Chapter 41
Aloud crack of thunder rattled through the hospital’s stone walls, sending bottles of tinctures clinking, rattling the shelf of medicinal instruments along the far wall. Maeve folded the letter from Tristan, then placed it at the top of the growing stack of letters at her bedside table, straightening them before they had a chance to topple off.
Not that it would make any difference.
Letters were scattered everywhere in the stark room. They were piled against the walls, their corners curling against one another, as if from the weight of all the sentiments. They were shelved like books in the wormwood shelf opposite her hospital bed. A pair of clerks from the Hall of Routes had carried in four wooden crates to help Maeve find her way through the jumble, but they were already overflowing, letters spilling to the worn tile floor.
At least the scents of parchment and sealing wax masked the resinous odor of the healing rub the hospital clinicians insisted she reapply hourly. Day after day.
She glanced out the hospital window to a narrow view of a bleak Leylish courtyard. She waited patiently for something green to push its way through the rain-soaked earth and give her a bright spot of color to focus on besides the brown ground. But you couldn’t rush a seedling, just as you couldn’t rush the knitting of bones.
Sixteen weeks had passed since Mordraig had thrown her over the window ledge. The fall cracked nearly all her ribs, shattered her left foot, and snapped the radial bone in her right arm. The coffee scribing in her system kept her conscious through it all, which was a blessing and a curse. She was able to swing out her arm as she landed, protecting her head from the worst of the fall, and the snow helped to cushion her as well. The clinicians believed that if it were summertime, there was a good chance she wouldn’t have made it.
But she pulled through, and now the truth was out in the open for everyone to have.
Maeve didn’t think she could be any happier in her discoveries, until a few weeks into her recovery, when a constabulary courier delivered a box of her father’s effects that they’d confiscated during their initial search of Mordraig’s quarters. It was filled to the brim with years of her father’s journals. When Maeve first paged through them, she gasped in surprise when letters spilled out—love letters written by her mother that her father had tucked away within the pages.
Her heart ached thinking about them, but she wouldn’t let herself cry over her parents anymore. She’d cried enough over her father as it was. Now she simply wished she could tell him everything.
Already, his work was gathering excitement across Leyland and Barrow. Ministers were in talks with various organizations. There were ideas already being tossed about now that a cure for the Aldervine’s poison existed.
Maeve wished her father were still here to see how important his work had become. More than anything, she hoped a guard rubbed it all in Mordraig’s face while he sat in his bare cell in the lower level of Stonewater Prison.
A familiar vibration hummed from the wall across from her hospital bed. A moment later, a strange black door appeared and opened. Tristan stepped through, wearing a new shirt covered in ink splatters.
He was soaked through from rain, his dark hair damp. He shook it, and it fell into dripping curls around his ears. The chill spring air had turned the tip of his nose bright pink, and his fogged-over spectacles sat crookedly across it. Maeve imagined if she rested her fingers against his jaw, it would feel the same temperature of fresh snow.
He paused at the foot of her bed and took her in, his mouth curving. “How do you feel?”
“Awful, as usual. But watch this.”
Maeve swung her legs down from the bed and pushed herself up, walking unaided for the second time that day.
Her legs wobbled, and she caught herself on the writing desk that Tristan had brought in, stocked with a stack of fresh leather journals and an assortment of left-handed quills. Of course one of those quills happened to be the left-handed swan quill Tristan had gifted her in his room, with the drip of silver along the fletching that ended in a ruby. As soon as Maeve discovered it sitting on her hospital desk, she took a quill knife and carved the tip.
The quill felt lovely to write with. But there was only so much she could write in a journal each day, only so many hours she could sit and stare out of a window at a patch of mud.
Already, she longed to feel paver stones beneath her feet and breathe in fresh air and sunshine. Most of all, she longed to write the traveling scribing on the inside of her wrist again.
She pushed herself from the writing desk. Holding out her hands for balance, she made it the rest of the way across the floor to her little window—something she wasn’t able to do yesterday. Tristan watched her with shining eyes.
“You’re walking on your own,” he said. “How it that possible?”
“Legs.” Maeve kicked one. “And muscles and sinew, and probably a small portion of my brain.”
Tristan arched an eyebrow dramatically. “There are some who would argue that gravity might have something to do with it as well.”
He came forward and brought one hand to her ribs, feeling along them slowly. She gasped and squirmed.
“They’re still sensitive?”
Yes. They certainly were sensitive, but the sensitivity she was experiencing had more to do with the feel of his fingers pressed against her than any tumble through a window.
They broke apart as the door to her room creaked open. A clinician in a white starched apron over a gray gown popped her head in.
“Time to administer your rub,” she said, then noticed Tristan. “Oh, dear me, you have company.”
“Yes. Company who has stepped through the fabric of worlds to pay me a visit. I would appreciate it if you left me alone for a moment,” Maeve said.
“But your rub—”
“I think my bruises can have a little patience for a change.”
The clinician’s cheeks pinked, and she curtsied quickly.
As soon as she dipped away, Maeve turned to Tristan. “That’s it. I need you to help me get out of this room today. In the next hour, in fact. I’ll give you a whole hallion if you help me escape before another clinician comes to prod me again. Two hallions, even.”
“You have two hallions?”
“No, but I can pay you in other ways.” She drew a finger along his jaw, torn between kissing him and escape.
He caught her finger and pressed his mouth to it. “Tempting, but I’m actually here to free you .”
Her eyebrows drew together. “You are?”
He ran his hand down her right sleeve. “May I check it first?”
When Maeve nodded, he brushed her hair aside and slipped her hospital gown down her shoulder, pulling out her right arm, inspecting the fresh coffee scribing she had written along the inside of her elbow that morning.
Tallowmeade was kind enough to send over a lotion he concocted from crematory ash and a blend of herbs that took away the stinging cold from the puncture wounds against her palm. Until the stewards figured out the logistics of the Silver Scribing, the coffee scribing still counteracted the black marks on her left hand.
There were estimates about how long it would take to have the Silver Scribing ready to test. Some gave it a month or more, but as soon as it was deemed safe, the stewards promised to call her first. Tristan was ever so slightly bitter, which she made sure to tease him about.
Once he was satisfied with her coffee scribing, he stepped to the small chair on the other side of the room and collected a few books he’d left yesterday.
He’d sat there nearly every night for the past few weeks, reading aloud from an endless array of the ghastliest novels; he had horrid taste in books. She would curl into his lap and try to listen to every word, but it was difficult to be so near to him without skimming her fingers beneath his shirt hem. He would put on a serious face, of course, and pretend to read for another few chapters before giving up entirely.
Maeve felt heat rise in her neck, thinking about those long nights. It was astounding what one could accomplish with a little creativity and no need for sleep.
She caught his hand, pulling him in for a slow kiss that soon left her breathless.
“We should probably stop this,” he said into her mouth.
“That’s a terrible idea. Why?”
“Because otherwise we’ll be here all day and night and possibly the next day. And if I remember correctly, you wanted to leave not two minutes ago.”
For a blissful moment, Maeve seriously reconsidered her need for escape.
“Then there’s the little matter of my father…”
She pulled away. She hadn’t yet spoken to the Postmaster, but she kept his letter near her bed and liked to read it from time to time. “What about him?”
“I told him that we would pay him a visit together before luncheon. There should be a coach waiting outside the front of the hospital now.” He slipped his arm across her shoulder. “I’ll help you walk out, so long as you promise me one thing first.”
He sounded grave.
“What is it?”
“That you won’t leap in front of the coach.”
By the time they made it out the door, their driver was tapping his toe impatiently. It took longer than Maeve would have liked to get off the front stoop and into the cab, but both Tristan and the hospital staff helped. Tristan climbed in beside her, and the coach rolled northward, across the river Liss, then up the twisting university streets, until they reached the road surrounding Blackcaster Square.
“Look at that.” Tristan pointed.
A large white banner was unrolled across the front gate. On it were printed updates from the Postmaster himself.
There was a note about the Second Library and how it was officially cleared of the Aldervine, a few of the survivors had awoken with the coffee scribing, then a larger message from the Minister of Agriculture. He was working with the Post to plant a new forest of white elm trees to harvest for crematory ash in the farmland west of the city.
It went on to explain that as soon as the Silver Scribing was figured out, there were plans in place to send a team of scriptomancers into Inverly armed with the scribing and a large amount of crematory ash, to see if they could slowly beat back the vine and wake up survivors.
For the first time in seven long years there was a stir of hope permeating the air around Blackcaster Square. There were still protesters, of course, but the messages had shifted to demanding timelines and more detailed plans about Inverly.
Soon , Maeve thought to herself. They would all get answers soon.
The coach veered north, through the Post’s main gate, then through the forest of oak trees now covered in bright green buds nearly ready to pop with all the spring light streaming through the canopy. They finally rolled to a stop outside the same lecture hall Maeve had visited her first day here, where she had been given the memory scribing.
“If your father makes me read a memory scribing, I will never forgive you,” she said as Tristan helped her step from the coach.
“I promise you it’s nothing like that.”
She halted. “You know what this is about, and you haven’t told me?”
His mouth curved. “It’s a secret.”
“You know I don’t like secrets,” she hissed.
That made him burst into laughter, and he took her hand, running his thumb along her palm. Together they went inside, then descended the stairs toward the pit of the stage.
Maeve was surprised to find the lecture hall as empty as it had been on her first day at the Post, save for a row of people in the front.
The Postmaster sat beside Steward Tallowmeade and three Leyland ministers in decorated waistcoats.
“Here she is,” Tristan said, then left her there while he stepped down and flopped against a chair. She glared at him, and he cracked a smile.
“Maeve Abenthy,” said Postmaster Byrne. “I have called you before us to declare that you are officially invited to join the ranks of otherwhere couriers.”
She wasn’t expecting that. “You’re making me a courier?”
“We’ve already made you a full-fledged courier, but whether you choose to accept the office is up to you. However, that’s not the sole reason I asked you here.” He steepled his fingers. “Next year, we’re planning for a new division of the Otherwhere Post that will begin traveling beyond the bounds of the three known worlds to seek out information that might help us repair the Written Doors more quickly. Given your proclivity for the traveling scribing, I would like you as a member of that team. Along with my son.”
Maeve was speechless.
“You don’t have to decide anything now. In fact, take as long as you would like to think it through. It’s a great decision and not one to take lightly. It comes with many risks, but we all thought that you might be up for the challenge.”
Maeve nodded, her mind already spinning with possibilities.
She would take her time to think everything through first, but she knew she wanted to go. As it was, she wanted to race back to her hospital room, crack open a journal, and make a list of all the new things she wanted—everything she’d dreamed of experiencing over the years but never thought possible because of her circumstances, then other experiences she hadn’t dared to dream about before. Then she would figure out how to go about doing everything on that list.
She curtsied to a line of ministers and stewards, then started toward the steps to take her off the stage, but the Postmaster held up a hand.
“One more thing,” he said.
He stood from his chair and approached the stage slowly, holding out something that caught the light from the gasolier overhead. It glimmered like a coin in the sunlight as he placed it in the center of her palm.
A courier key.
“I think you’ve more than earned it,” he said.
“I’m in complete agreement with you on that.” Maeve slipped the key down her right pocket, against her hip bone.