Genie raises a finger. “If you’ll excuse me, I need to see a hare about a card game.” He poofs out without waiting for said excuse.
“Follow me, and I’ll explain,” Gwyneth says, walking ahead, her fingers trailing along the spines of books as they lean into her touch. That power in my veins hums in response.
“It’s expanding,” I murmur.
“Yes.”
“How?”
She glances back at me. “It’s responding to the needs of the realm and offering safety to those in peril from the oncoming war.”
My jaw tightens. “The Idols. They need to be managed.”
She chuckles. “Much like you did the Red Queen?”
“That wasn’t intentional, but she was threatening people I love.”
“This started happening the tempo you left to find your dragon.” She gestures vaguely at the air. “Not sure what the consequences of the obliteration of an Idol will have.” Me either. “Your return wasn’t written in any story or foretold in any lore. You escaped your fate, and that set a precedent for others to do the same.”
“That’s a lot of pressure for a maiden who once got tangled in Rapunzel’s ribbons and caused a village-wide panic that I was turning into a villain with a new method of kidnapping.”
Gwyneth snorts. “Those ribbons had it coming. No one needs thirty-six different colors.”
We follow her deeper, the Library shifting around us as we move, creating new sections. Entire wings I’ve never seen before spiral into existence, the architecture fluid, responsive. One corridor forms from stacked books that flatten into a smooth walkway as we step onto it. Another arches overhead, pages turning to create a canopy of moving text.
“Is it doing this because of us?” Theo asks.
“Yes,” Gwyneth says.
We pass a long table where a group of sidekicks have gathered. A talking teapot. A disgruntled swan. A mirror that keeps trying to interrupt.
“We wereessential,” the swan says.
“You were background noise,” the teapot replies.
“I was emotional support.”
“You bit the hero.”
The swan squawks. “He needed humbling.”
The mirror chimes in, “I saw everything?—”
“No one asked you,” they say in unison.
I clap a hand over my mouth. “I love them.”
“They’ve been displaced,” Gwyneth explains. “When the stories started loosening, the ones who no longer fit and the ones who were never meant to matter were drawn here.”
My chest tightens. “They matter. They all matter.”
“I know.”
We continue up a spiral staircase that forms beneath our feet with each step we take, across a bridge of ink that ripples like water, and through a corridor where the walls are made entirely of unfinished stories—sentences that stop mid-thought, waiting. This is astonishing. I can hear the knights murmuring behind me as they take in the spectacle.
We reach the farthest corner where it’s quieter but with a pulse of power, a space carved out away from curious eyes. The heart of the Living Library. Rooms branch off down a corridor. Charming disappears inside one, and my capons come barreling out, clucking in a way that tells me they have seen things that need scrubbing from their tiny brains.
I scoop up Hamish and bop her on the nose. “You are still the most wise, and yes, I missed you too.”
