Chapter 33
“One ticket south,” Maeve said between heavy panting. She slid a hallion across the ticket booth counter at Dunsmore Station—one of two hallions Shea had given her in case of emergencies. She’d used half of the other one to pay for a coach to bring her here as quickly as possible.
The woman working the booth took it. “How far south would you like the ticket?”
“As far south as I can get.”
Out of reach of any traveling scribing.
“It’ll be the Hollibroath stop then, near the southern seashore.”
“That sounds lovely.”
Clutching her ticket, Maeve walked the length of the station, her eyes peeled for anyone in courier raiment, for any black courier doors materializing on the station’s brick walls.
A traveling scribing could bring you close to a specific person, so long as that specific person remained in the same location for a few minutes and wasn’t moving quickly.
It would take that courier time to get back to the Post and round up help. Maeve hoped it would give her enough time before the overnight train came. If she was lucky, she could be out of range of all traveling scribings by later this evening.
Beside her on the platform, a young man carried a leather suitcase, his free hand clinging to a small boy in suspenders and a bright green woolen coat. A pretty young woman ran up to the man and pecked him on the lips, then bent and flung her arms around the boy, nuzzling her face into his cheek.
Maeve’s chest tightened painfully, until she was forced to look away.
She could no longer deny the reality of her situation. Traveling scribings didn’t work on people riding moving trains. If she could get herself on this train in time, nobody would be able to find her—including Tristan. He would believe she ran away from him again, and he wouldn’t be wrong. But what else could she do? If she stayed, she would be caught within the hour. She had to keep moving.
A moment later, a whistle screamed. Maeve clutched the ticket to her chest as the train roared into the station, a behemoth of steam and grinding metal. Its brakes screeched as it came to a full stop along the platform. As soon as the doors opened, Maeve hurried up the steps, feeling her way to her second-class compartment. She managed to get the door open through a haze of stinging tears.
“Are you well, miss?” a man adjusting his suitcase asked from across the aisle.
Maeve kept her head down. “I’m perfectly fine.”
She wasn’t, however—far from it.
She shut her compartment door and latched it, then fell into the stiff seat and put her face in her hands, gulping her breaths so she wouldn’t pass out.
The train lurched and pulled away, relatively quickly, then picked up a gust of speed. As soon as snowy farmland filled the small square of her compartment window, Maeve let herself take a deep breath. No traveling scribing could catch her now.
She tugged her journal from her saddlebag and ripped out a page in order to pen a letter to Tristan that she’d composed in her mind on the way to the station. She would tell him that she was wrong about everything, and her father was guilty all along. Then end it with a stark order to forget about her, to never come looking for her under any circumstance. But as she uncapped her small well of lampblack, the car jostled. She swayed and her hands shook, and she couldn’t pour a godforsaken drop of ink.
The Oxblood letter was still balled into a knot in the center of her sweating palm. She unfolded it. A sob hit her chest as she read through it again, then touched her name, written in Oxblood ink across the top.
Her first name.
It was always only her first name. Never her last.
Why hadn’t they exposed her last name? Were they saving it? Or was there some other motive?
Maeve sat with that thought. If the person behind this letter revealed whose daughter she was—that it was an Abenthy who had snuck her way inside the Post for some malicious purpose—every person in Leyland would be hunting for her now, with vengeance in their hearts. Every courier would have taken today off delivery duties and penned scribings to locate her, but they hadn’t, because the letter only revealed her first name.
She couldn’t imagine there were more than a handful of people searching for her now, with just her first name exposed.
If it was Sibilla behind it all, she must not want everyone out searching, or for anyone to find her. Sibilla simply wanted her to leave. She’d written it plainly in that letter Nan mistakenly read, after all.
And Sibilla had never given Maeve’s first name away to anyone until now— after Maeve tried to steal the rose journal. But why was that? Maybe Sibilla realized that she was close to some revelation and grew fearful.
Sibilla hid who she was, just as Maeve did. She hid behind the Oxblood letters because she was frightened of being exposed—as frightened as Maeve used to be. Sibilla must not want any investigation.
The couple of times Maeve had spoken with her, she seemed skittish. If Shea and Nan found Sibilla’s name in that accounting log, Sibilla would likely disappear before anyone could speak to her and take away all of Maeve’s hopes with her.
Unless she could somehow force Sibilla to talk.
Maeve pictured the moment in Shea’s parlor when she’d confessed who she was. She had feared speaking her name, and yet her friends were all eager to help her. They listened to her story and believed it, despite having no conclusive evidence. Despite her last name. They believed her.
What if she told others?
Maeve pulled her lip between her teeth. Sibilla would never suspect that she was foolish enough to tell her story publicly, but what if she did? What if she used herself as leverage to get Sibilla to tell her the truth?
An idea struck Maeve suddenly.
She lurched upward, staggering from her seat, and flung her compartment door open.
“I need to get off! When is the next stop? I need to get off!” she shouted, frantic.
“You’ll have to wait another thirty minutes,” a man said from somewhere down the aisle.
Time slowed to a flicker. Maeve turned.
Tristan stood in the doorway between train cars, a bright sheen of sweat glistening above his spectacles, his jaw as rigid as she had ever seen it. He must have tracked her here, and she wasn’t mad about it in the least.
He shut the door behind him, then stalked forward and took Maeve’s shoulder, tugging her into her compartment, sitting them both down. He took her face between his hands. “I’ve never performed a tracking scribing nor purchased train tickets so quickly in my entire life. Maeve, I thought—” He swallowed his breath. “I thought you were gone. I thought someone had taken you and run off to god knows where. I thought…” His expression darkened. “I thought I had lost you forever. But then the tracking scribing led me right to the train station.” His sharp eyes pinned her. “Were you running again?”
The way he asked it without any emotion sent a tremor through her.
Maeve was a sodding mess with a red nose and tears streaking her cheeks, but she pressed her forehead to his. “I was scared, Tristan, and made a horrid mistake. But I promise you—I promise you—that I’m never running again.”
“You have to understand how difficult that is to believe.” He searched her eyes. “Why did you run?”
She handed him the crumpled letter.
“An otherwhere courier delivered this right after you left me.”
Tristan sat back in the seat, scanning over the words with a tense set to his mouth. He understood the implications of her name.
“You should have gotten me immediately.”
“Yes, I should have.” She realized that now. “But I panicked and thought if I stayed put, a courier door would have appeared and someone would have hauled me away. I read in the Scriptomancer’s Companion that my chances are better if I’m moving.”
He nodded. “You have to remain in roughly the same general location for a few minutes before a traveling scribing can bring someone close enough to you to get a tracking scribing to work. Ten to twelve minutes, give or take.”
That meant if she moved somewhere new every few minutes and stayed far away from every scriptomancer trying to track her, she could go undetected. She could wander around Gloam for hours if she was quick enough. If she didn’t stop to rest or sleep.
It could give her enough time.
“Were you able to find anything on Sibilla?” she asked.
“Yes,” he said with a small curve to his mouth. “She’d left a statement. Apparently, she’d visited Inverly the day the Aldervine came, then made it back through the station just before chaos erupted.”
“She was there,” Maeve said.
“She was. And she could easily have lied about the exact moment she returned to keep from being questioned further.”
Sibilla was in Inverly right before the Aldervine was unleashed.
“Maeve?”
Maeve realized she’d gone quiet. She cleared her throat. “I’m going to speak with Sibilla.”
Tristan wasn’t amused. “Surely you can’t be serious.”
“I’ve never been more serious. Sibilla will run if anyone else approaches her. She’ll run and take away my chance of uncovering the truth. I’m sure of it. And for some reason, she doesn’t want me discovered. Otherwise, she would have given away my last name.” Maeve gestured to the letter. “I believe she’s desperate for me to leave, which I’ll promise to do as soon as she talks.”
“Have you forgotten that she likely murdered your father?”
“Yes, I know. But I have an idea to get her to talk without hurting me.”
He raised an eyebrow. “Does it involve you dressing as a scantily clad scriptomancer?”
“It involves Nan and her contact at the Herald . I’m going to write an article that tells them everything: about my father’s rose journal, how it’s connected to Cathriona, the things we’ve discovered today, every single Oxblood letter. All of it. Then if Sibilla doesn’t give me answers, I want it to print.” She gave a shrug. “Or maybe I’ll have it printed anyhow. It’s about time the truth was out.”
His mouth was set in a flat line, but he nodded. “It would certainly confuse people.”
“I know.”
“And prompt an investigation.”
“Yes.”
“But it could also go badly and anger Sibilla, and she could hurt you anyway.”
Maeve exhaled. “That’s always a possibility.”
“Or she might not tell you anything.”
“Also a possibility. But if she’s going to speak with anyone, it’s me. She’ll have to, otherwise the article will run.”
Tristan was silent for a long moment. “And what if it still doesn’t work out?”
“If that’s the case, I’ll sneak away and hop on a train south, then write you devastatingly heartbroken letters from the middle of a garden somewhere,” she joked through a wavering voice, knowing full well that if she planned to confront Sibilla, it would have to be at the Post, where there was little chance of escaping afterward.
Tristan understood the implications as well, but he gave her a somber smile. “And after reading each of your letters, I’ll compose the melancholiest piano music you’ve ever heard, which I’ll make sure to play in the middle of the night while drowning away my sorrows with expensive wine that has no effect on me.”
“It’s a deal.”
He slipped an arm around Maeve’s shoulders and pressed a kiss to the side of her neck. She was half-tempted to tilt up and catch his mouth with hers, but it would only distract her, and she had an article to write.
Maeve wrote for a solid hour while the train sped south. When they reached a spot that Tristan was certain was out of the traveling scribing’s bounds, they changed trains and returned north.
The Dunsmore Station was busier than when Maeve left. Tristan took Maeve’s hand and wove her through the crowds of people, to where Butternut was tethered to a horse block. He climbed onto the horse’s back then swung Maeve behind him, and they made for the graveyard before a traveling scribing could latch on to them.
The snow was falling, and it took longer to get there than expected, but they spotted Shea and Nan standing just north of it, eating fried fish from newspapers.
“For a moment we thought you two had decided to go on an extended vacation,” Nan called out, waving them over.
“Where are your horses?” Tristan asked, searching the streets.
“Couriers needed them to haul some mail in from Blackcaster Station, so we left them at the Post and took a coach here an hour ago,” Shea said. “Where have you two been? It’s past dinnertime.”
“We hit a bit of a letter-shaped snag.” Tristan quickly explained their little tour of cramped train compartments.
Maeve showed them the crumpled Oxblood letter. “My name’s out.”
Nan shot up, looking around them—probably searching for a courier door to appear, just as Maeve was.
“We have a few more minutes,” Tristan said, then slid off Butternut, helping Maeve off as well. “Did you two find anything?” he asked.
Shea pulled a scrap of paper from her bag and handed it to Maeve. A yellowed sepiagraph of her father standing beside an oak tree on the Post’s grounds. A soft smile dimpled his cheeks. It took her breath away.
“I found it buried in Sibilla’s office,” Shea said.
Maeve straightened behind Tristan. “You searched Sibilla’s office?”
Shea didn’t seem too concerned. “We thought it might be helpful after we found her name in the accounting log.”
Maeve drew in a sharp inhale. “Good god.”
“Indeed,” Nan said. “O.P.A.A. was Sibilla. The minx purchased that bottle of Oxblood ink the day we started classes.”
Then Sibilla must have seen Maeve arrive and went to Plume it was about proving it to himself that he could. That he was capable of something other than hurting people. Her heart twisted, and she reached out and squeezed his hand.
“I’ll have to go somewhere with a worktable, but I’ll be careful,” he said. “And I have a wicked little scribing in mind—something I cooked up a long time ago.”
“What does it do?”
“That will be a surprise.” He pulled out a pocket watch and checked it. “We should all get moving. It’ll take me time to get the scribing to take, and you and Nan should get to the Herald ’s office before the staff leaves for the night.”
Nan startled. “The Herald ?”
Maeve turned to her roommate. “Do you think your contact will be keen for another article this soon?”
“Depends on the article.”
Maeve dug through her saddlebag and pulled out the ripped page from her journal, now covered, top to bottom, in a mess of words smudged from the jostling train. Her entire story laid bare.
She handed it to Nan, then caught a movement from the corner of her eye. Not a courier; an older man walking down the street in a butcher’s apron over a coat.
Hurry, hurry , a voice echoed in her mind. It was full dark now. A courier’s door could appear anywhere at any time, and she would barely be able to see it.
“I’ll meet you in an hour at the gap in the fence,” she called to Tristan, then took Nan’s arm, dragging her along.
“An hour!” Shea called, heading in the direction of the Post.
“An hour,” Tristan repeated, climbing onto Butternut. “And don’t you dare stop anywhere for longer than ten minutes, understand? That includes the Herald ’s office. Nan can pick up the slack if it takes any longer than that.”
Maeve gave a brisk nod, watching as Shea and Tristan disappeared into the snow-covered darkness.
“Holy hell, Maeve, this is good.” Nan held the article inches from her nose. “My contact will eat his tie at the chance to run this.”
“Let’s hope you’re right,” Maeve said.
All she had left was hope, after all. Along with the three people helping her now—her friends. It had to be enough.