I stared at it in frustrated silence. It was almost there—I couldfeelit. It was like not quite remembering a simple word, knowing it was on the tip of your tongue, but being unable to summon it forward, to speak it into the world. My needle hovered above the silk, charged and waiting. I bit my lip hard enough to draw blood. Then I gritted my teeth and got back to work, determined to keep stitching.
Please. Please come. Please find me.
Chapter Fourteen
The Split Braid
‘A technique whereby the seamstress splits her own thread while working it, doubling it back upon its own path to create an intricate plaited effect.’
—An Exhaustive Compendium of Stitches
Both Holy and Base, 4th Edition
True to her word, Mieka managed to take the night shift, and it was she who stood outside my room when I creaked open the door in the middle of the night. I had not been able to sleep, but had lain awake waiting for the great house to descend into silence.
“You’ll have to let me nap in your room tomorrow,” she said, yawning.
“Of course.” I looked up and down the corridor. “Is anyone else around?”
“Not that I’ve heard or seen. It’s as safe as it’s going to get.”
“Right, come on.”
We walked as noiselessly as we could down the long, hushed halls until we came to the library. It had a different nature, in the dark; the ranked books were gray and as evenly spaced as teeth. I ran my hand over the shelves, searching forthe hidden room I had found before. After some trial and error, we found the very faint, almost imperceptible seam that marked where the opening was, exposing an alcove beyond—large enough to step into, but small enough that I had to duck my head to enter.
“What do you see?” Mieka hissed.
More books. Perhaps more valuable than the rest in the library? They had the ornate, expertly bound and decorated covers of the Book Man’s most precious wares. I ran my fingers along the spines, and it felt like I was trailing them across the vertebrae of a sleeping animal. There was that same sense oflife: present but dormant.
“Come in,” I whispered.
Mieka ducked her head as she entered the little room, looking about her with wonder. The dust made her sneeze, and it sounded like a donkey’s bray in the silence.
“Sorry, sorry! It got up my nose.” She rubbed her nose violently. “What are all these, then?”
I reached for a book and slid it from its place, dislodging a shower of dust. It had clearly not been moved in some time, and the pages crackled as I opened it. I traced the shapes of the letters I could not read and saw that after a few pages of spellscript, there were illustrations, picked out in gold leaf. Bones, labeled. And someone had written notes in a different color of ink next to the pictures. I put that volume back and selected another. This one was almost all illustrations—bones again, skeletons moving and dancing in strange postures.
“You tell me.” I passed her one of the books. “My guess would be bone magic, from the pictures.”
“Plague, yes.” She cast her eyes down the page. “I don’t understand all of it, but it’s bone magic all right.”
I passed her another. She opened it to a random page and started reading silently to herself, lips moving.
“Some of it is in another language,” she said. “But yes. More bones.”
I looked around at the volumes that lined the walls. “All of these spellbooks must be about bone magic.”
“Some of them aren’t even spellbooks,” she said. She had picked up another slim volume and opened it to show me. “This is all just notes, look, and little drawings. And here’s another, all in the same hand.”
“So someone was doing research.”
“Or keeping a diary, of sorts.”
Mieka began to read aloud from one of the notebooks.
“‘I grow tired and discouraged in my Great Work, but I press on. The most Powerful Magic of all is at my fingertips, and if I stop now, I will not only cheat myself of the glory of its resurrection, but cheat future generations of its …” She stopped and made a face. “Took himself a bit seriously, didn’t he?”
She leafed to a new page and read again.
