“Enchanted?” I say, catching on to the one relevant detail. “Does that mean that this is a library of books on magic, or enchanted books? Or other enchanted items?” The push and pull of awe and fear within me is going to wreck my nerves.

“How should I know? Just...try not to touch anything. To be on the safe side.”

“Really?” I reply. “I was planning on licking everything, just to make sure.”

Raze tilts his head up, squinting. “That might take a while. We’re going to have to search every inch of every floor, aren’t we?”

“I don’t know.” I’d ask the compass, but it’s still pointing to me, which is unhelpful.

“Where should we start?”

I pause. My rational mind screams not to take another step into this beautiful, impossible building, that there’s something wrong here. Another, louder part of me is captivated, pulled, itching to explore. I take one delicate step, then another, feeling like a princess in a faerie story as the tap of Isolde’s boots echoes through the atrium.

“Let’s do the first floor first,” I say. “Work our way up.”

Raze looks around like he also senses something isn’t quite right, but he agrees, extending his elbow to me like we’re about to walk into a ballroom.

I ignore it and brush past him.

After that, Raze finally goes quiet for a bit. I don’t know what we expected—a giant nest of gold and jewels, a brightly lit sign that says WILDLINE LEGACY HERE—but there’s no indication of anything on the first floor.

Or the second.

All we pass is the shelves of books and cubbyholes of scrolls. Skeletons of glass cases, the panes long broken and scattered, stand over every couple of rows of shelves. Even though the building is open to the air, the books themselves don’t seem rotted at all. They’re dusty, some of the titles hard to make out, but after hundreds of years of abandonment, they should be totally disintegrated.

The breeze tastes of leather and paper and spoiled magic, bitter and oily. Even the air around me feels different, like the hum I felt last night in the faerie realm or at Revelnox. There’s an enchantment here, I realize. One cast over the whole library to preserve its contents. One that, after so many centuries, is finally beginning to unravel.

I glare at my palm, willing the arrow to move, to point at anything but me, but apparently that enchantment is done helping.

Besides the shelves and cases, webs of halls and cavernous rooms fill each floor. Some are filled with books, some hold enormous tables surrounded by chairs, and some are completely empty. Every once in a while, the sound of the wind or fluttering of a bird’s wings startles us, and we laugh nervously when we realize it’s nothing.

Finally, somewhere around the middle of the third floor, I can’t bear the silence. The question that’s been quietly stuck in the back of my mind since Leira confronted us spills out, surprising even me.