Sorcery of Thorns (14 page)

“Master Thorn will join us shortly,” Silas said. Then he added, “You may look around, if you like.”

Without permission, Elisabeth had already crossed the foyer and picked up a candlestick
made of solid crystal. Guiltily, she set it down. As she did so, Nathaniel’s gray eyes reflected across its facets, multiplied by the dozen, and she gasped—but when she whirled around, no one stood behind her. The crystal had reflected a portrait hanging on the wall. And the man in the portrait was too old to be Nathaniel, though he bore a close resemblance, down to the silver streak that ran through
his black hair. His smile, on the other hand . . . it was warm and kind and open, far happier than any smile she had ever seen on Nathaniel’s face.

“My master’s father, Alistair Thorn,” Silas provided. “I served him in his time.”

He’s dead,
she realized with a jolt.
He must be
. Suddenly, she found it uncomfortable looking into his eyes. Her gaze strayed to the white cat the artist had painted
on Alistair’s lap. It was a dainty, long-haired creature, captured in the act of grooming its paw.

The air stirred, and Silas stood beside her, studying the next portrait over, which depicted a blond woman in a lilac gown. This time Elisabeth recognized something of Nathaniel in her expression, the way her eyes sparkled with the suppressed laughter of an unspoken joke. On her face it looked welcoming
instead of mocking, illuminated by love.

Silas said, “His mother, Charlotte.”

Wistfulness tugged on Elisabeth’s heart. “She’s beautiful.”

“She was.”

Elisabeth glanced at Silas, lips parted around an apology, but he was expressionless, still gazing at the portraits. She instantly felt foolish for almost apologizing to a demon—a being who had not loved any of them, for demons could not feel
love, or compassion, or loss.

Silently, he gestured to the third and final portrait.

Elisabeth stepped forward and examined it closely. The painting was of a boy, perhaps seven years of age, pale and grave, with a dark collar buttoned high around his neck. He looked so serious. Perhaps that came with being the heir to the Thorn legacy. Had he known the stories about Baltasar even then? It felt
strange to think of Nathaniel as a child. An innocent.

“So he wasn’t born with the silver in his hair,” she said finally, looking to Silas.

“No, he wasn’t. The silver is the mark of our bargain. Every sorcerer possesses one, unique to the demon that serves them. But this portrait isn’t of Master Thorn. It’s of his younger brother,
Maximilian. He passed away a year after it was painted.”

Elisabeth
stepped back. The hair stood up on her arms. The house felt like a mausoleum, its cold, empty halls full of ghosts. Nathaniel’s entire family was gone. The Lexicon’s words returned to her:
For once a bargain with a demon is struck, it is in the demon’s best interest to see its master dead. . . .

“What happened to them all?” she whispered, not certain this time if she really wanted to know the
answer.

Silas had gone still. It took him a moment to reply, and when he did, his whispering voice floated through the foyer like mist. “Charlotte and Maximilian perished together in an accident. A senseless tragedy for a sorcerer’s wife and son. I know what you are thinking—I was nowhere near them when the accident occurred. Alistair followed only a few months later, and I was there, that time.
It proved . . . a difficult year for my master.”

“You killed him,” Elisabeth said. “Alistair.”

Silas’s reply came as a breath, barely louder than the distant ticking of the grandfather clock. “Yes.”

“Nathaniel knows?”

“He does.”

Elisabeth grappled with this information. “And he still—he still decided to—”

“He bound me to his service directly after it happened. He was only twelve years of
age. The ritual was surely frightening for him, but of course, he already knew me well.” Silas drifted toward a blank spot on the paneling, where there was an empty spot left for one final portrait. He lifted his gloved hand and lightly touched the wall. “I was there when Master Thorn came into the world, you see. I heard him speak his first words, and watched him take his first steps. And I will
be there when Master Thorn dies,” he said, “one way or another.”

Elisabeth took another step back, almost colliding with a coatrack. Nathaniel had told her that everyone else in line for his title was gone, but she hadn’t expected anything like this. Certainly not that he had been completely alone in the world at only twelve years old, bargaining away his life to the demon who had killed his
father. The demon who would one day kill him.

A step creaked. Elisabeth turned. Nathaniel was coming down the stairs, one hand in his pocket, the other skimming along the banister. He looked striking in an expensively tailored suit, the cut of the green brocade waistcoat accentuating his strong shoulders and narrow waist. She stared, trying to reconcile his careless poise with what she had just
learned. He returned her gaze evenly, an eyebrow lifted as though in challenge.

When he reached the bottom, Silas went to him at once. With the silent efficiency of a professional valet, he went about making minute adjustments to Nathaniel’s clothes: fixing his cuffs, straightening his collar, tweaking the fall of his jacket. Then, with a slight frown, he undid Nathaniel’s cravat and whisked
it from his neck.

“Does it need to be so tight?” Nathaniel objected as Silas retied the cravat in a complicated series of knots, his gloved fingers moving with nimble certainty over the fabric.

Silas could easily throttle him with that
, Elisabeth thought, astonished. Yet Nathaniel appeared completely relaxed, trusting of his servant’s ministrations, as if he had a murderous demon’s hands at
his throat every day.

“I’m afraid so, if you wish to remain fashionable,” Silas replied. “And we wouldn’t want a repeat of the incident with Lady Gwendolyn.”

Nathaniel scoffed. “How was I supposed to know tying it that way meant that I intended to proposition her? I have better
things to do than learn secret signals with handkerchiefs and neckcloths.”

“Had you listened to me, I would have told
you, and spared you from getting champagne thrown in your face—though I heard several people say afterward that that was their favorite part of the dinner. There.” He stood back, admiring his work.

Nathaniel automatically reached up to touch the cravat, then dropped his hand when Silas narrowed his yellow eyes in warning. With a lopsided grin, he strode across the hall toward Elisabeth, his boots
rapping on the marble floor.

“Are you ready, Miss Scrivener?” he asked, offering her his arm.

Elisabeth’s heart skipped a beat. She might have misjudged Nathaniel, but she had been right about one thing. A sorcerer did want her dead. And somewhere out there, he was waiting.

Chilled to the bone, she nodded and took his arm.

ELEVEN

T
HE COACH PASSED tall, grand houses of gray stone, stacked tightly alongside each other like books on a bookshelf. Bright blooms of foxglove and deadly nightshade spilled from their window boxes, and wrought iron fences bordered
them in front, guarded by statues and gargoyles that turned their heads as the coach passed. Heraldic devices were carved upon the pediments above the front doors. Many of the houses were clearly centuries old, their elegant facades wrapped in a sense of untouchable wealth.

She watched a woman exit a carriage, jewels glittering on her ears. A small child opened the door for her, and Elisabeth
assumed he was the woman’s son until she dismissively handed him her shopping parcels. She saw the boy’s eyes flash orange in the light before the door swung shut. Not a boy—a demon.

“Does this entire neighborhood belong to sorcerers?” she asked Nathaniel. Her stomach writhed like a nest of snakes. The saboteur could live in any one of these houses. He could be watching her even now.

“Almost
exclusively,” he replied. He was looking out the opposite window. “It’s called Hemlock Park. Sorcerers like their privacy—our demons are a bit like dirty laundry, not a secret, but an aspect of our lives that commoners rarely see, and one that we prefer they don’t think about too much. A lot of old blood around here, as you can probably tell. Sorcerous lineages that go back hundreds of years, like
mine.”

Curiosity snuck through her guard. “I thought all sorcerers belonged to old families. Aren’t you born into it?”

“I suppose that’s true in the sense that magic is an inheritance.” Nathaniel spared her a glance. “Or rather, demons are. A highborn demon can only be summoned by someone who knows its Enochian name, and families pass those names down through the generations like heirlooms.
But occasionally a dabbler with no magical heritage digs up the name of a notable demon in some obscure text and manages to summon it. They have to keep the demon in the family for a few decades before the old houses begin to consider them respectable.”

Dabblers and criminals
. That was how the Lexicon had referred to people who summoned lesser demons, like fiends. True sorcerers didn’t stoop
to that level.

Not unless they wanted to eliminate a witness, and blame the murder on someone else.

Disturbed, Elisabeth mulled this over as they passed a park full of ancient oaks and winding gravel paths, and then a patch of urban woodland that made her feel like she was back on the outskirts of the Blackwald. The coach turned onto a drive flanked by marble plinths. A matching pair of stone
gryphons sat atop them, flicking their tails and sunning their mossy wings. Eventually a structure came into view beyond a hedge, first visible as a flash of light on the copper of a domed cupola.

“Oh,” she breathed, pressing her face to the window. “It’s a palace!”

She felt Nathaniel watching her. When he spoke, he sounded oddly reluctant to correct her. “No, just Ashcroft Manor.”

But there
was no “just” about the building they were heading toward, an immense white manor surrounded by lavish gardens. Its roofline of towers, domes, and elaborate cornices resembled the skyline of a miniature city, and the sunlight threw dazzling prisms from a glass-roofed conservatory attached to its side. The drive circled around a large fountain directly in front, and as they drew nearer she saw that
the water lifted by itself, splashing in vortices that continually changed shape: first it formed a group of translucent maidens leaping into the air like ballet dancers, who merged into a rotating armillary sphere, which next split apart into a pair of rearing horses, their manes tossing droplets across the drive. A few of the droplets struck the coach’s windows and clung to the glass, sparkling
like diamonds.

“And Silas says
I’m
extravagant with my magic,” Nathaniel muttered.

Elisabeth made an effort to stop gaping openmouthed as they neared the manor. A crowd of people stood scattered around the drive, but as far as she could tell, they weren’t sorcerers or even servants. They all wore brown tweed jackets and had notebooks tucked under their arms, repeatedly consulting their pocket
watches as if they were in a great hurry. When they heard the carriage approaching, they looked up with hungry, eager expressions, like dogs waiting for scraps to be thrown from the dinner table.

“Who are those people?” Elisabeth asked uneasily. “They look like they’re waiting for us.”

Nathaniel slid over to her side of the coach, looked out, and
swore. “Chancellor Ashcroft’s allowed the press
onto his estate. I suppose there’s no escaping them. Courage, Scrivener. It will all be over soon.”

When Silas opened the door, a wave of sound immediately swamped the coach. No one spared Silas a glance; they focused on Elisabeth as she stepped outside, jostling between themselves for a better position near the front of the crowd.

“Miss Scrivener!” “Do you have a moment—” “I’m Mr. Feversham
from the
Brassbridge Inquirer
—” “Over here, Miss Scrivener!” “Can you tell us how tall you are, Miss Scrivener?”

“Hello,” she said bemusedly. All the men looked very similar. Never before had she seen so many mustaches together in one place. “I’m sorry—I have no idea.” She had grown since the last time Katrien had measured her.

“Is it true that you defeated a Class Eight Malefict in Summershall?”
one of the men asked, already scratching away frantically in his notebook.

“Yes, that’s true.”

“Completely on your own?”

She nodded. The man’s eyes nearly popped from his head, so she added kindly, “Well, I had a sword.”

Another tweed-clad reporter dodged through an opening. “I see you’ve been spending a great deal of time alone with Magister Thorn. Has he declared his intentions?”

“I wish
he would,” Elisabeth said. “He hardly makes sense half the time. Knowing his intentions would be helpful.”

Nathaniel made a choking sound. “She doesn’t mean it that way,” he assured everyone, taking Elisabeth’s arm. “She’s a feral librarian, you see—raised by booklice, very tragic. . . .” He tugged her out of the crowd and up the manor’s front steps.