OLIVER
“YOU MUST BE KIDDING,” RAPSCULLIO SAYS WHENhe sees me for the third time. “What do you need now?”
I don’t want to be here. I don’t want to be anywhere in this stupid fairy tale. I am back to square one, actually. Although I’d believed that maybe I had found a way out of this prison, Delilah is right. I can’t be the one who paints myself free, and I can’t trust anyone else to do it for me, which means I’m going nowhere fast.
I’d wanted to talk to Delilah, but she was fast asleep—my own fault since I was the one who asked her to close the book. After she left, I felt so completely defeated, as if nothing I could ever do would change my circumstances. Nothing I usually did in my off time—chess, a long walk,a bracing swim in the ocean—could take me away from my thoughts. And then I remembered Delilah.
When she wanted to escapeherlife, she read books. Like this one.
Queen Maureen had mentioned an entire library at Rapscullio’s cave—a room that I’d never actually reached, because I got so distracted by his magic canvas instead. But if Delilah could use stories for distraction, maybe they would work on me too.
“I’m looking for a good read,” I tell Rapscullio. “I hear you’ve got quite a large selection?”
Rapscullio brightens. “Oh, yes, indeed I do. I’m particularly fond of troubadour ballads and folktales, but my shelves seem to have a bit of everything: romances, horror, comedy. Even some plays by a fellow called Shakespeare. He’s not half bad.”
“Maybe I could browse?” I ask. “I don’t really know what I’m looking for.”
“Be my guest,” Rapscullio says, extending one emaciated arm toward a tunnel in the rear of the lair. “You go have a look around, and I’ll make us some tea. Chamomile. You seem a little… high-strung these days.”
“I don’t want you to go to any trouble—”
“No trouble at all.” He elbows me and grins with half his mouth; the scar immobilizes the other half of his face. “Maybe you’ll even tell me more about that girl of yours.”
“Girl?” I can’t tell him about Delilah. I feel like she’s my own personal secret. Like if I tried to explain her to anyone inside here, it would be giving a piece of her away.
“The one you had me paint the picture for—”
“Right.” The girl I made up, as an excuse. I wait for Rapscullio to unearth his teapot from under a moldering flutter of old maps on a broad table, and I turn and duck through the narrow passageway into another part of the lair.
The small room is musty and slightly damp, with floor-to-ceiling shelves carved out of gnarled walnut. Books are stacked and tucked and jumbled in piles. There are astronomy tomes and volumes about insect species and a whole shelf about Renaissance painters. I read some of the spines.An Herbologist’s History of the World. War and Peace. A Tale of Two Cities.
Rapscullio’s teakettle begins to whistle. Any minute now he’s going to come back here and expect me to rhapsodize about a make-believe maiden who lives somewhere in this kingdom. I pluck a book off the shelf. Maybe one of these stories will inspire me to come up with a good lie that he’ll believe.
When I pull the book free, though, another one tumbles to the dirt floor, having been jammed behindthe first on the shelf. I pick it up and dust it off, about to replace it more carefully, when I realize I’ve seen this one before.
It’s purple leather, with gold lettering.
BETWEEN THE LINES,I read on the cover. I flip it open and see a picture of myself on the very first page, as if I am staring into a mirror. “Once upon a time,” I murmur aloud.
Maybe one of these stories will inspire me.
“Milk or sugar?” I hear Rapscullio’s footsteps in the narrow corridor, so I slip the book beneath my tunic and hastily reach for another one, which I pretend to be thumbing through when my host arrives with the tea.
My whole connection to Delilah started with words—a message etched onto the cliff wall. Why couldn’t it end the same way?
I may not be able to paint myself into another world, but perhaps I can edit myself out of this one.
