The bell gave me the idea.
Somewhere beyond the estate walls, in the town of Valtier, there was a temple with a bell tower, and every hour from dawn to dusk its bell rang out across the fields. Most days I barely noticed it. It was background, like the wind and the loose windowpane. But one afternoon, about five months into my new life, I happened to fall asleep just as the bell started to toll, and happened to wake in my cradle just as it was ringing again.
That should have been unremarkable. A one-hour nap. Except that during that nap, in the Reading Room, I had read the entire first half of Histories of the Western Kingdoms, made forty new flashcards, rewritten my vocabulary lists twice, and spent a long, idle stretch in the armchair watching my sprout.
That was not an hour's work. That was most of a day.
I lay in the cradle and stared at the beams, trying to run the numbers and finding I didn't have enough of them.
Time moves more quickly inside than out, the Keeper had said. I'd known that. I just hadn't thought through what it meant. How much more quickly? Twice? Five times?
I was an archivist. I didn't like not knowing things. I decided to find out.
The first problem was that there was no clock in the Reading Room.
I'd never noticed, because I'd never needed one. Time in the Library had always felt slack, like a long summer afternoon with nowhere to be. But once I went looking, I searched every shelf and every corner and found nothing. No clock, no sundial, no candle marked in hours.
Then I opened the bottom drawer of the desk, which I was absolutely certain had been empty the last time I looked, and found an hourglass.
It was small and elegant, about the length of my hand, framed in dark polished wood and filled with fine golden sand. A tiny brass plate on its base read, in the Common Tongue: One quarter-bell.
A quarter of an hour, the way this world counted time.
I held it up to the lamp and laughed. "You're spoiling me," I told the room. The lamp didn't answer, but I was fairly sure it burned a little smugly.
So I ran an experiment.
The next afternoon I lay awake in my cradle until I heard the temple bell begin. Then I shut my eyes, thought of old paper, and went through the door.
In the Reading Room I turned the hourglass over and sat down with A Child's Book of Numbers, which was simple enough that I could read it without losing track of the sand. Every time the last grain dropped, I made a mark on a sheet of paper and turned the glass.
One mark. Two. Five. Eight.
I'd planned to stay until the tug pulled me out, but it didn't come; my body was evidently sleeping peacefully. So at ten marks, two and a half hours by the glass, I closed the book, walked to the door, and stepped back through on purpose.
I opened my eyes in the cradle and lay still, listening.
No bell. Outside, Berta was chopping something on the kitchen board, the knife coming down in a steady rhythm. Elke was singing about the sailor and his snoring mermaid. I waited. And waited. My baby body was wide awake now and bored, and I had to fix my whole attention on a knot in the ceiling beam to keep from fussing.
At last, the bell.
I repeated it the next day, and the day after, with different numbers of marks, coming out at different points and estimating the time to the next bell from the length of Elke's songs and the order of Berta's chores. Three verses of the pig song came to about a quarter-bell. Scrubbing the kitchen floor took about a bell and a half. It wasn't precise. A real scientist would have laughed at my methods. But after a week of careful counting, the pattern was clear enough.
For every hour that passed in the annex, about ten passed in the Reading Room.
Ten to one.
I sat in the armchair after the last experiment with the hourglass in my lap, and the room seemed to tilt slightly around me.
Ten to one. A baby sleeps fourteen, fifteen hours a day. Even if I only reached the Library on half of those sleeps, that was seventy hours of study. Every day.
Seventy hours. I'd never had seventy free hours in a single week in my entire adult life.
I thought of every book I'd wanted to read and never found the time for. Every language I'd meant to learn. I looked at the forty-eight volumes on the shelves, at the heavy dark door at the back of the room, and beyond it, somewhere, the endless shelves climbing into the haze.
All the knowledge in the world. And all the time I needed to read it.
I laughed out loud. Then I got up, took the next book off the shelf, and started.
I'm not proud of what I did next.
I went every time. Every nap. Every stretch of night sleep. Every moment my eyes closed. I stopped watching the sprout. I stopped sitting in the armchair to rest between books. I sat at the desk under the lamp with the hourglass turning and read and wrote and read and wrote, hour after hour after hour.
It was the happiest I'd been since I died.
The card in my pocket kept a running tally, and every few sittings I'd pull it out and watch the number climb.
[VOLUME COMPREHENDED] Histories of the Western Kingdoms — 2 / 48
[VOLUME COMPREHENDED] A Primer of the Common Tongue, Vol. II — 3 / 48
[VOLUME COMPREHENDED] A Child's Book of Numbers — 4 / 48
[VOLUME COMPREHENDED] Plants and Herbs of the Temperate Lands — 5 / 48
[VOLUME COMPREHENDED] Customs and Courtesies of the Noble Houses — 6 / 48
The numbers book taught me this world's counting system, base ten with some odd names for the large values. The herbal I loved so much I read it twice. The book on noble courtesies I did not love at all, and finished anyway, out of spite.
Six books in what felt to me like a few weeks. In the annex, it was perhaps ten days.
I didn't notice what was happening to my body.
That's not quite honest. I noticed, and told myself it didn't matter. I was a little more tired when I woke. A little more irritable. I cried more, harder, and couldn't always stop. My appetite went. Once, Berta held the horn cup to my mouth for so long that the milk cooled and a skin formed across its surface, and I simply turned my face to the wall, because all I wanted was to get back to sleep, back to the book I'd left open on the desk with a scrap of paper marking the page.
Berta pressed the back of her hand to my forehead and held it there, frowning, and muttered that I'd been grizzling all week and what on earth was the matter with me. I didn't care. I went back to sleep.
And then, one night, I couldn't find the door.
I closed my eyes and thought of old paper. Nothing.
I tried again. And again. The smell wouldn't come. The brass handle wouldn't come. There was only darkness, and a thick, swimming heat behind my eyes, and a pounding in my head like someone hammering on a door from the wrong side.
I opened my eyes. The ceiling beams were turning slowly.
I was burning.
The next three days come back to me only in pieces, like pages torn out of a book and scattered across a floor.
Berta's hand on my forehead, and the sharp hiss of her breath.
Berta's voice, high and frightened, shouting for Jonas.
A damp cloth wrapped around me, and screaming, because the cool of it hit my skin like ice.
Berta again, farther off, at the outer door, arguing. Harlan. I caught it in fragments through the fever, the two voices cutting across each other without either one listening: Berta saying all she wanted was a healer, he was burning up; Harlan saying, flat and even, that her ladyship's instructions were that the household healer attended the family; Berta, almost a shriek, "He is the family! He's the Duke's own blood!"; and Harlan repeating her ladyship's instructions in exactly the same words, as if she hadn't spoken at all.
The door slamming. Berta crying, hard and furious, the way I'd heard her cry only once before.
Tomas's rumble. Something about a woman in the village. The little cloth purse Berta kept at the bottom of her chest, upended on the table, coins scattering, one of them rolling away across the boards.
Bitter tea dripped into my mouth from a twist of rag. Willow bark, some distant clerk in the back of my mind noted, recognizing the taste from the herbal I'd read twice. For fever. Good.
Berta's lullaby, the five notes, sung over and over in the dark, cracking on the high note every time and never stopping.
And every time I closed my eyes, I went looking for the door and couldn't find it. I wasn't afraid of dying. I was afraid I had broken something. That I'd used the Library so greedily I had torn it, the way you can work a muscle until it rips, and that it would never come back.
On the third night, I dreamed.
I was in a chair beside a fire with a cup of roasted barley tea in my hands, and across from me sat a tall figure in parchment-colored robes, letters turning slowly in the dark of their hood.
I was Haruto again, grown and whole, in my grey sweater, and my hands were shaking so badly that the tea slopped over the rim and ran hot across my knuckles. I was apologizing before I'd even set it down, the words tumbling out on top of each other: I was sorry, I hadn't meant it, I'd only—
"I did write it down," the Keeper said mildly. "Do not forget to sleep. I even underlined it, in my mind."
I put the cup on the table so I'd stop spilling it, wiped my wet hand on my slacks, and asked the only thing that mattered. Had I broken it? The Library?
"No." The Keeper's voice was gentle. "You broke nothing. The Library is quite safe. It is your body you have been breaking." I looked down at my hands, and the Keeper went on in the same even tone. "Your mind is a lantern, Haruto. A bright one, and a grown one. But the body it lives in now is very small, and very new, and its wick is short. Every hour you spend in the Library, your mind is awake and working, even while the body lies still. When the mind never rests, the body never truly rests either. And a baby that does not rest does not grow. It sickens."
So the time inside wasn't free, I said. My voice came out small.
"Nothing is free. Least of all knowledge." The letters in the hood slowed. "The Library will wait for you. It has waited a very long time. It is in no hurry. You should not be either."
I wanted to ask something else, but the fire was already fading, and the Keeper's outline was running at the edges like ink on wet paper.
"Live in the world," I heard them say, from very far off. "Read about it afterward."
When I woke, it was morning, and the fever had broken.
I was soaked in sweat, the blanket clammy and twisted around my legs, and so weak I couldn't lift my arm off the mattress. The light through the bubbled window was thin and grey. Berta was asleep in the chair beside my cradle, slumped sideways at an angle her neck would make her pay for, mouth open, one hand still resting on my blanket. Her face was grey. There were new lines around her eyes that I was fairly sure hadn't been there a week before.
I looked at her for a long time.
She had spent her savings on willow bark and a village healer. She had begged the steward and been sent away. She had sat up three nights running, singing the same five notes. All because I'd been too greedy, too excited, too impatient to remember the one simple instruction the Keeper had left on the desk.
My stomach rolled over, and it wasn't the fever.
When Berta finally stirred and woke and saw me watching her with clear eyes, she burst into tears. She snatched me out of the cradle and held me so tightly my ribs creaked, rocking back and forth and muttering into my hair, calling me a silly sparrow, a silly, silly sparrow, and telling me I was never, ever to frighten her like that again.
I won't, I promised her silently. I won't. I'm sorry.
When she held the horn cup to my mouth that morning, I drank every drop. Then I made the small, demanding noise that meant more, and she laughed through her tears and went to warm another cupful, and I drank that too.
Later that day, while Berta finally slept properly in her own bed, Tomas came in on quiet feet. He stood by my cradle for a while, turning his unlit pipe over and over in his big knotted fingers. Then he reached into his coat pocket and set something down on the blanket beside my hand.
It was a little wooden bird, no bigger than a walnut, carved from some pale, close-grained wood and rubbed with oil until it shone. A round body, a stubby tail, a tiny pointed beak, and two dots for eyes burned in with the tip of a hot nail. It still smelled faintly of linseed.
A sparrow.
"There," Tomas rumbled softly. "Something to hold on to. Since you gave us all such a fright."
He patted the edge of the cradle twice, awkwardly, the way a man pats something when he doesn't know what else to do with his hands. Then he went back out to his goat.
I curled my fingers around the little wooden sparrow and held it all afternoon. It was warm from his pocket at first, and then warm from my hand.
I still have it. Even now, after everything, it sits on my desk, the oil worn away in patches where small fingers gripped it every night for years.
That night, when I finally found the door again, I didn't go to the desk.
I took a fresh sheet of paper to the armchair and wrote a list. I titled it, in careful Japanese: Rules.
One. The Library only during night sleep. Naps are for resting.
Two. At least one night in three, no Library at all. Real sleep.
Three. When the thread feels thin, stop. Even in the middle of a page.
Four. If I start not wanting to eat, stop for a week.
Five. Live in the world first. Read about it afterward.
I read it through three times. Then I propped it against the base of the lamp, where I couldn't avoid seeing it every time I walked in.
Out in the window garden, the sprout had grown while I wasn't watching. Four leaves now instead of two, leaning gently toward the light, in no particular hurry at all.