#solravn

She could never fall asleep there.  It was too cold and too proper for sleeping.  But she often saw the library in her dreams.  Or rather, she saw the forbidden things she wanted it to have.  The novels and the poetry and the dramatic plays, the gilded, richly illustrated compilations of folktales and fairy-stories, all the things her father called wasteful and inane.  A deep, broad education was vital for a thief straddling the line between noble and criminal, but there was so much more to life than gemology, history, culture, and mathematics.  There were heroes facing down dragons in the garden outside, noble battlemages hunting daedra.  Unicorns clip-clopping across the marble to nose her shoulder, smelling faintly of cinnamon and sugar and vanilla…

Chimes touched her hearing, at first distant and delicate, then sharpening to a tinkling staccato.  Her lashes fluttered as she groggily looked around, just registering the coarse cotton of her sleeve against her cheek.  Then, like a jab from a hot poker, dread raced through her.  This wasn’t the Vestalis library.  This wasn’t home at all.

The chimes ceased.  There was no echo, not in a twenty-by-twenty study.  As if a spell had shattered, the remnants of sleep flaked away like dried plaster.  She knew the shelves lining the walls and the rug beneath her feet, thick and soft as eiderdown.  Familiar scents enveloped her.  Chamomile tea and parchment, worn leather and fresh ink, things always doomed to be lost in the vaulted ceiling of the Vestalis library.  She heaved an annoyed, weary sigh and scrubbed at her dry eyes.  Weary because she’d been out two nights thieving with little more than a handful hours of sleep.  Annoyed because she should’ve known better than to nod off anywhere but home.  Should’ve known better than to get fall asleep to fairytales.

Behind her, Marcano snickered.  She looked over her shoulder; he was still scritch-scratching away in a weathered tome at the table at the center of the room, floppy white quill dancing over his hand like the bird who’d lost it.  Her brows knitted.  Gods, she realized, I haven’t even bathed…  How shabby she must look in this small, but ritzy townhouse, standing there on an antique rug. 

“What a nap that turned out to be,” Marcano greeted, pausing his work to sip his tea.  The cup clinked daintily as he set it back on its saucer.  “I look up to see you reading one moment, and poof, you’re out hardly a moment later.”

Tatiana glanced at the tiny clock on the nearest bookshelf.  Its abalone face seemed somehow derisive, the sweeping woodwork a mocking parody of a shrug.  “It’s after midnight and you didn’t think to wake me?”

He laughed again and grinned, teeth a white crack in his sun-bronzed face.  “Please, you know me better than that.  I’m always thinking, and I was thinking you were sleeping like a worn-out kitten.  Thieves need rest, too.  Particularly those who get in and out of the Tiber Septim Hotel’s safety deposit box.”     

Tatiana’s throat tightened.  She’d come to fence her goods and rest briefly before heading home, not sleep for over three hours on a book of fantasy.  She’d abused the Pagani’s hospitality.  Mother and Father had expected her home before eight this evening, too.  By now, they were undoubtedly pacing the library with steam billowing out their ears, and Father’s thieves would be combing the alleys, taverns, and underground for her.  Missing curfew was one thing.  Missing nighttime tea with Mother was another.  Missing both was another entirely.  Antonia could slip away with that, being a butterfly that thrived in the spotlight, but Tatiana couldn’t.  Alongside their mother, Antonia maintained and grew the family’s social connections, plying more information than tangible goods.  Tatiana shined behind the scenes, where a colder, quieter, more calculated hand was needed.  Their father held the twins on a tight leash, but Tatiana’s had always been tighter.  Because he disliked her or because he saw her potential as a thief and heir and thus expected more of her, she didn’t know.  Parsing through it made her head hurt, so she didn’t bother.

If he didn’t dislike her before, he sure as Oblivion would now.

She casting about for her socks and boots but found only the usual sea of parchment, books, and scraps of Marcano’s works-in-progress.  They must still be by the door.  The woolen blanket on her shoulders slipped to the floor as she turned.  Nocturnal spare her, she was so tired she hadn’t even noticed it until now.  They brought me a blanket.  They didn’t have to do that.  “I have to go,” she murmured.

“Of course you don’t,” he replied.  Watching her with soft hazel eyes, he put his quill aside and kneaded tension from his hand.  His silk robe glimmered in the lamplight, its yellow and black checkers as good a wake-up call as the clock had been.  Maybe it was the late hour or the shadows or her fatigue, but something carved years into his lean face and lent him an almost grandfatherly air, a shocking contrast to the shrewd negotiator who relieved her of stolen jewelry, trinkets, and art, then mercilessly critiqued the poetry in the day’s Black Horse Courier.  Without its wax his mustache drooped over his mouth, looking as tired as she felt.  “It’s quite late, you know.  You might as well stay here.  Leave now, and it’ll be an hour before you make home.”

She hesitated, then shook her head.  “Marcano, I can’t.  If nothing else, it’s improper.  You’re my fence-,”

“And your friend.”

“And my friend.”  She forced a smile and rubbed her eyes again.  Her cheeks burned, albeit for an entirely different reason.  Her smile dropped like a stone.  “But…a young woman coming and going from your house, then suddenly staying overnight?  People will talk.  People in and out of the guild.  I can’t do that to you and your wife.”  And to my family either.  Marcano only laughed—actually laughed.  The fire spread down her neck.  “I’m serious.”

“As am I!” he said, shoulders still shaking as he caught his breath.  He wiped away an errant tear and met her gaze.  “A lesson for you, Tat: worry what every little person thinks of every little thing you do, and you’ll do little more than worry.  Livia and I live for gossip, and your father does not.  Anything that springs up, we’ll prune before he knows it’s sprouted.”

Tatiana rubbed the side of her neck and chewed her lip.  She looked to the bookshelves, then the table crowded with paper and open books, the taxidermy hawk on the wall, and her bare feet, finding no comfortable place for her gaze to rest.  Marcano’s library was everything the Vestalis one wasn’t.  For starters, it was a cozy nook in comparison.  There was no fireplace.  There were no crystal chandeliers that twinkled in the feeblest of light.  The lamps on the table and hooked into sconces were fine, but plainer and their glass smoke-stained.  The thick, once-wildly expensive rug upon which she’d slept hid scuffed floorboards, its blue and gold whorls faded in bars where sun barged through the windows.  Unlike the variety of sofas and reading tables at in the Vestalis library, only four chairs crammed around an oblong table here, two of which were heaped with books.   The shelves were smaller, simpler, and without glass.  It was a librarian’s nightmare, the books shelved in different places every time she visited, and with ever-changing gaps in the stacks as Marcano and his wife read, reread, and added to their collection. 

Here, she felt she could slouch and laugh and lounge to her heart’s content.  Here, she could sleep.  And here, she realized with a dull ache in her chest, was the home she never realized she didn’t have.

Worry must’ve tightened her face, for Marcano pounced on her silence like a cat taking a mouse.  He cocked his head and raised an eyebrow, salt-and-pepper tendrils of hair swaying across his forehead.  “You know, Livia made up the guest room for you before she turned in.  The bath should still be hot, too.  It would hardly do as hosts and temporary guardians to let you wander the city at night.”

Tatiana was glad she had her eyes down; it gave her the cover to blink away the tears.  Beyond her family—sometimes within her family—no one had been so kind to her before, not without orders, duty, or notions of personal gain in mind, anyway.  How did she even respond to such kindness?  Her mind blanked, so she did what she did best.  Yank on her sardonic mask and hope for the best.  “It’s the Elven Gardens district,” she drawled.  “That’s about the closest thing to safe as you get in the City.  I’d be fine.”

Marcano stood, smoothed down the front of his robe, and stepped around the edge of the table.  It was a monumental effort to look away from his slippers, which looked like blocky rabbits.  “Safety’s where all of the best criminals hide, child.  Remember that,” he said with a wink.  He waved her to the door and the dark hall beyond.  “There’s no need to worry about going home to a lecture or having dessert taken from you or anything.  I sent my footman to your house shortly after you fell asleep.  Cassius and I are old friends, you know.  He knows where you are and is pleased you’re safe.  Oh, don’t look so doubtful.”  He fished a square of parchment from his breast pocket.  “I have his letter if you wish to read it for yourself.”

Tatiana bit her lip again, this time to stifle a yawn.  A bath and a warm, clean bed.  Safety.  Care.  Marcano and his wife had become her friends over the last year, certainly, yet all these things sat before her like unexpected gifts.  And there she sat staring dumbly at them, too stunned to know what to say.  “Thank you,” she managed, and quietly despised how weak and raspy it sounded.