The Lost Books Read online

  Alex knelt next to the cot.

  “Sorry, sir,” he said, then pushed aside the old man’s wispy beard and felt around his neck for the chain that held the key.

  It wasn’t there.

  Alex sat back on his heels.

  Had the key been left in the door?

  Possibly.

  Getting to his feet, aware of the passage of time, Alex hurried to the locked room. But the key was not there, either. Alex twisted the knob in the middle of the door, but it didn’t turn.

  Maybe the librarian had left the key in his desk.

  Alex made his way through the corridors again, knowing the steward would be along shortly to deal with the librarian’s body, and to kick him out of the castle for good.

  The librarian’s desk was just as untidy as the library.

  It bothered Alex. Like an itch. A librarian needed to keep things in order, not all jumbled on the shelves. Maybe the librarian had been too old. He’d been so obsessed with bug droppings that he’d let the books get away from him.

  The desk was in a poorly lit corner near the main door of the library. Keeping an eye on the door, Alex began searching the desk for the key.

  There was no method to any of it. Papers were piled a foot deep, along with books, pens, dried-up bottles of ink, scraps of paper with illegible writing, and enough dust to choke a camel. At the back of the desk were rows of cubbyholes that held nubs of pencils, balls of twine, a nose-hair clipper, and plenty of dead spiders.

  With a growing sense that he needed to hurry, Alex went through all of it.

  No key.

  “Blast it,” he said, sitting back.

  His eyes fell on the in-box, almost buried by papers at the edge of the desk. It was a hinged box where the librarian kept all of his letters. The librarian hadn’t gotten many letters, but he had answered them all. Eventually.

  Lifting the lid, Alex found that the box was almost empty.

  The single envelope had been sealed with a thick blob of black wax with some sort of seal stamped into it. The paper was creamy and thick. Expensive, Alex thought. He rubbed it between his fingers. He was sure it was from the paper-makers at Barrettim. The finest paper available anywhere.

  He pulled out a two-page letter. The top edge of the paper was gilded. Below that was a crest that he recognized, a bear holding a garden spade in one paw, a sword in the other, in black with accents in gold.

  The royal crest. Black for the rich dirt of the Kingdom of Aethel, gold for ripened wheat. He wasn’t sure what the bear had to do with anything.

  Alex checked the second page to see the signature.

  Q. Kenneret III

  The letter was from the queen!

  Before he could start reading it, there was a bustle at the door of the library, and it was suddenly flung open.

  In the doorway stood the Purslane Castle steward, with one of the stable grooms at his back.

  Jumping to his feet, Alex shoved the royally crested paper and envelope into his jacket pocket. He’d had a run-in with the steward before, when he’d searched the castle, trying to find an extra key to the locked library room. The steward didn’t like Alex. The feeling was decidedly mutual.

  In the doorway, the steward’s beady eyes darted from bookshelves, to dark corners, to the desk. Like any normal person, he was reluctant to enter a library. “Well,” he complained, “where is he?”

  Alex felt a pang of sorrow. Merwyn Farnsworth had not only refused to reveal any librarian secrets, he’d refused to admit that there even were secrets. Mostly he’d known way too much about bug poop. But the old man was rather unexpectedly dead, and that was a sad thing. “In the back,” Alex said, pointing.

  The steward scuffed through some scattered papers. “Are Farnsworth’s magic page thingies lurking about?”

  Alex shook his head. “They’ve disappeared.”

  “And what about you?” the steward asked, eyeing Alex. “You don’t have any of those pages, do you?”

  “No,” Alex had to admit.

  “Good.” The steward shoved aside a tottering pile of papers and came farther into the library.

  Alex knew that most of the duchess’s papers were worthless, but still it made him cringe. “Careful,” he warned.

  The steward paused, then turned. “Careful, is it?” He folded his burly arms. “Jock, come here.” He summoned the hulking groom from the doorway, then pointed at Alex. “Duchess’s orders. Toss this annoying scrap out the front gate. Give him a good kick, while you’re at it, to send him on his way.”

  “Will do,” said the groom, and grinned widely, exposing a missing front tooth. “Come along, you.” With a long arm, he reached out and grabbed Alex’s shoulder.

  “Kick me and you’ll regret it,” Alex threatened.

  “Oh sure.” The groom shoved him toward the library door. “Let’s go.”

  As Alex stumbled out into the hallway, he bumped straight into the duchess, who had two more servants with her. “Make sure he hasn’t stolen anything,” she ordered.

  “There’s nothing in your library worth stealing,” Alex shot back.

  The duchess’s face turned dusky red, and she made a gabbling noise like a chicken. “Throw him out!” she managed to say, pointing at the stairway that led down to the main part of the castle.

  The groom grabbed Alex by the collar of his jacket. “Come along, annoying scrap,” he said cheerfully, and dragged him away.

  The castle was built on traditional lines, with a main gate through six-foot-thick walls and a drawbridge that was never closed, leading over a moat filled with muck and dead leaves. When the groom reached the road on the other side of the bridge, he planted a heavy foot in the middle of Alex’s back and gave a mighty shove.

  Alex stumbled forward, tripped, and landed with a splut on a pile of horse dung, right in the middle of the road. Sitting up, he shot the groom a venomous look, and spat dust out of his mouth.

  “And stay out!” the groom yelled.

  Climbing to his feet, Alex turned away, just so he wouldn’t have to see the groom’s grinning face. Fine. He was going.

  Then he thought better of it. He turned back. The groom was still standing on the drawbridge, arms folded. Behind him, the castle loomed. Thorny rose vines grew up the towers and spilled over the castle walls.

  “Hey, Jock,” Alex called.

  “You’re not coming back in,” the groom answered. “So don’t even bother asking.”

  “Yeah, I know.” Alex glanced at the sky. Late afternoon—almost evening. He needed to be getting along. But first he had to warn them. With his chin, he pointed at the rose-encrusted castle. “Tell them if they find the key to the room in the middle of the library, they shouldn’t open it unless they’ve got a librarian or two with them who knows what they’re doing.”

  Jock rolled his eyes. “Key. Room. Right.”

  “Right,” Alex repeated. “And if they find a book about vines, they absolutely must not read it.”

  Jock pretended to yawn.

  “It’s important,” Alex warned him.

  “Oh, sure it is,” the groom said. “Now quit stalling. Get going.”

  “Idiot,” Alex muttered under his breath. But he couldn’t go yet. He had to lay a false trail. “Listen, if anybody comes looking for me, tell them I’m heading . . .” He paused and looked around, then chose a direction at random. “. . . west. Toward the border. I’m going to get a ship to go to Xan to study in the great libraries there. All right?”

  The groom shrugged. “Sure. What name?”

  “Alex,” he replied. “Alexandren.”

  “Right. Traveling west. Now off you go.”

  Turning his back on the castle, Alex headed out.

  He wasn’t sure where he was going, but he knew one thing for sure. It wouldn’t be west. It would be anywhere but west.

  3

  One bitterly cold winter day when he was ten years old, Alex had hidden in his father’s library.

  It was a f
airly large library, but even so, like most people, his father was not a reader. Far from it. Books were useful for starting fires, his pa thought, if you ripped the pages out first, and for propping up tables with one leg too short. His library was kept locked because there was no librarian, and the untended books were left to grow moldy.

  But young Alex had found the key, and he took refuge there. It was quiet. There were no men-at-arms or women-at-arms in the library. No sword practice. No strategy and tactics, no military history lessons.

  And there were books.

  He had made his own place, a cozy nest hidden behind a curtain in a windowed recess. There he kept a stack of books that he read like a thousand grasshoppers eating their way through a wheat field. By the time he was twelve, he’d read every book in his father’s library. Twice.

  Everybody knew how to read, of course, but for practical reasons. Not for reading books, of all things. Librarians were so obsessive about keeping their libraries locked up all the time that books had come to be treated with suspicion. There were no new books, only old ones. Most people felt a little creepy about going into a library. Even so, as far as Alex knew, books were inanimate objects that sat on the shelf getting dusty, unless he read them, in which case the dust got on him.

  But one day he found a book on a top shelf that, somehow, he’d overlooked. Standing on a chair, on tiptoe, he pulled it out from where it was hiding behind a rack of encyclopedias. The book was very thick, and had a worn red leather cover and no title. It smelled of smoke and cinnamon spice. It was much heavier than it looked. Alex heaved it off the shelf and took it to his lair, where he wrapped himself in a blanket. Opening the book, he started to read.

  And the world around him went away. There was no itchy wool blanket, no chill seeping up from the stone floor, no ache in his bones from sword practice the day before. There was just the book. Even the feel of the bumpy cover faded away, and so did the faintly smoky smell wafting up from the pages.

  The book had him in its clutches.

  And then, as he read, the black words spooling across the creamy white page, the letters had twitched, pulled themselves up, and marched across the paper and up his ice-cold fingers. He’d watched, fascinated, feeling prickly all over as the words crawled like spiky black ants over the back of his hand, then encircled his left wrist. The letters shifted, blurring into one word, then another.

  BOOK, he read, then STOLEN and THE and NEVER. Then a strange word, CODEX. Then the letters shifted again, jumbling into nonsense.

  As Alex wondered what a codex was, the library door had slammed open with an echoing bang. A moment later, two of his father’s soldiers ripped the curtain away from his hiding place. He had a moment to blink owlishly up at them before they grabbed him.

  “So here’s where you’ve been hiding, kid!” exclaimed Jeffen, who was one of the Family, his father’s most trusted soldiers. Like all of the Family, Jeffen was sort of like an older sibling to Alex. An extremely loud, obnoxious, annoying, teasing, redheaded big brother who also happened to be an expert swordsman. Jeffen had looked uneasily around the dim, dusty library. “Kind of snaky in here, isn’t it?”

  Alex had given him his most dire scowl. “Go away.”

  “Can’t,” Jeffen said with a cheerful shrug. “Your pa wants you.”

  The other Family soldier was a woman-at-arms, Franciss. “You know what they say, Alex,” she said. “‘Children should be seen and not hide.’”

  “That is not what they say,” Alex had snapped, “and I’m not hiding. I’ve been reading.” The words that had crawled onto his skin started prickling like lots of tiny needles. The prickling feeling became an almost unbearable stinging, and the letters flowed over his own hands and spilled out of the book he was holding, onto the floor, and then swarmed over Jeffen and Franciss. The words slithered up the legs of their trousers and up their sleeves.

  Jeffen had shrieked and ripped open his uniform. “Gah!” he shouted as he pulled it off and flung it to the floor, and then started stamping on it. At the same time, Franciss drew her sword and spun in circles, looking for something to fight. A word crawled out from under her collar and up her neck, and her eyes bulged with fright.

  “Franciss, put your sword away,” Alex said, using the sharp tone his pa used when giving orders, “before you skewer somebody.” Then he turned to Jeffen. “And quit yelling about ants all over you.” Somehow, he’d known exactly what to do next. Pointing at the words, he shouted one of the markings that had been printed on his wrist: “Codex!”

  And the words had peeled off of Franciss’s neck, and off of Jeffen’s arms, and flown through the air toward him.

  “Codex!” he ordered again, opening the red-leather-covered book, and he’d felt certain the words would obey him—and they did, flowing back to him. He snapped the book closed.

  But a few words had stayed behind.

  Black spots flickered in his vision, and his skin felt prickly all over. Then his eyes cleared and he saw black letters printed around the pale skin of his left wrist, like a tattoo, or a bracelet. The words didn’t spell anything, or at least they didn’t make any sense when he tried to read them. But he’d been marked, and he had suddenly known with a fierce certainty that this meant he wasn’t supposed to be a soldier like his pa.

  No. He was a librarian.

  There were three problems, that he knew of, with this fact.

  The first problem was that every librarian that he’d ever met—and he’d met a few since leaving home—was ancient. None of them would teach him anything. None of them would tell him any of their librarian secrets—and he knew they had secrets.

  The second problem was that every true librarian had pages—magical pieces of paper that carried out the librarian’s orders. Unfortunately, Alex didn’t have even one page to help him.

  The third problem was the biggest. His father. Pa valued swords, not words. According to him, librarians were useless and spineless and basically less in every way.

  And yet.

  Alex had, of course, told his father about the book that had gone after the Family soldiers. Or the Red Codex, as he thought of it.

  “It wasn’t a book,” Jeffen said scornfully. “It was ants. That library is infested.”

  “It was not ants,” Alex insisted. “They were words. Words that crawled out of a book.”

  “You know what they say,” Franciss had put in. “‘You can’t judge a book by the color of its spots.’”

  “Nobody says that, Franciss,” Alex had said with a glare.

  “I say it,” Franciss argued. She appealed to Jeffen. “Didn’t I just say it?”

  “All right now,” Pa had interrupted just as Alex was about to explode with annoyance. His father had just come in from sword practice. He was huge in his leather armor, with the broadsword strapped across his back. “What was this book about, son?”

  Alex had opened his mouth to answer, when he realized that he couldn’t remember a single word of what he’d read. “It’s . . . it’s about the history of . . . of making swords,” he’d told his pa. He hadn’t been a very good liar when he was younger. He’d gotten better since then.

  “Show me this book, then,” his pa had said.

  Alex went to fetch it, but the Red Codex was nowhere to be found.

  “See?” Jeffen said, when Alex came back empty-handed. “Ants.”

  Ants or not, that was enough for Alex’s pa to decide that they needed a proper librarian.

  Alex had told him that he wanted to do it.

  Pa had snorted. “Why waste your time?” he’d asked.

  And then Alex had told Pa that he wasn’t going to study the sword anymore, or military tactics, or strategy, or any of the things that Pa thought were important. He showed him the bracelet of letters printed around his wrist and said that he was going to be a librarian.

  And his father had laughed. “You, a librarian?” he had boomed. “Hah. My only son will not be wasting his life looking after a bunch o
f moldy books.”

  Alex had argued and shouted and had even tried to reason with him, but Pa wouldn’t listen. Instead he’d brought in a professional, an old woman librarian with two faded-looking pages who refused to teach Alex anything.

  He had tried telling her about the Red Codex.

  When he’d told her that the words had crawled off the page and onto his skin, her eyes had gone wide. When he’d told her how he had ordered the words back into the book again, she had given him a sour, suspicious look and called him a liar. When he’d asked her what the word codex meant, exactly, she went to his father. Then she locked the library and wouldn’t let Alex back into it. Pa’s orders.

  The betrayal of it still hurt.

  Because no matter what his pa said, no matter that he didn’t have his own pages to act as his servants, and even though all the other librarians he’d met were dusty and decrepit and secretive, Alex knew exactly what he was meant to be.

  He just wasn’t sure how he was supposed to do it.

  With his own eyes, he had seen books that did not just sit on shelves getting dusty—first the Red Codex in his pa’s library, and then the book at Purslane that had attacked him with vines and had probably killed Merwyn Farnsworth. Clearly librarians were more than just keepers of the keys to library doors. There was something magical about books, something dangerous, something more. But what more, exactly, he didn’t know.

  Well, he’d just have to figure it out as he went along.

  He was sure about one thing, at least. He couldn’t go back home, even though he missed . . . certain people. He had to go on. He had to prove himself, somehow.

  Down the road a short distance from Purslane Castle was the town of Purslane, which sat on a crossroads. There was an inn on its busiest corner, which was not particularly busy, because people didn’t travel much these days.