Llyfyr laughed and leaped to her feet, spinning around and skipping. “You did it, you got him, you—”
“What is the meaning of this?” Mellifera roared. She stormed toward them, her two guards at her back. Emily winced. They’d defeated Rudolph, but not the spell he’d used to bind the fairy princess. Mellifera grew taller with each step she took, until she towered nearly eight feet high. Even knowing it was probably glamour, Emily shrank away in alarm. A hazy yellow-and-black nimbus formed around Mellifera, accompanied by an ominous buzzing. Bees drifted up from her hair and flew out of her sleeves, and a few even slipped out of her mouth when she cried, “Where is my love?” Soon a cloud of buzzing, stinging insects surrounded her: a manifestation of her temper, terrible and beautiful to behold.
One of her guards reached out for Mellifera’s arm, perhaps to hold her back from rushing into possible danger, then shrieked and stumbled away as a score of Mellifera’s bees swarmed around his head. The guard waved his arms wildly and raced down the corridor, flesh welted and swelling. Mellifera didn’t even notice.
Sela raced around and got ahead of her sister, stepping between her and Emily. “We heard a gunshot, and then this noise—”
Llyfyr stepped forward and curtsied to Mellifera, who was now nearly invisible beneath a curtain of undulating bees. “Ma’am, there was an accident, you see, all the books fell down, but Emily is going to fix it, with her . . . librarian . . . prowess. Aren’t you, Em?”
“Where. Is. Rudolph?” Mellifera’s voice thundered from beyond the cloud.
“Emily will look for him while she’s fixing the books, won’t you?” Sela called. “It’s all right, sister.” She made soothing motions.
Mellifera’s arm appeared from the cloud of bees and pointed straight at Emily. “Fix. This. Or you will feel my sting.”
“I—of course.” Emily clambered around the edge of the mountain of books piled on Rudolph and made her way deeper into the stacks. She tried to ignore the buzzing behind her. She’d called all the books from the library to her, emptied the shelves in this place, but Murmured Under the Moon wasn’t from her library. She couldn’t summon it, and that meant—
There: one book still standing on a shelf, hidden in plain sight. She climbed up the shelf like it was a ladder and snatched the book down. The cover looked right for the era, leather over wood, with raised bands across the spine, and the pages were vellum, covered in elegant handwriting and lines of poetry in Latin.
In the distance she heard Mellifera shouting and making demands, Sela arguing with her, and Llyfyr trying to keep the peace. Emily started to tear out the pages, but something in her rebelled—she was a librarian. She was supposed to take care of books, especially one-of-a-kind books, and not destroy them. She cocked her head. The shouting didn’t sound too serious, not yet, and it was a short book, so maybe she had time—
A few minutes later, content that she’d done the best she could, Emily tore out the pages. Mellifera was still yelling back there. How destroyed did the book have to be? She sighed, tore up a page, and put the pieces in her mouth, chewing and swallowing the shreds of vellum, hoping the ink wasn’t toxic.
She’d eaten only one page when the shouting stopped. Emily crept back toward the book pile and saw Sela with her arms wrapped around her sister as Mellifera wept on her shoulder. Emily made her way toward them, and Llyfyr took her hand. “Whatever you did, it worked.”
“I ate a book,” Emily said.
“Now you’re just trying to make me jealous,” Llyfyr said.
*
A week later Mellifera and Sela stood in Emily’s small office. Mellifera was beautiful, ageless, and strange, as befitted a princess of the Folk, and she wore a sea-green gown that rippled like water. Sela was her same piratical self, lounging and self-satisfied. “Is everything back in order?” Mellifera asked.
Emily nodded. “More or less. There wasn’t too much damage. Thanks for sending the extra hands to help get everything back in place.”
“It was the least I could do.”
“What, ah, happened to Rudolph?” The rain of books hadn’t killed him, just knocked him out, but the fairy guards had whisked him away as soon as they uncovered him. Mellifera had been known to lay curses on mortals who offended her or slighted her—who knew what she would do to someone who’d enslaved her?
“He is making himself useful,” Mellifera said. “I have turned him into a living hive in my garden. I look forward to tasting the honey my bees make inside him.”
Emily swallowed. Mellifera was so light and nonchalant about it. She opted not to press for further details.
Sela saved them from an awkward silence by saying, “I came by to thank you for helping me, Emily. I couldn’t have done it without you.”
“That’s sweet,” Emily said, “but I know you’re really here to pick up Connie. She’s been talking for days about going on adventures with you. She never did like being cooped up in a library.”
“I can be here for two reasons. I’m complex.” Sela turned to Mellifera. “I’ll leave you to it, sister.”
“We’ll talk soon.” Mellifera gave her a kiss on the cheek and watched her go.
Emily cleared her throat. “I have something for you. Before I destroyed your book of poems, I photographed the pages with my phone, and I made . . . this.” She slid a small volume out of a drawer. “It’s a facsimile edition. Sela said only the original, written in your own hand, had those . . . problematic properties, so . . .” She handed the volume over. “I read them. It’s really beautiful work.”
The Folk loved compliments, especially sincere ones, and Mellifera grew more luminous. She turned the book over in her hands. “Oh, Emily, how thoughtful. You’re very kind. Some say the Folk cannot create art, not as humans do, but that’s not true. We simply understand that art is magic, and more magical than usual when we’re the ones making it, and so we’re very careful.” She sighed. “Usually, anyway. But my feelings when I composed these poems were real, even if they were foolish.”
Emily said, “I made a second copy, and I wondered, could I include it in the collection here? I don’t have many books by the Folk.”
Mellifera laughed like small bells. “Of course. I’ve administered this library for . . . a long time . . . but never expected to contribute to its holdings. I’m honored.” She cleared her throat. “Going out into the world, helping Sela, helping me . . . that sort of thing isn’t why you were hired. What you did was above and beyond. I owe you a boon. What can I give you?”
Emily went very still. A fairy, offering her whatever she wanted. As a teenager she would have asked for true love, but she had that with Llyfyr, or true enough. In her youth she’d dreamed of unicorns, but the practicalities of keeping one would be daunting. She could ask for wings, but she’d have to throw out all her clothes, and she tended to get airsick anyway. . . . But there was only one thing she really wanted.
“I want the library.”