Sorcery of Thorns (52 page)

Instead the hand came crashing down on emptiness; she had seized him by the arm and dragged him away. As though he were a bundle of rubbish,
she tossed him aside.

“Why?” he asked, rolling over, looking at her standing over him much as he had the Archon an instant before. “Why did you—?”

“I wanted to see your face when you realized you were wrong,” she said. “That everything you’ve done, all the people you’ve hurt and killed, was for nothing.”

Behind him, the Archon’s claws raked through the marble. Its light stretched higher, almost
touching the dome, blotting out half the atrium as it spread its wings. Dwarfed by its immensity, Ashcroft looked impossibly small. Sweat had broken across his brow; his throat worked. “Are you satisfied, Miss Scrivener?”

Elisabeth had desired this moment so greatly: his confidence shattered, his power stripped away. But now that she had it, she realized it was worth nothing to her at all.

“No,” she said, and turned.

His face contorted. He scrabbled after her, collapsing to a
crawl, his eyes blank and unseeing. “You must believe me. I need you to understand. Everything that I did, I did for the good of the kingdom. Please—”

She kicked him, and he went sprawling with an anguished cry.

Not caring what happened to him next, she went to Nathaniel. His eyelashes fluttered at her approach,
but he didn’t wake. She crouched, taking his hand, and saw that Silas still held the other, clasped between his own as though it were spun from glass.

Light spilled over Nathaniel, reflecting brighter and brighter from the floor around him. She supposed the Archon would kill them at any moment, but all she could think was that his hand felt terribly cold. “Is he in any pain?”

Silas spoke without
looking away from Nathaniel’s face. “No. The end, when it comes, will be swift for you both. I imagined it would be better this way—for you to fight together, and to fall quickly, rather than enduring the death of your world without hope.” He paused to smooth the lapel of Nathaniel’s coat, then to carefully straighten his collar. As though it were an ordinary evening, Elisabeth thought, making
him presentable to step outside. “I apologize for taking such a liberty.”

Tears flooded her eyes, and her throat tightened. “What will happen to you?”

He betrayed himself with the slightest hesitation. Finally he said, “It matters not, miss.”

“It does.” She reached out to cup Silas’s cheek. The evening’s trials had left her hand filthy, hideous against his remote perfection. But he held very
still, and allowed her to touch him, and she was surprised to discover that he felt human, not like a statue carved from alabaster.

A strange serenity came over her. There was one thing left
that she could do. This was the end of the world, and they had nothing left to lose. “Thank you. I just wanted to say that, before . . .”

His eyes flicked to her beneath his lashes. She saw the moment that
he understood. She had thought him still before, but now he turned to stone. Though his expression didn’t seem to change, there welled up in his eyes both wretchedness and hope, and a hunger so bottomless she could feel it yawning beneath his skin, like the devouring dark of a night without stars. The light had grown blinding; the Archon was almost upon them now.

“Silariathas.” The Enochian name
poured up her throat and rolled over her tongue like fire. “Silariathas,” she said, her voice raw with power, “I free you from your bonds of servitude.”

His pupils swelled, black swallowing up the gold. That was all she had a chance to see before the light grew so bright that she had to avert her eyes. A pulse traveled through the library, stirring her hair, as though a stone had been dropped
onto the surface of reality, its ripples flowing outward. She gripped Nathaniel’s hand, waiting to die. But a second passed, and then another—and she felt nothing.

Nathaniel’s eyelids cracked open. The silver had bled from his hair. Groggily, he tried to focus. “Silas?” he managed.

Slowly, Elisabeth looked up. For a heartbeat she thought she had died after all, and was dreaming. Silas stood
over them, one arm raised, blocking the Archon’s light.
Not Silas. Silariathas
. Horns curled from his scalp, white as porcelain, their spirals ending in wicked points. The angles of his face had grown unsettling and cruel, their delicate beauty filed to inhuman sharpness. His ears were pointed; his claws had lengthened, thin and razor sharp.

He did not seem to have noticed the Archon. He was
staring
down at Nathaniel, black-eyed and starving. “You dare address me so?” he hissed. With a contemptuous jerk of his arm, he flung the Archon’s hand away. Then he rounded on Nathaniel, bending over him. He was shaking; his hair trembled. He said in a horrible rasping whisper, “Are you aware of what I am—what I will do to your world, as its people flee screaming across the broken earth?”

Nathaniel didn’t look afraid. Perhaps he was too insensible to feel fear, which would explain what he did next: he took Silariathas’s clawed hand and stroked it clumsily, as though Silariathas were the one in need of comfort, in all his immortal glory, and not the other way around. “It’s all right, Silas,” he said.

“Do not speak to me, insect,” Silariathas spat, wrenching free of Nathaniel’s touch.
His fingers snapped around Nathaniel’s neck, his claws pricking the tender skin as they squeezed. When a bead of blood appeared, he was the one who reacted, not Nathaniel—a shudder ran through him, all the way down his spine. Nathaniel weakly attempted a smile.

“If you kill me, it’s all right.”

Silariathas froze. His fingers slackened. “You are a fool,” he grated, through lips that barely moved.

Nathaniel didn’t seem to have heard. He was losing consciousness too rapidly. “It’s all right,” he repeated. “I know it hurts. I know.” And as he slipped away, he mumbled, “I forgive you.”

The silence afterward was so profound that Elisabeth heard nothing but the silvery lament of the grimoires, rising above them in streams. Even the Archon had gone still; it gazed down, head tilted, as though
this was something even it had never seen before.

Silariathas looked up. Elisabeth followed his gaze and saw a grimoire she recognized passing over them, a withered face, the glint of a needle. They watched without speaking as it ascended to burn itself to ashes—a gruesome, tortured, deadly thing, monstrous but not beyond love, capable in the end of this final act of redemption. What Silariathas
thought of it, Elisabeth could not tell. There was nothing in his devouring black eyes that she recognized. It wasn’t until he looked back to Nathaniel that she glimpsed a hint of his other self: the being who had watched over Nathaniel as he grew from a boy to a young man, who had put him to bed and tended his wounds and made him tea, fixed his cravat, held his hand through every nightmare. Silas
shone through the cold, cruel mask like light flaring behind a glass.

He bent over Nathaniel. Elisabeth swallowed. But he only brought Nathaniel’s hand to his lips and kissed it, just as he had done after his summoning, even though agony wracked his face to do so, the hunger struggling every second for control. Then he put Nathaniel’s hand down. He stood and faced the Archon.

“Silas,” Elisabeth
whispered.

Pain rippled across his features at the sound of her voice. He closed his eyes, driving the hunger away. “I am not its equal,” he rasped. “I cannot fight it and win.” Every word seemed to strain him. “But I have strength enough to end the ritual, and force it back to the Otherworld.”

She couldn’t breathe. Her lungs felt tight as a drum, locked around an unvoiced cry. She saw again
the sword through Silas’s heart. Demons could not die in the human realm. But if he went into the circle, and left them—

“What will Nathaniel do?” she choked.

Silas paused even longer. Finally he said, in a voice almost like his own, “I fear he must learn to put his clothes on the right
side out. He will have twenty more years now to master the art. Let us hope that time is sufficient.” He took
a step forward. “Take care of him, Elisabeth.”

Tears streamed down her cheeks. She jerked her chin in a nod. Somehow, Silas looked calm now, his face transformed by relief. Faintly, he was smiling. She remembered what she had thought upon seeing Silas smile for the first time: she had never seen anyone so beautiful. She had never known such beauty was possible.

Understanding at last what Silas
meant to do, the Archon blazed to greater heights, sweeping its wings through the wreckage. Fragments of marble rained down around them. Tiles shattered, and the dome’s glass sparkled like snow as it fell. But she saw only Silas’s face, radiant, as he walked into the light.

EPILOGUE

E
LISABETH FIDGETED IN her seat. Under different circumstances, the wait would be making her sleepy. Sun poured in through the window, glancing from the Collegium’s bronze spires, casting a warm rectangle across her chair.
Snores issued from a grimoire resting open on a stand in the corner, who occasionally woke up and wheezed dyspeptically before lapsing back into slumber. The room smelled of parchment and beeswax. But this office belonged to Mistress Petronella Wick, and Elisabeth was wound as tightly as a spring.

She nearly leaped from her skin when a loud, sucking
whoosh
broke the near silence, followed by
a thump and a rattle. Just a delivery via the system of pneumatic tubes, arriving in the office from somewhere else in the Royal Library. Even so, her knuckles turned white. If she kept gripping the armrests like this, her fingers would go numb.

“Are you all right?” Katrien asked.

Elisabeth jerked her head up and down in what she hoped passed for a nod.

“If they’d brought us here to clap us
in irons,” Katrien said, “I’m fairly certain they would have done it already.”

Elisabeth glanced at her friend. Katrien was wearing a set of pale blue apprentice’s robes, her greatkey hanging against her chest. She was short enough that the chair’s edge hit her below the knee, forcing her legs to stick out in front of her, a pose that made her look uncharacteristically innocent.

“But it never
hurts to come prepared,” she went on, craning her neck to inspect the desk’s contents with interest. She was particularly fascinated by Mistress Wick’s paperwork, which wasn’t written in ink or regular script, but rather embossed with rows of bumpy-looking dots. “I snuck in a set of lock picks and a metal file just in case. They’re in my left stocking.”

“Katrien! What if someone finds them?”

“Then I suppose we’ll have to resort to the second file. But I have to warn you, that one will be less pleasant for you to retrieve if I’m incapacitated. It’s in my—”

Katrien clapped her mouth shut as the doorknob turned. Mistress Wick entered, resplendent in her deep indigo robes. The sunlight glinted on her key-and-quill pin as she took a seat opposite them behind her desk. Though her eyes never
shifted in their direction, Elisabeth nevertheless experienced the same sensation of scrutiny as last time.

Last time, when she had sat in this office and lied.

“Elisabeth Scrivener. Katrien Quillworthy. I thought it would be most efficient to deal with both of you at the same time.”

What did that mean? Elisabeth shot Katrien a look of pure terror, which was met with a shrug.

“First,” Mistress
Wick said, “I would like to update you on the situation with the scrying mirror. I appreciate your candor, Scrivener, in bringing the artifact to the Collegium’s attention.”

In the aftermath of the Archon’s summoning, Elisabeth had been too exhausted to do anything but babble out the truth—all of it—in one long, barely interrupted stream to the wardens who had dug her out of the atrium’s rubble.
Shortly thereafter, the scrying mirror had been confiscated from Nathaniel’s attic. Now a stab of panic set her heart pounding. For the first time, she realized that her honesty might have gotten Katrien in trouble, too.

Relief flooded her as Mistress Wick went on, “Based on my strong recommendation, the Preceptors’ Committee has decided to omit the mirror from both of your records. There are
some in the Collegium who would not look kindly on your use of a forbidden magical artifact, even in pursuit of saving the kingdom. I would prefer the information to never fall into their hands.” She turned her head slightly. “Now, Quillworthy.”

Katrien sat up straighter. “Yes, Mistress Wick?” she said, with a politeness that instinctively caused Elisabeth to brace herself, as that particular
tone, coming from Katrien, had once preceded a firecracker going off in Warden Finch’s face. This time, however, it seemed as though Katrien meant it sincerely.

“I’m pleased to share that the Committee has also approved the transfer of your apprenticeship from Summershall to Brassbridge, also on my recommendation. Once this meeting has finished, you will be shown to your new accommodations in
the Royal Library.”

Elisabeth barely kept herself from laughing out loud in delight. She and Katrien shared a grin. From now on, they would only be a fifteen-minute walk away.

“My suggestion to the Committee was influenced not only by your efforts against Ashcroft,” Mistress Wick continued, “but also your bravery in exposing ex-Director Finch’s crimes. Had
you not investigated his activities,
it is possible he would never have been caught.”