Sorcery of Thorns (13 page)

E
LISABETH WOKE SURROUNDED by sunlight. Though she had no idea where she was, a peaceful sense of well-being enveloped her. Silken sheets whispered against her bare skin as she stirred. When she turned her head, her bright, blurry
environment resolved itself into a bedroom. The walls were papered with a pattern of lilacs, and the delicate furniture looked as though it might break if someone accidentally leaned on it too hard, which Elisabeth supposed meant that it was expensive.

She wasn’t alone in the room. Porcelain chimed soothingly nearby. She listened for a moment, then sat up in bed, a down comforter tumbling from
her shoulders. Puzzled, she inspected herself. She had on her spare nightgown, and a bandage had been neatly applied to her arm. Not only that—someone had bathed her and brushed her hair.

Her head throbbed. A light touch revealed a knot on her scalp, sore beneath her fingertips. Perhaps that explained why she couldn’t remember a thing. Across the room, Silas stood with his back to her, presently
in the act of lifting the lid from
a sugar tin. He was dressed, as usual, in his emerald livery, and appeared to be making her a cup of tea.

“Where am I?” she asked.

“You are in a guest room of my master’s house,” Silas replied. “We thought it safest to convey you here after the attack.”

The attack.
Her gaze fixed on his spotless white gloves, and her blood turned to ice.

Last night came rushing
back: the snarls and the chaos, the lightning and the rain, and along with it her memories of the journey to Brassbridge, the ones he had somehow suppressed. She now clearly remembered the way he had caught her in the woods outside the inn; how he had made her forget that his eyes were yellow, not once but many times. Whenever she had drawn close to understanding what he was, he had turned
her thoughts away.

“You’re a demon,” she said. Her voice sounded clumsy in the delicate room, too loud, out of place among the lilacs and fine china.

Silas tilted his head, acknowledging the obvious. “Do you take sugar in your tea, miss?”

Elisabeth didn’t answer. She slid to the opposite side of the bed, as far away as she could get, and seized a chamberstick from the bedside table. It was
heavy, fashioned from solid silver. “I know what you are,” she warned. “You can’t make me forget again.”

He stirred the tea one last time and fastidiously placed the spoon on a folded cloth. “As it happens, you’re correct. You have a surprising resistance to my influence; I doubt I could have continued much longer.”

“What do you mean, your influence?” she demanded. “What did you do to me? And
why?”

Silas turned. He merely looked at her, trembling and clutching a chamberstick, a single startled reflex away from hurling it at his head. After a few seconds of meaningful silence, Elisabeth was forced to admit that he had a point.

“Humans,” he sighed. “Such excitable creatures. At least you didn’t scream, and I thank you for it. Some demons enjoy the sound of mortals shrieking and pleading
for their lives, but I have never possessed a taste for melodrama, unless it is safely confined to the opera.” His eyes moved to the chamberstick. “That won’t do you any good, by the way.”

Slowly, Elisabeth lowered it to the bedspread. She watched Silas cross the room. When he set the tray down beside her, she flinched, but he withdrew without touching her, standing with his hands politely folded
behind his back. It was the same way he’d stood in the thicket. She wondered if he was trying to make himself look less threatening, which was such a peculiar thought that she bleated out a laugh.

“What is it?” he inquired.

“I didn’t know that demons could make themselves look like us. I expected . . .” She wasn’t sure what she had expected. Horns and scales, like a fiend. She certainly hadn’t
expected him to be
beautiful
. “Something else,” she finished.

A shadow of a smile crossed his face. His hair wasn’t powdered, as she had first assumed. Everything about him was the flawless white of marble, down to the long pale lashes that shaded his sulfurous eyes. “Highborn demons such as I are able to change our shape according to our masters’ wishes. In society I appear as a white cat, but
when at home or running errands, Master Thorn prefers me in this form. Otherwise I am, as you say, ‘something else.’ ”

A chill passed over Elisabeth. The Lexicon’s words of warning
came back to her. The grimoire had made it sound as though merely speaking to a demon was dangerous. But after everything Nathaniel had done to bring her to the city safely, she didn’t think he would leave her alone
with Silas if he posed a threat. She recalled the night in the Blackwald, remembering the quiet sound of Silas’s laughter, the way the two of them had joked like old friends.

“Please.” Silas’s voice interrupted her uneasy thoughts. “Won’t you drink your tea?”

She hesitated before she reached for the teacup. Steam wreathed her face as she took a cautious sip, aware of Silas’s expectant gaze.
Her eyes widened in surprise. “It’s good.” In fact, it was the best cup of tea she’d ever tasted in her life. Not what she had expected, considering that it had been made by a—

She set the cup down with a clatter, sloshing hot liquid over her fingers. The heat and the steam had brought back a sudden, visceral memory of the man holding a hand over her mouth, his breath damp on her cheek. Then
the way he had simply been
gone
, as if he had vanished into thin air. What had Silas done to him?

“I killed him, miss,” the demon said softly. “He would have done the same to you, and you wouldn’t have been his first victim. I smelled it on him—so much death. No wonder the fiends were willing to follow him.”

She made a strangled sound. “You can read my thoughts?”

“Not precisely.”

“Then how
 . . . ?”

“I’ve spent hundreds of years observing humankind during my service to the Thorn family. I don’t wish to insult you, but you are not complicated beings.”

She shuddered, staring at her hands, at the too-perfect cup
of tea, wondering what else he could tell about her simply by looking.

“Are you feeling unwell? Perhaps you should get more rest.”

She shook her head, not meeting his eyes.
“I’ve rested enough.”

“In that case, I have news that may ease your mind.” He lifted a newspaper from the nightstand and passed it to her. She took it warily, glancing at his gloves, but she couldn’t see any evidence of his claws. “The attempt on your life has already reached the morning papers.”

Elisabeth almost did a double take. The headline on the front page read
SUSPECT . . . OR HERO?
and
was accompanied by a sketch of Nathaniel and herself standing on top of the coach as fiends closed in around them. Nathaniel’s lightning slashed through the crosshatched sky, and the artist had taken the liberty of replacing her iron bar with a sword. Her eyes flicked back to the headline. “This is about
me
?”

Silas inclined his head.

Incredulous, she began skimming the article.
The young woman, identified by an anonymous source as one Miss Elisabeth Scrivener, demonstrated uncommon courage and vigor in holding off her demonic attackers, going so far as to save the life of a helpless bystander. . . . She is believed to have arrived in Brassbridge as a suspect in the acts of sabotage on the Great Libraries, though we must question the Magisterium’s wisdom in naming her a suspect when this vicious attempt on her life suggests the precise opposite. It is clear that the true culprit hoped to silence her using any means possible. . . .

Elisabeth’s cheeks flamed as the article went on to speak glowingly of
reports from our trusted sources
that she had single-handedly defeated a
rampaging Malefict before it imperiled the lives of innocents in the quaint village of Summershall.
Then,
annoyingly, it devoted a subsequent column to
Magister Nathaniel Thorn, Austermeer’s Most Eligible Bachelor—When Will He Select a Bride?

Something nagged at her, and she went back to the beginning to reread the first several sentences. “Wait a moment,” she realized aloud. “This says
acts
of sabotage.”

Silas reached toward her. She tensed, but he only flicked to the second page. Scanning through
the article’s continuation, her breath stopped.

“There was an attack on the Great Library of Knockfeld?” Her lips moved as she raced through the cramped text. “ ‘Another Class Eight Malefict . . . three wardens dead, including the Director . . . first labeled a tragic accident, now believed to be connected to the incident in Summershall.’ This happened two weeks before the Book of Eyes!” She
looked up at Silas. “Why would any of this ease my mind?”

“Last night has altered your circumstances considerably. Your hearing has been called off in the midst of the public outcry incited by the press. Once you are well enough for a carriage ride, Master Thorn has been instructed to bring you directly to the Chancellor.”

She sat in disbelief, inhaling the paper’s scent of cheap ink and newsprint.
Her head felt empty, ringing with Silas’s words. “Why does the Chancellor want to see me?” she asked.

“I was not told.” Something like pity shaded the demon’s alabaster features. “Perhaps you might consider getting dressed. I can assist you, if you wish. I have taken the liberty of altering today’s selection.”

Elisabeth frowned. Her best dress hung from a hook on the wardrobe, lengthened with
fashionable panels of silk. Now, it looked like it would fit. Silas had done that himself? She touched
her neatly brushed hair, recalling her earlier observation that someone had bathed her and changed her clothes. When realization struck, she recoiled. “Did you undress me?”

“Yes. I have decades of experience—” Reading her horror, he raised a placating hand. “I apologize. I have no interest in
human bodies. Not in any carnal sense. I forget, at times . . . I should have said so earlier.”

Elisabeth was not to be taken for a fool. “I’ve read what demons do to people. You torture us, spill our blood, devour our entrails. The entrails of maidens, especially.”

Silas’s lips tightened. “Lesser demons eat human flesh. They are base creatures with vulgar appetites.”

“And you are so different?”

His lips thinned further. Against all odds, offense shone in his yellow eyes, and when he spoke, the edges of his courteous, whispered consonants were slightly clipped. “Highborn demons consume nothing but the life force of mortals, and even then, only once we have bargained for it. We care for nothing else.”

She sat back, her heart pounding. Slowly, she calmed. Silas seemed to be telling the
truth. He wasn’t attempting to disguise the fact that he was evil, only clarifying the nature of his misdeeds. Strangely, that made her feel that she could trust him, in this matter at least.

She thought of the silver streak in Nathaniel’s hair, so unusual to see in a boy of eighteen.
How much of his life have you taken?
she wondered.

“Enough of it,” Silas said, almost too quietly for her to
hear. “Now, if you are certain you don’t require assistance . . .”

“No thank you,” she said hurriedly. “I can get ready without any help.”

His raised eyebrows informed her that had his doubts, but he
bowed politely out the door all the same, leaving Elisabeth alone with a thousand questions and a cooling cup of tea.

•  •  •

When she opened the door fifteen minutes later, Silas was nowhere
in sight. She poked her head out of the room and peered down the hallway. While she had never spent much time in a real house, this one seemed enormous compared to the homes in Summershall. The hallway marched on for a considerable length, set with dark wood paneling and an astonishing number of doors. For some reason all the curtains were drawn, reducing the sunny day to a twilit gloom.

She
crept outside and drifted down the hall. Though grand, the house possessed an air of abandonment. She didn’t see any servants, demonic or otherwise, and the air was so still that the methodical ticking of a grandfather clock somewhere deep within the manor seemed to reverberate through the soles of her boots like a heartbeat. Everything smelled faintly of aetherial combustion, as if magic had soaked
into the building’s very foundations.

After several twists through the labyrinthine halls, the odor intensified. She turned this way and that, sniffing the air, and finally determined that the smell was seeping out from beneath one closed door in particular: a door whose panels were covered in soft snowdrifts of dust, the wood around the ornate knob scored with scratches, as though someone’s
hand had slipped repeatedly while trying to unlock it.

Elisabeth wavered. She was not going to touch a sinister-looking door in a sorcerer’s home. But perhaps . . .

Holding her breath, she bent and brought her eye level with the keyhole. The room was dark inside. She leaned forward.

“Miss Scrivener,” said Silas’s soft voice, directly behind her.

She flung herself around, striking the wall
with enough force to rattle her teeth. How did Silas move so silently? He had done the same thing to the man last night, right before he killed him.

Silas’s expression was remote, as though graven in marble, but he spoke as courteously as ever. “I did not mean to startle you, but I’m afraid that room is best left alone.”

“What’s inside it?” Elisabeth’s mouth had gone dry as bone.

“You would
not wish to see. This way, please.”

He guided her back the way she had come, and then down a broad, curving stair, huge and carpeted in velvet, which swept all the way to the foyer two floors beneath. Unlit chandeliers hung above her head, their crystals twinkling in the dimness, and her footsteps echoed on the checkered marble floor. The grandness of it brought to mind a deserted fairy-tale
castle. Her imagination peeled away the dreary pall of abandonment, replaced it with light and laughter and music, and she wondered why the house was kept this way, when it could be such a beautiful place.