The Auradon Museum of Cultural History was in a modern complex of buildings within walking distance of the school. The summer exhibit had been something called Animals to the Rescue, highlighting the history of – one would assume – Auradon's most beloved heroic animals. Like the dragon that kept telling Mulan to give up, or the horse that almost killed King Eugene of Corona. The banners for it were coming down, and being replaced with bright turquoise advertisements for Secrets of Maru, set to run through the fall and winter.
One-sided propaganda factories are like car crashes, and I'm as susceptible to morbid fascination as the next person, but it wasn't our destination.
The building next to the museum was the Royal Library.
Mirrored glass and steel, it was very new and shiny, full of promise, but unwelcoming. Something about the hyper-reflectivity, the coldness of the blue autumn sky shimmering back at us, the thick girders and the large double doors with handles that looked like highly-polished prison bars.
But even the ominously clean architecture couldn't deter me, and I can't say I wasn't at least a little excited to see inside.
Despite the fact that villains, as a group, tend to be much better-read than their heroic counterparts, there wasn't a great big building devoted to books on the Isle of the Lost. Books were circulated through stores, bartered for high-quality goods with neighbours, or hoarded in dark basements next to skulls that served as candle holders. Knowledge was currency. Arcane knowledge, political knowledge, secrets, rumours, it was all worth something to somebody.
Beside me, Armand let out a low whistle.
"That's a lot of books," he said. "It's like a graveyard for stories."
"A cemetery of bad ideas and public records," I nodded, as we headed through a garden of low hedges and rose bushes. All of which were blessedly inanimate.
"Please tell me we're looking for something easy to find…" Armand open the library door for me like a gentleman.
"We're looking for law books," I whispered. "Oh! But see if you can find a copy of Hathi's When Fear Came for me if you get bored and want to wander. I hear it's very worthwhile."
"…are you asking me to look for a book written by an elephant?" he whispered back, raising his eyebrows and crossing his arms.
"Don't look at me like I'm being weird, that elephant has extensive military experience."
Armand continued looking at me like I was being weird.
"We just passed a museum with a banner celebrating a dog who foiled a crime ring," I reminded him. "This is the world we live in."
He was about to make some sort of disparaging remark about how jungle animals shouldn't be writing better books than people – an opinion that should be directed at people who write books, not people who read books by jungle animals – when a polite cough came in our direction. It was impossible to see the cougher.
The front entrance of the library was a sort of cordoned off welcome zone, you walked in and were immediately presented with a huge shiny blue wall with a quote in yellow vinyl letters. "A library can make the smallest corner of the world feel big. Bon Voyage!" It was… cheerful. In front of it sat a selection of oversized ottomans made from huge gauges of knitted wool, just in case someone wanted to sit in the busiest, noisiest, dirtiest part of the building to read. They were the same yellow as the words.
You had to walk around the wall to get to see anything of the library itself, which smelled less like old books and fresh ink, and more like coffee and pumpkin cake.
We turned the corner, and the reason for this was immediately apparent. There was a coffee shop. Right there. It had bistro tables and highly polished wooden floors, and a woman in a blue and yellow apron with a golden rose motif on it looked at us expectantly. Other than her, there wasn't a soul in sight.
"Can I help you?" She asked.
Where the hell are the books?! I wanted to yell, but I just smiled and said:
"Something smells yummy, is that pumpkin?"
Armand had already made his way to a glass case of delicacies, some savoury, some sweet, none of them looking as toxically technicolour as the tea party offerings in regular rotation at the school.
"Babe, I want this cheese thing, but I don't have any money," he declared shamelessly.
I giggled because I wasn't at all sure about the woman in the apron, before heading to his side to look at the cheese thing in question. It really did look appetizing, and it wasn't just a bunch of eggs or some meat, a refreshing change for him. Normally, I would've supported this culinary adventurousness, but I didn't have any money either.
"Aren't you two students at Auradon Prep?" The woman asked. She sounded perpetually annoyed. Always an asset for customer service. "Don't you have a free service card?"
"Oh, they didn't give us those yet," Armand told her, blurting information like he'd been injected with truth serum. "We're VKs, so we have to earn them through being trustworthy."
The woman recoiled from us in rigid disgust. It was unsettling. Since arriving, we'd been greeted with guarded suspicion and cloying sympathy from a group of people who had mentally prepared themselves to deal with VKs every day. But this was a barometer of what was going on in the minds of the average Auradonian citizen. And it looked like despite Future Queen Mal's whirlwind tour of the world, the average Auradonian citizen did not like the idea of us.
It felt horrible.
It was like being kicked in the abdomen during someone else's beautiful wedding.
In that moment, watching this stranger eye us up and down like a couple of plague-carrying serial killers, I vowed to get Armand his stupid cheese thing that was probably stale no matter what. He would have that pastry in his hands, even if I had to kill this woman and make it look like a tragic electrocution from an open wire on the cash register.
"He's kidding," I laughed adoringly, and wrapped my arm through Armand's as a quick visual distraction. "We're transfer students from Arendelle, they're just working out all of our IDs and stuff. It's a long process. I don't suppose we could get something with a receipt? And then next time we're here, with our cards, it can just be logged onto our accounts?"
She looked suspicious. Of course she did, it was total bullshit, it wasn't important if she believed that part.
"I'm not sure about that…" she said carefully.
"Oh, well, the last thing I want to do is get you into trouble," I told her as earnestly as I could manage, before turning to Armand. "Honey, I left my purse in the basket on the scooter. I'll just go get it. Pick out the rest of your order, and I'll pay cash for both of us."
'Honey' is code for 'I'm about to do something highly illegal, distract this person.'
"Sure, you want a hot drink or a cold drink?" He said with admirable casualness, knowing full well there was no purse and no scooter.
"Surprise me."
I left him perusing the menu while the woman in the apron watched him like he was planning a jailbreak.
The self-fulfilling prophecy is an interesting concept to me. Let's use a totally random example and not an ethical quandary I've been obsessed with my whole life, just something totally out of the air. A king traps all of the "villainous" people in one place, along with their friends, family, and professional colleagues. Everyone on Team Bad News is there, including any children these villains might have. So he's created an environment where all of the influences in the lives of these children are (his idea of) villainous. Has he himself ensured an entirely new generation of embittered villains? Or is he protecting the new generation of princes and princesses from a group of their peers somehow genetically inclined towards destroying them?
This is the sort of thing that goes through my head when I'm doing something like walking around the outside of a royal library, looking for the employee entrance and making sure there aren't any CCTV cameras watching me.
Do I do things like this because people say: "Daughter of Hans, you are no good," and I let them be right? Or do I do things like this because I really want to? It must be the first one, but I can't be at all sure, because if I want to do bad things to people who assume I'm only capable of bad things, isn't it the second one after all?
A small door was hidden next to two dumpsters and a private parking lot. It was painted grey to better blend with the glass box look of the building. Security measures were none existent – who would rob a library in Belle's kingdom, that's crazy – and I broke the pushpin style lock without braking a sweat.
The back entrance was as mercifully devoid of people as the front. There was a utilitarian little corridor with concrete floors that led to bathrooms on one side and an employee area on the other. I slipped into the employee area and found a row of lockers. Only one of them was closed, meaning the barista was the only employee in that part of the building, likely because people didn't actually visit the library. (I wasn't too surprised, it was, in fact, a coffee shop.)
The locker had a combination lock, which I generally don't like because they take time and patience. Luckily, it was a cheap combination lock, so I used a quick trick that popped it open like a jack-in-the-box.
I didn't know anything about the woman at the counter except that she was bigoted, but her locker contents did not surprise me. Two photographs of her on vacation with a group of sour-faced friends, a forest of half-used lipglosses in near-identical shades, a copy of Tiara Wars, and a worn down canvas and leather tote bag with a rhinestone fleur-de-lis on the side.
As I grabbed a tissue from a box on a nearby table and used it to hold the handles of the bag, I wondered if the fleur-de-lis meant she was from Beast's original kingdom, a pre-Auradonian family. Perhaps a mother or grandmother had been riled up, torch and pitchfork in hand, and followed Gaston all the way to the castle. None of those people, the mob members, had been condemned to the Isle of the Lost. Despite all the horrible things they were willing to do. Maybe that was why she disliked VKs so viscerally. She had to view us as distinct, descended of people who were different from the Kill the Beast crowd, genetically inclined to villainy. Otherwise, she wouldn't be any different from what we were.
Or maybe she had the bag because it was tacky and she was tacky.
Either way, I felt no pangs of remorse when I removed twenty-five dollars from a wallet inside the bag, carefully closed everything up, put it back exactly the way I'd found it, and left.
"Sorry I took so long," I said breezily, walking back into the little coffee shop area, "I ran into Suzanne, and she had a bit of a girl crisis."
I pulled a conspiratorial face at the woman in the apron, as if to silently say my purse isn't with me, it is full of tampons and with a desperate friend, but I brought cash.
"They've got pumpernickel… biscuit… things!" Armand said excitedly, "You love pumpernickel!"
I noticed that coffees weren't assembled, nor baked goods placed into little wax paper envelopes so we could carry them around. She was waiting to see the cash.
"Did you choose drinks?" I asked, very visibly pulling the money from my pocket.
"There's a sugar-free, honey sweetened espresso thing with almond milk," he reported, "and I'm trying a pumpkin spicy something-or-other. It's the best, she says."
The whole thing, including cheese pastry and pumpernickel biscuit thing, came to around twelve dollars. I put the rest of the money in the tip jar, and said:
"Thanks for the treat!"
The woman in the apron didn't even look suspicious, just glad to be rid of us as we wandered further into the library. The fact that she didn't even attempt better customer service after getting a tip equal to the amount spent did a lot to ease my conscience. Not that it was particularly troubled on that one.
"Greta," Armand whispered, "where did you get that money?"
I stopped and looked up into his eyes, and waited. We'd moved into an area with shiny, vaguely glass, vaguely plastic looking tables with laptops on them and charging stations. It was eerily empty.
"I shouldn't have asked," he said, very quickly. "How's your coffee? Mine's terrible. It tastes like somebody melted a plastic jack-o-lantern into a big pot of caramel and added coffee. To punish the coffee for something its father did. Like a big steaming cup of Auradon…"
"Don't complain about things you get for free," I scolded him softly.
The cheese pastry, he happily reported, was pretty good. My coffee was – surprise, surprise – overly sweetened with the honey, and the pumpernickel was dry, but it could've been considerably worse. It was leaps and bounds better than the school provided food, although nowhere near as good as Naomi's rebel kitchen.
"I feel like we're not seeing any books …" Armand said, no longer feeling any compunction to whisper, since we were obviously alone in the building apart from the sole barista. "I feel like that's weird…"
The tech area split off into two distinct zones. One was a children's story time nook decorated with an eye-rolling amount of lions and roses, and focused obviously on a currently empty wingback chair. No doubt this was where Queen Belle had her literacy promotion photo ops, surrounded by eager little listeners all excited for story time.
On the Isle, we had something like that. A terrifying lion would stretch out in the cool shadows on top of the dockyard crates on very hot, sunny days. His glinting green eyes would fall on young faces, black claws idly tapping, and he'd tell darkly amusing fables to pass the time. Most of us loved it, even though our parents always warned us never get too close.
In the opposite direction of Belle's storybook corner was a split-level staircase, leading to a second floor and a basement. Beside it was a refreshingly large collection of magazines.
"Oh, finally, something," I breathed in relief.
"You know, I'm surprised. Dad always told me Belle was nuts for books, like even more than you," Armand said, sticking his hands on his hips and cocking his head to one side. "He said she was so into reading, she used to walk around with a novel, crashing into stuff and ignoring townsfolk. 'Your little mademoiselle hasn't caused a traffic accident because she refused to look up!' And I told him that you care about traffic safety and prefer to read sitting down."
His Gaston impression was very accurate. I felt my cheeks start to go pink, and the tops of my ears go hot at the idea of them discussing me and comparing me to Belle. Armand, completely oblivious, chuckled fondly.
"Dad likes you," he said wistfully. "Almost as much as he likes Gerard's girlfriend!"
"What?!" My voice was slightly louder than I intended, "Sibyl?! Gaston likes Sybil Smee more than he likes me? That's ridiculous. I get him Father's Day presents! Nice ones!"
"Babe. Relax," Armand told me, looking very amused. "Dad has really, really, really old-fashioned ideas about how girlfriends are supposed to be. Sybil is obsessed with Gerard and she has zero brain cells and she can cook. She's his ideal daughter-in-law."
"No matter what I do, I never just win," I groaned. "Stay here and look for legal journals, I'm going to see what's upstairs."
"Ok, but while you're up there, maybe remind yourself that you aren't exactly Dad's biggest fan, and I would rather drink unicorn punch and die than date somebody like Sybil," he said as I started up the stairs. "Sometimes winning is losing in disguise."
I stopped and leaned over the railing to look at him. His face was below mine, which was a rare and unusual angle for me to look at it from. He had very friendly, round cheekbones that gave him a kind of perpetual softness. It was difficult to notice it when all you saw was jaw and smirk. My loose hair fell like a curtain that hid us from the walls of the library.
I didn't know what I wanted to say to him.
I handed him the uneaten half of my pumpernickel biscuit, smiled, and went up the stairs.
"This is so dry!" His voice called after me, mouth full of bread. "Yuck. Yeah. Bleh, the coffee is still terrible. I don't even know if washing it down helped or made it worse…"
The second floor was much more in line with how you might picture Queen Belle's Royal Library. The afternoon light flooded in from the all-glass walls, landing upon rows and rows of bright white bookcases, and a far wall echoed the one at the entrance. The same shiny blue, the same yellow letters, only this time they read: "I Want Adventure in the Great Wide Somewhere."
All of the books were novels by the look of it.
There was also an obvious check-out station, with one of the almost-glass, almost-plastic looking countertops in yellow, and sleek pearl white computers in a row to handle high-volume days. Given that we'd been in there for quite some time and hadn't had the slightest hint of other patrons, I doubted high-volume days existed.
I was surprised when a little old man shuffled out from a back office. He was surprised, too, by the looks of it. A well-loved teacup in his hand, steaming fresh with the tab of a teabag hanging over the side, he blinked at me like I was a mirage. His glasses were thick enough to magnify his eyes and all the tiny wrinkles around them, and tufts of white hair stuck out from behind his ears.
"We don't have an event today," he said absent-mindedly, and I honestly couldn't tell if he was telling me or asking himself.
"I'm looking for law books," I told him. "Anything about current laws, and the legal aspect of the kingdom's founding. I'm specifically interested in gender bias as coded into laws. No man may do X, No woman may participate in Y, that sort of thing. I'm also looking for transcripts of royal negotiations, would they be here, or some kind of archive in the palace…?"
He broke into a beaming smile, and laughed very powerfully for a man of his age.
"A scholar! How wonderful!"
"Oh, no," I said bashfully, "I'm really just running an errand for a friend."
"You are a reader," he said forcefully, putting his tea on the check-out counter and pointing at me with an unsteady, bony finger. "I can always tell a reader. Nowadays, it's because they look a little annoyed with this place."
"It is a bit confusing that downstairs is so… focused on non-literary pursuits."
"Modernization," he sneered grumpily. "When the library was new, it was a wonderful institution. But people stopped coming, so they kept adding things to cater to students who didn't want to read, instead of changing the school to make them want to read. It must break Belle's heart. When she was your age, she would come into my shop every day for a book, and I didn't have a tenth as many as this place has now…"
"I'm sure she's gutted," I said, a little more sarcastically than I'd intended.
The old man looked me over, a twinkle in his eye.
I cleared my throat and smiled serenely.
"Is there a law section?" I asked.
"Basement. Go down the stairs you came up and down again. Of course, the old charters are in the reference room, you'll need to sign out a carrel and get a key if you want to look at those," he said, all business now. "Royal transcripts are in the castle, I think they scan them into the computers nowadays, I won't be able to tell you much about that. But! I bet I can guess what you read, young lady."
As a general rule, I don't like fortune tellers or personality quizzes. But I decided to humour the old man since he was being useful.
"Alright," I said.
"You read what you've been told to read. You enjoy it, and you get a lot out of it, but I don't think you really read for yourself," he said. "I'll make you a deal. I'll give you a key to the reference room and assign you a carrel for the rest of the year, I'll get your card set up right here and now, if you do one thing for me."
"And what would that be?"
"Read the book I'm going to give you," he smiled his beaming smile again. "Read it cover to cover all in one go, read it twice if you want to."
"That's it?" I asked, deeply suspicious.
"That's it," he nodded.
He ducked behind a computer, switched it on, asked me for my name, date of birth and dorm room number, then pulled a card off a stack held together with a rubber band kept in a drawer under the counter. He put a small key on top of it, and asked me to read the key's very tiny serial number to him. I did.
"All set. That's your card, that's your key, you've got carrel number four all to yourself until June of next year, and this…" he turned back into the office, and emerged a few minutes later with a leather-bound book in his hands. "This is your side of the bargain."
He passed it to me gently. It was heavy. Old. The covers were thick card bound in real leather, the spine had been repaired more than once. A few places spoke of gold-leaf lettering that had flaked off, but there wasn't any legible title left. I went to open it, to read the inside title page, but the old man stopped me.
"Ah!" He said, raising a finger, "Once you start it, you have to finish it all in one go."
I thanked him for his help, and the book just to be polite, before heading back down to the magazine section. I felt strange about the encounter, like it belonged to a different kind of life or a different kind of person than me. Maybe I'd accidentally bumped into a happy princess occurrence instead of an evil princess one.
It didn't feel like a profound crossroads, though. It just felt like an aberration. To use a library appropriate metaphor, a page from another book had been sewn into mine by accident.
"Hey," Armand said, when I found him next to a wall display of Pixie Dust back issues. "No law magazines, but do we know what we're wearing to Fall Ball? Are we coordinating?"
"No and no."
"According to basically everything here, we needed to start figuring that out four months ago. Do you have a makeup look?" He asked, surprisingly alarmed at my disinterested attitude.
"Did these stupid fashion magazines brainwash you?" I asked, "I was gone for two seconds."
"They say it can ruin your whole life if you get it wrong!" He whispered urgently. "People's friendships are destroyed, love dies, and reputations are sunk. If my tie is wrong, it could end my chances of getting a high-paid job in a royal court."
"Armand, your father is Gaston. The entire political world is dominated by the man he literally stabbed in the back with a piece of architecture. Tie colours are going to be the least of your worries when it's job hunting time," I told him patiently. "Now come on, what we want is in the basement."
The basement turned out to be familiar for all the wrong reasons. The stone floor was ice cold, and the lack of windows made the electric lights look amber and dull compared to the sunshine that radiated through the rest of the building. The bookcases were not the modern, slick, cube-shaped ones from the fiction section, or the slim functional ones from the magazine section. They were old and wooden, and disorganized. Stacks sat on the floor, shelves looked half empty, books were shoved horizontally on top of vertical rows inside shelves. Every footstep echoed softly, like it was being suffocated by unseen shadows.
"Kind of like the book area at Dr. Facilier's shop," Armand said.
"Except it smells like shoe polish and there aren't any dehydrated human heads," I nodded.
"I miss the shrunken heads, they'd make it feel less creepy," he said. "Like there's somebody here if we have an emergency."
"See if you can find a carrel marked four," I told him. "It's mine for the rest of the year."
"What's a carrel?"
"Like a permanent private desk."
He started to laugh, and I looked at him wonderingly.
"No, but babe," he took a bracing breath. "Normal people do not walk into a royal library for the first time in their lives and get a permanent desk in the basement in under an hour."
I decided to regale him with a favourite admonition of my father's, something he would often say before his mysterious disappearance:
"Normal people don't get crowns."
A/N: I spent last week in and out of the hospital because of cluster migraines. (And we have a heatwave, so it was fun in the sun...) Hence the lack of updates, but I'm slowly getting back into my groove! A big thank you to everyone who is reading and enjoying, and a special thank you to everyone who took the time to review. Feedback is so useful, and I do my best to incorporate it into the story. I really want this to be something all Disney fans enjoy, so if you have any ideas or suggestions, I'd love to hear them!
