by Andrea Blythe
The library beckoned, and she answered the call, slipping herself in between the welcoming shelves, letting the stillness and quiet seep into her, the soft motes of dust alighting on her skin and the smell of the leather-bound volumes soothing the aches of her body and spirit.
The books whispered their longing to be read. She plucked them from the shelves at random, gathering them up and cradling them in her arms. She laid them out upon a table and savored the creak of their spines as they opened.
She read—words unveiling worlds more astounding than the glittering gold and silver gardens she and her sisters found hidden under their floorboards. She read until the candles burned low, until her eyes felt like sand and her vision blurred, until her spine bent into a bow, and she fell into a restful sleep, a treatise on the alchymical uses of plants as a pillow.
As time passed, she faded into the library more and more—so many hours at a stretch, the days and nights blurred together in a litany of poetry and candlelight. She read and she wrote, the nib of her plume scratching out the results of her research, ink-splotched pages filled so thickly with text they appeared black. When visiting students and scholars spoke with her, she held discourse on the natural world and the worlds beyond, leaving them wide-eyed and awed when they returned to their universities.
Her father sent messengers to draw her back into the sitting rooms and gardens and ballrooms, the light and airy places where princesses belonged. When this failed, he stormed into the library himself, prepared to drive her out with the thunder of his speech and the lightning of his hand. The tall stone shelves greeted him with their towering height—full of tomes of natural history and philosophy and mathematics alongside the ramblings of novelists and the fancies of poets—all the crushing weight of knowledge pressing down upon him. He searched and found only books and silence, the whisper of his own breath loud in his ears. Eventually, the eerie quiet unsettled and drove him back to the clattering noise of the court, to the voices and laughter and music that filled up his thoughts and hours.
The library became her realm. She slept on the nests of old discarded pamphlets and nourished herself on the pages she consumed. Over time, her skin paled and hair thinned. Her hands became marked with paper cuts, nails black with ink. She padded through the shelves like a specter, leaving a wake of near-completed tracts and treatises and historical accounts at her feet—treasures scholars discovered and smuggled out into the world, published anonymously to great acclaim and outrage. She was rarely seen, more mythic creature than person—a ghost some said, a monster, a patron saint of the stacks. It was a blessing, it was said, or a curse, claimed others, to see her and have her look upon you. She might read you and find in your flesh the story that shapes you.
Continued in Twelve by Andrea Blythe
Forthcoming in Fall 2020