The Accidental Keyhand by Jen Swann Downey

wield a sword made a dumbfounding kind of sense.

CHAPTER 8
    THE APPRENTICE TABLE

    Busy replaying the sword fight she’d seen, Dorrie hardly remembered the bicycle ride from the Gymnasium to where Ebba finally stopped and dismounted, leaning her bicycle up against a wall. Only when they emerged into a grassy, sunlit space the size of a football field did Dorrie come back to her senses. She blinked in the warm brightness.
    â€œThis is the Commons,” said Ebba, spreading her arms wide. “It’s kind of the center of Petrarch’s Library.”
    All around the green expanse, the warren of Petrarch’s Library rose to various heights. Sunshine poured down onto the Commons and most of the buildings, but patches of thunderous clouds hung low over a few spots in the architectural tangle. Beneath them, various mists and drizzles and soaking storms blew.
    Ebba followed Dorrie’s gaze to one of the downpours. “The libraries come here with their own weather. There’s a perpetual snowstorm over at the Abbey Library of Saint Gall. The apprentices have snowball fights there on the first day of every month.”
    Ebba led them along a path of crushed shells that wound around clumps of trees and gardens of various sorts. “Some of the lybrarians like to garden.”
    As they walked along a hedge of hydrangeas, Marcus snorted. “If I could travel all over the time map, there’s no way I’d waste my time messing around with daffodils and—” He broke off, his mouth open, staring over the hedge, and then whispered hoarsely, “There she is.”
    Dorrie craned her neck to see. “Who?”
    â€œEgeria,” choked out Marcus.
    Dorrie stood on tiptoe. At some distance on the other side, Egeria, her hair caught up in a long braid, knelt with a group of people next to a raised bed full of bright green, fuzzy-looking plants.
    Ebba pushed a branch aside. “Oh, yes, she’s way into plants. That’s her beginner European field-foraging practicum. It’s the first one she’s ever taught. She only just made lybrarian this past midwinter. I think she might be one of the youngest ever. She’s only sixteen.”
    At that moment, Egeria looked up and waved. She had a smudge of dirt on her cheek, covering half of the spray of large freckles sprinkled on her nose. She came to them, smiling. “You’ve dried.”
    Marcus seemed to have relapsed into slip shock and just stared at her.
    â€œSince yesterday, I mean,” she added.
    Dorrie and Ebba looked at Marcus in alarm as he began to laugh maniacally, his face turning a dazzling shade of red. He stopped as abruptly as he’d begun. “Nice, uh, garden,” he choked out, sounding as though one of the larger statues from the Reference Room had been laid across his chest.
    Egeria looked brightly around at the well-tended beds. “Oh, are you interested in plants?”
    â€œTotally! Plants are just so…so…” Marcus worked his hands around in circles that Dorrie thought were meant to look enthusiastic. “Awesome!” He looked wildly around. “The way they grow up on those stems, with that wide variety of…shapes and smells and…roots and, and—”
    Dorrie widened her eyes at him, shaking her head faintly from side to side to warn him that he had crossed into the land of total idiocy, but he seemed unable to extricate himself from his sentence. Before Marcus could embarrass himself farther, Ebba explained that they needed to get to lunch, and Dorrie hauled him on down the path.
    At one end of the Commons, Ebba stopped at a two-story, timber-and-plaster building with a steep thatched roof. Diamond-paned windows stood open in the sunshine, and a dozen bicycles and handcarts were scattered around the entrance. A painted sign swinging over the massive wooden door read: “The Sharpened Quill.”
    Inside, cutlery clattered and voices rose and fell in