Part 2 - 5

Picky, wanting to not end up in a pauper’s grave at the cemetery, slinked out once night fell. The Raven took to matting a nest in her hair, and against the howl of wind rising on the Lonely sea, they crossed Hamfrill Lane. The library was narrow but was set in far enough to keep off the worst of the night wind, and shielded by a dormer roof. Yet after prying at the lock, all that had changed were the color of Picky’s numbed fingers into a pale blue. The Raven nestled out from her hair to speak.

“It’s s-stiff as c-cold b-b-butter,” she said with teeth-rattling, and let go of the lock.

“Hurry and think of another way or we’re popsicles,” the Raven said and rustled into her hair once again.

Picky pulled at the window shutters, only to find them latticed with iron like a spider’s web. She lamented that there was no back door, and seemingly no way inside. Her patience dropped like the temperature, and soon hot puffs of breath curled each time she exhaled. A wind bellowed through, and she braced herself for another onslaught of chill. But instead, a warmth tumbled down from above them.

Picky stepped back beyond the dormer, and her eyes winced to spot it; the round window atop, big as a wheel of cheese, with a hinge that let the library’s warmth escape. Hands ready and legs primed, Picky scurried up the banister like a cat up a tree and swooped inside to find another world. One of the books stacked end to end crowded together in an endless hug. She dashed towards the light and found a fireplace, overlapped rugs that warmed her toes, and a desk nearby where on it sat a crystal bowl of roasted peanuts the Raven was very fond of digging in. And it wasn’t an hour later before they curled up beneath a table on a plush rug unseen, lulled by the crackle of the fireplace into a deep slumber.

At sunrise, Picky woke to the Raven pecking at her cheek. “The next task, Picky. Come on,” the Raven said and gave a shake of his wings.

“But I thought we wouldn’t die now,” she said and stumbled up to her feet.

“Oh no, we’re far from getting away from death just yet. Probably just a bunch of bad luck come this way from what I smell. And the librarian will be here any moment too, and maybe they’ll have something to do with it?”

Picky’s mouth slipped open and she whispered, “sometimes librarians can get mean from what I’ve heard. Like, snap your hand shut in a book if you talk.”

“Oh, it would be worse than that. I did see a rather sharp letter opener on that desk,” the Raven said and shook out his feathers.

Picky slipped out the window fast as a fish going down the river, with no traces of them aside from a chair left a little crooked and the peanut dish a little emptier. But even if her leaving wasn’t graceful, as crawling backward out a window wouldn’t be, no one noticed that morning.

A windstorm off the Lonely Sea had run through the town, said to the be the worst in a century. Everywhere, people fussed themselves between the broken signs and skinned roofs and weren’t bothered with little things like children scurrying down from odd places. Not one inhale later did Picky know out of any night, it would have been her last had it not been for the Raven’s warning. Across the street, in the very alleyway Picky used for sleeping, rubble cast down from the roofs and windows lay exactly where Picky always slept.

“At the market I watched a merchant drop a watermelon onto the ground. That would have been a messy end for us,” the Raven that sat on her shoulder.

“Think I should get us some breakfast,” she said and was hungry for anything but watermelon. “You’re hungry I bet.”

“To the woods then,” the Raven said and nodded off towards the thicket of evergreens nested on the town border. “That’s where you’ll find us food. Without Bakers snatching us.”

Picky’s toes curled up in her sole-worn boots. “We aren’t supposed to go back in the Neverwoods! No one’s allowed.”

“Then we’ll both be dead soon,” the Raven said and flapped his wing not yet healed with a despondent sigh. “Should we head to the coffin maker now or later?”