Janus dropped the book and screamed. He tried putting out his hand by smothering it on the floor, but it was no use. Soon, a big man in a blue robe appeared in front of them, grabbed Janus’s hand, and shoved it into a jar of sickly-green oil.
“Ah, ah…” Janus moaned on the floor. “It hurts. It hurts a lot. Am I going to die?”
“Oh, no no,” the man answered indulgently, this time in Iberian. “This should stop the reaction and pain for now, and later we’ll get you healed up.”
“What the hell was that?” Felix snarled. “I won’t even ask how that was possible—but why did that book try to burn his hand off just for reading it? Isn’t that what books are for?”
“Of course, of course,” the man answered in a placating tone. “This was a simple mistake, young man. It’s not often that we get visitors here who do not know of our precautions. You see, there are many who covet this treasury of tomes, and as such we need must take steps to guard them. They are treated with alchemy treated, to do, well, that. But as long as you have this ring”—he pointed to a signet ring with a red stamp on his finger —“you won’t be harmed.”
By way of demonstration, he picked up the book Janus had dropped and this time there was no fire.
“I’ve never had anyone make for the shelves so readily. Indeed, your friend seems not to have noticed the warning.”
The main gestured to one of many mounted parchment signs scrawled with words that he imagined warned about the books’ protection in several different languages. If Janus had just ignored that, it was kind of his own fault.
“Are you Martin, then? I’m Felix, and this one is Janus. We’re…new. We were told to find you.”
“Oh, yes, of course. But first, let me…”
When Martin flashed the ring moments ago, Janus had stopped moving and just stared at it in shock, as if all memory of his hand being nearly burned away had vanished. But when the shock wore off, he burst out like a dog finally being let outside for a walk after being confined inside for months.
“The ring!” Janus cried out. “That’s what it is, it’s...I have one! It’s why I came.”
In a flurry of excitement, Janus produced an identical ring from a pouch on his side. Unlike Martin's ring, this one had a distinct coppery smell that Felix didn't like.
Martin’s eyes widened almost as much as Janus’s. “Where did you get that?”
Before Janus could answer, he realized he had taken his hand out of the jar to get at the ring and howled with pain. It was hard to believe this was the same person who had just gone toe-to-hoof with a monster and shrugged off his injuries in less than an hour. Even if this was playing out like a comedy routine in a Christmas play interlude, that fire was no joke. These people really didn't want anyone touching their books without their permission.
Eventually Janus got his hand back into the jar of ointment of whatever it was and went into a story about losing his memory and learning how to read in exchange. After he got the last line out, the pain in his hand seemed to overwhelm him and he started crying.
So that was how he had done it, the fortunate bastard. Felix would have been only too glad to trade his memory of any given year of his miserable life to know how to read.
Martin stroked a short beard of dark, curly hair that matched the hair on his head, lost in thought. Felix noticed how gaunt and pale his face was in spite of his otherwise round figure. His uncle had a similar build. Maybe all men who could read looked like that.
Eventually he threw up his arms and said,”There is nothing for me to decide! My boy, you need to keep that ring hidden until you speak to Yew. And whatever you do, do not mention it to anyone else until then.”
“Okay,” Janus said between sobs. After this he slowly began to regain his compassion.
Martin let out a sigh of relief now that he had made a decision, even if that decision was to pass the trouble on to somebody else.
“In any case, we need to get him to Clarissa. The girl is, well, for lack of a better term, our healer.”
“A healer? You mean a wise-woman?” Felix asked as Martin helped Janus, who in spite of having told his story was barely holding himself together, over to his desk in the back of the library.
“I’m afraid I don’t know that word. Is it Iberian? My Iberian is rusty, too too rusty.”
Martin pulled out some cloth wraps from a drawer and cut them with a neat little pair of scissors Felix guessed was normally used for cutting parchment.
“You know, a…a Witch.”
“What? Heavens no. What we do here is not Witchcraft. It is simply Craft. You see what I’m doing right now with these bandages?” Felix watched Martin somewhat clumsily wrap Janus’s hand. “This is craft—using human ingenuity, I use cloth to reduce pain and promote healing. What we do with song is the same, simply a more powerful form of Craft. There is nothing supernatural—that is to say, nothing that trespasses on the realm of God—in Craft, though it may appear so to the untutored.”
“I think you're leaving out a few steps,” Felix muttered. He wasn’t going to get a real explanation out of the librarian either.
Martin tied the bandage at the wrist and patted Janus on the head. “Better now?”
This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.
“Yes,” Janus answered, his tears completely dry now. “I’m sorry I tried to touch your books, Master…”
“Please, call me Martin my boy, no need for such formalities. I am merely the assistant to the librarian, not the Master. But as you were told, one of my duties is to set up newcomers. So then, this way please!”
Martin led them to the back of the library where there had probably been side chapels at one point. Janus clung tremblingly to Felix’s back, trying to stay as close to the middle of the aisles as he could for fear of grazing one of the books with his arms. He struck a pretty pathetic figure, Felix thought, for someone who just a few hours ago had faced down a huge wild boar and nearly beaten it into submission with his bare hands. Maybe he was a little touched in the head.
But somehow, Felix felt an uncharacteristic degree of sympathy for this towheaded kid, and not just because he had helped him get into the Bard’s Guild (or at least in the building) and saved his life. Maybe it was because he reminded him of his uncle. Felix looked over his shoulder and reassured him.
“Hey, it’ll be fine. It probably only works if you try to take the book off the shelf.”
Martin stopped and looked back with a raised eyebrow. “Just so, just so,” he said with a chuckle before resuming his pace. “That is exactly correct. How did you come to that conclusion?”
“Well, I didn’t see that Madina woman or anyone else from here we’ve seen wearing a ring like that, so even if everyone has one, they don’t wear it all the time. But I saw a bunch of hallways branching out from here on the outside, which means it must be something of a hub that a lot of people have to pass through to get around. And yet you have so many books in here that even the side aisles are pretty narrow. So I’m guessing that if you could set yourself on fire just by brushing up against a book, you’d at least space out the aisles a little more—or more likely, you wouldn’t put the library in this building at all.”
“Excellent reasoning,” Martin said in a singsong tone as they came to the end of a hallway and began up a spiral staircase. “As you said, the fire will only burn you if the will your hand moves with is to remove the book. This also prevents cleverer thieves from trying to cover their hands, as the will of the person will simply be transferred to the cloth, and both will burn.” They were walking now across a walkway in the open air leading to a brick building that Felix guessed was their destination “I suppose that doesn’t make much sense to you, at this point,” he muttered, stroking his curly black beard, “But it will, I assure you, it will.”
The three of them passed through dozens of corridors and up a staircase where Martin threw open a door to a rather ordinary-looking room with wood plank floors and bunk beds with gray woolen blankets with a little chest of drawers next to each. Down the middle of the room, there were long tables at which several young men, probably in their 20’s, were transcribing from books. Another man, younger than the copyists but still older than Felix, sat tuning a lyre in the corner by a window. They all looked reasonably well-fed and well-rested, nothing like the exhausted and occasionally half-starved appearance of the people in the ante-City.
For Felix, who had been sleeping in the streets for some time, it seemed like the pinnacle of comfort. He would have cried if he weren’t at the age where he felt embarrassed to do that sort of thing. Martin led them to a set of bunks and assigned Felix the lower. He wanted desperately to lie down, but he forced himself not to—the only reason he hadn't collapsed from his injuries hours ago was that the need to get answers from this Yew person had his humors in a state of excitation. If he laid down for even a minute, all that exhaustion and pain would come flooding in at once.
Janus, on the other hand, immediately climbed to the top bunk and giggled and rolled around in his new bed like a dog in a mud puddle.
“This bed is great! It’s okay sleeping outside, but I like this better,” he crowed loudly.
Martin had excused himself saying one of the copyists would take them to Yew in a minute. Felix guessed it was up to him to keep Janus in line since they would inevitably be judged as a pair at first.
“You have to be quiet. They’re doing, you know, serious business, in here.”
“No no, not at all,” came the voice of the young man previously tuning his lyre. “You misunderstand the nature of this place. It is not like this, usually. Quiet and morose like a monastery, no no, not at all. This is just a lull, a lull. We are all poets here, lovers of life, yes?”
“Oh, er, yes,” Felix said, jumping down from the bunk to take the hand of the obviously Frankish young man. His hair was long, extending maybe halfway down his back, and his face was pale and handsome, with a strong jaw and smiling blue eyes. He was almost half a foot taller than Felix with a runner’s build and wore a close-fitting pale blue tunic—expensive looking in fact—over a white linen shirt with banded hose on his legs.
“Call me Chrétien,” he said, shaking Felix’s hand vigorously.
“Felix. And she is Janus.”
Damn it. Felix cursed himself inwardly for the mistake. He knew Francian from his uncle and some extra scraps he had picked up from merchants, but it wasn’t second nature.
“Ah! You called me she!” Janus said with a laugh as he sat up in his bunk. Then he turned to Chretien “You’re from the North, right? Around Paris? I can tell.”
“Why. Yes,” Chretien said with a smile, looking up at Janus in the bunk, “You speak the southern tongue perfectly. And I can tell your Iberian is perfect as well.” That was true enough, Felix thought—if Janus had been Castilian, he would be the kind that really lived in a castle
“Eeeeh? Perfect? Really?” Janus cooed. “Well, I was in Francia for a long time, but I’m from Eirenn—that’s what they called it there at least. I’m just good with that sort of thing, but not much else. Oh! They did just tell me I’m pretty good at fighting too, though I just found out about that.”
“Is that so?” Chretien asked, puzzled. “If you don’t mind my saying so, you don’t look it.”
Felix frowned at Janus. “Let’s not—let’s talk about that some other time.” Now wasn't the time to be telling other people that story, not yet.
Felix turned to Chretien, deciding to stick with Iberian. “If you’re you tell us how to get to this Yew guy’s office? Martin said one of them would take us, but if you’re free…”
“Yew, is it? I can walk you there, if you like. This place, it can be a labyrinth at times, though we have no Minotaur.”
Felix had no idea what that meant. Neither had he known the significance of the scenes depicted on either of the doors. His mother had explicitly forbidden his uncle from telling him any pagan stories that would inevitably lead him to the devil. She wouldn’t let Uncle teach him how to read either, though not because of the devil, but because reading was a sure path to ending up a good-for-nothing poet like him.
Well, that sure backfired on her, Felix chuckled inwardly.
Somewhere in the far corners of his mind, a sense of guilt for leaving his home without telling anyone began to creep like a spider trying to crawl into his ear. In his mind, he smashed it. There was nothing for him there and he was of no use to anyone, so why shouldn’t he leave?
He was a Singer, whether they liked it or not. The fact that he could imitate Madina’s “Craft” proved it.
Felix left his lute and his other belongings on the bed and Chretien led them through a different doorway from the one they entered. The sunlight in the next hallway was just starting to recede from the windows.
Felix resolved not to think of his old home anymore.
Wherever I hang my lute is my home. This fortress would be his home for a while, and he would squeeze every drop of Craft out of it like a ripe grape.