Page 25 of Ink Blood Sister Scribe

Nicholas’s suite of rooms was on the second floor of the manor house, in the West Wing, off a long corridor of floor-to-ceiling windows that were spaced with low velvet benches and waist-high decorative vases devoid of flowers. It had rained through the night and the glass was streaked with water, the sky a luminous mother-of-pearl that filled the corridor with astrange, heavy-lidded light, bringing out the vivid reds in the carpet below Nicholas’s feet but making all other color feel washed out.

The house had been constructed in the early seventeenth century for one of Nicholas’s ducal ancestors and renovated in the late eighteenth, so the interior was all neoclassical doric columns and gilded pilasters, with ornate stucco mantels and carved plaster ceilings. Outside, the walls were plain stone, surrounded by rambling grounds that Richard referred to as the “deer park” although it had been years since anyone had hunted there. The furnishings were a testament to the succession of centuries the house had seen: deep blue and red Savonnerie carpets from the Stuart period, nineteenth-century Boulle desks inlaid with brass and tortoiseshell, silk Chinese wallpaper, gilt rococo mirrors... a curated temporal layering of luxury.

Nicholas made his way down the grand staircase, Sir Kiwi hopping down in front of him. She was a Pomeranian whose russet fur matched Nicholas’s own hair nearly exactly, like they were from the same litter. She was nine years old, shaped like a cotton puff, and weighed about the same. She’d been a consolation prize from his uncle when he’d lost his eye, a capitulation after years spent begging for a dog. He’d always imagined himself with a sleek German shepherd or a big-headed pit bull, something dangerous and loyal. Instead, he’d gotten Sir Kiwi. Perhaps this had been Richard’s idea of a joke, but the joke was on Richard, because Sir Kiwi was a creature par excellence. Not dangerous, perhaps, but fierce and devoted and clever and an endless source of good cheer. She was the best friend Nicholas had ever had. His only friend, really.

The grand staircase and lower reception hall were lined with oil portraits of dead people, all of them Nicholas’s ancestors, some quite demonstrably so. There was the dowager cousin with his long nose; a great-uncle with his sturdy chin; and his father, John, immortalized as a portrait of a man with laughing brown eyes. Nicholas knew his own portrait would be added someday.

Richard was not on the wall. He’d claimed modesty when Nicholasasked, but the one time Nicholas had been allowed into his private study, to celebrate the completion of his first book when he was eight, he’d seen that Richard kept in pride-of-place a portrait of his grandfather’s great-grandfather—Nicholas’s great-great-great-great-great-grandfather, founder of the Library—who looked so exactly like Richard that Nicholas had thought at first that they were the same person. It had scared him as a child because this founding ancestor, a surgeon best known for his speed with an amputation saw, had been painted in a bloody surgical apron holding a knife, and Nicholas had noticed that the ivory picture frame was only ivory on three sides: the bottom support was unmistakably made from the bone of a human leg. It was unnerving to see someone who looked like his gentle uncle so thoroughly doused in gore and surrounded by bone.

As a child, Nicholas had occasional heavily supervised playdates with the children of Library associates, but never here in his own home, and aside from lessons he’d usually spent his days alone. The house itself had become a kind of friend to him, and he had spent endless hours playing games with it: racing the pounding echo of his own footsteps across the black-and-white-checked marble floors of the empty Banqueting Hall; lying beneath the white Steinway piano in the never-used Green Drawing Room, staring up at the silent wooden ribs of its underbelly, hide-and-seeking with his own breath. Children in the novels Richard had brought him by the stack were always stumbling awed into mysterious old mansions seeking magic—and Nicholas had been lucky enough to have been born into it, surrounded by it, made of it. Once, this had been a source of wonder to him.

For most of the past decade, however, the endless hallways, fussy antique furnishings, and convoluted ornateness of the walls and ceilings had felt not wondrous but gloomy, oppressive. Yet sometimes he found it beautiful once again, as he did now. It was comforting to be within these familiar stone walls, snug behind the failsafe wards.

At the bottom of the stairs, Collins paused to listen to something on his earpiece. “Richard and Maram want you in the Winter Drawing Room.”

“Sir Kiwi needs to go out first.”

Collins rolled his eyes but relayed this information over the radio. “Richard says ten minutes max.”

“Am I not allowed on the grounds without permission now?” Nicholas said.

“I’m just repeating what I’ve been told,” said Collins, and then hesitated. “You should know—the rest of the staff have been confined to their stations today. I’m the only one allowed to walk around.”

Nicholas turned quickly. “Why?”

“Safety precautions until your uncle can interview everyone with a truth spell. To make sure there aren’t any... I don’t know, inside informants, moles, whatever.”

Nicholas groaned. “I suppose that’s what I’ll be doing the rest of the day, then. Writing truth spells.” He’d barely recovered from the last book. “And you’re the exception because of what you did last night?”

Collins frowned. “Guess so.”

Collins looked as tired as Nicholas felt, his normally bright blue eyes dulled by exhaustion, and unbidden Nicholas recalled that unexpected crack in Collins’s voice after the gun had gone off. Nicholas wanted to ask how he was feeling, if he was all right, but felt awkward doing so.

“Doug,” he said instead, returning to his old standby of guessing Collins’s first name.

Collins gave another expansive roll of his eyes and turned away, toward the main entrance. “Let’s get your dog walked.”

“Dougie, then? Douglas?”

Only Nicholas, Richard, and Maram could walk in the deer park; the Library grounds were included in the wards, and Collins would’ve been useless, too dazed from the addle of the protective magic to keep his feet once out the front door. Certainly no one else would be able to follow, so all told, the threat level was low. Nevertheless, Collins stood in the open doorway, arms folded, watching as Sir Kiwi dashed off across the wet grass with Nicholas following behind.

It had taken Nicholas a while to understand how other people perceived the house and its surrounding land. That is: they did not. Even those who knew the enormous house was there could not remember how to see it; they had to focus, and refocus, and argue against their own senses until those senses failed. It was why all the scant, carefully selected Library staff was live-in; if they left the premises, they’d never remember how to get back.

To Nicholas, however, who was immune to magic, and to Maram and Richard, whose blood was included as part of the warding spell they set each night, the house appeared as solid and obvious as anything, a gigantic stone manse settled complacently in the rolling green hills of West Berkshire. Brambles encircled the base of the house, though in summer those bare branches would be sagging with rose blossoms, yellow and pink and velvety red, and what looked now like black cracks in the stone walls would be green ivy crawling delicately upward.

The gardeners couldn’t stand the mental strain of remembering the ground on which they worked and so the wildness of the lawn was kept barely in check by a small herd of cat-eyed goats, several of whom were milling about, chewing, paying no mind to Sir Kiwi, who was darting at them and then away with joyous barks.

Nicholas walked out to the man-made lake and sat on one of the damp stone benches, taking deep swallows of the cold wet air. He pretended to himself that he was simply appreciating the fresh healthy scent of it and not catching his breath after the pitiably short walk, but he couldn’t ignore how his vision was swimming. He closed his eyes for a while, listened to the sound of the water moving in the wind. Writing a truth spell would probably put him in bed for days, but no need to focus on that now. He focused instead on how good it felt to be outside. He hadn’t noticed how squeezed and claustrophobic he’d been feeling until that feeling had lifted somewhat.

When he opened his eyes again, they caught on the wet gravel drive that stretched out across the rolling land and distant, misty hills. The nearestroad was about a half mile away and for a moment Nicholas’s practiced imagination took over and he pictured it: walking down that drive, reaching the smooth black pavement, thumbing down a ride, disappearing.

But that fantasy held far less appeal than it had before someone had pointed a gun at his head. Anyway, he had nowhere else to go.

He stood and whistled for Sir Kiwi, then let her lead him back to the house and the stifling warmth of safety.

In the Winter Drawing Room, Maram and Richard were sitting together on the cream and gold sofa, a sheaf of papers spread out on the low coffee table before them, along with an interesting-looking bundle wrapped tightly in waxed canvas. The bank of windows was sashed with heavy velvet drapes that had been pulled back enough for Nicholas to see the misty grounds he’d just left, and a fire flickered in the white stone hearth.

They were both dressed comfortably, Richard in a thick cardigan and Maram in a tan silk blouse. There was a silver pot with an arched spout sitting on a tray with an empty cup and a jug of cream. Nicholas went for it greedily.

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