Chương 7: The Library.

The first day nearly broke her. The Old Library was worse than she had imagined. The air stank of mold and old wax. Drafts of wind whipped through cracks in the tall windows, tugging her skirts and numbing her fingers. The shelves soared overhead, layered in sooty dust that settled in her lungs. The floor had a strange, sticky feel to it, probably old wax and grime residue that had never been cleared. She brought a cloth rag, with no water, and used a feather duster on the delicate spines of the books.

She tried to sweep, but each stroke kicked dust into the air, and when she turned around, it was like she had done nothing at all. She cleaned one corner of the floor at a time, only to come back the next morning to find it filthy again. Her fingers cracked from the cold, her eyes itched, and her back ached. But she didn't stop. On the evening before the dinner bell, Hesta came.

She swept her eyes over the space, arms folded, scanning, narrowing when they landed on Lira, who was up on a stool, cleaning the shelves from top to bottom. Her dress was dusty, her hair disheveled, and she looked miserable.

"Are you still in one piece?" Hesta asked.

"Yes, ma'am."

"Are you enjoying yourself?"

"No, ma'am."

"Good." She left without another word. Lira didn't exhale until she was gone. But she kept coming back, adapting her strategy day by day. She went to the storage and picked up extra layers of cloth, a scarf to cover her nose, and thick gardener's gloves to protect her hands. She expected someone to stop her, but no one did. Still, she made sure to remove them and stash them in the back before Hesta's visits. That woman wanted her to suffer more than she wanted the work to be done.

She timed her dusting so the air remained breathable most days. She worked from top to bottom, making sure not to stir up dust on the parts she had already cleaned. She plugged holes in the walls, and near the window frames with loose scraps of vellum she salvaged from a destroyed scroll, ones with barely any writing on them, reducing the draft. She even started cataloguing mentally what Hesta considered proper suffering. The headmaid was waiting for Lira to beg to be reassigned. Fat chance of that.

Lira had claimed this space. It was hers now. And no one else wanted it. Not even ghosts seemed fit to haunt it. And so she suffered through the first week, but by the second week, she began to use her mind. Lira learned quickly: this wasn't a place to conquer. No one expected her to completely restore it, which was impossible.

Lira thought she could do it if she were armed with twenty maids willing to work nonstop for a week, but as things were, the best she could do was start getting comfortable without having Hesta breathing down her neck. She added a coat to her ensemble. She stopped working with a cloth rag and a feather duster altogether, switching instead to a broom with stiff bristles and a wide dustpan. Her efforts stopped being about making the space shine completely. Instead, she started focusing on volume.

Because that was what Hesta wanted. Lira noticed that each time the headmaid visited, she didn't make a tour of the space to check the work. Instead, she looked at the amount of dirt gathered inside the dustpan. If the sack was full of grey, clumpy dust and crumpled debris, she left in silence. If it wasn't, she snapped. Support the creativity of authors by visiting the original site for this novel and more. So Lira focused on the sack.

She swept the ground in thick paths that caught the worst of the fallen soot, sometimes even scooping bits from neglected corners just to pad it out. A trickle of powdered grime from a cracked window sill? Into the sack. Charred paper scraps from an old candle register? Into the sack. A spider nest she found between two plinths? Into the sack, too. By the end of each shift, the sack was heavy and offensive. And that was all that mattered to the headmaid. The next part was trickier: managing visits.

She started tracking when Celene and Hesta came by. Celene, who managed rotations and did spot checks, usually came once a week near the start, always quick and mildly apologetic. Hesta, by contrast, showed up once a day, sometimes twice, mostly by late evening, but sometimes midday, depending entirely on how foul her mood had turned that day. So Lira began working smart. Mornings: she dusted the high shelves, clearing dust from books and letting it settle on the ground.

Then she swept the dust that had settled overnight, filling half the sack. Afternoons: she relaxed for most of it, only sweeping the now-settled dust from the morning work into the sack. She positioned herself behind the larger shelves when she needed rest. The shelves were tall enough to block her from view. She found a piece of broken mirror and used it to watch the door while hiding, just in case she got a surprise visit. She was rarely idle for long. There was too much to do.

But with each passing day, she carved out small pockets of time. Time she could spend doing what she loved most. Reading. The library had once been organized. That much was obvious. There were signs, literal ones, still hanging above certain sections: Trade Agreements, Histories, Correspondence, Genealogy, and more. But they meant nothing now. Shelves labeled for histories held books on mineral rights. Political speeches were tucked between children's storybooks. Scrolls curled in boxes marked "Receipts."

The chaos was the result of years of neglect. No one wanted to take ownership of the space, so the system had decayed, layer by layer. Every important noble in residence in Castle Elthram had a personal bookcase. Those who had manors in the capital had smaller libraries of their own. When one of their books became outdated, unfashionable, or too politically inconvenient, they sent it here. The library was a graveyard of obsolete knowledge. Still, half the texts were valuable, if you knew what to look for.

They were buried under generations of amateur reorganization, servants guessing where things should go, or worse, deliberately hiding them. Lira had only mapped less than a quarter of the room in her head. That alone had taken a couple of weeks. It was during one of her daily circuits, looking for fresh dust to sweep, that she heard the groan of the great door behind her. She turned to find a footman struggling under the weight of six thick volumes, stacked haphazardly against his chest.

"Oh, someone is here," he blinked. Lira just nodded.

"Where do these go?" he asked, panting slightly as he edged the books onto a nearby table. She recognized the gold-and-blue bindings: royal genealogies.

"Who sent them?" she asked.

"Lord Trenwell," said the footman.

"He said they're not needed anymore. I guess the heir situation changed." He flexed his fingers, cracking a knuckle.

"Do you file these?"

"It's not really my job, but I will do it," she said, wiping her hands on her apron.

"There's a shelf near the eastern alcove. Bloodlines and succession records. Though half of it is now filled with a botany collection for some reason." He let out a low chuckle.

"Better you than me." Then, noticing the dust collecting on his boots, he wrinkled his nose.

"Smells like a coffin in here."

"Hey, coffins aren't that drafty," she smirked. He laughed with her.

"The name is Marco, by the way."

"I am Lira."

"Well, Lira, see you around." When he left, she filed the books away, having already cleaned the section before placing the new arrivals in their new, permanent home. Then she headed toward the far end of the southern wing, where she had discovered an old alcove that morning. It was hidden behind the remnants of a decorative tapestry, depicting a scene so faded she couldn't tell if it was a garden or a forest. Inside, the stone walls wrapped close, blocking most of the wind.

Two worn armchairs sat beside a shuttered window, and the floor still had an intact, threadbare rug. It wasn't comfort, but it was enough. She lit a stub of candle from a hidden stash and reached into a pile of books that had already been there when she found the space. Something about them caught her eye, rather something about one of the books. The binding was leather, embossed with an elegant monogram: J. V. She tugged it loose, sneezed, and opened it. Calligraphic Foundations by Master Jorel Velora.

She stared at the page. Below the title, written in flourished ink, terribly similar in style to what her father had taught her: Dedicated to Her Majesty Queen Mirabelle, patron of the noble arts. Lira blinked. It stirred a memory from her past. She could still hear her father's voice.

"Your great uncle used to teach nobles how to write their own names, back when that meant something," he had said proudly.

"Jorel Velora, best scribe in the provinces. Trained half the court before they forgot about him." Her fingers trembled as she turned the page. It was art. Better than her, even better than her father. For some reason, it pulled at her heart. She felt, for the first time in a long while, that she had a lineage to be proud of, an art she had inherited. He would have told her that it mattered more than noble bloodlines and inherited coin.

For the first time in weeks, deep in a hidden alcove at the heart of the royal castle, Lira felt something close to home. The home from before her father's death. She was a child again, reading and learning, guided by the hand of one of her ancestors.