Ink Blood Sister Scribe, page 4
Joanna did not know what the book did, because she could not read it. The only clear image was a small gold embossment of a book on the back cover. The words themselves eluded her eyes, they swam and darted like the colors in a kaleidoscope. This was what books in progress looked like to anyone but the reader, though Esther could have read it. Could have but wouldn’t. A book in progress couldn’t be destroyed, either: torn or burned or drowned. Only the person who’d first read the spell could end it. By choice—or by death.
Books in progress sounded subtly different from a resting book, too, the hum more a swarm, and this book, the one her father had hidden for years and then carried with him to his death, sounded the strangest of all. It was deep like a rotting tooth.
When Abe had first died, she’d assumed the book was new to him, recently acquired. And, raised in the shadow of his paranoia, she’d assumed, too, that his death had not been accidental. It seemed certain that someone had given him that book on purpose; someone had killed him so they could take his books for themselves. The same fate that had met Isabel, and Joanna’s great-grandparents.
Her father had gathered their collection several different ways: by combing used bookstores and estate sales, attending rare books conventions, regularly ordering huge lots of antique books on eBay and hoping the boxes would arrive buzzing, and buying directly from people who knew what they were selling. He had kept detailed records of each transaction and in the days after his death Joanna had scrutinized every note he’d taken, looking for suspects—but then she had found a different record. A notebook she’d never seen before, hidden beneath his socks in his top dresser drawer.
It was an old composition notebook, the pages yellowed, and the dates went back twenty-seven years. Abe had been keeping this notebook since before she was born. There weren’t many entries, perhaps one or two per year, but as she read, it became very clear that the book in progress was not new to Abe at all.
Unbeknownst to Joanna, he’d had it her entire life, and for her entire life had been attempting to destroy it. He’d soaked it in turpentine and lit it on fire; he’d taken a chainsaw to it; he’d doused it in bleach. His last entry, made the day before he died, read, Curious what will happen if I add my own blood to the mix. Will it negate or interrupt the spell? Worth a try tomorrow.
Abe had been attempting to end whatever spell had been ongoing between the book’s pages. Instead, the book had ended him.
Now it lived atop the desk at the front of the rooms and Joanna took care never to touch it with her bare hands. Nor did she let it come too close to her book of wards, which were too precious to sully.
(Abe’s voice in her head, quizzing her as he’d done when she was young: “Not a book, technically. What do we call these early manuscripts?”
A codex. Semantics, Dad.
Precision of language, Jo.)
The book of wards—codex of wards—was in Latin, and despite its small size was the most powerful and rare in their collection; not only for what the book could do, which was considerable, but because unlike any of the others, whose ink eventually faded and with it the magic, the ink of the wards could be recharged. The codex had belonged to Isabel and at the time of her death had been in storage with a hundred other books, untouched by whoever had killed her. Three days after she died, Abe had packed up his daughter and driven without stopping across the border, across the continent, to his family’s old home in Vermont. That night he’d used the wards for the first time and had not let them drop for the rest of his life. Nor would Joanna.
She went to the sink and washed her hands thoroughly, then held them for a long while beneath the hot air of the electric dryer, until she felt every last remaining speck of moisture wick from them. Then she went to the herb cabinet and put a pinch of dried yarrow and vervain into a small bowl, which she brought back to the desk.
Herbs and plants were not strictly necessary to read the spells—blood alone would suffice—but they enhanced all magical effects, strengthening potency and increasing duration. There was never a single “correct” answer, but rather many possible factors, and Joanna had memorized everything from innate magical properties (vervain for protection, datura for knowledge and communication, belladonna for illusion) to physical correspondence (delicate herbs for delicate magic) to geographic specificity (chamomile for Polish spells, chincho for Peruvian). This last was helpful only if Joanna knew roughly where a book had come from, and yarrow was one of her most-used herbs because it was circumboreal and grew widely across the world.
She set the yarrow and vervain aside for now, picked up the tiny, leatherbound, fifteen-page codex, and spread it out on wooden support wings Abe had made. She let it fall carefully open. Silver knife in hand, she considered reopening her cut from earlier, but that would hurt unnecessarily, so she went to the usual spot on her finger and poked with the sharp tip until a drop of blood welled obediently to the surface. It was the brightest color in the room, more alive than even the body it had just quit. She held her bloody finger over the powdered herbs and let the bright red slide down her skin. Then she dipped her bleeding finger to the mixture and pressed the cut to the codex itself.
Unlike most books, which simply absorbed the drop of blood they were offered, the wards drank. As soon as she’d touched her finger to the page it began greedily swallowing her blood, her finger stinging with slight suction as if a tiny mouth was latched on, and the ink grew brighter, blacker, fiercer on the linen page. She’d been setting these wards all her life and had always found that suction comforting, but after Abe had died, she’d been terrified for months that the wards would turn on her, as that other book had on her father. They never did, though, and by now she was used to it again. As she fed the words, the Latin—a language she didn’t speak well—began to re-form beneath her eyes into something she understood. She took a slow, measured breath, and began to read.
“May the Word all-powerful grant unto this home a silence born of silence, and may the silence arouse to the heavens a flight of angels that none with ill intent shall see, for as the sky closes itself tight with a mantle of clouds so now shall angels obscure this home from the seeking eyes of the wicked world. Let life make dark the herbs and the life make dark these words, which make the Word . . .”
On and on she read, fifteen pages of angels and wings and malicious gazes, until the last sentence rang out and with a rustle like a million sweeping feathers, Joanna felt the wards reassert themselves. A slight popping sensation sounded in her already-buzzing ears, as if the seal around the house was hermetic in science as well as etymology and magic. The house was again, as ever, unmappable, untraceable. Nobody with ill intent could find her.
In fact, nobody at all could find her. The wards—set each night at the same hour—made certain of that, circling the boundary of her property so that her driveway and the house beyond it were essentially invisible to anyone whose blood wasn’t in the warding book. It was an invisibility not only of the eyes but also of the senses and the mind: the location of the property could not even be thought about, much less sought and found. The people in town had known Abe and Joanna for almost three decades, yet if asked where the two of them lived, a blurry look would come over the neighbors’ faces and they’d shrug, smiling, baffled. “Up the mountain?” they’d suggest. Or sometimes, “Down the mountain?”
Not even Joanna’s mother could locate her if she came looking; not since she’d moved out and stopped adding her own blood to the wards each night. If Cecily wanted to visit, Joanna would have to go and get her and drive her in, which Abe had made her swear she would never do.
This promise, at least, she hadn’t broken.
Only Esther, whom magic had never been able to touch, would have been able to find the house if she tried. Only Esther could come right up to the front door and push it open and call Joanna’s name.
But Esther wouldn’t.
The wards reasserted, Joanna slid the codex back into its protective case. She stood from the desk and set things in order, then she turned off the light and closed the door. Behind her the books hummed, resonant and sweet and safe in their underground home.
3
The following morning, the bowl of tuna on the porch had been licked clean. Joanna pulled on her red wool hunter’s coat and drank her morning coffee outside on the front steps, shivering, looking into the trees and hoping to see a glimpse of dark fur before she went into town.
The day was cold but damp, the humidity lending a sense of false warmth to the air; the kind of weather that reminded her of the day she’d found her father dead in the yard, but she was practiced now at pushing past that memory and focused instead on the familiar landscape. Her red truck was a bright slash of color against the frost-pitted mud of the driveway, and in the distance, the green flanks of the mountain went blue as they climbed into the mist. Everything smelled metallic and mouthy like pine needles and coming winter.
A flicker of motion caught her eye at the edge of the tree line, but it was only a squirrel skittering across the top of the old wooden swing set. When she and Esther were kids their parents had kept the front yard diligently mowed and cleared, but over the years the forest had encroached and now the weathered yellow plastic of the swing seats was mostly obscured by brush and bramble.
Joanna had a sudden, vivid sense-memory of sitting on those swings, her whole body engaged: wind catching her hair, fists tight around the ropes as she leaned back with all her weight, legs outstretched, toes pointed, Esther on the swing beside her shouting, “Kick the sky!”
On her seventh birthday, as a gift, her father had let her read a spell that gave her the ability to float down from moderate heights, and she’d spent the entire hour of the spell’s duration on those swings, pumping as high as she could and then leaping off and drifting to the ground as light as a blown dandelion. Cecily and Abe had watched from the porch, eating Joanna’s birthday cake and laughing, and ten-year-old Esther had swung beside her the whole time cheering her on. If she’d been jealous, she hadn’t shown it.
Usually, their parents were careful to only give their daughters magic that Esther could enjoy, too, magic of the environment or of physical objects: the floating spell had been an anomaly. Perhaps in compensation, the girls had woken just days later in their shared room to find their mother sitting in the chair by Esther’s bed, and their father cross-legged on the rag rug at her feet with a blue cloth-bound book in his hands.
Joanna had recognized it immediately. It was the book that had brought her parents together, the one Cecily had sold to Abe at an antiquarian expo in Boston a year or so after he and Esther had moved from Mexico to Vermont. It was an oft-repeated story in their family: how Abe’s attention had been caught as much by the pretty Belgian woman manning a booth of used books as by the little blue book she’d priced at only seven dollars, not knowing how its magic hummed in Abe’s head; and how, though Cecily had been drawn to the way Abe’s bushy-eyebrowed intensity contrasted with his easy, roaring laughter, she’d been just as interested by the two-year-old child on his hip, who laughed every time he laughed, throwing back her small head of dark curls in imitation of grown-up good humor.
“I fell in love with you first,” Cecily always said to Esther. “Your father was a bonus.”
That morning after Joanna’s seventh birthday, when Joanna and Esther woke, Abe was already on the last page of the spell, the air ringing with his resonant voice as the girls sat up in their beds. They’d been told what the blue book did but had never seen it read, and Esther had let out a shriek of delight as the first vines began to twine up the walls, brilliant green and sprouting fat, quick-swelling buds that just as quickly burst into velvet-petaled flowers.
The blooms were pink as sunset and as large as Joanna’s head and smelled so sweet they brought tears to her eyes. Cecily leaned forward in her chair to loop her arms around Abe’s shoulders and Esther was standing on her bed, but Joanna remained perfectly still, watching the vines and their enormous blossoms cover the ceiling and fill the room with their incredible scent—like caramelized roses and the sharp pith of an orange. Even after the petals had withered and fallen and the vines had shriveled up, the whole house smelled sweet for days.
The memory was so strong Joanna could almost catch that scent now, a hint of something rich and flourishing rising from the cold, hibernating earth. Books like that little blue one, that served no purpose but beauty, were rare. Cecily had taken it with her when she’d left Abe many years later, along with a few others: a spell that mended broken objects, a spell that coaxed perfect spheres of juicy red tomatoes from any living plant, a spell to trap someone within an invisible barrier.
Joanna thought it was hypocritical for her to keep them, considering how vehemently—how violently—she’d opposed the collection at the end, but still she was comforted by the thought that Cecily’s resentment for the books could not completely outweigh the awestruck love she’d once had for them.
Joanna left her now-empty coffee mug on the top step of the porch and turned from the swings toward her father’s old red truck.
She took the long way into town, eschewing the county highway and following the pine-fringed road that snaked alongside the green river. After Esther had gotten her license, she used to take Joanna out in this truck on weekends, just to drive, to listen to music, to talk, both of them chattier and more open when their eyes were facing forward. And once Esther had left, when Abe was still alive and Joanna wasn’t solely responsible for the evening wards, she had gone on long solo drives fairly often, seeking volumes to add to their collection—sniffing around rural estate sales, picking through cluttered shelves in small-town bookstores, looking for handwritten, synonymically repetitive books that had been miscategorized as historical diaries or ledgers. Listening, always, for the rare susurration of magic. In the grand tradition of Americana, she still associated the car with a heady sense of movement-based freedom, and when she was behind the wheel, she felt a kind of wild optimism, a sense that maybe her life was her own and at any moment she could take a sudden unexpected turn.
When she pictured a map, however, it was always as a network of veins with her house as the heart. She may be swept away from time to time, might feel as if she were moving outward, but inexorably she would be drawn back, a closed cycle and not an open path.
Not for the first time she wondered how Esther conceptualized the world. How did she think of the little patch of earth where she’d lived—happily, Joanna had believed at the time—for eighteen years? Until Esther had left with no warning, there had been few secrets between them, especially not in this truck, but Joanna hadn’t known her sister was planning to leave any more than she knew the reason she’d left. Nor could she imagine how Esther felt when she thought about home—if she even thought of Vermont as her home anymore. If she even thought of home at all.
The town, such as it was, was described optimistically in tourist brochures as “quaint,” which in this case meant the old buildings were all crumbling brick or painted white clapboard, with hand-lettered wooden signs that swung in the wind. A single-lane bridge spanned the rocky little moonstone river, laced now with ice at its edges, and separated the two blocks that constituted the town center, known colloquially as “the old town” and “the new town.”
The old town held the hardware store, the glass-fronted post office, and the bar and grill with its saloon-style entrance. It also boasted the “town green,” which was a square of grassy riverbank with a stone bench and an American flag. Across the bridge, the new town targeted ski tourists with a moose-and-butterfly-themed coffee shop and an outdoor outfitters on one side of the street, and Cecily’s general store and the used book shop on the other.
Joanna parked in the old town in front of the post office, her truck hiccuping to a stop behind a Subaru so rusty she could see through its chassis to the engine. The small front room with the rows of metal P.O. boxes was empty, but Joanna’s was not. There were two postcards sitting inside. Her heart immediately stepped up its rhythm, but she waited until she was back outside and sitting on the cold stone bench of the town green before she let herself look at them, at the handwriting that was as familiar to her as her sister’s voice had once been.
The card addressed to her was of a night sky shot through with strokes of green light, “Aurora Australis” written in curly script at the bottom.
Dear Jo, I’ve decided to stick around the station for another season. It’s summer, which means the sun never sets. There are no trees here to bloom and I miss them, and you. Love, your hardworking sister, Esther.
Cecily’s was similar, as it often was. Another scene of the Southern Lights, though this sky was pinker and the font squarer.
Dear Mom, I’m going to stay another season here in the snow. I like the people and the work, though the food leaves something to be desired. I miss maple syrup—and I miss you. Love, Esther.
Joanna stared at her sister’s writing until it started to blur. I miss you. The words and their saccharine lie made her stomach clench. If Esther truly missed them, she could come home and see them, but she didn’t. Wouldn’t.
She rose from the bench, wishing she had the fortitude to throw the postcards in the trash. Instead she put them carefully in her coat pocket and started across the narrow bridge, disturbing a cluster of crows who’d perched on the metal railing. They flapped away with a fading chorus of reproachful caws, and a feather drifted to her feet, oil-slick black against the concrete.
Where the old town was mostly white clapboard, the new town’s few buildings were squared brick. She stopped in the book shop out of habit, first to listen for the potential hum of magic (nothing), then to stand at the counter and browse the stack of historical romances that Madge, the owner, had set aside for her. Madge was seventy-three, skinny, and energetic, and despite the fact that she’d spent much of her youth in the lesbian separatist movement, she was a self-professed “sucker” for the almost eye-rollingly heterosexual romance novels Joanna loved, where taciturn dukes had their icy hearts melted by the fiery charms of anachronistically feminist women.
