She could have easily shaken off Nathaniel’s hold. Instead, it was Silas’s look that stopped her in her tracks. His pupils were so dilated that his irises appeared black, circled by a thin yellow edge, like the sun during a full eclipse. His eyes held no trace of his usual self, no sign that he even recognized her.
“He can’t cross the lines,” Nathaniel said, “but the instant you touch them, he will claim your life. He’ll kill you.”
That made no sense. Yesterday morning, Silas had brought her breakfast. He had helped her into her ball gown and clipped on her earrings. But Nathaniel wouldn’t say something like that unless he meant it. “What’s wrong with him?” she whispered.
Briefly, Nathaniel squeezed his eyes shut. Sweat glistened at his temples, pasting down a few curls of his hair. “He’s hungry,” he said after a long pause. “Usually, highborn demons are summoned directly after their previous master has died. When they’re sated, they’re easier to bargain with. But it’s been six years since . . .”
Since the death of Alistair Thorn, Elisabeth thought. Since Silas’s last payment.
“Silas isn’t human,” Nathaniel went on. “When he’s like this, the time we’ve spent with him, the understandings we’ve reached—none of that matters any longer. The hunger is too great.”
And Silas wasn’t just hungry. He was starving. Slowly, he turned his unnerving gaze back to Nathaniel. If he cared that they were talking about him, or even heard them, he gave no sign.
“Silariathas,” Nathaniel said, with a calmness Elisabeth couldn’t fathom, though perhaps it was the laudanum, or the blood loss, or the simple fact that he had faced this version of Silas before. “I have summoned you to renew our bargain. I offer you twenty years of my life in exchange for your service.”
“Thirty,” Silas countered, in a soft, rasping voice.
Nathaniel answered immediately, without hesitation. “Twenty-five.”
“You would offer me so little?” Silas looked down at Nathaniel as though he were a crawling insect. His whispered words pelted like sleet. “Remember who I am. Before House Thorn bound me to its service, I served emperors and kings. Rivers flowed red with the blood of mortals I slew at their bidding. You are just a boy, and I debase myself folding your clothing and fetching your tea. Thirty years, or I will find a new master, one who will reward me in proportion to my worth.”
Nathaniel’s eyelids fluttered. Grimacing, he put a hand to his chest and gripped the bandages through his shirt. When he let out a gasp, Elisabeth realized he was using the pain to keep himself conscious. He was fading, and any moment now, he would give in. He would do anything to get Silas back, even bargain away time that he might not have.
She couldn’t bear it. Silas watched without pity, without even interest, the suffering of the boy who loved him, whose life he had gone to such lengths to save.
“Nathaniel’s hurt, Silas!” she exclaimed. “Can’t you see?”
Silas’s gaze disengaged from Nathaniel, slowly, as though he found it difficult to look away, and fixed upon her instead. Her breath caught at the emptiness in his night-dark eyes, but she didn’t waver.
“I know you still care,” she said. “Just hours ago, you sacrificed yourself for him. Don’t waste that by asking so much of him. What if he doesn’t have thirty years to give?”
“Miss Scrivener,” he whispered, and her skin crawled; so he did recognize her, after all. Somehow, that was worse. “You continue to mistake me. When I intercepted the Chancellor’s blade, I did so knowing that I would be summoned again, this time for an even greater reward. You see sacrifice where there is only selfishness.”
“That isn’t true. I was there.”
“If you wish to prove it,” he said, “you need only step inside the circle.”
She saw the truth, then: the strain gripping his muscles, the wretchedness struggling to break through his cold, hungry mask. If she stepped forward, he would kill her; he wouldn’t be able to stop himself. But he did not want to hurt her. He didn’t want to take three decades from Nathaniel, either. She believed that with her whole heart.
“Take the ten extra years from me,” she said.
“Elisabeth,” Nathaniel croaked. “No.”
She forged on, “You said yourself that my life was like no other you’d ever seen. You would like to taste it, wouldn’t you?”
Silas’s lips parted. In his black eyes, a flicker. Whatever battle raged within him left the icy surface untouched. Finally he whispered, “Yes.”
“Then take it. Let’s end this.”
She remembered the night that he had given her Demonslayer, when he had advanced on her and frightened her. It was like that again, watching some terrible light go out of him as his hunger retreated. His lashes lowered. Hooded, his gaze considered the floor. “You understand that I can only serve one mortal at a time. As long as I walk this realm, you will be marked. But you will receive nothing in return.”
“I know.”
“The same conditions as before, Master Thorn?”
Nathaniel was leaning on one arm, which trembled with the effort of holding him upright, and he didn’t have the strength to look at either of them. The silence spun out. She felt him trying to summon the energy to resist, to argue, finding his will sapped and his last reserves spent. At last, miserably, he nodded.
Silas stepped out of the pentagram and knelt before them. He took Elisabeth’s unbandaged hand and kissed it. As his lips brushed across her skin, a touch as silky as the petals of a rose, she felt the promise of the ten years she had pledged to him draw out of her body and into his—a dizzy, weakening sensation, like blood rushing from her head. Next, he took Nathaniel’s hand and repeated the gesture. She watched the silver flow back into Nathaniel’s hair, beginning at the roots, a trickle of mercury flowing through the strands.
“I am your devoted servant,” Silas said to him. “Through me, you are conferred the art of sorcery. Any command that you give, I shall follow.”
Exhaustion slurred Nathaniel’s words. “You hate following commands. If I order you around, you always make me regret it.”
A faint, beautiful smile illuminated Silas’s face. “Even so.”
Smoothly, he moved to stand, but he wasn’t able to complete the motion. Nathaniel had thrown his arms around him and now held him fast. Silas wasn’t accustomed to being embraced. That much was plain. He stood bent, frozen, his eyes wide, staring over the top of Nathaniel’s head, as if he hoped his gaze might land by chance upon an excuse great enough to relieve him of his present difficulty. When no such excuse presented itself, he raised his hand and carefully placed it atop his master’s tousled curls. They remained that way for a time, until Nathaniel’s arms loosened, then slipped from Silas’s waist. He had fallen unconscious.
Silas looked down at him and sighed. He arranged Nathaniel’s limbs and lifted him as though he were a child who had drifted asleep by the fire, and now needed to be carried upstairs to bed. He performed the maneuver with such familiarity that Elisabeth understood he had done it many times before, though doubtless when Nathaniel was much smaller. Silas bore his master’s weight easily, but the fact remained that fully grown, Nathaniel posed an awkward burden, to say the least.
“I will see Master Thorn settled.” Silas paused to sniff the air beside Elisabeth. “Then, Miss Scrivener, I shall draw you a bath. I believe supper is also in order. And—has no one lit the lamps?” He looked aggrieved. “I have hardly been absent for twenty-four hours, and already the world has descended into ruin.”
• • •
Life and order returned to the house. Light chased away the darkness that pressed against the windowpanes. Linens were stripped, beds tidied, the remainders of meals whisked away. The shards of mirror-glass vanished from every room. Finally, after running his index finger down a wall sconce and inspecting it for dust, Silas announced that he was going to put something on for dinner and vanished into the kitchen. Elisabeth sat for a few minutes alone with Nat
haniel, watching him sleep. She was tempted to lay her head on the covers and join him. Instead, she forced herself to get up and head downstairs. She needed to talk to Silas.
She moved quietly through the house. Even so, when she neared the kitchen door, he spoke without turning around. “I have found the scrying mirror, Miss Scrivener.” His tone was mild. “In the future, I advise against using the laundry chute to dispose of magical artifacts.”
Abashed, she came inside and perched on a stool by the hearth. There were signs of Beatrice having made use of the kitchen: a cutting board with a loaf of bread beside it, the remains of diced vegetables. A pot simmered on the fire. When Nathaniel kicked her out, she had been making soup.
Silas was dressed impeccably in his servant’s uniform once more, his hair tied back, surveying Beatrice’s work with disdain. As she watched, he adjusted the cutting board so that it sat parallel to the edge of the counter. She searched inside herself for resentment, fear, anger toward him, and found nothing. He had always been honest with her about what he was.
“What have you done with the mirror?” she asked.
“I have placed it in the attic, facing a portrait of Clothilde Thorn. Should the Chancellor happen to look through it, I trust he will receive an unpleasant surprise.” Before Elisabeth could respond, he said, “Would you try that broth and tell me how it tastes?”
She found a ladle and dipped it into the pot. “It’s good,” she reported.
“But not exceptional?”
“I suppose not,” she said, unsure whether there was such a thing as exceptional broth.
“I feared as much,” he sighed. “I shall have to start over from the beginning.”
Elisabeth watched him dice carrots and onions, hypnotized by the rhythmic tapping of the knife against the board. After last night, it seemed impossible that his alabaster hands should look so flawless. His burnt, steaming wounds flashed before her eyes, and she winced. “Silas,” she said tentatively. “How did Ashcroft catch you?”
The knife paused. She couldn’t tell if the hint of tension in his shoulders was real or imagined. “He used a device invented by the Collegium during the Reforms, designed to control rebellious sorcerers by capturing their servants. I did not expect it. I had not seen one since the days that I served Master Thorn’s great-grandfather.”
“I’m sorry.” Guilt twisted her stomach. “If I hadn’t asked you to go—”
“Do not apologize to me, Miss Scrivener.” His voice sounded clipped, as close to anger as she had ever heard him. “It was my own carelessness at fault.”
Elisabeth doubted that. Silas was never anything but meticulous. However, she received the impression that he wouldn’t appreciate her saying so out loud.
Finally, he spoke again. “You came downstairs to ask about the life you bargained to me. You wished to know how it works.”
She sat up in surprise. “Yes.”
“But now you are having second thoughts.”
“I’m wondering if—perhaps it would be better not to know.” She hesitated. “I could still live to be seventy, or I could die tomorrow. If I knew—if you told me—I think that would change the way I lived. I would always be thinking about it, and I don’t want that.”
Silas continued chopping, aware she wasn’t finished.
“But I would like to know . . . how it happens. Do you do it yourself? Or do we just . . . ?”
She imagined herself toppling over dead, her heart stopped in an instant. That wouldn’t be so terrible, at least not for herself. The thought of Nathaniel dying that way—
“No,” said Silas. “It is not like that.” Now it was his turn to hesitate. He went on softly, “It is impossible to know how many years a human will live, or in what manner they will die. Life is like the oil within a lamp. It can be measured, but the pace at which it burns depends upon how the dial is turned day by day, how bright and fierce the flame. And there is no predicting whether the lamp might be knocked to the ground and shatter, when it could have blazed on a great while longer. Such is the unpredictability of life. It is good you do not have many questions; I do not have any answers. A portion of the fuel, the life force that once belonged to you and Master Thorn—I hold it now within myself. That is all I can tell you. The rest remains uncertain.”
Thoughtfully, Elisabeth leaned back against the fireplace’s warm stones. “I see.” She found his explanation strangely comforting—the idea that she had no preordained number of years remaining, that even Silas didn’t know her fate.
The warmth of the stones soothed her bruised and aching muscles. Her eyelids drooped. She felt as though she were half in the kitchen, listening to the quiet rattle of pots and pans, and half back in Summershall, dreaming of the apples in autumn, the market saturated in golden light. Eventually, she was roused by Silas setting the table in front of her. Her stomach growled at the rich aroma of thyme emanating from the pot on the fire. She blinked the rest of the way awake, watching him lift the pot’s lid and glance inside.
She wondered how he could tell whether it was finished, finding the taste and presumably the smell unappetizing. “Did one of the servants teach you how to cook?” she asked drowsily.
“No, miss.” He straightened to fetch a bowl. “The human servants did not speak to me, nor I to them. I learned through practice, as a matter of necessity. The appetite of a human boy of twelve is almost as frightening as that of a demon. And the lack of manners; I shudder to recall it.”
Guiltily, she took the napkin and placed it on her lap, conscious of the look he had just sent her beneath his lashes. “So you didn’t start until after Alistair died.”
He nodded as he ladled soup into the bowl. “Initially, I didn’t have the faintest idea how to care for Master Thorn. He came to me in poor condition; he had badly cut his arm drawing blood for the summoning—that is the scar, which I had not the knowledge to tend properly. . . .”
Silas’s movements slowed, then stilled. His eyes were distant, gazing not at anything in the kitchen, but far into the past. Firelight flickered across his youthful face, lending his alabaster features the illusion of color. Even that wasn’t enough to make him look mortal. She was aware of the vast gulf between them: his unfathomable age, the inscrutable turning of his thoughts, like the cogs within a machine.
“First, I learned how to make tea,” he said finally, speaking more to himself than to her. “When humans wish to help, they are forever offering each other tea.”
Elisabeth’s chest squeezed. She pictured the two different Silases: the one in the pentagram, eyes dark and empty with hunger, and the other in the pavilion’s moonlight, a sword through his chest, his features etched with relief.
She said, “You love him.”
Silas turned away. He set the pot’s lid back in place.
“I didn’t understand before,” she went on quietly. Beneath the table, the napkin twisted in her hands. “Truthfully, I hadn’t thought it possible. It wasn’t until today, when I finally saw why—” Why you had taken twenty years of Nathaniel’s life. She didn’t finish.
Silas rose and set the bowl before her. “Enjoy your supper, Miss Scrivener,” he said. “I will attend to Master Thorn, and see if I can persuade him to take some broth.”
As he turned, his eyes caught on something near her face, and he paused. He reached toward her, his claws very close to her neck, and drew out a lock of her hair. Her heart skipped. Several of the strands shone silver against the chestnut tresses spilling over his hand. Silas’s mark. It wasn’t as noticeable as Nathaniel’s, but she would still have to hide it—perhaps cut it off in order to avoid suspicion.
“I had nearly forgotten,” Silas murmured, gazing at the silver as though mesmerized. “It is an extraordinary sign of trust for my master to have allowed you to hear my true name. You are the first person outside House Thorn to know it in centuries. Now, if you wish, you can summon me. But there is something else you must know. You also have the power to set me free.”
<
br /> Her mouth had gone dry, despite the soup sending up fragrant tendrils of steam. “What do you mean?”
His eyes shifted to her face. In the firelight they looked more gold than yellow. “Bound in servitude, I exist as a pale imitation of my true self, the greater part of my strength locked away. You saw a glimpse of what I truly am inside the pentagram—only a glimpse. Were you to free me, I would be unleashed upon this realm as a scourge, a cataclysm beyond reckoning.”
A chill ran down Elisabeth’s spine. Was he asking her to free him? Surely not. But she could think of no other reason why he would tell her this.
“As a child, Master Thorn once proposed the idea,” Silas said, very softly. “He liked the thought of setting me free, of allowing us to be equals instead of master and servant. I told him not to. I give you the same warning now, though I don’t believe you require it. Do not free me, Miss Scrivener, no matter what comes for us, no matter how unspeakable things become, because I assure you that I am worse.”
He held her gaze a moment longer, then straightened and inclined his head in a bow. “Good night, miss,” he said, and left her sitting petrified by the fire.
TWENTY-NINE
THE NEXT MORNING, Silas brought a copy of the Brassbridge Inquirer inside from the stoop. A gargoyle had been gnawing on it, but it was still readable, and her pulse sped to a gallop as she smoothed it flat across the foot of Nathaniel’s bed, pressing the torn strips back into place.
Ashcroft’s name was everywhere. Her eyes skipped between the front page headlines, unable to decide where to settle first. There was the column on the left: DEADLY DUEL THROWS ROYAL BALL INTO CHAOS. And then on the right: MAGISTERIUM SCRAMBLES TO INSTATE NEW CHANCELLOR. But the bold text crowding the page’s center was by far the most exciting: OBERON ASHCROFT, CHANCELLOR OF MAGIC, IMPLICATED IN GREAT LIBRARY SABOTAGE.
She bent over it and began to read. “Due to his multiple attempts to silence Elisabeth Scrivener, a key witness in the Great Library investigation, Chancellor Ashcroft is believed to be connected to the recent string of attacks. He is wanted for attempted murder and the illegal summoning of lesser demons. The Magisterium has assembled a perimeter around his estate, where he is believed to be hiding, but as of yet have not been able to penetrate the wards. . . .”
Sorcery of Thorns Page 29