The Otherwhere Post

Chapter 20

The winter moon cast a halo that shone from behind the nighttime clouds. The frigid evening air felt like bitter frost and stung Maeve’s nostrils as she made the trek to the north side of the Hall of Routes.

“I thought you might never show up,” Tristan called out as she rounded the building.

He peeled away from a nearby oak tree like a flash of shadow, then lit a small oil lantern, handing it to her, while he carried a large leather writing case without explaining what it was for.

His courier’s cloak hung open along the front seam, streaming out in the wind. Beneath it, he wore a deep sapphire dinner jacket buttoned to his neck. It was a preposterous thing to wear to go traipsing around at night, but Maeve found herself noticing how it fit him like a glove.

He caught her looking. “It’s new. Do you like it?”

She tore her eyes away. “Not as much as my cloak,” she said, then cleared her throat. “So? Where’s your courier key?”

“It’s a secret.”

“I don’t like secrets.”

“That might be the most ironic thing I have ever heard come from a mouth.” He pointed to a spot northeast of them, in the middle of darkened trees. “We’re heading that way.”

“You keep your key in the middle of the woods?”

“It’s inside a building that’s impossible to see from here. I’ll explain everything once we arrive.”

They set off through the bare trees, dead leaves crunching beneath their feet. After he’d shut his room door in her face, Maeve expected the walk to be tense, but Tristan spoke easily. He told her how he first found this path through the woods right after he came to live at the Post. He didn’t tell anyone about it until Steward Mordraig caught him wandering up it one day and pulled him aside, threatening to feed him to the crows if he didn’t admit where he was going.

“When was that?” Maeve asked.

“Just after I turned fourteen.”

Maeve halted. “You mean you’ve lived on the Post’s grounds since you were fourteen?”

“Technically thirteen, but who’s counting?” he said. “I came here after Inverly, where my mother and I lived up until the Aldervine came. That was how she died, unfortunately.”

He said it so casually that it took Maeve a full second for his words to register. Shocked, she turned to him.

He gave a guilty nod. “Yes, I was also in Inverly that day. It was why your secret caught me so off guard,” he admitted.

Maeve searched his eyes. She never thought she would meet anyone who shared her experience, let alone be able to speak freely about it. Her throat grew tight.

Tristan took her elbow, and they continued walking. “Cathriona was from Inverly as well.”

“You knew Cathriona before you mentored her?”

“Long before. She and I were grammar school mates. She happened to be visiting Leyland the day the Aldervine came, whereas I was near enough to the station to run for it. Afterward, my father brought me to live with him at the Post, while Cath moved in with an incessantly chatty cousin in Old Town, near the Post’s entrance. Cath spotted me one day and insisted we be friends. She wouldn’t take no for an answer,” he said with an exhale. “She and I were never more than friends, but we became close. She was bubbly and sweet—easy to be around, save for her annoying habit of constantly worrying about me.”

“Why would she worry?”

He ran his fingers beneath his spectacles, rubbing his eyes, then turned to face her. “Surely by now you’ve noticed that I don’t sleep very much.”

“You don’t say?” Maeve said dryly, trying to make light of it. As if that were possible.

He took a deep breath. “I have a severe form of insomnia that began immediately after the Written Doors were burned. It can be difficult, but I manage it. For the most part.”

“I didn’t realize.”

“Not many know. But Cath did. She liked to bring me all sorts of despicable tinctures to try to cure it.” A sad smile flickered on his mouth. “And I put up with all her antics because we understood each other deeply. We both knew what it was like to have your entire world ripped away in an instant. To be haunted by a life that no longer belongs to you.”

His words stabbed between Maeve’s ribs.

She never thought she would meet another person who could describe the feeling. Tears burned her eyes, and for a moment, she thought she might burst open from her own loneliness.

Tristan took her hand, squeezing it. But then he didn’t let go of her hand. He threaded his fingers through hers.

Maeve shivered at the feeling, then scowled into the dark, angry at herself for letting him see how his story affected her. For allowing him to hold her hand.

She tugged her hand away, then folded her arms across her body. “Are we almost there?”

“Just about,” he said with a sigh, then turned off the path and started jogging—heading eastward.

“Where are you going?” Maeve called.

“There.” He pointed up, to a break in the tree line.

The sounds of ocean waves mingled with the howling wind.

Maeve squinted and could barely make out a circular stone tower rising like a fist from the ground, built on the edge of the cliff. It was topped with a round, peaked roof that reminded her of a witch’s hat from a storybook.

“Molly’s Keep,” Tristan said above the roar of wind.

Maeve ran up beside him, breathless. “Molly Blackcaster lived here?”

“Not quite. That’s only where she scribed.”

Tristan led the way to a small door on the western side of the tower. It pushed open to a darkened room that smelled of books, damp stone, and ocean salt. He took the oil lantern from her and lit a torch beside the door. Light flared into the shadowed edges of an enormous circular room, the walls lined with wooden bookshelves. The column of a spiral stair shot up the center of the vast space like human vertebrae.

Maeve spun in a circle, taking in all the shelves. “So where’s your courier key?”

“I’m not giving you my key.”

She spun to face him. “But we had a bargain. You promised.”

“My promise was to help you. Not give you a key.”

“No, I distinctly remember…” Her words trailed off. He did say help , didn’t he? But he’d also led her to assume that he meant a courier key. “You tricked me.”

“If you want a courier key, the only way to get one is by learning how to scribe.”

“And what—you’re suddenly going to show me how to scribe?”

“I’m not. I’m going to tell you a story first, and then you can decide if you still trust me enough to stay here.”

Maeve was thoroughly confused, but Tristan seemed determined. He pulled a book off a nearby shelf and handed it to her. A wolf’s snarling face was embossed on the leather cover.

She flipped through it. It was written in what seemed to be Old Leylish runes too worn away to read.

“After Molly died, this building was eventually converted into storage for a collection of handwritten books,” he said, then took the book from her and absently flipped through the pages. “Once upon a time, a sullen and stupendously foolish thirteen-year-old boy stole one of these books, then snuck inside the Scriptorium and tried a form scribing on the last page.”

“Let me guess. That boy was you?”

“Sadly, yes. I had never touched scribing pigment before that moment, but my scribing took.”

“How?” Tallowmeade said all adepts had to first spend years in a writing program before the talent would manifest.

“Hell if I know,” Tristan said. “But by then, I’d heard how overly protective the stewards were of adepts. So when someone noticed me, I shoved the book in a bookcase and ran off, worried the stewards might lock me away and keep me from Cath. I thought I got away with it, but Mordraig came to find me two months later with the book. I confessed, of course. Then he sat me down and had me run through all the scribing types. I performed another form scribing and then a tracking scribing on the first try.”

“You’re adept at two types?”

“Three. I somehow managed a memory scribing on my second try.”

“Oh, is that all?” No wonder they thought him a prodigy.

“The stewards decided I had potential but didn’t tell me what for yet, then they ordered me confined to the Post’s grounds for my own safety.”

“They locked you up?”

“For the most part. I missed Cath every day. I wrote to her about asinine things like the books I’d read and Steward Mordraig’s morning breath. She wrote me back at first—mostly worried letters asking about my insomnia—but then she started upper school, and her letters grew less frequent. Eventually they stopped altogether,” he said as if it didn’t matter at all, but the dark look on his face told a different story. “So I decided to put Cath out of my mind and focus on scribing, and that’s when I grew to love it. When it became precious.”

“An escape,” Maeve said, thinking of her own writing.

His eyes flicked to hers. “Exactly. Then that winter, I was laid up with a bad flu and went to the infirmary. They put me in a cot beside a man who had been there for over a year. Part of his leg was missing. He couldn’t speak; his vocal cords were damaged. Our head doctor wouldn’t tell me anything about him, so I bribed a nurse. She told me the man had accidentally read a form-scribed book that he had found in the Scriptorium.”

Maeve shot forward with a gasp. “It wasn’t your fault.”

“Ah, but technically it was.” Tristan returned the handwritten book to the shelf. “I barely remembered what I scribed in that book—I’d done it when my insomnia was at its worst—but I confronted Mordraig and my father, and they confirmed the scribing that hurt that man was indeed mine. They said the characters from the book somehow came to life with ink and stalked the upper floor in the Scriptorium for a few hours before they were all doused with crematory ash. They’d never seen anything like it. Then Mordraig sat me down and said I could be the next Molly Blackcaster and repair the Written Doors one day and wanted me to start training.”

He’d been earmarked so horribly young. What Mordraig did seemed especially cruel considering Tristan had just hurt someone and was clearly upset by it. “And what did you say?”

“I told them to go to hell, of course.”

“I would have probably said the same thing.”

“I think I’d pay good money to see that,” he said. “And even more if you finished it off with a little ditty about sheep.”

“Good heavens, no. I wouldn’t want to kill anyone.”

He burst into laughter. She hadn’t heard him laugh like that. The sound echoed and wrapped around her and ended far too soon.

She considered singing so she might hear him laugh again, but he walked to the stairwell and knocked his knuckles against the banister.

“Up these stairs is a place that makes learning to scribe easier. It’s where I used to come to practice, and it’s where I’d like you to practice. But before we go up, I need you to hear the rest of the story, so you understand all the dangers.”

Tristan’s tone was grave, and Maeve nodded, despite her apprehension.

He searched his coat and pulled a quill from a pocket—a sleek hawk quill. The fletching caught the torchlight.

“Yesterday, I told you it was hard to write after what happened to Cath, but it started long before that. The truth is, I refused to touch one of these after learning about what I did to that man in the infirmary.” He spun the feather. “My father felt pressure from everyone to somehow get me over what had happened—as if getting over nearly killing a man were possible—but he thought he could. He put me into the courier apprenticeship. I forced myself to do deliveries, but that was all I could stand. Then a year passed, and Cath appeared in the courtyard one day, bright and shining. I hadn’t heard from her in three years.”

“She came to apprentice?”

“Yes.” His throat bobbed. “Later, I learned the stewards offered her the apprenticeship spot so I would agree to mentor her. They thought they could use her as a bribe to get me to love scribing again, and I was too thrilled to notice. It was instantly like old times between me and Cath. I didn’t practice anything advanced myself; I was still too worried I would hurt someone if I tried. But it didn’t matter because I taught Cath things that she never would have learned from another mentor. I showed her which Old Leylish runes worked better to amplify different scribing types, which quill feathers to use. I gave her scribing pigments I don’t remember mixing because I was practically sleepwalking, and I think I threw in things I shouldn’t have.”

He lowered himself onto the bottom step. His head dropped into his hands and dark hair tumbled out between his fingers.

“A couple of months into the apprenticeship, Cath got her courier key. One day she showed me a journal she found in the Second Library, with notes about an advanced skin scribing called the Silver Scribing. She thought it might work better than one of her tinctures to cure my insomnia.”

“Aren’t all skin scribings outlawed because they’re dangerous?”

“Yes,” he said. “Extremely dangerous. I told her to get rid of it immediately. She promised she would, and I believed her because only a fool would try to recreate a historic skin scribing. A few days later, I was reading in the Scriptorium and heard something. I ran down the stairs and found Cath, face down in a puddle of pigment I’d mixed for her that morning. Then I turned her head—” He took a long breath. “I called for help. They found her body covered in writing mixed with Old Leylish runes.”

“The Silver Scribing?”

“As far as I know. I never read it. That journal was confiscated, and I haven’t seen it since. I hope I never see it again.”

He sounded miserable.

Mr.Braithwaite kept a drawer full of expensive inks that had been dropped, their glass cracked beyond repair, held together with nothing but their sticky gilded labels. Precious, but a swift shake away from shattering. Maeve suddenly felt as if she were cradling one of those inkwells.

Tristan had just told her a timeline of the worst moments of his life. He blamed himself for everything. She felt deep sorrow for him, of course, but anger spiked alongside it.

That man in the Scriptorium was a mistake made by a lonely child who was hurting from losing his mother. Cathriona’s death was not Tristan’s fault either. Cathriona tried the Silver Scribing on her own, despite warnings, then snuck away and did what she wanted. It was a selfish decision, and yet Tristan thought himself dangerous because of it. Now that thinking held him back.

It struck Maeve how similar their situations were. What her father did was not her fault, but she’d allowed it to hold her back as well, to rule over every aspect of her life.

“If you still want to go upstairs, I’ll come with you. But I won’t mix pigments or give you notes,” Tristan said. “Or do any scriptomancy myself, but I can explain things. I’ll supervise you if you wish to try for your courier key.” He pointed to the door. “But given everything I’ve just told you, I won’t be offended if you want to leave.”

Of course she wouldn’t leave. It would validate this hatred he had toward himself.

But before she could say a thing, he shot up. “I should never have brought you here. This was a terrible idea.” He raked fingers through his hair. “We should get you back to the grounds—”

“No,” Maeve said. “I’m going to stay. We had a bargain, and I intend to get my end of it.”

“But what if—”

“A blank page and a single word,” she said. She took his hand and squeezed it, just as he’d done for her in the woods. Then she stepped around him and started up the stairs.