Ink Blood Sister Scribe, page 38
If Richard was suitably impressed at the end of seven years, Isabel would surrender her parents’ collection to him and he would invite her into the Library, show her the secrets at the heart of the commissions, and make her an offer of full-time employment.
As a preliminary show of loyalty, she gave him the codex of wards, though she didn’t mention that it had a twin, which stayed safely locked-up in her flat. Secrets were currency and Isabel intended to stay rich.
Richard paged through the wards with a critical eye. It was true they were far stronger than the wards the Library currently employed, he told her, but their strength would block the mirror spells he used to communicate with his global employees, like Isabel herself. He pocketed them anyway. He told her he thought he could amend the spell to allow the mirror magic to pass through—an offhand comment that took her breath away with what it implied. Amending spells was as good as writing them.
This was the knowledge she’d been seeking all her life.
Seven years could not pass quickly enough.
Isabel completed her degree and graduated from Oxford and moved back home, ostensibly to help out in her parents’ shop but really to expand her list of connections and to make certain that the only books her parents sold were to collectors Isabel knew, so she could later buy—or take—the books back with the Library’s support. She traveled to New York and Chicago and Los Angeles and read the mirror spell in her hotel rooms, pushing books through to a place she’d never been but held always in her mind, a candle to light the way.
Everything went almost exactly as planned, until she met Abe.
He’d come to Mexico City on her invitation, a fellow collector with whom she hoped to make a deal, like so many of the deals she’d made in the past three years she’d been working for the Library. The deal was this: Abe’s knowledge would become her knowledge, his books would become Library books, and the Library’s money would line his pockets.
But instead, Isabel found in Abe what she’d found also in Richard: someone as passionate about books as she herself, someone who believed that her capacity for hearing magic was a higher calling, a calling Abe shared. He, too, was dedicated to preserving the books; he, too, wanted to study and protect them.
Isabel was already half in love with Richard, but since their first meeting at her London flat she had neither seen nor spoken to him. They communicated solely through the notes they traded through spelled mirrors, and in the face of Abe’s solid, earnest presence and his clear interest in her, Richard’s appeal was shadowy, harder to recall. She and Abe began sleeping together and when she became unexpectedly pregnant, he proposed.
Isabel refused. She hadn’t told Abe about her promise to Richard and to the Library, but she did so now. There were a little over three years left in her trial period and if Richard offered her a job at the end of that time, she fully intended to take it—regardless of Abe, and regardless of the baby he badly wanted.
Isabel did not want a child. But both she and Abe were from magical families; both she and Abe were committed, in their separate ways, to carrying on their magical lineage. Any child they had together would almost certainly be born with the gift they themselves had been born with, the ability to hear magic and to carry on the family work. It was this argument that convinced Isabel to keep the baby.
Isabel never told Richard she was pregnant and did not tell him when Esther was born, wary of saying anything that might jeopardize her chances of receiving the job offer that was still her ultimate goal. She figured she’d disclose her daughter only if and when she officially went to work for the Library, and had grand visions of toting Esther along with her, training her from childhood just as Isabel had trained herself.
As for Abe, he believed—because he wanted to believe—that having a child would change Isabel’s priorities, that as soon as she saw her daughter’s face, all her dreams of the Library would fade like mist in the tidal swell of maternal love.
This did not happen.
Isabel was impatient with nearly every aspect of parenting an infant, and impatient, too, with Abe’s wariness about her continued involvement with the Library. What had seemed kindred ideals were already proving to diverge in some irreconcilable ways. It was true that Abe shared her interest in preserving the books, but unlike Isabel he had no interest in making a profit off them, and he deeply distrusted the Library’s monopolistic business model. He wanted to keep expanding and protecting her family’s collection in secret and maintain the storefront of ordinary books as their actual revenue stream.
By the time Esther was a year old, Abe and Isabel had ended their romantic relationship, and Abe, who’d already been doing the lion’s share of the caretaking, took Esther with him when he moved out of their shared apartment. Isabel was on collection trips most of the week and saw her daughter on weekends, and it was she who suggested hiring a nanny: a friend of hers tangentially involved in the book scene, a young Belgian woman who adored Esther.
This was Cecily.
All three of them had already noticed—with great dismay and disappointment on Isabel’s part and some uneasiness on Abe and Cecily’s—that spells seemed to have no effect on Esther whatsoever. Cecily had a book that set an impassable perimeter and she used it one night in the living room, intending it to keep Esther safely inside a square of carpet while she cooked dinner, and not ten minutes after she’d set it, Esther crawled through the kitchen doorway. Abe and Isabel tested the baby with other books and found she could smash vases that had been spelled unbreakable and seemed impervious to any glamour they tried to place upon her. None of them were certain what to make of this.
Another year went by, during which Abe’s mother—widowed for over a decade—passed away and left him their family home in Vermont. Abe and Cecily were together, Esther was almost three, and Cecily was six months pregnant, when Isabel’s seven-year trial period ended and Richard formally invited her to England.
Finally, the time had come. Isabel was being offered the thing she still wanted most in the entire world: an invitation to the Library and all its secrets. Despite Abe’s disbelieving protests, she left immediately, as she had always told him she would. With nothing to keep them in Mexico City, Abe and Cecily moved to Vermont, to the big old house at the foot of a mountain, and Joanna was born a few months later.
It would be two more years before they saw or heard from Isabel again.
Then, late one night, when both Esther and Joanna were fast asleep, she showed up on their doorstep. She had flown to New York on a work trip and, unbeknownst to Richard, rented a car and made the eight-hour drive from the city. She wasn’t there to visit. She was there to tell Abe and Cecily what she’d learned in the past two years at the Library. She’d learned, finally, how they wrote new books.
She had learned about Scribes.
Not only that, she’d met one—a young man named John, who was missing an eye and had recently fathered a child. A child whom no magic could touch.
A child like Esther.
At first, Isabel had been ecstatic to understand that, far from being magic-less, her own daughter had the very power Isabel had structured her entire life around discovering. She could not help noticing, however, that John didn’t seem happy to have produced a child with this power. In fact, both he and his wife seemed grim. More than grim, really. They seemed terrified.
Isabel took a calculated risk and confessed to the new father that she, too, was the parent of a Scribe. She hoped exposing her own vulnerability would encourage John to confide in her, to tell her the truth of his fear, and the gamble paid off. He told her that Scribes were not only Richard’s most valuable commodity—they were also his biggest threat. Hundreds of years ago, he’d bound his life to a book and to the bone of a Scribe, his sister, and would live for as long as both book and bone remained whole. Only two Scribes could end the spell, one of whom had to be of Richard’s bloodline, like John and his son.
Because of this, Richard decided it was in his best interest that no two Scribes ever live free at the same time. To this end, he’d commissioned a spell to seek them out, to hunt them down and either kill or capture them, ensuring that the only Scribe would be under his control. This spell required the eye of a mature, living Scribe. Written in the mid-1800s, “maturity” was specified as thirteen years of age, and John had lost his own eye to this spell at age thirteen, as had the Scribe before him. So the fate of his son—and Isabel’s daughter—was at best to lose an eye and live the rest of their life in luxurious captivity, and at worst, to die. Probably soon. Three Scribes alive were two too many.
Isabel’s consolation was that the seeking-spell could only be initiated once every twelve months on the anniversary of its first activation, for twenty-four hours, and Richard had gotten complacent in the last few years, letting the November date pass without reading it. He’d been searching all John’s life without ever finding another and was starting to believe John was the last of his kind. The arrival of John’s child had changed that. This year, Richard planned to set the spell in motion once again. This year—if John was still alive, if the spell was still active—he would find Esther.
Richard had agreed to take John and his wife on a rare trip to Scotland to see her family, and John told Isabel they were planning to use the opportunity to attempt an escape. The seeking spell wouldn’t be able to pinpoint them if they kept moving, he told her, so each year on November 2, he and his family would keep moving for twenty-four hours. Isabel, who never missed a beat, made her own plan. She arranged to go to New York the day after Richard and the Scribe left for Scotland and to come home a day before they were to return, careful to let Richard believe that her trip and its convenient scheduling was his idea.
She was also careful—ruthlessly careful—to make sure that Richard got a tip-off about John’s escape plan. To protect Esther, she needed the seeking spell deactivated. She needed John dead.
Once in Vermont, she explained all this to a horrified Abe and Cecily, and then laid out her plan. She had a safeguard against the day the infant Scribe would turn thirteen, when Richard would inevitably reactivate the spell and follow it to Esther. The plan was this: in Vermont, she gave Abe and Cecily two books. One was the codex of wards that was twin to the ones now used by the Library, except these wards hadn’t been amended, so they’d block any outside communication spells. The other book was one half of a two-way mirror spell.
Abe and Cecily would enchant one of their mirrors in Vermont to connect with Isabel’s mirror in the Library. Meanwhile, Isabel would go back to England and immediately steal Richard’s life-book from his study, then send it to Abe and Cecily through the glass. The Scribe and his wife were attempting an escape at the same time, after all, and she knew that when Richard returned from Scotland to find the book gone, he was likely to blame the book’s disappearance on them. The second the life-book passed from England into Vermont, Abe and Cecily would read the warding spell and hide themselves and his book completely from view, forever. Thus, when Richard tried to find Esther someday, they would have a bargaining chip against him. They’d have collateral.
There was one final step to the plan.
To circumvent the truth spell Richard was sure to use on all his employees when he discovered his book was missing, Cecily would read Isabel a silencing spell, so even under magical compulsion she wouldn’t speak of what she’d done. Isabel, in turn, would read the same spell to Cecily and Abe.
Then, bound by silence, they would part ways, and Isabel Gil would disappear forever.
Cecily’s voice was hoarse by the time she’d finished speaking, despite the tea Collins had succeeded in pressing on her, and Sir Kiwi had ended up on her lap. Joanna was staring at a deep scuff on the kitchen table. Esther had made it with a fork when she was five, intent on carving her initials.
“But why would you tell us Isabel was dead?” Joanna asked. “Why would you let Esther believe that?”
“Legally, it was true,” said Cecily. “Isabel left her entire life behind when she joined the Library, including her name. She falsified the death records. We didn’t want Esther to ever go looking.”
“And you wanted us to be afraid,” Joanna said.
Cecily’s hand stilled on Sir Kiwi’s soft fur. “Yes. But for good reason. Richard is an incredibly dangerous man, you know that now.”
“I don’t know if there’s ever a good reason to terrify children,” Joanna said. Her mind was already working overtime to process the onslaught of information and she didn’t want to ask it to process feelings, too, so she pushed them down, her anger, hurt, grief. Eventually they would bob to the surface and she would have to face them.
Collins spoke up from his cross-legged position on the tiled floor. “If Richard’s book was supposed to be collateral,” he said, “how come you didn’t use that when Maram told you the Scribe-seeking spell was in effect? Esther was, what, eighteen? Why’d you send her away if you had the book all along?”
“I wanted to use it,” Cecily said. “That’s why I wanted to burn the wards—so Richard would know we had it, so he would come, so we could make a deal and Esther could stay with us. But Abe, he didn’t think it would work. When Isabel made contact to tell us the seeking spell had been reactivated, she told us also that the book didn’t matter after all, it was essentially indestructible, and we’d never truly be able to end Richard’s life with it. She said the important thing was to make certain that Esther kept moving once a year. That was how we’d keep her safe.
“But Isabel and I used to be friends, remember, and I knew she was in love with Richard—then, and still. It seemed clear she was lying about the book to protect him. I thought your father was being cowardly.” She turned toward Joanna. “And regardless of Richard, regardless of everything, I wanted the wards down because I wanted to get you out of the trap we’d built for you.”
Joanna put her head in her hands. She couldn’t look at her mother’s face right now, anguished and guilty and suddenly old in the stove’s greasy light, as if the conversation had aged her ten years.
“I’m sorry, baby,” Cecily said, her voice thick. “This wasn’t the life I wanted for you, or for Esther.”
A sudden loud scratching sound echoed down the hall and through the kitchen, and they all jumped.
“What is that?” Cecily said, Sir Kiwi’s ears pricking, and Collins started to climb to his feet.
“The cat,” Joanna said. “He’s hungry.” She stood from the table, glad for a reason to walk away for a minute. “Give me a second.”
She went down the hallway, letting herself breathe, struggling to keep her thoughts straight and opening the door on autopilot. She was so distracted that she could scarcely process what had come in along with a gust of chilly air.
The cat.
He had walked into the house, past her legs, without even glancing up, as if he’d done it a hundred times, and she stared after him, dumbfounded, as he sauntered toward the kitchen. Despite everything that was happening, despite what her mother had just told her, she found herself smiling. This had to be a sign, didn’t it? A sign that everything would be all right?
She heard Collins say, “Oh, hey, kitty cat!” Then, “What’d you do with Joanna?”
“Jo?” Her mother called.
She shut the door again and rested her forehead against it for a breath, then turned and followed the cat. She found him crouched on the linoleum next to Collins though not quite within arm’s reach, his ears flat, staring across the room at Sir Kiwi, who was whining excitedly and straining against the hold Cecily had on her.
“So Isabel,” she said to her mother. “Maram. She’s been protecting Esther. That’s what all this was for.”
Cecily readjusted her grip on Sir Kiwi, staring at the cat. “Your father was madly in love with Isabel,” she said. “Even after we got together, I think he believed she might come to her senses and return to him, to Esther. And when that never happened . . . I don’t think he ever trusted her again, not on any real level. He thought she wanted to keep Esther a secret from Richard not just to protect her, but also because it gave her power over him. He thought Esther was another card in Isabel’s deck, to be pulled when the time was right.”
“You trust her, though,” Collins said. To Joanna, it sounded like a question. “You think she’s on our side.”
Cecily shook her head. “Isabel’s loyalty has always been to the Library.”
“But not anymore, right?” Joanna could hear the smallness of her own voice and she tried again, louder, stronger. “She wanted to finish what she started when she gave you that book. She wants to keep Esther safe.”
Cecily looked up. Her face was bloodless, her eyes hooded and wet. She said, “I don’t know what she wants.”
35
It was true, what Richard had said. Nicholas’s nightmares were bad enough.
He did not need to add the feeling of Esther pulling her arm from his grasp, or the way Richard’s face hardened as his finger bent around the trigger. He didn’t need the memory of that unmistakable crack, the collision of firing pin and powder, the acrid scent of an explosion, didn’t ever need to relive the way he felt as he watched Esther pitch forward, his own knees barely holding him up, his heart a clenched fist as he watched her body fall.
And like so many nightmares, this one wasn’t making logical sense.
Instead of keeling over onto the ground, Esther’s body kept moving through the air—forward, not down. As if she wasn’t falling at all, but leaping. Nicholas’s ears were buzzing in the aftermath of the gunshot, a buzz that grew louder and louder, and maybe this wasn’t a nightmare after all but a dream, because there were bees in the air, fat droning honeybees the size of bullets. One of them whirred past Nicholas’s eye, black legs laden with pollen, and behind it, Esther’s body was colliding with Richard’s.
