The Scribe

Chapter Ten

He was avoiding her. It was the only explanation for the fact that Ava had been at the scribe house in Cappadocia for almost a week and had seen Malachi a grand total of two times. Fine. Whatever. If he was avoiding her, she refused to be sorry about it. She had other things to do.

For the first few days, she slept. For once in her life, sleep seemed to come easily. There was something about the inner voices of the Irin scribes that soothed her. Though none had the resonance that Malachi’s did, the combined chorus of their souls blended into a soothing tapestry, almost like the white noise of ocean waves. She dreamed vivid dreams where she wandered in a dark wood. Nothing about it was frightening; it was profoundly peaceful.

Her days were spent with Rhys and the oldest scribe at the house, Evren. She’d met Evren the first night, and he seemed to take Ava under his wing. He told her he was seven hundred years old, but he looked around seventy. His dark hair was sprinkled with silver and curled at the neck. His skin was olive-toned, but pale. Ava suspected he spent most of his time among the books.

“And your mother’s maiden name?” Evren asked quietly, taking notes with a pencil as Rhys typed on a computer in the library. Small windows, high in the walls, were the only bit of the outside world she saw. Like much of the oldest parts of the scribe house, the majority of the library had been dug underground into the soft volcanic rock.

“My mom was born Magdalena Russell. Lena.”

“Ethnicity?”

Ava shrugged. “Honestly, I don’t know. Her family has been in America for ages. I don’t think I’ve ever heard her talk about relatives in another part of the world. I think I’m a mix of all sorts of stuff.”

Evren nodded patiently, taking more notes she couldn’t read. They were in the same rough script that marked his arms and the back of his hands. She could see similar markings peeking out from the collar of the loose shirt he wore. All the scribes were tattooed with what Rhys told her were spells to enhance different senses and control magic.

“You said she was from South Dakota originally. And your mother’s mother?”

“Just her mom?”

Evren folded his hand in a way that reminded Ava of one of her favorite undergraduate professors. “When researching the Irina, it is the female line that is important. Irina power stems from their mother’s magic. Even when tracing Irin bloodlines, we always start with the Irina. Irin scribes are the preservers of magic and knowledge, but Irina hold the creative force in our race.”

“Oh. Okay, my mom’s mom was Alice Cook. Her maiden name was Rutner. She was from Missouri. I think. I don’t know much about her. My mom and she weren’t close.”

“Your mother’s grandmother?”

“I think her first name was Sarah, but I’m not sure. We’re not big on family history. Do you need to know about my dad?”

“Probably not.” Evren smiled. “Though I’m sure that seems backward to one used to human tradition, where male bloodlines are more thoroughly documented.”

“I hadn’t really thought about it, to be honest.” At least they didn’t need to know about her dad. Jasper’s family was a total mystery.

Evren cocked his head. “Do women still take a husband’s surname in America?”

“Not always, but it’s pretty common. My mom did with Carl. That’s why I’m legally a Matheson. He adopted me after they got married.”

“Hmm.”

Ava squirmed, feeling like she was under a microscope. “How about you guys? What’s your last name?”

Rhys turned from the computer. “We don’t have surnames in our culture.”

“Isn’t that confusing? I mean, you guys live a long time.”

Both men chuckled.

“Well, I suppose it helps that we don’t have many children,” Evren said. “They’re quite rare. If we were more prolific, I suppose it could be.”

Rhys said, “We have our own ways of keeping track of family history.” He reached down and pulled off the T-shirt he wore, then he rolled his office chair toward Ava and showed her his back, which was marked with more strange writing along with the first decorative tattoo work Ava had seen. Without thinking, she reached out and traced the intricate knot work that showed a distinct Celtic influence.

“This is beautiful.” She felt his warm skin shiver underneath her fingertips, but she didn’t take her hand away. Like any casual touch from one of the Irin, the contact was calming. “What is this? Is it magic, too?”

“Yes and no.” Rhys cleared his throat. “The writing on my back is the only work I haven’t done myself. My father did it. The names down the center are my family’s. Mother first—”

“Always the mother first,” Evren said. “Because we are protected by Irina magic when we are born.”

Rhys continued. “Then my father’s name. Then my maternal grandparents and then paternal.”

“So it’s like your whole family tree, written on your body. And the design?”

“From my mother.” His voice was quiet. “It was her gift to me.”

Evren said, “An Irin mother always designs something of beauty to add to her son’s talesm when he leaves for his training at thirteen, then his father does the tattoo. It goes on his back, over the heart. To be matched on the front of his chest when he is mated as an adult.” Then Evren’s face fell a little. “Though my son has neither, as he was only a child when his mother died.”

The look of sorrow on Evren’s face was enough to make Ava’s heart weep. His silent voice groaned at the mention of his wife as Ava waited for the words.

Vashamacanem, his soul whispered.

At least, that’s what it sounded like. Ava had come to think of it as the universal mantra of the grieving. She didn’t know what the phrase meant, only that she’d heard the same words from countless people around the globe. Funerals. Hospitals. It was one of the few phrases that was completely universal.

She pulled her hand away from Rhys’s back and squeezed Evren’s hand. “Where is your son? Does he live here, too?”

Evren squeezed her hand back and took a deep breath, forcing a smile. “He lives in Spain now. In a scribe house near Barcelona.”

A young man walked into the library, staring at Ava with the tentative awe she’d come to expect from most of the men. He bent down and whispered to Evren, who nodded and turned to her.

“We will have to take more notes later, Ava. I do apologize, but there is something I must tend to this afternoon.”

“Of course,” she said. “Don’t let me keep you.”

“Is there anything you need before I go? There is an English section in the library. Not large, but there are some books about local history that might interest you.”

Rhys said, “I’ll show her around, Evren.”

“Are you sure? I can find where Malachi—”

“I’m sure Rhys can keep me entertained.” Ava said, winking at the young scribe, then turning to Rhys who offered her a mischievous smile. Evren smiled knowingly as he and the young man turned to go.

When they were alone, Rhys said, “You know, scribe houses are almost as bad as sororities when it comes to gossip.”

“I’m counting on it.”

“Bad, tempting woman, you are.” He shook his head before he pulled on his shirt. “You’re going to get me stabbed. Malachi is not a man accustomed to sharing.”

“Well, then I guess he should be the one to keep me company. And you know about sororities, huh?”

“Sadly not through personal experience.” Rhys grinned. “But modern movies can be quite the education.”

“That was never my scene. Sorry. The popular girls don’t hang out with the crazy ones very often. Unless it’s to make fun of them.”

“Ava, Ava,” he muttered, throwing a casual arm around the back of her chair as they sat next to each other at the library table. “Don’t you know you’re not crazy? You’re special.” She felt him toying with an errant curl. “You’re magic, love. Someday you’ll understand how much.”

A beam of light came through a high window, flooding the room with sudden light and illuminating a mural on the other side of the library. One old man sat in the far corner, staring at the beautiful scene depicting a village bustling with life. In the six days she’d spent in the library, Ava had seen the old man do nothing else. He looked to be in his eighties or nineties, though like all the Irin, she knew he must be far older. Suddenly, she knew exactly what she wanted to do.

“Rhys?”

“Hmm?” He was staring at the mural, too.

“Will you tell me about the Rending?”

“There’s a human saying: You don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone. We Irin should have that tattooed on our foreheads.”

Rhys led her past the mural, toward a long hall lit with candles. On the dark wall, more images flickered from a mosaic of intricate design, made with shards of glass and pieces of pottery. Bits of stone, both precious and common, interspersed with paint and cloth and plaster. It was a confusing mixture, but as Ava stepped back, the images became clearer. She said nothing, waiting for Rhys to speak.

“It happened in the early 1800s. Things had been turbulent in human years. Wars. Revolutions. Political and social uprising. But for the Irin…” He shrugged and took a step down the hallway. “It had been an oddly peaceful few decades. Time has always moved more slowly for us. We exist among humans, but separate. We had become isolated in our own communities, for the most part. The council decided it was necessary after the madness of the medieval period in Europe.”

“Why?”

Rhys pointed to a section of the mosaic where a long-haired woman was laying hands on someone in a bed. “The Irina have always been healers. Before humans developed modern medicine, the Irina used their magic and their knowledge to help humanity. Herb lore. Wives’ tales. Those little bits of knowledge that have passed down in human custom. Much of it came from the Irina. Sadly, many humans thought their magic was evil. Some Irina were captured and executed as witches. Their families were devastated, and their mates often took revenge, killing the ignorant who had murdered their wives. Inevitably, innocents were killed, too. The council finally made the decision to isolate families so the Irina and the children could be better protected.”

“The council?”

The two had stopped near a depiction of an ominous Gothic building.

“The Irin council is in Vienna.” Rhys smiled and nodded at the Gothic building. “Everyone has their politicians, don’t they? They are ours. Once it was made up of seven scribes and seven singers—”

“Singers?”

“Irina.” He smiled again. “Their magic is in their voice. The oldest and wisest Irina would sing—” His voice broke. “The most beautiful, powerful music you can imagine. Ethereal. Their voices are magic. The council was always even, but once they had decided that families needed to stay in the retreats… there was conflict. Many of the Irina felt as if they were being punished for their sisters’ deaths. Many didn’t want to be isolated in the retreats. Eventually, though, it settled down. The Irin and Irina who were mated—particularly those with children—would live in retreats. Irin without mates, or with mates who were in study and meditation, worked among the humans or manned the scribe houses that preserved ancient knowledge.” He gestured around them. “Like this one. The Irin worked here. The retreats—small villages, really—were for families. There were also other Irina compounds where they went to train and study, but Irin weren’t allowed there, so I know little of those. I was raised in a retreat in Cornwall.”

“And Malachi?”

“He was born near here, actually.” Rhys smiled. “Though I believe his parents moved when he was still a child and were living in Germany when the Rending happened.”

“The Rending.”

“Yes… the Rending.” Rhys nudged her farther down the hall as his inner voice took on a low, desperate tone. “One summer, there was a sudden rash of Grigori attacks in the cities. We learned later that it all happened within just a few weeks, but at the time, we had no idea. I was in London, about one hundred years old. I’d finished my training and was doing guardian work, as we all do. The Grigori, who had been relatively quiet for years, started attacking many human women. It was unexpected, and we couldn’t keep up. We’d let our guard down.” He let out a shaky breath. “My watcher followed protocol. When we needed help, we called for the mated men to come help us. They left the retreats to aid us in the city, because that was where the threat lay… we thought.”

They took another step down the hall, and Ava saw the edge of chaos.

She whispered, “But they left the Irina in the retreats alone.”

“Irina…” Rhys’s fingers came up to trace the image of a woman, arms stretched out as dark figures ran toward her. “…have frightening magic of their own. Powerful. Deadly. But they were outnumbered, and they had to protect the children.” Ava felt the tears wet her cheeks as she watched him trail his hands over the scenes of carnage the artist had rendered in frightening detail.

Bodies broken on the ground.

Homes burning.

Children’s toys, bloody and abandoned.

Rhys stopped in front of the depiction of another woman, this one with a fearful gash on her throat. Rhys’s finger traced down the woman’s face, lingering near her neck as if to cover the wound. “Grigori will go for the throat first. If an Irina cannot speak, most of her magic is rendered mute as well. Their voices are…” Ava saw him blink away tears. “The Grigori soldiers overran retreats all over the world. The Irina protected as many children as they could, but most didn’t survive. The girls, especially, were hunted.”

A rushing began to fill her mind. Ava could almost hear it. Hear the voices of the women, silenced forever. Their children, cries cut short by murder. A terrible pain began to throb in her chest.

“How many?” she whispered.

Rhys shook his head. “No one knows for certain. Thousands. It was a coordinated effort on the part of the Grigori to render us weak. They know we are most powerful when we are mated. And they have always feared the voices of the Irina. They fear magic they don’t understand. So, they killed them. As many as they could, along with most of the children and the men who had stayed behind.”

Ava felt the trembling start in her legs.

“The council estimates eighty percent of our women and children were wiped out within a matter of weeks in the summer of 1810. Our race was cut in half. That’s why we call it the Rending.”

The shaking grew. The horror was too much. The loss—barely comprehensible.

They halted at the end of the hall where a tapestry hung, woven with the same circle of Irin and Irina depicted in the book Malachi had shown her. But instead of a couple embracing, the tapestry was torn down the middle, forming a kind of curtain that Rhys pulled back.

Behind it, there were more words, written in the ancient script.

“These are names of the Irina and children from the retreat nearby,” Rhys whispered. He pointed to one near the top. “This was Evren’s wife.”

Ava stifled a cry. Hundreds of names followed that first one. Column after column of names. Some worn smooth by fingers rubbing over them. Others sharp and jagged, as if the stone still held the anger of two hundred years.

She felt rage bubble up along with a primal grief she could barely comprehend. Words caught in her throat, and her hands clenched, her fingernails digging into her palms till she could feel the skin break and the blood run. She felt powerless. Strangled by her own pain. By Rhys’s pain. By the pain lurking beneath every face she’d seen. She shook with it, knowing she was crying, but the tears weren’t enough.

“Ava?” Rhys’s voice seemed to come from a distance. “Ava, are you all right?”

Don’t speak. Can’t speak. Never speak again.

Shaking her head, Ava pulled her hair and closed her eyes. She dug her fingers into her temple, relieved by the bite of pain. Her tear-filled eyes rose to the wall of names, but there was only silence.

And Ava knew.

These were her people. And they were gone.

“No,” she whispered.

The shivering took over, starting in her chest and spreading to her limbs. Her mind flew in a thousand directions as she closed her eyes again and rocked.

“Ava?”

She felt Rhys’s hand on her shoulder. He tried to put an arm around her, but she shoved him back.

“No!”

“Ava, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have—”

Rhys broke off at the unexpected cry of grief that came from her throat. It was a groan. A shout. It was everything her soul didn’t have the words to express. Ava leaned against the far wall, staring at the mosaic, feeling her legs start to give out. She felt locked in a pain she couldn’t escape.

And then she felt him. Felt him running toward her. Heard his footsteps coming down the hall.

Closer.

“What did you do?” he shouted.

“She asked! Was I not supposed to tell her the truth?”

A shove. A punch. Ava reached out, her eyes still closed, grasping for something she couldn’t name yet.

Hands met hers. Arms encircled her. And the calm followed. The rage fled, and in its wake was a fierce grief for a thousand faces she would never know. A thousand voices she would never hear. Ava held on to Malachi and wept for a loss her mind could barely comprehend. He lifted her and took her away from the hall. Away from the flickering candles and the bloody stones. Ava closed her eyes and let him take her away.

“So many dead.” She closed her eyes and whispered into his skin.

“I know.”

“Women like me. They hated them. They killed them. Because they were afraid.”

They were sitting in a quiet corner of the scribe house, in a room she hadn’t seen before. Low lights flickered from sconces on the wall, and the room was lined with comfortable chairs and sofas. There was another mural on the wall, but this one was a picture of the sky, vividly blue against the light stone walls. Malachi was holding her on his lap, stroking her hair as she burrowed her face into his neck.

“Was your mother killed, too?”

He didn’t answer for a moment. “Yes. And my father. He had remained behind at the retreat when the men in our village went to Hamburg to help the guardians. He was killed, too. Almost our entire village was wiped out. I was stationed in another city.”

She fell silent again, focusing on the quiet comfort of his skin against hers. How could a people survive such a loss?

“You lost your wives. Your mothers. Your children.”

“Most of us haven’t even seen an Irina since the Rending.” His voice held suppressed rage. “We are half a people.”

“That’s why you called me a miracle,” she said.

She felt his arms tighten. “Nothing about your family says you can be Irina, but you are. We lost so many, but… I am willing to hold out hope that somehow, if you exist, then others might, too. That our race will survive. We are dying, Ava. We may live forever, but we are dying from the inside. Once there were so many of us. Families. Generations. Now there are almost no children. The Irina who still live hide away, angry with the rest of us for leaving them vulnerable. Enraged at the loss of their sisters and children. And who can blame them?”

“And the Grigori know who I am.”

His arms squeezed a little tighter. “They will not get you. I will not allow it. None of us will.”

She pressed her face into the skin of his neck and breathed deeply, allowing herself the comfort. Allowing herself to dream for a moment that there could be a future for her that didn’t mean loneliness and isolation.

“Ava.” She heard the reservation in Malachi’s voice and felt him begin to draw away. She held his shoulders tightly.

“Just give me a few more minutes.”

His shoulders tensed, then relaxed, and she felt his arms go around her even more tightly, pressing her into his chest as he took a deep breath. His voice was only a soft murmur in her mind, and no other intruded. Malachi began stroking her hair again, tentatively brushing his fingers along her neck and behind her ear.

He finally said, “A few more minutes.”

And just like the moment in the hall, when grief and recognition slammed together, Ava knew. However it had happened, whatever strange twist of fate had caught her… these were her people.

And however he tried to deny it, Malachi was hers, too.