Page 33 of Ink Blood Sister Scribe

“I want you to get some rest,” she said, stepping away. “You’ll need your energy.”

“For what?” Nicholas said. “Walking Sir Kiwi to the lake and back?Lounging around reading spy novels? You need rest, too. Don’t use up your energy worrying about me.”

Maram shook her head. “In any event, Richard and I will be in the Winter Drawing Room from eight to twelve.”

“So you said.”

“It’ll just be you and Collins on your own for those four hours, since Richard and I will be occupied. Quite occupied.”

She was speaking slowly, a firmness to her words as if she were relaying something more important than mere logistics. It was unnerving.

“The adults need alone time,” Nicholas said, raising his hands. “Understood.”

She set the paperweight back on the desk with a loud clunk and gave him a quick, edgy smile.

Then she was gone.

“That was odd,” Nicholas said to Sir Kiwi, bending to scratch her perked ears. “Wasn’t that odd? Wasn’t it? Yes. Almost as odd as you. Are you an odd little—” But before he could dissolve completely into baby talk, he saw something that made him straighten.

The sparrow paperweight was sitting on the bare wood of his desk. But now there was something stuck beneath it. A small piece of paper. Nicholas tugged it out and stared at it, even more confused than he’d been before.

The note was in Maram’s neat script. A series of numbers and letters that didn’t make sense, until he realized it was the Library’s equivalent of a call number; its own specialized Dewey Decimal system.

PR1500tt.

It was the location of a book in the collection.

Nicholas read the number twice, then lifted his gaze to the window above his desk. He looked out at the mist that had settled into the folds of the hills without really seeing it, worrying the paper between a thumb and forefinger. Maram wanted him to go to the Library and find this book, and she wanted him to do so while she and Richard were otherwiseoccupied, that much was obvious. Maram often told him to revisit certain spells, quizzing him on them later. What he did not understand was why she hadn’t simply told him outright. He couldn’t see why such an assignment demanded secrecy.

He checked his watch. Just past five. He couldn’t start writing the truth spell until he’d made the ink, anyhow, which apparently wouldn’t be until the following morning, so if he started at eight, he’d have plenty of time to hunt this book down and try to puzzle out Maram’s bizarre behavior. For now, he’d finish typing up this draft and maybe even squeeze in a nap.

He sat back at the desk and pushed Maram’s note to one side, but found it difficult to refocus. Outside, the gray sky looked smooth as a shell, shimmering mother-of-pearl in places as the cloud cover thinned across the setting sun. A bird flashed by the window. It was as lovely as Nicholas had once thought magic could be.

How long had it been since he’d written a book purely for the sake of writing it, and not in service of the Library or some billionaire’s dreams? When he was younger, before he’d started commissions, he’d done so fairly often; had been encouraged to do so, in fact, to come up with some outlandish idea and see if he could write it into being. It was considered part of his lessons. Like most children Nicholas had loved myths and fairy tales, but unlike most children he’d never seen himself in the plucky heroes and heroines who spat jewels from blessed mouths or spun wheat into gold or stumbled across magic beans, magic lamps, magic geese. His place was outside the stories, where someone, he imagined, was writing all the spells that made the magic possible. So he’d based many of his early, experimental books on the tales he enjoyed: an enchantment for a harp that made all who heard it weep; a spell to steal a person’s voice and hide it in a seashell.

He couldn’t read his own books and so was obligated to ask his guardians or tutors to read them for him, watching breathless with anticipation to see if his magic had worked. He’d had a few failures, which he supposedhad been the point of allowing him the exercise—he’d learned for himself, for example, that magic could not directly transform a living body, no matter how often he tried to write a pair of wings or get an animal to speak—but his successes had been heady. For a while, it had felt as if he could do anything.

That feeling had faded over the years, along with the delight he’d once taken in his own abilities. Endless commissions had sapped any sense of play from writing, and as he grew older it became harder to convince his tutors to read the few spells he did write for pleasure. He got the feeling some were even a bit frightened of him, though the closest he’d come to accidentally hurting anyone was when he’d written an enchantment for a pair of shoes to make the wearer dance; a spell grudgingly read aloud by his then-classics tutor, a seventy-two-year-old woman in less than ideal shape for a half hour of frenzied waltzing.

There’d been a particularly depressing day when he was around ten, after he’d spent over a month obsessively drafting a book for a real-life magic carpet. He’d written it carefully to be the kind of magic that worked only on an object itself and not on the reader, so he would be able to experience his own book for once; he’d be able to climb onto the carpet and fly. Over the fields, over the pond, away from the Library.

If someone would just read it for him.

He knew full well that while perhaps Maram or Richard might deign to read the spell, neither were likely to let him climb aboard and try it out. But they were away for a few days on a collection trip in Chile and he hoped to circumvent their caution by convincing someone else, someone who might be less draconian about preventing what Richard called “high-risk behaviors,” which included swimming, climbing, running too fast, sliding down banisters, riding in cars with anyone other than Richard or Maram behind the wheel, and spending time with other children, excepting the few pinch-faced, dull-eyed sons of Library associates who were sometimes allowed to visit.

His tutor at the time, Mr. Oxley, was recently retired from Eton, andhad strongly intimated to Nicholas that he’d taken the Library position not for the joy of teaching but for the substantial remuneration. The man had laughed outright when Nicholas asked him to read the magic-carpet spell.

“What, so you can fly off and break your neck?” said Mr. Oxley. “A neck worth several times more than my own life, I might add—at least to some people, though my wife and children and grandchildren might argue otherwise, and so for their sake, thank you, I will decline.”

Nicholas went next to the working kitchen, where the cook was chopping leeks and two of the domestic staff were drinking coffee at the table. They stood quickly when Nicholas came in, smoothing their aprons and smiling down at him. He’d used to like this, how everyone had to snap to attention when he entered a room, but lately he was noticing what happened to their faces as they did: how whatever natural expression they were wearing was wiped clean and replaced with this same bland accommodating smile. He’d started to wonder what it would be like to have someone smile at him because they wanted to.

“I need one of you to read a spell for me,” he said. He did his best to imitate his uncle’s deep voice, the natural command in it, but instead it came out whining, childish. He cleared his throat. “You don’t need to know what it does. You just need to read it.”

“Gladly,” said the cook, “as soon as your uncle and Dr.Ebla get back and we can get their permission.”

“I’mgiving you permission!”

The cook was a slender, dark-skinned man with a head as bald as an avocado pit, and he’d been with the Library longer than either of the maids. He put down his knife and regarded Nicholas seriously. “Do you know what ‘chain of command’ means, Nicholas?”

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