Chapter Two Vina #2
But the air had tasted like an old penny—rusty, bloody.
And when Vina had met her eyes she’d seen the weeping man in the orangery so clearly that it had been as if she were ten years old again, watching him bow his head between his hands, his golden hair soaked to copper by blood, howling like a wounded animal.
She’d felt a loose knot in her chest abruptly draw tight, stealing her breath. Her tale had trapped her like a noose.
Isadora. Isadora. My love, my darling, not again, no—
The barge jerked. She heard Edmund curse again, then settle back into silence.
She was sure he and Matthias hadn’t heard her call the thief Isadora. Somehow, by luck or whatever trickery tales liked to pull, they hadn’t heard the wretchedness in Vina’s voice.
They didn’t know her tale would soon begin, which meant they didn’t pity her.
She set a hand on the edge of the barge. She was amazed at how still her hand was. She wasn’t trembling at all.
The Tower soon loomed above them. Even in the shadows and torchlight of the night she could see the ravens circling overhead, their wings spread.
The air seemed to grow colder as they grew closer to the gates that surrounded it.
Tale-scent filled the air: iron and ink, blood and apples alike.
She inhaled, and the smell of the Queen’s archives filled her lungs.
As an incarnate, Vina had learned long ago that her purpose was to live out her tale.
To embody the tale is to keep it alive, her stepmother Laura had told her gently, when Vina had first learned what she was.
She’d pressed Incarnate Tales for Children into Vina’s hands.
Vina remembered, even now, the red leather of its binding, sticky from the sweat of her own hands as she’d clutched it tight. Your value is beyond measure.
But tales need more than incarnates to live, darling. They need to be read. A tale read is a tale that can feast, nestling in your mind and growing strong. Read wisely, dear Lavinia. Keep the tales steadfast in your heart.
Vina had kept that book with her when she’d been led away to her new life. And in the royal Palace, alongside her fellow knights, she’d learned that a tale told wrong was a capital crime. Changing tales, altering them—penning heresies—risked destroying the tales entirely, and the Isle with them.
To protect the Isle, the Queen’s archivists maintained and preserved all canonical texts inside the Tower’s walls. Every single book and newssheet published across the Isle also passed under their careful eyes before reaching people’s hands.
She knew that the quiet, pervasive power of the archivists was necessary… but as she gazed up at the circling ravens, and the Queen’s rose flag, dun and dark in the night’s smog, she was grimly reminded that the Tower was not only an archive but a prison. Death lingered in its foundations.
When Vina had heard from Edmund’s sweet, gossipy sister that he and Matthias had been given a plum quest to carry limni ink to the Tower in the dead of night…
Well, she was hardly going to let them stumble into trouble alone. She’d always had a good nose for danger, and the archives reeked of stories and danger alike. In her experience, they often went hand in hand.
Their barge led them to the Traitor’s Gate, that arch of stone rising from the river.
It opened at their approach with a clank and a groan.
The silver water rippled around their barge as it swept beneath the darkness of the gate’s arch.
Beyond it, waiting on the steps, was an archivist, cowl pulled up so only her chin and the long gray braid of her hair was visible.
Above her, on the walls of the Bloody Tower, perched a watchful line of ravens who cocked their heads in something like greeting.
“You’re late,” said the archivist.
“Entirely my fault,” Vina said, jumping lightly onto the stone steps that awaited them. She bowed, then straightened. “I’m afraid we got a little caught up.” She smiled.
The archivist did not smile back.
“Come with me,” the archivist replied dourly, and turned. “Quickly, sir knights.”
They followed her swiftly up the stairs and across the grounds of the Tower, beyond the Bloody Tower and Wakefield Tower alike, through the inner fortifications: gray and imposing defensive walls guarded by Yeoman Warders in their starched liveries, their faces wan and blank.
Distantly, Vina could hear sobbing, high and childish.
The screams and wails of the Tower’s long-dead prisoners, no doubt.
Matthias murmured a soft prayer under his breath.
Vina, who never prayed, started humming.
It took Matthias a full minute to realize what she was humming, and half a second longer to kick her in the ankle.
“You can’t sing bawdy songs here,” he hissed.
“It’s good I wasn’t saying the words, then, isn’t it?” Vina replied, and resumed her efforts to psychologically torture her fellow knights with another round of “The Miller’s Song.”
New ghostly cries filled the air as they entered the grandest edifice on the Tower’s grounds.
The White Tower, as pale as its name, glowed coldly in the dark.
Vina finally let her voice fade in her throat as they clambered up its many stairs, passing grim warders with their hands on their sword hilts.
“Ignore the noises,” the archivist said, as ghostly wails rose up from the basement and clamored in Vina’s ears. “The ghosts are bound with chains of limni ink. They can’t cause us any harm.”
They followed her up a narrow staircase. The higher they climbed, the more the wailing faded and the more new sound welled up in its place: shouting, running, bangs. As they reached the third narrow landing, an archivist slammed open the door ahead of them, the wood bouncing against stone.
“You have the ink?” the man snapped. “Yes? Well, come here and hand it to me!”
Matthias shoved Vina’s shoulder and she strode up the stairs, taking off the satchel and handing it to the archivist. It was snatched without thanks and the man ran back into the room.
The woman who had guided them up lowered her hood, revealing a tense, exhausted face, mouth wrinkled with lines of deep tension. She strode in after him.
Vina, Matthias, and Edmund exchanged looks.
The archivist had not told them to follow, but she also hadn’t ordered them not to.
They were knights, so they did what came naturally and followed her into the fray.
Matthias and Edmund drew their swords with a high-pitched whine of steel.
Vina kept her own sheathed. She couldn’t imagine what use a sword would be against books.
Vina was closest to the door, so she was the first to feel the gut-punch of a tale.
It slammed into her, through her. Her mouth filled with the taste of hot pennies, and her ears filled with a buzzing: a low howl like a horde of bees, or a roaring sea; a tide of tale-spinning, rising and rising and clawing at the walls of stone and mortal flesh to force its way free.
It held her frozen as Matthias and Edmund bullied their way farther into the room, leaving her by the door.
The air was howling, a tempest of wind whipping against the circular flagstone walls.
Despite its ferocity, the torches hadn’t guttered out.
Instead they were huge wild discs of light wheeling in their sconces, billowing with the yells of the five archivists inside the chamber.
They were standing in a crescent, their cowls flying behind their skulls, their eyes narrowed against the storm.
Each of the five archivists around them now held a vial of limni ink, empty vials scattered at their feet, and ribbons of ink were spinning through the air, converging on the circular table at the center of the room.
With their voices and their hands, they were controlling the ink, but they were struggling to get it to obey them.
Vina felt limni ink whip through the air and splatter against her exposed chin—a burn, hotter than starlight.
Then it fell inert against her armor with a hiss.
“What the shit,” Edmund whispered fervently.
Matthias drew his shield up, angling to stand in front of them both.
Vina, grimly assured now that swords weren’t going to do them much good, slammed the door properly shut with her booted foot and kept her heel against the wood for good measure.
Whatever was flying around this room had no business leaving it.
On the table, burning in fire that wasn’t fire, in white flames that flickered in and out of existence like night terrors, lay a book.
It was an old book, an illuminated text with rich, flowing script in diamonds of bloodred and ichor black.
Its binding was leather, tooled with images of rowan berries and thorns.
It was open at the center, the spine cracked, the pages torn into fissures like dry earth.
As Vina watched, another page began to splinter, the ink crawling from it, leeching color from the page.
“More,” an archivist ordered, and more limni ink spooled across the page, pressing words and images back into place. “More, damn you!”
There was a blast.
The book tore. The sound of it was terrible, like a high scream and like flesh being pared. It did not sound like simple paper, easily mended. It sounded like death.
Ink gathered together like a cudgel and slammed its way toward the door.
Matthias squared his feet against the ground, bracing his shield for the blow.
Vina, thinking fast, shoved herself flat against the door.
If her one job was to keep whatever lay in that book from escaping, then she was going to do it.