Page 112 of Ink Blood Sister Scribe

The attendant handed her a mug and pushed the cart another aisle down. Joanna took a sip.

“Blech,” she said. “This is awful.”

“Oh yeah?” Esther said and poked one of Joanna’s dimples. “Why do you look so happy, then?”

Joanna batted her hand away though she couldn’t stop smiling. “Turns out I like flying.”

“Turns out I do, too, when it’s first class.” Esther stretched her legs appreciatively. “Don’t tell Nicholas I said that.”

Esther had not wanted to use the Library’s money for anything, much less luxury plane tickets. It was literally blood money, she’d argued, but Nicholas had eventually talked her around by making her count the zeros in the various bank statements Maram had signed over to him. The accounts hadn’t been transferred until days after they’d destroyed Richard’s book—at which point Maram had already been long gone.

She had vanished in the thirty-odd minutes it had taken for Nicholas, who’d come back to Vermont with Esther after ending Richard’s life, to realize that he shouldn’t have left her alone in the Library. His first fear was that she would end the mirror spell and sever the link between the two houses, trapping him in Vermont, but she’d left the spell intact. Nicholas had gotten back through the mirror without a problem and found a manila envelope sitting on Maram’s empty bed.

There was a note, too. It was as cryptic as Joanna had come to expect from her sister’s mother.

Dear Nicholas and Esther, I have always wanted what was best for the Library. I have also always wanted, in my own way, what was best for you. It has become apparent that I myself am neither. What am I best for, then? I aim to find out. There is much to learn, still, about everything.

The envelope held documents Nicholas would need as the new de facto head of the Library: the deed to the house, information on the Library accounts that were now under Nicholas’s name, instructions on how to find the paperwork and health insurance information for all Library employees. When Nicholas combed the collection, he found she had taken several books with her, including an invisibility glamour, a spell to let her walk through walls, and the bullets-to-bees spell. If the expiration date had not ended with Richard’s life, they could have trackedher, but as it stood, she was untraceable. She’d already proven how easily she could obtain false passports.

“Thanks again for coming with me,” Joanna said to her sister, dumping a paper sachet of sugar into her vile coffee. “Considering... you know.” Considering her sister did not need a plane to get to England.

“Of course,” said Esther. “I wouldn’t let you fly alone your first time.”

Since the two Scribes had returned to Vermont through the mirror several months ago, both of them had been constantly back and forth across the continents, and the room in Joanna’s house that had once been Esther’s bedroom and then a junk room was now looking very much like an extension of the Library.

“A satellite branch,” Nicholas had said recently, looking around at the books carefully propped on shelves, the desk Collins had helped Joanna carry up the stairs, the new dehumidifier humming away in one corner.

For the past several weeks, Nicholas had been working near-tirelessly on a text for the spell Joanna was now flying across the world to read; a spell Joanna herself had helped write.

When Nicholas had first begun asking her advice, popping through the mirror to yell for her to come and look at a certain sentence, or asking what she thought about using dandelion over comfrey, she’d been suspicious he was condescending to her, letting her feel involved despite the fact that she was stuck on one side of the mirror while he and her sister could waltz across the Atlantic with a single step.

But when she’d put her new cell phone to use and shared her doubts with Collins, who was also bound by the laws of physics and thus most likely to sympathize, he’d laughed at her. “Nicholas is not that well-socialized,” he said. “If he’s asking for your help, it’s because he wants your help, not because he wants to make you feel good.”

The more she offered her opinion, the more Nicholas asked for it, until eventually he’d shifted his writing office almost entirely to Vermont. Joanna was especially pleased because this meant Esther, too, was aroundmore often, fidgeting in a chair or pacing the room as Nicholas narrated the decisions he and Joanna were making on the draft. Nicholas was teaching Esther how to write magic, though he was the first to admit that a spell as difficult as the one they were attempting wasn’t an ideal primer.

“Soon as this book’s finished, we’ll start you on proper lessons,” Nicholas said, and his voice grew bitter. “Lessons designed by an expert.”

He was taking Maram’s disappearance very hard. Much harder than Esther seemed to be, though it was always hard to tell with her.

“Obviously there’s a lot I want to know,” Esther said. “But I’m not sure I want to cozy up to someone who’s basically spent most of her adult life as a creepy henchwoman.”

“That’s Dr. Creepy Henchwoman, to you,” Nicholas had answered, rather miserably.

Joanna supposed it made sense Nicholas was struggling more; regardless of blood ties, it was clear Nicholas had seen Maram as family—the only family he had left after Richard, and gone the same night he’d lost his uncle. He had tried unsuccessfully to hide his hurt and had not bothered to hide his anger. But Esther’s sanguinity on the subject came partially from the final object in the envelope: a small, silver hand-mirror marked with blood.

“Clearly she plans to be in touch,” Esther said. “We just have to be patient.”

“Patience is not one of the virtues I’ve cultivated,” Nicholas said, fixing his hair in the hand-mirror.

“Too busy with modesty,” observed Collins.

Only days later did Esther tell Joanna that she’d had time alone with Maram (Isabel? No one was sure how to think of her) before coming back through the mirror. All her life she’d had questions, but she forgot most of them the instant Maram looked at her, those eyebrows raised expectantly.

“Go on,” Maram had said. “Ask.”

“The novel,” Esther said. It was the first thing that had come to mind. “By Alejandra Gil. Why is it so important to you?”

Maram had looked surprised, as if that wasn’t the question she’d expected. “My grandmother wrote it,” she said. Then added, “Your great-grandmother. She was a writer... and I suppose, as a Scribe, you’re a writer, too, in your way. Writing is in your blood, right along with magic. But really it was the title that made an impression on me as a girl. I always thought it suggested, on some palindromic level, that it’s the steps themselves that make a path, instead of the other way round. We are creating even as we believe we are following.”

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