The elders met on a Tuesday, which was how I knew it was serious. They only ever used the meeting hall on Tuesdays when the news was too heavy for a doorstep.
I was not invited. I found out the way most things found their way to me — through old Mrs Aldren, who kept bees at the edge of the square and heard everything the wind carried. She pressed her hand briefly to my arm as I passed her on the way to the well and said, "They're sending someone to the Thornwood, Clara. For the library. " Then she walked on, as though she'd told me nothing more alarming than the weather.
The Thornwood. I had grown up with that name the way children grow up with the names of mountains — present, enormous, and belonging to a world that did not yet concern them. The castle sat three miles beyond the northern treeline, visible on clear mornings as a dark shape against the pale sky, its towers not ruined but thorned, wound round with briars so thick they had long ago become part of the architecture. The prince had been cursed before my grandmother was born. The village had been under his protection for longer than anyone alive could remember.
The price was always small. Rotating, manageable. A season's grain. A cartload of candles. My father had given a bolt of his best linen the year I turned seven and had counted himself fortunate.
I set my bucket down by the well and looked north.
✦ ✦ ✦
Elder Tomas came to our door that evening, hat in hand, which was more ceremony than he usually bothered with. He was a practical man, built for straight lines and clear transactions, and he stood in our doorway with the expression of someone delivering news he had already argued himself into accepting.
"The steward came again," he said to my father, though his eyes found me across the room. "The Prince wants a librarian. Someone careful with old things. The books are deteriorating — years of neglect, he said, and something in the curse accelerates it. He wants them catalogued. Preserved."
My father said nothing for a moment. The fire settled.
"For how long?" he asked.
"A season. Perhaps two." Tomas turned his hat in his hands. "It's a fair trade. He's asked for very little this decade, and the library – they say it's extraordinary. Thousands of volumes, some of them ancient."
He was not speaking to my father anymore.
I had been the village librarian for four years, since Old Marsh retired and left me his cataloguing system, his ink-stained stools, and his conviction that the organisation of books was a kind of moral act. I was twenty-three. I was unmarried, which the elders had begun to mention in the sideways manner of people who consider it a civic problem. I read too much, which they mentioned more directly. I was the most expendable person they trusted.
"I'll go," I said.
My father looked at me.
"Clara—"
"Someone has to. And I want to see the library." I said it plainly because fear had not arrived yet. In its place was something quieter and more stubborn — the same feeling I got when someone described a book I hadn't read.
Tomas left quickly, relieved he had delivered difficult news and found it received better than expected. My father poured two cups of tea and sat across from me at the kitchen table, and we looked at each other in the firelight for a long moment.
"He's cursed," my father said finally.
"Most things worth reading about are", I said.
He laughed, despite himself. Then he stopped laughing and looked at his tea, and I understood that his fear was real even if mine had not yet found me and that the least I could do was let him have it without arguing it away.
✦ ✦ ✦
My mother came to my room that night after my father had gone to sleep. I was packing one trunk with the brass fittings that had belonged to her own mother. She sat on the edge of my bed and watched me fold things in the particular silence that mothers save for occasions they have not permitted themselves to name.
She had soft hands, my mother. Brown and capable and always faintly warm, proof that they have spent a lifetime in kitchens and gardens. She pressed a jar of preserved figs into the space beside my spare boots and tucked it there firmly, as though its placement were a kind of argument.
"For the cold mornings," she said.
"Thank you."
She smoothed the quilt beside her once, twice. The lamp threw its small gold circle across the floor and held it.
"You know there's something wrong with him," she said. "Not just the curse. The steward who came — he spoke well enough, but his eyes were careful, like they're used to witnessing things they're not permitted to explain."
"I know."
"And you're still going."
"I'm still going," I sighed.
She looked at me for a long time. My mother had always been better at reading faces than books, and I had always been the reverse, and I think we had understood each other perfectly because of it rather than despite it.
"You have your father's stubbornness," she said at last.
"You've told me before that it's yours." I smirked.
"It becomes his when it worries me." She stood, pressed her palm briefly to my cheek — the warmth of it, the roughness, the smell of dried lavender that always clung to her — and then she was at the door, and then she was gone.
I sat on the edge of the trunk and looked at the jar of figs.
She had not said, 'Come home soon.' Neither had I. We were, both of us, too honest for promises we could not keep.
✦ ✦ ✦
The morning I left was the kind of October morning that smells of woodsmoke and turned earth, the sky pale and high and indifferent. The village gathered to see me off in the way villages gather — half from genuine feeling, half from habit, and wholly because standing together is its own form of comfort.
Old Mrs Aldren gave me a sprig of dried lavender. Tomas shook my hand with both of his, which was more warmth than I'd ever seen from him and made me trust the expedition slightly less. The baker's son, who had been considering asking to court me for approximately two years without arriving at any action on the matter, stood at the back of the small crowd and looked at his boots.
My father loaded my trunk onto the cart. He had arranged for a young man from the next village over to drive me to the edge of the northern road, where the Thornwood's own cart would be waiting. He checked the buckles twice. Then he put his hand on my shoulder, briefly, and stepped back, and I understood that this was as much as he could offer without coming apart and that it was enough.
I climbed up.
The cart moved. I looked back once – at the square, the baker's chimney, the library with its familiar green door, and my mother standing at the gate with her arms folded and her face composed into the particular expression she used when she was being strong on someone else's behalf. I turned forward before she became only a shape in the distance because I wanted to keep her face whole.
The northern road ran straight toward the treeline, and the trees beyond it were dark, and the castle was not yet visible. The wind smelt of rain and pine and something beneath those — faintly metallic, just like the way air changes before a storm that is still a day away.
Fear arrived, at last, somewhere between the last farmhouse and the first stand of ancient oaks.
It was smaller than I expected. Less a dread than a sharpening, but something in me had been waiting for it, and now that it was here, I found I could look at it plainly.
I was going to a cursed castle to catalogue the library of a cursed prince. I had one trunk, three jars of ink, my own cataloguing system on twelve sheets of pressed paper, and a jar of preserved figs.
It seemed, on balance, like enough.