Page 77 of Ink Blood Sister Scribe

Collins let out a hearty snort. In Joanna’s hands the jar lid finally came free with a pop and the lush, acid scent of tomatoes wafted into the air, a breeze from another season.

“By rare manuscripts,” Joanna said, “do you mean...”

She had never spoken of books with anyone outside her immediate family and found she couldn’t finish the sentence.

“Yes,” said Nicholas. “It’s a family organization and I grew up there. Rather like you grew up here, I understand.”

“How many books does the Library have?” she said.

“Oh,” said Nicholas, “ten thousand or so?”

She whirled to face him. “Tenthousand?”

“We’ve been around for hundreds of years,” he said. “My great-great-however-many-greats-grandfather started collecting on an amateur level in the early 1600s, and more recently my great-great-grandfather started lending them out, building connections, capital—he’s the one who started offering commissions.”

Joanna felt her mouth hanging open and slowly shut it. Collecting on anamateur level—was that what she and Abe had been doing? When she thought about it at all she’d assumed her own collection was one of the larger ones, if not the largest. Why else would anyone have targeted them and killed Isabel?

“So you really are an expert,” she said, swallowing her pride. “Good. I said I’d let you in if you looked at my father’s book. Will you?”

“He’ll look tomorrow,” said Esther. “There’s more we have to tell you right now.”

Joanna was shocked all over again at the sight of her sister sitting there at the kitchen table, lovely and adult and still so far away. “But we made a deal,” she said.

“Jo,” Esther said. “Nicholas doesn’t just collect books.”

“TechnicallyIdon’t collect them at all,” he said. “Maram’s got her little army of workers out in the field for that.”

“He writes them,” said Esther.

Joanna was holding half an onion in her left hand, which was still bandaged. Under the gauze her cut was healing well, while in the refrigerator her useless, unmagical ink still sat in its ramekin, dark with blood and ash.

She said, “What do you mean?”

“Sir Kiwi,” said Nicholas, snapping at his dog, who was engaged in an experimental scrabble at a peeling corner of tile. “Leave it.” He turned back to Joanna and said, “Right, Esther mentioned that’s been a question for you. How the books get written. Well...” He spread his arms, mouth twisting in a bitter, self-deprecatory way. “This is how. I’ve always known us to be called Scribes, capitalS, but probably that’s a dramatic Library thing, I don’t know.”

The coffee maker burbled a warning that it had finished brewing and Joanna reached for it numbly. She was attempting to put together Nicholas’s words in a way that made sense. This strange, posh young man with the designer dog did not match her image of the people who’d created the books she’d spent her life studying and protecting. Always, in all her reveries and musings, she had imagined women. Old ones, wise ones, witches. Their kind, wrinkled faces had lingered in her subconscious for so long that she didn’t even know they were there until she was asked to replace them with this face: young, male, untried.

“How do you do it?” she said. A question that was also a test. She wasn’t at all convinced he was telling the truth.

“With my blood,” he said. “And herbs, and ritual, and occasionally, the phases of the moon.”

All of this, Joanna had attempted.

“But it’s the blood that’s most important,” said Nicholas. “My blood, specifically. I could write a book without herbs, ceremony, or moon, and it would still have an effect, though a weak one. Whereas someone like you could bleed yourself dry and burn ten thousand candles beneath a total eclipse and end up with only a stack of paper.”

Nicholas couldn’t have meant this to sting, but it did. The cut on her hand felt suddenly silly, a mockery of all her efforts over the past few years.

“And you?” she said to Collins, whose eyes—very blue—were fixed on her. “Are you one of these... Scribes, too?”

Collins darted a glance at Esther and shook his head. “No,” he said. “I’m like you.”

She turned back to Nicholas. “What makes your blood different?”

“I don’t know,” Nicholas said. “How come you can hear magic and other people can’t?”

Joanna’s stomach lurched. She looked at Esther, who must have seen the betrayal in her face, because she looked away. Her sister had told these men a secret Joanna had spent her entire life keeping.

“I can’t hear anything,” Nicholas went on. “Or feel anything or do anything. That’s why wards don’t affect us.” He gestured to Esther, whose expression was suddenly very calm. “No magic does. Scribes can’t work it—we can only write it.”

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