The Kindness Curse

teeth several times. Even with a floor between her and them, the tones of the many voices, the hesitations, the broken sentences taught her the people coming before Brimble might respect him, but from fear and desperation, not admiration. Her father, by contrast, had ruled Avylyn with justice and honor, and the people had been intensely loyal by choice, not through intimidation. Bribes and threats didn't work well on people who were loyal to an admirable man.
What Merrigan heard solidified her resolve to have Brimble taken down a few notches, his benefactor mask torn away. He simply was not admirable. Not like her father. And not just because she owed the miller's son a good turn.
"Why can't I remember his name?" she muttered, nearly skewering her finger with the needle she had been trying to thread. "Oh, bother ..." She sighed, put down the needle and thread, and rubbed at her temples.
She had been sitting too long. After what felt like years of walking from village to town, she wasn't used to sitting for more than half an hour at a time. She felt restless. Oddly, she thought she might miss, just a tiny bit, being outdoors and on the move.
"That can be fixed easily enough," she muttered, looking around the massive library. Two or three circuits of the room, and then she could concentrate on the judge's conversation with the baker, who was upset over someone spreading false tales about finding ashes in his bread. Merrigan knew those were lies, because she had thoroughly enjoyed the light, tasty bread the baker had given her for free. A man who adulterated his flour and lowered the quality of his goods wouldn't give away free bread. Cheats didn't have that generosity of spirit. Anyone with a bit of common sense could figure that out in two seconds.
She circled the room twice, making a game of walking as silently and lightly as thistledown. The baker had been disturbed by the rumors enough to confront the people spreading them, to demand proof that the bread they had eaten was bad. Merrigan snorted at hearing that. If the bread was bad, they should have returned it and demanded their money back, instead of just complaining. Any fool knew that. Talk was no good without proof.
"Told you so," she muttered, when Judge Brimble echoed her thoughts, but in more formal, legal language. Then the baker said the people he confronted had only repeated what others said.
Her attention caught on something on the far side of the library. A stray beam of sunlight had moved across the wall as the afternoon aged, and landed on a jumble of old papers tucked into a corner bookshelf. She found that odd, because Flora and Fauna had done a splendid job of cleaning. Even odder, while the papers seemed jumbled and discolored and dusty, there was a sparkle in that dustiness. Still listening to the now-boring conversation in the room below her, she crossed to that odd bookshelf. Why hadn't the girls straightened out those papers while cleaning? Why did the papers sparkle?
She shuddered at the idea that bit of glitter in the air might be magic. Merrigan shook her head. While there was plenty of magic in the world today, much of it was in the hands of solitary enchanters who preferred to be left alone, or in the hands of interfering, judgmental busybodies. Or people like Clara, who never took into account the dreadful circumstances that forced people to lie to defend their rights. Nanny Tulip had told her stories about the wars between great and powerful majjians who tried to impose standards on all others who worked magic around the world. Many had vanished, either drained by their battles or simply because they no longer cared. According to Nanny Tulip, the dreadful results of their battles remained in the world, and the non-majjian suffered for it. The chances of encountering some magic in Judge Brimble's too big, too ostentatious house were very small.
"I should have guessed," she said on a sigh, when she reached the corner bookshelf and discovered a sheet of wavy, green-tinted glass across the nook in the shelves. Corner bookshelves were useless for storing books, because most of the books were tucked out of sight. They were most often used for hiding things, or getting useless things out of the way.
Merrigan lightly ran her fingertips along the frame holding the glass in place, seeking the latch. Someone at some time had decided that jumble of papers was worth putting away behind the glass. She suspected Brimble might not have entered the library since he inherited it, and didn't know this corner and those papers existed.
"I do wish I could find a latch of some kind," she muttered, and stepped back to let the fading light stream past her. It sparkled on the glass and the papers behind it, and Merrigan let out a sigh of exasperation. There, where her fingers had pressed not two seconds ago, was a hinge. She looked on the opposite side of the frame. There was an indentation, allowing her to slide three fingers in between the frame and the bookcase and tug the glass door out. Now why hadn't she seen that before?
She opened it slowly, anticipating a swirl of dust from the movement of air. A loud creak. She jumped and froze. No, the creak came from the judge's office. She smiled at her jumpiness. Who would walk into the library without knocking first? Wasn't the library her domain now? Besides, she doubted anyone in this household cared about books.
Merrigan, however, loved books, all the treasures of knowledge and secrets and useful information hidden inside them. A soft moan of dismay escaped her—that wasn't a jumble of papers sitting on two shelves, covered in dust that had filtered in behind the glass panes.
That was a book, cruelly ripped from the binding, the pages tossed into uneven piles. She held her breath as she brought the piles out