This was Desiderio’s first summer at Briarwood Hall, and his third in Anaxas.
Really, it was his first week at Briarwood Hall, or barely just. The aeroship had landed in Vienda eight days ago. Give or take. He only knew because he made sure to fill one page of his book with drawings of something pretty every day, and he had eight pages now filled.
Mostly he drew flowers; there were plenty of those, but they were hard. Sometimes he drew the vases he wasn’t allowed to touch. (He wasn’t sure why he would have wanted to touch them to begin with, but he made sure not to touch anything at all, which was the rule.) They were easier than flowers: they were shapes, and all he had to do was put shadows on them where shadows went, and if he closed one of his eyes it was very easy to see where the shadows were and weren’t.
Once, he had found a small atrium full of flowers. It had a pond in it, too, and he had hoped there would be fish for him to draw, but there were no fish in the pond. A terribly old man had been in the atrium, with one of those funny accents Anaxi plowfeet had. His name had been Mr. Gregor. Desiderio had not wanted to talk to him at first, but it had been nice to be listened-to.
He had been looking for the atrium today, and that was how he had gotten lost. Now he did not want to find the fishpond anymore; it didn’t have fish, anyway. He wanted to find his way back to the bedroom.
He thought that if he could find the Green Parlour – which was a sort of awful brown, which Desiderio thought made perfect sense… pah! If he could find the Green Parlour, he could find his way to the east staircase, and if he could find the east stairwell again then he could find the corridor that led to the Swan Hall, and his bedroom was not very far from it.
It was growing hotter, and he was growing weaker and weaker by the second. If he collapsed in one of these endless halls, well, they would be terribly sorry, wouldn’t they? His father’s mansion in Caroult was this big – maybe it was even bigger, because the Morandi family had been much more important than the Steerpikes, once – but there was always at least somebody around to take care of him.
Maybe he wouldn’t have to marry the girl, if he collapsed. Maybe Mr. and Mrs. Steerpike would decide that he was too sick to marry. He was too sick for a lot of things, after all. He was certainly too sick for sports, which was fine, because he didn’t like them anyway. If you were too sick for sports, then you must be too sick for marriage.
He thought about that as he crept past a row of high narrow windows, a line of small round tables with identically ornate vases on them underneath each one.
He couldn’t seem to think of what it would be like either way. It was probably for the best. He didn’t like girls, and girls didn’t like him. He was already scrawny and short for his age, with a chinless blob of a face and a beak for a nose. He couldn’t imagine himself courting a girl, anyway, not a pretty one like Lilianna Steerpike. Girls were even meaner than boys. Boys might shove your head in a pond or spill red sauce on your uniform at lunch accidentally-on-purpose, but girls said the things that really hurt.
He didn’t know much about Aurelie Steerpike, except that she had been very shy when Mother had made him say hello to her. He remembered her red hair, like the Anaxi girls at school, and the pretty little ribbon she had had in it that day.
He hadn’t seen her at all this time, which was all right. He supposed nobody had time, and anyway they weren’t supposed to be around each other unchaperoned anyway, though nobody much seemed to care about that either. Nobody seemed to care about anything, here.
This hall was darker; he had lost track of where he was. He found some of his agitation replaced by curiosity.
The carpet was a fine pattern of tangled vines, and so was the wallpaper. He could almost begin to imagine that he had wandered into a forest. It was a little stuffy, because the windows here were shut, in spite of the heat outside. But it was very quiet, and he felt like he had stumbled across something that nobody had ever found before. There was even a little dust on one of the tables he passed.
He was wondering if this place had a name, and wondering what he might name it himself, when he saw the door slightly ajar. He crept to it, his sketchbook and his little case of charcoals tucked under his arm. It creaked when he pushed it open.
It was a library.
It was a very small one. He had never seen it before. The pattern of vines was in here, too, but every inch of the walls was packed with bookshelves and books. There were a couple of very comfortable-looking leather-backed chairs, and he wondered if he might sit in one and read for a while, even though he wasn’t allowed to touch anything.
It was especially stuffy in here, and so he set his sketchbook on a desk and went to the little window set into one wall. But when he tried to push it open, his arms shook. He wasn’t very strong, but he thought that he might suffocate if he spent another moment in such a stuffy place. He tried again, but to no avail.
There was a noise behind him, then, and he turned. “Oh,” he said. “Hello.” He frowned.