To her immense relief, the bark peeled back. Hurrying through the new door, she found herself in another treetop room. This one was much smaller than the other chamber, with only one high, narrow window. It did, however, still contain quite a lot of books.
Cathy spent an informative few minutes learning about fairy toilets, which fortunately turned out to not be that different from the ones back home (albeit with magic rather than plumbing). Washing presented slightly more of a challenge. There was a small, continuous stream of water bubbling up from what looked like a pile of beach rocks in one corner, but nothing she could recognize as a shower. Or, indeed, soap.
Poking around the shelves unearthed books, more books, a number of unlabeled glass bottles, and yet more books. Cathy shook one of the bottles dubiously, watching glimmering blue liquid swirl inside. Given that she had no way of knowing if it was shower gel or a spell, it seemed best not to rub it all over her skin.
In the end, she did the best she could with handfuls of cold water (if there was a way to heat it up, it probably involved using magic), then got dressed. At least somewhat more presentable, she went back into the larger chamber. The crow-cat was still perched on the table, trying to get at whatever was under the bowl. At Cathy’s reappearance, the little griffin cawed hopefully.
Cathy lifted the bowl, and discovered a breakfast plate with a couple of soft white rolls, butter, slices of hard cheese, and a small bowl of what looked like orange raspberries. Her stomach growled. The crow-cat mimicked the sound with disconcerting accuracy, staring fixedly at the cheese.
Cathy narrowed her eyes at the small griffin. “Aodhan’s note said that you weren’t starving.”
From the crow-cat’s lashing tail, this was a vile lie.
“Given how tame you seem to be, I’m fairly sure Aodhan feeds you.”
The crow-cat eloquently conveyed that, to the contrary, she had never been fed in her entire existence.
“I don’t even know if griffins can eat cheese. It might poison you.”
The crow-cat was willing to take that risk.
Cathy gave in and held out a piece of cheese. With a pleased chirp, the little griffin plucked the morsel from her fingers, gulping it down in one bite. Then the creature’s feathers drooped. She let out the saddest, thinnest, tiniest caw, clearly about to perish of starvation.
“I literally just fed you.”
The crow-cat had no recollection of this event.
In the end, the griffin got the lion’s share of the cheese. Cathy made do with the bread and berries, which in truth was no hardship. The rolls were fresh and tender; the butter rich and salty. The unidentifiable berries tasted like raspberries but burst in her mouth like grapes, juicy and refreshing.
The only slight disappointment was the tea, which turned out to be a herbal tisane somewhat like spearmint, now stone cold. It wasn’t bad, but it was definitely decaf. Cathy drank it anyway, though not without a brief pang of longing for a proper cup of tea.
While she was eating, she gave into temptation and examined Aodhan’s shelves. Some, from the titles and authors—Across the Northern Wastes with Wand and Hippogryph, by Liraeth Ice-Hand, or Orcish Poetry, Vol 3—could only have been penned by fae. A few of them were in languages she didn’t recognize, or written in curling, alien runes that she couldn’t read at all.
Most of them, however, came from her own world. The vast majority were just cheap mass-market paperbacks, with creased spines and dogeared pages; the sort of books you found piled high in charity stores, or dumped by paper recycling bins. Here, however, each one was carefully shelved, displayed as proudly as though they were valuable first editions. Then again, she supposed even a battered Dan Brown thriller was rare in this world.
One set of books caught her eye, tucked away high on a very top shelf. Unlike the rest of Aodhan’s collection, they were shelved with the page edges facing outward, hiding the spines and titles.
He really does have a collection of erotica?
If he did, however, he didn’t keep it here. When she pulled out one of the volumes—because honestly, how could she not take a peek—she discovered that it was a copy of Harry Potter. It fell open in her hand, revealing margins heavily annotated in Aodhan’s neat handwriting:
That is not the correct use of wormwood.
Phoenix feathers in a wand?? Why not make the damn thing out of nitroglycerine?
Are the teachers TRYING to get the entire student body killed? Is Hogwarts actually a front for some criminal organization that’s embezzling educational grants?
NO. JUST NO.
Grinning, Cathy checked the final pages of the last book. Yes, Aodhan had hate-read the entire series. Lines of minuscule, outraged copperplate covered the endpapers. He’d even glued a few extra sheets of commentary into the back cover. The very last line was a scrawled, grudging:
Good story, though.
“Probably a good thing he doesn’t seem to have managed to get hold of any Sarah J Maas books,” she said to the crow-cat perched on her shoulder. “Unless he did, and they aren’t here because he burned them.”
The crow-cat flicked her tail, far more interested in the remaining food than books. Cathy absently passed the griffin berries as she drifted along the shelves, increasingly intrigued by what they revealed about the mage’s tastes.
If she’d had to guess, she would have assumed he’d be into heavy, intellectual books like Tolstoy or James Joyce. He did have a collection of such classics, but they were shelved at ankle level in a clear sign of disinterest. A near complete run of the Animorphs, on the other hand, got pride of place at eye-level, along with Diane Duane’s Young Wizards series. Picking up the first book, So You Want to be a Wizard, she found a number of underlined passages—apparently Aodhan’s favorites—but no outraged marginalia.