The Otherwhere Post

Chapter 31

Nan and Shea both turned to each other, while Tristan stared intently at the journal. “But you told me that your father was lost in Inverly,” he said.

“He was.”

Tristan’s jaw clenched and unclenched, and the sight made Maeve’s stomach sink farther to the floor. Finally, he said, “Jonathan Abenthy is your father ?”

“I thought we established that,” said Nan.

“This is between me and Maeve,” Tristan snapped.

“And me as well,” said Shea. “Technically, I’m harboring the daughter of a criminal.”

“My father was a good man,” Maeve shot back.

Shea balked, whereas Tristan faced the fireplace and tugged roughly at his hair, as if attempting to pull it all out. He wouldn’t look at her. He hated her—that was it. Just as Margery at the Sacrifict had hated her. Tears burned the backs of her eyes, but she swallowed them down and tucked her feelings carefully away before anyone might see.

Nan came forward. “I’d like to point out that if Maeve is who she says, she’s put herself in more danger going to the Post than she’s put any of us in. I think we should all give her a chance to explain herself. There’s some burned bread in the kitchen. We could each grab a plate, have a listen.”

“Thanks, Nan, but I don’t think soda bread is going to solve anything,” Maeve said.

“Agreed,” Tristan echoed without turning, and Maeve winced.

“For god’s sake, at least let her explain things,” Nan said.

Right. She could try to explain things. But where would she ever begin? You begin with a blank page and a single word . She could hear her father’s steady reply, coaxing her, lending her strength. She shut her eyes and pictured a page in her journal. If she were to write her story down, it would begin that moment in Alewick, when the grizzled courier leapt from the darkness and handed her a letter.

“I used to believe my father was as guilty as you all do,” she started, avoiding looking at Tristan. “But then I received a letter. It was one of the lost letters from right after the Post opened. The sender didn’t leave their name, but they told me my father was innocent, and I had to know if it was true.”

“That’s why you wanted to search for his room,” Nan said.

Tristan glared at her. “ You wanted to search for it?”

“I—I needed answers, Tristan,” Maeve said, utterly failing to keep her voice even. “You know better than anyone how risky it was for me to remain at the Post.”

Tristan’s eyebrows flickered. He leaned a shoulder against the mantel, looking about as cross as she had ever seen him, no doubt going over their every interaction with new scrutiny—finding more things to loathe.

Nan plopped into a club chair and kicked her feet up on a low table. “So? Did you find out who wrote the letter?”

Maeve’s fingers twisted in her skirts. “Yes. It turned out to be my father’s roommate. The one you wrote about. I spoke with him.”

Nan’s mouth dropped open. “You spoke with Fion Claryman? But he lives in Barrow now.”

“She’s adept at the traveling scribing,” Shea said.

Tristan knocked his knuckles against the mantel. “How in the worlds do you know that?”

Shea shot an exasperated look at Maeve.

At this point, Maeve wouldn’t mind it if the walls grew mouths and finished the rest of the story for her. She wrapped her fingers around the back of Nan’s chair to have something to grip as she went over everything Fion told her, nearly word for word: how her father was working on developing a new skin scribing in that journal, how he was murdered in Inverly, how Fion was threatened afterward with letters—the same threatening letters she’d been receiving.

Both Nan and Shea watched her as she explained herself, while Tristan stared pointedly at a spot on the floor.

This next part wasn’t going to go over well, but Maeve had to force it out somehow.

She took a deep inhale, then explained how Professor Claryman was convinced that her father was murdered over the Silver Scribing.

Tristan’s entire torso flinched.

“I know it’s hard to believe,” Maeve said. “But I think the same person who killed my father also murdered Cathriona.”

“Impossible,” Tristan said. “Cath was killed by the Silver Scribing.”

“I don’t think so.” Maeve held up the journal. “Fion said the scribing inside here is used to protect scriptomancers from the effects of scriptomancy to a much greater degree than crematory ash, so a person can practice whatever they wish to without scribings affecting them at all.”

They all stared at the journal as if Maeve held a bloody lung on a plate.

“Then you should take that journal straight to the Postmaster,” Shea said.

Yes, but the Postmaster might very well shove her to the bottom of the abyss before she could get a word in. She opened her mouth to tell them about her suspicions, then hesitated.

“Spit it out,” Nan said.

Maeve’s heart stuttered inside her chest. She turned to Tristan. “What if your father is behind everything?”

“My father?”

“Think about it. He was my father’s mentor. They would have known each other well.”

Tristan looked at her as if she were mad. “My father didn’t destroy Inverly.”

“You can’t deny that your father became a hero when the Written Doors were burned. Inverly was the beginning of his success. If the Aldervine didn’t come, he would likely still work for an underfunded college in the university.”

“So would all the other stewards.”

“Yes, but they’re not the Postmaster. Tristan, he confiscated the rose journal. It was kept inside his office this entire time. If this journal were discovered—if any of this were made public and there was an investigation—your father has the most to lose. You have to see—”

“Enough,” he snapped. “Unless you have real evidence implicating my father, you need to drop it now.”

His tone was ice cold, and Maeve’s stomach sank. Her throat tightened to a knot.

Tristan didn’t believe her.

He looked at the floor with a flattened mouth and cheeks reddened from anger—the exact expression Margery wore right before she raised her eyes to glare at Maeve with enough poison to kill a cat, then gave Maeve’s secret away to everyone she could. If Tristan looked at her like Margery had…

“I think…I think I need some fresh air. Pardon me.”

Maeve tossed the journal on a side table and ran from the room, tearing down a side hall, to a mudroom filled with coats and men’s hunting boots. A door led to a backyard.

Shoving her feet inside the smallest pair of boots she could find, Maeve rushed outside, into the morning snow.

It was deeper than she remembered. Her feet swam inside the too-large boots, and she stumbled around the side of the house, searching for somewhere to hide, then she spotted a small, boarded-up greenhouse against a back fence and barreled toward it. She flung the door open to a wide stone floor stacked with gardening supplies and empty clay pots. It was warm inside from the sun beating against the building. Most of the glass was boarded up, but an open section in the ceiling let in a small shaft of sunlight, illuminating an old stone garden bench near the center.

She started toward it, making it three whole steps before the door burst open behind her. A second later, hands clamped down on her shoulders.

Panic swamped her. She gritted her teeth and twisted, fighting to be free.

“Stop struggling, you fool,” Tristan barked. He let her go, and she stumbled forward, then turned.

His face was still beet red with anger. He was breathing as hard as she was.

Without saying so much as a word, he tugged off the old hunting coat that he must have taken on the way out and let it drop to the floor, then pulled his sweater over his head, tossing it away as well. Leaving only an ink-splotched buttoned shirt clinging to his chest.

He began undoing the buttons.

Merciful heavens.

“W-what are you doing?”

“Something I should have done weeks ago,” he said through a clenched jaw.

But weeks ago, she’d barely known him.

Her feet were rooted in place as his fingers worked until every last button was undone. He parted the material, exposing a swath of his bare chest.

Small words were written across his skin—the same words she’d noticed that morning in Molly’s Keep—but she had a much better view in the dappled morning light streaming in through the greenhouse roof. The words started an inch below his ash satchel and ran across his pectoral muscles, down his abdomen, nearly to the dip of his navel.

“Recognize any of it?” he asked, parting the shirt further.

Maeve didn’t dare step closer, but she could see enough of the top sentence and…She knew those words. She’d tried to perform a scribing on them many times over.

“It’s a coffee scribing.”

He gave a bleak nod. “A more complicated version that uses crematory ash mixed into the scribing pigment, so the magic doesn’t kill me outright. I have seven total penned across me and have to redo at least one every day.”

She didn’t understand it. “But you already have insomnia. Why would you scribe yourself with a coffee scribing?”

“I don’t have insomnia, Maeve.”

“You don’t?”

He pushed his shirt open another inch and pointed out two black marks below his heart, each the size of a small thumbprint. “The two spots where the Aldervine got me.”

It took a moment for his words to sink in.

Maeve’s eyes shot to his. “You were pricked by the Aldervine in Inverly?”

He gave a solemn nod, and she gasped.

“I don’t remember much of it, to be honest. I fell asleep and woke up in my father’s office covered in a few of the coffee scribings. It was Mordraig’s idea. He found me in Inverly during the commotion, and with the help of a few others, he brought me back and thought to save me. This version of the coffee scribing was something he read about in a text from Molly’s time, that it could be used as a skin scribing for a deeper effect. It worked. I woke up with a galloping heartbeat and eyes that wouldn’t stay shut.”

“But you were sleeping in Molly’s Keep.”

She had witnessed it.

“A body can’t live without some sleep. Eventually I fall into a deep bout for an hour or two, but then the coffee scribing wakes me up long before I would ever choose to on my own. The one upside is I can drink as much as I want; wine never affects my mind like it does for others.”

Maeve wrapped her arms across her front. “Why are you telling me all of this now?” As it was, his jaw was still tight and his eyes were dark and bleak.

“Because it pertains to my father,” he said, and Maeve’s spine pulled straight. “He didn’t destroy Inverly to somehow get his position. My father never wanted that position to begin with.”

“What?”

“He turned down the role of Postmaster at least twenty times in the days after Inverly—so many times that stewards still have their knickers twisted about it. My father wanted us to leave Gloam for good, but then the wrong people found out about my affliction, and the House of Ministers threatened to have me confined to a pea-sized laboratory at City Hospital. It’s where they brought a few others who were also asleep from the vine.”

She had no idea there were others who were poisoned. She always thought that nobody pricked made it out.

“Mordraig tried the coffee scribing on the others as well, but none woke up,” Tristan said. “He thinks there were too many thorn punctures on their bodies, but there’s no way to know without sending people into Inverly to test the theory, which would be too risky. Somehow the head doctor who was caring for the other victims found out I was also pricked, and he met with the House of Ministers, demanding that I be handed over so he could remove my coffee scribings in order to attempt other experimental cures on me. He wanted to keep me asleep and poisoned. And the House of Ministers planned to go along with it so they could tell the public they were working toward a cure. It was before anyone knew about my scribing ability. When I was worth nothing to them.”

Maeve listened to every word he said in disbelief. “They wanted to cage you like a rat.”

“Yes, and they would have if it wasn’t for my father. He was furious at the ministers, but they threatened to take me against my will. So my father made a bargain. He agreed to be Postmaster on the condition they never lay a finger on me, and they needed him. People were hurting, and my father was the hero.” He took a small step forward. “Now do you see?”

She did.

The Postmaster had no motive to destroy Inverly. He wasn’t behind the Oxblood letters. He didn’t kill her father. Maeve was back to having no idea who her tormentor was, and she was going to fall apart because of it. Right in front of Tristan, who still looked at her like he wanted to drag her to the constabulary.

She flipped to face the back wall. “Thank you for telling me that. You can go now.”

“Go? Why would I do that?”

“Oh, I don’t know. Maybe because I’m an Abenthy who just accused your innocent father of murder. I watched your face as I told you everything and…” She swallowed and rubbed her neck. Her godforsaken throat had tightened, and she could barely speak, let alone breathe. “I know you must hate me now, and I’d simply like a little more time before I’m forced to face that fact.” Go , she willed.

Tristan didn’t go. He was silent for a long moment. Maeve tensed when he took her hand, pulling her around to face him.

His eyes were narrowed. He chewed on his bottom lip, searching her face. “Yes—yes, I suppose I do hate you.”

His words seemed to make her heart crack wide open, and she nodded and blinked, on the verge of tears. She tried backing away, but he slid his hand against her waist, stopping her. She tensed as he leaned forward and brushed his mouth against the shell of her ear.

She froze.

“I hate how your ear always makes me want to do that,” he said.

Oh.

Tristan’s words caused a tangle of emotions to flood through her, breaking her further. Heated tears slid against her cheeks and a shudder traveled down her spine as he slid his other hand to the curve of her neck, then moved her hair aside to press a second, slower kiss below her ear.

“I hate how your horrible, delightful little curls hide that spot,” he murmured against her skin, trailing his lips along her jaw, up her chin, removing any doubt of his feelings with each caress. “But I hate your mouth most of all because, no matter how hard I try, I can’t stop wanting it.”

He pressed a soft kiss to the corner of her lips, then pulled back.

Maeve didn’t want him to stop. She was trembling like an autumn leaf by the time she glanced up.

Tristan’s eyes were bright with something that resembled hunger. Heat rushed up her neck, and she forgot why she’d been so afraid of him moments ago.

“Are you going to disappear on me if I take this further?” he asked.

He thought she would run now? But of course he did; running was all she’d done up until this moment.

Outside, wind swirled over snow and rattled the greenhouse glass, and Maeve had no desire to rush into it. On the contrary, in fact.

She grabbed a fistful of Tristan’s shirt. He grunted as she tugged him forward until her mouth hovered above his. There was nothing left between them, she realized. No more secrets. No more lies. Only a sliver of space that frankly needed to go.

Maeve pushed herself up and kissed him. Tasting the salt on her own lips as she pressed herself into him, so there could be no doubt how desperately she didn’t want to run. The kiss felt too good. Both feverish and soft. She opened her mouth further and tasted smoke and the barest hint of wine against her tongue.

Why had she been so afraid of this? With each press of his lips, it felt like molten wax was rushing through the cracks of her damaged heart, sealing it, flooding her system with a pleasant heat.

“Are you clear now about how much I hate you?” Tristan murmured into her mouth.

Pleasure snaked down her center. “No. Not quite yet. I still need convincing.”

Tristan nipped her bottom lip, and tilted, angling to kiss her deeper. Heat shot through her, and her fingers grasped for his hair—for something to grip on to before she floated away. “The bench,” she muttered.

He understood, and they stumbled to it, never breaking the kiss. He gathered her onto his lap so she faced him, his hands moving over her in a frantic rush. Touching, tasting. She drew her fingers down his bare chest.

He jolted.

Maeve pulled up and looked from his chest to his face. “Did I hurt you?”

“That depends on your definition of the word,” he said between heavy breaths, then cursed and ruffled his hair.

Heavens, she wanted to kiss him again, but she was afraid of accidentally touching something she shouldn’t. She brought her fingers down along the open seams of his shirt. “May I?”

When he nodded, she slid the shirt off his shoulders.

The inked paragraphs covered every inch of his chest, filling the spaces between each of his ribs.

He looked like a page in her journal.

“They’re something, aren’t they?” The corner of his mouth lifted in a sardonic smile.

His muscles twitched as Maeve traced her finger along one scribing that ran across his stomach, then continued drawing a path upward, stopping just below the lower of the two black puncture marks at his heart. “Do they hurt?”

“No, but they’re sometimes as sensitive as raw nerves.”

“So I should poke one when I’m mad at you?”

It was a joke, but he caught her finger and dragged it toward him, holding it directly above the mark. “Go on if you want.”

She touched her finger down. He flinched. It was shockingly cold compared to his heated skin. She moved her finger to the center of the mark and felt his heartbeat, then jerked back.

“They’re revolting, I know,” he said.

“No they’re not.”

“Don’t you think you and I are past the point of niceties?”

“They’re not . Why would you ever think that?”

“Cath—” He frowned. “Never mind.”

Maeve dearly wished that Cath were still alive so she could slap her across the face. Slowly, she placed both her palms against his chest.

He shuddered. “What are you doing?”

“Showing you how not revolting you are.” She slid her palms down and spread her fingers lightly over the marks, then began tracing her fingers between lines of text, going over them as if she were penning them herself.

“Are you enjoying yourself?” he asked, then wiped away a stray tear on her cheek.

“Mmm. I think I could do this all day. All night.”

“We would eventually freeze to death.”

“I already tried that three days ago. I’ll be fine,” she said, then decided it was time to kiss him again. He seemed to read her mind because he slid a hand around her waist. The other tugged her hip, pressing her against him, fisting her skirt—at her pocket. The love letter.

Maeve felt for it.

“Are you all right?” he asked.

“No.”

The letter wasn’t there.