The Forbidden Library

Magic, you’ll find, is nine parts dull to one part excitement, and the exciting bits usually hurt like the blazes.

“You’re a cat,” she said automatically.

“Your powers of perception are astounding,” the cat drawled. “Although I feel obliged to point out, in the interests of ontological exactitude, that I am in fact only half cat. Personally, though, I have always considered it the better half.”

But—though she was not an expert on cats—she was fairly certain that they did not, as a rule, snicker.

The sum total of Alice’s medical knowledge was that blood was supposed to stay on the inside.

“Patience, my friend.”

“I’m not your friend. And I’m not patient.”

“I still say they’re creepy,” Ashes said.

“I don’t think you get to decide what’s creepy,” Alice said. “You’re a talking cat. You’re creepy. This whole place is creepy.”

Some things are more important than following the rules.

Aren’t they?

“What do you see here?”

“Books?”

“Indeed, books. They are the ocean in which magic swims.”

In desperation, she slid her fingers in the cracks between blocks, looking for some kind of catch or hidden mechanism. Which was ridiculous, she thought, because how complicated could a secret door be if a cat figured it out?

“When you’re as old as I am,” Ending said, “one’s nature is largely a product of habit.”

He was, of course, cheating her, that was what lawyers were for.

At that age, Alice had grasped the idea that some things in books were real, and others were not.

After the cousins came the accountants, who were more open in their appraisals and didn’t bother with Alice at all, and after the accountants, like a Biblical plague building up to a big finish, came the lawyers.