The thick smell of old books filled my lungs as I threaded through the library. The whole space was quiet but welcoming, with the silence laying thick in the air like a warm blanket on a cold night.

  Just don’t think about what happened last time you were in here, I reminded myself while peering between two sets of bookshelves. I still have misgivings about destroying information here, but the System made good points in its favor about how dangerous the information could be.

  I’d done some introspective thinking in the time since I’d played ‘Secret Agent Liam’ and snuck in here. Honestly, the part that bothered me the most was that the System had urged me to keep the girls in the dark about it. If this had been some other kingdom that I wasn’t so heavily tied to the royal family in, I wouldn’t have had nearly so many problems with the actions I took. But with it being Rieka’s family that it involved—and thus her—it bothered me more.

  Pushing that thought aside, I focused on what many would argue would be the more important thing at the moment: finding my lover in this mass of books.

  A moment of focus was all it took to flow my form through several different uses of Shape-Shifting to tune different senses, use them, and then return to normal.

  I wonder if I should be worried about forgetting my natural form, I thought idly as I turned to head toward one particular corner of the library. It’s so easy to shift between different shapes and it happens so much on instinct now that I can’t help but think about how easy it would be to just… forget what my face looked like.

  I pushed those concerns down for now. I’d voiced them to Rieka and my princess had lovingly reassured me that I wouldn’t lose myself. Her exact words had been: “You always return to this form on instinct, just like you return to us when we call you, so I know you won’t forget.” And that still reassured me, I just had to remind myself of it on occasion.

  Whether by guilt or instinct, I managed to avoid the attention of the librarian, hearing familiar firm footsteps in another aisle as I headed toward the familiar voice muttering by the windows.

  Finally emerging from the aisle I’d been in, I spotted my quarry.

  Jane was curled up in a large chair washed in warm sunlight. The mousy scholar had a massive, leather-bound tome open in her lap and was skimming over the pages with one hand using a slim wooden stick as a pointer while she wrote in a notebook with the other. Her large, rounded mouse ears wiggled slowly as she worked, rotating and flicking on occasion but never stilling. The long, tufted length of her tail lay draped over the back of her chair, limp for once.

  I probably shouldn’t scare her, I thought to myself. The last thing I’d want to do is make her scream, jump, or some combination of both. It’d be funny, sure, but she’d also get in trouble with the librarian and I don’t want Jane upset at me, at least not for that.

  So rather than seize the opportunity to harass my lover by surprise, I circled around her and settled into the chair just to one side to wait.

  Minutes passed as Jane continued to read, mutter, and scribble in her book. It amused me to no end that she was using one of the ballpoint pens that I’d bought in bulk for her while writing on the thick parchment that was native to this world. The dichotomy of the two—in addition to the extra effort needed to write on the coarse material with the ballpoint pen—made it rather funny to watch.

  “You are staring, Liam,” Jane murmured after a few minutes of me watching her.

  “Didn’t want to interrupt you while you were focusing,” I replied just as quietly. “I also didn’t want to surprise or startle you.”

  “Which I appreciate,” Jane replied, not looking up from the passage she was copying down. Her long tail stirred though, lifting up from where it draped over the back of her chair to wiggle slowly over her head. “These pens you gave me are very nice, but also present their own challenges with the material.”

  “You should just use them on regular paper,” I answered, watching as Jane carefully finished her writing and lifted the parchment notebook up to set aside. “I can easily bring more if you need it.”

  “I know, but I also don’t want to be constantly asking you for more paper. I have the funds to buy my own writing goods, so I should,” Jane answered, finally setting her pen down and looking up from her work.

  The bookish mouse girl was smiling softly at me, her eyes bright as she scanned me from hairline to feet and then back again, as if checking to make sure I was still in one piece. I suppose that might have offended some folks, but knowing how much trouble I often got up to, I couldn’t really fault her checking on me.

  “Just remember that I don’t mind bringing stuff for you all. Privilege of being my bonded summoners,” I replied with a smile.

  Jane blushed but nodded in understanding while marking her place with the thin stick of wood and carefully closing up the volume she’d been working her way through.

  “What were you reading about this time?” I asked curiously, tilting my head to the side to try and catch the title. Unfortunately, this was one of the many books in the library that didn’t have anything written on the spine or cover, a habit that was apparently more common with these older handwritten books.

  “Researching import and export guidelines for Kassandra,” Jane answered without hesitation, grunting when she went to heft the large book out of her lap.

  Since there wasn’t a table nearby, I reached over and took it from her, setting the heavy tome on the arm of my chair. Jane shot me a sweet smile as thanks before hopping down out of her chair, dusting off her skirt, and scampering over to my chair.

  Within moments, the smaller woman had scrambled up into and draped herself across my lap. Her happily wiggling tail curled around my shoulders as Jane snuggled into my chest with her legs folded demurely under her. A quick tweak with one hand ensured that her skirt continued to cover everything it needed to in order to remain polite in this environment, though I knew she wore shorts underneath the skirt as a matter of habit.

  An odd choice given the era that they live in, but this isn’t Earth either, and with the addition of the fact there are no other humans here, then it makes sense they’d have different customs, I thought while settling Jane onto my lap. I’d never decline a chance to cuddle with one of my girls and Jane was just about small enough that I could hug her entire body at once without having to use my Shape-Shifting to lengthen my limbs.

  Jane and I shared a few quiet kisses before she buried her face in my neck and sighed contentedly.

  “So what brings you to find me, Liam?” Jane asked, happiness and contentment oozing from every word she spoke. “Not that I’m complaining, but I’m surprised you managed to escape the others to track me down.”

  “I wanted to spend time with you,” I answered without hesitation. “As to escaping the others, it was easy enough once I explained it to them. Even Kass—who pretends that she wants to monopolize me at all times—is happy to ensure you girls all get your fair chance to spend time with me. She’s the one who pointed me this way when I asked where you’d run off to.”

  “I figured you’d want to spend time with Rieka,” Jane said, still keeping her face tucked into my neck. “And the sooner I have these laws sussed out, the sooner that Kassandra and Thomas can start arranging supplies to produce these printing-presses that you mentioned.”

  “It’s going to be years before there will be a wide demand for them, we have time,” I reassured her, even though I knew it was pointless.

  Jane was the kind of person to see a list of things to do and insist that they all needed to be completed as soon as possible to prevent issues from possibly arising if one were to delay. Honestly, I was always more concerned that she was overworking herself more than anything else.

  “I know,” Jane replied, just as I expected she would. “But I wanted to get the information together for them so that it was ready before the need arose. Better to be prepared.”

  “Also true,” I replied, running a hand down Jane’s back and eliciting a happy noise from my little scholar. “Have you been enjoying yourself with the Royal Library at your fingertips?”

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  Jane actually pulled back from snuggling to shoot me a look of reproach, asking with just that look if I was serious.

  “Yes,” Jane answered after staring at me for a long moment, apparently deciding that I was being serious in my question. “It’s been fascinating to see what tomes and writings are kept here. What the queen herself deems important enough to stock her library with.”

  “Honestly, it’s more likely that it’s what her advisers and the librarian think are important to stock,” I teased and Jane rolled her eyes while smiling.

  “The point is,” Jane said with a little huff. “I have learned a lot from just casually studying what is here and there is a lot of information here. What is more telling to me is what is absent.”

  That statement caught my attention. It didn’t send a chill down my spine or anything—I was confident that the girls had no idea that I’d vanished some select documents here—but the way that Jane said it gave me pause.

  Jane, thankfully, took my pause for the curiosity that it was and elaborated.

  “There are a lot of historic records of the queendom here,” she said, laying her head on my shoulder once more and snuggling into my neck. “Documentation since the formation of the Coldeye queendom. I even found the official records of when Duke Ironclaw earned his sovereignty and formed the Ironclaw Clan that Valda is descended from.”

  “But you mentioned documents missing?” I prompted when Jane trailed off. She didn’t jump to the answer immediately, which was an indicator of how much she was considering what came next when she finally did speak.

  “Yeah,” Jane said at last. “There are records of the queendom’s dealings and trades with the Glass Stars to the north, the battles with the barbarians to the northeast, alliances with Ironclaw to the east, and the tensions to the west with the Emirates. But nothing is mentioned of the southern lands.”

  “I thought the sea covered most of the southern border,” I said thoughtfully, trying to remember the last time I’d seen a large map of the territory.

  “It does,” Jane admitted without hesitation. “South and southeast are all covered by the ocean or the lowlands the Ironclaw have claimed. Their lands border another kingdom that I know nothing about and that Valda told me basically ignores them. But the southwest…”

  I thought for a long moment, focusing on the memory of that map and finally remembering the tidbit that had been niggling at the back of my mind.

  “Isn’t that where those Ebonheart people are from?” I asked her. “I remember Shayla mentioning once that her family traveled up from there. Does the Coldeye have a border with them?”

  “No,” Jane answered immediately, then rephrased. “I mean, ‘no’ they don’t share a border. Not that you are wrong about the assumption. Trade with the Ebonheart Empire goes through the Emirates. They maintain a trade route through their territories as well as way stations, villages, towns, and more. If you wanted to go overland, you could probably get to the Ebonheart via the southern plains of the Coldeye queendom, but it would take four or five times as long and you’d be stuck doing it on foot.”

  “I remember how rough that terrain was,” I said, remembering when we’d traveled into those plains to explore one of the ruins marked out on the copper map we’d recovered from the Shadow Mountain facility. “And the queen hasn’t bothered building a road?”

  “It’s not a priority, I guess,” Jane answered with a shrug. “There isn’t much of a call for trade goods going through there, and the distance traveled makes it impractical for all but a handful of luxury traders to make it worthwhile.”

  “So what about that makes it suspicious?” I asked, going back to running my hand up and down Jane’s back. The mousy woman gave a small shiver and started returning the motions on my chest with her smaller hands, stroking and kneading my chest through my shirt.

  “It got me thinking about the world as we know it,” Jane answered after a moment of thought. “I know that the world is a large place. You’ve told us stories about how large your world is and how much your people have studied it. That got me thinking about how small of a world we live in here.”

  I opened my mouth to speak but Jane covered my lips with one hand.

  “I know that our world isn’t actually smaller,” she said softly. “But the section that we are aware of feels so much smaller. I don’t know what lies beyond the Ebonheart empire, or beyond the Ironclaw lands. There are lands beyond them, and people that live there. But I have no idea what they are called.”

  Jane went silent for another long moment and I felt her flexible tail wind around my left arm, joining in on the cuddling as she sought reassurance.

  “It felt comforting, originally,” Jane said in a small voice. “I thought I knew what was important, that anything beyond those borders was so far away that it wouldn’t be able to affect me in the slightest. But ever since I bonded with you, I’ve been questioning that thought process.”

  “Because my presence proved that even distant lands could affect your life?” I asked gently. Jane nodded, her soft, poofy tuft of hair brushing my neck like a handful of cotton.

  “Sort of,” she murmured a moment later. “I’ve not gone to see Earth yet, but the stories that the other girls have told of it are magical and unbelievable. That, combined with the knowledge that the world is a large and wild place, has had me thinking about how much of Cortha I don’t know or understand. I don’t know that our world doesn’t have places like that in it, with strange people and interesting knowledge that I don’t have yet…”

  Understanding flowed through me at that. Jane was caught between fear of the unknown and her deep-seated desire to understand everything she could. My mousy scholar loved knowledge in all forms and clearly wanted to understand more about her world, but understanding it would also require her to accept just how little she actually knew.

  “Maybe we can travel one of these days,” I murmured into her hair, pressing a kiss to her forehead gently. “Once things settle down and you girls finish your time at Juneau, so there are no other obligations.”

  Jane murmured contentedly at the affection, but her next words surprised me.

  “I don’t think Rieka is going to escape her family obligations that easily,” Jane said in a quiet voice.

  “Oh?” I prompted Jane gently.

  “Yeah,” Jane agreed. “I don’t know if she’s realized it, but Kassandra and I have both seen how Queen Gemma has been watching Rieka… I think that our princess’ standing in the royal family is rising more with each day, and she may not be as low in the ranks as she might think.”

  “To be fair,” I said teasingly. “She has had more important things to think about lately than her ranking in a family competition that she doesn’t care about.”

  “Like catching one of your kids?” Jane teased right back, her breath hot on my throat. I would be lying if I didn’t have a reaction to the words, and Jane giggled while grinding her hips against that reaction. “I would be more surprised if she wasn’t thinking along those lines, Liam. I think all of us are. Even Valda has been watching you like a hawk, and I wouldn’t be violating any trust to say that she’s been asking about you.”

  That statement made me smile and squeeze Jane closer. I would be lying to even pretend that I wasn’t interested in starting a family with any of my girls, to the point that I was honestly wondering about how I might be able to start one with multiples of them. The comment about Valda flew in one ear and out the other initially, but thankfully came back around for another pass.

  Honestly, I’m not surprised. She’s made it apparent that she’s interested in me before, and I find her attractive too. The girls have all given their blessing in different ways, too, I thought while gently stroking Jane’s back.

  When I realized I’d been quiet for too long, I replied to Jane’s earlier assertion.

  “Do you think Rieka would just cave to her mother’s demands if the queen were to order her to stay close and prepare to take up the throne?”

  Jane’s derisive snort was the only answer that I needed to hear, but my mousy lover continued anyway.

  “I think that Rieka would be happy as long as you were there with her, Liam. Just like the rest of us.” Jane’s lips stroked my neck again before she continued. “But yes, I have been thinking a lot about how traveling might help us and how it could be a benefit for the nation. With you along, we wouldn’t have issues with one of the largest barriers: language.”

  “Yeah,” I said thoughtfully, my free hand going to run along Jane’s thigh in a counterpoint to the hand on her back. “And I know you girls are capable and competent in your own rights, too. It might be fun to travel and see more of the world, find information that we can bring back to Coldeye and the like.”

  “I notice you didn’t deny that Queen Gemma has been eyeing Rieka more, too,” Jane said with a small laugh.

  “Because I try my best to never lie to you all,” I answered without hesitation. “Gemma has been watching Rieka more, and has told me as much. I wouldn’t be surprised if her sisters have noticed as well and that is why one of them was foolish enough to challenge me.”

  “That was pretty funny to watch,” Jane said, giggling softly before going back to kissing along where my throat met my shoulder. “I’m so proud of you for handling that fight cleanly and without hurting her.”

  “I didn’t have a reason to injure one of the crown princesses just because she was rude,” I replied with a smile.

  “Well yeah, because she only insulted you,” Jane interjected, her hot breath tickling my throat. “Now if those insults were aimed at one of us.”

  “An entirely different situation,” I answered with a playful growl that made the small woman in my lap shudder happily.

  “Liam?” Jane questioned after another few moments of silence.

  “Yes, Jane?”

  “I was worried about how big the world is before, but just being here with you reminded me that my corner of that world is a good one,” she said softly.

  “I’m glad,” I replied.

  “Would you take me back to my room and remind me why it’s wonderful instead?” Jane asked, and her teeth raked lightly against my throat while her hips continued to grind.

  “Happily,” I rumbled, and leaned forward to stand with Jane still cradled in my arms, only pausing to collect her notebook and pen.

  My lover gave another happy sigh, rubbing her cheek into my chest as we made our way out of the library to enjoy some time alone together.

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