Silver in the Bone (Silver in the Bone #1)(17)
Author: Alexandra Bracken
There were numerous references to the ring in the Immortalities of the sorceresses who had come from the Otherland, but only one within the last hundred years. The Sorceress Rowenna’s Immortality.
I forced myself to pretend to finish the German fairy tales, then flip through the Russian lore. All the while, my mind was working, combing through my memories of Rowenna’s Immortality until I could bring a picture of the relevant page to mind.
How I wish I had not lost the Ring of Dispel to that horrid cow Myfanwy. Now I’ve nothing left of Avalon . . .
The library, unfortunately, didn’t have Myfanwy’s Immortality, but there was a chance—one as good as any—that the Dyes had it in the private collection they kept in the library’s basement.
But first, I needed to confirm something else.
I opened to a random page in Legends of the Moors and counted down from a hundred before flipping wildly to another page and letting out a false gasp of surprise. Then, collecting my things in a hurry, I left the books on the table and rushed toward the atrium, calling out “Good night, Librarian!” before pretending to open and shut the All Ways door.
There was another door, this one hidden, in the paneling just to the right of it. I pushed on an inconspicuous piece of molding, and it opened, revealing the stairs to the loft. I climbed slowly, avoiding the steps that I knew creaked. The dusty attic space, crammed with various crates of supplies, greeted me. I didn’t bother turning on the light or glancing at our old sleeping bags rolled up in the corner. I lay down on the floor and peered through the crack in the floorboards, my heart hammering.
Septimus and his cronies were just out of my line of sight, but I could hear them clearly as they made their way over to my worktable to pick up Legends of the Moors.
“—how do we even know for certain that she’s searching for it?” Hector asked in a hushed tone.
I drew in a sharp breath, trying to hear over the sudden rush of blood in my ears.
“They take work from even the weakest of the sorceress scum, and if the Council wants it, so do the rest of them,” Septimus hissed back. “The reward would be too great for them to pass up.”
Rat scat, I thought.
None of this could be a coincidence. They had to be talking about the Ring of Dispel.
It was bad enough that Emrys wasn’t the only other Hollower searching for the ring; now it sounded like the entire Council of Sistren was involved—and they had a head start. The thought left a bitter taste on my tongue.
“Maybe we should have just grabbed her and been done with it,” Phineas said. “I don’t want to be trudging over all the moors of England looking for his rotting corpse. What if one of them finds it before us? We’ll never get it out of the Council’s claws, and then it’ll be Endymion’s wrath we have to worry about—”
“Be quiet, you old fool,” Septimus snapped, closing the heavy book and storming toward the All Ways door. “Enough of this. We can’t lose another hour.”
My pulse rose to match the quick clip of his steps. Horror was slow to come, but no less poisonous, as his last words echoed over the polished stone floors beneath me.
I rolled onto my back, my thoughts whipping up into a furious storm of worry and fear. As I lay there in the dark silence, Septimus’s earlier words pierced through the chaos in my mind.
Where was it that he left you and your brother again?
I pushed myself up off the floor, feeling as though I were moving through cold, dark water as I made my way back downstairs. I passed beneath the library’s marble archway, and the message carved into it:
THOSE WHO STEAL THE TREASURES WITHIN WILL DIE FORGOTTEN BY PEN, FRIEND, AND KIN
The founding members of the guild had traded services with a sorceress to cast the curse, and its sigils, carved into the wall, were behind a pane of glass above Librarian’s desk to keep the cats from trying to maul it. They still gathered in front of it every day, hissing. Waiting for one of us stupid humans to remove the long-festering dark magic.
But no one ever would. It was the only insurance policy the guild had that the donated relics and books wouldn’t be taken from the building, even by the Hollowers who had originally brought them in. Bad enough to have your library key rescinded and lose access to its temple of information. Being cursed into obscurity, stripped of all bragging rights, had proven a bridge too far for most Hollowers, who lived and died by their reputations.
“Librarian?” I called.
Heavy steps pounded across the floor as Librarian emerged from the back office, random bits of paper and packing tape stuck to his metal frame. I warmed at the sight of him and the familiar soft whirring of his inner mechanics.
The automaton moved as if he had been crafted yesterday, not thousands of years ago in the workshop of Daedalus—or Hephaestus himself, depending on which legend you wanted to believe. To most, he must have looked like a strange android, or a bronze statue that had suddenly come to life and stepped off its pedestal.
The strange, ancient quicksilver that gave life to him flowed through the gaps in his metallic joints and around his eyes. His metal, unmoving expression used to unnerve me as a kid, but now I found its dependability comforting.
“Yes, young Lark?” he chirped in ancient Greek.
In his past life, when the library had still been a sorceress’s vault, the automaton had guarded the treasure inside, though he was the most prized relic of her collection. The guild had successfully managed to retrain him to serve as both the caretaker of the library and the impartial enforcer of its rules. But while you could show an automaton how to vacuum, you apparently couldn’t teach him a modern language.
Cabell, ever the wonder, had picked up the three ancient languages we used most often in our line of work almost instantly when we were twelve, which had been beyond frustrating. Even with a photographic memory, it had taken me months to memorize ancient Greek, Latin, and Old Welsh, and I was still bad at speaking them.
“Do you know if the Dyes have the Sorceress Myfanwy’s Immortality?” I heard myself ask. “Downstairs, maybe?”
“No,” Librarian said. “They do not.”
I started to turn back toward my worktable, only for Librarian’s strange voice to bring me up short. “They do not, for it was ruined a day past. Young Dye asked me to dispose of it.”
“Ruined,” I repeated through gritted teeth.
“Yes, by a leak,” Librarian said, clearly repeating the lie Emrys had told him. “A tragedy.”