Sorcery of Thorns (21 page)

“T
HERE MUST BE some mistake,” Elisabeth said to the freckled boy behind the counter. “Master Hargrove has known me my entire life. He wouldn’t send this reply.”

The paper shook between her fingers. The terse message read
only,
We have no record of an apprentice named Elisabeth Scrivener at the Great Library of Summershall
. Underneath, in lieu of a signature, someone had stamped the Collegium’s crossed key and quill. That meant the letter had been written by a warden, even though she had addressed it to Hargrove.

The clerk looked sympathetic, but his eyes kept darting nervously to the glass front of the post office.
“I’m sorry, miss. I don’t know what to tell you.”

The paper blurred as she attempted to focus. This was wrong. Surely she was—she was—

“It’s Finch, the new Director,” she heard herself say. “He must have intercepted my letter. He’s stripped me from the records. . . .”

Someone cleared his throat nearby. Elisabeth glanced over her shoulder in time to see the well-dressed gentleman in line
behind
her whisper something to his wife, both of them eyeing Elisabeth with a combination of disapproval and unease.

She looked back at the clerk and saw herself through his pitying gaze. She had been sleeping on the streets for the past few days. Her hair was tangled, her clothes dirty. Worst of all, her urgent attempts to contact the Great Library of Summershall were beginning to resemble the actions
of a madwoman. An unfamiliar feeling of shame burned inside her stomach.

“Please,” she said, the words rasping through her sore throat. “Can you give me directions to Hemlock Park? I know someone who lives there.”

The clerk wetted his lips, glancing between her and the waiting couple. She could tell he didn’t believe her. “Could I post a letter for you instead, miss?”

Elisabeth had used all
of Mercy’s money sending the first letter. She couldn’t pay for a second. Suddenly, the shame overwhelmed her. She mumbled an apology and ducked past the staring couple, pressing a hand to her mouth as she fled from the post office. As soon as she reached the street, she doubled over in a coughing fit. Pedestrians gave her a wide berth, shooting her troubled looks. With a trembling hand, she folded
the letter and slipped it into her pocket.

Her fever was getting worse. Yesterday morning, after sleeping huddled up and shivering in a doorway, she had woken with a cough. Today she felt so disoriented that she’d barely found her way back to the post office.

Her heel slipped on something slimy as she started down the sidewalk. A wet newspaper, pasted to the gutter. She peeled it free and held
its translucent headline to the light, even though she had already read the article a dozen times since her escape from Leadgate.
THIRD ATTACK ON A GREAT LIBRARY—FETTERING
IN FLAMES
, the front page proclaimed. Beneath that there was an illustration of a spiny, deformed monstrosity—the paper’s interpretation of a Malefict—howling in front of an inferno. The article went on to say that there had
been at least two dozen casualties in the village, some lives claimed by the Class Nine Malefict, others by the blaze. The number made her head spin. Traders from Fettering occasionally stopped by Summershall’s market. She might have met some of the people who had died.

Near the end, there was a quote from Chancellor Ashcroft:
“At this time we believe the saboteur is a foreign agent working to undermine the strength of Austermeerish magic. The Magisterium will stop at nothing to apprehend the culprit and restore order to our great kingdom.”

The paper crumpled in her hand. The attack had happened while she was trapped in his manor. He had lied to reporters while she lay in bed.

She was running out of time to stop him.

Yet the letter’s response had left her unmoored. Weeks ago she
wouldn’t have bothered with the letter; she would have charged straight to the Collegium and pounded on the front doors until someone answered. Now she knew that if she did that, she would be turned away, or worse. She had counted on arming herself with Master Hargrove’s good word to prove that she was someone worth listening to. The anticipation of holding his response—of being vindicated at last—was
what had kept her going through the long, cold nights and the gnawing ache of hunger. Now she had nothing.

No . . . not nothing. She still had Nathaniel. But days of searching hadn’t led her any closer to Hemlock Park. The city was huge; she felt as though she could remain lost within it forever, growing ever more invisible to the people passing by, until
she faded away to a shadow. No one had
proven willing to help her. Few were even willing to look at her.

She didn’t know if Nathaniel would be any different. But of everyone in Brassbridge, he was the only person she could trust.

A glimpse of a short, slim boy passing through the crowd yanked Elisabeth to a halt. She stood frozen on the sidewalk as people flowed around her. It didn’t seem possible. Either her fever was causing her
to hallucinate, or Silas had appeared as though she had summoned him out of thin air by thinking his master’s name. Could she be mistaken?

She whirled around, searching for another sign of him across the street. Her gaze latched onto a slight figure stepping neatly through the afternoon bustle. The young man wasn’t wearing Silas’s green livery, but instead a finely tailored suit, a cravat tied
impeccably around his pale neck. But his hair—pure white, held back with a ribbon—could belong to no one else. He was not a hallucination. He was real.

She hesitated, wavering, and then rushed across the street, the dismayed shout of a carriage driver chasing in her wake. She scanned the crowd once she reached the sidewalk, but Silas was no longer in sight. She hurried along in the direction
he had been heading, peering into the windows of shops as she passed. Her own dirty reflection stared back at her, pinched and desperate, her blue eyes bright with fever. She broke into a jog, trying to ignore the fire that roared in her lungs as she urged her body to move faster.

There. A flash of white hair ahead, turning onto a side street. She hastened after him, barely noticing that the
buildings around her had grown dilapidated, the traffic thinner, its carriages replaced by carts filled with junk and wilted produce. Crooked
eaves hung over the narrow avenue, strung with unused laundry lines. The damp, dark corners stank of urine. Silas stuck out like a sore thumb in his expensive suit, but no one spared him a second glance. The same wasn’t true for Elisabeth.

“Where are you
going in such a hurry, little miss?”

Her heart tripped. She kept her gaze fixed straight ahead, as though she hadn’t noticed the man’s leering face in the periphery of her vision. But he didn’t give up, as she’d hoped. A boot crunched broken glass behind her, and multiple shapes detached from the shade of a nearby building.

“I said, where are you going? Maybe we can help.”

“Give us a smile
for our trouble, eh?” another man suggested.

Silas was too far ahead, a shape glimpsed behind a passing cart. Elisabeth tried to call out. Though she only made a hoarse, pathetic sound, he paused and began to turn, a yellow eye flashing in the light.

She couldn’t tell whether he had truly heard her, or whether the reaction was a coincidence. She didn’t have time to find out. “Silas,” she whispered.
And then she ran.

Pavement scuffed beneath her heels. When the men moved to cut her off, she dodged from the main street and into an alley, stumbling over crates and sodden drifts of newspapers. Rats fled squealing toward a branching alleyway, and she followed them, hoping they knew the best place to hide. As the deep shadows enveloped her, her boots skidded on something slippery. A putrid stench
hung in the air, and puddles of fluid shone on the cobblestones, covered in floating scum. She had wandered into the rear of a butcher’s shop. Her breath came in labored, agonizing rasps.

“This way!” a voice called. The men were close on her heels.

Elisabeth staggered to the end of the alley and around the
corner, only to draw up short at a dead end. The building that backed up against this
alley looked abandoned. Its windows had been bricked over, and the door, once painted black, was badly peeling and secured with a padlock. She jerked at the doorknob, but the padlock held.

Footsteps splashed through the puddles. There was no use trying to be quiet; her pursuers would notice the adjoining alley any moment now. Fueled by terror, she dug her fingers into one of the wooden boards
that crisscrossed the door and yanked with all her might, staggering backward when it wrenched free with a metallic squeal of protest. The board had come loose in her hands. Bent, rusty nails protruded from the ends.

She armed herself not a moment too soon. A man appeared at the mouth of the alley, his trousers spattered with congealed blood. His hair was closely shorn, and scabs covered his
gaunt cheeks. Revulsion twisted Elisabeth’s gut at the look in his eyes.

He grinned. “There you are, little miss. How about that smile?”

“Stay back,” she warned. “I’ll hurt you.”

He didn’t listen. With a yellow-toothed grin still fixed on his face, he took a step forward. Elisabeth braced herself and swung. The board struck his shoulder and lodged there, stuck fast. He howled, falling to his
knees, reaching for the makeshift weapon. When she tore it back out, the nails made a horrible squelch. An arc of blood spattered the brick wall.

Shocked, she stumbled backward until her shoulder blades struck the door. She had slain a Malefict and battled demons, but this was different. He was a person. No matter how evil he was, he wouldn’t disintegrate into ashes or return to the Otherworld
if he died. His moans of pain throbbed sickeningly in her ears.

Officium adusque mortem.
Was it her duty to fight him, even
risk killing him, if escaping his clutches meant saving many more lives?

“Over here, you idiots!” the man snarled, clamping his hand over his wet, torn sleeve as he shoved himself upright, using the wall for support. Blood bubbled over his fingers as he glared at Elisabeth.
“And be careful! She’s found herself a weapon.”

There came no reply from the butcher’s lot.

“Did you hear me?”

The alley was silent as a tomb.

“Stop fooling around!” he snapped.

There came a faint splashing sound from around the corner. And then a soft, courteous voice said, “Do not judge your friends too harshly. I fear they are indisposed.”

“Is this some sort of joke?” He limped back for
a look. All the color drained from his slack face. “What—what
are
you?” he stammered.

“That is a difficult question to answer,” the whispering voice replied. “I am an ancient thing, you see. I have brought about the fall of empires and attended the deathbeds of kings. Nations now lost to time once fought wars over the secret of my true name.” He sighed. “But presently, I am inconvenienced. My
day’s plans didn’t include traipsing down a squalid alleyway to dispatch a handful of second-rate criminals. Not in a clean suit, and certainly not in a new pair of shoes.”

The man’s eyes bulged from his head. He tried to run, but that was a mistake. Elisabeth didn’t see what happened after he fled past the corner, out of sight. She only heard a choked-off scream, followed by a silence so thick
it made her ears ring.

She slid down the door, the stained board clattering to the ground. A cough seized her body and shook her like a rabbit in the jaws of a hound. She blinked back tears as Silas stepped into
view. He looked just as he had on the street, except for a spatter of blood on his face. He flicked a handkerchief from his breast pocket and dabbed the blood away, then examined the
soiled handkerchief, pursed his lips, and cast it aside.

“Miss Scrivener,” he said, giving her a minute bow.

“Silas,” she gasped. “I’m so glad to see you.”

“Curious. That is not what people usually say to me at a time like this.”

“What do they usually say?”

“Generally they cry, or wet themselves.” He studied her. “What are you doing here? Master Thorn and I assumed you would be back in Summershall
by now.”

Elisabeth didn’t have the energy to explain Ashcroft and Leadgate. She was no longer certain that the tears in her eyes had to do with how hard she had been coughing. She knew she shouldn’t be this relieved to see Silas—that he was evil, a murderer, a warden’s worst enemy. But he didn’t pretend to be anything other than a monster. In that way, he was more honorable than most of the people
she had met since leaving Summershall.

“Did you kill those men?” she asked.

“When one calls upon a demon, one must be prepared for death to follow.”

“I didn’t . . .”

“You spoke my name. You wished for me to save you.”

“You could have let him run,” she said. When he said nothing, only looked at her, she added, “I suppose you will tell me they were bad men, like last time.”

“Would that make
you feel better, miss?”

She felt a dull twinge of horror upon realizing that it would. And once a person began to think that way, she wasn’t certain how they ever managed to stop. A shiver ran through her.
“Don’t say it,” she whispered. “Silas—I’ve seen such terrible things. I’ve . . .”

He knelt in front of her. He reached for her, and she flinched, but he only placed a bare hand on her forehead,
his touch so cold that it burned. “You aren’t well,” he said softly. “How long have you had this fever?”

When she didn’t reply, unsure, he began to unbutton his jacket. She shook her head as he moved to tuck it around her. “I’ll get your clothes dirty,” she protested.

“It matters not, miss. Up you come.”

He lifted her from the ground as easily as he had the last time. Elisabeth wondered if
this meant she was finished starving, running, sleeping in the rain; perhaps she could stop fighting, just for a little while. She turned her face against his chest as he carried her away. “You’re a proper monster, Silas,” she murmured, caught halfway in a dream. “I’m glad of it.”