Sorcery of Thorns (40 page)

Silas’s movements slowed, then stilled. His eyes were distant, gazing not at anything in the kitchen, but far into the past.
Firelight flickered across his youthful face, lending his alabaster features the illusion of color. Even that wasn’t enough to make him look mortal. She was aware of the vast gulf between them: his unfathomable age, the inscrutable turning of his thoughts, like the
cogs within a machine.

“First, I learned how to make tea,” he said finally, speaking more to himself than to her. “When humans wish to help, they are forever offering each other tea.”

Elisabeth’s chest squeezed. She pictured the two different Silases: the one in the pentagram, eyes dark and empty with hunger, and the other in the pavilion’s moonlight, a sword through his chest, his features
etched with relief.

She said, “You love him.”

Silas turned away. He set the pot’s lid back in place.

“I didn’t understand before,” she went on quietly. Beneath the table, the napkin twisted in her hands. “Truthfully, I hadn’t thought it possible. It wasn’t until today, when I finally saw why—”
Why you had taken twenty years of Nathaniel’s life
. She didn’t finish.

Silas rose and set the bowl
before her. “Enjoy your supper, Miss Scrivener,” he said. “I will attend to Master Thorn, and see if I can persuade him to take some broth.”

As he turned, his eyes caught on something near her face, and he paused. He reached toward her, his claws very close to her neck, and drew out a lock of her hair. Her heart skipped. Several of the strands shone silver against the chestnut tresses spilling
over his hand. Silas’s mark. It wasn’t as noticeable as Nathaniel’s, but she would still have to hide it—perhaps cut it off in order to avoid suspicion.

“I had nearly forgotten,” Silas murmured, gazing at the silver as though mesmerized. “It is an extraordinary sign of trust for
my master to have allowed you to hear my true name. You are the first person outside House Thorn to know it in centuries.
Now, if you wish, you can summon me. But there is something else you must know. You also have the power to set me free.”

Her mouth had gone dry, despite the soup sending up fragrant tendrils of steam. “What do you mean?”

His eyes shifted to her face. In the firelight they looked more gold than yellow. “Bound in servitude, I exist as a pale imitation of my true self, the greater part of my strength
locked away. You saw a glimpse of what I truly am inside the pentagram—only a glimpse. Were you to free me, I would be unleashed upon this realm as a scourge, a cataclysm beyond reckoning.”

A chill ran down Elisabeth’s spine. Was he asking her to free him? Surely not. But she could think of no other reason why he would tell her this.

“As a child, Master Thorn once proposed the idea,” Silas said,
very softly. “He liked the thought of setting me free, of allowing us to be equals instead of master and servant. I told him not to. I give you the same warning now, though I don’t believe you require it. Do not free me, Miss Scrivener, no matter what comes for us, no matter how unspeakable things become, because I assure you that I am worse.”

He held her gaze a moment longer, then straightened
and inclined his head in a bow. “Good night, miss,” he said, and left her sitting petrified by the fire.

TWENTY-NINE

T
HE NEXT MORNING, Silas brought a copy of the
Brassbridge Inquirer
inside from the stoop. A gargoyle had been gnawing on it, but it was still readable, and her pulse sped to a gallop as she smoothed it flat across the
foot of Nathaniel’s bed, pressing the torn strips back into place.

Ashcroft’s name was everywhere. Her eyes skipped between the front page headlines, unable to decide where to settle first. There was the column on the left:
DEADLY DUEL THROWS ROYAL BALL INTO CHAOS
. And then on the right:
MAGISTERIUM SCRAMBLES TO INSTATE NEW CHANCELLOR
. But the bold text crowding the page’s center was by far the
most exciting:
OBERON ASHCROFT, CHANCELLOR OF MAGIC, IMPLICATED IN GREAT LIBRARY SABOTAGE
.

She bent over it and began to read.
“Due to his multiple attempts to silence Elisabeth Scrivener, a key witness in the Great Library investigation, Chancellor Ashcroft is believed to be connected to the recent string of attacks. He is wanted for attempted murder and the illegal summoning of lesser demons.
The Magisterium has assembled a perimeter around his estate, where he is believed to be hiding, but as of yet have not been able to penetrate the wards. . . .”

She trailed off, remembering what Ashcroft had told her when she’d first arrived: his wards were powerful enough to repel an army. Perhaps the Magisterium hoped he would surrender, but Elisabeth couldn’t see that happening. Ashcroft wouldn’t
go easily. And on the pavilion, he had almost spoken as though it no longer mattered whether people found out about him—that if his plan succeeded, its results would make all of this irrelevant.

Quietly, Nathaniel moaned. She looked up, but he hadn’t woken. He was twisting in the throes of fever, his cheeks flushed, his hair damp with sweat. She watched him turn his head and mutter something
inaudible against the pillow. His loose nightshirt clung to the lines of his body, but had slipped off one shoulder, revealing a glistening collarbone.

She rose and wrung out one of the cloths in the basin nearby. When she folded it and placed it on his forehead, she felt the heat radiating from his skin even before her hand drew near. He winced as though the wet cloth were painful. Tentatively,
she stroked his damp curls, and at her touch, he sighed and went still. His breathing eased.

Something drew tight inside her, like a violin string awaiting the touch of a bow. Looking down at him, her heart ached with a song that did not have words or notes or form, but strained nonetheless to be given voice—a sensation that was not unlike suffering, for it seemed too great for her body to contain.
It was much like how she had felt on the pavilion, when they had almost kissed.

She withdrew to the window, where she pressed her burning
cheeks against the cold panes. Outside, snowflakes fell glittering past the glass. The snow had begun overnight, shortly after Nathaniel had woken screaming and delirious from a nightmare, and then subsided shivering in Silas’s arms. Unable to sleep afterward,
Elisabeth had been awake to see the first flakes drift down. It had fallen steadily ever since. Now a thick coat blanketed the gargoyles, who shook themselves occasionally, sending up sparkling puffs of white. A shimmering layer of ice glazed the branches of the thorn bushes and the rooftops across the street. She gazed in wonder at the scene. She had never known a winter storm to arrive so early
in the year.

With her face pressed to the window, she became aware of a distant noise, a sort of buzzing sound—shouting, she realized, distorted to a tinny vibration by the leaded glass. She frowned and squinted through the snow. The scene that resolved itself was so ridiculous that it made her blink, wondering whether her imagination had gotten the best of her.

A man was stuck in the hedge,
his arms and legs tangled in thorn branches, shouting for help as a lion-shaped gargoyle prowled toward him. Her eyes widened when she saw that he was wearing a postman’s uniform. She tightened her dressing gown and pelted down the stairs.

The front door sprang open without a touch. A blast of cold air struck her, flinging snowflakes into the foyer. She barely noticed the frigid shock as her
bare feet sank deep into the snow.

“Don’t hurt him!” she cried to the gargoyle, which was poised to spring, its stone tail lashing back and forth. The snarl fell from its whimsical face—apparently carved by someone who had never actually seen a lion—as she approached and laid a hand on its shoulder.

“Thank god you’re here,” the postman sputtered. “I didn’t realize that blasted hedge would come
alive. Sorcerers, I tell you. Why don’t they use magic to collect their packages, and save us ordinary folk the trouble?”

“I don’t think they’re practical enough,” she said as she helped him free his limbs from the branches. “The last time I saw Nathaniel conjure an object, it nearly fell on my head and killed me. Thank you.” She turned the package he had handed her around, and her heart leaped
at the name scrawled above the return address: Katrien Quillworthy.

The postman waved her off. He was already beating a hasty retreat through the passage that had opened in the hedge. “Just tell that sorcerer of yours to stop making it snow. It’s falling over the entire city, you know, not just in Hemlock Park. At this rate, the river will freeze solid by nightfall. Half the houses on my route
are snowed in, traffic’s a nightmare. . . .”

She almost protested, but then she thought of the way Nathaniel had been muttering incoherently ever since his nightmare, shivering with violent bouts of chills. This wouldn’t be the first time he’d cast spells in his sleep.

She looked up at the milk-white sky with a renewed sense of awe. Snowflakes spiraled downward, settling on her hair and eyelashes.
Silence had enveloped the normally bustling street, the quiet so profound that she could almost hear the ice crystals chiming in the clouds: a high, chalky, clear ringing, as though someone were tapping the highest keys on a piano far above the rooftops.
Nathaniel did this,
she thought.

In her head, she repeated what the postman had called him.
That sorcerer of yours
. Was that what everyone thought
now? Suddenly she felt oddly clumsy, like the world had shifted a few degrees on its axis. Clutching the package, she hurried back inside.

She tore off the wrappings in the study, and held her breath as she unfolded the beautifully drawn map of Austermeer within. She had forgotten it was on its way. Katrien had put it in the post almost two weeks ago, at the start of their meetings, after she
had found it gathering dust in one of the Great Library’s storage rooms. They had always planned to hang it above the fireplace.

Elisabeth stood on her toes and pinned it up. Standing back, she saw that Katrien had circled Ashcroft’s attacks in red ink. Knockfeld. Summershall. Fettering. Frowning, she scavenged a pen and inkwell from the desk and circled Fairwater, too. With the four libraries
marked off, Harrows represented the fifth and final target of a near complete, almost perfect circle around the kingdom.

Slowly, Elisabeth sat down. The pattern reminded her of something. A half-formed idea itched at the back of her mind, but it slipped away whenever she reached for it, always just outside her grasp. Her eyes traced the map over and over. Beside the Royal Library at the very
center of the circle, Katrien had drawn a question mark. They had never figured out whether Ashcroft planned to target Brassbridge after Harrows.

For a moment her surroundings receded and she was back in Ashcroft Manor, raising her champagne glass in a toast. She heard her own voice alongside the other guests, reciting after Ashcroft,
To progress
. Ghostly laughter echoed in her ears. What was
she missing? Frustrated, she dug her knuckles against her eyes until bursts of color filled her vision.

She shouldn’t be sitting safely in Nathaniel’s house. She should be out there doing something, fighting back against Ashcroft. But this wasn’t a battle she could win alone. As the minutes ticked on, all she could do was wait.

•  •  •

Nathaniel’s fever broke the next morning. When Silas changed
his bandages, the strips of linen came away clean. The wounds beneath no longer looked raw and angry, but had healed overnight to the shiny, healthy pink of weeks-old scars.

“It is the doing of the wards,” Silas explained, seeing Elisabeth’s expression as he prepared to remove Nathaniel’s stitches. “Magic has been laid down in the house’s stones by Master Thorn’s ancestors for hundreds of years.
Spells of protection and healing, intended to guard each heir.”

The snow tapered off to a fine glittering dust as the afternoon wore on, and none too soon; the drift on the windowsill was already eighteen inches deep, burying the gargoyle that had stationed itself on the roof outside. Quiet muffled the house, as though the walls had been stuffed with feather-down. Out of tasks to do, Silas transformed
into a cat and slept curled up by Nathaniel’s feet, his nose tucked beneath his tail. Elisabeth watched the two of them drowsily, surprised to discover that Silas did sleep. She had always imagined him staying awake through the night polishing the silver or prowling Brassbridge’s streets on mysterious errands. Did he have his own room in the manor? She had never seen any sign of where he
kept his clothes. Her eyelids drooped. One day, she would ask Nathaniel. . . .

She opened her eyes some time later to find that it had already grown dark. Flames crackled in the fireplace, and Silas had tucked a blanket over her legs. Her breath stopped when her gaze traveled to Nathaniel. He was awake. He had pulled himself up against the headboard and was staring into the shadows of the hall,
one hand resting loosely on his bandaged chest, his gray eyes unreadable in the light of the candles arranged around the room. When she shifted, he looked at her
and drew in a ragged breath. Anguish shone in his eyes.