Page 98 of Ink Blood Sister Scribe

If a mirror was a path, then the natural next step wasthroughit.

Esther thought of Abe’s poor, doomed groundhogs. She thought of Trev’s finger mangled black and unnatural. She thought of the horrorshe’d felt when her own hand, covered in Trev’s blood, had seemed to brush the mirror’s surface, how she’d snatched it back expecting pain but found the skin unmarked.

Esther and Nicholas were untouched by ordinary spells the way shadows ceased to exist in a pitch-dark room, because darkness couldn’t add to darkness. Richard’s Scribe-seeking spell needed Nicholas’s eye in order to see Esther, because only magic could see magic. Nicholas and Estherweremagic. It treated them as a part of itself.

If Maram was on the other side of this mirror, if she had activated the spell, then her blood was necessary to pass things through. Hers or Cecily’s, but Cecily’s blood wasn’t here.

Esther looked at the vial she’d taken from her duffel bag, filled with red. Maram’s might be.

She went over to the mirror and tapped the glass: it was solid and unyielding. Carefully she unscrewed the cap of the vial and poured out a scant drop of the liquid inside, letting it fall onto her palm and smear red across her skin. She put a hand to the glass again, expecting resistance or pain or pins and needles or anything, any kind of sensation, but she felt nothing. Her fingers went through the glass like it was air. She snatched her hand back, her pulse skyrocketing.

“Esther,” Joanna said. “What are you doing?”

Esther ignored her. She gripped the mirror’s frame with both hands and took a huge breath, like she was about to jump into deep water. Then, before anyone could stop her, before she could change her mind, she plunged her face through the silvery surface of the mirror. Behind her, she heard Joanna scream.

She’d squeezed her eyes shut but when no pain came, she opened them. Before her was a stately room, empty, with a four-poster bed, dark oil paintings on the walls, and a beautiful blue rug, then she felt hands grabbing at her body and pulling her back, and a second later the stately room disappeared and she was looking at the mirror in the closet again, its surface rippling slightly.

Joanna, who’d grabbed her around the waist to haul her back, spun her around and searched her face with terrified eyes. But when she saw no damage, her expression changed from terror to incredulity.

“We can go through the mirror,” Esther said. “Nicholas and I. We can go to the Library while it’s empty and find whatever object Richard’s tied himself to, and destroy it.”

31

Nicholas had been the only Scribe for so long that it had not occurred to him there was anything he might not know about his own powers. He’d read all his father’s notes and every book in the Library at least twice over, not to mention the thousands of pages Maram had found and collated from the notebooks of other Scribes, some of whom had been dead a century, some a millennium. Maram had traveled all over the world seeking this knowledge, purchasing it for enormous sums of money from museums and private archives, or bartering for it, or stealing it. Probably even killing for it. All so she could bring it home to Nicholas.

So he had thought.

Such an error of thinking, to believe himself the expert because he was the one with the power. Such an error of thinking to believe he had power in the first place. Everything he knew about writing books had been filtered through Maram. All this time, it was she who’d been the expert.

Amazing that even after the events of the past week, Nicholas still had the capacity for surprise.

Stepping through the mirror was like no physical experience he’d ever had. It was like swimming if the water were made of treacle and also of outer space, sweet and airless and tugging and infinite, and dark in a way that wasn’t a binary to light but rather a different state entirely, complete unto itself. The body of the darkness was sound, which was sensation: countless wings brushing against one another, countless blades of golden grass moving in an endless wind, every distant highway ever heard. Nicholas’s mind and body were still fully his, which made things even more peculiar, because his brain, limbs, nerves, everything was working to make rational human sense of something that had no senses.

It was terrible and incredible and if he’d had time, he would’ve started to panic—but he’d taken a step and the step ended. As his foot landed on the other side of the frame, the roaring darkness was gone, and he was in the world again. First his head, then his other foot came out of the mirror, and finally he was standing in Maram’s bedroom, as naturally as if he’d gone through a door.

He put a hand to his jacket to check the inner pocket where Richard’s book was tucked and a second later, he watched, fascinated, as Esther came through the glass. It was like watching someone emerge perfectly dry out of a vertical pool, and his head swam at the sight.

“Bizarre” was Esther’s assessment of the experience. She tightened her curly ponytail and flicked her eyes around the room. Nicholas followed her gaze: the four-poster mahogany bed, the enormous Louis XV armoire, the silk carpet. He remembered lying on that carpet on one of the rare occasions Maram had granted him entry when he was a child, staying quiet so she wouldn’t regret inviting him in.

Her bedroom door was locked from the outside and he fumbled with the three inside locks until he found the correct configuration of bolts, Esther hovering behind him, her wish to take over tangible. Finally, the door clicked open. He pushed it very slowly in case any domestic staff were nearby, but Maram’s antechamber was as empty as her bedroom and Esther followed him through it into the hallway.

After Esther’s revelation, they had waited an hour or so to ensure that Maram’s assurances would be true, that she and Richard would indeed have left the house, and the Library would be empty. It had been nine o’clock in Vermont and was two in the morning here in England, the halls lit low, the huge windows black and nearly as reflective as the mirror they’d just come through. The marble floors shone under the light of the wall sconces.

“People really live here?” Esther whispered. “Youreally live here?”

Nicholas looked around for the source of her wonder. It was true that compared to Esther’s shabby childhood home the Library was palatial,but recent understanding had so warped his memories that his eye, too, had changed. He’d spent the majority of his life in this house and until recently had felt he’d known it in the same alert, instinctive way he knew his own body; knew its coldest stones and softest sofas, knew the best place to find midafternoon sun, knew which rooms the staff cleaned at which hours and which rooms were rarely cleaned at all, knew every hallway, every painting. Turning a corner was like bending an elbow. Opening a door like blinking an eye.

Or it had been.

Now Nicholas felt he’d stepped through that looking glass and emerged into a parallel world. Physically everything was as he remembered, but his perception had changed so irrevocably that the physical surroundings themselves appeared altered. The height of the soaring ceilings felt cruel rather than grand, built to a scale not meant for human comfort, and the carpets sat rich and bright over the floor like they were hiding stains.

“It’s like a museum,” Esther said.

“Yes, and like a museum, you mustn’t touch,” Nicholas said, and Esther set down the thousand-year-old vase she’d picked up off its stand. Then, checking himself, he said, “Actually, touch away.”

“Because fuck them?” Esther said, picking up the vase again and turning it in her hands.

“Fuck them,” Nicholas confirmed. “I’d say we ought to smash it ceremonially, but it hasn’t done anything wrong. Unfair to punish it for the Library’s sins.”

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