Sorcery of Thorns (38 page)

The injustice of it overwhelmed her, stung her eyes like needles. For a long time she sat in silence, her head bowed, blinking back tears.

Fabric rustled. Beside her, Nathaniel had stirred. She held her breath as his eyelashes fluttered, even though his movements appeared less a conscious effort to wake than a reaction to a
dream. Impulsively, she reached over to brush a lock of hair from his
forehead. The strands slid through her fingers, softer than silk. She had so little to give him, but at least she could let him know that he wasn’t alone.

Nathaniel’s eyes cracked open, bright and unfocused.

“Silas?” he whispered.

Elisabeth’s heart crumpled. She finished tucking his hair behind his ear, and then she took his hand. She watched him slip, reassured, back to sleep.

The loss of
his demonic mark told her that he’d gained back the two decades of life he had bargained to Silas. Yet it was impossible to be glad for him. She knew that given the choice, he would trade the years away again in a heartbeat to have Silas back.

Hours passed. Beatrice came and went, bringing a cold lunch scavenged from the kitchen. Afterward, Dr. Godfrey changed Nathaniel’s bandages. Elisabeth
sat gripping the chair’s armrests as the stained cloth peeled away to reveal four jagged lines carved diagonally across Nathaniel’s chest. They stretched from the bottom of his ribs on one side to his collarbone on the other, clamped together with sutures. She forced herself not to look away, remembering the sweep of Ashcroft’s claws, the blank look on Nathaniel’s face as he stumbled backward. She
could tell that the wounds would leave fierce and permanent scars.

When Dr. Godfrey finished reapplying the bandages, he placed his palm on Nathaniel’s forehead and frowned.

“What’s wrong?” she blurted out.

“He’s developing a fever. That’s common with injuries of this nature. Wound fevers can be dangerous, but in his case, the wards should protect him from any serious harm.” He paused. “Magister
Thorn? Can you hear us?”

Weakly, from the bed, Nathaniel had coughed. Elisabeth balanced on the edge of her seat, every muscle tensed. Soon Nathaniel’s eyes drifted open, the pale clear gray of quartz. He regarded her in silence, studying her face as though he had never seen it before, or as though he feared he had forgotten it while he slept. Finally he said, “You stayed with me.” His voice
was barely a sigh, a breath.

She nodded. Tears filled her eyes. She swallowed, but the words came out anyway, unstoppable. “I’m sorry. This is all my fault. It was my idea to confront Ashcroft at the ball. Without me, none of this would have happened.”

A wrinkle appeared between his eyebrows. At first she thought he was having trouble remembering. Then he said, “No. The scrying mirror . . .
you couldn’t have known.” He paused, collecting his strength. Even breathing seemed to hurt. “Ashcroft. Did you catch him?”

Tearfully, she shook her head. She didn’t want to tell him the rest, but she had to. “Silas—” Her voice sounded high, odd, unlike itself. Her throat closed up. She couldn’t finish.

The wrinkle deepened in confusion. She saw the moment he began to understand. His gaze didn’t
leave her face, but he went very still.

Silverware chimed in the hallway. Beatrice. She had gone downstairs to make tea.

Nathaniel went alert. Before Elisabeth could stop him, he heaved himself upright. He instantly went gray with pain and listed to one side, catching himself on his elbow, but he didn’t make a sound. He stared at the door with such intensity, waiting, that when Beatrice came
into view and saw him, she froze.

“If you’d like to sit up,” Dr. Godfrey said, “we’ll arrange the pillows for you. You mustn’t strain yourself so soon.”

Nathaniel didn’t seem to hear him. A sense of impending doom hollowed Elisabeth’s stomach. Beatrice was holding the same silver tray that Silas always used. Nathaniel’s eyes were stark, wild, almost unseeing.

“Get out,” he said quietly.

Beatrice
and Dr. Godfrey traded a look.

“Both of you. Get out.”

Beatrice came forward and set the tray on the nightstand, then stepped back, her hands folded against her pinafore. She had the manner of someone accustomed to dealing with difficult patients. But she didn’t know that to Nathaniel, what she had done was unforgivable.

Her crime was simple. She had brought tea. She wasn’t Silas.

Calmly,
she began, “The laudanum may make you feel—”

Nathaniel surged out of bed, grabbed the tray, and flung it against the wall. Everyone flinched as the porcelain shattered, leaving a splash of tea dribbling down the wallpaper.

“OUT!” Nathaniel roared. “Get out of my house!”

His voice echoed from every direction, magnified. The walls shook and groaned ominously; a trickle of plaster dust fell from
the ceiling onto the bed. He stood panting in his nightshirt and pajama trousers, his eyes ablaze with feverish light.

“Come along, Beatrice,” Dr. Godfrey said, closing his leather case with a snap. He shot Nathaniel one last look as he ushered his assistant from the room. Footsteps creaked on the stairs. A moment later, the front door clicked shut.

Elisabeth glanced out the window. The sun
hung low in the sky, winking redly through the thorn bushes. Their tangled branches unwound to let Dr. Godfrey and Beatrice pass, then laced back together again.

She turned back to Nathaniel, her mouth hanging open.

His rage had vanished, though not the febrile glitter in his eyes. “Come on, Scrivener,” he said brightly. “We must go at once. Do you mind if I lean on you?”

“Wait,” she protested.
“You aren’t supposed to be out of bed.”

“Ah. That explains why my legs have stopped working.” He gave Demonslayer an approving glance. “Good, you’ve come prepared.”

“But—” As he slumped, she rushed to catch him before he struck the floor. He had gone so droopy that it required some effort to arrange his arm over her shoulders. “Where are we going?”

He laughed as though she had asked a completely
nonsensical question. “We’re summoning Silas, of course. We’re getting him back.”

Her eyes widened. She hadn’t known bringing Silas back was possible. But just like that, she knew where to take them without Nathaniel having to say it out loud. The forbidden room. The one behind the locked door.

It took them an eternity to make their way down the hall, pausing every time he sagged against her,
blinking his way back to consciousness. Surely this wasn’t a good idea. If she had any sense, she would turn around and put him back to bed. He couldn’t frighten her off like Beatrice and Dr. Godfrey; even if he could, he wouldn’t be able to make it down the hallway by himself. But as soon as the thought occurred to her, her conscience revolted.

He would never forgive her for the betrayal. And
she could not leave him alone, as he had been as a boy of twelve, with no one else in the world to depend on. Right now, she was the only person he had left.

When they reached the door, Nathaniel muttered an Enochian
phrase under his breath and snapped his fingers. Nothing happened. He blinked, stared uncomprehendingly at the doorknob, and then swore. “Silas is the one who keeps track of all
the keys. Ordinarily I just . . .” He snapped his fingers again, to no avail. His magic was gone. She saw in his face how much its absence shook him, as though he had put out his hand to steady himself and found nothing, only empty air. Now he didn’t know what to do.

“Hold on.” She raised Demonslayer and slammed its hilt against the doorknob. The first blow dented the knob. The second sent it
clattering to the floor.

Nathaniel began shaking. She looked at him in concern, only to discover he was laughing. “Scrivener,” he said.

She frowned. “What?”

“It’s just—you’re so—” He was laughing too hard to finish, gasping helplessly from the pain. He made a motion with his hand that suggested a hammer striking a nail.

“I think you’ve had too much laudanum,” she said. She pushed open the
unresisting door and drew him inside.

The stink of aetherial combustion almost choked her. As she looked around, the back of her neck prickled. The curtains were drawn, letting in only enough light for her to make out that the room appeared empty. A few small objects that she couldn’t identify lay scattered across the center of the room, as though children had once lived there and left a few
of their toys behind. For the first time in weeks, she felt the imaginary presence of the house’s ghosts, of Nathaniel’s dead. Moving carefully, she lowered him to the floor and crossed the room to yank open the curtains.

Dust swirled amid the sunlight that flooded in. Looking down, she jumped aside. An elaborate pentagram was carved
into the floorboards beneath her feet, the grooves burnt black
and caked with grime. Stains darkened the wood within and around it—bloodstains, some of them so large she wondered whether they marked places where people had died. The objects she had glimpsed turned out to be half-melted candles, anchored in pools of their own wax at each of the pentagram’s five points. Two other items waited on the floor beside the circle. A matchbox and a dagger, the metal
dulled by a patina of dust.

She remembered what Silas had said to her all those weeks ago.
You would not wish to see.
This was where he had been brought into the mortal realm, not once in the distant past, but time and time again.

Nathaniel fumbled with the matchbox, his fingers trembling too violently to withdraw a match. Elisabeth tucked Demonslayer under her arm and took it from him. “I want
to help,” she said. “How is this done?”

He looked up at her, so pale, the steeply angled light shining translucently through the thin fabric of his nightshirt, revealing the outline of his body beneath. He looked like a ghost himself. “Are you certain?”

This was worse than using the scrying mirror. Worse even than stealing from the Royal Library. On the first day of her apprenticeship, Elisabeth
had vowed to protect the kingdom from demonic influences. If she participated in a summoning, and a rumor somehow got out, even a whisper of speculation, every Great Library would be closed to her. No warden would speak to her. She would become an outcast from the only world in which she had ever belonged.

But her oaths meant nothing if they asked her to forsake people she cared about in their
greatest moment of need. If that was what being a warden required of her, then she wasn’t meant
to become one. She would have to decide for herself what was right and what was wrong.

Though she didn’t speak, Nathaniel saw the answer written on her face. His hand curled into a fist against the floor. She thought that he might attempt to dissuade her, but then he said, “Light them in order, counterclockwise.
Make sure you stay outside the circle. Don’t cross the lines. That’s important.”

Elisabeth clumsily struck a match with her bandaged hand and moved around the pentagram. As each candle flared to life, it seemed to mark the immolation of something past and the beginning of something new. So many of her memories were characterized by flame. The gleam of candlelight on Demonslayer’s garnets. Warden
Finch, the ruddy glow of a torch playing across his face, asking her if she was consorting with demons. The Book of Eyes reduced to ashes on the wind.

As she shook out the final match, she looked up to find the dagger in Nathaniel’s hand. Before she could react, he drew it along his bared wrist, beside the scar that twisted up his forearm. Only a shallow cut, but the sight of blood beading on
his skin still made her heart skip with a fluttering anxiety she had never felt before on anyone else’s behalf. When he was finished, the dagger fell from his weakened grip.

“Stand back,” he said. He pressed his wrist to the edge of the circle, leaving a red smear on the floorboards. When he spoke again, his voice echoed with ancient power. “By the blood of House Thorn, I summon you, Silariathas.”

Silariathas
. Silas’s true name. It did not slither from her mind like the other Enochian words she had heard Nathaniel speak, but stuck fast, smoldering, as if branded by fire onto the surface of her thoughts.

Outside, the sun sank behind the rooftops, plunging the
room into shadow. A breeze disturbed the stagnant air, snuffing out all five of the candles simultaneously. The curtain rings chimed
as the drapes stirred. And a figure appeared at the center of the pentagram.

He wore nothing but a white cloth draped loosely around his waist. In his nakedness he appeared not just slender, as she had thought of him before, but thin, almost gaunt. Shadows traced his ribs, the bones of his wrist, the sharp edges of his shoulder blades, a form elegant in its spareness, as if everything unnecessary
had been pared away. His unbound hair hung in a straight and silvery cascade that fell past his shoulders, hiding his downcast face. Where the sword had entered him, his chest was smooth. He looked different like this—more beautiful, more frightening. Less human than ever before.

He lifted his head and smiled. “Hello, Nathaniel.”

TWENTY-EIGHT

F
OR A MOMENT, nothing happened. Gazing up at Silas from the floor, Nathaniel wore the expression of a man about to plunge into a battle that he knew he could win, but only at a terrible cost. Elisabeth didn’t understand.
She hadn’t expected a joyful reunion to take place inside a blood-soaked pentagram, but this . . . it felt wrong. There was something so strange about Silas’s smile.