It is true that everything has a heart. The hearts of towns and villages and cities do not look very much like the heart of a person, but they have hearts all the same. Sometimes it looks like a train depot, sometimes it looks like a university, sometimes it looks like a castle, sometimes it looks like a river, sometimes it looks like a factory. A town must dream or it will die, and a town’s dreams come from its depot or its university or its castle or its river or its factory. It longs for marvelous folk to come through the village center on a shining train and stay. It longs to make steel so strong it can build the whole of the rest of the world, or to see its river filled with great ships trading one thing for another until no one lacks any longer. It yearns to protect its villagers from the rampages of time and economics. It wants to make wisdom so bright it can keep the lights on for the whole of the rest of the world. If you look at the center of any city, you can see what it wants to be when it grows up.
The Great Grand Library did not know Meridian was the exact center of Fairyland when she settled there. She did not even know it was called Meridian, for it was not called anything at all yet. She was but a young and reckless hut whose owners had abandoned her during the first Fairyland Ice Age, which was caused by Hushnow, the Ancient and Demented Raven Lord, biting off chunks of the sun for his children to gobble up. This is why ravens are wiser and wilier than most other birds and some people, though it also covered Fairyland in green glass glaciers. But without the glaciers, there would have been no ice wyrms, so on the whole, it all comes out reasonably even. The sun sulked and moaned for a thousand years or so and then got over it. But the Great Grand Library knew only that the family of were-mammoths whom she loved and sheltered had run off at the first sign of wyrms and left her alone with nothing more to her name than a candlestick with no candles, a porridge bowl with no porridge, and a single book without a bookshelf to keep it safe from the storms.
The Great Grand Library picked up her studs and her door frame and high-tailed it south, looking for a better life. Now, a hut, no matter how good-hearted and sturdy-souled, has little use for candlesticks (all houses, huts, shacks, and bungalows can see perfectly well in the dark, though mansions have a terrible fear of it). Nor does she need much in the way of porridge bowls. A house eats only evening hours, the smells of baking things, and wood polish. And even if she did decide to give food a go, she would not start with porridge, which is horrid. This left the Great Grand Library, neither great nor grand nor a library quite yet, with her single solitary book. She sat down to read it in a patch of poor raven-chewed sunshine, and when she finished, she read it all over again. By the time she had finished her fourth reading, the hut looked up and realized that a gnome had wandered into it and lain down to sleep. When the gnome awoke, it unpacked its belongings, which included two more books. When the gnome left for an exciting business opportunity in the brand-new baby city of Pandemonium, the hut hid all three books from him and kept them for herself.
And so it went. The hut prowled all over Fairyland, enticing Fairies and spriggans and hobgoblins and wights to move in and move out, and each time, the hut stole their books, and her collection grew. She read every last book and then started over from the first one, the were-mammoths’ book, again and again. Finally, she got so heavy with the weight of her books that she could not prowl any longer, and the place where she plopped down at last is the place where she still sits.
The heart of Meridian is a hut that wanted to be a library when it grew up.
And that is just what September and her friends saw when they appeared, rather suddenly and with a loud chuh-chunk stamping sound, in the middle of the Great Grand Library. They landed in the Mystery section, which had once been a tiny kitchen where were-mammoth children had laughed and refused to eat their greens and gotten porridge all over their antlers. Now it had a ceiling like an overgrown cathedral, tangled up in flying buttresses and skylights and study desks zooming and darting to and fro like warplanes. But there were still a number of sinks and china cabinets and sideboards and tables with dinner plates laid out, though they had no beef or cheese on them, only more books, piled forty volumes high. The Mystery section is also the theatre district—for all of the town of Meridian is contained within the Great Grand Library, safe and sound and snug behind a wall of bookshelves, just as a medieval village bunkers down within a wall of bricks.
Ell could hardly stand still—so he didn’t. He leapt into the air, soaring up the stacks past the buttresses and the spitfire study desks with their green lamps blazing.
“Wait!” called September. They had to stay together—who knew how far Tanaquill and the others might have gotten by now?
“Looking for clues!” he shouted down while he darted all round the tip-top shelves, where there are precisely no books on the Heart of Fairyland. Human novels are kept on the top shelves of the Mystery section. The Great Grand Library did not have many books from the human world. She had to wait until some traveler who happened to bring along a paperback dropped it or traded it for a fourth wish or left it carelessly on a bedside table—with the spine split and pages dog-eared! The Library’s spies could never stand such abuse. Whenever she heard a book cry out in vain, the Great Grand Library sent someone to liberate it on the double quick. This is just what happens when you cannot find the book you were only just yesterday eagerly reading.