MURMURED UNDER THE MOON
by Tim Pratt
Emily Yuan, the mortal head of Rare and Sentient Special Collections at the fairy library, took a different route to work every day. Some mornings she left her house in Oakland, walked along the sidewalk, turned a corner, and found herself stepping into her office in that other realm. Other days she strolled down to the shores of Lake Merritt, where a mystic fog on the water would part to reveal a small, jewel-encrusted boat—a fairy ferry, her friend and coworker CeCe joked—for her to ride across strange liminal waters to the island that housed the library. One morning she’d opened her shower curtain and found, instead of the bathtub, the library’s front desk. That had been embarrassing, and she’d asked the facilities department to tweak the commute spell.
The morning the library was invaded and sacked, the weather was all gloomy, rainy October, so she opted for a strictly indoor commute after finishing her toast and jam. “Did you want to come in with me?” she asked her girlfriend, Llyfyr.
Llyfyr had green skin and wore a gown of living leaves that morning; she smelled like a forest after rain. She lifted her head from the kitchen table and blinked at Emily. “I read too much poetry last night. I’m still drunk. I think I’ll just linger here. There’s a volume of Goldbarth in the living room I haven’t read yet. Hair of the dog.” Her head dropped back down.
Emily kissed Llyfyr on the crown of her head and said, “See you later.” Emily had discovered Llyfyr in the deep stacks of the library when she first got hired, two years before, and they’d both been smitten straightaway. No one loved books like a librarian. Once Emily got used to the strangeness of dating a shape-shifting living book, they’d settled into a relationship of lazy weekends and quiet evenings and enjoyably active nights. In book form, Llyfyr was a fantasy love story, which made her whimsical and romantic; Emily was one of the only people who’d ever read her cover to cover. As a living book, Llyfyr called the fairy library home, but she had the autonomy to check herself out whenever she liked, and often stayed over with Emily in the mortal world.
Time to get to work. Any door would do. Emily picked up her bag and walked to the nearest closet, directed her mind toward the day’s tasks—helping researchers, continuing to catalogue the depths of the rare book archive, shepherding along the digital conversion and preservation projects—and opened the door.
She’d wanted to walk straight into her office, but instead she stepped into the outdoors, at the base of the stone steps that switchbacked up to the library from the dock. She frowned, but fairy magic was unreliable by nature, and at least it wasn’t raining here in the fey realm. The morning was cool and partly cloudy, as usual, and glittering waters surrounded the rocky island as far as her human eyes could see. She started up the stairs—I could probably use the exercise—and halfway up became aware of a commotion.
When she reached the top of the stairs, she saw a crowd of three dozen people milling around on the steps in front of the stately stone vastness of the fairy library. The immense carved wooden doors were closed, as usual—they only opened when one of the rare giant patrons visited—but the smaller inset doors were closed too, and that was decidedly unusual. Even more unusual: a pair of tall, slender guards wearing gilded armor stood blocking the doors, holding spears with nasty-looking complex barbs on the ends. The guards looked more bored than menacing, but something very serious must be going on. The library was full of valuables and had its own security in the form of the formidable Miss Ratchet and her hounds, but Emily had never seen soldiers like these before.
Two of the Folk—they preferred that name to “fairies,” as a rule, though they also responded well to any kind of compliment—hurried toward Emily. They were frequent researchers engaged in long and bewildering scholarly projects, and quite familiar to her. Mr. Ovo was an immense smooth white egg with arms and legs, dressed in trousers and a waistcoat, and the Kenning was an anthropomorphic metaphor who looked like a crow-headed undertaker today. The Kenning squawked and Mr. Ovo signed too rapidly for her to follow—the only words Emily picked up were “outrage” and “theft”—but fortunately, her assistant Faylinn came over too.
Faylinn was an ancient fairy woman with the upright mien of a Victorian governess, her eyes featureless spheres the color of quicksilver. After some initial resistance to having a mortal boss, she’d become devoted to Emily, mostly because Emily had started a scanning project that allowed researchers to examine the contents of rare books on computer screens instead of touching the beloved volumes with their filthy hands. She wrung her long, ink-stained hands. “Emily, something terrible has happened. We’ve all been barred from the library—and look!” She pointed, and Emily lifted her eyes to see winged fairies the size of children streaming out of the sides of the crystal dome atop the library—she hadn’t even realized there were windows that opened up there. Each fairy carried a small cargo net full of—
“Where are they taking the books?” she gasped.
“No one knows!” Faylinn said. “I thought it was theft at first, and I cast a summoning to call Miss Ratchet, but when she appeared, she told me the library was closed and the resources were being reallocated on the orders of Mellifera.”
“That—what—that doesn’t make any sense. Wait.” Emily took her phone from her bag. There was no cell service here—they weren’t even in the mortal world, though she’d never seen any of the fey realm beyond this island—but she could always reach Mellifera, the fairy woman who’d hired her and had ultimate authority over the library. Emily poked at the honeybee icon on her screen . . . but instead of connecting her to Mellifera, the bee flew off the side of her screen and vanished.
That was troubling. Emily marched up the steps to the guards and poked one in the chest plate. He looked at her and frowned, his long, narrow face transforming from bored beauty to cruel sneer. “Begone, mortal. Your kind has no place here.”
“Mellifera hired me personally to oversee the most valuable part of the library—”
“There is no more library. Just a building that will soon be empty of books. Be gone.” He grabbed her shoulder, spun her around, and shoved her—
—and she stumbled out of her closet, into the hallway in her apartment. Her phone buzzed with a text from her former roommate and current best friend, CeCe. Emily had hired CeCe to help modernize the library, and CeCe had put in computer terminals and started an ambitious project to scan and digitize the rare volumes. The text read, Tried to go to work and couldn’t find a path, just walked in circles. What’s up?
Not sure, Emily texted back. Looking into it.
Emily walked through the house, calling, “Llyfyr!” There was no sign of her girlfriend in the bedroom or the living room, though she found a volume of poetry on the living room floor, pages splayed open. That was odd. Llyfyr was usually gentle with books. Emily tried not to worry. Sometimes Llyfyr took on a more human-looking guise and went on walks, but she usually left a note (her handwriting was exactly the same as the typeface that filled her in book form). She’d probably expected to be back before Emily got home, that was all, but—
“Are you Emily Yuan?”
Emily spun around. The armchair in the corner was occupied by a woman—no, she was Folk, her ears pointed and her smile revealing sharp teeth—dressed in black. Her long dark hair seemed to sparkle, as if stars were caught in the shadowy waves. She looked like a theatrical pirate, right down to the cutlass resting across her knees.
Emily resisted the urge to back up a step. As a rule, the Folk scorned the fearful. “Who are you?”
“I’m Sela. We have a mutual friend who needs our help. Mellifera?”
“I’m . . . not sure she’s my friend.”
Sela chuckled. “Nor mine, really, but we’ve known each other for a long time. Mellifera recruited you, though, to run her library?”
“I don’t know what you’re doing here—”
“I’m here to help you get your precious library back, but if you’d rather return to your mortal life—” She began to rise.
Emily held up her hands. “Fine, yes, Mellifera hired me. Over two years ago now.”
“Why did she pick you?”
“I’d just been fired from my job at a university library because of budget cuts, and I was in the train station with a box of all my personal items from work, waiting to go home, when I saw a woman sitting on the edge of the platform, her legs dangling over the tracks. She seemed upset, so I asked her if she was all right, and shared a chocolate bar I’d had in my desk. That was Mellifera. The next day I got a job offer . . . and found out magic was real.”
Sela nodded. “If you show one of the Folk kindness without motive, you will receive kindness in return.”
Emily bristled. “I didn’t get the job just because I was nice. I’m qualified, and I’ve totally transformed the collection. It’s almost entirely catalogued. We’re digitizing and preserving—”
“Peace, mortal. I never meant to impugn your skills. Mellifera is practical, and I’m sure you’re good at your job. I was just curious how a mortal came to hold such a position, and, I confess, I hoped that she’d hired you because you had some deep knowledge of magic.”
“I mean, I know what I’ve read, and been told. . . .”
“Yes. Well. Mellifera is in danger, Emily—”
“Mellifera is the danger! The library was closed by her order.” Mellifera had always been aloof and superior, and was terrible to behold in anger, but she’d always shown Emily a measure of respect and even distant affection. To take away Emily’s job, what she’d expected to be her life’s work, without even a conversation, was immeasurably cruel.
Sela shook her head. “Not of her own free will. Mellifera is not herself, but you might be able to help me fix that, even if you aren’t a sorcerer. I understand that as librarian you have been granted certain powers? That you can summon books?”
Emily nodded. “Yes. The archive is vast, and as part of the cataloguing magic, I can call any volume in the collection to my hand.” She touched the necklace around her throat, where an enchanted pewter charm in the shape of a book dangled.
“Excellent. I need you to call up a volume of poetry called Murmured Under the Moon.”
“Who’s the author?”
“Mellifera.”
“Really?” Emily closed her eyes, murmured the incantation, and held out her hands. No book appeared.
“A shame.” Sela stood, sheathing her cutlass at her belt. “Mellifera’s soldier must have disenchanted your necklace before he shoved you off the island.”
“Wait!” Emily thought of a book at random—one of the volumes from the Subterranean Warfare section, Under Hill and Kill and Kill, a firsthand account of something called the Battle of Fallen Barrow. The hardbound book appeared in the air and dropped a few inches into her waiting hands, and she brandished it. “See? The magic works. I couldn’t call that other book because it was never part of the collection. I’ve never heard of a book like that. I had no idea Mellifera was a writer. I only have a score of books authored by your kind.”
Sela sighed. “Ah, well, it was a long shot. The Folk don’t produce much art, and don’t often share what they do. I thought Mellifera’s vanity might have led her to include the book in the collection, but it seems not. Too bad. Good-bye, mortal.”
“Stop. What is going on? What’s happened to Mellifera?”
“She’s under a powerful enchantment, and I need to save her.”
“Who enchanted her? I thought the Folk were immune to that kind of thing! And what does it have to do with this poetry collection?”
The fairy leaned against the door frame. She looked almost amused. “It’s not just poetry. It’s love poetry. Long ago Mellie fell in love with a mortal, wrote poems to him—in her own hand!—and had them bound, intending the poems as a gift.” Sela shook her head. “One night several centuries ago, during the new moon in October, she opened a passage from our world to the mortal’s house and read her poems to him. She wanted to lure him through, to stay with her forevermore. There is magic in such an act, you know—for a princess of the Folk to murmur such things under the moon. The man refused her, though, choosing his own mortal family instead. He must have had tremendous strength of will, because when Mellie wants to charm someone, they are generally well charmed.” Sela sighed. “Unfortunately, his refusal created a sort of . . . unresolved spell, deeply embedded in the pages of the book. Someone in possession of those poems, with the right knowledge, at the right time, can use it to reopen that passage between worlds and charm Mellie as she tried to charm her would-be lover—by symbolically becoming that lover.”
“Someone got the book and cast that spell?”
“A mortal student of the occult named Rudolph . . . something, I forget. We haven’t had time to gather much information on him. The new moon was two days ago. Mellifera left our realm without explanation, and then directed her subjects to loot our precious works of art and volumes of lore. Obviously, having a princess of the Folk in thrall to a mortal isn’t ideal. I have . . . certain skills, and was tasked with solving this problem. Destroying the book will destroy the enchantment, but since you can’t summon the poems, I’ll have to use other means.”
“I can help,” Emily said. “I have certain skills too.”
“Hmm.” Sela looked Emily up and down. “There could be advantages to having a mortal along. This enchanter may have protections against the Folk that you could more easily circumvent. Very well.” She rose and strode down the hall. Emily went after her, but Sela walked fast, and soon the familiar hallway was gone, the plaster walls becoming dark wood, the hardwood floor turning to stone. The corridor took many sharp right-angle turns, and though Emily moved along quickly, she kept losing sight of Sela, finally calling, “Wait!”
“Hurry!” came the call back. Emily gritted her teeth and ran. When she rounded the last corner she almost slammed into Sela, who stood on a tiny wooden platform in what looked like a cave, with train tracks running out of one tunnel and into another. “Just in time,” Sela said, as a vehicle slid smoothly from the tunnel and stopped before them.
Emily had seen Mellifera’s private train before, a sort of jeweled steampunk Fabergé egg on wheels, but this was something different: Sela’s train looked like an old-fashioned horse-drawn carriage with a closed coach, made of black wood with silver trim. The door swung open, and a folding set of steps spilled downward. Sela climbed inside, and after a moment’s hesitation, Emily followed.
The door closed after her, and the interior was totally dark, revealing that the sparkles in Sela’s hair did cast their own light. Emily groped her way to a sumptuously padded bench and sat down across from the fairy woman just as the car lurched forward. “Why is it so dark in here?”
“We’re going to a place in the mortal world, but it’s faster to take shortcuts through my realm. On the way, we will pass through tunnels where there are things that covet light. Our lands border . . . less pleasant countries. There are safer routes, but I want to get to Mellifera as quickly as possible.”
“You said you and Mellifera are friends?”
“We’re . . . sisters, or close enough. We spent our formative years together, anyway, but when we were done forming, we turned out rather differently. I choose to live outside the court of the Folk and dwell largely outside our lands. Occasionally I am called upon to render services in exchange for the freedoms I enjoy. This is one such occasion. The court can’t tolerate a mortal holding one of us in thrall.”
Emily’s grasp of fairy culture outside the boundaries of the library was tenuous at best. There were books about the subject, but they were wildly contradictory, and the Folk she spoke to about the subject were maddeningly oblique. “The court. Like, royalty? Is Mellifera some kind of queen?”
“Mmm. Perhaps a princess. We have a queen, but she sleeps, most of the time, and lets her daughters oversee things, with the work divided among them according to their inclinations and capabilities. Mellifera says it’s more like a board of directors than a proper court. Dull, really. Mellifera is sort of . . . minister of cultural affairs, you could say? She has ultimate authority over the libraries, museums, concert halls, and other such things. The Folk value the arts greatly—Mellifera’s position is one of great power and prestige.”
“Which she’s abusing, or being forced to abuse. Can’t she be replaced, before this enchanter steals everything?”
Sela chuckled. “It’s not that easy. Mellifera was given her powers by the queen, and only the queen can revoke them. We have no reason to expect our mother to awaken before the solstice at the earliest. In the meantime, within her sphere, Mellifera’s power is absolute.”
“Your system of government has some flaws.”
Sela nodded. “I always thought so.”
“Are you a princess too?”
“I would be, had I not given all that up. You can’t lose your responsibilities without also losing your privileges, but I care about my freedom more than anything the court can offer me.”
The carriage lurched to a stop. “We’re here.” The door swung open, and they emerged onto a rocky beach under a gray sky amid eddies of fog. Emily turned to look back at the coach, but it was gone. Nothing behind them but waves crashing against great rugged outcroppings of stone.
“Where’s here?” Emily shivered. She was wearing black trousers and a white blouse and flats. She wasn’t dressed for a cold beach.
“Some coast or another. It’s nearly twilight. Good. That’s when my powers are strongest.”
Emily looked at her phone, which agreed that it wasn’t yet lunchtime, suggesting they were in some time zone other than the one she’d started in. She had no phone service here, naturally, and no way to tell where they were.
Sela pointed toward a nearby sea cliff, and the fog parted as if moved aside by her gesture—perhaps it had been. Emily could just see the upper floor of a building perched up there, a foreboding thing of gray stone and few windows. “Mellifera went into that building, and has not come out. Our scryers can’t see what’s happening inside—there are powerful enchantments in place, and lots of iron, which all confound us.”
“Is the enchanter in there? Is that where he’s taking the books?”
“Perhaps.” Sela glanced at her. “Isn’t your lover one of those living books that walk around like people?”
“They are people. Yes, Llyfyr and I are together.”
“Are you worried she was taken by the enchanter?”
Emily shook her head. “She was in my house this morning, not at the library.”
“Yes, but I got into your house easily enough, and one of Mellifera’s servants could have too. The enchanter’s interest seems to be in the most potent magical books, naturally, and that would include the living books—”
Emily thought of the volume of poems sprawled open on the floor, and a cold spike of fear pierced her. She’d assumed Llyfyr was okay because she hadn’t been at the library when it was besieged, and with everything that was happening, she hadn’t had time to fret over other possibilities until now. “Let me call her.” Emily put her hand to the charm at her throat and murmured the incantation to call Llyfyr.
Nothing happened. “That . . . The living books have personal agency; unlike the nonsentient books, they can refuse a summons, but Llyfyr always comes when I call!”
“Perhaps she can’t. There could be spells of binding in there, cages of iron. . . .” Sela shrugged. “If she’s inside, we’ll save her. I don’t suppose you can fight?”
“I don’t have to do much violence in my line of work.”
“I’ll focus on the fighting, then. You look for Mellifera’s book. I’m not sure what to expect. If Mellifera is there, her guards are too, but they would bristle at taking orders directly from a mortal, so Rudolph may have other resources. He certainly knows about the weaknesses of the Folk, and is likely to have measures in place to confound us. Come.” They walked across the gritty sand in silences contemplative and anxious until they reached the base of the cliff. Sela gestured again, and fog swirled away, this time revealing what looked like a mine cart made of black wood and silver, resting against the bottom of the cliff. “Here we are. It’s a sort of elevator. I don’t mind climbing a cliff freehand with a dagger in my teeth, but I thought you’d prefer something less taxing.” One side of the cart swung open, and they stepped in. The quarters were close, and Emily was pressed against Sela, who smelled, not unpleasantly, of leather and brine.
The cart jerked and began to ascend, though there were no signs of cables. There could be some kind of hydraulic piston underneath . . . but Emily knew it was driven by fairy magic.
They reached the top of the cliff, with just a narrow ledge of stone between them and the wall of the house. The other side of the cart swung open, and Sela stepped out, walking casually along that narrow strip of solid ground, knocking her knuckles against the wall in a few places. She hissed. “Iron in the walls, along with binding spells, so I can’t open a door. Not surprising, but frustrating.”
“Ah. Those countermeasures you mentioned.” Not all the stories were true, but the bits about iron being anathema to fairies were.
“Yes. But there’s got to be a proper door somewhere.” Sela walked along the ledge toward the corner of the house, apparently unconcerned by the hundred-foot drop on her right. Emily eased along the wall much more slowly and carefully. She didn’t have a particular fear of heights, but she could see herself developing one, given the circumstances. Once she made her way around the corner of the house, away from the cliff’s edge, she felt better. The land around them was flat and barren—it looked almost scoured—and the house was no less forbidding from a different angle. They walked around to the front and found a thick wooden door, banded with dark iron.
“Ha. This, I can deal with.” Sela pressed her hands against the wood, between the iron bands, and after a moment, small mushrooms popped out of the wood, first a few, then dozens, then hundreds. The door sagged, the wood rotting, and Sela kicked with her high black boots, sending up puffs of powder and rot. Soon the “door” was nothing but three black bars crossing an empty doorway. “Be a dear and shove those aside?”
Emily pulled on the iron bars, which were still attached to hinges, and they swung outward. Sela peered inside, into a wood-paneled foyer with an intricate tiled floor. “I sense guardians.” She grunted. “From the Mist Realm. Rudolph has made a political alliance with enemies of our queen, it seems.”
“What’s the Mist Realm?”
“A place of monsters. Though they’d say the same about the fey realm.”
“Can you fight them?”
“Ha. Not with this sword, or my magic. I know Mellifera probably gave you the impression the Folk seem all-powerful, but most of our powers are limited to nature magic, glamours, and minor reality-warping—making milk go sour, bending space-time, things like that. Fighting denizens of the Mist Realm is beyond my abilities.” She growled. “We were hoping to keep this operation quiet, but I may need to find reinforcements. I hate to give Rudolph time to consolidate his position further.”
“Wait. You need fighters? Even if they’ve taken Llyfyr, they might not have captured all the living books, especially the really cunning ones, who like to hide. . . .” Emily touched her charm and murmured an incantation.
A battered volume bound in black leather dropped into her outstretched hands. She opened the book, murmured to the pages, and in an eyeblink the book was gone, replaced by a crouching woman dressed in a cloak of moss, with green hair and eyes like gray river stones. Her hands were clawed, and each claw was a different color and texture: amber, ivory, obsidian, silver, emerald, wood, and others Emily couldn’t identify.
“Who’s this?” Sela said.
“She’s never bothered giving herself a name other than her title: A Manual of Unconventional Warfare.”
“Sometimes Emily calls me Connie.” The book’s voice was low and rough. “Do you know why the Folk are trying to pillage the library, Em? They made off with half the archive before the living books got organized. We formed a defensive line, and we’re keeping the looters out of the deep stacks, but it’s only a matter of time before the soldiers break through.” The living books were a strange crowd, perhaps fifty volumes that could take on forms ranging from the humanoid to the monstrous, depending on their contents and inclinations. They would be a formidable force to overpower, but Emily quailed at the thought of them being damaged in fighting. The living books were the closest thing she had to family—she thought of them almost as her family, even if they were all centuries older than she was.
“Mellifera is being mind-controlled by a mortal,” Emily said. “We think the enchanter is inside, but there are . . . things in the way.”
“Sentinels from the Mist Realm,” Sela said. “Can you fight such creatures? I can’t—they can choke and poison me but are too incorporeal for me to strike.”
Connie chuckled, then held up her claws. All of them sparked and glittered and glowed and rippled with diverse magics. “I have a key for every lock and a knife for every throat, and I’ve never yet grown weary of battle.” She rushed into the foyer, smashed through a door, and disappeared from sight. Sela and Emily followed at a safe distance as a great howling emerged from within, like winds whipping through narrow mountain passes, but also a little like screams. The stars in Sela’s hair seemed to glow brighter, providing sufficient light to illuminate their passage as they went deeper into the dark house. The place was huge, and the rooms were filled with paintings in ornate frames, antique furniture, statues, vases, and all manner of museum-quality relics, presumably looted by Rudolph from fey lands. There were magic items too: a mirror that reflected a sky with two suns; a harp that played itself softly as they walked by; a statue that wept what looked like real tears.
Sela ignored it all and pointed to scuffs in the dust. “See, Connie fought here, and continued on. . . .” They went up a wide staircase to the second-floor landing, and Sela continued tracking the living book’s passage until they found Connie herself in a hallway, facing off against an eight-foot-tall figure that looked like a suit of armor made from white smoke.
“Mist wraith,” Sela hissed. “Warrior caste, looks like a war-band leader, so Connie must have cut down its subordinates. You have good taste in books, librarian.”
The wraith conjured a long-handled ax from smoke and swung, but Connie rolled underneath the blow and lashed out with her glowing claws, shredding the thing’s legs into misty ribbons. The wraith fell, making a strange howl like wind whistling through a crack in a wall, and Connie tore its helmet off and crouched over its rippling form, raking her claws through the smoke. When the living book stood and limped back toward Emily, there was nothing left of the wraith but a dissipating patch of ground fog.
“Are you all right?” Emily knew living books were hard to hurt permanently, short of total destruction, but Connie seemed wounded at least.
“Tore my flyleaf nearly in half,” she muttered. “Just let me rest.” She collapsed into book form again, and Emily picked her up and tucked the volume under her arm.
“She’ll be all right,” Emily said. “She just needs time to repair herself. Are we safe?”
Sela sniffed the air. “I don’t sense any denizens of the Mist Realm—Connie dispersed them all. I do sense Folk, though—”
The door at the end of the hall burst open, and two tall guards, twins to those at the library, burst out, pointing their spears at Sela’s and Emily’s throats. Sela dropped back two steps and brought up her cutlass, smacking aside the barbed end of the spear—was it made of iron? Emily didn’t dare twitch.
“What’s the commotion?” Mellifera appeared at the door, regal and cool as always, dressed in a gown that shimmered like a midnight ocean. “Lower your weapons! This is my beloved sister, and my dear mortal librarian. Come in, come in! See my new throne room.”
The guards exchanged an indecipherable look, then lowered their spears and moved aside. Mellifera disappeared into the chamber, still chattering, and Sela sheathed her sword. She glared at the guards. “You collaborate with the Mist Realm now?”
One guard lowered his eyes. “We are bound to serve Mellifera . . . whatever we may think of her orders.”
Sela sighed. “True enough. That’s one reason I’m not a princess anymore, Emily—I don’t like the idea of binding people to my will. Let everyone be free, I say. Come on.” She led the way, and Emily followed, gasping at the opulence beyond the door. The room was as big as a ballroom, perhaps enhanced with illusory or spatial magic, and it was full of magical and mundane light: shining chandeliers, standing lamps, countless candles, floating orbs of light. The walls were all mirrored, reflecting the luminosity, and the only furniture in the room shone: two thrones, side by side, both mostly gold, one rather more large and ornate than the other.
Mellifera sat on the smaller of the two chairs. “It’s so good to see you, Sela. I have so much to tell you! I’ve fallen in love. He’s a mortal, and I know you disapprove, but he has the most wonderful ideas. We’re going to kill Mother, you see, and then I will rule as queen, though my sweet Rudolph will be king—isn’t it time we had a king? We will ally the mortal and the fey and misty realms forever, tearing down all the walls that separate us—”
Sela said, “Mellifera, where’s the book of poems?”
“What do you mean, dear sister? If you need a book, you should ask Emily. I want her to be our personal palace librarian, you know. Once Rudolph has all the books moved here, I’m sure he’ll need someone to help organize them—”
“Murmured Under the Moon!” Sela said. “Where is it?”
Mellifera scowled, and the lights all around them dimmed. “Don’t speak of my past . . . infatuations, sister. I wouldn’t want to make Rudolph jealous.” She brightened, and the room did with her. “We should discuss plans for my wedding!”
Sela tried again. “You’ve been enchanted, Mellifera, by mortal magic—”
“Oh, nonsense. I enthrall. I am not enthralled myself. Now, I was thinking, we could hold the ceremony in the old winter palace. . . .”
Emily cleared her throat. “Could I see the library? If I’m going to be working here, it would be nice to have a look.”
“Oh, of course, dear.” Mellifera gestured to the right. “One of the guards will show you the way.”
Sela shot her a warning look, but Emily just offered a reassuring smile. If Llyfyr was trapped here, she’d be in the library.
One of the slender Folk in armor glided toward her and gestured. When they were some distance from the thrones, he whispered, “Please set her free.”
“I’ll try,” she murmured, though saving her boss was less important to her than saving her love.
The guard pressed on a mirror, and it swung open. She stepped through into what looked like the library of a great country house, a handsome room with towering wooden shelves, lamps, long wooden tables, and club chairs. There were thousands of volumes, and a quick perusal of a nearby shelf assured her that most, if not all, were from the fairy library. She went deeper into the room and realized there was some spatial trickery here: there were freestanding walls of shelves, forming passages and corridors, winding deeper and deeper through the house.
She’d been unable to summon Llyfyr from outside, but now that she was in the library, perhaps the binding spells didn’t apply. She touched her charm and whispered for Llyfyr.
Her lover appeared before her, looking like a black-and-white photograph of a classic movie star, with dark pageboy curls and a pale gown, but her face was, as always, unmistakable. She embraced Emily fiercely. “They came for me, Mellifera’s soldiers, and I was dragged here. There’s a man—”
“And what a man I am.” A sallow twentysomething with messy hair stepped around a shelf. He wore an old-fashioned red velvet dressing gown and held a shotgun, as incongruous a sight as Emily had ever seen. “This gun is loaded with iron shot. It’s meant to cripple fairies, but it would work fine on you, too. Who are you, and what are you doing here?”
“I’m—my name is Emily. I’m a librarian.”
“Ah, you must be Mellifera’s pet. Did the court send you to find the book of poems? Librarians are supposed to be good at finding books. I’m sure you’ll manage. It’s probably tucked away here somewhere. You only have thousands of volumes to sort through.” He cocked his head. “They wouldn’t have sent you alone, though, and why didn’t the Mist Folk kill you when you entered?”
The book tucked under Emily’s arm squirmed, and she let it fall. Connie shape-shifted into her humanoid form and stepped between Emily and Rudolph. “I killed your guards. Give us the book of poems, or I’ll kill you.”
“No.” Rudolph lifted the gun and fired, and though Connie moved with inhuman speed, she was still hurt from her fights with the Mist Folk, and she wasn’t fast enough. The iron shot tore through her, and she spun, changing back into a book before she hit the ground, her pages tattered and torn.
Llyfyr shrieked, but Emily just stared. Connie was one of hers, one of the volumes under her protection, and this arrogant prick had hurt her. She looked up as Rudolph took shells from his pocket and broke open the shotgun to reload. “Mellifera is fond of you,” he said, “the way my mother is fond of her cats, but she loves me, and she’ll understand if I have to kill you—”
Emily touched the locket at her throat and called the books to her.
All of them. All at once.
She held out her open hands before her, toward Rudolph. Thousands of books blinked out of existence, leaving the shelves around them bare, and then reappeared in midair. Emily and Llyfyr dove out of the way as books rained down, landing on Rudolph’s head and shoulders, knocking the gun from his hands, driving him to his knees, and burying him under a mountain of hardbound volumes that towered taller than Emily’s head.
She winced at the sight of the books piling up, but almost all of them were protected by preservative magics to keep the pages from tearing or deteriorating, which should minimize the damage.
Llyfyr laughed and leaped to her feet, spinning around and skipping. “You did it, you got him, you—”
“What is the meaning of this?” Mellifera roared. She stormed toward them, her two guards at her back. Emily winced. They’d defeated Rudolph, but not the spell he’d used to bind the fairy princess. Mellifera grew taller with each step she took, until she towered nearly eight feet high. Even knowing it was probably glamour, Emily shrank away in alarm. A hazy yellow-and-black nimbus formed around Mellifera, accompanied by an ominous buzzing. Bees drifted up from her hair and flew out of her sleeves, and a few even slipped out of her mouth when she cried, “Where is my love?” Soon a cloud of buzzing, stinging insects surrounded her: a manifestation of her temper, terrible and beautiful to behold.
One of her guards reached out for Mellifera’s arm, perhaps to hold her back from rushing into possible danger, then shrieked and stumbled away as a score of Mellifera’s bees swarmed around his head. The guard waved his arms wildly and raced down the corridor, flesh welted and swelling. Mellifera didn’t even notice.
Sela raced around and got ahead of her sister, stepping between her and Emily. “We heard a gunshot, and then this noise—”
Llyfyr stepped forward and curtsied to Mellifera, who was now nearly invisible beneath a curtain of undulating bees. “Ma’am, there was an accident, you see, all the books fell down, but Emily is going to fix it, with her . . . librarian . . . prowess. Aren’t you, Em?”
“Where. Is. Rudolph?” Mellifera’s voice thundered from beyond the cloud.
“Emily will look for him while she’s fixing the books, won’t you?” Sela called. “It’s all right, sister.” She made soothing motions.
Mellifera’s arm appeared from the cloud of bees and pointed straight at Emily. “Fix. This. Or you will feel my sting.”
“I—of course.” Emily clambered around the edge of the mountain of books piled on Rudolph and made her way deeper into the stacks. She tried to ignore the buzzing behind her. She’d called all the books from the library to her, emptied the shelves in this place, but Murmured Under the Moon wasn’t from her library. She couldn’t summon it, and that meant—
There: one book still standing on a shelf, hidden in plain sight. She climbed up the shelf like it was a ladder and snatched the book down. The cover looked right for the era, leather over wood, with raised bands across the spine, and the pages were vellum, covered in elegant handwriting and lines of poetry in Latin.
In the distance she heard Mellifera shouting and making demands, Sela arguing with her, and Llyfyr trying to keep the peace. Emily started to tear out the pages, but something in her rebelled—she was a librarian. She was supposed to take care of books, especially one-of-a-kind books, and not destroy them. She cocked her head. The shouting didn’t sound too serious, not yet, and it was a short book, so maybe she had time—
A few minutes later, content that she’d done the best she could, Emily tore out the pages. Mellifera was still yelling back there. How destroyed did the book have to be? She sighed, tore up a page, and put the pieces in her mouth, chewing and swallowing the shreds of vellum, hoping the ink wasn’t toxic.
She’d eaten only one page when the shouting stopped. Emily crept back toward the book pile and saw Sela with her arms wrapped around her sister as Mellifera wept on her shoulder. Emily made her way toward them, and Llyfyr took her hand. “Whatever you did, it worked.”
“I ate a book,” Emily said.
“Now you’re just trying to make me jealous,” Llyfyr said.
* * *
A week later Mellifera and Sela stood in Emily’s small office. Mellifera was beautiful, ageless, and strange, as befitted a princess of the Folk, and she wore a sea-green gown that rippled like water. Sela was her same piratical self, lounging and self-satisfied. “Is everything back in order?” Mellifera asked.
Emily nodded. “More or less. There wasn’t too much damage. Thanks for sending the extra hands to help get everything back in place.”
“It was the least I could do.”
“What, ah, happened to Rudolph?” The rain of books hadn’t killed him, just knocked him out, but the fairy guards had whisked him away as soon as they uncovered him. Mellifera had been known to lay curses on mortals who offended her or slighted her—who knew what she would do to someone who’d enslaved her?
“He is making himself useful,” Mellifera said. “I have turned him into a living hive in my garden. I look forward to tasting the honey my bees make inside him.”
Emily swallowed. Mellifera was so light and nonchalant about it. She opted not to press for further details.
Sela saved them from an awkward silence by saying, “I came by to thank you for helping me, Emily. I couldn’t have done it without you.”
“That’s sweet,” Emily said, “but I know you’re really here to pick up Connie. She’s been talking for days about going on adventures with you. She never did like being cooped up in a library.”
“I can be here for two reasons. I’m complex.” Sela turned to Mellifera. “I’ll leave you to it, sister.”
“We’ll talk soon.” Mellifera gave her a kiss on the cheek and watched her go.
Emily cleared her throat. “I have something for you. Before I destroyed your book of poems, I photographed the pages with my phone, and I made . . . this.” She slid a small volume out of a drawer. “It’s a facsimile edition. Sela said only the original, written in your own hand, had those . . . problematic properties, so . . .” She handed the volume over. “I read them. It’s really beautiful work.”
The Folk loved compliments, especially sincere ones, and Mellifera grew more luminous. She turned the book over in her hands. “Oh, Emily, how thoughtful. You’re very kind. Some say the Folk cannot create art, not as humans do, but that’s not true. We simply understand that art is magic, and more magical than usual when we’re the ones making it, and so we’re very careful.” She sighed. “Usually, anyway. But my feelings when I composed these poems were real, even if they were foolish.”
Emily said, “I made a second copy, and I wondered, could I include it in the collection here? I don’t have many books by the Folk.”
Mellifera laughed like small bells. “Of course. I’ve administered this library for . . . a long time . . . but never expected to contribute to its holdings. I’m honored.” She cleared her throat. “Going out into the world, helping Sela, helping me . . . that sort of thing isn’t why you were hired. What you did was above and beyond. I owe you a boon. What can I give you?”
Emily went very still. A fairy, offering her whatever she wanted. As a teenager she would have asked for true love, but she had that with Llyfyr, or true enough. In her youth she’d dreamed of unicorns, but the practicalities of keeping one would be daunting. She could ask for wings, but she’d have to throw out all her clothes, and she tended to get airsick anyway. . . . But there was only one thing she really wanted.
“I want the library.”
Mellifera cocked her head. “What do you mean?”
“I want what you have. Total control of this library. So that if there’s ever, ah, another problem, like the one we just had, I won’t be locked out. I want to take care of these books, and I want the power to fulfill that responsibility.”
“To give a mortal control of a fairy holding . . . it’s unprecedented.”
“Only for as long as I’m alive,” Emily said. “That’s, what, another sixty or seventy years at most? Then control can pass to Faylinn.” Her assistant cared about books more than her own life. Emily would be comfortable with the library passing into her hands someday.
Mellifera nodded slowly. “Very well. The library is yours.” She unhooked a necklace from around her throat, a small brass key dangling from the chain. “This opens all the doors and signifies your authority. We’ll have a meeting to go over the budget and staffing and so on soon, and after that, I’ll make myself available if you have questions. And you will.”
Emily draped the necklace around her throat, and a knot of tension in her shoulders dissolved. She’d probably just taken on an incomprehensible amount of work, but it was work she loved, and now she felt safe. “Thank you.”
“Thank me after you run your first all-staff meeting.” Mellifera air-kissed Emily’s cheeks and sauntered out of the office.
Llyfyr emerged from wherever she’d been hiding, wearing the flowing robes of a Roman senator for some reason, and a laurel crown on her head. “You have a copy of Mellifera’s love poems?”
Emily took the other facsimile edition from the drawer and handed it to Llyfyr, who flipped through the pages. “Oh, this is potent. This is the literary equivalent of fifty-year-old scotch. Do you know what’s going to happen tonight?”
Emily chuckled. “Let me wildly speculate: you’re going to get drunk?”
Llyfyr leaned into her. “No, silly. We’re going to get drunk. You’re queen of the library now, and I’m your consort. It’s time to celebrate. I’ll get you a bottle of champagne. Then we’ll write some love poetry of our own. I’ll be the page, and you can be the pen.”
“You always get to be the page,” Emily said, and kissed her.