Page 93 of Ink Blood Sister Scribe

They were having a rare afternoon out, just the two of them, at a cafe on the South Bank where Nicholas had spent most of his lunch staring around in wonder at all the chattering strangers. Now Maram set her fork down and regarded him solemnly.

“Do you want the grown-up answer,” she said, “or an answer fit for a ten-year-old?”

Nicholas scoffed. What ten-year-old would choose the latter?

“I love Richard because he has never wanted me to be other than what I am,” Maram said. “And that is a scholar. I’m dedicated first and foremost to the Library, to our books and to the preservation of our knowledge, and Richard loves this about me.”

“So you love him because he loves you,” said Nicholas, disappointed at the lack of romance in this reply.

“That doesn’t sound like a good reason to love someone?”

Nicholas didn’t know. He wondered if that was why he loved Richard, too; because Richard loved him, or at least came closer to loving him than anyone else in his life. Was that because Nicholas, like Maram, was an extension of the Library? Was the Library the only thing that held them together?

After that, he’d tried to put away his fantasies of family. Maram was a guardian, a friend, she would never be anything else. But the truth was that for quite a long time, if someone had come up to him and told him that for all these years, Maram had secretly been his mother, he’d have been ecstatic.

He would nothave shrugged his shoulders and said, as Esther did, “Unlikely.”

“Unlikely?” Nicholas repeated. “Esther, you look just like her.”

Joanna said, her voice careful. “It does make sense.”

“No, it doesn’t,” said Esther. “It doesn’t tell us why she sent us here to Vermont, or why she told Collins to drop the wards, or what she wants from us. It doesn’t tell us anything at all.”

Nicholas was too agitated to stay sitting. He let his feet carry him to the far end of the room and then back. “You’re wrong,” he said. “It does explain a few things. As a thought exercise, let’s say Maram is your mother and has been acting to keep you out of danger. That would certainly explain why she passed those tickets to you through the mirror: to get you off the research base and away from Tretheway. And it would explain why she’s decided all of a sudden to go against the best interestsof the institution she’s been dedicated to for the past twenty-five years. You overstayed your time in Antarctica, the Scribe-seeking spell finally located you, and Maram had no choice but to act.”

“She’s not going against the Library’s interests,” Esther said, “she’s playing right into them! She sent us here,together,and told Collins to drop the wards as soon as he could. She’s made it easier for Richard to get us both in one place, not harder.”

“But the Scribe-seeking spell is over for the year,” Nicholas said. “Dropping the wards doesn’t mean Richard will suddenly know where we are, not unless we stay for another entire year, waiting. He has no other way of tracking—”

The words dried up in his mouth, because across the room Joanna’s face was suffused with fear. She was looking at him and shaking her head.

“Oh,” he said. “Shit.”

The book in the pantry. The book clearly emblazoned with the Library’s tracking spell.

“I rest my case,” said Esther. “So I propose we stop forcing sense out of a nonsensical situation, take that book, and throw it in the ocean.”

“An ocean won’t hurt it,” said Joanna, “not while it’s in progress.”

“I could hurt it,” Nicholas said. “So could Esther.”

“No,” said Collins. He’d moved in front of the living room doorway, his breadth crowding the space and his posture radiating a coiled, preparatory energy, like a predator about to spring. Nicholas sometimes forgot how large Collins was—how large he could make himself.

Esther stalked toward him. “What do you mean, no?”

“Do you have any idea,” Collins said, “how many people the Library has had killed over the years? How many books they’ve bribed for and blackmailed for and straight-up stolen? We’re talking centuries of this shit. A magical monopoly. Why do you think the two of you are the only Scribes left? The rest of you died writing the Library’s spells. The Library doesn’t want to ‘preserve knowledge,’ it just wants to preserve its own power, it wants to be the only game in town so everyone has to buytickets and come watch.” He turned to Nicholas. “I don’t know what happened to your parents, but I’m willing to bet it wasn’t—what’d your uncle tell you? A robbery gone wrong? Bullshit, Nicholas. That’s bullshit. Your father died for his blood just like every other Scribe the Library’s ever had. Just like you will.”

Each one of Collins’s words hit Nicholas like a blow, his ears ringing.

“I think Maram really does have a plan,” Collins said. “I think she’s sick of Richard’s shit and ready to do something about it, finally, and I’m ready, too. I don’t want to run, and I don’t want to hurl anything into the ocean, I want to figure out what she wants us to do and see if we can execute it. She wanted you to know the wards were down and she said to find the thing—the thing Richard will use to find you. She’s gotta be talking about that book. There’s something there, we just have to figure it out. Please.”

This last he said very softly, a direct appeal. Collins’s eyes were steady and his expression so earnest Nicholas had to look away. Joanna was chewing her bottom lip, moving her long hair from shoulder to shoulder, her brow knitted. Esther was examining her fingernails as if bored with the whole thing.

“How much time do we have before the wards drop?” Nicholas asked Joanna.

“About two hours.”

“So we give it two hours,” Nicholas said, meeting Collins’s gaze. “Two hours to think this through and decide if Maram’s plan is intended to hurt us or help us.”

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