The Otherwhere Post

Chapter 39

As Mordraig led Maeve down the hall, one of the officers held up a hand. “Sir, we’re supposed to watch over her. Postmaster’s orders.”

Mordraig sighed. “There’s already five more of you louts stationed at each exit. I don’t think our Onrich will mind if she goes up two mere floors for a few minutes to have a blasted drink of water. I’ll return her shortly. Use the time to eat a biscuit if you want. I don’t care. If Onrich has a problem with it, tell him to take it out on me.”

Clapping his hand over Maeve’s shoulder, Mordraig shuffled her past the men, then up the stairwell and down the long hall to his sitting room. His rocking chair still sat in one corner, the rest of the room as cluttered as she remembered.

He poured a large glass of water at a sideboard and handed it to her. She drank the entire thing in a matter of seconds. “Thanks. I was thirsty.”

“It would appear so.” He took the empty glass. “Now, why did you call for me? Out with it.”

She wiggled the fingers on her left hand. “This hand was covered with crematory ash when I touched the Aldervine. The moment I threw it, it shriveled and shrank away.” She coughed again, wincing. “Do you think there might be something to it? What if the Aldervine is affected by crematory ash?”

Mordraig scratched his jowl, his small eyes glittering behind his spectacles. “ That is certainly worth some digging. Come. Make yourself comfortable while I have a look through my storage room. I might have a journal or two that can give us some answers.” He shuffled unsteadily from the room.

The sitting room smelled as musty as it had the last time Maeve was here and was infinitely messier. There were a couple of chairs, but her nerves didn’t let her sit. Then she caught a movement from the shelf filled with glass cloches. The emerald feather wasn’t there, but that wasn’t what caught her eye. It was a trapped drear moth.

She wandered over and watched it move its wings for a minute beneath the glass. It had a pattern to how it moved that felt manufactured, like it was somehow made by human mechanisms and not nature. That must be a product of the scribing.

It made her curious, and Maeve lifted the lid, hoping to inspect it, then put it back before Mordraig returned. The moth fluttered around her fingers, then landed on her knuckle.

Up close, its wings shone a deep, iridescent blue. It hopped along her finger for a moment, then fluttered off, leaving a splash of deep blue ink in its wake—just like in Molly’s Keep.

She brought her knuckle to her nose and tensed. The ink smelled sharp and sweet, and Maeve caught the scent of henbane and hawthorne, then honeysuckle. All scribing herbs she’d learned about in Tallowmeade’s laboratory.

Honeysuckle was a scribing herb, and so was spring gorse—the two strong scents wafting off the Aldervine. They were scribing herbs.

The vine could have simply smelled like scribing herbs, but the fact that it reacted to crematory ash made her wonder if there was more to it.

Maeve took in the drear moth fluttering around, weaving through the air in a looping pattern that looked like words, as if it were mimicking someone’s hand penning a scribing. She shut her eyes and pictured the pattern of the Aldervine across the ceiling of that library lobby. It had looked like a pattern of woven lace, but it could have been mimicking words as well.

She brought her left hand up and turned it over, inspecting the faint yellow-green mark along the side of her palm—the mark she’d assumed was a bruise. But she didn’t bruise easily, and all her bruises faded to purple over time. This was different. Slowly, Maeve brought her hand to her nose and inhaled. A week had passed, but she could still smell the sharp scent of honeysuckle and spring gorse, then…Was that henbane? Yes, it was. Then the barest hint of amaranthus.

All scribing herbs.

Heavens, the mark on her hand wasn’t a bruise, but an ink stain. The Aldervine had left behind a godforsaken ink stain on her skin—a stain as ancient and near-permanent as the one left behind on her knuckle from the drear moth.

Maeve felt her world sharpening to a point. If all of this was true, it meant that the Aldervine was made by a scribing. It had to be. That was why it reacted to her crematory ash on her fingers, why she was able to wander through the library without it wrapping around her like it had with Sibilla. Mordraig had said the first sightings of the Aldervine spoke of it growing up buildings and fenceposts. It grew first in cities, and not in nature, because a scriptomancer must have created it.

Its poison must work in a similar way to the scribing that blackened her finger, but probably much stronger, given that it took Tristan six coffee scribings laced with crematory ash to wake her up.

The Aldervine was made from scriptomancy.

The truth sent her reeling. She stumbled backward until her legs hit Mordraig’s rocking chair and she fell into it, suddenly feeling dizzy, thinking.

She imagined her journal spread before her, with all the elements of her mystery written out with lines drawn, connecting them. And her father’s notebook…Her father’s notebook sat squarely in the center.

The Silver Scribing.

If it nulled the effects of scriptomancy, it would likely render the Aldervine’s poison harmless as well. She wouldn’t need a dozen coffee scribings if she used it. She wouldn’t even need one. The Aldervine would become as harmless as the thorns on a rosebush. Anyone who wished could use the Silver Scribing to walk into Inverly whenever they wanted. If there were people left alive, her father’s scribing might even be able to wake them up. It changed everything.

She had to tell Mordraig immediately.

Maeve felt shaky on her feet, but she walked across the sitting room, then through the doorway Mordraig had gone.

“Steward?” she called out, but he didn’t answer.

The hall led her past a smaller room with an enormous scriptomancy worktable covered with ink splatters and quill shavings. Four separate scribing glasses were affixed along the edge with unpolished brass clamps. Crumpled papers were strewn about the floor in messy heaps, and Mordraig’s black cane was tossed on top of it all.

The sight jarred her. Mr.Braithwaite always asked her to fetch his cane, and she never minded because he used it like a third arm, to help him stand and move around. Mordraig moved similarly, so it was a shock that he would leave his cane here.

She lifted it and saw why; it was cracked down the center, the end broken off. A sharp chip of something had embedded close to the splintered edge. She dug it out with a nail.

A sliver of glass.

The cane fell from Maeve’s fingers. She backed away, her stomach sickening as the truth stared back at her.

She had to find the ink.

Maeve listened for footsteps. When she didn’t hear any, she stepped around the scriptomancy worktable, where a large shelf of ink hung against a wall. There were over a hundred bottles haphazardly shoved on top of one another, some stamped with flourished manufacturer’s labels, some hand labeled.

Her fingers worked fast, picking through the bottles. The dizziness she felt in the sitting room came over her again, and her hand slipped and knocked over a bottle of lampblack. It rolled to the edge of the table and fell before she could grab it, shattering against the floor with a loud crack.

Maeve halted, listening.

Her breath was sharp in her lungs, but she didn’t hear Mordraig anywhere.

She kept searching, picking through bottles. Where was it? Finally, behind a row of empty wells, she pulled out a bottle with ink that looked black at first glance, until she tilted it to the light.

A deep, glittering red color coated the inside of the glass.

She ran her thumb along the word “Oxblood” handwritten with thick, swooping letters on top of a label that read: Plume she wanted to run, but she forced herself to wait a minute until she was sure Mordraig was gone. She slipped from the room, moving deeper down the hall, through an open doorway which led to a much colder hall.

A thin dusting of snow coated the stone floor below an open window.

Maeve stepped to the window and glanced down along the sheer side of the building to a small snow-covered courtyard.

Her vision grew fuzzy again, then doubled. Maeve gripped the windowsill, blinking, until her vision cleared slightly. But it still wasn’t normal. It looked as though she were staring through a bottle, the walls around her pressing in. Almost—almost as if she’d been drugged.

The glass of water.

Footfalls clicked along from somewhere down the hall.

Maeve tried walking, but she stumbled over her feet. Her limbs grew heavy, and that tap-tap of footsteps grew louder. She had to hide.

A few small oak doors lined the opposite wall. Closets. Maeve opened the first, then reeled backward at the pungent reek.

Her hand flew to her nose as she slowly propped the door open further. A fly buzzed out, circling around her. She swatted it and peered into the darkened closet, at a figure in a plum robe slumped against the back wall. Fion Claryman—or what was left of him. Dried blood matted the side of his head, as if something had hit him with a blunt force. His face—

Maeve pinched her nose hard to keep herself together.

“There you are.” Steward Mordraig came around the corner.

She listed heavily to the side, clutching the closet doorknob to keep herself upright. Barely. Her muscles were numb. If the doorknob wasn’t there, she’d be on the floor.

“You murdered him—as soon as Nan’s article ran in the Herald ,” she said, remembering how Fion had disappeared. “You murdered him just like you murdered Cathriona.”

Mordraig didn’t deny it. In fact, he looked smug. Pleased with himself.

Now he was going to do the same to her.

Run, run, run , her mind screamed. She pushed away from the closet door and took a few steps, then stumbled and fell to her knees. Her mind still felt razor sharp, but her body was failing her.

“W-what did you put in my water?”

“Something that should kick in fully in another few minutes. If you try to scream, I can always shorten that time.” He touched his cloak at his hip.

Maeve’s eyes widened. He must have a knife.

He leaned against the open window, tapping his fingers against the sill.

Tears clouded her eyes. She couldn’t move, but she still had enough of her wits left, and she wanted to know why he was doing this, to understand how someone could be so evil. Her mind spun in circles from all the information she’d uncovered in the past half hour. The murders. The Oxblood letters. The truth of the Aldervine. The ink staining her hand like an old bruise. It took effort, but she dragged it up. Wiggled her fingers.

Mordraig glanced at them and pursed his lips.

“You knew, didn’t you? You knew the Aldervine was made with scriptomancy this whole time,” she said, but he remained silent. “If you’re going to kill me anyway, you can at least talk to me until then. Unless you truly don’t know anything…”

“Of course I know what the Aldervine is, apprentice,” he said, taking her bait. “Molly Blackcaster discovered its origin long before me and left a diary that’s been handed down from each steward of apprentices to the next for centuries, so we’re aware of the grave nature of our teachings. It goes into great detail about the magnitude of destruction the vine caused in other worlds, then Molly’s ordeals in Leyland up until she created the Aldervine specimen in the Second Library.”

“Molly Blackcaster made that thing?”

“To study it and test theories, apprentice.”

His gaze shifted to something in his left hand. A pocket watch. Was he counting down the seconds until Maeve’s heart stopped beating?

“What theories?” Maeve pressed. Mordraig was passionate about scriptomancy and teaching; perhaps that passion might get her answers. Perhaps the drug would take too long to kick in and she could somehow escape with those answers. It was a long shot, but she had to try. Tell me more, she willed.

He gave an impatient sigh. “Molly wondered if she might go from world to world cleaning up the vine, then realized there simply wasn’t enough ash.”

“Because the trees harvested for ash only grow in Leyland,” Maeve said, remembering her first lesson here.

His lesson.

“My, my,” he said. “What a good memory you have. There were even fewer trees back then. It would take all the ash in existence to even attempt to clear one world of the vine. It was then that Molly decided to preemptively save our three worlds from ever being infested by putting a moratorium on the old ways of traveling and create the Written Doors.” His mouth flattened. “She was nearsighted in that regard; those doors were death to scriptomancy.”

His eyes burned with a cold fury as he said it, and his fingers continued to drum. He checked his pocket watch again.

Maeve’s heart thumped. “But…I don’t understand. Why were the Written Doors so terrible for scriptomancy?”

Mordraig considered her. “The Written Doors did away with the need for scriptomantic travel,” he said simply. “Without the need for travel, our art became a novelty, which the university board liked to remind me every year when they voted on our budgets. Then one year they held a vote to decide on whether to dissolve the College of Scriptomantic Arts entirely and archive our libraries. I was there. I watched people get up and put little scraps of paper that decided the fate of magic in a chipped bowl! It didn’t pass, but only by a single vote. The former Minister of Communication gloated that he proposed the idea, so I was forced to slip poison into his tea to make sure he never made such a decision for all of us again.”

“Forced?” Maeve couldn’t believe she was hearing this.

“I’m not an evil person. I don’t do any of this because I want to, apprentice. I do it all because it’s necessary. Because I signed a sacred oath penned by Molly herself when she created my role centuries ago, to uphold her ideals and do everything in my power to keep scriptomancy thriving . Revered. And I’ve followed that oath damn well, if I say so myself. To the best of my ability.” He gave another small smile.

It made her want to retch.

Good heavens, Mordraig believed killing that minister was his stewardly duty. He was unhinged.

“The day of that vote, I realized the Written Doors had to go,” he went on. “It was the only way for travel to begin again. For scriptomancy to become important again.”

That didn’t add up. “But the doors didn’t burn until much later.”

“Yes, I couldn’t simply torch the Written Doors in my pajamas one night, now could I? There would be investigations that would jeopardize my oath to Molly. I needed a reason big enough that others would see burning down the doors as necessary.”

“Unleashing the Aldervine.”

“Exactly.” Another smile curved his mouth. “There’s an edict kept at the station, written by Molly herself, that states if the Aldervine ever popped up in one of the known worlds, the doors were to be burned immediately. I knew that if I could bring a small enough piece of it over, it would create a panic and ensure the doors were torched. Then afterward, I could nullify that small piece of vine with ash. It was a solid start of a plan, but it was still too risky. Molly wrote about how crematory ash repelled the vine, but stepping inside a world infested with it?” He shook his head. “Even with the coffee scribing, enough puncture wounds could send me to sleep, which would have put everything at risk. I already accounted for a few necessary casualties, but—”

“ Necessary ?”

“I’m not vain enough to think my plan foolproof,” Mordraig snapped. “But my plan was never to destroy Inverly, apprentice. Only the Written Doors.”

“I find that difficult to believe.”

“Yes, you would, wouldn’t you? But it’s the truth. Destroying an entire world filled with innocents isn’t exactly my flavor of tea. I certainly don’t take pleasure in that part of duty. I taught classes and sat on the idea of using the Aldervine for years. Then I grew close with your father. He was a brilliant scriptomancer in his day—one of the best. Adept at the traveling scribing, though he never got a chance to use it, sadly.” Mordraig gave a thin smile that twisted Maeve’s stomach. “I asked him to be my successor. The next steward of apprentices.”

She had no idea.

“But he didn’t want to be a steward,” she said. He’d fought with Aggie over it on his last night at home. Her father must have been referring to Mordraig’s offer that night—an offer he refused.

“Your father and I argued about it,” Mordraig said. “He told me that a stewardship would take too much time away from scribing. And to help convince me how precious his scribing time was, he showed me what he’d been working on in secret.”

“He showed you the Silver Scribing.”

“Yes.”

“And it was the answer you’d been waiting for,” Maeve said, understanding everything. “To keep you safe while you brought the vine to Inverly.” It was easy to fill in the blanks.

“Indeed. The only flaw in my plan was how quickly the Aldervine spread.” His mouth turned down. “I never thought it would take off like it did, just like I never wanted to frame your father, but Inverly was a disaster. I knew that people would need someone to blame.”

Maeve’s bottom lip drooped to one side, but she gritted her teeth against the sensation and glared up at him. “So you murdered him.”

“Jonathan was another necessary casualty,” he said with no hint of remorse. “I thought the vine had already finished him off, but he had the Silver Scribing drawn up his arms.”

Yes, her father did.

Maeve pictured their last night together, when she’d noticed the moth hole on his cuff after she’d touched the fresh writing on his forearm. The Silver Scribing.

“Your father was too smart for his own good. If he’d escaped Inverly, he would have figured out the origin of the Aldervine and given the secret away. I did what had to be done.”

Tears fell down Maeve’s cheeks, but she felt too weak to brush them away.

Mordraig killed her father because he’d signed some centuries-old oath that he felt duty-bound to uphold, despite slitting throats and stuffing bodies in closets. Because he loved scriptomancy. Except it didn’t have to be like this.

“Why didn’t you simply give away the secrets? If you feel a moral obligation toward keeping scriptomancy thriving, you could have easily come forward with the Silver Scribing as soon as my father brought it to you. You could have figured out a way to open travel again safely.”

Maeve could see it perfectly. Blackcaster Station encased in glass like the Aldervine specimen in the Second Library. Cases of crematory ash at the ready. It might have been impossible to clear all the worlds of the vine, but with enough ash, you could clear one or two. Then plant more trees. Get more ash.

“The College of Scriptomantic Arts could have become invaluable because of you,” she said.

“True. But the Otherwhere Post is much more valuable, apprentice. We control everything; the House of Ministers, the university board…They might still believe they hold power, but they all do what we say because we train their couriers. We allow their constituents to communicate with their loved ones. Scriptomancy was always the most powerful tool humanity had, and now everyone knows it to be true because they must depend on it.”

“So what happens when Tristan figures out how to repair the Written Doors?” Maeve asked.

She didn’t want to hear his answer, but she needed to hear him say it.

Mordraig scratched his chin. “A tricky thing to say. I want to see what the boy can do before I make a judgment.”

“To see if he’ll also be a necessary casualty?”

“Hopefully not, but who’s to say?”

Maeve wanted to end him with her own two hands, but her limbs had other ideas.

She lost her balance and collapsed onto her side on the cold stone floor. “You murdered innocent people to save your position,” she spat.

“I did what was required to save scriptomancy, Miss Abenthy. There’s a difference.”

Mordraig was entirely convinced that he was in the right, which made him all the more dangerous. But there was nothing she could do to warn others; her body was useless.

He checked his pocket watch.

“How much longer?” Maeve asked.

He didn’t answer. He tucked the watch away and came toward her. “I hoped I wouldn’t have to kill you, truth be told. I like your spunk, and I don’t want to suffer through yet another investigation like after Inverly. Ah, well.”

Mordraig pushed his hands beneath her arms, shoveling Maeve upward. She tried to shake him off her, but it was pointless.

“If you’re planning to put me in the closet with Professor Claryman, you won’t get away with it,” she said. “There were guards who watched me come in here with you.”

“True. But none of them will be surprised when you attempt your escape, only to have a little tumble.”

Mordraig slid her limp body along the wall until frigid air brushed the back of her neck.

The window.

“Don’t worry, apprentice. My drug will have you lose all consciousness in the next few seconds, and you won’t feel a thing.”

A drug—not poison.

Maeve’s vision darkened at the edges, but she forced her eyes to remain open—willed them with all her might. It helped that her mind still felt sharp. Awake.

The coffee scribing.

Tristan had said wine barely affected his mind. The coffee scribing must be helping her resist the effects of Mordraig’s drug, just as it did with alcohol, and Mordraig must not realize it. He expected her to pass out.

It was an effort, but Maeve turned her head to the side until cool winter air rushed against her cheek.

Black courier cloaks fluttered in the distance—close enough to hear a scream.

Mordraig had threatened to hurt her if she screamed. But it was only a threat, she realized. He didn’t want this to look like murder.

“Help!” she screamed at the top of her lungs. It came out shrill and loud, like a bell carried on the wind.

“ Quiet ,” Mordraig snapped.

As if she would go quietly. “Someone help me!”

Maeve’s limbs were useless, but her throat worked well enough, and she screamed and screamed.

Mordraig tore off his cloak and stuffed a section into her mouth, muffling her.

His shirtsleeves were rolled beneath it, his forearms covered in a skin scribing more intricate than the coffee scribing. The same scribing written along her father’s arm all those years ago.

Scriptomancy was her father’s life’s work. The thing he loved most in the world, besides her, and the Silver Scribing was his greatest achievement.

Maeve felt a fierce burst of pride at what her father had accomplished, at the man he was. But mostly that she was lucky enough to be his daughter.

The scribing was beautiful.

It was the last thing Maeve saw before Steward Mordraig shoved her out the window.