Page 109 of Ink Blood Sister Scribe

It would be two more years before they saw or heard from Isabel again.

Then, late one night, when both Esther and Joanna were fast asleep, she showed up on their doorstep. She had flown to New York on a work trip and, unbeknownst to Richard, rented a car and made the eight-hour drive from the city. She wasn’t there to visit. She was there to tell Abe and Cecily what she’d learned in the past two years at the Library. She’d learned, finally, how they wrote new books.

She had learned about Scribes.

Not only that, she’d met one—a young man named John, who was missing an eye and had recently fathered a child. A child whom no magic could touch.

A child like Esther.

At first, Isabel had been ecstatic to understand that, far from being magic-less, her own daughter had the very power Isabel had structured her entire life around discovering. She could not help noticing, however, that John didn’t seem happy to have produced a child with this power. In fact, both he and his wife seemed grim. More than grim, really. They seemed terrified.

Isabel took a calculated risk and confessed to the new father that she, too, was the parent of a Scribe. She hoped exposing her own vulnerabilitywould encourage John to confide in her, to tell her the truth of his fear, and the gamble paid off. He told her that Scribes were not only Richard’s most valuable commodity—they were also his biggest threat. Hundreds of years ago, he’d bound his life to a book and to the bone of a Scribe, his sister, and would live for as long as both book and bone remained whole. Only two Scribes could end the spell, one of whom had to be of Richard’s bloodline, like John and his son.

Because of this, Richard decided it was in his best interest that no two Scribes ever live free at the same time. To this end, he’d commissioned a spell to seek them out, to hunt them down and either kill or capture them, ensuring that the only Scribe would be under his control. This spell required the eye of a mature, living Scribe. Written in the mid-1800s, “maturity” was specified as thirteen years of age, and John had lost his own eye to this spell at age thirteen, as had the Scribe before him. So the fate of his son—and Isabel’s daughter—was at best to lose an eye and live the rest of their life in luxurious captivity, and at worst, to die. Probably soon. Three Scribes alive were two too many.

Isabel’s consolation was that the seeking-spell could only be initiated once every twelve months on the anniversary of its first activation, for twenty-four hours, and Richard had gotten complacent in the last few years, letting the November date pass without reading it. He’d been searching all John’s life without ever finding another and was starting to believe John was the last of his kind. The arrival of John’s child had changed that. This year, Richard planned to set the spell in motion once again. This year—if John was still alive, if the spell was still active—he would find Esther.

Richard had agreed to take John and his wife on a rare trip to Scotland to see her family, and John told Isabel they were planning to use the opportunity to attempt an escape. The seeking spell wouldn’t be able to pinpoint them if they kept moving, he told her, so each year on November 2, he and his family would keep moving for twenty-four hours. Isabel, who never missed a beat, made her own plan. She arranged to go to NewYork the day after Richard and the Scribe left for Scotland and to come home a day before they were to return, careful to let Richard believe that her trip and its convenient scheduling was his idea.

She was also careful—ruthlessly careful—to make sure that Richard got a tip-off about John’s escape plan. To protect Esther, she needed the seeking spell deactivated. She needed John dead.

Once in Vermont, she explained all this to a horrified Abe and Cecily, and then laid out her plan. She had a safeguard against the day the infant Scribe would turn thirteen, when Richard would inevitably reactivate the spell and follow it to Esther. The plan was this: in Vermont, she gave Abe and Cecily two books. One was the codex of wards that was twin to the ones now used by the Library, except these wards hadn’t been amended, so they’d block any outside communication spells. The other book was one half of a two-way mirror spell.

Abe and Cecily would enchant one of their mirrors in Vermont to connect with Isabel’s mirror in the Library. Meanwhile, Isabel would go back to England and immediately steal Richard’s life-book from his study, then send it to Abe and Cecily through the glass. The Scribe and his wife were attempting an escape at the same time, after all, and she knew that when Richard returned from Scotland to find the book gone, he was likely to blame the book’s disappearance on them. The second the life-book passed from England into Vermont, Abe and Cecily would read the warding spell and hide themselves and his book completely from view, forever. Thus, when Richard tried to find Esther someday, they would have a bargaining chip against him. They’d have collateral.

There was one final step to the plan.

To circumvent the truth spell Richard was sure to use on all his employees when he discovered his book was missing, Cecily would read Isabel a silencing spell, so even under magical compulsion she wouldn’t speak of what she’d done. Isabel, in turn, would read the same spell to Cecily and Abe.

Then, bound by silence, they would part ways, and Isabel Gil would disappear forever.

Cecily’s voice was hoarse by the time she’d finished speaking, despite the tea Collins had succeeded in pressing on her, and Sir Kiwi had ended up on her lap. Joanna was staring at a deep scuff on the kitchen table. Esther had made it with a fork when she was five, intent on carving her initials.

“But why would you tell us Isabel was dead?” Joanna asked. “Why would you let Esther believe that?”

“Legally, it was true,” said Cecily. “Isabel left her entire life behind when she joined the Library, including her name. She falsified the death records. We didn’t want Esther to ever go looking.”

“And you wanted us to be afraid,” Joanna said.

Cecily’s hand stilled on Sir Kiwi’s soft fur. “Yes. But for good reason. Richard is an incredibly dangerous man, you know that now.”

“I don’t know if there’s ever a good reason to terrify children,” Joanna said. Her mind was already working overtime to process the onslaught of information and she didn’t want to ask it to process feelings, too, so she pushed them down, her anger, hurt, grief. Eventually they would bob to the surface and she would have to face them.

Collins spoke up from his cross-legged position on the tiled floor. “If Richard’s book was supposed to be collateral,” he said, “how come you didn’t use that when Maram told you the Scribe-seeking spell was in effect? Esther was, what, eighteen? Why’d you send her away if you had the book all along?”

“I wanted to use it,” Cecily said. “That’s why I wanted to burn the wards—so Richard would know we had it, so he would come, so we could make a deal and Esther could stay with us. But Abe, he didn’t think it would work. When Isabel made contact to tell us the seeking spell had been reactivated, she told us also that the book didn’t matterafter all, it was essentially indestructible, and we’d never truly be able to end Richard’s life with it. She said the important thing was to make certain that Esther kept moving once a year. That was how we’d keep her safe.

“But Isabel and I used to be friends, remember, and I knew she was in love with Richard—then, and still. It seemed clear she was lying about the book to protect him. I thought your father was being cowardly.” She turned toward Joanna. “And regardless of Richard, regardless of everything, I wanted the wards down because I wanted to get you out of the trap we’d built for you.”

Joanna put her head in her hands. She couldn’t look at her mother’s face right now, anguished and guilty and suddenly old in the stove’s greasy light, as if the conversation had aged her ten years.

“I’m sorry, baby,” Cecily said, her voice thick. “This wasn’t the life I wanted for you, or for Esther.”

A sudden loud scratching sound echoed down the hall and through the kitchen, and they all jumped.

“What is that?” Cecily said, Sir Kiwi’s ears pricking, and Collins started to climb to his feet.

“The cat,” Joanna said. “He’s hungry.” She stood from the table, glad for a reason to walk away for a minute. “Give me a second.”

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