Sorcery of Thorns (24 page)

Late in the afternoon, she staggered out of the study with such
a prodigious stack of grimoires that she had to tilt her head to see around them. Climbing three flights of stairs to her bedroom didn’t seem wise. Instead, she hauled the books into a room she had discovered during her exploration: a tiny parlor tucked into a warm, sunny crevice of the manor, its plump armchairs arranged around a fireplace in which someone had left a bouquet of dried lavender, the
flowers now brown and brittle with age. She set the grimoires down on the coffee table, sneezing in the cloud of dust that puffed from its surface.

A review of the Lexicon had led her to focus on Aldous Prendergast, the author of the Codex Daemonicus. The books she’d selected to start with were all Class One and Two grimoires with sections on sixteenth-century history. One of them looked especially
promising: Lady Primrose’s Complete Handbook of Historical Personages, New and Revised Edition, which kept emitting delicate, ladylike scoffs at the dusty table, and refused to open for her until she went back and borrowed a pair of kidskin gloves from Nathaniel.

By nightfall, however, the grimoires had yielded disappointingly little information. She’d read that Prendergast had devoted
his life
to the study of demons and the Otherworld. He was obsessive about his work, even going so far as to claim that he had traveled to the Otherworld, which appeared to be the beginning of his falling out with Cornelius. The two were close friends before Prendergast wrote the Codex. Soon afterward, Cornelius had him declared mad and locked him away in a tower, where he died after lapsing into some sort
of comatose state. It was not lost on Elisabeth that Ashcroft had attempted to get rid of her in much the same way. No wonder the volume’s psychic howls had raged with fury and betrayal.

But none of the grimoires contained what she really needed: a clue as to what sort of secret Prendergast might have hidden inside the Codex—or, barring that, where she could find a copy of it to study.

Frustrated,
she set the last grimoire aside and looked out the windows. It was almost too dark to continue reading. A bluish gloom had descended over the parlor, and the traffic had grown thinner outside. Her thoughts churned away as a carriage rattled past, shiny with rain, bright yellow leaves pasted to its roof. Thus far, the attacks on the Great Libraries had occurred about two weeks apart. That meant
she had barely over a week left to expose Ashcroft before he attacked the Great Library of Fairwater, and less than a month until he targeted Harrows. She had barely begun, and already she was running out of time.

“Miss Scrivener?” She jumped. Silas stood at the entrance to the room, holding a silver tray. “I have taken the liberty of bringing your supper, unless you would prefer to move to the
dining room.”

Elisabeth hurried to clear a spot on the coffee table, ignoring Lady Primrose’s indignant huffs of protest. “This is fine. Thank you.” She watched Silas set the tray down. Earlier, she had ventured
into the kitchen and seen no one. “Do you cook all the food here yourself?”

“Yes, miss.” Silas lit the oil lamp in the corner, then went to draw the curtains. It was strange to see him
perform such mundane tasks. His pale, slender form looked ethereal in the twilight, barely human. “I have served Master Thorn in every capacity these past six years.”

I’m even eating meals made by a demon
, she thought in dismay. Nevertheless, she owed Silas her life. It didn’t seem right that he should wait on her hand and foot. “Would you . . . would you like to join me?”

He paused, head tilted.
“Do you wish me to?”

Elisabeth hesitated, unsure what to say.

He considered her through his lashes. “I do not eat human food, miss—not without a reason. To me, it tastes of nothing but ash and dust.” He tugged the curtains shut. Before they closed, she noticed that his breath didn’t fog the glass. “But I will dine with you, if you wish.”

Had she offended him? It was always so difficult to tell.
“In that case, I won’t trouble you.”

He nodded and made to leave.

“It’s very good,” she blurted out. “I’ve never eaten this well except in Ashcroft Manor, and I’d prefer to forget about that. You’re an excellent cook, though I have no idea how you manage it, if you can’t taste anything.”

Silas drew up short. She winced, hearing the clumsy words over again, but he didn’t look insulted by her
blundering praise. If anything, a hint of satisfaction showed on his alabaster features. He nodded again, more deeply this time, and vanished into the shadows of the hall.

•  •  •

The next day she entered the parlor with a second stack of books to find that in her absence every inch of it had been dusted and polished, the rug beaten, the sheets removed from the remaining furniture; the windows’
diamond-shaped panes sparkled between the mullions. A sweet aroma hung about the room, which Elisabeth traced to the new bouquet of lavender in the hearth. Even Lady Primrose found nothing to criticize, and resorted to a few noncommittal sniffs before she reluctantly fell silent.

Elisabeth passed another unsuccessful afternoon reading. Two days stretched into three, and she found herself no closer
to an answer. At times her attention wandered while she climbed through the rafters of Nathaniel’s study, and she paused to watch him add an ingredient to the glass cauldron, which was still sending up purple smoke, or conjure a flock of hummingbirds that darted around him in iridescent flashes of viridian. The light sifting down from above outlined his shoulders and feathered his unruly hair.
Sometimes, when the sun grew hot, he took off his waistcoat and rolled up his sleeves. Then she saw the cruel scar that wound around the inside of his right forearm, starker here than in the dim hallway of the inn.

He continued to ignore her, but it was not, Elisabeth found to her surprise, an unfriendly feeling silence. It was a great deal like being back in Summershall, companionably going
about her business with other librarians doing the same nearby. She didn’t want to examine that thought too closely, for it seemed wrong that a sorcerer’s study should feel so curiously like home.

Clothes arrived courtesy of Silas, a parade of silk dresses in shades of cerulean, rose, and striped cream. After trying them on and wondering at the novelty of having clothes that didn’t show her entire
ankles, Elisabeth guiltily moved the blue dress
to the back of her wardrobe. The color no longer reminded her of a warden’s uniform, but instead of her time spent as a prisoner in Ashcroft Manor. She had had nightmares of it since, her memories of the past several weeks blurring together into phantasmagorical horrors—lying helplessly in the thrall of Lorelei’s glamour while Ashcroft struck the
Director down in front of her, or while a uniformed attendant tightened leather straps around her legs, Mr. Hob standing unblinkingly nearby. She woke from these dreams sweating in terror, and took hours to fall back asleep afterward.

Her breakthrough occurred on the third evening of her research, and it happened entirely by accident. She was taking notes in the parlor when a fight broke out
between Lady Primrose and a Class Two named Throckmorton’s Peerage, who had been spitting wads of ink at the other grimoires on and off all afternoon. Finally, Lady Primrose’s nerves reached their limits. The parlor briefly transformed into a dervish of flying dust and flapping pages; then Throckmorton shunted itself beneath a cabinet, desperate to get as far away from the vengeful Lady Primrose as
possible, who was emitting a high, thin shriek, like a teakettle.

“I can’t say I feel sorry for you,” Elisabeth said sternly, crouching on her hands and knees to haul Throckmorton back out like a misbehaving cat. “You should know better than to tease another grimoire.”

Then she saw it: the flash of a metal object wedged behind the cabinet, the sunlight striking it just so. Whatever it was, it
looked as though it had slid down and become lost, trapped against the wall. Elisabeth reached for it, and instantly snatched her fingers back in shock. The object was freezing cold to the touch. She wrapped her hand in her skirt and tried
again, this time carefully lifting the object into view.

It was a small hand mirror, its ornate silver frame elaborately scrolled and swirled. But it wasn’t
an ordinary mirror. Icicles hung from the edges of the frame, and a layer of frost clouded the glass. When Elisabeth peered closer, she saw no hint of her own reflection. Ghostly, unfamiliar images flowed across the mirror’s surface, moving beneath the frost.

First the mirror showed her an empty salon in an unfamiliar house, its colors reduced to pale suggestions by the ice. She sucked in a breath
when a child ran laughing across the salon, pursued by a nursemaid. Then the image swirled, replaced by an office in which a man sat signing papers, and again, showing her a drawing room in which one woman played the piano while another embroidered nearby. Elisabeth stared, entranced. Those were real people. Judging by the angle, she was seeing through the mirrors of their rooms.

She held the
mirror close to her face. Every time she exhaled, her breath fogged the ice, and soon a clear spot melted away at the center, bringing forth a flush of color from the images. The tinkling notes of the piano filled the parlor, as if it were being played behind a shut door in Nathaniel’s house just a few rooms away. A lonely ache filled Elisabeth’s chest.

“I wish you would show me someone I knew,”
she whispered to the glass. “I wish,” she said, “that you would show me my friend Katrien.”

The piano music stopped. The woman frowned and looked up, directly at Elisabeth. Her eyes widened, and she flew from the stool with a shriek. Elisabeth didn’t witness the rest. She was still processing the fact that the woman had been able to see her when the image swirled again. This time, it looked into
her own room in Summershall.

Her room—and Katrien’s. Katrien sat on her bed, flipping through scribbled sheaves of notes. Crumpled pieces of paper covered Elisabeth’s old quilt and gathered around the edges of the room like snowdrifts. Some of them sat on the dresser, against the mirror, written in a deliberately illegible scrawl. Katrien was clearly up to something.

Elisabeth’s throat tightened.
The mirror shook in her hand. She hadn’t expected it to obey her request. If the Collegium found out that she had used a magical artifact, she would never be permitted back inside a Great Library. Not only that, she didn’t know how the mirror worked, or where it drew its magic from—it could be dangerous to use. She should put it back where she’d found it and never touch it again.

But this was
Katrien—truly Katrien, right in front of her. And she didn’t have the strength to turn away.

“Katrien,” she whispered.

Katrien sat bolt upright, then spun around. “Elisabeth!” she exclaimed, rushing to the dresser, her face filling the mirror. “What’s happening? Are you a prisoner?” She paused to take in Elisabeth’s surroundings. “Where
are
you?”

“I have so much to tell you. Wait! Don’t go!”

“I’m not going anywhere! But, Elisabeth, you’re fading—you’ve gone transparent—”

The frost was creeping back in. She breathed on the mirror again, but it was no use. This time, the frost didn’t recede. As she scrambled for a solution, a different idea occurred to her. In the Great Library, Katrien had access to resources that Elisabeth did not.

“I need your help,” she said into the rapidly diminishing
circle. “I don’t have time to explain, but it’s important.”

“Anything,” Katrien said grimly.

“There’s a grimoire called the Codex Daemonicus. I think it’s a Class Five or Six. I need to find out where I can locate a copy—”

The last section of frost crystallized into place, and the mirror’s surface turned milky white. Elisabeth had no way of knowing whether Katrien had heard her. She sat back,
squeezing her eyes shut against frustrated tears.

She kept the mirror close for the rest of the day, hidden beneath the armchair’s cushions, checking it periodically. But its magic seemed to have been exhausted. It showed her nothing, only a blank white oval. She lay awake in bed that night, watching a strip of moonlight travel across the ceiling, wondering what to do. The mirror sat on the covers
beside her, its icy chill raising goose bumps on her bare arms. Katrien at once seemed close enough to touch and farther away than ever before.

Perhaps I should go to Nathaniel
, she thought.
He’ll know if there’s a way to restore its magic
.

She dismissed the idea at once. Nathaniel seemed willing to tolerate her efforts to expose Ashcroft, but only under the condition that she didn’t involve
him in any way. He might take the mirror from her, especially if it turned out to be dangerous, or if he feared that she would break it. Better to wait and see if the magic returned on its own.

Nathaniel . . . she still didn’t understand him. He wasn’t being unkind to her, but he obviously didn’t welcome her presence, either. Her arrival had disturbed him for some reason—his argument with Silas
had made that clear enough. They never shared meals together, and he only spoke to her when absolutely necessary. When they weren’t in his study, he avoided her completely.

Perhaps he didn’t want to encourage her. He might not be interested in women, as the ladies had suggested during the dinner at Ashcroft Manor, or he could be like Katrien, who possessed
no interest in romantic matters whatsoever.
Either might explain why he’d never courted. But she hadn’t mistaken the way his eyes had darkened the other morning, or the tension that had suffused the air between them.

She flipped over beneath the covers, restless. She imagined padding down the hallway in her nightgown and knocking on Nathaniel’s bedroom door. She pictured him answering in the dark, his hair tousled with sleep, his nightshirt
unlaced down the front. When she finally drifted off to sleep, it was to the memory of how soft his hair had felt in Summershall, and the callused brush of his fingers when he’d touched her hand.

•  •  •

When she awoke the next morning, the first thing she did was sit up and seize the mirror, her hair falling around it in a tangled curtain. The magic was back. Images moved beneath the frost
again. But before she could invoke Katrien, a knock came on the door. She shoved the mirror beneath the blankets, holding her breath.