Sorcery of Thorns (44 page)

His fist seized the front of her cloak, bunching
the fabric in his huge, scarred fingers, and lifted her from the ground.

“Let go of her,” Nathaniel snapped. There came a scuffle and a rattling of chains; he had lunged for Hyde, and the warden keeping watch had seized him.

The Director paid Nathaniel no mind. His eyes roved over Elisabeth’s face from mere inches away, full of disgust. Shame burned within her—shame as real, as physically painful
as the lash of a switch—but she didn’t look away. The Collegium’s teachings held power over her still; perhaps they always would. She had grown around them like a sapling around a nail, taking the foreign part into the core of herself, no matter how poisonous. But she had not been through everything she had, fought and suffered, to yield to this man’s will like a chastened apprentice.

“You’ve
been corrupted,” he growled.

“If that’s true,” said Elisabeth, “then we’re all corrupted, and have been from the start. You know that the libraries we serve were built by a sorcerer. Have you ever questioned why?”

A scowl answered her. Of course. This was not a man who asked questions. He’d followed orders his entire life until he’d eventually become the person giving them, one identical cog
swapped out for another to keep the library’s machinery running the exact same way it had for centuries.

Even so, she couldn’t give up hope of breaking through to him. “Have you ever seen a summoning circle, Director?” she pressed. “No—I don’t suppose you have, but surely you can imagine—”

“Silence!”

Spittle flecked her face. She choked on her words, stunned into obedience as his other hand
came up, roughly, and seized a hank of her hair. Too late, she understood what he had been looking for, and what he had found. Silver gleamed between his scarred fingers.

“You bear a demon’s mark,” he snarled.

Silence. Hideous silence, in which she heard the rasp of the warden’s indrawn breath.

“Director,” Nathaniel interjected sharply, a note of real panic in his voice, “I speak on my honor
when I say that Miss Scrivener’s mind remains entirely her own, that this situation is far more complicated than you can possibly—” He stopped there with a grunt, as though the warden had kneed him in the stomach to shut him up.

Elisabeth barely heard.
Too late, too late, too late
. If only she had remembered to snip off the silver lock . . .

Hyde’s features twisted in revulsion. With a great
heave, he threw her to the floor, sending her sprawling. She landed poorly, and cried out when the shackles cracked against her spine.

“Elisabeth!”

“I will listen to none of your lies,” the Director ground out. “You are a disgrace to the Collegium, girl. Corrupted. Tainted. Addled by demons.” Each word struck her like a kick to the stomach.

“Have you gone completely mad?” Nathaniel roared.
“She risked her life to come here! She’s trying to
save
you, you imbecile!”

Hyde whirled on him. “And you, no doubt responsible for leading the girl into darkness. I have seen enough of this vile display.” To the warden, he said, “Take them to the dungeon. They cannot be trusted. Only time will tell whether they are telling the truth, or are involved in the sabotage themselves.”

Through a haze
of misery, Elisabeth felt the warden wrestle her upright and march her out the door. Judging by the storm of invectives that followed, Nathaniel was being treated similarly. She had never heard him so angry. The air even held a faint tang of sorcery, as though his rage was nearly sufficient to overcome the iron.

They were taken back down the spiral stair and past the shelves, down a few more
times, and soon she stumbled over the roughly hewn stones of a dungeon passage, averting her eyes from the sputtering torches. Metal clanked; then she was shoved forward into a cell, bare aside from a bucket in the corner and a scattering of straw on the ground. Nathaniel received such a hard push that he went down onto his knees, unable to catch himself with his hands bound. The cell door slammed
shut.

The warden paused before he turned away. He regarded Elisabeth expressionlessly, his hand on the hilt of his sword.

“It isn’t too late to stop this,” she said, gathering her strength. “There’s still time—”

“I don’t speak to traitors,” he interrupted. Then he left without another word, his boots echoing down the corridor into silence.

THIRTY-TWO

F
OR A MOMENT Elisabeth stood frozen, too shocked to react. Then she threw herself against the bars. She spun around and felt at them with her bound hands, scrabbling for a loose piece of metal, crumbling mortar, a rusty
hinge—anything she could use to break them out of the cell. She was stronger than an ordinary person. If only she could find a weak spot—

“Elisabeth, stop.”

Nathaniel might as well have spoken a different language. She gritted her teeth and yanked harder, even though doing so sent a spike of pain through her injured hand. A wildness filled her, taking over her body, the same as when she had
struck down the fiend on the pavilion, or the time she had destroyed all the mirrors in Nathaniel’s house.

After tonight, she would never be able to enter a Great Library again. But that wouldn’t matter if Ashcroft succeeded, and there were no libraries left to speak of. She didn’t know who made her more furious in that moment, Ashcroft or Director Hyde. To think that the world could fall to
ruin due to the
decisions of a single small-minded man in charge—that that was all it took to doom everyone—

“Elisabeth!” Nathaniel exclaimed.

She whirled on him, suddenly remembering, with glorious clarity, that the warden hadn’t confiscated Prendergast’s vial. “Can you use that to free us?” she demanded.

He was breathing hard, staring at her. It took him a moment to grasp the object of her
question. “No,” he said. “Not while I’m wearing iron. Listen,” he went on, but she cut him off, turning back to the bars.

“It was after midnight when we fought Ashcroft,” she said. “The Collegium couldn’t have sent someone any earlier than that. The rider won’t get here for hours.”
We’ll be stuck in a dungeon as the kingdom goes up in flames
.

“Elisabeth. You’re hurting yourself.”

“No, I’m not.”
After that first stab of pain, she’d felt fine.

Nathaniel pushed himself between her and the bars before she could start again. “Look at your hands,” he said, his expression strange.

She twisted to look over her shoulder, raising her hands as best she could within the confines of the shackles. The dim light of the torch down the hall traced over her skin, and she saw that Nathaniel was right.
Blood darkened the bandage on her palm. She had torn two of her fingernails nearly off.

“Sit down.” His shoulder pressed against hers, herding her toward the back of the cell. “Take a moment to rest.”

She stumbled along reluctantly. “We never discovered how Ashcroft is carrying out the attacks. If he’s working with someone, or—” She stopped, disturbed by how little they actually knew. “We have
to be prepared for anything.”

“And you won’t be if you hurt yourself trying to wrestle a cell door. Honestly, Scrivener. We don’t need to escape on our own. Silas will come rescue us.”

Silas
. She had forgotten. “But how will he know we need help?”

“He’ll just know. He always senses when I’ve gotten myself into trouble.” Nathaniel grimaced as he eased himself down the wall, sitting awkwardly
with his bound hands, his shoulder tipped against the stone. “Sometimes I wonder whether he simply assumes I get into trouble by default when he isn’t around to keep me out of it, but I prefer to credit his supernatural intuition.”

Guilt sank claws into her body. Nathaniel should be the one resting, not her. Distressed, she crouched beside him. A moment later, he slid sideways a few inches until
his shoulder rested against hers.

The frenzied energy drained from her muscles, leaving her weary and cold. Their breathing was the only noise in the dungeon’s subterranean silence. She remembered the silence well from Summershall—the oppressiveness of it, the way it played tricks on the mind. She couldn’t imagine how much worse being imprisoned alone in this place would feel, knowing that the
kingdom’s highest security vault lurked somewhere nearby within the labyrinth of stone, its slumbering inhabitants powerful enough to destroy entire cities if released. . . .

Her breath stopped.

“What’s wrong?” Nathaniel asked.

She turned to him. “The grimoire Baltasar wrote—is it called the Chronicles of the Dead?”

He stiffened. His face looked spectral, his eyes dark pools in
the feeble
torchlight. For a moment, she thought he might not respond. Then, finally, he nodded.

Elisabeth didn’t want to tell him, but she had to. “It’s here. Here in Harrows. They transferred it in secret the night I stole the Codex.”

Nathaniel exploded to his feet. “Why didn’t you say anything?”

“I forgot. There was so much going on at the time.” Unhappiness wrung her heart as she watched Nathaniel
turn away, pacing across the cell. She hesitated, then asked, “How much do you know about the Chronicles?”

Nathaniel drew up short, gazing out into the passageway. When he spoke, his voice sounded clipped. “It contains the spell Baltasar used to raise his army, among other necromantic rituals. As to what powers it would manifest as a Malefict, that’s a librarian’s area of study, not mine.” She
sat in silence, waiting. He was holding something back. At last he leaned his forehead against the bars and went on, “My . . . my father read it. To prepare. He wasn’t quite the same when he returned. I was never able to decide exactly what was different about him. Sometimes, I thought it felt like he had brought something back with him. Other times, it was as though he had left a piece of himself
behind.”

She studied Nathaniel’s face, the stark lines of his profile. “I’m sorry.”

“What for?”

Everything
, she thought. “I dragged you into this,” she said. “You wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for me.”

“You’re right. I would be alone in my study, utterly miserable, spending my final hours unaware that demons were about to overrun the world.” He returned and slumped beside her, tipping
his
head back against the stone. “I like this version better. The one with you in it.”

“Even if we die?”

Briefly, he shut his eyes. “The last month has been the happiest time of my life that I can remember since I was twelve, the fiends and the blood drinking and the imminent threat of a demonic apocalypse notwithstanding. I think—I think I was a bit dead already, before you came along.” He turned
his head, taking her in. “It’s an honor to fight by your side, Elisabeth, for however long it lasts. You’ve reminded me to live. That’s worth having something to lose.”

Elisabeth swallowed. She did not have anything to say; she could only think how intolerable it seemed that she had once found his face so cruel. Impulsively, she folded herself up and tucked her head against his chest. After a
pause, he rested his chin on her hair. She sat listening to his heartbeat in the dark.

The moment stretched on, the passage of time impossible to calculate, and her thoughts stretched with it, casting outward. She pictured the Great Library from above, its guttering torches and soaring black towers rising above the wilderness.

How long would it take Silas to find them? She wasn’t certain that
she shared Nathaniel’s confidence. The defenses here were like nothing she had seen before. Even if Silas could scale the sheer wall encircling the building, it was clad in iron and patrolled by wardens. And that was just the beginning; next, he would have to sneak through the library and get past the countless locked iron gates leading to the dungeon.

After waiting for what felt like hours,
she sat up. “You don’t think Silas has been caught, do you?” she asked.

“I should think not,” answered a whispering voice from the corridor, sounding faintly injured. “I am not an amateur.”

“Silas!” they both exclaimed, rushing to the bars.

He sighed as he stepped into view. “Not so loudly, if you please.”

Nathaniel grinned irrepressibly at the sight of him, unearthly in the torchlight, but
pristine and unruffled, no different than he looked on a regular evening at home. “You weren’t hurt?”

Silas waved a hand, dismissing the question as beneath him. “I see the pair of you have wasted no time getting yourselves thrown into prison.” He bent to inspect the door, then drew a warden’s key ring from his pocket, holding the iron carefully within a wadded-up handkerchief. “What is this,
master—the third time I’ve broken you out of a jail cell?”

Nathaniel coughed. “Minor misunderstandings, on both previous occasions,” he assured Elisabeth.

Silas detached one of the keys from the ring and used it to unlock Nathaniel’s shackles. While Nathaniel got to work on Elisabeth’s, Silas selected a second key and tried it on the door. He spoke mildly, his lashes shading his eyes. “At least
you’re wearing clothes this time, master.”