The librarian said, “You’re as earnest and eager as ever, Commander. Despite your gray hair.”

“I’m still young enough to be a student, I hope.”

Emil was at his most affable, exercising the graces and courtesies that Zanja had tried to emulate, though she could not imitate his sincerity. He produced books from his satchel, some in paperboard boxes, others wrapped in cotton cloth and tied with twine. The librarian opened them like gifts and tutted over the water‑stained, chewed, and crumpled pages as though the books were children come to harm. “This is no quick lesson,” she said, and then added matter‑of‑factly, “I’m dying, you know.”

“Yes, I do know,” Emil said. “Your knowledge should not die with you. If you agree to teach me, we’ll take lodging in town.”

For the first time, the librarian noticed Zanja, standing unobtrusively by the stairs, and Emil introduced her as a reader of glyphic poetry, which proved a certain method to win a book lover’s admiration. Certainly, the librarian also wondered how a tribal woman came to have such an arcane and unlikely pursuit, but did not ask, and so Zanja did not have to make up an explanation for a thing she could not even explain to herself. “Would you like to see my books?” the librarian asked Emil.

“Would those be the ones that you threw by the armload out the windows of the burning library?”

The librarian rose without answering and led them to a staircase. They had scarcely begun to climb the narrow stairs when Zanja smelled old paper and leather bindings, the same scent that pervaded Medric’s book‑lined attic. The old librarian hauled herself up one step at a time, and behind her Emil held himself alert as though he thought she’d fall and he would have to catch her. At the rear, Zanja breathed in the scent of the books, and breathed out a few lines from Koles:

“A scent, faint and far away, ephemeral As though somewhere a flower bloomed As though someday it might bear seed.”

Ahead of her, Emil paused and looked over his shoulder at her. “There’s something up here? Besides just a wonderful collection of books?”

Zanja’s soul, which had seemed only tenuously connected to her body, snapped sharply into place, like a dislocated bone popping into alignment. “Something that we need,” she said.

At the top of the stairs, the old woman lifted a blind, and in the beam of light swimming dust gleamed like gold. Above Zanja, Emil exclaimed, “Blessed day!” And then Zanja was herself stepping up into an attic crammed with books, and the old woman stood grinning like a child with a wonderful secret. Books upon books: two, three layers deep on cobbled‑together shelves that leaned tiredly sideways and surely would have fallen over if not for the companion shelves leaning on them in the opposite direction. Emil turned ecstatically from one book to the next. “Is that a copy of Songs?And is that A History of a Coastal Town?And a completeset of the plays of Barness?”

“Two complete sets,” said the librarian smugly. “There’s another behind that one.”

They would be at it for hours. For Emil, the only pleasure greater than that of reading was the pleasure of talking about books, whether he had read them or not. The attic was narrow, and so crowded with books that there was scarcely room for the three of them. Zanja worked her way to the far end, where a comfortable chair was wedged by the second window, and she squatted down before the lowest shelf. In the shadows and dust that gathered here–for the sick old woman could no longer keep such a mess of books clean–Zanja could not hope to see the titles without removing each book and holding it up to the window. But perhaps the books’ titles or contents were of no importance. She ran her fingertips across the spines, and then slid her hand through the front row of books to touch those tucked behind. Would touch be enough? When intuition gave her a target, she did not usually have to separate it out from a clutter of virtually identical objects. To Emil, all of these books would be important. To Zanja, only one of them was, but she did not know which one.

They remained in the attic until the light began to dim, and by then Zanja had worn herself with aimless searching. She and Emil ate fried fish and potatoes at a tavern, and rented some rooms that were located over a busy wheelwright’s shop. One room had a battered table and a couple of banged‑up chairs. Zanja sat, feeling unutterably weary. Emil opened the windows, and in a moment two ravens landed, and he fed them the greasy remains of the fish and potatoes.

One of the ravens said, “Medric is on his way to join you.”

Emil stepped back in surprise. “Medric is traveling?‘

“Karis is alone?” Zanja added.

Without answering, the ravens squabbled over the fish like ordinary birds. Emil sat at the table with Zanja. “They’ll answer our questions when they’re done eating. Does your head hurt?”

“I think I’m past that now. I feel like I’ve awakened exhausted from a night of bad dreams.”

“You haven’t actually been sleeping much, that I’ve noticed. What were you looking for in that attic?”

“A book, I think. I knowit’s there.”

“Well, you’ll never hear me say that books aren’t important, but how can one book be so important that it brings our recluse out of his attic?”

“You think he’s coming to help me find it?”

“The ravens will tell us. But yes, that’s what I suspect.”

Zanja put her head down on the table. “How did we wind up in this town? Did you follow an impulse of insight, or were you planning to come here anyway?”

“The second,” he said. “But you know, an insight can arrive long ahead of its usefulness. Maybe it was prescience that made me start looking a year ago for an education in book repair.” He stood up and put a hand on her shoulder. “Go to bed.”

“Medric shouldn’t travel alone,” Zanja said. “Someone will think he’s a madman and lock him up.”

Emil smiled. “Now you sound like yourself again. Go to bed.”

“Karis shouldn’t be alone either,” Zanja said.

“She’s impervious, unassailable, and unbelievably competent. I certainly don’t see why she can’t be left alone. And she’s got Leeba.”

Zanja stood up. And then she noticed that the ravens were gone. Though Emil leaned out the window and called them to come back, they didn’t respond.

“Well, that’s odd,” he said.

The next morning, Zanja set out to find Medric and brought him into town some days later. He baffled and charmed the old librarian in her sitting room, then climbed the stairs to the attic. Zanja, armed with a broom and feather duster, promised the librarian that she would shelve each book exactly as she found it, and followed Medric’s light footsteps up into the darkness. By the time she raised the blind in the attic, he was already ensconced in the chair, with three books in his lap.

As the morning passed, Zanja sometimes heard the murmur of voices downstairs, where the librarian supervised as Emil painstakingly put back together the torn pages of a book he would later re‑bind. Zanja emptied and cleaned one shelf of books at a time. Occasionally, Medric sneezed from the dust, but otherwise he seemed oblivious to Zanja’s search.

Zanja had dusted the last book and was sweeping the floor when Medric, cross‑legged in the armchair, looked up from his reading. “You missed some.” He pointed vaguely underneath the chair.

Zanja leaned against the balustrade, exasperated. “You’re worried about the dust under the chair? Sweep it yourself.”

“Dust? Sweep? What are you talking about?” Medric managed to shift the chair so that Zanja could see that underneath it lay book boxes, stored flat, with warnings written on each one with a wide‑nibbed pen: “Be VeryCareful!”

She took one up, carefully, and opened it. A few tiny pieces of burned paper floated out. Inside lay the charred remains of a book.