Page 32 of Ink Blood Sister Scribe

Nicholas had learned over the years that privacy was the rarest of his life’s many luxuries, and following his uncle’s example, he did not let other people into his study. Unlike Richard, however, who had an elaborate system of locks and spells to keep people out, Nicholas’s door closed with a simple key, of which both Richard and Maram had copies.Just in case, they always said. He set the tray of food on his desk and locked the door behind him, Sir Kiwi at his heels, though at the moment she was more interested in Nicholas’s lunch than in Nicholas himself.

Lunch was a pot of nettle tea, a spinach salad, and a plate of cold roast beef with a bowl of mustard. Iron-rich and not, overall, very appealing forhis current mood, which would have preferred carbohydrates, sweet ones. He lit a fire in the marble fireplace to cut the damp chill of the air, then sat at his desk, moving his chair to one side so he could keep his seeing eye on the door.

When he was a small child, this room was where his governess had slept, but once Mrs.Dampett had gone and he’d started writing books in earnest, he’d taken it over. His bookcases were filled with perfectly useless novels, not a spell among them, and he’d positioned the leather-topped mahogany desk right between the three bay windows that looked out over the lake.

He could see it now, the water dark and rippling in the wind as Sir Kiwi curled into her favored position right on top of his feet. He smiled down at her and took a grudging bite of spinach salad, then opened his laptop and notebook and arranged them just-so before him. The laptop was, like everything he owned, top of the line, though he was sure many of its higher functions were wasted in a house with no internet connection. Mostly he used it for writing drafts of the words he’d later set to paper, or for watching the action movies he downloaded by the dozens whenever he was outside the wards and attached to a Wi-Fi connection.

He’d written many, many truth spells in his life and so the work mostly involved going through his past drafts and seeing if anything needed to be improved on or customized. A truth spell was, in fact, the first successful book he’d written on his own, an assignment Richard had set him when he was eight. His uncle had stored the finished copy behind glass and it stood on a plinth at the end of one of the Library’s narrow aisles, complete with a plaque inscribed with its date of completion. According to Richard, his father’s first book had been a truth spell, too. At the time, Nicholas had never felt so proud. Maybe never since, either.

He’d been a mere infant when his parents were murdered, and he had no memory of either of them. According to Richard, after Nicholas was born they had chosen to leave the safety of the Library wards in favor of “pretending at independence” in Edinburgh, and it was there they hadbeen killed. Nicholas knew that Richard was still angry at his younger brother for leaving and it was an anger that Nicholas had inherited, to some degree. If his parents had simply done as he had done—as he was doing—and resigned themselves to life in the Library, they’d be alive today.

Though his father had been a Scribe, his mother had been like Richard and Maram—able to sense magic but not create it, like her own dead parents before her: one of the magical legacy families created when Nicholas’s several-times-great-grandfather had founded the Library in the late 1700s and commissioned the spell that confined all magic to bloodlines.

It was hard for Nicholas to imagine what the book world had looked like before, with magical talent popping up in a person regardless of whether any family members were similarly skilled. He’d seen the book that held the bloodline spell only once, nearly fifteen years ago in Richard’s study: a book so thick and complicated he’d immediately known it had taken the life of more than one Scribe to get it written. Three, his uncle told him later.

Almost harder to imagine than a world of randomized magic was a world in which there were so many Scribes that three of them could be bled to death for a fourth to write the spell.

Richard maintained that Nicholas’s ancestor had commissioned the bloodline spell to ensure that magical knowledge was passed down instead of being lost among a scattered, disconnected populace, but Maram had once told Nicholas, privately, that his forefather had intended the spell to work somewhat differently. He’d intended it to confine all magical skills solely to hisownbloodline, to his own children and their children on down the generations, but the spell had bucked that intention and become generalized instead.

Nicholas found the original goal of the spell absolutely brutal, if Maram was telling the truth—and he thought she was. Everything he knew about his ancestor made him seem distinctly unsavory. Though hehad to admit, that bloodstained apron in the once-glimpsed portrait had not done his ancestor any favors in his overactive imagination.

Anyway, the man had got what he wanted, ultimately, hadn’t he? There was only one Scribe left and it was his own great-great-great-great-great-grandson. Bully for grandad and a pity for Nicholas, who’d had to learn everything about writing from the reams and reams of notes the Library had spent the past centuries searching the world for, paying exorbitant prices to private dealers and institutions alike.

It was for the collation and preservation of these notes that Maram had first been hired, several years after graduating from Oxford with a doctorate in theology. She’d then designed Nicholas’s entire education plan, employed all the necessary tutors, and generally made herself so indispensable she was now nearly as much a part of the Library as Richard himself. She likely knew more about the particularities of Scribes than anyone alive.

Going through his own notes and yawning, Nicholas wondered, not for the first time, who would organize his notes when he himself died. Perhaps his own child, though it was difficult to imagine how such a child might come about, considering how little time he spent in the company of people outside the house. It was a testament to his tragic social life that his only real crushes thus far had been fictional, namely the Musketeers and the women who loved them.

He yawned again. Despite the coffee he kept nearly nodding off over his laptop, and after a while forced himself to stand and shake off his afternoon torpor and stiffness. He was stretching when Sir Kiwi leaped up and began barking, and someone rapped on the door.

“Nicholas?” It was Maram.

He cracked the door. “Yes?”

She smiled, rattling a bottle at him. “Brought you some paracetamol,” she said. “Can I come in?”

She knew how he felt about his privacy. She wouldn’t ask to enter unless she had a reason. Warily, he stepped back. She bent to pat Sir Kiwi onthe head and then went to stand by the printer, watching the pages slide out of its near-noiseless mouth. Nicholas, because he did in fact have a headache, shook a couple pills into his hand and swallowed them with the last of the nettle tea. He glanced up to meet Maram’s eyes.

There was an odd intensity to the way she was looking at him, a stillness to her usually expressive face. The white light from the window lit up the furrows in her forehead, the lines at her mouth, and it made her look suddenly old and unhappy.

“What?” he said. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing’s wrong,” she said. “I just came to tell you that Richard and I will be in the Winter Drawing Room from about eight to midnight, sorting some things for the coming weeks. We’re not to be disturbed.”

“Noted.”

She picked up a brass paperweight in the shape of a sparrow and examined it. “Until midnight,” she repeated. “And you may want to plan on getting an early night. Richard will assist you with making ink tomorrow morning at seven.”

“Seven,” Nicholas groaned.

“He has a meeting in London at ten.”

“I’m perfectly capable of making the ink on my own, especially if it means I might sleep past dawn.”

“Richard wants you to wait for him.” Maram scrutinized him with an expression that someone who didn’t know her might take for irritation. Nicholas, however, recognized it as worry. “I tried again to talk him out of having you do it so soon, but both of you seem to think it will be fine.”

“And it will,” Nicholas said. “Pleasant, on the other hand...”

Maram let out a sharp, unhappy sigh and Nicholas looked at her more closely, taking in her pinched brows and the slackness of her tired skin. Last night had rattled her as much as it had Nicholas.

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