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making good company
with the crickets’ nightly symphony.
Depart your skulled prison for the air,
joining the wide world on a dare.
When Dermot reached the last section, his breath exhaled white and cold, swirling up toward the ceiling, and the air filled with the notes of some pretty song, lured right from his mouth. The melody sounded entirely more romantic than anything Fia would have imagined Dermot listening to.
She smothered a smile as the music continued to breeze about the shop, playing itself through from start to finish as if performed by the smallest orchestra.
Dermot shook his head, rattling out any lingering notes, and with a final curl of misty breath, he grudgingly acknowledged, “It’s good and gone now.”
“I’ve always loved the ‘Ballad of Rivelyn,’ ” came a soft voice, and both Fia and Dermot turned to find Skye Blackwood, a barmaid who worked at Poet’s Theory a few streets away, standing in the shadows of the bookshelves. Framed there, she might have been a painting, carefully rendered so her brown eyes glinted gold—like mirrors to her gentle soul (or so Sable had once said with a shake of her head).
“Oh, I didn’t even hear you come in.” Fia had been too busy spellwriting to notice, or else Skye just had that light a step. She probably could sneak past the Thistledown librarians without any trouble at all.
“Well, you were busy—and drawn inward more than I ever saw your mother,” Skye said with the hint of a smile. She wore her dark hair up in braids, but one had come loose, and she fiddled with it as she began to hum.
“Are you trying to get that song stuck in my head again?” Dermot grouched before tapping the counter twice and striding away. “I’ve got to go.”
“Have a good day!” Fia rose up on her toes, leaning over the counter, as if her words wouldn’t otherwise reach him. And then he was gone.
She sank back on her heels, glancing again at Skye, who’d moved deeper between the shelves, apparently not in the mood to talk.
But really, neither was Fia.
As she usually did, Fia let Skye be, liking the older woman’s presence, the sound of her soft humming and the turning of the pages as she looked through a book. It was a comfort, not being alone.
And it also gave Fia time for more thinking. About quiet footsteps and a rook’s feather. About ink on the tip of her hair that no one would notice.
About spells that might let her slip into the Thistledown archives unseen.
CHAPTER 2
The bells in the clock tower resounded in the night, and a clamor of rooks startled from the rooftop of the great library, wheeling through the air before careening back to the gables. Once again settled, they screeched in dissatisfaction and shook out their feathers.
On the street below, clutching a small stack of books and unable to shrink completely into the shadows as she would have liked, Fia passed under all those dark, watchful eyes, sure that their commotion had been a warning.
However, she didn’t know if the warning was meant for her—Don’t do it. Don’t go!—or for the library itself—Watch out. She’s coming!
It was all the more likely the rooks were looking out for Thistledown. They were the librarians’ companions, after all. Steadfast and true, the birds watched over the stacks with unwavering devotion, and so the fairy tales told—and so Fia fully believed—the very first of the rooks’ long line sprang from the pages of a spellbook.
Fia touched the black feather in her thick fall of hair, the same one she’d collected from the stoop of Sable Spells a week prior and that had spurred her here tonight. While the librarians wore a feather on their lapels as a symbolic gesture, Fia had spelled hers, hoping to show she’d pledged allegiance with the birds.
And with Thistledown itself.
Before her, the great library rose like a cathedral, all steep peaks and spindly towers, gray stone and crawling ivy that refused to be tamed. Its stained glass windows of amber and gold glowed against the darkness. A wide set of timeworn stairs led up to the arched doors at its center, and as Fia climbed toward them with a pounding heart, she wondered for the hundredth time if she was acting too rashly.
Rashly and recklessly, her friend Grace Lu would have advised if she’d known what Fia had in mind. Which was why Fia had kept her scheming secret. Grace was enormously persuasive—some might say annoyingly persistent—and Fia hadn’t wanted to be talked out of it.
Anyway, Fia had thought things over, crafting a plan she never would have imagined herself making, because there wasn’t any other way into the archives. That awful letter was proof enough.
It is with regret…
Denied…
On this day and in perpetuity…
