Sorcery of Thorns (29 page)

Part of her expected to reach the top and find the Codex missing. It seemed that she had come too far, and faced
too many trials, for any aspect of this mission to come easily to her. But when she finally hauled herself up to the final rung, the Codex’s familiar scaled cover awaited her, encircled by chains. The secret to Ashcroft’s plan, close enough to touch.

She reached for the chains, and then froze. Her joints locked; her muscles refused to obey. She had come here to steal from the Royal Library, but
now that the moment was upon her, every fiber of her body revolted. Once she crossed this line, there was no going back. She imagined getting caught, having to face Parsifal and Mistress Wick, who had both treated her so kindly. Her heart burned with shame.

“Think of it as more of a rescue mission,” Katrien had told her during their last, brief conversation through the mirror. “I’m sure the Codex
would much rather be with you than with people who think it was written by a madman. Can you imagine what that would be like, knowing some sort of enormous secret and no one believing you?”

Yes
, Elisabeth thought, with a wrench in her chest. For the Codex, this place must be as bad as Leadgate Hospital. Books, too, had hearts, though they were not the same as people’s, and a book’s heart could
be broken: she had seen it happen before. Grimoires that refused to open, their voices gone silent, or whose ink faded and bled across the pages like tears.

The Codex looked as though no one had touched it in decades. Dust coated its chains, and a neglected case of Brittle-Spine had left its leather cracked and graying. It didn’t stir at her arrival, as though the passage of time had reduced
it to an ordinary book.

Just like that, she found she could move again. “I’m here to help you,” she whispered. She gently unhooked its chains from the shelf. The other grimoires began rattling harder than ever, their nasty mutterings turning into desperate pleas as they watched their neighbor gain its freedom, but the Codex remained still, almost lifeless. It didn’t resist her as she tucked it,
chains and all, into a sack tied to her belt.

By the time she climbed back down the ladder, the grimoires had stopped rattling. A profound hush had fallen over the archives. No sinister voices whispered. No ominous figures appeared from the mist. The silence didn’t feel hostile, but Elisabeth wasn’t going to linger. As she strode quickly past the cage from earlier, the pale face inside rotated
to watch her.

“It’s been waiting a long time, that one,”
it whispered.
“So long since the Codex has known a kind touch, an open mind. But I see now that you are not the same as the other humans . . . you are different, somehow . . . yes, a true child of the library. . . .”

Elisabeth’s steps faltered. She wanted to listen to what the grimoire had to say. But right now, she didn’t have time to
chat with books.

A mixture of relief and regret flooded her as she slipped through the gate, leaving the archives behind. She waited until a patrol had passed, then shimmied up the gate to restore the bell, weighed down by the Codex’s awkward bulk at her hip. The grimoire’s words echoed in her mind as she turned to go.
A true child of the library.
What had it meant? How had it known?
The Book
of Eyes had said there was something different about her, too.

She took one step toward the atrium. Before she could take a second, a hand shot from the mist and seized her cloak. With ruthless strength, it dragged her from the center of the hallway and into the same alcove she had hidden in before. But when the hand fell away, she didn’t bolt or reach for Demonslayer. Silas stood in front of
her, luminously pale, crouched between the hooded figures carved into the wall.

So he didn’t abandon me after all
, she thought in wonderment.
But where has he been?

Before she could ask the question aloud, he held a finger to his lips. His yellow eyes flicked toward the hallway.

Lights shone through the mist. Wheels groaned as something heavy rolled along the corridor, accompanied by footsteps.
The sounds swirled eerily, distorted by the stone and the mist, but they had to be coming from the direction of the vault. Elisabeth held her breath as the first warden emerged into view. She had a lantern in one hand, a drawn sword in the other. More wardens followed, a good dozen in all. Near the head of the procession strode Mistress Wick, elegant in her long indigo robes, and a man who could
be none other than the Royal Library’s Director. Medals decorated his blue coat. Gray hair fell loose to his shoulders, concealing some of the brutal scars that slashed across his face. Two fingers were missing from his hand, which rested on the hilt of an enormous broadsword.

“Are you certain this is wise, Marius?” asked Mistress Wick.

“No,” the man replied grimly. “But we cannot take the risk.”

Mistress Wick’s brow furrowed. “If the saboteur’s pattern continues, he is almost certain to strike Harrows. I can’t help but feel we are playing into his hands.”

“Be that as it may, there is no other vault in Austermeer that can contain the Chronicles of the Dead. The saboteur might decide to target the Royal Library at any time. And if he sets loose the Chronicles, every man, woman, and child
in Brassbridge will be dead by sunrise.”

Elisabeth’s skin prickled. She didn’t recognize the title, but at Ashcroft’s dinner, Lady Ingram had mentioned a grimoire written by Baltasar Thorn—a grimoire of necromancy. Only a handful of necromantic texts existed. Were they discussing the same one?

“It’s true that Harrows is best prepared.” Mistress Wick gazed sightlessly ahead. “And Director Hyde?”

“Hyde understands his duty. He accepts that he will die if he must, if it comes to that. If his sacrifice saves thousands.”

The groaning and squeaking of the wheels drowned out their voices. A shape materialized from the darkness, sailing through the mist like a black ship skimming over ghostly waters. It was a cage, a great wheeled cage, which at first appeared to have nothing inside. Then the
lamplight flowed through it, and Elisabeth made out an iron coffer hanging at the center, fixed there by a web of chains stretched taut from each of the cage’s corners.

Her mouth went dry, and a cold finger drew down her spine. The shadow that fell upon the wall between the wardens didn’t belong to a cage. Something else’s shape rippled along the stone, stretching all the way to the ceiling many
stories above, where it crooked sideways to flow across the ribbed arches overhead. Taloned fingers twitched above the wardens as though grasping for them, each claw as long as a sword. Though the shadow was too vast, too distorted by the masonry for Elisabeth to discern its features, something about its form seemed chillingly familiar.

A Class Ten
. The way they spoke of the grimoire, it had
to be. Even as a future warden, she had never expected to see one. Much less that she would stumble across a transfer in progress—the first of its kind in hundreds of years.

Soon, all three of the kingdom’s Class Ten grimoires would be in the vault at Harrows.

TWENTY-TWO

E
LISABETH DUNKED HER mop in the soapy bucket, then slopped it across the floor, pushing suds across the flagstones. Dirty water sloshed ahead, evicting booklice from their hiding places in the molding. She didn’t have
the energy to chase them. As she watched one fat louse skitter in a panicked circle, she paused to lean on the mop. Her eyelids drifted shut. Just one moment. One moment to rest her eyes . . .

“Good heavens, girl! What’s gotten into you?”

Elisabeth jolted awake, her heart seizing as she saw a long shadow stretching up the wall. But she blinked, and it was only Gertrude, her fists resting on
her hips.

“You aren’t carrying on with some young man, are you? Well, let me tell you,” Gertrude said, lifting the heavy bucket and hoisting it down the hallway for her in a rare display of kindness, “he isn’t worth it. Not if he keeps you up at night and makes the rest of your life a misery. There you are, you silly girl.”

Elisabeth nodded mechanically and resumed mopping. Her
limbs felt like
they were made of lead. Grit and sand filled her eyes. If only Gertrude knew the truth.

By the time she’d gotten out of the Royal Library earlier that morning, the city’s bells had been ringing the fifth hour, and the servants of Hemlock Park were already bustling about their work in the predawn dark. Though she had felt perfectly awake in the archives, her two nights of lost sleep came crashing
down on the return journey. Her vision had begun to blur; her steps had weaved like a drunkard’s. When she reached Nathaniel’s house and stumbled on the threshold, she dimly recalled Silas lifting her and carrying her upstairs. He had helped her get ready for work while she dozed on her feet. Then, before she knew it, she was back at the library.

It had taken all her willpower not to skip work
in favor of starting on the Codex. There was nothing more frustrating than spending her morning mopping floors, knowing that Ashcroft could make his next move at any moment. But she couldn’t risk attracting attention. This was only her third day working at the Royal Library, and if she vanished right after the theft of a Class Six grimoire, Mistress Wick would take note. Better to spend her morning
mopping floors than languishing in the dungeon.

So far, she hadn’t noticed any signs that the Codex had been missed. No bells began ringing; no wardens came sprinting past. The morning crept by in a woolly haze of exhaustion.

At noon, Gertrude granted her an hour off and commanded her to take a nap, then return to work prepared to earn her pay. Elisabeth carried her lunch to a room that Parsifal
had shown her in the South Spire. It looked out over the grounds, the broad swaths of green hemmed in by clumps of trees resplendent in shades of red and rusty orange. It was a crisp, sunny autumn day, and the wardens-in-training were out practicing drills. She
cracked a window so that the distant sounds of shouting and swords clashing drifted in on the breeze. The trainees weren’t much older
than Elisabeth. Just weeks ago, she would have easily envisioned herself among them. Now she felt as though she were a ghost haunting her own body, gazing at her life through a dirty glass. She wasn’t certain where she belonged—or, stranger still, what she even wanted. After knowing Nathaniel and Silas, could she truly declare magic her enemy, and go back to the way she had been before?

She was
halfway through lunch, seated at a worktable in the corner, when Parsifal appeared in the doorway. “I thought you might be up here,” he said. “Can I join you?”

When she nodded, he came over to look out the window. “I was too embarrassed to tell you the other day, but I used to come up here because the other apprentices bullied me. That’s what happens when you have a name like Parsifal. I’d fantasize
about how I’d be a warden one day and make them sorry.”

She stopped chewing her apple. “You wanted to become a warden?”

“Don’t look
too
surprised. Of course I did. Every apprentice wants to be one. Sometimes for the right reasons, but mostly because they fancy the idea of being in charge and thrashing other apprentices for a living.”

“That isn’t true,” she protested, but then she thought of
Warden Finch, and had to admit he had a point. “What made you change your mind?”

He shrugged. “I’m not sure. It’s just that there’s more to life than looking grim and stabbing things with swords, isn’t there? There are other ways to make a difference.” He stood there fiddling with his key ring, as if he were working up the courage to say something. As the seconds spun on, she began to feel uneasy.
“Elisabeth,” he blurted out, “I know you told the steward your name is Elisabeth Cross. But are you . . . are you Elisabeth Scrivener, from the papers?”

The blood drained from Elisabeth’s face. Her first name was so common, she thought she had been safe keeping it.

“I won’t tell anyone,” Parsifal hurried to add. “No one else knows. It’s just that I kept thinking about it the other day, when
I gave you the tour, and you knew far too much about grimoires for someone who’d never been inside a Great Library before. And you see, I’d been, ah, following your story in the news.” His ears turned red. “I just—since you defeated a Class Eight Malefict, and all.”

Elisabeth lurched upright. “Has there been anything else about me in the news?”

“No—nothing! That’s why I wanted to . . . it was
as though you completely vanished after the Chancellor’s press release.” He glanced over his shoulder. Then he lowered his voice. “Are you on some sort of secret mission for the Collegium? Have you been sent undercover?”

She stared.

“Right,” he said knowingly, tapping the side of his nose. “You wouldn’t be able to tell me if you were.”

“That’s correct,” she said weakly, wondering how much trouble
it was possible for a person to get into in one lifetime.

He glanced over his shoulder again. “Well—I have some information for you. I overheard two wardens talking this morning. Apparently, the saboteur struck the Royal Library last night.”