Sorcery of Thorns (27 page)

It was no use. She had returned to the gate, and the ominous figure still awaited
her. This time, when the gate swung open, it opened its mouth and screamed.

Elisabeth’s eyes snapped open, her pulse racing. But the screams didn’t fade. They ground against her skull, echoing ceaselessly from every direction. They hadn’t happened in her dream—they were real.

She leaped from bed and belted on her salt rounds, then seized a poker and stumbled into the hall, where the screams
grew louder. They came from the floor, the ceiling. They tore forth from the very walls. It was as though the house itself had begun howling in anguish.

A whiff of aetherial combustion drifted over her, and her stomach clenched with dread. Someone was performing sorcery. What if Ashcroft had spotted her in the Royal Library after all, and had traced her back here—and was now launching an attack
on Nathaniel’s house?

Without thinking, she headed for Nathaniel’s room. He would know what to do. The screams throbbed painfully in her ears as she sprinted down the hallway, poker at the ready. She turned a corner and drew up short.

In the moonlight, something wet glimmered on the walls. She approached the wainscoting with hesitant steps and touched the substance. When she raised her hand,
it gleamed crimson on her fingertips.

The walls were weeping blood.

Then she blinked, and everything returned to normal. The screaming ceased. The blood vanished from her fingers. Bewildered, she let the poker fall to her side. In the sudden quiet, she heard voices down the hall. They were coming from Nathaniel’s bedroom.

“Master,” Silas was saying. “Master, listen to me. It was only a dream.”

“Silas!” This raw, tortured voice had to belong to Nathaniel,
though it sounded little like him. “He’s brought them back again, Mother and Maximilian—”

“Hush. You’re awake now.”

“He’s alive, and he’s going to—please, Silas, you must believe me—I saw him—”

“All is well, master. I am here. I will not let you come to harm.”

Silence descended like a guillotine. Then, “Silas,” Nathaniel gasped,
as if he were drowning. “Help me.”

Elisabeth felt as if there were a rope attached to her middle, towing her forward. She didn’t will her steps to move, but she approached the room nonetheless, transfixed.

The door hung open. Nathaniel sat up in his nightshirt, tangled within a snarl of bedclothes, his hair in a wild state of disarray. His expression was terrible to behold: his pupils had swallowed
up his eyes, and he stared as though he saw nothing around him. He was panting, and trembling; his nightshirt clung to his body with sweat. Silas sat on the side of the bed, angled away from Elisabeth, one knee drawn up to face Nathaniel. Though it had to be two or three in the morning, he was still dressed in his livery, aside from his hands, which were bare.

“Drink this,” he said softly, reaching
for a glass on the nightstand. When Nathaniel tried to grasp the glass and nearly spilled it, Silas guided it to his lips with the surety of many years of practice.

Nathaniel drank. When he finished, he squeezed his eyes shut and slumped back against the headboard. His face twisted as if he were trying to stop himself from weeping, and his hand sought Silas’s and clasped it tightly.

Elisabeth
suddenly felt that she had seen enough. She withdrew and retreated down the hall. But she lingered at the corner, stepping first in one direction and then another, torn with
indecision, as though she were pacing the confines of a cage. She couldn’t bring herself to go back to bed. She wouldn’t be able to sleep, knowing Nathaniel was in such pain. Not after what she had heard, what he had said.
She recalled the comments people had made about Alistair. Nathaniel had been having a nightmare, but was it only a nightmare, or something more?

After several long minutes, Silas appeared in the hall, and she realized that she had been waiting for him. He nodded at her without surprise—he had known she was there the whole time. She couldn’t read anything in his expression.

“Will Nathaniel be
all right?” she whispered.

“Master Thorn has taken medicine, and shall rest undisturbed until morning.” That wasn’t precisely an answer to the question she had asked, but before she could say so, he went on, “I would be obliged if you didn’t mention tonight’s events to my master. He feared this would happen. He has nightmares often. The draught will make him forget.”

Oh
, thought Elisabeth, and
the world seemed to shift ever so slightly beneath her feet. “Is that why he didn’t want me to stay here?”

“The answer is complicated—but yes, in part. His nightmares drove his father’s human servants from the house long ago. They often cause him to lash out with his magic, as you saw, and he worries that in time, he might lose control in even worse ways.”

“So he pushes people from him,” she
murmured, thinking aloud. “He doesn’t let anyone get close.” Her gaze drifted to the wall, then back to Silas. “It doesn’t bother me. That is—I don’t like getting woken up by the sound of screaming, and seeing blood drip down the walls, but I’m not upset by it, now that I know why it happens. I’m not afraid.”

Silas considered her for a long moment. “Then perhaps you should speak to my master
after all,” he said finally. He turned. “Come with me. There is something I must give you. Something that, I regret to say, I have been keeping from you unjustly.”

He led her downstairs to a sitting room—one of the many rooms in Nathaniel’s house that she had peered into, but had never been inside. He didn’t light any lamps, so Elisabeth could barely see. By all rights being alone in the dark
with a demon should have frightened her, but she only had the strange thought that perhaps Silas was distressed, in his own way, and was not himself, for he always remembered to light the lamps. She felt her way to a couch and sat down. Silas’s alabaster face and hands stood out, disembodied, as though his skin produced its own pale light.

A cabinet door opened and shut. He straightened with
a long, slender bundle, which he held cautiously, as if it might burst into flame at any moment.

“This arrived from Summershall the day before I encountered you on the street,” he said, holding it out to her. “There was no note, but it was posted by someone named Master Hargrove.”

Elisabeth’s heart gave a swift, painful throb, like a hammer striking an anvil. She took the bundle with trembling
hands. There was only one thing it could be, and when she untied the twine and parted the fabric, the faintest whisper of moonlight glimmered across garnets and a liquid length of blade.

“I don’t understand.” She looked up at Silas. “Why didn’t you give this to me earlier?”

His face was still as marble as he replied, “Iron is one of the few things capable of banishing a demon back to the Otherworld.”

She hesitated. “And you thought I might use it against you? I
suppose I can’t blame you. I would have, once. Not to mention, its name is Demonslayer.” She gazed helplessly at the sword. She still hadn’t touched it. She couldn’t bear to, for fear that it might reject her; that it might scald her as though she herself were a demon.

“Is something wrong, Miss Scrivener?”

“The Director left Demonslayer
to me in her will, but I . . . I’m not sure I’m worthy of wielding it.” A pressure built in her chest. “I no longer know what is right and what is wrong.”

His hands settled over hers, cool and clawed, and gingerly brought them to rest against the sword. “Worry not, Miss Scrivener,” he said in his whispering voice. “I can see your soul as clearly as a flame within a glass.”

They sat there in
silence for a time. Elisabeth remembered that day in the reading room, when the Director had spotted her behind the bookcase and almost smiled. She had been breaking the rules, but the Director hadn’t minded. She had left her Demonslayer anyway. And she had not always been the Director—she had had a name, Irena, and she had been a girl once, too, and she’d had doubts and felt uncertain and made mistakes.

Somehow thinking about those things made Elisabeth feel as though she were losing the Director all over again, because she realized now that she had never truly known Irena, and would never get the chance. When a sob escaped her, Silas said nothing. He only passed her his handkerchief, and waited patiently for her to stop crying.

A long moment passed before she was able to speak. She dried her
tears and blinked up at Silas. It struck her that he put up with a great deal from the humans in his care.

“Why did you fear my sword,” she asked, “if you can’t die in the mortal realm?”

A trace of a smile illuminated his beautiful features. “I fear not for myself. If I were banished, my loss would be an inconvenience for Master Thorn. It alarms me to imagine the state of his wardrobe. He would
offend young ladies with his cravat.”

She laughed, taken by surprise, but it was a painful laugh, for the truth was terribly sad. If something happened to Silas, Nathaniel would be well and truly alone. He’d lose the only family he had left.

“Silas—” She hesitated, then forged onward. “Will you tell me what happened to Alistair Thorn?”

“It is an unpleasant tale. Are you certain you wish to
know?”

She nodded.

“Very well.” He turned and went to the fireplace, gazing at nothing she could discern, except perhaps the ashes. “You recall me telling you that Charlotte and Maximilian perished in an accident. That was the start of it all.”

Elisabeth recalled what Nathaniel had said upstairs, terrible possibilities beginning to take shape in her mind.
He’s brought them back again, Mother and Maximilian. . . .

“Alistair was a kind man—a good one, if you will forgive the irony of a demon saying so, and a devoted husband and father. But after the accident, a change came over him. He began studying Baltasar’s work day and night. Young Master Thorn grew lonely, and developed a habit of hiding in his father’s study for company.” Silas paused, as if considering whether to go on. “I
shall get to the point. Two months after the deaths of his wife and younger son, Alistair exhumed their bodies and attempted to resurrect them via necromancy, here in this house. The ritual would not have raised them from the dead—not as themselves—but he had lost himself to grief, and would no longer listen to reason.”

Ice flowed through Elisabeth’s veins. “When you told me that you killed him
 . . .”

“Yes,” Silas whispered. “We were distracted, Alistair and I, and the both of us failed to notice that Master Thorn had hidden himself behind the drapes. He had been there all morning, as quiet as a mouse. We understood that the spell might take Alistair’s life, for it was a dark and terrible magic, but I knew when I glimpsed those eyes watching us through the curtains that it would take
his son’s as well. So I ended it at once, in the only way possible. Master Thorn saw everything: the bodies, the ritual, his father’s death at my hands. He sees it still, when he closes his eyes to rest.”

Elisabeth said nothing. The horror of it was too extreme. Her stricken thoughts jumped to the journey through the Blackwald, remembering how Nathaniel had stayed up, unable to sleep. How little
she had understood.

“There is a lesson to be had from that night.” Silas drew his gaze from the hearth and faced her again. He looked perfectly calm. “Alistair trusted me. He believed that I would never harm him, so he failed to command me not to. His trust was his undoing.”

“No. He was right to trust you.” Elisabeth’s stomach twisted. How did Silas not understand? “Had he been in his right
mind, he would have wanted you to stop him, no matter the cost. You saved Nathaniel’s life.”

“And what did I do next, Miss Scrivener?” he inquired.

“What do you mean?”

“When Master Thorn summoned me, while his father’s body still lay warm on the floor, what did I do then?”

She had no answer.

“I took his life. Twenty years of it he bargained away to me,
when he had scarcely seen the passing
of half that number, and did not understand what he was giving, only that he did not want to be alone.” He took a step forward. “And it will taste sweet once I have it, just as his father’s before him, and the lives of his forebears stretching back three hundred years.”

Elisabeth’s hands tightened reflexively on Demonslayer.
Two decades
. “But how . . . how could you—?”

“I have devoured them
all, Miss Scrivener.” He took another step forward. His eyes were yellow slits. He did not look beautiful now. “Do not see compassion where there is none. Was it not to my advantage to save Master Thorn’s life, so that I could claim a portion of it for myself?”

Silas was almost upon her. She raised Demonslayer between them and pointed it at his chest to halt his advance. Yet he took a third step
forward nonetheless, and the blade pressed against his ribs, over his heart, if he had one. A smell of burnt flesh filled the air.

“Stop this!” she cried. “I don’t want to hurt you. I can’t. No matter what you’ve done, Nathaniel needs you.”

“Yes,” he whispered, as if she saw the truth at last. “You see, there is no absolution, no penance, for a creature such as I.” His eyes shone bright with
pain. “You could strike me down and the blow would only harm another.”

She let the sword fall. Silas neatly stepped back and raised a hand to his chest. Some horrible light seemed to have gone out of him.

“I am a demon,” he said. “You cannot see me as anything more.”

Elisabeth shook from head to toe. She knew that if she tried to stand, her knees would give out beneath her. But it was not fear
she felt. She did not know what this emotion was. Pity, perhaps,
though she couldn’t tell for whom, and anger and despair, tearing through her like a storm. She believed that Silas cared about Nathaniel; she had seen it as plainly as day. But how could someone care for another and still take so much from them?

Twenty years. If Nathaniel was fated to die young—in his early forties, perhaps—then
with that much taken away, he might only have a handful of years left. Her chest squeezed at the thought, the air wrung from her lungs like water from a dishrag. She couldn’t meet Silas’s gaze any longer.