Elisabeth was grinning from ear to ear. “Thank you!” she shouted after him.

Nathaniel waved dismissively from the top of the landing. But before he vanished around the corner, she saw him smiling, too.

TWENTY-FOUR

WHEN ELISABETH BROUGHT the scrying mirror to Nathaniel’s study the next evening, he didn’t seem surprised—even though, according to him, it had been lost for the better part of a century.

“It belonged to my Aunt Clothilde,” he explained. “She died before I was born, but I always heard stories about how she used it to spy on her in-laws.”

Elisabeth hesitated, remembering what Mistress Wick had told her the other day. “Wasn’t that after the Reforms?”

“Yes, but you wouldn’t believe the number of forbidden artifacts squirreled away in old homes like this one.” He closed his eyes and ran his fingers over the mirror’s edges, concentrating. “The Lovelaces found ambulatory torture devices in their cellar, including an iron maiden that chased them back upstairs, snapping open and shut like a mollusk. Personally, I won’t even go into my basement. There are doors down there that haven’t been opened since Baltasar built the place, and Silas tells me he had a bizarre obsession with puppets. . . . Ah.” His eyes snapped open. “There we are.”

She leaned over on the couch for a closer look. The glaze of frost had receded from the mirror’s surface. According to Nathaniel, there was nothing wrong with it; its magic had only needed to be replenished after lying dormant for so many years. Now, she and Katrien should be able to talk for as long as they wanted.

A delighted laugh escaped her. She looked up to find Nathaniel watching her, his eyes intent, as though he had been studying her face like a painting. A shock ran through her body when their gazes locked. Everything shifted into sharp focus: the study’s instruments glittering over his shoulder, the softness of his lips in the candlelight, the crystalline structure of his irises, infinitely complex up close.

For a heartbeat, it seemed as though something might happen. Then a shadow fell across his eyes. He cleared his throat and passed her the mirror. “Are you ready?” he asked.

Elisabeth bit back a rush of embarrassment, struggling not to let anything show on her face. Hopefully, he wouldn’t notice that her cheeks had turned pink, or if he did, he would mistake the flush for excitement about Katrien.

“Yes, but I want to try something else first.” She brought the mirror close to her nose, ignoring the jitters in her stomach. “Show me Ashcroft,” she commanded.

Nathaniel tensed as the mirror’s surface swirled. When it cleared, however, it didn’t show an image. A pool of shimmering golden light filled the glass instead. Elisabeth frowned. She had never seen the mirror do anything like that before.

“I don’t understand. Is he in a place with no mirrors nearby?”

“That’s Ashcroft’s magic.” Nathaniel’s tension had eased. “It looks as though he’s cast protective wards on himself. They’re intended to stop malicious rituals, but evidently they block scrying mirrors, too.”

She blew out a breath, realizing she’d been holding it the entire time. “He prepares for everything. That was one thing I came to understand while trapped in his manor. It seemed too good to be true—being able to spy on him—but I had to try.”

“Perhaps it’s for the best,” Nathaniel sympathized. “Imagine if we’d caught him in the privy. Or trimming his nose hairs. Or even—”

Elisabeth made a face. “Show me Katrien,” she said to the mirror, before he could add anything else.

Her fingers tightened on the frame as the glass swirled again. She had prepared Katrien and Nathaniel for this moment as best she could, considering she’d only had a minute or so to speak with Katrien that morning, but now that the time had arrived for them to actually meet, she felt disturbingly queasy. For some reason, she didn’t think she could bear it if her best friend ended up hating Nathaniel.

Katrien’s face appeared in the mirror. She sat cross-legged on the floor, wrapped to the chin in an oversized quilt. Somehow, she managed to make the effect look threatening. Perhaps it was her gaze, dissecting Nathaniel like a laboratory specimen.

“Thorn,” she intoned.

“Quillworthy,” he replied.

A long pause elapsed, during which Elisabeth wondered if she might throw up. Finally, Katrien poked a brown hand from the quilt and pushed up her spectacles. The hand retreated back out of sight as though it had never existed. “I suppose you’ll do,” she said. “Now, what else do I need to know before we get started?”

Just like that, the awkwardness vanished. Elisabeth barely resisted leaping to her feet and cheering. She angled the mirror so Katrien could see both their faces. “To start with, Ashcroft is a couple of days late attacking the Great Library of Fairwater.”

Katrien frowned. “Do you think that’s because he hasn’t made any progress on the Codex?”

“Exactly—he could be buying himself more time, because he isn’t ready to move on to whatever he has planned for Harrows. . . .”

The three of them spoke well into the night, interrupted once by a random room inspection that left them scrambling to cancel the mirror’s spell before a warden saw their disembodied faces hovering above Katrien’s armoire, and a second time by Silas, who insisted on serving them a three-course dinner on the coffee table. Katrien watched Silas with keen interest, but thankfully said nothing.

They capped off the meeting by trying to get Nathaniel into the Codex. First they tried having him go alone—in order to establish a control, Katrien explained, but Elisabeth suspected she just wanted to watch Nathaniel struggle. Next they tried going together, linking their arms in the hopes Elisabeth could somehow pull him along with her. But every time, she simply materialized in the workshop dimension on her own. Prendergast grew so upset by her repeated arrivals that he began throwing jars full of severed fingers at her, at which point they decided to call it a night.

“Elisabeth,” Katrien said, as they all got up and stretched. “Can I talk to you about something? In private.”

Alarm jolted straight to Elisabeth’s stomach. No doubt Katrien had noticed the way she had turned red every time Nathaniel took her arm. Did they truly need to talk about that? As Nathaniel and Silas left the study, she sank back onto the couch, sandwiching her hands between her knees.

“Are you all right?” Katrien asked. “You look like you have indigestion. Anyway, I’ve been thinking about your resistance to magic. Where it might have come from, and so forth.”

Elisabeth slumped into the pillows. She felt as though her organs were liquefying with relief. “Did you come up with any ideas?”

“Well,” Katrien hedged, “there must be a reason why you’re the only person who’s been able to get inside the Codex, and it has to be related.” She paused. “Do you remember that time you fell off the roof, and you didn’t break anything?”

Elisabeth nodded, thinking back. She had been fourteen at the time, and had climbed two stories to avoid being seen by Warden Finch. “I got lucky.”

“I don’t think so. That fall should have hurt you, but you only walked away with a few bruises. Stefan swears you cracked one of the flagstones. Then there was the incident with the chandelier in the refectory—it practically landed on you. And the time you got strawberry jam all over—”