Chapter 17
Maeve was too stunned to speak at first. When she regained her composure, her voice came out high-pitched. “I told you I wasn’t interested in him anymore.”
“Yes, but you say the same thing about breakfast and the Groggery and speaking to anyone at all, for that matter. I may have been ill the other night, but I could tell there was something more to that scribble in your journal. I’m right, aren’t I? You’re dying of curiosity.”
“I’m not.”
She rubbed her palms together. “This is going to be fun.”
“There will be no fun! We’re not going to his room.” They couldn’t. As it was, Maeve could barely wrap her mind around what Nan was offering.
“Oh, don’t be such a sourpuss. You helped me when I was sick, and now I’m returning the favor because that’s what friends do.”
“We’re roommates, not friends .”
Nan ignored her. “I was just outside the building. It’s not far from here.”
She motioned for Maeve to follow her.
“You expect to go right now?”
“Either now or another late night. The building is boarded up, but I found an entrance—sort of. The only problem is that it’s right off the main path, and someone might see you during the day.”
Already, the thought of visiting one of the last places where her father graced this world made Maeve want to curl up on the stone floor. But her roommate was looking at her like she would physically drag her down the stairs if she said no.
Maeve considered it. What if she went? Already, she could feel her time here slipping through her fingers. Her attempts at getting inside the Second Library were fruitless, but answers might be waiting for her inside her father’s room. If Nan brought her there now, she could make up some excuse to not go inside, then return at dawn to investigate everything alone.
“Very well. Show me,” she said before she could stop herself.
Nan’s lips curved. “Then we need lights.”
Portable oil lamps would be too bright. Maeve grabbed a pair of candles, and Nan led the way east across the grounds to a derelict building. A rush of dead vines clung to the ancient stone, and a large elm tree filled the front courtyard with dripping branches that clattered in the bitter ocean wind.
Nan picked her way to a weather-beaten plaque. Maeve lit a candle and cupped her hand around the flame as she held it up. Eldermoss Hall was carved onto the plaque in blackletter.
“Jonathan Abenthy lived in the easternmost room on the second floor,” Nan said.
Maeve scraped her fingers against the ancient etching. There were answers inside this place—she could feel it.
When another gust rattled the elm tree, Maeve knew that she couldn’t leave until she at least explored inside. “Where’s the entrance?”
“I heard that nobody wanted to live here after Inverly, so they shuttered the building and nailed the main door shut,” Nan said, then left Maeve to walk along the choked bushes to a garden-height window near one corner. The glass was shattered, and a board hung over the gap. “I went in through here before I came to get you, then saw a mouse and hopped right out.”
Maeve was beside her in an instant, shoving the board aside, propping her foot on the window ledge. “I’ll meet you back at Hawthorne House.”
“You’re going in alone?”
“Of course I am.”
“It’s as dark as pitch, and some floorboards are thoroughly rotted. What if you fall through them and break something vital?”
“I have the candles.” Maeve hauled herself over the ledge, then hopped down, holding up her flame. Cobwebs covered the ceilings, and slicks of black liquid dripped down what was left of the peeling wallpaper. A rotting scent wafted up from the floorboards. The candlelight reflecting against the wall began to ripple. Maeve looked down at her shaking hands, feeling like she was disturbing her father’s grave. Other graves.
There was a noise behind her, and Nan came over the sill, then stumbled over a buckling board, into her. Maeve nearly groaned with relief that her roommate was here.
Nan tilted back her chin. “Is that a glimmer of joy I see at my presence?”
Maeve choked out a laugh. “I think it is.”
Nan shuffled past her and looked around them. “Did you honestly expect me to miss this? It took me all day to figure out where this was.”
“How did you figure it out exactly?”
“Well, my father always told me that he got to his station in life not by sitting complacent, but by grabbing every opportunity by the throat. And I was in the dining hall and happened to be seated at a table over from the stewards, and—”
Maeve tensed. “Please tell me you didn’t ask a steward after Abenthy’s room,” she said, her last name coming out in a choked whisper.
“No. I asked the Postmaster.”
Maeve dropped the candle. It snuffed out, and she scrambled to grab it before it rolled away in the dark. “Nan, what were you thinking ?” she said, struggling to light the wick again.
“Don’t worry your pretty head,” Nan said. “It was after the stewards left and the Postmaster was all by himself. I went about it innocently enough, and I’m certain he had no idea I was planning to come here. I’m sure he gets questions like that all the time, besides.”
True, but not from the roommate of someone he’d like to do away with.
“You should never have approached him.” And she should never have referenced her father in her journal.
Nan stepped closer. “This is about Tristan, isn’t it? You’re worried this might get back to him.”
“This has nothing to do with Tristan.”
“ Of course it doesn’t.”
“What is that supposed to mean?”
Nan picked her way across the hall, brushing away cobwebs with her fingertips. “I’ve heard gossip about the two of you.”
“People talk about us?”
“Don’t worry,” Nan said. “People like to talk about everything. Most of the gossip is about Cathriona anyhow.”
The name echoed in the darkness.
Maeve knew she should change the subject, but if anyone knew what had happened to Cathriona, Nan would. “I heard that she died.”
“It’s disturbing, really.”
“You know how it happened?”
“Of course I do. She performed an advanced skin scribing on herself that boiled her blood.”
Nan said it as if she were rattling off this week’s scribing assignment, and it took a moment for her words to sink in. Maeve’s limbs grew cold, and she pictured that beautiful woman in that class portrait and swallowed back a wave of nausea.
“There happens to be more,” Nan said.
“I’m not sure that I care to hear more.”
Nan came around to face her. “Tristan was the one to find her.”
“What?”
“Dreadful, I know. Cathriona was well liked, and the last year’s entire apprentice class is still in a tangle about it. Some believe the stewards handled it badly, but most are convinced that Tristan had something to do with it. I haven’t been able to get to the bottom of any of the rumors. Has Tristan told you anything?”
“No, but he would never hurt anyone, if that’s what you’re implying,” Maeve said, wishing Tristan were standing here now to defend himself, to tell Nan that none of it was true. It couldn’t be. Could it?
Tristan wasn’t only the Postmaster’s son, but a valuable fledgling scriptomancer. Powerful people wanted to use him to repair the Written Doors. They needed him to scribe. What if Nan was right? What if he had a hand in Cathriona’s death and the stewards simply made his troubles go away?
No. He couldn’t have killed anyone. He was the kindest person she’d met here. He helped her when she did nothing to deserve it. But what if he did something on accident? If he killed Cathriona without meaning to…
Maeve pinched her temple, hoping the thoughts of conspiracy would disappear, wishing she’d never brought up Tristan to begin with. She lit the second candle and shoved it in Nan’s hand. “No more gossip. Let’s get this over with so we can leave.”
There were no lights inside the building, only their flames casting yellow halos against the moldering wallpaper. A tangle of debris littered the floor. Maeve picked her way over a tarnished candelabra, stepping over the remains of a wooden divan, its silk fabric hanging in soiled rags and covered in spots of mildew. She held her nose to keep from gagging at the scents of decaying animal.
Nan clutched a fistful of Maeve’s cloak, huddling close.
They walked together through an abandoned foyer, the elaborate stone hearth stuffed with coarse boulders. Nan yelped when something rustled from behind them.
“Hush.” Maeve raised her candle. There were pictures along the walls covered in thick layers of grime. A bookshelf still held a few books. Maeve lifted one, and the entire thing fell apart in rotted clumps. Nothing salvageable. So much for looking for her father’s journals.
An old, curving stairwell lay beyond the parlor. Nan laced her fingers through Maeve’s as they made their way up it, tiptoeing around a rotted section. Maeve’s heart lodged itself inside of her throat as they turned down the short hall, facing the easternmost room. Her father’s room. She knew it was his instantly because thick scribbles of lampblack ink covered the warped door.
BASTARD! TRAITOR! MURDERER!
She still didn’t have concrete proof that any of it was false, but she didn’t need proof to know how she felt, and those words were not her father. She stepped forward and placed her palms against them and shoved the door open.
“Welcome to the monster’s lair,” Nan said as dramatically as she could with a shaking voice.
Her father’s bedchamber.
Where he slept and read his books and filled his leather journals and wrote pages and pages of love letters.
It was hard to picture him seated amid the rot, reading the very love letter that now rested at her hip, but he had. Her father penned countless letters to her mother, Aoife, in this very room. Then after her mother died, he was so stricken that he barely left this chamber for seven months and didn’t visit Inverly at all. Her aunt told her that she had never been more furious. By the time her father finally showed up groveling, Aggie had already burned all the love letters he’d ever sent to her mother.
“What’s this?” Nan held a candle to the wall.
“There used to be a dresser there, I’m guessing. And a headboard there.” Maeve ran a finger over the discoloration from years of furniture once pushed against the peeling paint.
Maeve lowered her candle and walked the perimeter, shining it against more outlines. A writing desk. Another dresser. A shelf. A doorway.
She slipped through it, into an adjacent room with a rotted sofa and plugged hearth. A sitting room that had another door on the opposite wall. Nan opened it, and Maeve followed, into another bedchamber identical to her father’s.
“I’ve heard of these larger suites with shared sitting rooms,” Nan said. “They’re common in many of the older residence halls. They usually get snatched up by senior couriers because of how spacious they are. I never realized that Jonathan Abenthy lived in one himself.”
“Neither had I,” Maeve said, her pulse fluttering wildly.
Her father had a roommate when she lost him to Inverly. A roommate she had never heard about, who was never mentioned once in any of the countless news articles about her father.
Maeve touched the letters at her hip, going over everything she’d uncovered so far. That the old friend was likely a scriptomancer turned courier. How in their letter, they spoke of a secret about her father that nobody else knew.
Her father’s roommate would have watched him come and go and noticed things that her father never spoke of. He could easily have stumbled upon a big secret. A roommate might have also known about her. But why was his name erased from all the news?
Maybe Postmaster Byrne wiped the roommate’s name from the records. He certainly had the authority.
Maeve looked around the bedchamber. She felt in her bones that this was something big. Everyone who had known her father had given public statements in the few weeks after Inverly was destroyed—but not his roommate. She couldn’t think why, unless they knew something they shouldn’t. Maybe even the truth of what happened in Inverly.
Whoever this room belonged to had to be hiding something.
“Look at this,” Nan said, running her finger over a section of wall.
Maeve picked her way through debris and crouched down beside Nan. A few lines of faded words were inked on the wallpaper right beside the outline of the writing desk. Maeve recognized the long list of herbs used to make scribing pigment base.
“That’s genius. I’m writing the same tomorrow beside my worktable.” Nan turned to Maeve. “Do you think Abenthy’s roommate wrote this?”
“Who’s to say?” Maeve said, even though truth stared right back at her. She knew exactly who wrote it—the same person who wrote the letter in her pocket. Her old friend . The penmanship was identical.
It was him. Her father’s roommate.
The revelation staggered her, but she made sure to not let it show on her face. She pulled her spine straight, feeling a renewed determination. After all this time, she was finally on the right path.
“What is that?” Nan asked.
Maeve looked up and jolted at a flickering light. At first, it looked like moonlight glinting off the cracked windowpane, but the light was coming from the trees. It bobbed and guttered. Lantern light. She caught a silhouetted face directly behind it. A person in the woods, watching them.
She snuffed out her candle.
The person began moving, their light bobbing as they headed west through the trees. Maeve darted to a nearby window, then another, keeping her eyes on the moving lantern.
“Watch it!” Nan called out.
A second later something shuddered then cracked beneath Maeve’s feet. The floor gave.
She dropped, her back scraping the broken edge of boards as she fell, landing hard somewhere below.
Pain shot across her temple, hot and sharp, while a ringing started in her left ear. She choked, tasting metal and dust against her tongue.
Yellow candlelight sputtered above her, and Nan’s face poked through a hole. “I’ll get help.”
“Don’t. I’ll be all right,” Maeve croaked.
The world went dark.