This is where Theun is going to make or break his survival chances.

He walked up the mezzanine stairs after his last class and took a minute at the banister to look out over the stacks. It's surprisingly pretty, to his sensibilities, but mostly it's important.

The classes matter. Allies matter. What he asks for from the void in his bedroom matters. The books he enchants, the alchemy projects, the weapons he makes in shop, they matter. But from the week he figured out his affinity, he's known that what he finds here, that's what matters most.

He will find spells to get him through graduation, find spells he can trade for things he's not good at, offer to find spells and designs and recipes to fill gaps his potential allies badly need. His advantage - the thing that will save him from the consequences of running his mouth off, if anything does - lives between these walls.

Better get to it.

It's SO BEAUTIFUL.

Tens of thousands - hundreds of thousands - are there millions of books here, there might be, in hundreds of languages covering who knows how many subjects, old books and new books and scrolls and the occasional stone tablet, beautifully illustrated books with gold leaf on the covers and books whose covers don't even have titles, thin books and fat books and tall books and tiny little pocket-sized books, books about anatomy and astronomy and education and psychology and mind control and ritual sacrifices and the Tang dynasty and the ancient Sumerians and pre-contact America and medicinal herbs and quantum mechanics and ancient battles and modern battles and the bottom of the ocean and different kinds of rocks and symbolism in alchemy and secret codes and magic arrows and magic bottles and textiles and diseases and curses and wards and blessings and a thousand kinds of monsters and something in Arabic or Persian that's all pictures of palaces -

She gets lost. For four hours, but she does get out again at the end of them. She doesn't even know enough to be scared; it's a library, and nothing really awful ever happens in a library unless it gets lit on fire.

Marcy loves libraries and this one is amazing. It has so many books in so many languages and she'll never be able to read them all even if she stayed here her entire life but she has four years and that's enough time to read lots of them. There are books of spells and books of artificing information and books that nobody has read in a hundred years. And today she has the delightful task of finding the German section and getting a primer on Middle High German to read in Boston and Philly's cosy reading room, curled up in a chair big enough that at her size it's almost a couch. Either this room or the workshop is going to end up being her favorite place in the Scholomance. She can't completely let her guard down even now, either physically or socially, but she can breathe a little easier, up here with a new language to learn between the books and the void. 

St. Petersburg has a reading room. They share with Novogord, and when Kiev's in the school they kick whichever unlucky indies claimed the armchairs in front of it out and use those too. While Dasha's the only one here, though, she's not quite Kiev. Not enough to feel comfortable of her place. She knows their reading room is, though. The first day she's going to spend her work period there, read off memorized letters for whoever isn't busy and establish that she has a right to be there. After that she isn't going to push it, at least until she's also established that she's not just Petersburg's hanger-on.

That's the plan, anyway. When she gets there she can't find the damn place. It's not like she can pop her head inside the door and ask if it's the right one. She walks around for ten minutes, trying not to look like she's unsure where she's going, and eventually ducks into a random stack and stares at the spines. Somehow it's this, of all things, that suddenly makes everything feel like too much. She wants to be home. - no, not even that. She wants to be in Anya's house in the city, the one Alyosha had to sneak her out to until she got too old to leave the enclave. She's never been to a public library but she's been in Anya's office where every wall has bookshelves to the ceiling and this is absolutely nothing like that except, somehow, she's crying. Anya lived but Misha and David and Tamara died, in her cluster, and Anya had a cluster, and she's alone and she's going to - she's going to die, if she's the kind of person that has breakdowns in the library stacks where anyone could find her.

The book titles she's been staring at are in some kind of script she doesn't recognize. She jerks her eyes away even though that's almost certainly safe. The void is terrifying. The floor is - the floor isn't safe to look at, it might be the library on the first day but that is how you die. She wipes her eyes on the back of her hand and looks up and down the stacks.

This library is bigger and better than Mother's library. This is not surprising, of course, but - The library is probably bigger than the one in the Istanbul enclave. It's bigger than the blue mosque. She was prepared for a big library, but she was not prepared for quite how big the library actually is. Some of the enclaves might have libraries this big, but probably not this well-stocked. Hard to beat a giant sentient library combing the void for lost copies of every book ever written.

- None of this is important enough to dwell over now, though, because she is with her Group and she needs to be keeping an eye out for mals and study carrels.

Home.

The library makes Camillo so homesick he has to duck blindly, unwisely, behind a shelf -- stupid, stupid, in a few months that's the sort of thing that will get him killed -- and scrub at his eyes with the back of his hand until tears stop threatening.

He grew up in the Tejano library, quite literally. His mother's affinity is for libraries, and so after she made it through the Scholomance on the maintenance track, she married her favorite graduation ally and moved right on in to the enclave library. The building is twenty beautiful stories tall, and the spellbook floor behaves itself better if there's someone living there among the stacks, fussing over the volumes just like she fusses over her own new post-graduation baby. It's the perfect arrangement.

Camillo's first word is book, and he reads before he's weaned, pushes his picture books on the swings and invites them to his tea parties. He's banned from the foreign language sections, and not allowed alone with the spellbooks, but he builds forts out of reference works and races through the card catalogue and has his sexual awakening to Boccaccio and Réage.

This library isn't like that. This library is strange and deadly and shifting, and it's not his own small kingdom, it's the disputed territory of a hundred enclaves. But something deep in his gut cries out home! nevertheless, and he can't quite silence that voice, no matter how hard he tries.