“Warden Finch—”
“Director,” Finch corrected. “If you’ve forgotten your place, Hargrove, I’m sure I can find you a new one.”
Why is Finch calling himself the Director?
Elisabeth’s memory flooded back as she fought her way awake. Ashes. Bells. Wardens surrounding her with their swords drawn, Finch emerging from the group to seize her arm. He had dragged her downstairs and thrown her in this cell. She recalled the rage that had twisted his pockmarked face in the torchlight. And she remembered the wetness that had shone on his cheeks when he turned away.
At once, she regretted waking. Every inch of her body ached. Bruises throbbed on her arms and back, and whenever she breathed in, her ribs stabbed her lungs. But far worse than the pain was the rush of understanding that followed.
He blames me for what happened. She hadn’t expected to be hailed as a hero—but this? And if he’s the Director now . . .
Biting the inside of her cheek, she forced herself to sit up. She clutched the coarse blanket to her chest, finding that she was still dressed in her nightgown, crusted stiff with ink and stained with her own blood. Looking around, she found no sign of Hargrove, but Finch stood outside the bars of the cell door. Hard lines etched his features as he gazed down the corridor. A single torch blazed on the wall behind him, throwing his long, threatening shadow into the cell. She struggled to make sense of her final memory from last night. Why had his face been wet? It hadn’t started raining.
The truth dawned on her. “You were in love with the Director,” she realized aloud.
Her voice was little more than a thin scratching, but Finch swung around as though she’d hurled an insult. “Shut your mouth, girl.”
“Please,” she insisted. “I loved her, too. You must listen to me.” The words came tumbling out as though a dam had broken inside her. “Someone else released the Book of Eyes last night. I came downstairs, and . . .”
As she began recounting the story in fits and starts, Finch’s hand stole toward the hilt of his sword. He squeezed the leather grip until it creaked. Elisabeth stammered to a halt.
“Always telling tales,” he said. His eyes shone like black beetles in the torchlight. “Always causing trouble. You expect me to believe you, after all the rules you’ve broken?”
“I’m telling the truth,” she said, willing him to see the honesty on her face. “You can’t send me away to the sorcerers. It was a sorcerer who did this.”
“Why, pray tell, would a sorcerer free a grimoire, knowing it would be destroyed? Those spells are gone now. No chance of getting them back, and all the sorcerers are weaker for their loss.”
He was right. There was no reason for a sorcerer to have done it. But she knew that what she had sensed had been real, and if he would only believe her . . .
“There was something wrong last night,” she blurted, grasping at a memory. “There weren’t any wardens on patrol aside from the Director. I didn’t see anyone in the halls. It was a spell—it must have been. You can check the logs, ask the wardens. Someone else must have noticed.”
“Lies and more lies.” With satisfaction, he spat on the ground outside the cell.
Terror seized Elisabeth. She had the sense of wandering into a dark wood and suddenly realizing that she was lost with no hope of finding her way. Finch was never going to believe her, because he did not want to. Her guilt was the best gift he had ever received. The Director had chosen to love Elisabeth, not him, and finally he had an opportunity to punish her for it.
“An idiot, you are,” he was saying. “Always thought so. Irena never believed me, claimed you had promise, but I knew you weren’t worth the trouble of room and board, ever since you were a fat little babe, filling the library with your squalling.”
Irena. That was the Director’s name? She had died without Elisabeth even knowing it.
“I’m telling the truth,” she whispered again. Her face prickled, hot with humiliation. “I smelled sorcery in the library. A smell like burnt metal. Aetherial combustion. I swear it.”
His lip curled in a sneer. “And how would you know that smell?”
“I—last spring, when—” She cut herself off, feeling ill. If she explained that she’d snuck into the reading room and spoken to a magister, she would only make things worse. She looked down and shook her head. “I just know,” she finished weakly.
“Read it in a grimoire, no doubt,” he growled. “One you shouldn’t have been reading, filling your head with the words of demons. Are you consorting with demons, girl? Have you begun dabbling in sorcery—is that how you know?”
She retreated in bed until her back thumped against the wall. “No!” she cried. How could he accuse her of such a thing? She had sworn her oaths, just like him. If she broke them by attempting sorcery, she would never become a warden, never be permitted to set foot in a Great Library again.
“We’ll find out soon enough.” He turned away, lifting the torch from the wall. “I’ve heard what the Magisterium does to traitors. Their interrogations are worse than torture. When they’re finished with you, girl, you won’t be fit to sweep the library’s floors.” The light began to recede, taking his shadow with it.
Elisabeth scrambled free of the blanket and stumbled to the cell door, gripping the bars. “Stop calling me girl,” she called after him. “I’m an apprentice!”
There came a dreadful pause. “Are you, now?” Finch asked, his voice ugly, full of relish.
His torch bobbed away, leaving her in darkness. Slowly, she reached for the key around her neck, the key she hadn’t taken off in the three and a half years since the Director had given it to her, and grasped only emptiness.
There was nothing there.
• • •
Elisabeth’s days blurred together. The Great Library’s dungeon lay deep underground, far from any glimpse of sunlight, and she was alone. She rested on her cot listening to the scufflings of rats and booklice, grateful for their company. Without them a thick, suffocating silence descended over her cell, tormenting her with strange imaginings.
Finch didn’t visit her again; neither did Master Hargrove. At regular intervals, torchlight flooded the corridor and a warden came to shove a tray of food beneath the cell door. Less often, he unlocked the door and replaced the waste bucket in the corner. It was always the same warden who did this. She tried pleading with him the first few times, but he didn’t listen. The looks he gave her were proof enough that he believed whatever Warden Finch—the Director—had told him.
That I am a traitor, she thought, and a murderer.
Despair dulled her mind. Grief lapped at her in a ceaseless tide. She had never guessed that the Director loved her. Certainly not enough to leave her Demonslayer, her most prized possession. Elisabeth wished she could carry that knowledge back in time and do everything differently. She finally had proof that the Director had believed in her all along, but it had come too late, and at far too great a cost.
As the days crept past and her tears ran dry, she obsessively combed through the attack in her head, trying to piece together exactly what had happened. It was difficult for her to imagine the Directer being taken by surprise, but every piece of evidence pointed to the fact that a sorcerer had ambushed her. He’d stolen her keys and gone down to the vault, then freed the Book of Eyes. No one had interrupted him, because he’d used a spell to—what?