by Kate Blair
There was sadness in the bird’s eyes, dark and deep as a lake. It nodded, once.
I jumped as the letters moved. They scuttled onto my fingers, crab-wise and crooked. I struggled to stay still, wondering if I’d made a terrible mistake. Wondering if I should have listened to the warning in my head. The words scampered over my hands as my heart raced. I let them settle on me, let them spread over my skin.
The page cleared. The words clutched my arms tight and pulled me into the book.
FOR A MOMENT, I thought I was in a cupboard with a cushioned floor, and then I realized I was lying in a four-poster bed, the curtains almost closed around me. I was in the sixteenth century again, but I wasn’t Isabel this time. Sheets covered my body, topped with embroidered blankets, and one thin arm lay on top of them: Maghew’s arm. The air was heavy with woodsmoke and the reek of sweat. Maghew’s body was hot with sickness and pain.
There was a small gap in the bed curtains, and I tried to focus on the wider room. It was dark, lit only by a single candle. Colorful wall-hangings decorated the chamber. A door was set into the wall opposite. It was familiar, thick and ancient, but there was no magpie scorched on it.
The agony pushed in on me along with Maghew’s memories: memories of being constantly sick and alone, the shame of being caught stealing from his own family. The memories tried to replace mine, but I clung on to myself. Clung to my soul.
If I was going to die, I was going to die as me.
His thoughts were disjointed, and perspiration dripped from his hair into his eyes, blurring the room.
Make the deal with me, a voice in his head said. And I can end the pain.
A chill went through me. I knew that voice.
I’d heard it before, in my own head, although I’d thought it was my own. It was the voice that told me not to invite Ollie to the library, the voice that told me not to read Maghew’s story. I’d heard it in Ollie’s head, too: the voice that told Ollie that Mum and I would be better off without him. In Maghew’s head, the voice was louder, impossible to ignore.
I am the only one who cares about you. Listen to me.
It spoke over Maghew’s own thoughts, drowning them out. The voice ripped into him, tearing into his lonely soul, and he wept into his pillow.
Isabel will be back soon. She will help; surely she will.
I tried to focus, but the pain drove a wedge between me and my memories. I struggled to stay myself, to stay afloat as the fever tumbled through Maghew’s mind, threatening to drag me into the seasick depths of his confusion. I was suddenly aware of someone standing above us.
To Maghew, the doctor seemed like a creature from a nightmare, his features elongated into a beak by his plague mask, black robes hanging from his shoulders like wings. He leaned over the bed, and for a moment, Maghew thought he was looking into a mirror.
Magpie: was that not what Isabel had called me?
Maghew’s heart raced. The doctor stank of sweat and vinegar, barely masked by the nauseating sweetness of cloves. Pain seared through my head and neck. A weight pressed upon my chest and I struggled to inhale. An overwhelming thirst consumed me. Maghew begged for water, but the doctor had already gone.
It is time, the voice in his head said. You can bring your family together. Bind them to you, forever. But you must make the deal now.
This was the decision, the one I had to stop. But Maghew did not want to make it.
No. I must be the goodly man Isabel thinks I am.
The voice kept up its whisper. Kept hissing in his head, trying to persuade Maghew. But he would not agree. After a long time, I was aware of another noise in the room, a different voice.
“We must leave.”
Maghew twisted his aching neck. The door was open a crack. A girl peered through. The shock of recognition made me dizzy. I had worn that fur-trimmed dress. Her name came to me, from my own memories, and Maghew’s: Isabel.
Her father stood behind her, his hand on her shoulder. “We have many hours to travel before nightfall.”
Isabel wiped at her eyes. “May I … bid him goodbye?”
Maghew pulled in a shuddering breath. No. They cannot be leaving without me.
His father’s grip tightened on Isabel’s shoulder, and she flinched. “We cannot risk breathing the miasma that surrounds him.”
Maghew’s throat was tight, almost closed with the swelling of his neck. He reached a shaking hand towards his sister, perspiration glistening on his skin.
“Could not the physician help him?” Isabel said.
“He is only God’s instrument. The Lord shall decide if Maghew lives or dies.”
“The priest?”
“He is busy. This sickness is abroad in many homes.”
Tears began to fall, clouding Maghew’s vision.
“We cannot leave him, father, please.”
“’Tis divine punishment for his thieving nature. We shall pray for him, but the pestilence shall claim us all if we flee not the city now.”
Maghew’s mouth moved, but no sound came from his parched throat. For a moment, I thought Isabel was going to step into the room, toward her brother.
Their father spoke again. “Naught can be done for him, and Alice has need of thee.”
Alice? Wasn’t that the dead girl in Isabel’s story?
Isabel squeezed her eyes shut. Maghew’s father steered her away and the door swung shut behind them. Maghew waited for it to reopen, but it stayed closed.
She cannot have gone. She would not leave me to die alone. She would not.
Maghew stared upon the door, still not believing, and my heart broke.
THE SICKNESS GREW worse. A hot agony held my limbs rigid, paralyzed with pain. My breath came hard. My gut burned. Maghew was going to die soon, that was clear. He was going to die in this room, abandoned by his family, all alone.
No, not quite alone.
I told you they never loved you. The voice sliced into his aching soul, sharp as a razor. I am all you have left.
There was a triumph in the words, in the dark velvet tone. Even through Maghew’s pain and confusion, the cruel joy was clear. The voice left a long pause then spoke slowly, like it was savoring the sentence.
I could leave you too.
“Please, do not do that.”
The voice did not answer. Silence rang through the room.
“Are you there? Come back!”
The boy’s heart sped dangerously fast, the panic leaving him weaker, dizzier.
“I’m sorry! You’re all I have!”
Still no answer. Maghew clutched the bedclothes, the panic seizing his breath.
So that was how it had happened. A deal had been made with a dying boy, terrified and alone. A deal for his soul. The pain within Maghew hardened, resolving itself into a dark determination.
The priest will not come to take my confession. I will die unforgiven, damned to hell. If I am damned, what do I have to lose? Was there not meant to be a price for a soul? Am I not owed more than a lonely and painful death? Is it so wrong to wish to live, to be with the people I love?
“I’ll make the deal! I don’t want to die!” Maghew said.
Finally, the voice spoke again. What are your terms? What is it that you want?
There was a sob in the boy’s voice. “To be with my family.”
Then that shall be our deal. You will not die. I will help you collect your family, and keep them together, forever. And in return, you will share your soul, your twice-seventh-born magic with me. You agree to this?
There was a pause, but I knew what Maghew would say. What he had said, all those years ago.
This was the story I had to change: the first one.
I focused. I claimed Maghew’s body. His agony became my agony. I owned it all, the aching, the sorrow, the loneliness. The pain was a fire, burni
ng in the core of me. I held his mouth shut. Maghew was trying to speak, to agree to the deal, but I would not let him.
The feeling of wrongness, strong as nausea, crashed through me. His story strained against me, trying to snap back, trying to reassert itself, trying to force Maghew’s mouth open. I couldn’t let that happen. I was trying to re-write the story, unravel it at the start. It chafed at my weakened will, at my paper-thin soul, trying to fix itself, trying to drag the boy back into his deal.
I kept his lips pressed together, struggling against the force of the past, strained tight as the leash of a rabid dog. But I was slipping away.
This was Maghew’s story, not mine. I could not change it.
Yet Chloe had changed a story. I’d seen the evidence. Chloe said she held on long enough that the girl had felt her. Cordelia had known she wasn’t alone.
I had to let Maghew know I was here.
So, fighting the sickness, the wrongness that reverberated down to my core. I spoke. It was hard to move Maghew’s mouth, hard to get the word out. But I spoke to the voice that had lied to us all. The voice that told Maghew no one loved him. The voice that told Ollie we’d be better off without him. The voice that had told me not to invite my own brother to the library.
It came out as a hoarse shout, sharp as a shard of glass in my throat. “No!”
The room froze, the flickering candle suddenly impossibly steady. The pain was still there; the agony and heat of Maghew’s body, but the story was no longer fighting me.
We’d stepped outside of the tale written in his book. Outside what had happened, hundreds of years ago, and into our own moment; two souls entwined at the end of our stories.
I held him there, in the space between him and the deal he’d made.
Silva. The girl from the library.
This wasn’t the real Maghew, of course. He had died hundreds of years ago. But this was his soul, his memories, his life trapped in the pages of his book.
I spoke out loud, using Maghew’s own mouth, his voice a wisp of sound.
“You’re not alone,” I said. “I’m here.”
Please, do not leave me.
Maghew’s desperation was bright as blood, and I understood. He shouldn’t die alone. He needed family. He needed me, distant as I was. My own soul was draining out, and it was hard to focus.
“I’ll stay,” I said, using too much strength to move his dry lips. “I can’t hold us here for long, but don’t make the deal. Don’t listen to the voice. It’s lying.”
No. The Whisper would not do that.
“It’s been trying to drive a wedge between you and those who loved you.”
No one loved me.
“Isabel loved you, so much. I was her. I felt it.”
Silence. Maghew’s abandonment had left him raw, his heartbreak echoing through hundreds of years.
“She wanted you to live with her. At her fiancé’s estate.”
There was a long pause.
Isabel wished for me to live with her?
“Yes. She thought the country air would be good for you. She wished she’d never left you that day … this day. She wished she could go back and stay with you. Didn’t you read her story?”
No … I cannot. But she never returned.
“She thought the place you made for her was too dark for the light in your soul. She thought you had made a deal with something evil. And you did, didn’t you?”
I was fading, my own life slipping away. I wanted to let go, to escape the pain of Maghew’s body. I wanted to rest. But I knew once my grip on Maghew slipped, the story would start again.
“It’s not too late. Please, don’t make the deal. Let us all go.”
I wished only to help, to give you all what you wanted. I wished for us to be together.
It was hard to move Maghew’s mouth as I replied. The words were a weak whisper.
“It doesn’t work like that. We can’t make people stay, no matter how much we want to. They have to choose for themselves how their own story goes. All we can do is be there when they need us.”
Tears slipped down my hot cheeks. I wasn’t sure who was crying, him or me. His weak body was wracked with sobs, with the searing pain of the disease that was killing him and the ache of the battle in his head.
There was so little of me left, and I was so tired. I couldn’t hold him anymore.
I let my grip slip, hoping it was enough.
The candle resumed its skittish flicker. Maghew exhaled as he took control of himself. He spoke, his voice rasping through his parched throat.
“I am so sorry. Thank you. Thank you. Forgive me.”
The sweat was cold on Maghew’s body. He trembled for a long while, and then fell still. His breathing grew weaker, bit by bit. His pulse slowed. Darkness crept in.
Maghew’s chest grew still. The pain drifted away.
I was dying. Maghew was dying. Both of us.
The flickering candle was a pinprick of light in our rapidly shrinking world.
Maghew let go.
Chapter Twenty
I LAY ON my back on the floor of the magpie’s library.
There was nothing left of me. The library had taken it all. I couldn’t move. My chest was too heavy to rise and fall.
I was dying.
Dark clouds filled the sky on the other side of the glass dome. A flash of lightning illuminated the branches, casting shadows black as cracks in the walls. The angry rumble of thunder shook the books, still scattered in heaps on the floor, half-hidden by the gloom.
The letters around me lay as still as dead insects.
I wanted to inhale, to get oxygen into my lungs, but there was nothing to animate my body, it was all in my book. The air itself was a weight on my chest, suffocating me.
More lightning, shocking the branches into movement, like electricity through a corpse. They twisted, lurched, and pulled themselves away from the dark walls, winding back toward their own roots.
The weight on my chest shifted, just a little. I pulled a tiny gasp of air into my lungs.
Not enough. Blackness gathered at the edge of my vision.
Another flare of lightning, and the ear-splitting crash of thunder. The dome above me cracked. I wanted to lift an arm, to protect myself as the glass fell. I couldn’t even flinch. But the shards melted away to nothing, dissolving in the air.
The pressure on me lifted, gram by gram. I pulled in a shallow breath. Then another.
My head spun.
The branches unraveled, unweaved, untangled. The books around me fluttered and crumbled, pages separating from spines that dissolved into the air as the paper faded to nothing. The text on the floor moved. It swirled up, forming a whirlwind of words, throwing themselves into the air, to the now-open sky. I struggled to sit up, pushing myself onto my elbows, and recoiled as I saw letters on my hand.
Silva would’ve noticed something was wrong sooner, if the magpie hadn’t distracted her.
But the words weren’t crowding this time, not forming a net on my skin. Instead they melted into my flesh. I lifted a hand to watch a line fade, glowing gold as it disappeared, spreading its light deep into my body
And yet, when she pushed against it, it swung open easily.
My story, returning to me. My memories, my feelings, my soul. I felt stronger as each letter slipped back into my skin. I sat up properly.
She wanted to tell Chloe about the library then. Shove it in her face, show her there was far more to reality, more to life than someone like her could ever imagine.
I pushed myself onto my knees. Watched the library twist into a tornado of letters and pages. Wind whipped my hair around, half-blinding me. I crawled away from it, struggling out of the spinning text, raising a hand to protect my face.
Another line settled on my arm.
As
she turned the corner, her blood froze. The fire engine sat outside Grandpa’s house.
I stumbled to my feet, feeling the life flow back into me. Shapes formed out of the words: figures, people. A girl of text, head back, eyes closed. A young boy written in the air, arms open to the sky above. They broke up, the letters spiraling out of the library to freedom. The wind sucked at me, tried to pull me into the growing funnel.
Lines from my book twisted out of the mass and returned to me.
On the cover a boy stood in an arcade, the familiar shape of him silhouetted against the light of the games.
I struggled against the hurricane of souls, arms windmilling as I tried to get to the door, Maghew’s door. My breath was sucked away by the storm. I faltered, slipped as the wind dragged me back.
I was weak, but more and more words landed on me.
She held Maghew’s mouth shut, struggling against the force of the past.
I used the strength my story gave me. I pushed forward, fought toward the door. It swung open, pulled by the vortex behind me. It hung on its hinges, showing me the real library. The way back to my life.
I wanted my life, my stupid life, so much.
Pages whipped into my face, and I clawed at them, hurling them behind me. The wind tried to drag me back into the heart of the storm, tried to suck me away from my world.
I fell to my knees, ducked my head down to fight the pull. My nails dug into the cracks in the stone, aching as I wrenched myself forward. I screamed. The wind stole my cry, stole my breath as I crawled, inch by inch, toward freedom.
The metal of the door’s hinges twisted like the branches of the library, and with a snap, the bottom one pulled away from the wall. I scrambled on as the other hinge broke, and the door swung toward me.
I ducked to one side and threw myself through.
THE GIRL STAYED with me. She was a different voice within my head, telling me a different story: a story where I was loved, a story where I was not alone.
As she spoke, as her words slipped into me, I let go. I let go of the tale I had been told for so long, where none would love me, where none but The Whisper would stay with me, where I must steal love, steal companionship, steal souls. I let go of the existence I had clung to, and the terrible cost of it.