Page 108 of Ink Blood Sister Scribe

London was notable because of the rumors.

Isabel had heard them from the book sellers and collectors she’d been seeking out since she was old enough to know how: rumors about a certain organization and a smiling man in a suit who was paying handsomely for entire collections. Rumors that if you refused him, he’d find a way to take them anyway and loan them back to you at exorbitant prices. These rumors were repeated in ominous tones of warning, but far from being warned off, Isabel was intrigued. The organization sounded like the very thing she herself had sought to build from her parents’ store.

And then she heard the other rumors, and her intrigue solidified to intention.

These were the rumors that someone in London was not only collecting but producing. For nearly unpayable prices, it seemed a person couldcommission a specific book, a specific spell, which meant that somebody out there was actively writing the magic that Isabel had spent her entire life so far endeavoring to understand.

To her it was clear that all these rumors were describing the same organization and perhaps the same person: the smiling man in the suit. Whoever he was, Isabel wanted to know him. So she set her sights on England, attained it, and arrived at Oxford for her doctorate in theology with a suitcase full of her parents’ most valuable stock. Quickly she established herself in the relevant circles and let it be known that she had a small but impressive collection she was willing to sell in its entirety, including the crown jewel: a fifteen-page volume of rechargeable wards, small and ancient and powerful.

It took two years for Richard to make contact.

By this time, she was known professionally as Maram Ebla, and it was to Maram Ebla that Richard addressed his letter of introduction. She’d chosen Maram because of a family predisposition toward palindromes, and the surname as a tribute to the ancient library of Ebla, which was often called the oldest library in the world. To herself, however, she was still Isabel.

Isabel had heard that the man in the suit was handsome, but she’d also heard that he was in his fifties, which to a woman in her twenties seemed abstractly old. So when Richard appeared at the door of her flat, stooping a little in the low-ceilinged hallway and smiling down at her with tender, cunning eyes, she was startled to find that not only was he attractive, but she was attracted to him.

In no uncertain terms, she told him she was seeking not compensation for her collection, but employment. More than employment, really. A livelihood. A life in the Library, among the books she so loved, as close to the source of the magic as she could get. By the end of their first visit Richard had made her a deal. He would give her a seven-year trial period in which she’d finish her degree and move back to Mexico City to work as the Library’s representative in North America, traveling the continentand using her connections to locate private collections and persuade the owners to sell. She would send whatever books she acquired to the Library via a set of spells that would allow her to pass things through a mirror. This was also how she and Richard would stay in communication, by sending notes back and forth through space.

If Richard was suitably impressed at the end of seven years, Isabel would surrender her parents’ collection to him and he would invite her into the Library, show her the secrets at the heart of the commissions, and make her an offer of full-time employment.

As a preliminary show of loyalty, she gave him the codex of wards, though she didn’t mention that it had a twin, which stayed safely locked-up in her flat. Secrets were currency and Isabel intended to stay rich.

Richard paged through the wards with a critical eye. It was true they were far stronger than the wards the Library currently employed, he told her, but their strength would block the mirror spells he used to communicate with his global employees, like Isabel herself. He pocketed them anyway. He told her he thought he could amend the spell to allow the mirror magic to pass through—an offhand comment that took her breath away with what it implied. Amending spells was as good as writing them.

This was the knowledge she’d been seeking all her life.

Seven years could not pass quickly enough.

Isabel completed her degree and graduated from Oxford and moved back home, ostensibly to help out in her parents’ shop but really to expand her list of connections and to make certain that the only books her parents sold were to collectors Isabel knew, so she could later buy—or take—the books back with the Library’s support. She traveled to New York and Chicago and Los Angeles and read the mirror spell in her hotel rooms, pushing books through to a place she’d never been but held always in her mind, a candle to light the way.

Everything went almost exactly as planned, until she met Abe.

He’d come to Mexico City on her invitation, a fellow collector with whom she hoped to make a deal, like so many of the deals she’d made inthe past three years she’d been working for the Library. The deal was this: Abe’s knowledge would become her knowledge, his books would become Library books, and the Library’s money would line his pockets.

But instead, Isabel found in Abe what she’d found also in Richard: someone as passionate about books as she herself, someone who believed that her capacity for hearing magic was a higher calling, a calling Abe shared. He, too, was dedicated to preserving the books; he, too, wanted to study and protect them.

Isabel was already half in love with Richard, but since their first meeting at her London flat she had neither seen nor spoken to him. They communicated solely through the notes they traded through spelled mirrors, and in the face of Abe’s solid, earnest presence and his clear interest in her, Richard’s appeal was shadowy, harder to recall. She and Abe began sleeping together and when she became unexpectedly pregnant, he proposed.

Isabel refused. She hadn’t told Abe about her promise to Richard and to the Library, but she did so now. There were a little over three years left in her trial period and if Richard offered her a job at the end of that time, she fully intended to take it—regardless of Abe, and regardless of the baby he badly wanted.

Isabel did not want a child. But both she and Abe were from magical families; both she and Abe were committed, in their separate ways, to carrying on their magical lineage. Any child they had together would almost certainly be born with the gift they themselves had been born with, the ability to hear magic and to carry on the family work. It was this argument that convinced Isabel to keep the baby.

Isabel never told Richard she was pregnant and did not tell him when Esther was born, wary of saying anything that might jeopardize her chances of receiving the job offer that was still her ultimate goal. She figured she’d disclose her daughter only if and when she officially went to work for the Library, and had grand visions of toting Esther along with her, training her from childhood just as Isabel had trained herself.

As for Abe, he believed—because he wanted to believe—that having a child would change Isabel’s priorities, that as soon as she saw her daughter’s face, all her dreams of the Library would fade like mist in the tidal swell of maternal love.

This did not happen.

Isabel was impatient with nearly every aspect of parenting an infant, and impatient, too, with Abe’s wariness about her continued involvement with the Library. What had seemed kindred ideals were already proving to diverge in some irreconcilable ways. It was true that Abe shared her interest in preserving the books, but unlike Isabel he had no interest in making a profit off them, and he deeply distrusted the Library’s monopolistic business model. He wanted to keep expanding and protecting her family’s collection in secret and maintain the storefront of ordinary books as their actual revenue stream.

By the time Esther was a year old, Abe and Isabel had ended their romantic relationship, and Abe, who’d already been doing the lion’s share of the caretaking, took Esther with him when he moved out of their shared apartment. Isabel was on collection trips most of the week and saw her daughter on weekends, and it was she who suggested hiring a nanny: a friend of hers tangentially involved in the book scene, a young Belgian woman who adored Esther.

This was Cecily.

All three of them had already noticed—with great dismay and disappointment on Isabel’s part and some uneasiness on Abe and Cecily’s—that spells seemed to have no effect on Esther whatsoever. Cecily had a book that set an impassable perimeter and she used it one night in the living room, intending it to keep Esther safely inside a square of carpet while she cooked dinner, and not ten minutes after she’d set it, Esther crawled through the kitchen doorway. Abe and Isabel tested the baby with other books and found she could smash vases that had been spelled unbreakable and seemed impervious to any glamour they tried to place upon her. None of them were certain what to make of this.

Another year went by, during which Abe’s mother—widowed for over a decade—passed away and left him their family home in Vermont. Abe and Cecily were together, Esther was almost three, and Cecily was six months pregnant, when Isabel’s seven-year trial period ended and Richard formally invited her to England.

Finally, the time had come. Isabel was being offered the thing she still wanted most in the entire world: an invitation to the Library and all its secrets. Despite Abe’s disbelieving protests, she left immediately, as she had always told him she would. With nothing to keep them in Mexico City, Abe and Cecily moved to Vermont, to the big old house at the foot of a mountain, and Joanna was born a few months later.

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