by ‘What’s the plan,’ Jay whispered to me as we stood there, frozen with horror amidst the destruction of the great library of Farringale.
‘I don’t know,’ I admitted, already reaching with those other senses, hooking my mind and my heart into the landscape around me. ‘I think I’m about to wing it.’
If he replied, I didn’t hear it. My consciousness winged away from him, from Rob; away from the hideous spectacle of looters emptying those long-neglected shelves; brushed past Mauf, still asleep in my satchel—a mercy upon him; I left him undisturbed—past Baroness Tremayne, a distressed shadow haunting the scene, just out of sight or hearing; sank at last into the bones of the earth below.
Trees. I joined a tangle of their deep roots, a web running beneath the paved streets and stone houses, oak and ash and elm; we’d seen some few of them flanking the library, their heavy boughs still shading the deserted boulevards, long ages after those who had planted them had gone.
Something else lingered there: a memory, a ghost; trees-that-were, once; had ceased to grow, ceased to soak up the sunlight and rainfall of Farringale. The last of their sweet, spring leaves lay far behind them: hundreds of years had passed since they had last borne fruit, borne seed, let their green leaves turn the colour of amber and drift down into the slow death of autumn.
They had not forgotten. The memories lay locked inside every knot, every whorl, and I realised at last what it was I had encountered.
Shelves. The bookshelves of the library of Farringale had been built here, out of the siblings of those same trees that rose so proudly outside: and they were trees still, somewhere inside.
An idea unfurled in my own mind, like a leaf in spring: fresh and lovely and perfect. It was the work of a moment to touch those slumbering sparks with a thread of magick, to whisper to them of light, and fresh-fallen water. They responded, stretching themselves as they woke, reaching with fresh life and growth for the heavens.
And the leaves of Farringale—the thousands, hundreds of thousands, of bound and inked and printed pages, each one pressed from the mulch that had once, also, been a tree—these they carried with them, unfurling them like banners, opened to the sun.
I came back to myself slowly, through a greater exertion of effort than it had cost me to lose myself, for that little space of time. How simple, how easy, the life of a tree: the slow turning of the seasons around me, the crisp freshness of rainwater, the dulcet warmth of sunlight upon my upturned leaves…
In what stark, sharp contrast, the life of a Ves: hurry and haste, pain and turmoil, pressure and distress—I liked being a tree, could easily come to prefer it over any other shape—I fought to grasp the beauties of my little human life, the details: strong cups of tea in the morning, with lashings of milk; carrot cake, and Bakewell tarts; dance parties at midnight, when I couldn’t sleep—hugs, preferably from Jay; the velvety softness of Addie’s nose; the snap in Milady’s voice when I’d displeased her—
I flailed, halfway Ves and halfway tree, and then someone was shaking me, shouting my name in my ears and—
I had eyes again; I felt them; I opened them.
Jay, a vision of concerned fury. I was still a creature of heightened and layered senses, every pore tuned to the myriad cues of my environment. I felt every wave of Jay’s distress, felt it begin to ebb, when he saw me looking back at him.
‘We are really going to have to talk about this,’ he growled at me, his fingers digging into my shoulders where—I concluded—he had been shaking me.
‘Agreed,’ I breathed, gulping air. The ease with which I meld with landscapes, turn myself into boulders and bridges and chairs—it’s exhilarating, in the same way as a rollercoaster, the kind where you’re only mostly certain that you aren’t going to go hurtling off the rails at the next corner, and sail off into oblivion, screaming.
If I could only turn myself back with the same ease I wouldn’t mind it half so much.
‘Was I a tree?’ I whispered, half afraid of the answer.
‘Something like that—’ began Jay.
‘Ves,’ Rob broke in, and I tore my gaze away from my fascinated scrutiny of Jay’s expressions. ‘Was that you? I really hope that was you.’
He gestured, widely, and I beheld, with some awe, the fruits of my impromptu labours.
The library-as-was would, in all likelihood, never be the same again. The bookcases were gone, the very walls had shifted, and the roof gaped open to let the sky in; I wondered distantly what had become of the rafters, not to mention the roof tiles.
A forest had sprung up out of the earth. Chiefly oaks, these handsome trees: not so very old yet, their trunks still slight and lithe, but they were growing, thickening: changing, changing back, into the grand old trees they had been long ago, before men of Farringale had come with axes, and chopped them down.
A thick canopy shaded us from sun and wind: a rustling, green arbour, smelling of spring, and among those unfurling leaves there were: books.
I breathed out, a note of relief, for I had not, in my haste and carelessness, disassembled every book in the library, turning every separate page into roots and leaves. The books looked intact, as far as I could tell from some distance below: hanging from the branches like tempting fruits, far out of reach.
I watched as a quick-thinking looter jumped, reaching for a low-hanging tome; his hands never closed upon it, for the tree snatched it back, quick as lightning. The earth shook in palpable warning.
‘Yes, but before you ask,’ I informed Rob, and Jay, ‘No, I don’t have the slightest idea how I am going to get them down from there.’
‘Noted,’ said Jay.
‘But they seem to be safe, for the moment.’ So I fervently hoped; it was always possible that I had done as much damage to the books with my magick as the thieves had with their careless, grabbing hands, but I couldn’t think of that now. It was too late. I would have to hope that the love and fear I had laced into my magick had preserved them; the trees’ obvious protectiveness of their bookish burdens boded well.
Of course, I had been anything but subtle. Only some of the book thieves’ attention remained upon their prize, now hanging out of reach; others were raising the alarm, shouting questions at each other, beginning a search for the culprit. For me.
They wouldn’t find us: not yet, not while we remained tucked behind the echoes of space and time, swaddled in shadows and silence. But we couldn’t stay that way, and we had other objectives before we could hasten back to the Society.
I paused long enough to watch as several more energetic souls attempted various methods of retrieving the hanging books: jumping; boosting each other on cupped hands, or shoulders; climbing into the boughs of the trees themselves. All failed: the trees retaliated, swatting and swiping away the climbers, or shaking the looters out of their branches.
‘Right,’ said Jay, shaking himself out of his absorbed appreciation of the scene. ‘We need to find out what’s become of the regulators.’
The regulators, freshly ripped from Silvessen and—what? What were these people intending to do with them in Farringale? Whatever it was, I didn’t think they had yet deployed them. Surely there would be some sign already, some shift in the conditions of Farringale. Or would there? Could two regulators have much of an effect on an entire, magick-drowned city?
Someone passed by me, almost close enough to touch, and my train of thought shattered—I knew him, I was sure of it—shadowed as he was in my sight, his movements juddery and jerky, the strange effect of my disconnected state—even so—I followed him at a trot, noting his height, the breadth of his shoulders, the public schoolboy cut of his hair—
‘That’s George Mercer,’ I hissed, and stamped my foot in sheer rage. ‘Ancestria bloody Magicka.’
‘You’re certain?’ Jay called, following me.
‘Yes. I suppose he might have defected to some other soulless organisation devoted to the plunder of magickal heritage, but I doubt it.’
Jay seemed unsurprised, and so was I. Fenella sodding Beaumont: she just couldn’t go more than a month or two without kicking up fresh trouble.
Rob was hulking. It’s a squared-shoulders, chin-raised, threatening sort of posture he does when he’s contemplating destroying someone (to do him justice, he hardly ever actually does).
‘Now’s not the time,’ I told him. He’d have to step out from behind the echoes to actually lay hands—or Wands—on Mercer directly, and we were vastly outnumbered in here.
Rob gave me a terse nod, and his shoulders relaxed. ‘We’d better get a move on,’ he told me. ‘I may be wrong, but I think we have a surge coming on.’
I glanced at what was left of the library’s mullioned windows, forest-bound as they now were. I might have imagined it, but was that a slow flush of pale colour creeping across the glass? A soft, palpable hum of magick building in the air?
‘That seems—’ I began, but was unable to finish the sentence for the sheer sinking of my heart. It seemed like improbably prompt timing, but what if it wasn’t random? I had just unleashed a small tidal wave of magick in the great library. I’d turned the previously inert bookshelves into Merlin-trees, and now that I had occasion to think about it they were rather fizzy with magick—
‘Oh, dear,’ I sighed, exchanging one fraught glance with Jay. The same realisation was written all over his face.
‘It’ll be all right,’ he said reassuringly. ‘We’ve weathered these surges before.’
We had, but that was before I’d emerged from the fifth Britain in a state of dangerous magickal excess. Before I’d set eyes—or hands—on the strange old lyre from my mother’s Yllanfalen kingdom. Before I’d become a Merlin. No one could say what the effect would now be upon my shrinking self.
I had two choices. Wait and see—or run away.
I took a big breath, squared my shoulders, and hulked. ‘It’ll be okay,’ I echoed Jay, trying to sound like I meant it.
I could feel it now, pulsing through the floor under my shoes and thrumming in the air.
From the depths of my satchel, an irate voice began shouting. ‘Miss Vesper. Permit me to ask—with the utmost esteem and respect for your ordinarily unimpeachable judgement—what in the name of every conceivable god have you done to my LIBRARY.’
Mauf had woken up. And I saw his point fairly quickly, for quite apart from the unusual elevation of the formerly neat rows of books there was something else going on. They were—swaying. Their pages were fluttering, as though riffled by invisible fingers. As I watched, a cloud of butterflies erupted from the pages of one handsome old tome, and exploded in tiny flashes of light.
A discordant chorus of babbling voices rose in volume, rising with the magickal tide: the books of Farringale were gibbering, cackling, screaming in rage—
–And then, horror of horrors, the bright young oaks I’d conjured out of the bookshelves ripped their roots out of the earth and began to walk.
