The library at the White Pace was two stories tall, with arched, stained gss windows stretching from floor to ceiling on each floor. When the sun shone, the gss spangled colors across white marble floors and mahogany shelves full of blue leather books. A rge, pis zuli sun was inid in the marble floor between two winding staircases.

  It was, to say the least, extensive. Aubri, the originator of the Quintinar dynasty, had been a wizard, and the talent for magic had popped up at least once a generation ever since. It had occurred three times in Beri’s line–in him, in his eldest sister Solis, and in his youngest sister, Nikkiana, though at the time of her disappearance, she’d barely begun her training. Accordingly, the library, besides a pace’s usual histories and political tomes, was stuffed with grimoires and magical treatises on every topic from necromancy to green witchery. There had to be a way to move between universes here somewhere.

  The Summernds and the Winternds, the lower Courts Avalon ruled over, were housed on two different worlds. They were joined to the mainnd by magical portals created while the Quintinars were only genteel apple farmers. It was a history on the portals that Beri chose for his first research subject. He found a sunny table and prepared his pens in a line beside his hand.

  The first book provided nothing of use, and no spells for parting the Veils. After three tomes yielded the same useless information, he started to get frustrated. It was clear the spells could be cast, dammit, they had been cast many times. Why would none of these authors tell him how it could be done?

  As morning faded toward afternoon, a servant delivered a pte stacked high with sandwiches. Beri ate without looking up. He worked backward in the stacks, finding books coated in thicker and thicker yers of white dust. He sneezed twice in a row, wiping the spine of a forgotten volume clean with his palm. “Why do we employ librarians if they don’t even dust the books?”

  The afternoon became purple dusk, cutting off his source of light. He flipped on a mp to cast a golden cone over the heavy book he was reading as the night rains began to fall against the windowpanes, then ate another stack of sandwiches without tasting them. His first pen ran out of ink. He read until the mp blurred and his skull pulsed before he finally rose to go to bed.

  Beri awoke early the next morning, only to pass the day in much the same manner. The servants who came to deliver his food whispered to one another behind their hands, and they passed their thoughts out of the room to the guards, who passed news of his behavior to the council. The council members looked at one another with wide, worried eyes.

  “Tuberculosis,” someone lied. “The High King cannot appear in Court now. He is mortal, after all; he’s contracted a terrible mortal illness.”

  Beri didn’t hear the lies, and he didn’t notice when the sunlight faded and the pools of mplight became his only illumination. He didn’t notice the concerned gnces from the librarians as they passed him when the days ended. He knew only that he felt useful instead of helpless. He could finally do something for Katie.

  He scratched notes onto his pad–shreds of sheet music that might prove useful, the names of eyewitnesses and researchers, anything he thought might help him recreate the bridges between worlds. These books were not the right ones. He had no documentation on how best to set up a portal of his own.

  References to a few books he didn’t have in his collection popped up, but he knew they were housed at the Caliburn Academy. He sent runners to acquire them. Those referred to volumes, even more obscure, books that had been borrowed by the authors from private collections while they conducted their own research. He sent letters asking to borrow these as well. It was one of these books in which he found the first reference to the Border Lord.

  He was mentioned only in passing in the first book, and under a slightly different set of circumstances in another. It took another letter and four more books before a picture of the strange creature began to form in Beri’s head: a being from some other pce, some distant world that was neither Faerie nor Earth. He had appeared to the Flower Court some time in the st century in pursuit of something the text didn’t divulge, and he had gone after convincing half the Luminous Orchard he was an angel and the other half he was a demon. Beri’s fingers moved without him, copying a sketch of the man onto his notepad. A beard like a human, he noticed ter. A hood.

  Was it possible this person really could travel between worlds? Not just between Earth and Faerie like Katie could, but really travel across the multiverse somehow?

  Beri gave up on his portals and cross referenced the Flower Court with the Border Lord. Outside, the rain thickened to a storm, hammering the stained gss like fists. Beri bent over the drawing, and for the first time in days, he smiled. A trill of excitement told him he was on the right track. If he could find this Border Lord somehow, and convince the being–whether god or monster–to help in his fight–

  Why, there would be nothing to stop him. He would get Katie back if he had to kill every Matil who stood in his way.