Page 90 of Ink Blood Sister Scribe

“Mom.” She clutched the book more tightly and looked at Nicholas. “I think our mother is under the same spell. Silence. An NDA.”

Her words brought a moment of quiet.

“That particular technology,” Nicholas said, “was developed by the Library. By my father. I’ve seen his notes.”

“So what does that mean?” Joanna said, her face pale.

Nicholas thought of Abe’s awful book. “It means that at some point, both your parents must’ve had a connection to the Library.”

Joanna lifted her chin and drew herself up to her full height, which Nicholas only belatedly realized was tall, maybe taller than he. The long hair, the big eyes, the quiet voice, it all made her seem small, but she wasn’t.

“I want to use this on my mother,” Joanna said. “Not on Collins.”

“Joanna,” Collins said, his voice low and imploring, and she looked like she was about to start spitting fire.

“I don’t owe you a goddamn thing,” she said.

“But I stole your wards,” he tried. “Don’t you want to knowwhy?”

“It won’t work, anyway,” Nicholas said. “I wrote Collins’s NDA, I know the language of the original, so I know the language needed to undo it. There’s no possible chance I wrote your mother’s, I imagine she’s under an older version, from my father’s tenure as Scribe.”

Joanna looked crushed. “But—”

“Stop, all of you,” Esther said, clapping her hands to her ears. “One thing at a time! Look, Nicholas asked Collins why he trusts Maram, and that’s something we need to know above all else. She’s our puppet master, she brought us here, we need to figure outwhy.”

“Yes,” Collins said, pointing at her.

“I wrote that book,” Esther told Joanna. “So I think I should decide what we do with it. And I want to break Collins’s NDA.”

“Thank you!” Collins said.

“Nicholas?” Esther said.

Nicholas was very used to being ordered around. He wanted to protest, to assert himself, but the truth was he didn’t know what to assert himselftoward,and there was a not-insignificant part of him that showed its neck at the commanding tone in Esther’s voice. “Your call,” he said.

“Jo,” Esther said, her voice noticeably softer when she addressed her sister. “Is this all right? Will you read the spell?”

Joanna looked down at the book in her hands, thumbs moving back and forth over the leather cover. She nodded at last, resigned. “I’ll get the herbs and the knife,” she said.

“Meet us in the living room,” Nicholas said. “Collins should be sitting down for this.”

Collins sat on the couch and Joanna started to sit next to him, then seemed to think better of it, and sat on the coffee table before him instead, the book in her lap. Nicholas stood a pace or two away, arms folded, while Esther perched in the leather recliner, one foot pulled up on the cushion like she might spring away. Joanna glanced between the two of them nervously.

“Nicholas, could you maybe not loom so much?”

“I’m not looming, I’m—”

“Standing over me, glaring,” said Joanna. “It’s making me nervous.”

Grudgingly, Nicholas stepped back. “Better?”

Joanna nodded. In a voice that started soft and then went hard, like she was remembering to be angry, she said, “Collins, are you ready?”

“I’m ready,” he said.

She opened the book on her lap and took a deep, slow breath. Then, without so much as a flinch, she stabbed the point of the knife into her ring finger and dipped the bloody tip into the bowl of herbs. Collins watched her every movement, his posture tense and anticipatory, his breathing fast. Joanna pressed her finger to the page and began.

Nicholas had expected her to be a tentative reader, small-voiced and uncertain, but he kept forgetting she had been doing this her entire life. Her voice was confident and continuous and beautifully modulated, rising and falling as if she were in conversation with the words. Once she began reading, she did not lose focus: not when Sir Kiwi leaped onto the back of the couch to yap out the window at a squirrel, not when Nicholas had awave of dizziness and sat heavily on the piano bench, not when Collins’s hands began to tremble in his lap and he started swallowing convulsively.

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