Chapter 16
Maeve had swum in the ocean only once in her life, on a day trip with her aunt Aggie. She had stood in the shallows, fearfully plucking threads from the edges of her sagging bathing suit, until a wave snuck up, spitting sand into her mouth, up her nose. Walking into another world felt like the crack of that wave.
Her breath caught in her chest and made her cough, as if the air were thicker, her lungs too small to breathe it in. When she regained her breath, she looked around her at the empty woods and started to panic, thinking she had made a mistake and somehow wound up in a world with the Aldervine. But then she heard voices carried on the wind.
Maeve walked to a nearby oak tree and slowly peeked around it, to an iron fence a few feet away.
A tall city rose beyond the fence that looked like Gloam in Leyland if she squinted; all of Gloam’s steep hills were in the same places, along with the twisting streets. But here, the buildings were straight and scrubbed clean of the black sediment that dripped down the building sides in Leyland. The sky still hung with brooding clouds, but the city beneath it gleamed opalescent in the gray light.
Gloam in Barrow.
She’d made it.
Just southwest of her was Blackcaster Square, looking exactly as it did in Leyland. Judging from the iron fence in front of her, she had to be standing just inside the Barrow campus of the Otherwhere Post.
Maeve turned see the strange black door she’d just exited hanging a foot off the ground on the side of a tree trunk.
According to the Scriptomancer’s Companion , a courier door lasted for twelve hours, give or take, depending on the skill of the scriptomancer. Not sure how long she had, given that this was her first ever scribing, Maeve tossed her hood up and hurried down a pathway that led her between two enormous new buildings, their squared entrances carved from cream-colored marble.
There were no crumbling eaves or broken tree stumps used as stair risers. Not a single paving stone was cracked. They were all squared off and laid out in neat rows and columns. Maeve imagined Molly’s ghost turning her nose up at this place.
This campus was planned and built by the glut of architects and mathematicians who went to university here before the doors burned, when this city’s colleges all taught the applied sciences.
A sign for the tracking office led her past several more pristine buildings before she found the one she wanted. She walked inside, passing offices dedicated to various ministers and government secretaries of Barrow—offices that didn’t exist in Leyland. The stewards would likely put up a stink if any minister ever tried to work from the grounds there. Finally, Maeve spotted a small door marked Tracking Office at the end of the hall. Only a few paces before it, a pair of double doors stood propped open.
Maeve slowed as she heard muffled voices drifting from the open doors. She thought she recognized one of the voices. A steward?
She had to pass by that room to get to the tracking office. If a steward was inside and spotted her through the doorway, this trip would be over before she knew it.
Slowly, she peeked inside the room—a large drawing room where men were in the midst of a heated discussion. Some wore waistcoats with embellishments that marked them as Barrow ministers; a few others wore deep plum university robes; and then a handful wore the Post’s raiment, including Postmaster Byrne himself. He sat with his back to the door beside Steward Mordraig.
None of them faced the open doorway, thank goodness.
Maeve tightened the hood of her cloak around her head and passed the doorway quickly, but halted just beyond when she heard a name she recognized. She tilted her ear.
The conversation inside the drawing room seemed to focus mostly on the Postmaster’s announcements in the papers, until someone clapped their hands and said the name again. Tristan. But why were they discussing him? She crept closer, listening.
The conversation meandered for a moment, then someone said, “It would be nice to announce that we’re actually attempting to fix the Written Doors again.”
“No. Tristan needs much more practice before he attempts that,” Steward Mordraig said, and Maeve’s eyes flew wide. Mordraig beat his cane against the floor. “Tristan’s nowhere near ready to experiment with that level of scriptomancy so soon after what happened to him last year.”
Maeve edged even closer to the door.
“Then force the boy to practice!” someone said.
“It doesn’t work like that. He must make the decision to practice again on his own. But he’s mentoring again, thanks to our Onrich. It’s a start,” Mordraig said. They were referring to her. “And he seems in better spirits, too. I’d give it another year or two.”
“A year or two?” someone echoed, frustration threading his words. There were grunts of disapproval. “But you told us that Tristan is a prodigy. That he could be the next Molly Blackcaster.”
“And he will be,” Mordraig snapped. “But you must give the boy time, especially after what happened to his last apprentice.”
The room went silent, and Maeve found herself straining to hear.
“He should never have been paired with Cathriona,” Mordraig said in a grave tone.
Cathriona .
“God rest her soul.”
Maeve’s hands flew to her mouth.
She thought through every moment she’d spent with Tristan, picking out clues that helped paint what might have happened: his fight with his father, his reluctance to scribe, and his flat-out refusal to teach her. Tristan’s former apprentice was dead. Did scriptomancy play a part? Was that why Tristan was so reluctant to teach her anything?
Maeve blanched, remembering the story of the woman with chewed-out eyes. But Tristan said it was a courier who read the form scribing, not an apprentice. Still, if Cathriona died by scriptomancy, it would explain Tristan’s ill feelings toward it perfectly.
That had to be it. And Tristan was still grieving, clearly.
No wonder he could barely stand to answer her when she’d asked him to teach her the traveling scribing. She wanted to run back and apologize to him, to beg his forgiveness. She put her face in her hands, feeling dreadful.
Then her mind went blank at a shuffling of feet.
The meeting had ended.
Without a second thought, Maeve rushed to the door at the end of the hallway, slipping through it before anyone might see her.
The tracking office was a stifling room filled with scriptomancer worktables. An incinerator chute hung beside a long reception desk, where a young clerk fanned herself with a copy of the Herald , the high neck of her blouse sheer from sweat. Her thick glasses slid down her fair, freckled nose.
Maeve fidgeted with her sleeves and approached the desk, her heart still pounding. “I’m a courier with the Leyland office,” she said, trying to catch her breath and remember the speech she’d practiced for this moment. “I’m here because one of my deliveries turned out to be sent from someone who didn’t leave their name on their letter, and the woman who received it has given it back to me to investigate. The recipient is beside herself. She thinks the letter might be from an ill relative. I promised to find the sender for her.”
The desk clerk screwed her lips together. “I’m sorry, but there’s no possible way to track down a sender if they didn’t leave their name.”
That wasn’t what Tallowmeade had said. “I was told that someone here might be of help.”
“I could take a look,” someone called out.
A man stood up from one of the worktables. He ran his fingers over his close-cropped white hair, then adjusted the gray cuffs of his officer’s coat.
Maeve’s mouth went bone dry.
She braced her hands against the side of the desk. “You work for the constabulary?”
“Not technically. I’m a scriptomancer who only works alongside their couriers.”
A bead of sweat caught on Maeve’s lip. She swiped at it, unsure of what to do. It was far too hot to think.
“A name is always the best route for tracking, but I can sometimes deduce things by studying a letter.” The man held out a hand, and Maeve recoiled. He cocked his head. “I thought you told the clerk that you had the letter with you.”
“She did!” the clerk piped in.
Maeve silently cursed herself. “Yes, I have the letter, but I’ve made a promise not to show it to anyone.”
“Then you can tell your recipient that they’ve wasted a solid minute of my time.”
Maeve chewed on her lip. This man knew nothing about her, and he worked in Barrow. She’d likely never see him again after this moment. But then this was the tracking office, and he worked with the constabulary to track down criminals.
“Could you tell anything from looking at the envelope?” Maeve asked, deciding that as long as he didn’t read the letter, it would be all right. She pulled it out. “That wouldn’t break my promise.”
“I can try,” he said.
She felt ill as she handed it over.
He ran his nose over the broken wax seal, then picked off a bit of wax and rubbed it between his fingers until it melted. “It was posted from Barrow.”
“Here?” That was impossible.
“Without a doubt. I can tell by the faint blue tinge to the black wax. All letters collected in Barrow are sealed with this wax. The black wax from Leyland has a yellow cast to it.” He turned the envelope in his fingers. “The envelope itself tells a different story. It’s crafted from a special paper substrate made from yew, imported from the north. You can tell by the grit. The Barrow Campus of the University of Gloam used to order reams of this particular paper for faculty.”
“Someone employed by the university sent that?”
“Yes—someone from the Barrow campus.” He ran a finger over the fold, then ripped it open, pulling out the letter.
“Sir!” Maeve panicked and tried to grab it, but the desk stood between them.
He backed out of reach. “Unless I inspect the letter itself, madam, I can tell you nothing more.”
She froze in place as he read through it.
He didn’t remark on the contents, thank heavens. Instead, he placed the letter on the desk and held a magnification glass to his left eye. Then he took out a tiny metal measure used for typography, holding it between the individual words.
“Perfect leading. Masterful command of chirography.” He clicked his tongue. “This letter was written by a highly trained scriptomancer once employed by the College of Scriptomantic Arts, as evidenced by the style of writing. A scriptomancer who probably became a university courier after the Post was founded, with access to this paper substrate…Or perhaps they’re simply another type of courier who stole the paper and posted the letter from Barrow. This letter is written in a clandestine manner, after all.” He handed it to her. “Tell your Maeve that she can visit the office of the House of Ministers in Leyland and open an official inquiry if she wants any further investigation, but her old friend was indeed a courier once. And given the scarcity of couriers these days, I’d wager they still are.”
Maeve found her courier door still waiting for her on the tree trunk. She used it to cross worlds and made it back inside the Leyland campus just after dark. Her feet stumbled through the woods, while her fist clutched her skirt over her hip bone, where the letters were tucked.
This whole time, her old friend was a courier.
The idea had popped into her mind a few times, but now that she was certain of it, the grounds took on a different feel—as if she might lift a paving stone and find hidden secrets buried beneath. Although, if they were still a university courier, they wouldn’t live here. They’d have their own residence somewhere in Gloam proper. But that man in the tracking office said they could easily be an otherwhere courier who happened to steal the paper from Barrow. They could live on the Leyland campus. Be close by.
But there were hundreds who could have written the letter and no way to narrow it down. And she couldn’t avoid the thought that the person sending her the threatening red letters was also part of the very same group. The two letter-writers might even know each other.
Maeve’s thoughts spun in a wild tangle of possibilities as she climbed the stairs inside Hawthorne House. She halted on her landing. Piano drifted from the direction of Tristan’s room.
The melancholy notes caught in her chest. He would probably be shocked if she beat on his door and asked to come inside, to listen.
She considered it, then quickly dismissed it. It was a terrible idea. As it was, he was probably poring over memories of Cathriona.
Curious, Maeve stepped to last year’s apprentice class portrait hanging in a dusty wormwood frame. Names were jotted beneath each row of couriers. She ran a pinky along the names, stopping at Cathriona Martin.
“There you are,” she whispered, then followed the name up to the image of an absurdly stunning young woman. That was Cathriona? It was hard to imagine someone so lovely toiling over a scriptomancy worktable.
A curtain of dark hair parted for angelic features and a complexion as bright as a pearl. Cathriona’s lips curved into a wicked smirk. Perhaps she wasn’t so angelic after all. This young woman had secrets, certainly, but Maeve doubted any were as big as hers. Now she was dead.
“I found it!”
Maeve jerked so violently, she stumbled and caught herself on the wall.
Nan raced toward her, then skidded to a stop. Her face was mapped with a sheen of sweat. A trickle of blood ran across her dark brow. “I found Abenthy’s room.”