“Ah. Those countermeasures you mentioned.” Not all the stories were true, but the bits about iron being anathema to fairies were.
“Yes. But there’s got to be a proper door somewhere.” Sela walked along the ledge toward the corner of the house, apparently unconcerned by the hundred-foot drop on her right. Emily eased along the wall much more slowly and carefully. She didn’t have a particular fear of heights, but she could see herself developing one, given the circumstances. Once she made her way around the corner of the house, away from the cliff’s edge, she felt better. The land around them was flat and barren—it looked almost scoured—and the house was no less forbidding from a different angle. They walked around to the front and found a thick wooden door, banded with dark iron.
“Ha. This, I can deal with.” Sela pressed her hands against the wood, between the iron bands, and after a moment, small mushrooms popped out of the wood, first a few, then dozens, then hundreds. The door sagged, the wood rotting, and Sela kicked with her high black boots, sending up puffs of powder and rot. Soon the “door” was nothing but three black bars crossing an empty doorway. “Be a dear and shove those aside?”
Emily pulled on the iron bars, which were still attached to hinges, and they swung outward. Sela peered inside, into a wood-paneled foyer with an intricate tiled floor. “I sense guardians.” She grunted. “From the Mist Realm. Rudolph has made a political alliance with enemies of our queen, it seems.”
“What’s the Mist Realm?”
“A place of monsters. Though they’d say the same about the fey realm.”
“Can you fight them?”
“Ha. Not with this sword, or my magic. I know Mellifera probably gave you the impression the Folk seem all-powerful, but most of our powers are limited to nature magic, glamours, and minor reality-warping—making milk go sour, bending space-time, things like that. Fighting denizens of the Mist Realm is beyond my abilities.” She growled. “We were hoping to keep this operation quiet, but I may need to find reinforcements. I hate to give Rudolph time to consolidate his position further.”
“Wait. You need fighters? Even if they’ve taken Llyfyr, they might not have captured all the living books, especially the really cunning ones, who like to hide. . . .” Emily touched her charm and murmured an incantation.
A battered volume bound in black leather dropped into her outstretched hands. She opened the book, murmured to the pages, and in an eyeblink the book was gone, replaced by a crouching woman dressed in a cloak of moss, with green hair and eyes like gray river stones. Her hands were clawed, and each claw was a different color and texture: amber, ivory, obsidian, silver, emerald, wood, and others Emily couldn’t identify.
“Who’s this?” Sela said.
“She’s never bothered giving herself a name other than her title: A Manual of Unconventional Warfare.”
“Sometimes Emily calls me Connie.” The book’s voice was low and rough. “Do you know why the Folk are trying to pillage the library, Em? They made off with half the archive before the living books got organized. We formed a defensive line, and we’re keeping the looters out of the deep stacks, but it’s only a matter of time before the soldiers break through.” The living books were a strange crowd, perhaps fifty volumes that could take on forms ranging from the humanoid to the monstrous, depending on their contents and inclinations. They would be a formidable force to overpower, but Emily quailed at the thought of them being damaged in fighting. The living books were the closest thing she had to family—she thought of them almost as her family, even if they were all centuries older than she was.
“Mellifera is being mind-controlled by a mortal,” Emily said. “We think the enchanter is inside, but there are . . . things in the way.”
“Sentinels from the Mist Realm,” Sela said. “Can you fight such creatures? I can’t—they can choke and poison me but are too incorporeal for me to strike.”
Connie chuckled, then held up her claws. All of them sparked and glittered and glowed and rippled with diverse magics. “I have a key for every lock and a knife for every throat, and I’ve never yet grown weary of battle.” She rushed into the foyer, smashed through a door, and disappeared from sight. Sela and Emily followed at a safe distance as a great howling emerged from within, like winds whipping through narrow mountain passes, but also a little like screams. The stars in Sela’s hair seemed to glow brighter, providing sufficient light to illuminate their passage as they went deeper into the dark house. The place was huge, and the rooms were filled with paintings in ornate frames, antique furniture, statues, vases, and all manner of museum-quality relics, presumably looted by Rudolph from fey lands. There were magic items too: a mirror that reflected a sky with two suns; a harp that played itself softly as they walked by; a statue that wept what looked like real tears.
Sela ignored it all and pointed to scuffs in the dust. “See, Connie fought here, and continued on. . . .” They went up a wide staircase to the second-floor landing, and Sela continued tracking the living book’s passage until they found Connie herself in a hallway, facing off against an eight-foot-tall figure that looked like a suit of armor made from white smoke.
“Mist wraith,” Sela hissed. “Warrior caste, looks like a war-band leader, so Connie must have cut down its subordinates. You have good taste in books, librarian.”
The wraith conjured a long-handled ax from smoke and swung, but Connie rolled underneath the blow and lashed out with her glowing claws, shredding the thing’s legs into misty ribbons. The wraith fell, making a strange howl like wind whistling through a crack in a wall, and Connie tore its helmet off and crouched over its rippling form, raking her claws through the smoke. When the living book stood and limped back toward Emily, there was nothing left of the wraith but a dissipating patch of ground fog.
“Are you all right?” Emily knew living books were hard to hurt permanently, short of total destruction, but Connie seemed wounded at least.
“Tore my flyleaf nearly in half,” she muttered. “Just let me rest.” She collapsed into book form again, and Emily picked her up and tucked the volume under her arm.
“She’ll be all right,” Emily said. “She just needs time to repair herself. Are we safe?”
Sela sniffed the air. “I don’t sense any denizens of the Mist Realm—Connie dispersed them all. I do sense Folk, though—”
The door at the end of the hall burst open, and two tall guards, twins to those at the library, burst out, pointing their spears at Sela’s and Emily’s throats. Sela dropped back two steps and brought up her cutlass, smacking aside the barbed end of the spear—was it made of iron? Emily didn’t dare twitch.