The Most Dangerous Books

Everybody at the library knew not to turn their backs to the books. The library was designed so that you could never do it, except on purpose. Because the books at Ashpointe library weren’t like the others: they were dangerous. 

Even so, Nina still liked them. Even when her fathers scolded her, she ran her fingers along their spines to feel the leathery backs. She wasn’t allowed to read them, and even if she was, she couldn’t. No one in Ashpointe knew how to read. They were librarians, not scholars.

About once every month a scholar would come by and borrow a book. They would take it out of the library, stuff it in their satchels, and take it home(wherever that was). Nina would follow them as far as the town limits, but she was too afraid to step into the forest. Books were dangerous, but at least they could control them. Monsters couldn’t be controlled.

It so happened that one day, the board of scholars was visiting Ashpointe to discuss with Nina’s fathers the appointment of a new librarian there. Nina fixed herself above her father’s office in the rafters, where she could hear all that was going on. 

“It’s really not safe, keeping everyone here illiterate,” her baba was saying. “If only one of us could read the books, then we might be able to protect ourselves.”

“Don’t be insolent,” one scholar said with a snort of indignance. “Common folk, reading? The very thought would make the empress keel over.” Nina blew her cheeks out in a huff. Who was this man, talking to her baba so?

“Don’t be rude, Preston,” another scholar said. “They may be simple, but they have important work. It might be wise to place a scholar here to monitor the books.”

“A scholar?” Nina’s papa said. “Why not teach a librarian to read? There are plenty of tutors from the Castle who could work here.”

“They can’t be bothered,” Preston said, taking on the same haughty tone. “You people just aren’t worth it. It’ll be easier to place somebody who already knows how to manage the books. We’ll leave Mazarine here, won’t we?”

The scholars laughed, and Nina leaned over the rafter to get a better look at the room. She realized with a start that all but one of the scholars were men, and they were laughing at the lone girl in the room.

“For a while, at least,” Mazarine said. She didn’t look happy about the arrangement. 

“Very well. That concludes our busniess for today.” Preston and his group began to leave. 

“We had other matters to discuss,” Nina’s baba said. “The elderly home could use renovations, and we were hoping the empire would fund--”

“Can’t be bothered,” Preston repeated. “Good day, gentlemen.”

Nina crawled away from the office to watch the men leave, sticking her tongue out at them as they did so. She crawled back to her father’s office, where they were conducting their discussion with Mazarine.

“I suppose I can stay here,” the young scholar said. “But not for long. I have important work to do in the empire.”

“Perhaps if you trained somebody?” Her younger father said, and Mazarine hummed. 

“Maybe. I’ll have to find somebody worthy.” She turned and left the room.

She clearly didn’t think Nina’s fathers were worthy. 

Nina followed her, trying to get an impression of the girl. She wasn’t very good at understanding people, and that’s why her father kept her inside the library. The village girls thought she was strange, and the boys pushed her in the mud. She had better company here, with the books.

Mazarine pulled a book off of a shelf, and Nina gaped. Oh, how she wished she could do that! She stared, unblinking, as Mazarine whipped through the pages. She shuddered as Mazarine’s little brown finger scanned over the words. She was reading.

Nina was so excited, she could hardly stay still. But she forced herself to hold her breath. She’s been discovered in the rafters before and got in trouble. She didn’t want to get in trouble again. 

Mazarine moved her fingers in an upward motion, pulling them together. An azure light emitted from the pages as she did so. It looked like she gripped it between her thumb and pointer finger. Nina’s heart sped up as a sword emerged from the pages. 

But it disappeared just as quickly, because Nina went crashing into the floor below. 

Mazarine yelped as Nina sat up, rubbing her sore knees. Her elbows ached too, but she had just hurt her knees yesterday when she ran into a bookshelf.

“Who are you?” Mazarine demanded, snapping the book shut. Nina shuffled back, trying to avoid her falcon-like gaze. 

“I-I’m Nina,” she said, “I live here. In the library.”

Mazarine raised an eyebrow. “A library is no place for a child.” She paused, narrowing her eyes at Nina. “You are a child, aren’t you?”

Nina nodded. What else could she be?

Mazarine relaxed, then put the book back on the shelf. 

“Well, I suppose I better get used to seeing you, since I’ll be working in this pigsty in the foreseeable future.” She sighed, running her finger along the books as she walked. Nina followed after her, even though she could sense she was not wanted. 

“I’ve always wanted to read,” Nina told her. People usually looked at her with pity when she said that, but Mazarine hardly looked at her at all. 

“Do you now?” She said with little commitment. 

“I do,” Nina said. “And you can read--I saw you.”

Mazarine turned to her, stopping her casual stroll. She crossed her arms and pointed her chin down at the little girl. “What are you getting at?”

Nina stood up on her toes, sticking her hands behind her back. Her father’s said it made her look like a good little girl, and good little girls got what they wanted. 

“You could teach me.”

Mazarine laughed, a cruel and sharp thing Nina never wanted to be subjected to again. 

“And why in the empress’s name would I teach you? Reading is only for the best of the best, those blessed by the empress. I doubt you could do it even if you tried.”

Nina puffed up her cheeks and placed her hands on her hips. “Oh, yeah? Well, I guess you’ll never leave Ashpointe then. I guess none of the other scholars will ever respect you.”

Mazarine turned red. 

“Why, you little insolent brat!”

“Shhh!” Nina hushed her. “There’s no shouting in the library.”

Mazarine stomped her foot and left, slamming the library door shut behind her. 

“Did you meet Mazarine, Nina?” Her baba said as he came out of the office behind her. “She’ll be living here for a while. I hope you can be friends with her.”

But Nina was never good at making friends. 

A few days passed, and Nina was sitting alone at a table, looking at the books. She had the dangerous desire to turn around, just for a moment, to see if they would do anything. But she didn’t dare; she wasn’t that reckless.

Suddenly, a book slammed down on the table in front of her. Nina was about to yelp when she saw the hand attached to it. It was Mazarine.

“You want to learn so bad, do you?” she said. “Fine. I’ll teach you. You better be a fast learner.”

And Nina was.

They started with the alphabet, and Nina had it memorized in a day. Mazarine had her push the letters together to make sounds, and she found that each letter had a different taste. F was like honey, whereas M was like vinegar. M stood for Mazarine, she learned. And she learned her own name, too. Nina. N-I-N-A. N like dusty book covers and wooden rafters.

Sometimes, when Mazarine was done for the day, Nina begged her to stay. 

“I’m so close,” Nina said. “I can feel it. Won’t you stay, Mazarine? Just a little longer?”

And Mazarine did.

She read books out loud to Nina, pulling creatures out and having them dance around her head. Nina giggled as Mazarine's voice carried throughout the library, echoing against the shelves that were filled with books longing to be read. Nina would read them all one day.

Soon, Nina was reading words. Then sentences. Then paragraphs. But no matter how far she came, Mazarine never let her read a whole book.

“They’re dangerous,” she told Nina. “I don’t want you to get hurt.” For even though she loathed to admit it, there was a certain fondness in her heart that existed only for the scrawny little girl in the library.

So Nina begged, and begged, and finally, on a cloudy Wednesday afternoon, Mazarine brought out a children’s book.

“You can’t read it while I’m away from you,” Mazarine made her promise. Nina promised, linking their fingers together tightly. 

They went slowly, as Nina was nervous and still having trouble with some of the new words. But soon, Nina was pulling her own pictures out of the pages of her books, a chirping little sparrow that flew above her hand. 

“How are books dangerous?” Nina asked. “How could anything this beautiful be dangerous?”

“You’ll understand one day,” Mazarine said. Nina huffed. Adults were always telling her that. 

But one day, she did understand. 

Mazarine couldn’t teach her that day. She had to go out into the forest to travel to a neighboring town. Apparently, the Ashpointe library had a book they shouldn’t have--one far too dangerous for its walls. Mazarine had to deliver it to Mossbourne, which had more scholars prepared to take it on. 

But Nina was bored on her own, and she missed her teacher. So unlike all the other times before, she followed Mazarine out to the town border, and crossed into the forest.

The sun was blocked out by the towering branches above her. Nina’s little heart pounded in her chest as she stayed a safe distance behind Mazarine. She was scared, but it was more scary to get caught doing something she wasn’t supposed to. Her fathers would be disappointed in her, and so would Mazarine.

But Mazarine had longer legs, and thus, longer strides. She got too far ahead of Nina in no time, and she was lost.

She didn’t know where she was, and so she decided to stay put. She leaned up against a tree, trying not to let her imagination fill her mind up with horrible images of what was out there. 

The forest made noises Nina didn't recognize. A deep guttural growl resonated in her ears, and she pressed her back up against a tree so that nothing could attack her from behind. Her breathing rapidly increased, and she flinched as her foot landed on a twig, snapping it in half. Gradually, the growling stopped. Nina held her breath as a new noise emerged, an eerie howl and pounding footfall. Something was coming towards her, and whatever it was, it wasn't human. 

Nina stayed perfectly still, hoping the whatever-it-was wouldn't see her. But as a wispy azure smoke emerged from the trees, Nina knew she was being hunted. She watched helplessly as a beast creeped into her vision. 

It was like a wolf, but not quite. As it slowly stepped closer to her, she could see it better in the darkness. It had snarling fangs that dripped with drool and horrible breath that made her face scrunch up. But its ears were too stout, its legs too long, its fur too sandy to be a wolf. The blue mist cling to its body, giving it an ethereal appearance. Bones stuck out of its gnarly beard that hung from its twisted jaw. Bones of children that snuck out too far from home. 

Nina screeched and ran, ran, as fast as she could. The beast gave chase, hungry for easy prey. Leaves flew in the air all around them, and birds flew from the trees at the commotion. Soon, Nina tripped over a root and fell, scraping her knees. She hurried to scramble up to her feet, but the beast pinned her down with its front paws. 

The beast hovered over her, opening its mouth wide. Nina imagined living in its stomach, her various limbs floating around, chewed up, out of reach. She was scared, but didn’t close her eyes. Nina almost never closed her eyes, even when she was deathly afraid. 

A crashing sound drove the beasts’ attention away from her, and Nina turned to look in the same direction. Trees were being knocked down by something huge coming towards them, something with long black wings. A similar blue mist clung to its feathers, more controlled and restricted than the beast on top of her. 

It was a colossal sparrow with shiny crimson eyes. Everything about it screamed evil, like something out of a nightmare. Nina shrunk away from it, but she didn’t need to. It scooped up the beast that sat on her chest and crushed it in its claws. It roared in agony, thrashing its head around recklessly. A book, seemingly out of nowhere, hurled towards them and slammed into the wolf creature. It captured the blue mist surrounding it, pulling the wolf's body into the pages. They fluttered before slamming shut, toppling onto the forest ground. 

“Nina!” someone yelled, and Nina recognized it as Mazarine. She pushed herself up just as Mazarine pulled the bird back into the book--the one she was meant to take to Mossbourne. It dissolved into the pages, rebecoming the ink that made up the words.

“Mazarine!” Nina cried, running towards her tutor and hugging her. “I was so scared. I thought I was never going to see you again.”

“It’s alright, I’m here,” Mazarine said, brushing out Nina’s tangly hair. “It can’t hurt you now.”

“The book protected me,” Nina said. Mazarine pushed her away. 

“No, Nina, listen. Books are dangerous.” She knelt down to Nina’s height, putting her hands on the little girls’ shoulders. “If a book gets loose from the library, it becomes the monsters in the forest,” she said. “That thing that attacked you, it was once just words. We might have gotten rid of it now, but it will come back. It will spawn from wherever that book is, lost to humanity. Books are not our protectors, Nina, they are our demise.”

Nina gulped. Books were dangerous. She knew that now, but that didn’t change that she loved them. She could never turn away from them. 

Slowly, she slithered out of Mazarine's arms and reached towards the discarded book on the ground. She picked it up in her little hands. It had been a wild thing, escaped from its home, lost and alone. Just like she had been. Perhaps books were neither good nor evil. Perhaps it was what you did with them. 

"Are all the monsters in the forest from books?" Nina asked. She grazed her finger along the cover, the cool leather melting into her skin. 

"Yes," Mazarine told her. "That's why books are dangerous. We have to keep them locked up."

"We need to protect them," Nina corrected. "So they cannot hurt themselves or others. Books open new worlds, and everyone should be able to read them." Nina held the book out to Mazarine, and the older girl took it. 

"But where would we start?" Mazarine asked. Nina pondered the question for a moment before answering. 

"Little by little, we save the books of the forest. We put them back in the library. We teach more people how to take care of them. How to read." She paused, afraid she would get in trouble for saying such things. The empress certainly wouldn't approve. But Mazarine nodded, as if she understood her desires completely. 

"Little by little," she said. "We'll save them all."

She took Nina's tiny hand in hers, and together they walked deeper into the forest, so rescue the most dangerous books of all.