“Then how . . . ?”
“I’ve spent hundreds of years observing humankind during my service to the Thorn family. I don’t wish to insult you, but you are not complicated beings.”
She shuddered, staring at her hands, at the too-perfect cup of tea, wondering what else he could tell about her simply by looking.
“Are you feeling unwell? Perhaps you should get more rest.”
She shook her head, not meeting his eyes. “I’ve rested enough.”
“In that case, I have news that may ease your mind.” He lifted a newspaper from the nightstand and passed it to her. She took it warily, glancing at his gloves, but she couldn’t see any evidence of his claws. “The attempt on your life has already reached the morning papers.”
Elisabeth almost did a double take. The headline on the front page read SUSPECT . . . OR HERO? and was accompanied by a sketch of Nathaniel and herself standing on top of the coach as fiends closed in around them. Nathaniel’s lightning slashed through the crosshatched sky, and the artist had taken the liberty of replacing her iron bar with a sword. Her eyes flicked back to the headline. “This is about me?”
Silas inclined his head.
Incredulous, she began skimming the article. The young woman, identified by an anonymous source as one Miss Elisabeth Scrivener, demonstrated uncommon courage and vigor in holding off her demonic attackers, going so far as to save the life of a helpless bystander. . . . She is believed to have arrived in Brassbridge as a suspect in the acts of sabotage on the Great Libraries, though we must question the Magisterium’s wisdom in naming her a suspect when this vicious attempt on her life suggests the precise opposite. It is clear that the true culprit hoped to silence her using any means possible. . . .
Elisabeth’s cheeks flamed as the article went on to speak glowingly of reports from our trusted sources that she had single-handedly defeated a rampaging Malefict before it imperiled the lives of innocents in the quaint village of Summershall. Then, annoyingly, it devoted a subsequent column to Magister Nathaniel Thorn, Austermeer’s Most Eligible Bachelor—When Will He Select a Bride?
Something nagged at her, and she went back to the beginning to reread the first several sentences. “Wait a moment,” she realized aloud. “This says acts of sabotage.”
Silas reached toward her. She tensed, but he only flicked to the second page. Scanning through the article’s continuation, her breath stopped.
“There was an attack on the Great Library of Knockfeld?” Her lips moved as she raced through the cramped text. “ ‘Another Class Eight Malefict . . . three wardens dead, including the Director . . . first labeled a tragic accident, now believed to be connected to the incident in Summershall.’ This happened two weeks before the Book of Eyes!” She looked up at Silas. “Why would any of this ease my mind?”
“Last night has altered your circumstances considerably. Your hearing has been called off in the midst of the public outcry incited by the press. Once you are well enough for a carriage ride, Master Thorn has been instructed to bring you directly to the Chancellor.”
She sat in disbelief, inhaling the paper’s scent of cheap ink and newsprint. Her head felt empty, ringing with Silas’s words. “Why does the Chancellor want to see me?” she asked.
“I was not told.” Something like pity shaded the demon’s alabaster features. “Perhaps you might consider getting dressed. I can assist you, if you wish. I have taken the liberty of altering today’s selection.”
Elisabeth frowned. Her best dress hung from a hook on the wardrobe, lengthened with fashionable panels of silk. Now, it looked like it would fit. Silas had done that himself? She touched her neatly brushed hair, recalling her earlier observation that someone had bathed her and changed her clothes. When realization struck, she recoiled. “Did you undress me?”
“Yes. I have decades of experience—” Reading her horror, he raised a placating hand. “I apologize. I have no interest in human bodies. Not in any carnal sense. I forget, at times . . . I should have said so earlier.”
Elisabeth was not to be taken for a fool. “I’ve read what demons do to people. You torture us, spill our blood, devour our entrails. The entrails of maidens, especially.”
Silas’s lips tightened. “Lesser demons eat human flesh. They are base creatures with vulgar appetites.”
“And you are so different?”
His lips thinned further. Against all odds, offense shone in his yellow eyes, and when he spoke, the edges of his courteous, whispered consonants were slightly clipped. “Highborn demons consume nothing but the life force of mortals, and even then, only once we have bargained for it. We care for nothing else.”
She sat back, her heart pounding. Slowly, she calmed. Silas seemed to be telling the truth. He wasn’t attempting to disguise the fact that he was evil, only clarifying the nature of his misdeeds. Strangely, that made her feel that she could trust him, in this matter at least.
She thought of the silver streak in Nathaniel’s hair, so unusual to see in a boy of eighteen. How much of his life have you taken? she wondered.
“Enough of it,” Silas said, almost too quietly for her to hear. “Now, if you are certain you don’t require assistance . . .”
“No thank you,” she said hurriedly. “I can get ready without any help.”
His raised eyebrows informed her that had his doubts, but he bowed politely out the door all the same, leaving Elisabeth alone with a thousand questions and a cooling cup of tea.
• • •
When she opened the door fifteen minutes later, Silas was nowhere in sight. She poked her head out of the room and peered down the hallway. While she had never spent much time in a real house, this one seemed enormous compared to the homes in Summershall. The hallway marched on for a considerable length, set with dark wood paneling and an astonishing number of doors. For some reason all the curtains were drawn, reducing the sunny day to a twilit gloom.
She crept outside and drifted down the hall. Though grand, the house possessed an air of abandonment. She didn’t see any servants, demonic or otherwise, and the air was so still that the methodical ticking of a grandfather clock somewhere deep within the manor seemed to reverberate through the soles of her boots like a heartbeat. Everything smelled faintly of aetherial combustion, as if magic had soaked into the building’s very foundations.
After several twists through the labyrinthine halls, the odor intensified. She turned this way and that, sniffing the air, and finally determined that the smell was seeping out from beneath one closed door in particular: a door whose panels were covered in soft snowdrifts of dust, the wood around the ornate knob scored with scratches, as though someone’s hand had slipped repeatedly while trying to unlock it.
Elisabeth wavered. She was not going to touch a sinister-looking door in a sorcerer’s home. But perhaps . . .
Holding her breath, she bent and brought her eye level with the keyhole. The room was dark inside. She leaned forward.
“Miss Scrivener,” said Silas’s soft voice, directly behind her.
She flung herself around, striking the wall with enough force to rattle her teeth. How did Silas move so silently? He had done the same thing to the man last night, right before he killed him.
Silas’s expression was remote, as though graven in marble, but he spoke as courteously as ever. “I did not mean to startle you, but I’m afraid that room is best left alone.”
“What’s inside it?” Elisabeth’s mouth had gone dry as bone.
“You would not wish to see. This way, please.”
He guided her back the way she had come, and then down a broad, curving stair, huge and carpeted in velvet, which swept all the way to the foyer two floors beneath. Unlit chandeliers hung above her head, their crystals twinkling in the dimness, and her footsteps echoed on the checkered marble floor. The grandness of it brought to mind a deserted fairy-tale castle. Her imagination peeled away the dreary pall of abandonment, replaced it with light and laughter and music, and she wondered why the house
was kept this way, when it could be such a beautiful place.
“Master Thorn will join us shortly,” Silas said. Then he added, “You may look around, if you like.”
Without permission, Elisabeth had already crossed the foyer and picked up a candlestick made of solid crystal. Guiltily, she set it down. As she did so, Nathaniel’s gray eyes reflected across its facets, multiplied by the dozen, and she gasped—but when she whirled around, no one stood behind her. The crystal had reflected a portrait hanging on the wall. And the man in the portrait was too old to be Nathaniel, though he bore a close resemblance, down to the silver streak that ran through his black hair. His smile, on the other hand . . . it was warm and kind and open, far happier than any smile she had ever seen on Nathaniel’s face.
“My master’s father, Alistair Thorn,” Silas provided. “I served him in his time.”
He’s dead, she realized with a jolt. He must be. Suddenly, she found it uncomfortable looking into his eyes. Her gaze strayed to the white cat the artist had painted on Alistair’s lap. It was a dainty, long-haired creature, captured in the act of grooming its paw.
The air stirred, and Silas stood beside her, studying the next portrait over, which depicted a blond woman in a lilac gown. This time Elisabeth recognized something of Nathaniel in her expression, the way her eyes sparkled with the suppressed laughter of an unspoken joke. On her face it looked welcoming instead of mocking, illuminated by love.
Silas said, “His mother, Charlotte.”
Wistfulness tugged on Elisabeth’s heart. “She’s beautiful.”
“She was.”
Elisabeth glanced at Silas, lips parted around an apology, but he was expressionless, still gazing at the portraits. She instantly felt foolish for almost apologizing to a demon—a being who had not loved any of them, for demons could not feel love, or compassion, or loss.
Silently, he gestured to the third and final portrait.
Elisabeth stepped forward and examined it closely. The painting was of a boy, perhaps seven years of age, pale and grave, with a dark collar buttoned high around his neck. He looked so serious. Perhaps that came with being the heir to the Thorn legacy. Had he known the stories about Baltasar even then? It felt strange to think of Nathaniel as a child. An innocent.
“So he wasn’t born with the silver in his hair,” she said finally, looking to Silas.
“No, he wasn’t. The silver is the mark of our bargain. Every sorcerer possesses one, unique to the demon that serves them. But this portrait isn’t of Master Thorn. It’s of his younger brother, Maximilian. He passed away a year after it was painted.”
Elisabeth stepped back. The hair stood up on her arms. The house felt like a mausoleum, its cold, empty halls full of ghosts. Nathaniel’s entire family was gone. The Lexicon’s words returned to her: For once a bargain with a demon is struck, it is in the demon’s best interest to see its master dead. . . .
“What happened to them all?” she whispered, not certain this time if she really wanted to know the answer.
Silas had gone still. It took him a moment to reply, and when he did, his whispering voice floated through the foyer like mist. “Charlotte and Maximilian perished together in an accident. A senseless tragedy for a sorcerer’s wife and son. I know what you are thinking—I was nowhere near them when the accident occurred. Alistair followed only a few months later, and I was there, that time. It proved . . . a difficult year for my master.”
“You killed him,” Elisabeth said. “Alistair.”
Silas’s reply came as a breath, barely louder than the distant ticking of the grandfather clock. “Yes.”
“Nathaniel knows?”
“He does.”
Elisabeth grappled with this information. “And he still—he still decided to—”
“He bound me to his service directly after it happened. He was only twelve years of age. The ritual was surely frightening for him, but of course, he already knew me well.” Silas drifted toward a blank spot on the paneling, where there was an empty spot left for one final portrait. He lifted his gloved hand and lightly touched the wall. “I was there when Master Thorn came into the world, you see. I heard him speak his first words, and watched him take his first steps. And I will be there when Master Thorn dies,” he said, “one way or another.”
Elisabeth took another step back, almost colliding with a coatrack. Nathaniel had told her that everyone else in line for his title was gone, but she hadn’t expected anything like this. Certainly not that he had been completely alone in the world at only twelve years old, bargaining away his life to the demon who had killed his father. The demon who would one day kill him.
A step creaked. Elisabeth turned. Nathaniel was coming down the stairs, one hand in his pocket, the other skimming along the banister. He looked striking in an expensively tailored suit, the cut of the green brocade waistcoat accentuating his strong shoulders and narrow waist. She stared, trying to reconcile his careless poise with what she had just learned. He returned her gaze evenly, an eyebrow lifted as though in challenge.
When he reached the bottom, Silas went to him at once. With the silent efficiency of a professional valet, he went about making minute adjustments to Nathaniel’s clothes: fixing his cuffs, straightening his collar, tweaking the fall of his jacket. Then, with a slight frown, he undid Nathaniel’s cravat and whisked it from his neck.
“Does it need to be so tight?” Nathaniel objected as Silas retied the cravat in a complicated series of knots, his gloved fingers moving with nimble certainty over the fabric.
Silas could easily throttle him with that, Elisabeth thought, astonished. Yet Nathaniel appeared completely relaxed, trusting of his servant’s ministrations, as if he had a murderous demon’s hands at his throat every day.
“I’m afraid so, if you wish to remain fashionable,” Silas replied. “And we wouldn’t want a repeat of the incident with Lady Gwendolyn.”
Nathaniel scoffed. “How was I supposed to know tying it that way meant that I intended to proposition her? I have better things to do than learn secret signals with handkerchiefs and neckcloths.”
“Had you listened to me, I would have told you, and spared you from getting champagne thrown in your face—though I heard several people say afterward that that was their favorite part of the dinner. There.” He stood back, admiring his work.
Nathaniel automatically reached up to touch the cravat, then dropped his hand when Silas narrowed his yellow eyes in warning. With a lopsided grin, he strode across the hall toward Elisabeth, his boots rapping on the marble floor.
“Are you ready, Miss Scrivener?” he asked, offering her his arm.
Elisabeth’s heart skipped a beat. She might have misjudged Nathaniel, but she had been right about one thing. A sorcerer did want her dead. And somewhere out there, he was waiting.
Chilled to the bone, she nodded and took his arm.
ELEVEN
THE COACH PASSED tall, grand houses of gray stone, stacked tightly alongside each other like books on a bookshelf. Bright blooms of foxglove and deadly nightshade spilled from their window boxes, and wrought iron fences bordered them in front, guarded by statues and gargoyles that turned their heads as the coach passed. Heraldic devices were carved upon the pediments above the front doors. Many of the houses were clearly centuries old, their elegant facades wrapped in a sense of untouchable wealth.
She watched a woman exit a carriage, jewels glittering on her ears. A small child opened the door for her, and Elisabeth assumed he was the woman’s son until she dismissively handed him her shopping parcels. She saw the boy’s eyes flash orange in the light before the door swung shut. Not a boy—a demon.
“Does this entire neighborhood belong to sorcerers?” she asked Nathaniel. Her stomach writhed like a nest of snakes. The saboteur could live in any one of these houses. He could be watching her even now.
“Almost exclusively,” he replied. He was looking out the opposite window. “It’s called Hemlock Park. Sorcerers like their priv
acy—our demons are a bit like dirty laundry, not a secret, but an aspect of our lives that commoners rarely see, and one that we prefer they don’t think about too much. A lot of old blood around here, as you can probably tell. Sorcerous lineages that go back hundreds of years, like mine.”
Curiosity snuck through her guard. “I thought all sorcerers belonged to old families. Aren’t you born into it?”
“I suppose that’s true in the sense that magic is an inheritance.” Nathaniel spared her a glance. “Or rather, demons are. A highborn demon can only be summoned by someone who knows its Enochian name, and families pass those names down through the generations like heirlooms. But occasionally a dabbler with no magical heritage digs up the name of a notable demon in some obscure text and manages to summon it. They have to keep the demon in the family for a few decades before the old houses begin to consider them respectable.”
Dabblers and criminals. That was how the Lexicon had referred to people who summoned lesser demons, like fiends. True sorcerers didn’t stoop to that level.
Not unless they wanted to eliminate a witness, and blame the murder on someone else.
Disturbed, Elisabeth mulled this over as they passed a park full of ancient oaks and winding gravel paths, and then a patch of urban woodland that made her feel like she was back on the outskirts of the Blackwald. The coach turned onto a drive flanked by marble plinths. A matching pair of stone gryphons sat atop them, flicking their tails and sunning their mossy wings. Eventually a structure came into view beyond a hedge, first visible as a flash of light on the copper of a domed cupola.
“Oh,” she breathed, pressing her face to the window. “It’s a palace!”
She felt Nathaniel watching her. When he spoke, he sounded oddly reluctant to correct her. “No, just Ashcroft Manor.”
But there was no “just” about the building they were heading toward, an immense white manor surrounded by lavish gardens. Its roofline of towers, domes, and elaborate cornices resembled the skyline of a miniature city, and the sunlight threw dazzling prisms from a glass-roofed conservatory attached to its side. The drive circled around a large fountain directly in front, and as they drew nearer she saw that the water lifted by itself, splashing in vortices that continually changed shape: first it formed a group of translucent maidens leaping into the air like ballet dancers, who merged into a rotating armillary sphere, which next split apart into a pair of rearing horses, their manes tossing droplets across the drive. A few of the droplets struck the coach’s windows and clung to the glass, sparkling like diamonds.
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