“It’s the king’s concubine,” he says.
“I thought you said they were crazy in love. Why is she crying?”
“She wearied of being alone while the king labored at his experiments. She waited hundreds of thousands of years for him, alone except for those few creatures he trusted with her, and his occasional visits.”
Christian tells me the rest of the story while we twist and turn down hallways and corridors. I’m riveted in spite of myself. Who’d have ever thought such fantastical places existed side by side with our world, accessible through hidden portals and mirrors? My life is so fecking interesting I almost can’t stand it!
We pass over lemon marble floors in sunny wings with tall windows that frame brilliant summer days, down rose quartz floors that reflect violet hues of the sunset beyond, across bronze tiles that wind through rooms that have no windows, only stately, enormous, kingly chairs and couches and beds. There are fireplaces here as tall as a small house, with ceilings higher than the spires on cathedrals.
“How big is this place?”
“Some say it goes on forever, that the king created a house that constantly grows itself.”
“How do you find anything?”
“Och, and there’s the rub, lass. It’s difficult. Things move. It doesn’t help that the king created decoys. To better protect his dangerous journals, he seeded multiple libraries within the house. Barrons thinks he found the true repository. He didn’t. I saw the books he pilfered. They came from the king’s Green Study.”
“How do you know where the true library is?”
He hesitates. “Something in it calls to me,” he says finally. “I was trapped for a while in the king’s boudoir, and I could feel the pull of the house beyond it. The residue in his chambers was so strong that reality and illusion blurred for a time. Sometimes I would hear whispers as I fell asleep, and those times I would dream I was the king, walking my halls. I knew where everything was, as if it was I who’d fashioned this house. I even understood how things shifted. A few of those memories remain. Others aren’t so trustworthy. Still, I know that down a crimson hall that will always be found off a bronze corridor is a music room with thousands of instruments that play themselves when you twist a key inside the door, like a giant music box. I know there is a vast arena in the cobalt wing with no gravity, and stars painted all around where sometimes he took his beloved and created universes in the air for her amusement. And I know that because he feared other Fae would find the journals he kept, filled with notes about his experiments, he brought them into the White Mansion. It is said that he locked away the recipe for every Unseelie he ever created, and countless more unborn, that he chiseled a warning above the entry when he left. It is by that inscription you can know it’s the true library.”
“What does it say?”
He stops. “See for yourself, lass.”
I look up, and up some more. We’re standing outside doors that are nearly identical to those in our abbey, at the entrance to the chamber where Cruce is trapped. Alien symbols glow with eerie blue-black fire, chiseled into the stone all around the doors, with much larger symbols carved across the arch.
“I can’t read it. It’s not in English.”
Christian moves from side to side of the archway, pressing various symbols, and after a moment the doors swing open silently. “It says, ‘Read them and weep.’ Come, lass. We’ve a needle in a haystack to find.”
The king’s library is the craziest place I’ve ever seen.
Christian disappears the second we’re in the door. Me, I stand in the doorway, catching flies in my open mouth. The view seems to go on forever, between jagged, zigzagging bookcases, dwindling to a tiny black point that seems miles away. I step inside, fascinated.
Despite how ginormous the doors are, I can spread my arms wide as they go and my fingertips brush the walls of books on both sides. Lined with shelves and cubbyholes and built-in desktops that drop down on invisible hinges and are covered with more books and jars and knickknacks, every horizontal surface perches at skewed, absurd angles that defy physics. The things on those shelves shouldn’t be staying on them. The bookcases lean in, and close over me in places, which means the books should be falling on my head. The walls soar to a ceiling beyond my line of vision. It’s like being at the bottom of a jagged chasm of books, and there are millions of them in all colors, shapes, and sizes.
Here, the passage between the shelves widens to twenty feet, there it narrows barely wide enough for me to turn sideways and force myself through. I munch candy bar after candy bar as I move deeper into the nutty place.
There are bookshelves that branch off, perpendicular to the main passageway with only an inch of space between them. “Nobody could even get a book off some of these!” I say irritably. “How are we supposed to search?”
“A Fae could.” His voice floats down from somewhere above me. I guess he’s sifting up and down the shelves.
I pass through a low-hanging doorway, the top of which is a shelf of upside-down books. They should be dropping on my head as I walk under them. There’s a bronze plaque on the ceiling near them, I suppose saying what that section is, but I can’t read the language. I reach up and pluck one from the shelf. I have to tug, like the book is set in glue or something, and it comes off with a wet pop. The pale green cover is soft and mossy, and the book smells like the woods after a spring rain. I open it and realize it was pointless to bring me here. I can’t read a word. It’s all in some other language and I have no idea what it is. I don’t think even Jo could translate this stuff.