Daddy and Godmother were counting on me to come home as quick as I could. My stepmother and the Council had ordered me to return with a fiancé, and the little thatch of tick marks in the back of my book told me that I had only two days left in England. That fewer and fewer days stood between me and the threat of the Imperiya.

Every step I took toward Bear was a step off the path toward duty. Toward my rightful role. Toward Daddy and Godmother and home.

I’d sealed the note and sent it before I could change my mind.

“We’re only going about a half a mile as the crow flies.” Bear pushed open the back gate, and it gave with a long creak. The woods behind the castle were dark beneath the somber sky. “But the hills are rough, so it’s a bit further than that, really.”

I eyed the gathering clouds uncertainly as I picked my way down the ridge, over fallen logs and scrub. The exposed skin on my arms and collarbone prickled under a cold wind. “Is it about to rain?”

Bear smirked. “This is England. It’s always about to rain.”

“It’s been mostly clear since we arrived— Oof.” My feet slipped over a stone slick with the morning dew. Bear reached out, bracing me.

“Well, then.” He grinned, charming but still dangerous, palms dawdling over my arms even once my feet were steady. “I guess you brought the sunshine.”

We came at last to a tall stone building nestled between damp green hills, its gray slate roof covered in moss, its leaded windows glowing with warm light. Vast oaks and thick tangles of willows and wildflowers crowded around its sides, trembling in the wind.

“Where are we?”

Bear took me by the elbow. The hair on my arms rose at his touch, at his private smile.

You are making a mistake.

“Come inside and see.”

An old grandfather clock marked the time with pensive ticks in the dark-paneled foyer, dimly lit and otherwise empty. The sound followed us through a narrow corridor and into an adjoining room. When my eyes adjusted to the weak lamplight and the gray glow of the sky outside, I gasped aloud.

Bear had finally brought me to the library.

Thousands of leather- and canvas-bound books lined hundreds of chestnut shelves, like carved jewelry boxes stuffed with treasure. Rugs covered the walnut floor beneath my feet. The only sounds were the faint wooden tick-tick-tick of the grandfather clock and the whispery rattle of branches on the windows and the hum of my nerves.

I ran my hands over the nearest spines—Parmenides, Plato, Pythagoras—and silently multiplied the shelves, the corridors, the spiral staircase just visible through a half-open door.