Spending Time With Friends, Part II
Oshal found his sister and Aonva in the library. After asking again if he was sure, Master Durwey left him there with the two of them.
“What are you doing?” Oshal asked. His first guess was studying, but he heard an awful lot of scribbling of pens.
“Aonva had a brilliant idea,” Roshil said. He could hear the grin in her voice. “We started working on it last month. Or maybe the month before. Not sure.”
“It’s not that amazing,” Aonva said. “I just thought that it seems like only the librarian and I know where to find anything in the library. So what if there were a way for people to find books based on author or topic? At first, we tried to devise a spell, something where someone would say a topic, and they’d get a list of the books of that topic and where to find them.”
“The books are already categorized,” Roshil said. “But ‘magic’ or ‘dragons’ are big subjects, apparently. I guess people can’t just say ‘avoid’ for dragons.”
“They can, but that doesn’t explain why you should avoid dragons. But if someone wanted to know about the different dragons we know about, or more about magic, or the history of the court, then they don’t know exactly which books to check. They just know that there are books on the subject. Maybe they want a particular part of the court’s history, or want to know about the War of Torpn.”
“Don’t we learn all of that in class?” Oshal asked. He figured they’d already thought about it, but knowing the two of them, it was entirely possible that they’d overthought the solution.
“Sure, but even Aonva can’t remember everything.”
“I’m not… It’s not like I can remember everything, of course. No one can remember everything. I’m only organized, that’s all. It’s not a big deal.”
Flowers bloomed in Aonva’s mind, filling it with light and color. She rolled among them, smiling.
“But this is! She had a great idea. When we couldn’t figure out a spell, we thought ‘what if we just had cards that said what books covered which topics?’ Master Juoura said she liked the idea, so she gave us a bunch of cards to fill out. I’m working on a cabinet to put them all in. Each drawer will be labeled with the broad topic, like ‘magic’ or ‘history’, then each card will give more specifics.”
“We’re not sure about how to organize the books, though,” Aonva said. “There will probably have to be something more to it, like some sort of system for numbering them. For now, it might be good enough to organize them by author.”
Oshal listened to the sound of both girls scribbling information about every book onto cards. He wondered where the giant stack of completed cards was. Knowing both girls, Roshil’s cards were scattered in an unorganized mess that she’d fix up later, and Aonva’s were stacked neatly beside her, where she’d be terrified she was going to knock them over.
“Is there anything I can do to help?”
The scribbling stopped. He felt both girls sidling around something big, something they didn’t want to touch.
“I don’t know if there’s anything you can do,” Aonva said. “You could… well, actually… um…”
“I can keep you company,” Oshal suggested.
“Okay!” Roshil said, in the tone she used to try being nice to Oshal. She was too enthusiastic, and he could sense right through it.
Oshal sat and listened to the girls filling out cards. He had little concept of exactly how big the library was, so he didn’t know how long this project would take them. They must’ve finished planning it out recently, otherwise he would’ve heard about it before this. Although, the more he thought about it, they had been conspiratorial at dinner lately. Maybe they were working on it then. Either way, most of the time they’d spent on it must’ve been planning out how it would work.
“How many cards do you have left?” he asked.
“It’s less about how many cards we have,” Aonva said, “and more about how many books we have. Every time we run into a new topic, we make a new card.”
“But we’re not as worried about the topics as we are about the books,” Roshil said. “I’m working on all the books I know, which is a lot of the engineering books.”
“I’m working on everything else,” Aonva said. “We’ve got books about the temples set aside, though, because Sirshi wanted to work on those. Kurgm’s here sometimes, too.”
“He’s our book fetcher. We tell him to bring us books, and he does. It’s very helpful.”
“That’s good. How much of the library have you filed?”
“Don’t know,” Roshil said, at the same time that Aonva said, “About a third of it.”
“Do you know how much longer it’s going to take?”
“We’re not finishing today,” Roshil said. “If you’re bored—”
“I’m not. I was just asking.”
“Probably another month,” Aonva said. “There are still a lot of books, and it’s slower when we don’t have someone fetching books for us.”
Oshal opened his mouth to volunteer, but realized he didn’t know where any of the books were. They couldn’t easily direct him to find them, and even then, it’d probably be faster if one of them did it.
“If you want to leave, you can,” Roshil said. “Don’t feel you need to keep us company.”
“I like being with friends.”
“What happened to your other friends?” Roshil asked.
The truth was, it’d been getting to Oshal that his other friends were so mean to his sister and Nourd. After Demndun’s group had upset Kurgm so much, he wasn’t sure he wanted to spend time with them anymore. He liked it when everyone got along, and his sister was never mean to anyone (unless they actively went after he or Aonva). Aonva was never mean to anyone, Sirshi only snapped when people annoyed her (which was often, but she didn’t hold grudges for long), and Kurgm tried to be nice to everyone.
“I decided it was more important to have good friends than a lot of friends.”
For a moment, he was sure his sister knew he didn’t entirely believe that. It was hard getting over not having a lot of friends anymore.
His sister stopped scribbling. He could sense her frowning, the frown that always accompanied a problem she was trying to solve.
“Oshal, what do you like to do?”
That was the second time that day someone had asked that, so Oshal was prepared with an answer.
“I like spending time with friends.”
“Then what? Just sitting around and talking? I’ve known you your whole life, and I don’t know what you like to do other than talk to people.”
Oshal didn’t have an answer to that. He liked doing what other people wanted to do, even when he couldn’t always participate. But then, what did he like to do? He wasn’t sure anyone had even asked him that before.
“I don’t know,” he said, as much to himself as to his sister.
“Something to think about while I get more books,” Roshil said, getting out of her seat.
He thought about that the rest of the time in the library. He really didn’t know.