Effie started to feel sick and empty as the used-up adrenaline drained through her body. What had she actually just done? She’d argued with Cosmo and gone, against his wishes, into the Great Library, where she had intended to meddle with reality in one way—and had then ended up doing something that could, now she thought about it, be far worse. She suddenly felt ashamed. But at least she hadn’t done what he’d told her not to. She hadn’t taken out the book. Just a kind word from him would make her feel so much better . . . But Cosmo was nowhere to be found.

He was displeased with her; Effie knew that without him being there to say so. She was, after all, a galloglass islander who didn’t do anything she was told, and who had just put a book into the Great Library without going through any of the processes she’d heard about. In order to put a book into the library you had to do all those complicated things. . . . What was it Clothilde had said? Effie had been so distracted thinking about going to Frog Hole that day that she’d barely listened. She just thought she’d be able to pick it up later. Stupid, stupid. But . . . Surely what she’d done hadn’t been that bad. The spirit of the library had wanted the book after all.

As she walked down the stairs back to the landing in the main part of Truelove House, Effie suddenly had a horrible realization. In fact, two.

The Diberi were planning to put a book in the library themselves. That’s what they were hoping to achieve with their enormous spell. All this speculation about the Diberi storming the Great Library to take books out, to remove some aspect of reality, was almost right, but it was not the whole picture. How much more effectively you could edit reality if you just wrote your own book of what you wanted to be the truth and somehow got it accepted.

That was what Skylurian Midzhar had planned to use Terrence for! And now that Russian poet Lady Tchainsaw was doing the same. Effie recalled what she and Maximilian had overheard at the university. Remember our agreement? You will be author of the new universe, and I will be its queen. I will have total power, and you will serve me. It had sounded stupid at the time, but Effie now saw that it had been deadly serious. The idea of writing a whole new universe made no sense until you understood how the Great Library worked. She shuddered to think what would happen if a book like that did find its way inside.

That was Effie’s first realization. That the Diberi most wanted to put books in the library, not take them out.