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“On that, at least, we are agreed.” Margaret sighed as she gave up on gaining anything more useful from this visit. “I’ll do my best to work out the supernatural side of things.”
“See that you do,” said her king, “for all our sakes.”
She was up again only a few hours later, as usual, but there was time for only a brief conversation with her husband before he left to prowl through late-night Viennese society in pursuit of his own mission. Margaret would have accompanied him if any support had been required, but she was deeply relieved when he released her from that obligation. Although he would never say or imply any such thing, she was privately all too aware that her presence could only hamper his work of charming the locals. Instead, she remained alone in their apartment to read through her notes from the morning’s meeting and then pore through her parents’ old journals from their Slavic travels, which she had carefully packed in England but hadn’t re-read in years.
According to Amalie, none of her fellow lorelei could be involved in the mysterious waltz without their haunting voices being heard and remembered—and as little as Margaret knew about music, she definitely hadn’t heard any vocals join the orchestra’s performance.
The dance-loving tünder of Hungary had at first sounded promising, but when she re-read her parents’ journals from that area, she found the tünder, too, ruled out by the fact that Margaret had found herself frozen in place during the music rather than being forcibly drawn into the dance with all the others.
The vilas of Croatia had been accused more than once of enforcing a brutal form of justice by dancing male ravishers to death. According to her father’s notes, that accusation was entirely plausible. However, at every royal ball thus far, ladies had been caught up along with their male dancing partners, and the only injuries sustained had been to their thin-soled dancing slippers. At any rate, a scribbled note in Margaret’s mother’s impatient scrawl added that the vila only engaged in group circle dances, finding their supernatural strength in joined community.
Waltzes were not their style.
Either the culprit behind this series of attacks was a creature Margaret had never heard of, or else another powerful supernatural artifact was at work...in which case any attendee could be behind it, human or supernatural alike.
Regardless, when the court library opened its doors the next day, she was ready and waiting to find answers. This time, no librarian could see and stop her in her path! Liberated by her cloak of invisibility, she strode towards that waiting bank of card indexes like a homing pigeon arcing towards its target, her head aching with exhaustion but determination powering her movements.
...And there, by those famous card indexes, she was forced to remain, unmoving, for an agonizing delay as two nearby librarians struck up a low-voiced, huddled conversation, their faces pointed at just the side of the card bank she needed to consult.
Margaret’s fingernails bit into her invisibly clenched fists.
Surely they had to stop nattering soon and go archive something? There must be work to be done elsewhere!
Patience. She tried to calm herself by running through her plan of attack, listing all the different subjects she would look up in the indexes by order of priority. Again and again, though, she was aggravatingly interrupted by random words from their nearby conversation as the urgency of their gossip led to rising murmurs. “...himself. Not even...”
“...certain? ...never...that kind of request would...”
“...privately...said restricted...now an equerry, must have left something behind...told me....”
“...But records are always...even the emperor...!”
“...he said essential...leave no record it had ever even been here.”
What? Margaret snapped to attention. This conversation might not be a mere distraction, after all!
Maddeningly, the two librarians chose that moment to lower their voices to real whispers; luckily, she wasn’t limited by her position. She hurried to join them, protected by her cloak...
And a third librarian appeared in the closest doorway. “Why are you two lazing about?” he demanded. “There’s no time for chit-chat!”
Margaret barely suppressed a groan. Now they were going to work? Just when she was on the verge of finally learning something useful?
The gossiping librarians parted with muttered apologies. Under the stern eye of their supervisor, one of them left immediately. Their supervisor followed. The other librarian took up a guarding position at the entry desk, the better—Margaret supposed—to watch out for any other hopeful scholars who might dare to attempt entrance.
Grinding her teeth, Margaret headed back to the card indexes to continue waiting for her moment.
It took her nearly two hours to fully consult the famous index, using stolen moments to pull open drawers and scribble notes and references when no librarians were watching. Even then, when she ventured past the guarding desk, she found no resources in the beautifully vast reading room and nothing relevant to her personal quest in the open shelves nearby. Every catalogue reference she’d noted down was located in the private archives, which only librarians could access.
Naturally, she found a way into those archives by following a grumpily muttering librarian, and she began her quest full of hope and confidence. However, not only was the archival system labyrinthine, but the lack of any stable lighting proved a maddening dilemma. Light only appeared in accompaniment with the visits of various librarians across the day...which meant that even after hours of seizing every possible chance for her academic hunt, Margaret found only one book of related herbal lore that might be of any use at all.
There was a further, inner door that looked promising, but it was firmly locked with no fewer than three large padlocks, and not a single librarian was helpful enough to enter it ahead of her and clear the way.
As afternoon turned into early evening without any sustenance along the way, Margaret’s headache worsened into a pounding nightmare. Without any light to read by, she couldn’t even peruse the single useful book she’d found. Still, she kept doggedly attempting to find more information each time a new librarian entered. Only when the library itself prepared to shut did she finally admit humiliating defeat and leave, an abject failure.
Margaret had never enjoyed failing at anything. But to fail at research?
Intolerable.
As a lover of libraries, she couldn’t even take any satisfaction from the book she had secreted in her cloak. It would be safely returned once she’d had the chance to read it in the light—but the last time she’d been forced to sneak any book from a library without permission had been when she was a young woman fighting against her uncle and aunt for access to her own parents’ books. Despite having been left to her in their wills, those had been locked away by her aunt and uncle as ‘inappropriate for a young lady.’
