The Accidental Keyhand Read online

  “See!”

  Phillip lifted one eyebrow. “Yes but that’s because I’m also talking about the Socrates.”

  Marcus stopped chewing. “Socrates, the ancient Greek philosopher. Socrates who had to drink the poison hemlock. Socrates who was big into asking questions?”

  Phillip put his mug down. “Otherwise known as the Socrates of Athens who was charged with impiety, made to stand trial, argued his own defense, was found guilty, and sentenced to drink a pretty goblet full of the stuff. Yes, the one and only.”

  “Isn’t it a little late for worrying?” said Marcus. “I mean, didn’t that all happen thousands of years ago?”

  “You forget,” said Phillip, crossing one leg over the other. “From Petrarch’s Library, one can walk into an Athens in which Socrates hasn’t yet drunk the hemlock.”

  A knock sounded on the door.

  “Come in,” boomed Phillip.

  Ebba, the girl they’d seen the previous day, poked her head around the door. She smiled shyly at Dorrie and Marcus.

  Phillip packed up the coffeepot and mugs. “You can find Ursula over in the repair and preservation department, if you need her. Ebba will take you to the Apprentice Attics and find a room for you there. It’s been a pleasure to meet you. When I return, we must talk about the state of alchemy—I mean, chemistry—in the twenty-first century.” He hurried out the door.

  After they’d changed from their bathrobes back into their clothes, they met Ebba out in the polished marble hallway.

  Ebba smiled uncertainly at Dorrie and Marcus. “So how do you feel about bicycles?”

  They only had to walk a short way until they found four of them parked in a jumble by a broad brick stairway. Stuffing their robes in Ebba’s satchel, they pedaled along behind her, making a dizzying number of turns. Through open doorways and passing them in the corridors, Dorrie glimpsed people in turbans and people in bowlers. People in hoods, fezzes, bonnets, colossal wigs, and straw sombreros. People in saris and gum boots, bow ties and kilts, habits and high-heeled shoes, kimonos, bloomers, robes, doublet and hose, fringed leather, gowns of every length, and trousers of every sort of cloth. Often in very odd combinations. Many stared at Dorrie, and she couldn’t help but stare right back.

  At the top of a flight of stairs, they left the bikes leaning against a wall.

  Ebba turned suddenly. “I know you’re there, Kenzo.”

  A younger boy with lank black hair and ears that stood out like sugar-bowl handles leaped out from behind an enormous urn and scowled. “How?”

  “I could hear you breathing.”

  The boy joined them as they trooped down the stairs, staring at Marcus with astounded bright eyes. “Is it true you busted a hole into Petrarch’s Library?”

  Ebba looked embarrassed. “Kenzo, don’t accuse them of that.”

  “I’m not accusing. I’m just asking.”

  “No, we just fell through one that was already there,” said Marcus. “At least that’s what we’re going to tell Scuggans.”

  “So, do you live here?” Dorrie asked Ebba, as they turned a corner into a room hung with tapestries and filled with heavy wooden trunks.

  “Of course,” said Kenzo, looking at Dorrie as though she’d just fallen a few notches in his estimation.

  Ebba pushed her yellow headband back. “Kenzo, they’ve never been here before. They don’t know.” She led them up a narrow set of wooden stairs. “Kenzo lives here with his mother in some rooms off the Dutch Royal Archives Library. She works in the reference department.”

  “Ebba’s an apprentice,” said Kenzo. “I’m going to be one. Maybe next year.”

  “Apprentice what?” asked Marcus.

  “Lybrarian,” said Kenzo. “What else?”

  Ebba stopped on the landing and looked at Kenzo sternly, her hands on her hips. “Aren’t you supposed to be helping with lunch?”

  “Okay, okay,” said Kenzo, kicking the spindles as he made his way back down the stairs.

  “How did you and Kenzo get here?” asked Dorrie, as they continued up the next flight of stairs, wondering if they had also plunged accidentally into Petrarch’s Library.

  “Kenzo came here when he was just a baby, after his mother had to leave Japan. The Lybrariad rescued them. I was born here. Lots of people live here who aren’t lybrarians. Refugees, mostly. Or the children of refugees. My parents were from Timbuktu, but now they live out in Haven, the village on the other side of the island. I spend some time here and some time with them.”

  As they rounded a corner to a carpeted corridor, Ebba almost ran into a tall woman who had just emerged from a stone archway without looking. “I beg your pardon, Ebba,” the woman said, looking distractedly at them for a moment before moving on. She was dressed all in white, the cloth hanging in a loose drape over one shoulder. A thin circlet pressed down on her long, gently curling dark locks, which were pulled back into a loose bunch at the back of her head.

  Dorrie looked back at the archway and caught her breath. Above it, between two images of a sword crossed with a quill pen, the words “Athens, 399 BCE” glowed. Beyond the archway stood a small white room with a table against one wall, upon which stood a rack of scrolls and little clay pots. Along the top of the walls, dolphins made of bits of blue tile cavorted. “That’s a Spoke Library in there, isn’t it?” breathed Dorrie.

  A tinkling sound caught Dorrie’s attention. Two rough stone ledges protruded from the stones on the left side of the archway. The bottom one stuck out farther than the top one, and upon each stood a large clay pot. Water trickled from the higher pot into the lower pot through a clay tube.

  “It’s a water clock,” said Ebba, peering into the lower pot. “Every hour, the water level rises to another line.” She pointed at a set of deeply etched marks in the clay. “See?”

  Beside each mark, figures danced, and in another moment, Dorrie could read “9 a.m.” and “10 a.m.,” hour by hour up to the top of the pot, which read “12 p.m.”

  “All the archways have a clock on the left and a calendar on the right,” said Ebba. “So we know what time it is out in the Spoke Libraries. Sometimes time runs slower or faster out there than it does in Petrarch’s Library.”

  Dorrie looked back down the corridor where the woman in white was just disappearing around a corner. “So she just walked out of a whole other time.”

  “Well, yeah,” said Ebba, as if Dorrie had just announced that eyes were for seeing.

  “Then how come she looks like she just came back from getting a cavity filled?” asked Marcus. “I mean, she just rode a time-space-continuum roller coaster.”

  “Is she the one who’s friends with Socrates?” asked Dorrie.

  Ebba looked surprised and then worried. “How…how did you know?”

  “Phillip told us about her, and we ate some of her ambrosia.”

  Relief flooded Ebba’s face. “Oh. Yes, that’s Aspasia. She’s been trying to convince the city of Athens not to bring Socrates to trial, but I don’t think she’s getting very far. For now, the history books tell us that he’ll be summoned to appear before the legal magistrate in about a week. A citizen is going to charge him with the crime.”

  “The impiety thing?” asked Marcus.

  “Exactly. For saying that the moon and the sun are rocks rather than gods, or something like that. Oh, and also that the stuff he says is making people do bad things.”

  “Like what?” Marcus snorted. “Ask irritating questions?”

  Dorrie felt a snort of her own indignation coming on. “Yeah, how can you make someone do something with words, unless they’re under some kind of magic spell or part zombie or something?”

  “Or you get the person to agree to a stupid bet,” said Marcus, his expression one of freshly laundered innocence.

  Dorrie shot him a thoroughly unlaundered look of irritation.


  Ebba looked from Dorrie to Marcus. “You’re not really enemies of Petrarch’s Library or part of some new Foundation out to destroy us or anything, right?”

  “What? No!” said Dorrie. “We’d never even heard of Petrarch’s Library before yesterday.”

  Ebba grinned. “I didn’t think so.”

  They continued down the hall. “So, how exactly do the librarians here keep people from, you know, being set on fire for saying the wrong thing?” Dorrie asked.

  Ebba looked confused. “Oh, lots of ways. It depends on the situation.”

  “Maybe their stubby little pencils are really fire extinguishers,” said Marcus.

  “But librarians…” Dorrie chose her words carefully. “They put books on shelves and check out books, or help you find something out. They don’t seem very…” She took a deep breath. “Strong or brave or the kind of people who’d know how to do, well, daring things like that.”

  “Oh, no,” said Ebba, stopping short and looking shocked. “A properly trained lybrarian is one of the most fearless and fearsome beings in the world!”

  “Fearsome?” said Dorrie, trying not to sound doubtful.

  Ebba must have heard the dubiousness in Dorrie’s voice anyway. “They’re wonderful at finding out things and slipping around undetected and getting the right information into the right hands. And of course they’re all masters of…” She looked from Dorrie to Marcus. “The Lybrariad thoroughly trains them! Come on, I’ll show you.” She launched herself forward at a run with Dorrie and Marcus pelting after her.

  After a series of hallways and stairways and confusing turns, Ebba finally slowed down and then barreled through a set of battered brown doors.

  Marcus elbowed Dorrie. “It’s going to be librarians learning how to yell at people for bringing soda into the library. I know it.”

  “Shhh,” hissed Dorrie, pushing open the doors.

  They found themselves standing on the edge of a large room that rang with the sound of heavy sticks being whacked against one another, and the shouts and grunts of people kicking and punching in unison in one of the room’s far corners. Spears and swords of every conceivable size and shape hung from the walls in great profusion.

  “Those are librarians?” cried Dorrie, so loudly that a few people in the process of hauling themselves up long ropes hung from the ceiling stopped climbing and stared at her for a moment.

  Marcus’s mouth hung open.

  Ebba turned to them, her face proud. “This is the Gymnasium, where the lybrarians learn their combat skills. In case they hit a brick wall with the research and stealth. And only for defensive use.”

  “Combat skills,” repeated Dorrie, sounding very much like Marcus murmuring about Egeria’s mermaid-forever hair.

  Dorrie’s fingers tingled, and her pulse quickened as not far from where they stood, a man in breeches and a billowy white shirt forced a woman in a long gown backward with a blindingly fast succession of sword thrusts and parries. A knot of string held back the man’s thick, dark hair. For a moment, his blade and that of the woman came together in a quivering cross. His nose loomed over his face like a monument. It sucked mercilessly at Dorrie’s attention.

  The woman grunted and the swords slid against each other, first in one direction and then another. The woman tried to thrust, and the man blocked her blade and began to drive her backward again with the casual attention of a shopper pushing a grocery cart. They moved nothing like Mr. Kornberger did when he demonstrated a move. They were a hundred, a thousand times better!

  “They’re ninja librarians!” crowed Marcus.

  A staggering realization swelled and burst into a fountain of blazing sparks inside Dorrie’s chest. Here in Petrarch’s Library, her desire to wield a sword made a dumbfounding kind of sense.

  CHAPTER 8

  THE APPRENTICE TABLE

  Busy replaying the sword fight she’d seen, Dorrie hardly remembered the bicycle ride from the Gymnasium to where Ebba finally stopped and dismounted, leaning her bicycle up against a wall. Only when they emerged into a grassy, sunlit space the size of a football field did Dorrie come back to her senses. She blinked in the warm brightness.

  “This is the Commons,” said Ebba, spreading her arms wide. “It’s kind of the center of Petrarch’s Library.”

  All around the green expanse, the warren of Petrarch’s Library rose to various heights. Sunshine poured down onto the Commons and most of the buildings, but patches of thunderous clouds hung low over a few spots in the architectural tangle. Beneath them, various mists and drizzles and soaking storms blew.

  Ebba followed Dorrie’s gaze to one of the downpours. “The libraries come here with their own weather. There’s a perpetual snowstorm over at the Abbey Library of Saint Gall. The apprentices have snowball fights there on the first day of every month.”

  Ebba led them along a path of crushed shells that wound around clumps of trees and gardens of various sorts. “Some of the lybrarians like to garden.”

  As they walked along a hedge of hydrangeas, Marcus snorted. “If I could travel all over the time map, there’s no way I’d waste my time messing around with daffodils and—” He broke off, his mouth open, staring over the hedge, and then whispered hoarsely, “There she is.”

  Dorrie craned her neck to see. “Who?”

  “Egeria,” choked out Marcus.

  Dorrie stood on tiptoe. At some distance on the other side, Egeria, her hair caught up in a long braid, knelt with a group of people next to a raised bed full of bright green, fuzzy-looking plants.

  Ebba pushed a branch aside. “Oh, yes, she’s way into plants. That’s her beginner European field-foraging practicum. It’s the first one she’s ever taught. She only just made lybrarian this past midwinter. I think she might be one of the youngest ever. She’s only sixteen.”

  At that moment, Egeria looked up and waved. She had a smudge of dirt on her cheek, covering half of the spray of large freckles sprinkled on her nose. She came to them, smiling. “You’ve dried.”

  Marcus seemed to have relapsed into slip shock and just stared at her.

  “Since yesterday, I mean,” she added.

  Dorrie and Ebba looked at Marcus in alarm as he began to laugh maniacally, his face turning a dazzling shade of red. He stopped as abruptly as he’d begun. “Nice, uh, garden,” he choked out, sounding as though one of the larger statues from the Reference Room had been laid across his chest.

  Egeria looked brightly around at the well-tended beds. “Oh, are you interested in plants?”

  “Totally! Plants are just so…so…” Marcus worked his hands around in circles that Dorrie thought were meant to look enthusiastic. “Awesome!” He looked wildly around. “The way they grow up on those stems, with that wide variety of…shapes and smells and…roots and, and—”

  Dorrie widened her eyes at him, shaking her head faintly from side to side to warn him that he had crossed into the land of total idiocy, but he seemed unable to extricate himself from his sentence. Before Marcus could embarrass himself farther, Ebba explained that they needed to get to lunch, and Dorrie hauled him on down the path.

  At one end of the Commons, Ebba stopped at a two-story, timber-and-plaster building with a steep thatched roof. Diamond-paned windows stood open in the sunshine, and a dozen bicycles and handcarts were scattered around the entrance. A painted sign swinging over the massive wooden door read: “The Sharpened Quill.”

  Inside, cutlery clattered and voices rose and fell in conversation beneath a low-beamed ceiling. Heads turned toward them as they entered and the room quieted slightly, then returned to its original volume.

  “The apprentices usually sit over there,” said Ebba pointing to a long trestle table in a corner where a crowd of younger people sat. Kenzo noticed them immediately and began to wave at them wildly.

  Millie, the other girl who’d discovered them, lo
oked up from her seat nearby. Dorrie smiled tentatively at her. Millie looked straight at Dorrie for a moment and then, without smiling back, turned to speak to a girl sitting next to her. The girl, small and fragile-looking with long, dark hair and eyes like darting green fish, simply stared at Dorrie and Marcus.

  Ebba pointed to the back of the room where a table laden with serving bowls and trays stood against the only section of wall not lined with rough-looking, saggy bookshelves stuffed with well-thumbed volumes. “You get your own food. Everything’s over there. Come on.”

  When they arrived at the apprentices’ table after filling their plates, most of those seated stopped eating and talking to stare at Dorrie and Marcus.

  Ebba unslung her satchel. “Can you make some room?”

  Nobody moved.

  “She said make some room, Goggle Eyes,” ordered an older girl with a little brown velvet hat perched on her head. In a rush of knocking knees and sliding plates, the apprentices crowded closer to each other. Millie and the girl with the darting eyes moved last and slowly and not very far. Ebba, Dorrie, and Marcus sat down.

  “I’m Mathilde,” said the girl who had spoken, sticking her hand out across the table. She had merry brown eyes and thick chestnut hair parted in the middle and pinned in two coils to either side of her head. To Dorrie, she looked a little older than Marcus, maybe fifteen.

  “I’m Dorrie. Dorrie Barnes.” She took Mathilde’s hand, glancing at her brother. “And this is Marcus.”

  “So are you really keyhands?” sang out Kenzo, while the rest of the table froze, some going pink in the cheeks.

  “What’s a keyhand?” asked Dorrie.

  “You don’t know?” asked Kenzo, astounded. “Maybe you really are Foundation.”

  “Kenzo,” Ebba said, shocked. “You’re being rude again!”

  “How is that rude?” Kenzo protested.

  Mathilde waved a chicken leg. “Because anyone who isn’t Foundation would be insulted at the question,”

  “If that person even knew what you meant by ‘Foundation.’” said Marcus.