Chapter 24
The opening reception for the Scriptomantic Exhibition will be held on Midautumn’s Eve at Alban Hall, located in the New College of Language and Linguistics in Barrow. There will be music, refreshments, and performances to kick off the weeklong exhibition. All parties involved in planning are encouraged to attend.
Maeve dragged her fingers over the words “all parties.” She had touched the flyer so many times that it was beginning to fuzz.
Someone beat on her door. “Dinner, Isla!” a woman’s gruff voice shouted from the other side, followed by the clink of plates and flatware.
She waited a moment so she wouldn’t have to make small talk, then opened the door to a small cup of watery stew sitting at the threshold. Her stomach growled. It could’ve been gray jelly, and she would have slurped it down. She brought it inside her tiny room—the smallest room in any boardinghouse in east Gloam. It was the only thing she could afford on such short notice.
After covering the cost of the room, there were no leftover shills to do anything for the past two weeks but walk the city aimlessly, with endless time to think about every letter, every drop of Oxblood ink. Tristan.
She didn’t know what to say to him if she ever saw him. How could she explain any of this without telling the truth?
That thought terrified her. Tristan lost his mother to Inverly. If he suddenly learned that she was Jonathan Abenthy’s daughter, he wouldn’t be able to look at her. He would hate her, and she was coming to realize that she didn’t want him to hate her. What she wanted more than anything was for him to leave her head. It was near impossible though, especially when her dreams liked to feature him as well.
She scrubbed her palms across her eyes. Tonight was not about him. It was about her father’s roommate.
It was about finally getting the truth.
Maeve washed her face in a chipped basin and braided her hair. A few curls sprang up beside her cheeks, but it would have to do. Not knowing when she’d eat again, she forced down the disgusting soup and went over the flyer for the Scriptomantic Exhibition. Then she slipped on her courier’s cloak, checked the fresh traveling scribing she’d penned earlier, and left.
It took her an hour to walk to Blackcaster Square, where she tucked herself inside the cloud of protesters and waited. When a group of couriers came through the Post’s gate, heading for the north entrance of the square, she quietly slipped inside their ranks. Nobody questioned her with her courier raiment. She was able to get inside the station and over to the black stone wall within minutes.
She whispered her name against the wall. A courier door appeared.
“Where’s your letter?” an older man called out from across the room.
“Oh drat. It’s in my pocket,” Maeve said with a shrug, and stepped into Barrow.
The scribing brought her to the mouth of Drummond’s Close, a five-minute walk to the College of Language and Linguistics.
Snow fell in wet flakes as Maeve found her way through the gate that led into the college, then spotted a banner marked with the Post’s pigeon hanging above the entrance to one of the larger buildings called Alban Hall. She hurried up its icy steps and brought her hand up to knock, but the door opened before her fingers touched the handle.
A woman in an elegant black evening gown and feathered headpiece peered down at her. She had a slight sneer to her upper lip. “Are you lost?”
“I’m here for the reception.”
“You are?” She smoothed a curl hanging across her collarbone with a gloved finger.
“Pardon us,” someone said.
A pair of men came up the steps, then slid around Maeve, tipping their top hats to the sneering woman. One man shrugged off his cloak inside the door, revealing full evening attire.
Maeve was merely dressed in her courier’s uniform.
“Tonight is formal attire,” the woman said, looking her over. “Which committee are you from?”
“I—I think I’ve made a mistake,” Maeve said, then darted down the steps and around the side of the building, searching for another entrance.
“Ho there! If you’re with the troupe, you better hurry. Fenella has her head screwed on sideways tonight,” someone called out—a lanky man with a short beard and small row of gleaming bangles in each of his ears. He pointed to a parked wagon where a few people in tweed coats milled about. A side door to Alban Hall opened, and they all rushed inside.
“I will hurry. Thank you,” Maeve called to the man, not knowing what he was referring to, nor caring. She ran through the door, to a stifling, packed room with people in makeup and various stages of dress.
A man in an undershirt and breeches slapped a powder puff against his hair, sending up a plume of talcum. Maeve coughed and covered her nose and mouth, weaving past him, then around a woman painting rouge across her lips. A line of men along the far wall were warming up their vocal cords, just like the students would in Inverly.
An interior door hung a few paces away.
Maeve started toward it, until a man stopped her with his arm. “Nobody goes through that door unless they’re in costume.” His eyes fell on her cloak and narrowed. “I don’t recognize you. Are you singing later, or are you with the other talent?”
“The other talent,” Maeve said. Her singing might get her booted from the premises quicker than anything else.
“Then you’ll get dressed over here.” He walked Maeve to an adjoining room filled with men and women in stage gowns sewn with globes and quills, their faces powdered with gold dust. “Another girl for you, Fenella!” he shouted.
Fenella couldn’t be more than fourteen, but she clamped Maeve on the shoulder with her tiny hand and shouted shrill orders to a sweaty man twice her size to have a scriptomancer costume pulled or she’d “knock him a good one.” The man scurried away and returned with a low-necked gown covered with frothy ruffles and a lace-up corset that was meant to be worn on the outside .
“That’s underwear,” Maeve said, scarcely believing her eyes.
“It’s your costume, and if you want ’a get paid at the end of the night, you’ll shut it and put it on,” Fenella said.
Maeve glanced back to the door that she’d come in through. It wasn’t too late to run. But then an inner door opened, and she caught a sliver of a dark wood room with university faculty milling about in long plum robes.
There were answers through that door.
She wrenched the costume from Fenella’s hands. “Where do I change?”
Fenella led her behind a curtain, and Maeve slipped on the ruffled dress, relieved the long sleeves covered the traveling scribing at her wrist. There were no pockets anywhere on the dress, so she balled up her clothes with her letters inside and tucked them down her saddlebag, which she hid beneath a sideboard.
She took a step from behind the curtain and felt a breeze. The ruffles parted for a slit that crested her thigh.
It was wholly indecent. Maeve’s neck and back blazed hot with embarrassment, her fingers furiously pinching the skirt closed.
Fenella slapped her hand away. “Don’t tug yer skirt, or it might rip. I’m assuming ol’ Monte told you what to do when you get out there?”
“I have a terrible memory. Mind going over it?”
Fenella groaned but told Maeve that she was to walk the reception and dust passersby with “that arcane magic stuff” in the form of a pouch of gold powder that smelled like used socks. And no “yapping with the misters”—whatever that meant.
Maeve caught her reflection in a dressing mirror and froze at the sight of her red curls slipping free of her braid.
Searching the racks of costumes, she found a veil headpiece delicately embroidered with beaded inkpots and stars and put it on. It was translucent, but it hung past her collarbone and would cover her face enough.
“Is the next group ready?” Fenella shouted to the room.
Maeve’s stomach flipped over with nerves, but she got in line behind a few others and followed them into the reception, clutching a pouch of gold powder between sweating palms.
Her eyes watered at the cloud of pipe tobacco wafting through the air.
The room was dim and swathed in caramel leather and dark wood. Thick furniture sat beneath hanging banners for the exhibition. Ladies and gentlemen in evening wear milled about, sipping from snifters and fluted glasses.
There was no one she recognized from the Post, and only one person in a plum robe. But she doubted Fion Claryman was a gray-haired woman with large earrings. Judging by the smaller size of this room, there had to be many other rooms to search through inside this building.
Maeve followed the lead of the actors in front of her, stepping with toes pointed, smiling. A round of applause went up as they all circled the room and blew gold dust from their palms.
Three actors dipped through a side door, and Maeve followed them into a glass-walled solarium where a large group in plum faculty robes stood around a refreshments table.
The other actors moved on to an adjoining room, but Maeve hesitated. Her legs felt molten as she moved toward the table. Everyone looked her way, of course.
Not sure what to do, she put up her hands, mimicking Molly Blackcaster’s pose on top of the ink fountain.
A man cleared his throat, while a woman beside him whispered, “The House of Ministers paid for that? She’s vulgar.”
Yes, I realize, and it wasn’t my choice , she thought to herself, while she sweated like a pig as more murmured comments were flung about.
She scanned across the faculty, but how was she supposed to know who Fion was without asking? This was a dreadful idea. She lifted the satchel of gold dust to douse them all and make for the door, then froze as a shorter man in a robe poured himself a snifter of amber-colored liquid.
At the sight of him, it felt as though her entire world shifted, spinning on its axis before coming to a grinding halt.
She knew him.
His deep-set eyes were now surrounded by wrinkles, and his hair had gone as white as pounce. He was much shorter than she remembered, but she was probably a whole hand taller than she’d been in Blackcaster Square that day he pulled her though the Written Door to Leyland minutes before it was burned.
This man saved her, then left her beside the milk bottles on the front stoop of the Sacrifict Orphanage.
He met her eyes for an instant, then looked away.
“What do you think, Fion? Shall we go find the others?” someone asked him, pulling him toward another door.
Fion. Of course this was Fion. Heavens, if this was her father’s roommate, he must have known exactly who she was that day in Inverly.
Maeve strode toward him and tapped him on the shoulder. “Professor Claryman?”
He met her eyes for the second time. Still no sign he recognized her.
“Can I help you?” he asked, sounding confused.
His voice—his voice was exactly the same.
Her throat closed, and all the words she’d scripted out for this moment fled her mind completely.
He blinked at her, his brows tightening a small amount. He dabbed a handkerchief to his forehead. “I think I might need some air,” he muttered, then left the solarium.
Maeve counted to five, then followed through the same door, into another dark wood room filled with people in evening dress, along with a few faculty in plum robes.
Fion wasn’t one of them.
“Can you tell me where I might find Professor Claryman?” she asked one of the faculty members sipping from a flute off to one side. “He left a handkerchief on a refreshment table, and I’d like to return it.”
“I believe he left out that door.”
The woman pointed to a small door hidden in the woodwork.
Maeve walked through it, to a narrow hall. She flipped the veil off her face and rushed down to where the hall abruptly ended at a larger door that had to lead outside, judging from the dusting of fresh snow on the threshold.
There was no time to retrieve her cloak. Maeve held her breath and pushed the door open, stumbling into a wall of falling snow. It soaked into her thin costume slippers instantly.
“Fion!” she cried out, dragging her feet through a nearby thicket of winter oaks, their bare branches scraping her arms.
One snapped behind her.
A hand took her shoulder, and the cold edge of a blade slid against the side of her neck.