Chapter 37
At the sound of Sibilla’s body hitting the floor, Maeve staggered to the end of the aisle and retched, then stood and wiped her mouth, looking around her. The shelves were difficult to see over, but she could feel the Aldervine surrounding her, growing over the spines of books, threading its way through pages of ancient parchment, trapping her.
She smelled the same sickly honeysuckle and spring gorse scent from that day in Inverly. It stung her nostrils until the Aldervine’s sweet fragrance was all she could taste. If she didn’t leave now, she would be trapped inside this place forever.
Maeve picked her way through the darkened aisle, passing patches of the vine growing over shelves, but the back stairwell was still clear. Maeve ran up a flight, coming out on the third floor below ground, right beside the gated room with the glass case.
The gate hung open.
A leafy tendril of the Aldervine curled over a nearby bookshelf, but the entrance to the room was miraculously clear. How was there no vine covering the doorway?
Maeve bit down on her tongue as she picked her way past the gate, wanting to investigate the room. She halted when her foot stepped down on crunching glass. A glittering trail of broken glass littered the floor, leading into the small chamber.
Sibilla could have broken the glass, but how would she have escaped to the floor below without being pricked? If it wasn’t her, the person responsible might very well be still inside the room.
Maeve tried peering inside but couldn’t see anything. Carefully, she stepped through the doorway, into an empty room. There was no Aldervine anywhere, nor any sleeping bodies. Save for glass debris, the walls and floors were bare, and Maeve didn’t understand it. This room should be covered in the vine.
One pane of the glass case had been knocked out. Jagged shards rimmed the opening like teeth.
Maeve stepped toward the broken pane and noticed something on the floor buried in the glass. She knelt and lifted it. It was a strange splinter of wood, one side painted black. There were two more pieces of the painted wood inside of the broken case, along with a puddle of blood.
She swiped a finger near the broken pane, mopping up a fresh streak of the blood.
The person who released the Aldervine had cut themselves badly—probably on the glass.
Sibilla had been clutching her arms, but she’d looked cold and frightened, not bloody. Maeve didn’t remember seeing any hint of red on her. Her hands had been perfectly clean—
Her hands.
Maeve splayed her fingers. Ink was embedded beneath her nails from penning the article. Scribing pigment still stained some of her fingers. Calluses and blisters ran up her thumb and index finger. They always looked a wreck, but never quite as much as when she practiced scribing. All scriptomancers’ hands looked the same—but not Sibilla’s. There were no lampblack spatters on her delicate fingers, no scribing pigment, no calluses or blisters. Her hands were pristine. Because they were archivist’s hands.
The revelation felt like a sudden snap of cold. Sibilla wasn’t a scriptomancer. It was the only explanation.
She didn’t scribe the Oxblood letters—she didn’t know how. And she certainly didn’t break the pane of glass and release the Aldervine, nor did she kill Maeve’s father. Which meant someone else did.
Someone else who was willing to murder to protect themselves. Judging from the puddle of fresh blood, they were still inside the library now.
Maeve pulled a quill knife from her saddlebag and ran outside of the room, crying out when she nearly stumbled into a length of the Aldervine that clung to a bookshelf. A tendril moved toward her arm, then stopped and moved away. It must not be able to sense her.
That was a small measure of relief as she backtracked to the stairs. She took them up to the first floor, halting at a figure cloaked in black blocking the top of the stairs.
Her heart sailed to her throat. “Tristan?” she whispered.
The figure remained eerily silent. Was it an officer? Maeve jerked when she noticed a tendril of Aldervine crawling along the stair’s handrail. More had grown over two of the steps below her. She couldn’t backtrack.
She rushed forward and raised the knife, hoping to knock the man down, but he shifted away from her hand, gnashing skeletal teeth.
One of Tristan’s scribing manifestations.
Maeve opened her left hand. It was still coated with crematory ash. She dusted it at the form scribing then pushed past it without waiting to see if it dissolved or not. She had to get out, but the floor was a maze of the Aldervine mixed with toppled books. She raced down one aisle, then turned up another, coming to a grinding halt at a pile of bodies.
Limbs and feet and arms were tangled together beneath a pulsing growth of the Aldervine, lacy tendrils weaving over their faces. They were all officers of the constabulary. The man nearest her still had his eyes wide open, the irises white. Chests rose and fell in a steady rhythm.
Maeve felt her gorge rise again, but she forced herself to search the pile for Tristan. He wasn’t there, though. If he were pricked, hopefully the coffee scribing would at least keep him awake long enough to get through the lobby. He could have somehow made it out. She refused to believe anything else.
The thought kept her moving.
She backtracked down the aisle, then raced for the door separating the library from the front lobby. She opened it and slammed it shut behind her. But when she took a few steps forward, she heard a rustling sound coming from above her and craned her neck to look up.
Tendrils of Aldervine covered the entire ceiling like branching fingers.
The dark green leaves shivered as Maeve stood utterly still beneath them. The last door was only a few paces away.
Holding her breath, Maeve took the chance and walked beneath the canopy of vines quickly, until she reached the glass front door.
A large group of officers gathered a short distance beyond it. There were more lights bobbing in the trees, but no sign that the Aldervine had gotten outside, no sign anyone outside realized the danger they were in.
Slowly, Maeve gripped the door handle, then let go when a tendril grew down from the ceiling, moving along the top of the doorframe. It twisted its way along as if trying to feel for a way out. It would escape if she opened the door now—and destroy everything she loved.
She couldn’t leave.
Maeve thought she heard her name and pressed her forehead to the glass, searching the darkness. Shea came running for the library’s entrance, her hand raising toward the door handle.
“No, Shea.” Maeve shook her head. She gritted her teeth and threw her weight against the door, bracing her fingers on the handle at the same moment Shea tried to turn it.
Maeve pointed to the ceiling. “The Aldervine!” she screamed.
Finally, Shea looked up and noticed the vine crawling over the ceiling. She jerked backward, her eyes snapping to Maeve, filling with tears. “ The Aldervine? ” she mouthed.
Maeve gave a furious nod. “I’m not the one who let it out,” she shouted, but Shea touched her ear and shook her head.
Nobody outside could hear her through the glass.
Shea waved at two more figures racing toward the door. It was Nan and Steward Tallowmeade. Nan’s hair was down, her clothes disheveled and sweat-stained. She must have run across the city all the way here. Tallowmeade was usually a breath of calm, but even he looked agitated, his light brown cheeks spotted with red. Both his long hands were wet with ink and dusted with crematory ash.
A grouping of officers ran up behind him, followed by Postmaster Byrne himself in all black. Mouths fluttered, and pupils swelled as every last person noticed the Aldervine across the ceiling.
At the sight, a few officers ran off into the night. Tallowmeade, however, stepped toward the glass and leveled a finger directly at Maeve. He shouted something that Maeve couldn’t hear. Postmaster Byrne shouted as well.
Murderer! World killer! she imagined them chanting.
Maeve shook her head with vehemence and mouthed out that she didn’t do it, but it was no use. They couldn’t hear her, and she would never attempt to open the door to explain herself.
She sank down to the cold floor and tucked her knees to her chin, feeling impossibly powerless. There was no amount of shouting that would change what Tallowmeade or the Postmaster or those officers thought of her. It was a waste of her precious time to even try. Her fate was sealed. Everyone in the worlds would always think she was no different than her father.
A hysterical laugh bubbled from her lips. Let them think whatever they wanted of her. She knew that none of it was true. She was Maeve Abenthy, someone who fought for the things that mattered until her knuckles bled and her hands were stained with ink. The worst part of it was she knew that she could be so much more.
Maeve turned her hands over, taking in the blue veins on the insides of her wrists.
She once thought evil lurked there, waiting to show itself. But there was no evil, only pure potential running through her as thick and powerful as the arcane magic hanging in the air. Potential that could be shaped into whatever she wanted.
At distant shouts, Maeve looked up.
Everyone behind the glass had backed away, pointing down.
At first, Maeve thought they were pointing to her, but a tendril of the Aldervine had spread to the floor, a pace away from where she sat. It grew along the seam at the base of the door—a seam that appeared larger than the other seams.
An opening.
If the vine got out, Leyland would be lost.
Maeve’s heart stuttered. The person who released the Aldervine was trying to be rid of her the same way they got rid of her father. They probably planned to pin everything on her as well. After the Herald article, it wouldn’t be a stretch. It was clear that some outside thought she released the vine.
But she had come too far to sit back and allow others to make up her legacy for her. This was her life. She knew exactly who she was now, and she wanted everyone behind the glass to know it. To see her.
Maeve wrapped the edge of her cloak around her hand and tried to grab the Aldervine, but she couldn’t get a good enough grip. Out of time, she flung the cloak away and grabbed the clump of the Aldervine with her bare fingers, ripping it from below the door. She pressed her legs along the door seam, hoping it would be enough. The Aldervine was sticky to the touch, but she hurled it across the floor in a fierce toss. It hit the ground and curled into a tight ball, like a wilting rose. A moment later, the vines above her thinned, the ceiling clearing out until the room was nearly free of the vine. It felt like a miracle, until she noticed a throbbing in her hand.
She held it up.
Six overlapping black marks kissed her palm like thumbprints. They smelled sweet, like the vine itself, and oozed with a dark green liquid mixed with her blood. Heavens, it was a ghastly sight.
Her eyes grew heavy. Her body flooded with the sensation of stepping into lukewarm bathwater. Her vision blurred, but she squinted her eyes, straining to see through the haze as something shifted across the room—at the entrance into the library.
The door opened. She caught a flash of spectacles and dark hair as her eyes drifted shut.
“What did you do?” Tristan asked, pressing a palm against her cheek.
“I stopped it from getting out,” Maeve whispered, and fell fast asleep.