Alice hadn’t paid much attention to the grounds thus far. For all that it was nearing summer, there hadn’t been a proper sunny day since she’d arrived, and the air was still cold enough that she had to wrap up to go outside. From the upstairs windows, she’d got the impression of a vaguely rectangular lawn surrounded on all sides by dense, leafy forest, and she hadn’t bothered to investigate further. She wasn’t much for the outdoors at the best of times, and whenever her father had taken her on some rural outing, she’d always been secretly eager to return to the well-organized life of the city.

Now she found that her impression had been mostly correct, but for one important detail. There was another building on the other side of the lawn, its facade barely protruding from the thick surrounding greenery, its sides disappearing back into the forest so that it was difficult to get a proper sense of its size.

The gravel path led right up to its unornamented stone face, in which was set a single door of ancient, greening bronze. There were no windows that Alice could see, and no embellishments or decorations at all.

‘This is the library?’ Alice said.

‘Yes,’ Emma said, as always without elaborating further.

It looks more like a fortress, Alice thought. Or else some kind of bank vault. Emma grabbed the heavy bronze ring attached to the door and pulled, grunting with effort, and the door swung slowly open with an anguished scream of corroded metal.

Inside was a little anteroom, dark except for the dim trickle of sunlight through the doorway. A set of heavy hurricane lamps hung from pegs in one wall, beside another bronze door.

‘You must use a lamp when you’re inside, never a candle,’ Emma said. Alice was startled to hear her speak unbidden, until she remembered that Mr Black had told her to explain the rules. ‘And you must always close the outer door before you open the inner.’

‘Got it,’ Alice said.

Emma lit one of the lanterns, dropping the match into a bucket of water apparently provided for the purpose. The flame flickered weakly inside the double layer of glass, like a caged spirit. She handed the lamp to Alice and lit another for herself, then pushed the outer door closed. It swung slowly, giving another grinding shriek of protest, and closed with a forbidding boom. Darkness closed in at once, broken only by the faint flicker of light from the lanterns.

Emma opened the inner door and raised the lamp over her head, revealing a wooden-floored space flanked by enormous bookshelves. Stretching back from the entrance—

Alice stifled a gasp. There were eyes, a forest of eyes, from the floor to up above her head. Every one of them glowed a brilliant yellow in the lantern light, and every one was focused on the two of them.