Sorcery of Thorns (48 page)

Fragments of sound. Motion. A voice. “Elisabeth.” The voice belonged to Nathaniel, tight with barely controlled emotion. “Elisabeth, can you hear me?”

His face hovered over her, a pale, blurry smear against the dark. Soot marked his cheek, and green embers swirled through the night behind him. He was cradling her with one arm,
the other gripping her hand, squeezing it desperately. Her breath caught when she saw her fingers, shriveled and leached of color. But as she watched, the Malefict’s touch receded. Sensation returned to her hand in a rush of pins and needles.

Nathaniel helped her up when she struggled to stand. Around them, devastation. Emerald flames licked over the battlements and danced along the empty uniforms
scattered across the rampart. A lone cannon boomed, and a shriek reverberated through her ears—the Malefict. Nearby, the Director was barking orders, trying to rally the remaining wardens.

“I’m all right,” Elisabeth said, adjusting her grip on Demonslayer. “I’m ready.”

Nathaniel had a peculiar look on his face. He glanced meaningfully at Silas, then took a step backward. A protest rose to her
lips even before he spoke. “I’m going to draw it away—”

“No.”

“I have to. I’m the only person who isn’t affected by its magic.”

“Wait,” she said. “You shouldn’t. The voice—you might not be able to resist it.”

“Don’t worry. I have an idea. There isn’t time to explain, but . . .” He was already turning, a fiery whip unraveling between his hands, its light transforming him into a tall, slim silhouette.
The last thing she saw was a hint of a smile. “Trust me.”

Ahead of him, the Malefict finished raking its claws through a tower and turned, chunks of masonry tumbling down its
shoulders. Though it resembled the moss spirit they had seen in the Blackwald, the bark that made up its hide was darkened and decayed, split in places to reveal an inner green glow. Nathaniel looked impossibly small walking
toward it, his whip a mere thread of light.

Elisabeth wasn’t going to stand by and watch. She shoved Demonslayer through her belt and dashed toward the nearest cannon, its previous operator nothing but a uniform and a pile of dust. Sweeping the remains aside, she climbed onto the gunner’s seat.

The device was a far cry from the medieval-style cannons she had read about in books. Like the rest
of the Great Library’s mechanisms, it was a complex instrument riddled with gears and pistons. She seized a wheel and experimentally wrenched it to the left, its metallic chill biting into her fingers. Machinery rumbled to life, shaking the seat so violently that only her grip on the wheel prevented her from being flung off. With a protesting groan, the cannon’s barrel swung several feet to the
left. Now, up. She heaved on an adjacent wheel, and the barrel rose. All that remained was a lever beside her hip. That had to be what fired the cannon.

Nathaniel’s whip spun out, readying to strike. But he didn’t follow through. He stood still, gazing upward as the Malefict stooped over him. Her heart skipped a beat, remembering the transfixed expression on his face in the vault.
Move,
she urged.
Fight
.

In the silence, the forest exhaled a breath. Wind swirled over the rampart, fetid with decay, as though issued from the mouth of a corpse. Boughs bent. Branches creaked. And a voice whispered,
“Thorn . . .”

“Don’t listen to it!” Elisabeth screamed. Her pulse throbbed
against the collar of her coat as she rammed the lever down.

A rattling sound came from within, like chain links winching
upward. The barrel shuddered, its mouth glowing red-hot. Then the cannon bucked in recoil, rattling her teeth and numbing her arm to the elbow. Somehow, she didn’t let go.

There came a thin, high whistling, and then a thud. She stood, clutching the wheel for balance. Green light roiled around a metal ball embedded in the Malefict’s chest. Elisabeth knew the cannonball must be huge, but against
the monster’s colossal frame, it appeared no larger than a marble.

The Malefict had barely reacted. She began to wonder whether this had been a foolish idea. Then, the cannonball exploded.

The Malefict shrieked as splinters of its barklike skin went flying. A white cloud puffed around the crater left behind—
salt
. The cannonball was an iron-coated salt round.

Far below, Nathaniel shook his head
as though trying to clear it of cobwebs. His shoulders tensed, and he swept his whip through the air, the flame sizzling as it wrapped around one of the Malefict’s wrists. Jerking the monster off balance, he raised his other hand, which let loose a volcanic blast of green fire. Thrown back, the Malefict caught itself by clamping its claws down on a battlement. As the smoldering embers fell, it
regarded Nathaniel at eye level, near enough to reach out and seize him.

“I know you,”
it whispered instead.
“Son of House Thorn, master of death.”

“No,” Nathaniel croaked, stepping back.

“Why do you hide your nature? Deny the call in your blood?”

Terror lanced through Elisabeth’s chest. “Nathaniel!” she shouted. He didn’t react, didn’t even seem to hear her.

“I see,”
the Malefict said.
“You wish to spare the girl you love.
But you know the truth of magic. The greatest power springs only from suffering.”
It drew closer to him, its spindle-toothed mouth seeping smoke.
“Join me,”
it whispered.
“Master of death, become the darkness that haunts you. Kill the girl.”

Nathaniel’s arm drifted to his side, the whip fizzling out. Slowly, he turned. Elisabeth didn’t recognize the expression
on his face. His coat was torn, and his eyes were rimmed in red.

Mouth dry, she spun the wheels, angling the cannon into a new position. She slammed the lever down again. As Nathaniel strode toward her, flames rippled over his shoulders and down his arms like the blossoming of some strange, translucent flower.

The cannon coughed. Stone sprayed several yards in front of the Malefict, a miss.
She couldn’t aim directly at its head without risking hitting Nathaniel.

Green flashes lit the rampart. The sky above them roiled, a violent, churning mass of storm clouds. Surrounded by a corona of fire, he looked barely human, untouchable.

Elisabeth’s hands trembled on the controls. “Nathaniel, stop!”

He wasn’t listening. As he continued to advance, lightning streaked through the sky, arcing
between the peaks of the mountains. The earth rumbled as snow cascaded down a nearby peak, the avalanche boiling over the trees that dotted the slope with enough force to level a village. Elisabeth had never seen such raw destruction. Worse, Nathaniel didn’t appear to even be aware that he was doing it.

A terrible thought struck her. She could adjust the cannon’s aim. The cannonballs were made
of iron; he wouldn’t be able to stop one if she fired it at him. If that was what it took—if that was the only way to end this, to keep him from becoming another Baltasar—

A cool touch stayed her hand. “Wait,” Silas said. His hair
had come free, flowing in the wind. She didn’t understand how he could look so calm.

Nathaniel was almost upon them. Sorcery glazed his eyes. Flames rolled off his
body like a cloak. In a moment, it would be too late to stop him.

“Elisabeth.” His voice echoed unrecognizably with power. He held out his hand. The fire billowed back, away from his sleeve, so she could take it.

Trust me
, he had said.

She remembered the day that they had met, when he had offered her his hand, and she had hesitated, certain he would hurt her. But the horrors she had imagined,
those evil deeds—he had never been capable of them. Not Nathaniel, her Nathaniel, who was tortured by the darkness within him only because he was so good.

The Malefict’s words repeated in her mind.
The girl you love.
The truth of it rang through her like the tolling of a bell.

Slowly, she climbed down from the cannon. Heat shimmered in the air, but she felt no pain. It was as though she had
donned a suit of armor, become invincible. She stepped toward the emerald flames, and they parted around her, curving away from her body like cresting waves. Nathaniel’s hand waited, outstretched.

Their fingers met. He closed his eyes. That was when she saw it: Prendergast’s vial hung empty at his chest.

The Malefict howled in fury, sensing the trick too late. It surged toward them, mouth agape,
its head looming closer and closer, fetid breath washing over them, as the magic seized them and Harrows spun away.

THIRTY-FIVE

E
LISABETH, NATHANIEL, AND Silas materialized in an unfamiliar parlor, in the middle of a group of women enjoying their evening tea. At least they
were
enjoying it, until the severed head of the Chronicles landed on their
coffee table.

It arrived with a crash that flattened the table’s claw-foot legs and rattled the porcelain in the parlor’s mirrored cabinets. Decapitated at the neck, its antlers shorn off, it looked like a boulder-sized lump of charcoal. Staring at it in shock, Elisabeth supposed that it had come near enough Nathaniel to get seized by the spell. But evidently Prendergast’s magic hadn’t been able
to transport something as large as the Malefict’s entire body between dimensions—only the head had come along with them. As its muscles relaxed, its tongue lolled from its mouth, glistening on the carpet like a giant slug.

A teaspoon dropped. The women sat stunned, ink splattered across the fronts of their silk dresses. None of them said a word as the head began to disintegrate, spouting embers
onto the wainscoting.

“Excuse me, ladies,” said Nathaniel. He bowed, which dislodged a trickle of soot from his hair. Then his eyes rolled up, and he collapsed face-first onto the floor.

Shrieks filled the air. Teacups went flying. As the women fled from the room, tripping over the carpet’s fringe, Elisabeth dropped to her knees at Nathaniel’s side and rolled him over onto her lap. Soot blackened
every inch of his exposed skin. His charred coat was still lightly smoking, and the fire had singed his eyebrows. At some point he had gotten a cut on his forehead—she didn’t know when, or how, but it had covered his face in blood. She pressed her fingers to his throat, and relaxed when she felt the steady rhythm of his pulse.

“
That
was his plan?” she asked Silas, pointing at the Malefict’s head.
As though being pointed at were the last straw, it slumped into a pile of ashes.

Gazing down at Nathaniel, Silas sighed. “Truth be told, miss, I suspect he did not possess a plan, and was simply making it up as he went along.”

“Ugh. Where are we? Has anyone a clue?” Nathaniel opened one gray eye, startlingly pale against his soot- and blood-covered face. He looked around dubiously, as though
he wasn’t sure whether he wanted to wake up yet, and then slowly opened the other, focusing on Elisabeth’s face. “Hello, you menace.”

She laughed, weak with relief. As she stroked his hair back from his sticky forehead, an unbearable tenderness filled her. “I love you, too,” she said.

Nathaniel’s brow furrowed. He turned his face to the side and blinked several times. “Thank god,” he said finally.
“I don’t think unrequited love would have suited me. I might have started writing poetry.”

Elisabeth continued stroking his hair. “That doesn’t sound so bad.”

“I assure you, it would have proven more unpleasant for everyone than necromancy.”

She laughed again, helplessly. A weightless, sparkling joy filled her, like the sunlight of a spring morning after the rain had stopped and the clouds
went scudding away, and the world felt new and clean and bright, transformed into a better version of itself, heartbreaking in its beauty. The immensity of the feeling made her ribs hurt. She swiped her knuckles across her cheek, conscious of Silas watching them.

Nathaniel looked at her sidelong. “Scrivener, I know I cut a devilishly handsome figure lying here on the floor all covered in blood—which
I hear some girls find quite appealing, strangely enough, and if you’re one of them I’m not going to judge—but please stop crying. It’s only a flesh wound. I’ll be back to fighting evil any moment now.”

She sniffed loudly. “I’m not crying. My eyes are watering. You smell awful.”

“What? I never smell awful. I smell like sandalwood and masculine allure.” He lifted his head to smell himself, and
gagged. “Never mind.”

“Perhaps you might consider not setting yourself on fire next time, master,” Silas said, pointedly.

A clatter came from the hall. A pair of footmen crowded the doorway, one of them clutching an antique sword that looked as though it had been torn down from a mantelpiece, and was now trembling violently in his hands. “Surrender peacefully, sorcerer,” he declared, after an
encouraging look from the other, “and we won’t hurt you.”

Nathaniel squinted at him. “You look familiar. Are we in Lady Ingram’s town house?”

I hope so
, Elisabeth thought. The ink stain on the carpet looked permanent.