For a while, neither of us spoke. We sat there, fingers becoming more intertwined with each passing breath, and simply basked in the comfort of shared silence. I didn’t understand why he was looking at me with such care. Why my own pulse kept ratcheting with each minute that scraped by. It wasn’t until he cleared his throat that I realized I’d leaned in far too close, and I straightened as a heat overcame my cheeks.
Orin tracked the crawling blush across my skin, and wantflickered to life in his gaze. Still, his smile was gentle. “Take your time. For now, I’ll give you a few days to read these without interruption. You can resume physical training with Rorik later, and I won’t distract you any further.”
I removed my hand from his and busied my fingers by flipping aimlessly through the journal’s pages. “I’ll let you know if I need anything.”
“Please do.” Orin stared at me for a moment longer, letting his smile wash over me fully, before standing and straightening his shirt. He left without another word, and it was all I could do not to collapse on the cushions.
What in the Ever-lovinghell was that?A groan simmered from my chest, and I closed my eyes. Orin defied every preconceived notion I had about Evers. Every. Last. Thing. I hated him for it, and yet, at the same time, I didn’t. Because here I was, holding a piece of my family’s history that I never knew existed.
Opening my eyes, I righted myself on the sofa and flipped Rowena’s diary open to the first page.
Before her days as a threadmender, she’d been the town’s poet laureate. She had been prolific and eloquent, and her cozy home—now property of the town elders—was packed with books and journals full of her neat handwriting. When she’d left us, I kept a few of her smaller memoirs for myself. But this journal was the last thing she’d penned.
I forced myself to swallow my grief and slowly began to move through her dated entries. Her work was formal, her prose stiff. It was so different from what I was used to seeing from her, and I realized that while she may have agreed to help find a cure for blight, she took no joy in it. Still, I read every word. Every detailed explanation of Evers’ threads, their movements, their strength and resilience. She’d also built on methods for mending based off the earlier threadmenders’ journals, and while I planned to read those as well, I couldn’t help but appreciate her meticulous instructions.
The only page that lacked any detail was the final entry. It contained only one word.
Mavis.
A dull ringing settled low in my ears.
“Aunt Rowena,” I murmured to myself as I traced her handwriting. The page was dated fifteen years back. Orin had said she’d died several years ago, butfifteen? My heart twisted. Her life had been cut drastically short. Had she known that attempting to cure Mavis would result in her death? Tears welled in my eyes as I stared at the name. She hadn’t managed it. I’d known as much, given the situation I was in, but seeing that entry... that solitary word...
A fist clenched my heart tight as I gently stroked the page. A sudden, sharp pain sliced through my forefinger, and I winced as I dropped the book in my lap. A bead of blood welled to the surface of my skin along the neat slit. Glancing down at the open journal, I spotted a small, jagged fragment of paper jutting from the center binding.
A missing page?The evidence of the rip was almost imperceptible, just the barest scrap to indicate a page had been there at all. There were no ink splatters or notes of any kind that had bled across its surface, and since it was sandwiched between Rowena’s last entry about threadmending techniques and the final page with Mavis’s name, there was no interruption in her train of thought. If not for the cut now dulling on my finger, I never would have known it was missing.
I flipped through her journal to see if anything else had been removed, but the remainder of the binding was intact. Had she torn it out? Or someone else? A ghostly chill crept down the length of my spine. I could ask, but what good would it do? Would they even tell me the truth? Did they even notice?
“Strange,” I muttered. Wiping away the droplet of blood on my pants, I set her book beside me and reached for the next journal. I had four more to browse, four more chances to glean any additional information about blight or the Evers’ threads. But as I spent the next few hours sifting through the threadmenders’ memories, I couldn’t help but think of the missing page from Rowena’s diary and that single, damning word.
Mavis.
Ten
Two days passed in blissful solitude. The only Ever I encountered was Orin as he occasionally checked in on my progress, but it seemed like the rest of the family had, in fact, heeded his warning. Even when I took breaks or strolled the grounds to clear my mind, I passed by only attendants going about their duties. I wasn’t required to attend family dinner. What the Ferngloves were doing or where they were, I didn’t know. I didn’t much care. The journals held all my attention.
Unfortunately, I moved through them quickly. Despite the years the threadmenders had spent at the estate, their diaries were lucky to exceed fifty entries. All of them. I’d started taking notes on my own, jotting down ideas and methods to try first. One of the earliest threadmenders had penned an idea for cutting versus stitching, and that gave me pause.
Isolate the affected life thread with your nondominant hand. Then focus your power to the palm of your dominant hand. Will it to take the shape of a knife or scalpel, and then aimthe sharp end at the base of the thread. Go for a clean cut to create neater ends in the life thread and reduce the chances of unnecessary fraying.
I’d yet to test slicing away at someone’s strands, Ever or human. Would the pruning help or hurt? Would they die like a withered plant too far gone, or would new growth sprout, free of infection? Perhaps it would, but that wouldn’t eradicate the disease that seemed to stem from somewhere deep in the body. Pruning might temporarily alleviate their symptoms, but one unknown remained: me. If I endured the actions of what I inflicted, would I survive healthy strands being cut away from my core? Or would I propel myself toward death that much faster?
The former threadmender didn’t explain in detail, but his final entry was illuminating enough:Don’t cut.
Another threadmender, the one before Rowena, had the idea to somehow pinch threads while utilizing his magic, but for what purpose, I couldn’t tell. He’d left a sketch in his journal illustrating a forefinger and thumb holding a thread that had been shaped into something like a needle. It was his final entry, and a ghostly chill ravaged my skin. I hoped he hadn’t tried it only to die in the process. But... I underlined the idea and made a note on my papers. Perhaps.
By the second morning, I’d set their journals aside and turned to the surrounding shelves. A few of the threadmenders had mentioned reading other books for inspiration, but they’d left little notes about the texts themselves outside of the titles.
“Where are you?” I murmured, squinting at the spines as I inched along the bookcase. Dusty, old tomes with gilded leather and worn bindings were packed neatly on the shelves, many of which had obscure titles or were stamped with ancient sigils I had no hopes of deciphering. But finally, I found the three books that had been mentioned in the journals:A Collection of Rare Flora,Sloan’s Guide to Curses and Poisons, andFable or Fact: A History of Evers. Returning to my seat, I started with the latter after a quick glance at the tome’s contents revealed the passages were at least written in modern tongue.
The very first entry was a short myth involving Death and a woman whose words were full of magic. She’d become Ever after escaping his clutches, and both her and her kin were granted eternal life. Apparently, blight didn’t give a damn about Death’s promise. Mavis was still dying, despite being a descendant of the original immortal woman.
I flipped through the chapters and made notes of what to revisit until I reached the end. The last portion of the book was reserved for a sprawling lineage chart that spanned several pages, complete with the names and locations of Ever families.
So many.I lost count of their ancestors, of the hundreds of branches in the chart that all somehow tracked back to the first Ever centuries ago. Their origins were ancient. Some offshoots seemed far removed, and the majority of families did not have a crest above their names. But those that did were penned in a bolder, larger font as if to give the family more weight. Importance. Power.
Within Glaes’s borders, only four families were inked in that manner: the Ferngloves, the Waterstones, the Starglens, and a fourth I hadn’t heard of. The Embergraves. Frowning at the name, I flipped back through the pages hoping to find details about any of the families present, and yet nothing. I hummed wordlessly to myself, making a mental note to ask Orin about it, more out of curiosity than anything, when my gaze drifted to the passage I’d stalled on.
