The Orphan of Saint Olette

Three

The oak doors of the library were cool under Aoife's palms, and with the winter chill in the air, she dared not touch the brass handle, for fear of getting stuck to it. The familiar scent of paper and worn leather washed over her like a wave of perfume as she made her way inside, and for perhaps the first time in her life, she thought perhaps she understood what people meant when they spoke of finding home. She wasn't sure she would ever really have a home, but as long as she could find a library to immerse herself in, she would always have that comforting sense of familiarity and wholeness that she had always craved in her childhood. As she headed for the fiction section, she couldn't help but wonder if Niamh had found her own sense of home. If any of the other orphans had.

She sat herself down with one of the oldest books in the library, a great leather bound tome about as thick as a child's head is tall, cover encrusted with precious gems and gold leaf. It was kept in a locked crystal cabinet, more for display than anything given its value, but every now and then, certain patrons were able to read its contents, provided they were careful with it, and provided Elias found them trustworthy enough. The content, however, had meant Aoife was at the end of a very short waiting list. The book had no decipherable name, and over the years plenty of linguists and scholarly types had all tried their hand at finding one, and it contained all the fairy tales of old. The stories of wise men winning wars with little more than their words, of beautiful queens and handsome princes, of brave knights slaying foul beasts, sometimes even of foul beasts slaying cowardly knights. Aoife had heard there was a moment in everyone's life, no matter how trivial it might be, that would occur and allow them to die happy, whether they died that day or twenty years later. As she ran her fingertip along the first, crisp page of the nameless book, she was sure this was her moment.

She glanced around her at the few other patrons in the library with her, wanting to fully savour every detail of this moment if she were to truly die happy. Dotted around the outskirts of the building, picking at books on shelves were various scholars, dressed head to toe in black, save for a flash of white in the form of freshly starched white shirts. A young woman sat a few seats away from her and could be heard muttering to herself as she scribbled away feverishly on a well used piece of paper. There was soot on her face, and the strained veins in her eyes suggested she hadn't gotten much sleep recently, and Aoife could only guess she was some sort of scientist or inventor. Any other day, she might have asked what the woman was working on.

Seated at the desk across from hers was a stout old man, whose beard spread wider than his head, and whom Aoife couldn't help but think looked out of place in somewhere like the Great Library. His hair, while slicked back in the appropriate fashion, was wild and unruly, something that wasn't a common occurrence in the library. His posture was shrunken in on itself, and the way he sat hunched over the table meant Aoife couldn't see what he was reading. Whatever it was, he seemed suitably engrossed in it. Despite his overall scruffy appearance, the man did seem well dressed. His overcoat, while a little moth bitten, was made of silk, and his buttons were most definitely bronze, at the very least. Aoife wasn't sure her clothes even had all their buttons, let alone bronze ones. She could see, as was customary, a waistcoat underneath his coat, which seemed to also be made of a deep green silk with some sort of embroidery that she couldn't quite make sense of.

"I ought not stare too long, if I were you," a voice said from beside her, making her jump.

Aoife drew her attention away from the strange man to look at the owner of the voice, a boy about her age that seemed to have more legs than sense. He towered over her, and the rest of his limbs seemed to be equally too long for his body. A thick mess of black curls rested atop his head, blue eyes cast towards the strange man despite his warnings not to.