Low, orange clouds scud the sky as Constance sheds Dr. Carulus's office. Normally, his is a bright, inviting place, and she often finds herself whiling away her breaks beneath his bright windows and invaluable mentorship. But this evening, only grim looks and gloom filled the space as he confirmed her fears: absolutely nothing is being done about the library.

Constance wants to believe the campus feels it too, that it's as downcast as her, but that would be whimsical nonsense. The songbirds still twitter to each other in the cherry blossom trees. Their petals still paint the winding cobblestone paths white and pink. Passing students still wave to each other, stopping to gossip about assignments and teachers and things that Constance would probably rather not know about. She sighs.

The Inky Well is no more accommodating when she pushes into it. In fact, her habitual dinner spot is as warm and lively as ever. Fairy bulbs cast a delicious yellow haze over the dark wood of the bar, where customers chat with the young and garrulous Mr. Starke. He works with an impossibly breezy air, always making a person feel as if his attention is solely on them rather than the drinks he fills and the spills he wipes away.

The fairy lights reflect off his bronze, toned arms (visible since his white sleeves are rolled to the elbow). He glances up at her, and she quickly looks away lest he mistake her staring for anything other than admiration of his work ethic.

Pulling her shawl tight, she makes her way to her spot at the back corner of the tavern: a narrow wooden booth set in the perfect amount of shadow to be cozy. She's not sure why it's always open when she arrives. Perhaps people don't like two-seaters or the tint of darkness; perhaps they also are creatures of habit and already have their own favorite dinner spots.

She scans the room for any of her students (not that she's one-hundred percent confident she would recognize one if she saw them), then relaxes back into the shadows as her search turns up empty. When she first started dining here, she wasn't sure how she felt about potentially mingling with them, but many dinners of cold bread, reheated soup, and an empty apartment chipped away at her unease. Now, it's more difficult to imagine not dining here.

Constance drops her face into her hands. This establishment is just off campus, and it isn't that far from the old library.

When they vent it, will the wild magic leak here? Will smoke put out the fairy lights and curl, leering, around the workers' feet? Will it smash the windows and set screams in patrons' throats?

Or worse—will it creep in here in its full, unhindered glory, offering what everyone wants and no one can afford to take? How many wishes, granted here, would ruin lives forever?

"Hey, Konnichiwa." Mr. Starke's voice startles her hands off her face. He quirks a single brow at her (a feat of facial dexterity she keeps finding herself impressed by). "You look even more distressed than usual. What's a matter?"

She prickles. "I do not usually look distressed!"

She was, when they first met, a bit distressed that he insisted on talking so casually with her (a complete stranger and a paying customer to boot), especially when at the time, all she'd wanted was to bury herself into the shadows. But she got used to his forward manner, coming so far as to even find his strange nickname for her (somewhat) endearing.

He took to calling her it when she'd revealed that she'd traveled to Japan as a child with her father, who was fairy-trapping on Mount Fuji. Mr. Starke seemed to find her family's many travels endlessly entertaining, often pestering her with questions during her dinners. She imagines he, like many of the citizens of Reinhardt, has never traveled beyond the neighboring towns. She can't fathom why he'd be so interested otherwise.

As his brow lifts higher with her (over)reaction, she flushes. "But perhaps I am a little distressed tonight." In defense of her uncharacteristic outburst, she hurriedly adds, "Though you would be too if you could understand it."

"Well that sounds like a challenge if I've ever heard it." He leans an elbow atop the tall booth. "Why don't I bring out your normal and you can educate me?"

Constance frowns. "What about your patrons?"

"Jamison's got them." He nods to a gangly boy behind the bar, barely old enough to drink and even more klutzy than Constance (quite the feat). "Let me just go finish this round of drinks. I'm due for my break anyway."

Constance never understands how that could be given that it is dinnertime. Still, Mr. Starke is the manager and Jamison, even as many times as Mr. Starke has left him to fend for himself in this way, has yet to set anything on fire. (Though if he does, she is fairly confident she and Rosaline can snuff it.)

She folds her hands in her lap. "That's alright then, I suppose."

He smiles, a bright, crooked thing that whispers of mischief and points arrows at his even crookeder nose. She frowns, worrying perhaps she's just been pulled into some prank. But no, she reasons as he turns at his normal rolling stroll. His smile is just always like that.

He's gone for just enough time for her to consider how best to explain the library situation to him. When he returns, he sets out a bowl of stew, a slice of warm, buttery bread, and a glass of black lemonade (an Inky Well special, and a particular favorite of Constance's). Sliding into the opposing booth, he lays out a sandwich for himself (he prefers cold dinners for some reason she'll never understand) and an ale. Or at least she thinks it's an ale. She doesn't drink.

She dips her spoon into her stew, but despite the mouth-watering smells rising off it, she's not sure she can eat. She steeples her fingers over the bowl and meets the barkeep's eye. "Have I ever explained to you how fairies are bound, Mr. Starke?"

That dextrous brow makes its return. "You've been eating here every day for over a year. Are we really still on last names?"

Her head tilts. "Well we're not engaged."

His mug covers his face as he takes a long drink. "No," he says, sounding a bit choked as he sets it down. "No. But perhaps we could make an exception?"

Spotting edge cases, special instances where the same logic as normal doesn't follow, is a specialty of Constance's. She supposes Marek Starke was an edge case if she's ever seen one.

She frowns. "Fine. Have I ever explained to you how fairies are bound, Marek?"

"A lot of gift-giving and courting and a structured spell, if I remember correctly. One the target fairy performs." He takes a bite of his sandwich.

She flushes with pleasure. "Correct." She wishes her students took as well to her ramblings as he does. "At least, that is the current methodology. The old method was much less humane, which is where the term fairy-trapping came from, even though modern fairies are not trapped in the normal sense of the word. They're free to leave any time the book is open, or to enter any other book—"

"Or tree that the book comes in contact with, yes." His hand spins. "You've explained to me before why your father wasn't a kidnapper and why Rosaline isn't a hostage. Where is she, anyway?"

Constance scowls lightly. "She's not a trinket to show off, you know."

"No," he draws out. "She's a thinking being. I hear those like attention every now and then." His brows raise lightly (both of them), and he smiles at her, soft and closed-lipped and not crooked at all.

Constance can't fathom its meaning, so she fiddles in her tote bag for her tome. "Don't touch it," she mutters in an (unnecessary) reminder and opens its pages so Rosaline can roam.

She pops out with a twirl, shedding pink and gold sparks onto the paper. She blows a kiss to Mr. Starke—Marek—and he puts his finger out for her to flitter onto (safe since a fairy's magic, as long as it's book-bound, is triggerable only with the book itself). He draws her to his face as she swings her tiny feet off the ledge of his finger. "Hello, you."

The little minx has the gall to swoon.

Marek keeps his finger extended as a perch and looks back up at Constance. "You were saying?"

"Yes. So the modern practice is to bind fairies with their permission, but an older, more rudimentary practice is to trick a fairy into a book or bind it by force with the help of another fairy. Locked books exist for this purpose—though explaining the mechanics of that would take too long, and it is more my father's field any..." She bites her lip. "That is to say, was my father's field."

Marek is giving her that same hand-patting look the confounded women at the funeral (more than a year past now; she really shouldn't still be making these mistakes) did. She hurries on before he can say anything as asinine as them.

"The Library of Gifts is a storehouse for those forcefully captured fairies. When it was first founded, they say it was a place of wonder. But the locked fairies' spell-execution slowly turned lackadaisical, then contrary, then malicious. So the books were closed, the library locked, and everyone thought that was the end of the matter."

"I take it from the smoke coming off it today, that was not, in fact, the end?"

"You saw it too?" Perhaps it is irrational, but she is strangely validated to have a witness outside her classroom.

He nods, mouth full, and swallows. "Would've thought someone set it on fire if it wasn't for the glitter."

"They've threatened it," Constance mutters darkly. A flurry of papers have been written about the hypothetical repercussions. Aside from the abhorrent moral consequences of burning the fae alive (which an astounding number of professors dismiss with a stroke of a pen), there are practical concerns. What if it doesn't work (since fairy tomes are notoriously hard to destroy, the locked ones even harder) and only damages the protective library walls? What if it does work but causes some unexpected magical reaction first? (After all, the magic is behaving unreliably as is.) Or what if it only partially works: should the books burn but the angry fae be set free, what then?

In the end, of course, nothing was done. But the threat has never been entirely withdrawn.

"Konnichiwa?" Marek tilts his head, and Constance blinks free of her train of thought. Before she's forced to offer a rote apology for her wandering brain, he nods his chin at her bowl. "That stew's gonna get cold, you know."

She sighs and flops back against the bench. "I can't think about stew right now."

"Alright." He sips his alcohol. "Then why don't we skip to the end of the lecture where you tell me what's bothering you. Is it the smoke?"

"Not the smoke, but that nobody's—" She cuts off, eyes darting for any eavesdropping ears. She leans forward again and hisses, "Nobody is doing anything about it, Marek. Not a single thing."

Frowning thoughtfully, he rubs Rosaline's wings (which the fairy absolutely adores and has pestered him into ever since they met). "Can they do something about it?"

"Yes!" she insists. "They could have done something years ago, or at least started working on it after the venting incident last year. The protective spells on the library walls are waning and outdated to boot. They leak like sieves. New infrastructure, new ward techniques could contain it, at least until a more permanent solution could be found. With the walls sealed up tight, a permanent vent could be put in with a dome: catch the leaking magic, dispose of it safely, replace it with a new dome. That would be sustainable, if expensive. The Library of Gifts isn't the only locked-fae library in Europe; other universities are handling this problem as we speak. But ours can't be bothered to even station a few FL professors to contain any unexpected behavior on Venting Day!"

Flustered (and frustrated at herself for being so), Constance swigs at her glass of black lemonade. The cool, tart liquid slides down her throat, but even her favorite drink can't drown the worry and anger from her mind. (And she hates being worried or angry; it's very unprofessional and often counter-productive.) So she nurses the lemonade until the knot of emotions behind her breastbone has unraveled enough for her to feel like herself again.

Marek doesn't pester her while she thinks (one of the reasons she—usually—doesn't mind him dining with her). Instead, he quietly finishes his sandwich, then eventually sets Rosaline back on her book. She preens at him, and he pats her (gently) on the head.

Constance sighs heavily and lays a napkin over her cold stew. "I suppose she and I should be heading home."

Marek stacks their plates. "What are you going to do?"

"At home?" Her face screws up. Surely the man isn't asking for an invitation. First the insistence on forenames and now this. Oh, for all that's right and true, please tell her he hadn't thought she was suggesting earlier that he propose—

He waves it away, and she relaxes by ten degrees. "About the library."

Her brow draws together, now for a different reason. "Me? I'm no one."

"No. You're the one who cares."

What is left of her bun dissolves as she shakes her head. "No, no, no. I really don't think you understand. I tried to tell them today. The dean knows but won't do anything; my department chair knows, but his hands are tied. I don't have any say in the matter."

Marek shrugs and slides languidly out of the seat. "If you say so."

"No." Constance closes up Rosaline's book (despite her protesting sparks) and jumps (well, scoots awkwardly) to her feet. Thankfully, Marek waits. "Not 'if I say so.' It's the truth of the matter."

He shrugs again, but now that crooked smile has made its return. "It is if you say it is."

"That is—" Constance sputters, then protests, "Circular reasoning!"

"I think it's quite logical." The crooked smile grows, daring her. He retrieves the tray he used to bring their food out and busses the table. "You say your department chair's hands are tied. Untie them."

She stares at him slack-jawed as he strides off with the remains of their meal. As if she could just—

Untie them. Untie the whole affair from money. Solve the problem with the constraints she's been given, rather than complaining no one else will solve it.

A barrage of ideas begins pelting her mind like rain. She looks up to offer a quick thanks to Marek, but he's disappeared into the back. "Come on, Rosaline," she whispers to the tome and hurries out the Inky Well's doors. "We've got a proposal to write."