Chapter Twenty Nina
By the following day, my head felt lighter, the infection cleared.
We converged in Tamir’s living quarters soon after waking, and John pulled The Stewards’ Testament from his coat pocket. When I laid my eyes on it again, something more than grief and guilt ignited within me. I felt hunger.
I imagined bursting seams of black ore beneath the earth’s crust and Lord Shop digging his way toward it.
We needed to find it first.
The little book lay open on Tamir’s unvarnished kitchen table. A scrawl of indecipherable faded symbols stared back at us.
Tamir remained two steps away, his hands twisting together in the sleeves of a teal housecoat.
His small flat unfolded behind him in a collection of upholstered furniture and antiques.
Compared to the rest of his establishment, these two rooms were quietly elegant, refined.
The walls were adorned in mournful abstract landscapes instead of women’s vulvas.
A cat slunk around the curve of an armchair.
Tamir came to peer around John’s frame at the first page, unable to help himself.
“But what does it say?” he asked.
“Fuck if I know,” John responded. “But it’ll lead us to a treasure trove.”
I frowned at the pages, some eaten through by moths. “How can we be sure it says anything about the Seam?”
“I don’t know yet,” Patrick answered. “Expect that Shop seemed to think it of great importance.”
“And there’s supposed to be a Scribbler somewhere in this city who can translate it?” I asked. “How are we to find them?”
“It ain’t that big of a city,” John said, crossing his arms. “We’ll find ’em.”
“You have a name?” I asked.
“Better. I’ve got a place,” he said. “Some swank club not far from here.”
“The problem isn’t just in finding someone who can translate it,” Theo interrupted. “It’s in convincing the Scribbler to break their oath to the House to help us.”
“What oath?” John asked.
Theo shrugged as though it were obvious. “Scribblers are entrusted with highly sensitive information. If captured or tortured, they would accept death before revealing national secrets.”
“Then capture won’t do,” Patrick said. “We’ll have to swindle ’em.”
I stared at the book, plain as it was. A blur of symbols. “If they swear an oath to protect Belavere’s secrets, then they’ve likely been trained to spot such a scheme.”
“Well,” John said, closing the book with a loud slap, “they’re yet to be swindled by a Colson.”
Rickers was the name of the club—a restaurant the Artisans in the city frequented, according to Tamir, where they ate five courses and danced to a brass band.
The women wore their most scandalous dresses, the kind polite society wouldn’t dare accept in Belavere City, where the citadel bore down from every angle.
The Scribblers of the Morland archives favored it, said Tamir. It seemed the only place to start.
“I can secure us a reservation,” Tamir said with the wave of a hand. “I am often asked for at these parties, you know.”
“In that case,” Patrick said, and looked to his father, “we’ll need supplies.”
“Supplies?” Theo asked.
“A few tinctures.”
Theo narrowed his eyes. “Which tinctures, exactly?”
Patrick looked at Theo’s jaw as though deciding whether to lay his fist into it.
Theo leaned away.
“If the Scribblers are inclined to drink, then we’ll give them a little somethin’ to loosen ’em up,” Patrick said. “They’ll be more easily swindled if they’re seein’ double.”
“You’re planning to drug them?” Theo looked to me as though expecting I might join him in his reproach.
But whatever doctrine had sewn together the threads of my morality had been snipped free. I did not blanch.
Perhaps deep down there was a murmur—a tired belief that Artisans were people, not all bad. Not all evil or hateful. But it was damningly quiet. Easy to ignore. Right now, every one of them was Lord Tanner or Lord Shop.
“How will we know which ones are Scribblers?” I asked.
Tamir grinned shrewdly. “They’re proud, the swanks. It never takes much conversation to learn their medium.”
“And which of us is to simply parade through a room of Artisans, looking for a Scribbler to drug?” Theo asked.
“Ain’t that the question,” John chortled, looking at Theodore expectantly.
Patrick clicked his tongue. “There’s a use to you yet, Teddy.”
Theo looked from one to the other. “Not me, surely.”
But it was obvious. Patrick’s hands were pressed to the desk, the knuckles compacted with callouses, arms thickly corded in muscle, his entire stance that of a miner, even if the blood beneath was shot through with ink.
John with his thick beard and grating tenor.
Neither moved nor spoke in the language of the genteel. But Theo did.
And I did.
“You can’t be serious,” Theo said bluntly, his mouth a thin line. “You want me to drug a Scribbler?”
“That’d be grand, Teddy, if you could,” John said, slapping Theo on the back.
Patrick and Theo seemed engaged in a silent scuffle, eyes locked, chins jutting.
Then Theo pinched his eyes closed. When he opened them again, he was looking at me.
“Nina, listen to me—”
“I can’t think of a person I would be less inclined to listen to.” The words had teeth.
He winced. “The terranium hasn’t even been found yet, and already people will be hurt in its pursuit. More will follow. After it’s uncovered, every man and his dog will come scrapping for a piece. The entire continent will devour itself.”
Good, I thought.
“There’s another option,” Theodore said, his gaze skirting to Patrick and away. “A stalemate.”
“There ain’t a stalemate to be found,” Patrick said immediately. “Either we find the terranium before the House does, or we lose the fight.”
“They have no Alchemist, Colson,” Theo said. “Without one, the terranium is useless to them.”
“And so you’ll have them continue razin’ brink towns while they hunt me down,” Patrick said. “Or perhaps you imagine I’d give myself over to ’em, eh?”
“If it’s my loyalty you’re questioning, I’ll remind you that I’m the reason you’re standing here and not in a locked room,” Theo reminded him. “And no. I don’t propose we do nothing.”
“Then what, Theo?” I asked. “And to be clear, I do question your loyalty.”
He seemed to find difficulty in keeping himself impassive. “Burn the book,” he said simply.
There was silence for a moment, the ringing kind.
I felt that void inside me shudder.
John seemed amused. “Burn it?” he said. “Son, that there is a map to more magic than we’ve ever known.”
“And it’ll do no good in the hands of my father. I know that now,” Theodore said, straightening his shoulders. “But your hands are no cleaner.”
Patrick’s head rolled back on his shoulders, and he laughed tiredly, the blue of his eyes icing over. “Ah, Teddy. You’ve no need to tell a miner of his dirty hands.” His blue eyes swept to Theodore’s neatly trimmed fingernails. “A less honorable man I’ve never seen.”
“Far more people will die if you do this,” Theo pressed on, imploring me, not Patrick.
He turned his back to block the Colsons from my view, stepping closer.
“Let the idium die out. Let no one have it, Nina. Force a stalemate. My father will have no choice but to negotiate with the Union and find a truce.”
But I knew otherwise. I knew men like his father were born ravenous. The currency shifted: if not idium, then coal, timber, until another path to power was found.
Once, I’d have sided with Theo. I’d thought Belavere a slave to idium, and that we were each better off without it running through our blood.
Now, I didn’t care for what was right. I cared for that hole carved out in my middle.
“A truce?” I looked at Theo squarely, remembered all those times his father had invited me to dinner, his disgust for me swimming beneath the surface. “I don’t want a truce with your father. I want them all in the ground.”
I watched Theo war with it; his loyalty to me, to his father, to the Artisans.
“I don’t believe that,” he said, searching my face, I thought, for remnants he recognized. “I don’t believe you want to see people suffer.”
A rumble grew then, beneath our feet, beneath the foundations of the hotel, deeper still: a buried titan deep in the earth, clawing for the surface. The pendant light overhead shook. Dust fell. Tamir shrieked and stumbled against a credenza.
“God almighty,” John intoned, gripping hold of a chair.
The quaking ceased. Theo and I held each other’s gazes. “Do you doubt I could do it?”
He hadn’t moved. Hadn’t blinked. The only change came from two splotches of deep red, high on his cheekbones. “You don’t scare me, Nina.” But his jaw was tight. “I know who you are.”
Fury reared up. “Not anymore.”
But still, Theo stood there, breaths carefully measured.
“Go,” I told him. “Crawl home to your father. Pray he doesn’t hang you next.”
My voice cracked on this last, and Theo’s guard crumpled in response, his dark eyes hazing. He shook his head. “I want to stay. I’ve picked a side.”
“Then don’t stand in my way.”
He nodded stiffly, relenting, but I thought I saw something solidify in his resolve. He lifted his chin and turned to Patrick. “I’ll help to find the Scribbler,” he said. “But I won’t drug them.”
Patrick had his arms crossed. He was watching Theodore with barely veiled hatred. “That’s where you draw the line, is it?”
“It is.”
The look he gave Theo was withering. “Not with the decimation of Kenton Hill, then? Or with the death of Nina’s kin? Druggin’ one of your fellows is what turns your stomach?”
Theo bristled.
“I’ll do it,” I said, empty of feeling. “I’ll drug the Scribbler. I can talk circles around them as good as Theo.”
“You’re too recognizable,” Patrick said warily, like he could sense I was close to combustion. “They’ll know your face.”
“I don’t see another option,” I argued, crossing my arms over my chest.
“A-hem,” Tamir coughed. “Pardon. But I have many decorative garments, and quite a few wigs. We can make the lady quite undetectable, I swear to you.” He covered his heart with his hand and bowed his head. “It would be my honor.”