Page 38 of Ink Blood Sister Scribe

Collins shoved his big hands absently into too-small white cotton, still looking around. “These are all... all these books are...?”

“Spells, yes, for the most part.” Nicholas started off down the aisles. “The majority are quite old, as you can see. All the ones written by Library Scribes are around that corner.”

“There used to be a lot more of you, right? Scribes?”

“Supposedly,” said Nicholas.

“I’m surprised they’re not breeding you like a show pony.”

“I’m not amenable to breeding—and besides, there’s absolutely no guarantee any of my children would be Scribes. My father was the first Scribe born to our family since the Library’s founding; my own birth appears to have been pure dumb luck.” Nicholas glanced back. “Anyway, what do you know about show ponies?”

“I might know a lot. I might have grown up on a ranch.”

Collins, growing up: it was a startlingly charming thought. Nicholas pictured a small square boy with bright blue eyes and a furious adult scowl. “Didyou grow up on a ranch?”

Collins didn’t answer, though, and the smile slipped off Nicholas’s face. He should have known better than to expect Collins would answer; conversation wasn’t part of the job description. Then he heard the rasp of a cough. He didn’t turn around, unwilling to see on Collins’s face the strain of fighting an NDA—unwilling to wonder why he’d be forbidden to disclose information that seemed so innocuous. Probably it was just a cough, perfectly natural. Besides, Nicholas had every intention of keeping his promise and reversing the spell—so maybe sooner, rather than later, Collinswouldbe able to reply.

“Here we are,” he said, leading Collins up the aisle beneath the stained-glass windows, to the dais. Collins watched with trepidation as Nicholas took the Hungarian book down from its shelf and held it out. “This is what I need you to read. Have a look through, it won’t do if you stumble.”

Collins looked at the description card. “It’s in Hungarian.”

“The language won’t matter once the book feels your blood and knows your intention to read it. Once you start, you’ll understand it as if it were English.”

“I know that,” Collins said.

“I don’t have a needle or a knife or anything,” Nicholas remembered. “Do you have something we can poke you with?”

Collins dug in his pockets and brought out a keychain with a small Swiss army knife. “You got a lighter? To sterilize it?”

“Alighter?” Nicholas said. “There’s about a thousand kilos worth of irreplaceable paper in this room.”

“So, no.”

“You’re not going to go septic from a prick on the finger, trust me.”

Collins rolled his shoulders like a man gearing up for a fight and yanked off his gloves. “Fine. Let’s do this.”

Despite Nicholas’s general exhaustion, his irritation with Maram, and his resentment at such a spell in the first place, he felt a little zing of excitement. The Library was full of secrets, but it had been quite some time since he’d encountered a new one. Collins held the knife to his finger and waited for the blood to well up before he pressed it firmly to the page and began to read. His voice was clumsy at first and then more natural, his accent lending the words a hypnotic kind of cadence.

It took about twenty-five minutes until, silently, the bookshelf began to blur. At first it seemed merely out-of-focus, but then its edges started to dissolve like a storm cloud fading into rain, and by the time the last word rang out, Nicholas’s hand could pass through with no resistance at all. The bookshelf and the books on it were a vague dark haze and Nicholas could see through that haze to the wall.

Only it wasn’t a wall.

“A door,” said Collins.

It was. The bookshelf had faded to reveal the brass knob, the plain wood, the hinges fastened to the bare stone of the wall—a door like any other but hidden. And behind the door, when Nicholas reached forward through the intangible shelf and pulled it open, was a dark staircase heading up.

11

“Are you sure I can’t get you anything?” Cecily said. “A cup of coffee? Tea?”

Joanna didn’t bother looking at her mother as she shook her head. She was lying on the couch with her gaze fixed out the window, tracking the slow fade of light as the sun sank downward, a bright coin tossed into a dark pool. With every dimming ray she moved further from the possibility of getting out and getting home in time to set the wards.

“You didn’t finish your lunch,” Cecily said. “I could reheat the soup?”

“You can’t feed me into forgiving you,” Joanna said. Her voice was hoarse from yelling.

“I know that,” said Cecily, though her tone suggested she planned to keep trying. Joanna had been trapped behind her mother’s spell for over an hour and wore herself out in the first fifteen minutes, screaming and weeping and begging for an explanation, and all Cecily had said, over and over, was “I can’t tell you, I’m sorry, I can’t tell you.” She’d been crying, too, but neither of them was crying now. Joanna felt almost calm; perhaps she’d used up her yearly allotment of furious emotion. Cecily had positioned a chair in the doorway and was watching her daughter with sorry determination from outside the living room. Gretchen lay dozing at her feet.

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