The Library

The day I went to the Library at last there was a dinner first. My brother and sister, who years ago went to the Library, jumped over from their posts to celebrate the coming of my turn. I asked my brother once what it was like and why it was so secret and why everyone went. We were walking along the edge of the forest near the mandarin pond. 

“I’m not supposed to tell you,” he said, kicking a rock off the path. “I will say this. It’s where you get your eyes opened to the reality of things.”

“Not a good reality?” 

He wouldn’t look at me, his eyes on the stones at his feet.

We reached the pond where a magnificent mandarin duck glided over its glassy waters. 

“Oh!” I exclaimed. “How beautiful! Do you think there’s every color in its feathers?” 

“If not, then almost every color.”

“I think reality is pretty good for this mandarin.”

“Because it doesn’t know,” my brother said. 

“Is it better to be ignorant?” 

“I guess sometimes.”

“That’s not what you used to think.”

The scarf around my brother’s neck was trying to unloose itself, unfolding its soft, tight stitches across his bony shoulders. Glacian wool. Light, yet warm. Made in a place foreign to me.

“You do like your work in Glacia, don’t you?” I asked.

His eyes were on the vivid smear of colors the mandarin reflected in the ripples of the pond. 

“I like Glacia,” he said like someone who had fallen in love with a place, but not its people. 

I remembered this while sitting at the family table looking out from the big window as I had so many times, at the familiar blur of tree branches waving angrily in the wind and the exposed stubble of grass and the round yellow house down the path, tucked into itself like a bird in a storm. The rain started at second sun and was only getting stronger. Mother was disappointed.

“Well, there goes the outdoor plan.” She stood in front of the window, willing the smears away.

She put me in a dress, a light blue dress that looked like it should be out in a sea of grass and yellow flowers, not in a rainstorm. But Mother would see sun where there was rain.

The dinner moved indoors to Harfollow. I sat with my family and ate wild thackaney for the first time. It tasted like woods some complained, but I like the woods.

“We are here today,” began the Protectress, standing before her people with her black, coiling hair and deep, dark eyes. “To celebrate the coming of age of Althea. Tonight, she will be taken to the Library to begin her instruction. It is a bittersweet day for us all when a young woman must leave the comforts of her family and begin her independent life and find the true work she is called to perform. The carefree days of wandering the forests and lakes looking for birds and flowers are over and now it is time for more serious matters. It happens to us all. It must happen in order for our world to continue to grow and survive. We must do our part.”

I thought of my parents. What part were they doing? Were some people assigned to be parents? Did you get assigned to your husband or wife? That didn’t sound very promising. What if you had to marry someone you found revolting? 

I wonder why the choices are made for us. I suppose I will learn the answer in the Library.

It was part of the ritual that they come for me in the middle of the night. Sort of like a kidnapping, only everyone knows about it, so not really a kidnapping. My little bag was packed and ready by the window. I slept in traveling clothes with my shoes next to the bed. 

Mother and Father and my brother and sister hugged me tightly. Father was weeping.

“Oh, Fidor. Really. This is not a time for tears! It’s a time to rejoice. Our little girl is growing up.”

Mother could be so unfeeling.

I hugged Father again and he looked me in the eyes. “I’m going to miss you,” he breathed. “I enjoy talking with you. You help me see things a different way.” 

“I will miss you, too,” I said, dry-eyed. I felt deeply, but never teared.

When my brother put his arms around me, he said, “Look after yourself. And one thing to remember. Do not accept a gift from the Ubrill. Do you hear me? Under no circumstances accept a gift from the Ubrill.”

“Who are the Ubrill?” I whispered into his neck.

“You’ll know.”

I had just gotten to sleep when they came. Hoods and all. “Climb on my shoulders,” said the one with the black cloak. “We see your case.” They brought me down to a waiting horse. Was that a flash of fulgent green? Would I be on the back of one of the fabled Welchefarben? It was too dark to be sure. 

It happened so quickly. There was no time to say goodbye to the places where I’d put my steps and whatever part of myself was fingered into the trees or voiced for the birds or stomped into the path and the pond was suddenly gone. 

The motion of riding put me into a half-sleep and I woke much later just as the first sun rose.

Next: Listen, Move, Hide, Repeat