expected, “the librarian has scars like this on his hands.”

  “From training with the sword?” he asked, tugging his hand away. Then he snorted. “I doubt it. They’re probably from paper cuts.”

  The sword master was approaching with a selection of practice blades.

  “Well, be careful,” Kenneret advised.

  Charlie gave her an exasperated look. “Kennie, that is not what you say to somebody about to fight a duel.”

  It was practice swords, after all, and not edged steel. “Fight well, then,” she told him, and he carefully chose a practice sword, then went to meet the librarian in the center of the room.