Chapter 4 Upside Down

“Your book is upside down.”

I said it softly. I swear I did.

He froze.

The book dropped from his hands and hit the floor with a thump. Across the shop, a dozen shelves went silent, the way a room goes silent when someone says the wrong thing at dinner.

“I was—” His voice came out rough. “I was only looking.”

“It’s upside down,” I said again, because I couldn’t think of anything else.

He didn’t answer. He bent and picked up the book carefully, as though he’d dropped something that could break. He held it against his chest. Then, very slowly, he turned it around.

The right way up.

“Idris.”

“Please.”

It was the first time I’d heard him say it. Not an order. Not a declaration. Just a word, rough and low and quite ashamed.

“Please,” he said again. “Do not tell anyone.”

I stood very still. “You can’t read.”

“I—”

“You can’t read,” I said, and it wasn’t a question anymore, and I watched the last of his pride slide off him like a cloak.

“No,” he said. “I cannot.”

We sat on the floor of my ruined Poetry section, with the moon coming through the gap in the tarp and Footnote watching us from a rafter like a small, furry judge.

“It is not that I never learned,” Idris said. He held the book in both hands. He still hadn’t put it down. “I was taught. Everyone was. My family keeps the Ledger of Scales. It is the oldest book in the Court. A dragon who is raised in my house is raised on letters.” His mouth twisted. “They crawl away from me.”

“Crawl?”

“The letters. They move. I look at a word and it will not stay.” He made a small circle in the air with one finger. “Like ants. I can see them. I cannot catch them.”

I thought of my account book, sitting under the till. Two years of beautiful, careful lies in my own handwriting. I knew something about hiding what you couldn’t do.

I did not tell him that.

“How have you hidden it?” I asked.

“I listen. I watch my family’s lips. I nod at the right moments.” A tired shrug. “A dragon can bluff for a very long time, if he is large enough.”

“And you never told them?”

“Then I would be what they say.”

“Which is what?”

“Where I come from,” he said, “a dragon who cannot read is not a dragon. He is a very large disappointment with wings.”

“That’s a terrible thing to say.”

“It is what they say.”

“Who’s they?”

He didn’t answer. His thumb moved back and forth over the book’s spine. It was the most delicate thing I’d ever seen him do.

“You hid this from everyone,” I said slowly. “Your whole life.”

“Yes.”

“And you came into a bookshop.”

He looked at me. In the dark, the gold in his eyes was low and steady, like banked coals.

“It smelled like paper,” he said. “I wanted to be close to it. Even if I could not—” He stopped. “Even so.”

That was the moment I lost the argument I’d been having with myself for three days.

“Okay,” I said.

“Okay?”

“I have a proposal.” I sat up straighter. “You’re fixing my roof. That’s one job. I teach you to read. That’s another job. Two jobs. Reading nights, after closing. Nobody else knows.”

“I do not need charity.”

“It’s not charity. It’s a trade.”

“It is charity with a coat on.”

“Then it’s a very nice coat.” I held out my hand. “Take it or I’ll keep the coin and you can sleep on the step.”

He stared at my hand. Then, carefully, as if I might break, he took it.

His palm was enormous and very warm.

“Nobody tells,” he said.

“Nobody tells,” I said. “I swear it on every spine in this shop. I’m a professional. Books tell me everything. I have never told a soul.”

He winced. “The books know?”

“They’ve known since you walked in.”

All around us, in the dark, I felt the shop shift. Four thousand books pretending, very badly, to be asleep.

“They won’t say a word,” I told him. “They like you.”

“Why?”

“Honestly?” I shrugged. “No idea. You’re terrible company.”

For the first time, he laughed. It was a short, startled sound, as though he hadn’t known he could.

First, though, I held up the cover. “Can you see this?”

He squinted. “Those are the ants.”

“Those,” I said, “are the letters. We’ll catch them one at a time.”

“You are very confident.”

“I am very stubborn. It’s the same thing, on a good day.”

I picked the book without thinking. It had been my favorite when I was fourteen: The Lantern and the Letter, a stupid, beautiful story about a lighthouse keeper and the mapmaker who writes to her for ten years without ever once admitting why.

“You don’t have to,” Idris said stiffly.

“I want to. Lie down.”

“I—”

“It’s a reading lesson. Lie down.”

He lay down. It took a while. There was a great deal of him, and the floor of Poetry was mostly splinters. In the end he stretched out with his head against the bottom shelf, one arm folded under his neck, the curtain pulled up to his chin. He looked like an enormous child pretending he wasn’t one.

I sat beside him and opened the book.

I read the first chapter by candle, in the voice I use for children and the grieving. The words went out into the dark, and the books around us went still, listening. I could feel them listening. Even Footnote came down from the rafter and settled on Idris’s feet.

He didn’t move. He didn’t say a word. He just lay there, with his eyes on the ceiling, as if it were the only thing in the world.

When I reached the part where the mapmaker says I am perfectly fine, truly, never been better, while standing in the rain with his heart in pieces, Idris let out a long breath.

“People in these books,” he said slowly, “are very bad at saying what they mean.”

I smiled. “That’s the genre.”

“Why do they not just say it?”

“Because then the book would be over.”

He considered this. “That seems a poor reason.”

“It’s the only reason.”

“Hm,” he said, unconvinced.

He was quiet for a long time. Then he said, so low I almost missed it: “Will you read the next one tomorrow?”

“Yes.”

“And the one after?”

“Yes.”

“Good,” he said, and closed his eyes.

I read another page, and then another. I had never read aloud to anyone who listened like that, as if every word were being carried somewhere and kept.

By the end of the chapter his breathing had gone slow and deep. I thought he might be asleep. I shut the book very softly and sat there in the dark, beside a dragon, with a cat on his feet and a blanket I had not remembered fetching. I had pulled it over him without thinking. That was the worrying part. I had done it without thinking at all.

I was about to get up when I heard it.

Not from the shelves. Not from the rafters.

From below.

A low, rising murmur, coming up through the floorboards like water through a crack. A voice. Then ten. Then a hundred.

Then more than I could count.

I put my hand flat on the floor.

Two thousand voices, whispering.