Chapter 25
“Why are you following me?” a man’s ragged voice spoke into Maeve’s ear. She caught the flicker of a plum robe in the periphery.
“Are you Fion Claryman?”
The knife dug deeper. “Who sent you?”
“I came on my own.”
She hissed as the blade slid into her flesh. A warm trickle ran down her throat. “That hurts.”
“Yes, I bet it does. Prove that you’re alone, or I’ll cut deeper.”
“I—I don’t know how to prove anything.”
“I think you do.” The knife slid along her skin, opening it with a thin sting. More blood spilled out.
“ Please . I saw your name on the flyer for the exhibition and only hoped to speak with you—without a blasted knife shoved down my throat!”
“Then tell me who you are, and I’ll consider your request.”
Her teeth gnashed together. “I’m the girl you saved from Inverly, you heathen.”
She spat the last words.
He released her, and she staggered forward, clutching the gash on her neck. Her palm came away bloody. She turned to face him.
Professor Claryman stared at her, open-mouthed. “Impossible. But you can’t be…Jonathan’s Maeve?”
Her name spoken so freely startled her. She gave a nod.
He stumbled backward a step. “When I saw you inside, I thought I had met you before, but I wasn’t sure with your veil, however—” He searched her eyes. “You look exactly like your mother. I cannot believe I didn’t see it right away.”
Maeve was already on the edge of hysterics, but at the mention of her mother, tears stung her eyes. “You knew my mother?”
“Aoife attended an upper school writing program with me and your father. That was before your father and I applied to the College of Scriptomantic Arts together.” He puffed out a wintery exhale. “Aoife was a hotheaded one. When I introduced her to Jonathan, she demanded he marry her before the month was up, then she forced me to the church to bear witness.”
Her father never spoke of his wedding. Aggie only ever told her that it was quick, and her mother didn’t invite her. Yet this man had witnessed it. He had to know more than she originally thought.
“I g-got your letter a few weeks ago,” she said, her teeth beginning to chatter.
“I wondered if you would,” he said. “Nearly seven years ago, I made the trip to Edding’s Close, like I promised in that letter, and you weren’t there. I always wondered if the letter had gone out or if it had been lost in the chaos. I tried to hunt it down, but never found anything. Then I had to leave suddenly, and it was too late.”
“Suddenly?”
He pressed his mouth shut.
It took everything inside of Maeve to keep from grabbing his shoulders and shaking the answers from him.
She stepped closer. “You said my father was innocent. I want you to tell me why you think that, so I can clear his name.”
He barked a laugh. “That’s a tall order.”
“But is it possible?”
“Perhaps.”
Perhaps wasn’t what she wanted to hear, but it would do for now.
He pocketed his knife, then handed over a handkerchief to wipe the blood on her neck.
A pair of students trudged by, kicking up the fresh snow.
Professor Claryman stepped closer. “It’s not private here. We should talk more in my office.”
Maeve was instantly wary, but she’d come all this way. And an office seemed much warmer than her current predicament. Cautiously, she followed him across the grounds, then inside a tall gray building to a small office where an oil lamp was already lit, a fire turned to embers in a hearth. Certificates filled the wall stretching from the hearth to where a large scriptomancy worktable covered with inks sat in the corner.
The professor stepped to a sideboard and poured himself a glass of dark liquor, taking down half in a single swig. The remaining liquid sloshed around his glass. His hands were shaking.
Fion was short and stocky, with legs like tree stumps, but he trembled like a dead oak leaf in a winter gust. “Now would you explain to me how you’re part of a Barrow acting troupe?” he asked.
Maeve lifted her chin. “I’m not the one who owes anyone any answers.”
“Very well,” he said in a short tone. “What should we discuss first?”
“Inverly. What happened?” He was there, after all. He’d saved her.
“You don’t waste time, do you?”
“There’s no time to waste.”
He took another sip of his drink and stared at the remaining liquid as he spoke.
“When the Aldervine took over Inverly, your father knew he didn’t have long to get you out—maybe a handful of minutes. He wanted to go search for you at your aunt’s, but he worried that the two of you had gone shopping, so he showed me a sepiagraph of what you looked like and described your hair color, then had me look for you around Blackcaster Square.”
His words cut straight to her heart. “My father went to search for me?” She always thought he’d abandoned her to the vine.
“Of course he did. But we were finishing up a long lunch just west of the square when the Aldervine got in. It shocked us both. There wasn’t enough time to do much searching.”
Her pulse thrummed in her veins at the words coming from the professor’s lips. “But if my father was eating lunch with you that whole time, that would mean…”
“Yes, he certainly didn’t travel somewhere that day and bring the Aldervine back to Inverly. He’d been with me that whole morning.”
“Then why didn’t you say something?” When the professor was silent, anger erupted inside of her. “You took me to an orphanage and dropped me off with a horrible woman who whipped my fingers and locked me in a barn for days,” she said, and he flinched. “The least you can do is tell me the truth now.”
Fion frowned. “Did she? I’m sorry to hear that, but I had no way to know that would happen. Kirstine was different when we went to school together.”
That took her aback. “You knew Headmistress Castlemaine?”
“She was your mother’s great friend. I trusted her to take care of you.”
Maeve felt as if the ocean tides were rising around her, and she was a wave away from drowning in them. This man had too much knowledge about her past—things she was desperate to know. But she had to remind herself that this conversation wasn’t about her mother. “Why was my father framed?”
“If I tell you any more, it puts you in danger.”
He was a little late for that. “Go on.”
Fion swirled his glass. “Your father—he told me one night that he was working on a special scribing using ideas that he found in journals left over from the scriptomancers of Molly’s day. He worked on it relentlessly, writing down everything in this funny little journal that he kept hidden from everyone. I only saw it because he would write down things in our room late at night.” Fion’s eyes remained bleak, but he gave a chuckle. “The journal looked feminine for a man, with a tracery of silver roses around the cover.”
Maeve’s breath caught in her throat. She remembered that journal—she’d picked it out for her father when they went shopping a few months before she lost him. She loved gardens and flowers and thought the roses were pretty. “What did my father’s scribing do?”
His expression turned grave. He pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and dabbed his forehead. “I don’t know the specifics, but your father told me that it made scriptomancy completely safe for the scriptomancer.”
“But isn’t that what crematory ash is for?”
“Yes, but your father said his scribing was far superior. It allowed scriptomancers to scribe on whatever medium they wished, using any advanced technique they wanted to try—techniques the stewards themselves are afraid of using. All without anything affecting them. With no fear of getting hurt.”
“So no turning into worktables?”
“Exactly. That and much more.”
“And you think this scribing had something to do with my father being framed for Inverly?”
“I’m sure it did. The week after Inverly everything was a blur. I was not well, as you can imagine. Then I was forced to move out so the constabulary could search our room. I watched some of it. They tore through everything, even slitted Jonathan’s mattress down the middle, pulling out the stuffing. One of them asked me about the rose journal—if I had seen it anywhere. But your father had kept that journal a secret. He never showed it to anyone.”
“Then why was the constabulary looking for it?”
“I don’t know if even they knew. I think someone wanted the journal and used searching our room as an excuse to get their hands on it. I had such a strong feeling about it that one night, I decided to write down everything I suspected. I put down my thoughts about the journal, everything Jonathan told me leading up to Inverly, and my full account of the events of that day—why I was convinced that your father could never have released the Aldervine. I planned to bring it to the authorities the next morning. I went to sleep with the pages of notes sitting beneath a book on my desk. When I woke up, the notes were gone. A letter sat in their place.”
Maeve shivered. “What kind of letter?”
“One that still haunts me. It warned me to never tell anyone any of it. I would have shown the letter to someone, but it went on to list some information regarding something foolish I did when I was an apprentice.”
“What?”
“I’m certainly not telling you that,” he snapped. “Just know that it was an indiscretion that I am not proud of—something that would cost me a great deal if it were made public. The letter gave me two choices: have my secret indiscretion revealed, or resign and take a position here. I chose to resign, of course. Onrich Byrne was in charge by then and wrote me a glowing recommendation.”
Maeve straightened. “The Postmaster sent you here?”
“He certainly tried, but this college wouldn’t take me unless my name was left off all public information about the investigation. They didn’t want Abenthy’s name associated with any new professor.”
That was why he wasn’t listed in any of the press from Inverly.
“I stayed at the newly formed Otherwhere Post in Leyland for a few months, traveling back and forth between the Post and the college, waiting for the school year to start. Then the week before I was to move here for good, I received a letter from Kirstine Castlemaine explaining how you ran away, that you were trouble. It mentioned something about a barn.”
“Yes, there was a barn involved,” Maeve said in a flat tone.
He nodded and scratched behind his ear. “Your father made me promise in Inverly that if I found you and he didn’t make it out that I would watch out for you. It was the last thing I said to him.”
Tears flooded Maeve’s eyes. “So you wrote me that anonymous letter.”
He wrote it using university supplies and posted it from Barrow because he traveled back and forth. Everything made perfect sense now.
“Yes. I was foolish and thought that I could meet you in secret and leave you with a bit of hope before I stopped visiting Leyland for good. But you never showed up, and I moved here. I thought that would be the end of everything, but it was far from it.” Fion paused, seeming to consider his next words. “I still receive threatening letters every so often.”
“Who’s sending them?”
“Someone more dangerous than you know.”
He walked to a writing desk and dug around a bottom drawer, pulling out a folded paper.
Maeve backed away. “If that’s one of them, you can toss it on the fire. I don’t want to touch it.”
“It’s not,” he said. “I wrote this one myself. I planned to give this to you at Edding’s Close.” He handed it to her.
It was a simple folded paper that was sealed like an envelope, the glob of white sealing wax gone yellow with age.
“What is it?”
“A written account of right after your father left me standing in Blackcaster Square in Inverly. I thought Jonathan was foolish for trying to find you at his flat—it was blocks away from the square, and the Aldervine had already grown over a nearby building—so I followed him, thinking I’d have to drag him back. Jonathan ducked through Edrick’s Close, but the vine grew over the alley’s mouth after he went in, blocking me. I was forced to run around it, to the other side. That’s where I found him on the ground.”
“The Aldervine pricked my father?”
“No,” he said, and downed the rest of his drink. “Your father was lying in a pool of his own blood, his neck slit open from ear to ear.”
Maeve gave a strangled gasp. “He was murdered?”
“Without a doubt.”
She braced her hands on a nearby chair to keep herself upright.
It felt as if a cloud had opened above her head, dashing rain against her shoulders, battering her, hollowing her out until she was nothing but a husk. Then as soon as the feeling came, it was washed away by a wave of bright hot rage.
The word “murderer” had been written across more walls and doors and sepiagraphs than Maeve could count. And she’d believed it that whole time. When it was a lie. When her poor academic father was the victim. Someone had murdered him and framed him. But the worst of all of it was this person had made her hate him for seven whole years, until she hated every speck of her own face that resembled his, until she believed evil ran through her own blood and corrupted her.
Maeve wanted to run outside and shout about her father’s innocence, and shout it to herself most of all.
Claryman gestured to the sealed paper loosely clasped in Maeve’s hands. “I scribed that so you can see everything for yourself.”
She looked down at the paper. “It’s a memory scribing?”
He nodded.
Maeve was suddenly glad she never read Claryman’s anonymous letter until recently. Seeing her father murdered in a memory scribing when she was twelve would have driven her to worse choices than she’d already made.
“I’ll read it later,” she said, folding the paper and tucking it up her sleeve.
There was no way she was about to read a memory scribing in front of him; there was something off about the man—something she didn’t trust. But if the memory scribing was real, it could be the proof she needed. It wouldn’t tell her who had killed her father, but it could spark an investigation at the very least.
“I took care to make sure there was nothing on that page that will implicate me,” Claryman said. “And if I learn that you showed that to another soul or tell anyone about me or my association with your father, then I’ll make sure that your name gets out. If something happens to me, you better believe the same will happen to you. Understand?”
Maeve nodded, eager to get away from here. Then she remembered something.
“Whatever happened to the rose journal with my father’s scribing? Did the constabulary ever find it?”
It had to be important if the person who murdered her father had wanted it so badly.
“No. I found it in your father’s hiding spot beneath the floorboard under his worktable in the Scriptorium, then got nervous and hid it deep in a library and never went back for it.”
“Which one?”
“The Second Library.”
Of course it was that one.
“If you go searching for it, it had ‘The Silver Scribing’ written across the cover . That was your father’s name for it.”