Ink Blood Sister Scribe

by Emma Törzs

Genres: Contemporary Fantasy; Magical Realism; Women's Fiction

Synopsis

A GOOD MORNING AMERICA BOOK CLUB PICK!

“Astonishing and pristine, the kind of debut I love to be devastated by, already so assured and sophisticated that it’s difficult to imagine where the author can go from here. . . . It’s simply a delight from start to finish.” – AMAL EL-MOHTAR, New York Times Book Review 

“Follow where this novel leads and you will be lost in a bewitching spell, a book of magic about books of magic . . . extraordinary.” – MARLON JAMES

In this spellbinding debut novel, two estranged half-sisters tasked with guarding their family’s library of magical books must work together to unravel a deadly secret at the heart of their collection—a tale of familial loyalty and betrayal, and the pursuit of magic and power.

For generations, the Kalotay family has guarded a collection of ancient and rare books. Books that let a person walk through walls or manipulate the elements—books of magic that half-sisters Joanna and Esther have been raised to revere and protect.

All magic comes with a price, though, and for years the sisters have been separated. Esther has fled to a remote base in Antarctica to escape the fate that killed her own mother, and Joanna’s isolated herself in their family home in Vermont, devoting her life to the study of these cherished volumes. But after their father dies suddenly while reading a book Joanna has never seen before, the sisters must reunite to preserve their family legacy. In the process, they’ll uncover a world of magic far bigger and more dangerous than they ever imagined, and all the secrets their parents kept hidden; secrets that span centuries, continents, and even other libraries . . .

In the great tradition of Ninth House, The Magicians, and Practical Magic, this is a suspenseful and richly atmospheric novel that draws readers into a vast world filled with mystery and magic, romance, and intrigue—and marks the debut of an extraordinary new voice in speculative fiction.

"Ink Blood Sister Scribe is so many things at once: an adventure, a puzzle, a twisty thriller, and a tender romance. . . . I adored it.” – ALIX E. HARROW

"If, like me, you’re a fan of Holly Black and Leigh Bardugo, pick up this book at once.” — KELLY LINK 

Release date: June 27, 2023

Publisher: HarperCollins

Print pages: 416

Sample

Prologue

Abe Kalotay died in his front yard in late February, beneath a sky so pale it seemed infected. There was a wintery wet snowbite to the still air and the sprawled-open pages of the book at his side had grown slightly damp by the time his daughter Joanna came home and found his body lying in the grass by their long dirt driveway.

Abe was on his back, eyes half-opened to that gray sky, mouth slack and his tongue drying blue, one of his hands with its quick-bitten nails draped across his stomach. The other hand was resting on the book, forefinger still pressed to the page as if holding his place. A last smudge of vivid red was slowly fading into the paper and Abe himself was mushroom-white and oddly shriveled. It was an image Joanna already knew she’d have to fight against forever, to keep it from supplanting the twenty-four years’ worth of living memories that had, in the space of seconds, become more precious to her than anything else in the world. She didn’t make a sound when she saw him, only sank to her knees, and began to shake.

Later, she would think he’d probably come outside because he’d realized what the book was doing and had been struggling to reach the road before he bled out; either to flag down a passing driver to call an ambulance, or to spare Joanna from having to heave his body into the bed of her truck and take him up their driveway and past the boundaries of their wards. But at the time she didn’t question why he was outside.

She only questioned why he’d brought a book along with him.

She had not yet understood that it was the book itself that had killed him; she only understood that its presence was a rupture in one of his cardinal rules, a rule Joanna herself had not yet dreamed of breaking—though she would, eventually. But even more inconceivable than her father letting a book outside the safety of their home was the fact that it was a book Joanna did not recognize. She had spent her entire life caring for their collection and knew every book within it as intimately as one would know a family member, yet the one lying at her father’s side was completely unfamiliar in both appearance and in sound. Their other books hummed like summer bees. This book throbbed like unspent thunder and when she opened the cover the handwritten words swam in front of her eyes, rearranging themselves every time a letter nearly became clear. In progress; unreadable.

The note Abe had tucked between the pages was perfectly legible, however, despite the shakiness of the hand. He’d used his left. His right had been fixed in place as the book drank.

Joanna, he had written. I’m sorry. Don’t let your mother in. Keep this book safe and away from your blood. I love you so much. Tell Esther

It ended there, without punctuation. Joanna would never know if he’d meant to write more or if he only wanted her to pass on a final message of love to the daughter he hadn’t seen in years. But kneeling there on the cold dirt, with the book in her hands, she didn’t have the wherewithal to think about any of this yet.

She could only stare at Abe’s lifeless body, try to breathe, and prepare herself for the next steps.

 

1

Esther couldn’t get over the blue of the sunlit sky.

It was a variated blue, almost white where it met the snowy horizon but deepening as Esther’s eye followed it upward: from robin’s egg to cerulean to a calm, luminous azure. Beneath it the Antarctic ice was blindingly bright, and the scattered outbuildings Esther could see from her narrow dorm window drew stripes of indigo shadow on the white ruts of the road. Everything gleamed. It was eight o’clock in the evening and not discernibly darker than it had been at eight o’clock that morning.

“Excuse me,” Pearl said, and hip-checked Esther to one side so she could fit a piece of custom-cut cardboard in the window frame. Esther fell backward onto her unmade bed and propped herself on her elbows, watching Pearl lean over the tiny, cluttered desk to reach the glass.

“If you’d told me two weeks ago I’d block the sun as soon as it came up, I would have laughed you off the station,” Esther said.

Pearl ripped the tape with her teeth. “Well, two weeks ago you were sleeping through the night. Never say the dark did nothing for you.” She applied the last strip and added, “Or me.”

“Thank you, darkness, and thank you, Pearl,” Esther said. Though she had indeed been sleeping badly since the sun had reappeared after six months of winter, it was still somewhat dispiriting to watch the light and the distant mountains vanish, plunging her back into the realities of her cell-like room: the bed with its rumpled purple sheets lit by the baleful overhead bulb, the scuffed tile floors, and the plywood desk piled high with scattered papers, most of them notes on the Mexican novel Esther was translating for fun. The novel itself was on top of her dresser, safely out of range of the collection of half-full water glasses leaving rings on the notebook paper.

Pearl sat opposite Esther at the foot of the bed and said, “So. Are you ready to face the unwashed masses?”

In response, Esther threw an arm over her eyes and groaned.

Esther and Pearl had spent the past winter as two of just thirty others holding down the small South Pole station, but November had ushered in the summer season and over the past few days, small roaring cargo planes had disgorged nearly a hundred new people into the station’s hallways. Now scientists and astronomers filled the dorms, the galley, the gym, the upper workrooms; strangers who ate all the late-night cookies and booted up long-sleeping computers and asked constant, anxious questions about what time of day the internet satellite went up.

Esther had imagined she’d be happy to see all these new faces. She had always been a natural extrovert, not the typical candidate to be locked away on the ice in a research station that much resembled her tiny rural high school. She’d lived in Minneapolis for the year before she’d come here to the Antarctic, and her friends there had reacted with honest horror when she’d told them she’d accepted a job at the Pole station as an electrician for the winter season. Everybody knew someone who knew someone who’d tried it, loathed it, and flown home early to escape the crushing isolation. But Esther hadn’t been worried.

She’d figured Antarctica couldn’t be that much worse than the isolated, extreme conditions in which she had grown up. It’d be good money, it’d be an adventure—and most importantly, it would be completely inaccessible to most every other person on the planet.

Sometime over the long winter, however, Esther’s extroversion had started to atrophy and with it the mask of good cheer she usually

donned each morning along with her uniform. Now she gazed up at the ceiling, industrial white like the industrial white walls and industrial white hallways and her industrial white coworkers.

“Have I actually been an introvert this whole time?” she said. “All these years, have I been fooling myself? The real extroverts are out there like hell yeah, fresh meat, nonstop party, bangtown USA.”

“Bangtown Antarctic Treaty International Territory,” Pearl corrected. Pearl was Australian with dual citizenship.

“Right,” said Esther. “That.”

Pearl got to her knees and crawled down the length of the bed toward Esther. “I imagine,” she said, “that six months of unwanted celibacy plus a planeful of new faces could make an extrovert of anyone.”

“Mmm,” Esther said. “So you’re saying I’ve become an introvert through the sheer power of . . .”

“My amazing body, yes, obviously,” said Pearl, whose lips were now trailing along the sensitive shell of Esther’s ear.

Esther reached up and helped herself to a handful of Pearl’s blond hair, which somehow always looked sunkissed despite the utter lack of sun. Australians. So indefatigably beachy and up-for-it. She wove her fingers through those tangled strands and tugged Pearl down to kiss her, feeling her smile against her mouth as Esther pulled her closer.

For the past decade, since she was eighteen, Esther had moved every November—moved cities, states, countries. She made friends and lovers breezily, picking them up like other people picked up takeout and going through them as quickly. Everybody liked her, and like many well-liked people, she worried that if people really got to know her, if they managed to penetrate that glancing shield of likability, they wouldn’t actually like her one bit. This was a benefit of never staying in one place.

The other, vastly more important benefit: not being found.

Esther slipped a hand beneath the hem of Pearl’s sweater, fingers finding the smooth dip of her waist as Pearl nudged one of her long legs between Esther’s thighs. But even as she moved her hips in friction-seeking instinct, her father’s long-ago words began to echo unbidden in her head—a cold glass of water thrown in the face of her subconscious.

“November 2 by eleven o’clock p.m., Eastern Standard Time,” Abe had said on the last day she’d seen him, ten years ago at their home in Vermont. “Wherever you are, you must leave on November 2 and keep moving for twenty-four hours, or the people who killed your mother will come for you, too.”

The summer season had officially begun a couple days ago: November 5. Three days after Esther, according to her father’s urgent edict, should have been long gone.

But she wasn’t. She was still here.

Abe had been dead two years now, and for the first time since she’d started running

a decade before, Esther had a reason to stay. A reason that was warm and solid and currently kissing her neck.

Technically, Esther had first met Pearl at the Christchurch airport, as part of a big group of workers waiting for their flight into the Antarctic. They’d both been hidden in the many layers required to board the plane—wool hat, huge orange parka, gloves, clompy insulated boots, dark-lensed goggles pushed up on their heads—and Esther had gotten only the briefest impression of sparkly eyes and a full-throated laugh before the group was ushered onto the plane and she and Pearl were seated on opposite ends of the cargo hold.

Because of their different duties and different schedules, their paths hadn’t really crossed again until the end of the first month, when Esther had hung a sign in the gym looking for sparring buddies. Boxing, Muy Thai, BJJ, MMA, Krav Maga, let’s fight! :) :) :) She’d added the smiley faces to counteract the aggression of “fight,” but had immediately regretted it when another electrician—an obnoxiously tall white guy from Washington who insisted everyone call him “J-Dog”—saw it and began giving her endless shit.

“The Smiley Face Killer!” he’d crow when she walked into their shift meeting. If they crossed paths in the galley at lunch, he’d pretend to cower. “You gonna hit me over the head with that big ol’ smile?” But the final straw came when he started loudly telling everyone about his black belt in karate, and how he’d love to find a sparring partner who was “really serious about the sport.”

Honestly, he gave Esther no choice. After a week of this, he approached her one day in the galley and planted himself in her path so she couldn’t get to the pizza, grinning at her so widely she could see his molars.

“What are you doing,” she said.

“Fighting you!” he said.

“No,” she said, and put down her tray. “This is fighting me.”

A few minutes later she had J-Dog on the floor in a headlock, one of his arms trapped in her hold, the other swatting at her face, his long legs kicking ineffectually at the tiled floor as onlookers hooted and cheered. “Not gonna let you go until you smile,” she said, and he whimpered, pulling his lips up in a forced approximation of his earlier grin. As soon as she released him, he bounced to his feet, brushing himself off and saying, “Not cool, dude, not cool!”

When Esther turned back toward her abandoned lunch tray, suppressing her own very real smile, she found herself face to face—give or take a few inches—with Pearl. Shucked from her plane layers, Pearl was tall and tough, with a pile of sun-streaked hair wadded into a precarious knot that seemed in danger of sliding off her head. Her brown eyes were as sparkling as Esther remembered. More so, because now they

were sparkling right at Esther.

“That was the most magical thing I have ever seen,” Pearl said, and rested a slender, long-fingered hand on Esther’s arm. “You wouldn’t consider giving lessons, would you?”

Pearl was terrible at self-defense. She had no killer instinct and always second-guessed herself, pulling her punches and dropping her kicks and making herself laugh so hard she went weak in Esther’s grip. Within three lessons, the “training sessions” had turned into make-out sessions, and they’d moved from the gym to the bedroom. The first time they’d slept together, Pearl had asked, hitching her hips as Esther began to slide her jeans down, “Have you ever been with a woman before?”

Esther looked up from between Pearl’s legs, affronted. “Yes, plenty! Why?”

“Calm down, Don Juan,” Pearl said, laughing. “I’m not questioning your technique. You just seem a little nervous.”

This was when Esther had realized she might be in trouble. Because not only was it true, she was nervous, butterfly-stomached in a way she hadn’t felt for years . . . but Pearl had noticed. Had read it somehow on Esther’s well-trained face or in her well-trained body. Esther wasn’t used to people seeing what she didn’t want them to see, and the way Pearl looked at her, saw her, was unsettling. In response, she’d given Pearl her most confident, reassuring smile, then set her teeth very gently to the inside of Pearl’s bare thigh, which had been enough of a distraction that the conversation ended there. But even then, at the very start, she had suspected how difficult Pearl might be to leave.

Now, a whole season later, thinking about this—about leaving, about staying, about the lasting echo of her father’s warning—had the unfortunate effect of breaking her current mood. She rolled Pearl over onto her side and carefully ended the kiss, lying back against the pillows, and Pearl settled against Esther’s shoulder.

“I’m going to get so drunk tonight,” said Pearl.

“Before or after we play?”

“Before, after, during.”

“Me too,” Esther decided.

Esther and Pearl were in a Pat Benatar cover band that was scheduled to play at the party that evening. The whole long winter they’d been practicing and putting on shows exclusively for the same wearily supportive thirty-five people, and by this point it was like playing the recorder in front of a parent whose pride couldn’t outweigh how tired they were of hearing “Hot Cross Buns.” Performing for new ears and eyes felt as nerve-racking as climbing the stage of Madison Square Garden.

“We should drink water in preparation,” Pearl said, “so we don’t end up puking like beakers.”

She fetched them two glasses and Esther sat up on her elbows so she didn’t spill it all over herself as she gulped it. This was the driest

place she’d ever been, every last bit of moisture in the air frozen into ice. It was easy to get dehydrated.

“Do you think the scientists drink so much because they’re making up for all the years they spent studying?” Esther said.

“No,” said Pearl without hesitation. She herself worked with the carpenters. “Nerds are always absolute party freaks. I used to go to these kink nights in Sydney and it was all surgeons, engineers, orthodontists. Did you know that people who’re into BDSM have notably higher IQs than their vanilla counterparts?”

“I don’t think that’s a testable hypothesis.”

Pearl grinned. She had unusually sharp canine teeth in an otherwise soft mouth, an incongruity that did funny things to Esther’s blood flow. “Can you imagine the variables?”

“I’d like to,” Esther said, “but not right now. We need to get a move on.”

Pearl glanced at her watch and jumped. “Shit! You’re right.”

They’d been holed up in this hole of a bedroom since dinner a few hours ago, and Esther stood to stretch before jamming her socked feet into her boots.

“God, I’m so glad you agreed to stay on,” Pearl said. “I can’t imagine facing this without you.”

Esther wanted to answer but found she couldn’t quite look at the woman in front of her, this person she liked more than she’d liked anyone else in a very long time. She felt a tight longing spread through her chest; not desire, but something even more familiar, something that was always with her. It was that she missed Pearl despite her presence. An anticipation of missing, like her emotions hadn’t yet caught up to the idea that this time was different, this time she was staying.

Her father’s paranoia had begun to hiss again in her ear, telling her to go, telling her she was making an abominable, selfish mistake; that she was putting Pearl in danger, and Pearl was still looking at her, face open and affectionate but starting to shutter a little at Esther’s lack of response.

“I’m glad, too,” Esther said. She had practice around Pearl now and could trust her own face not to betray any of her sudden, melancholy mood, and she watched Pearl relax beneath her smile. “Come get me when you’re dressed,” she added. “We can fortify with a shot.”

Pearl raised her hand, those long fingers wrapped around the stem of an imaginary glass. “Here’s to the crowd. May they love us.”

 

The crowd loved them. All four members of the band took their practice sessions very seriously and had even managed to come up with passable eighties hair band costumes: black jeans, leather jackets. Esther and Pearl had both teased their hair to great heights, though it would’ve been more convincing with hairspray

, which no one on base had. They looked good and they sounded good, and they were aided by the fact that by the time they plugged in their amps and started playing, everyone was well on their way to wasted and willing to cheer.

Esther was the backup singer and bassist, and her throat was raw, fingers sore by the time they finished “Hell Is for Children” and ended their set. The party was in the galley, which by day resembled a high school cafeteria, complete with the long gray plastic tables that had been pushed up against the walls to free up floor space, and even without the overhead fluorescents and a set of flashing red and purple party lights turned on, there was a distinct middle school vibe that made Esther feel young and silly in a pleasantly immature kind of way. The band had played at the front of the room beneath a web of white fairy lights, and once their set was over, pop music started piping through the new speakers Esther herself had rigged in the corners of the room some months ago.

The large, tiled floor was packed with people milling around, most of them unfamiliar to both Esther and to one another, and more sat in the row of chairs that blocked off the swinging gates leading behind the buffet-style hot bar to the darkened, stainless-steel kitchen. Esther noticed that the new summer crew looked amazingly sunned and healthy compared to their Antarctically pale colleagues. The new smells, too, were overwhelming in their variation. When you lived with the same people, eating the same foods, breathing the same recycled air, you started to smell the same, too—even to a nose as keen as Esther’s. These people were, quite literally, a breath of fresh air.

And a breath of something else.

Esther was midconversation with a new carpenter from Colorado named Trev, a man Pearl had described as “eager to please,” when suddenly she raised her head like a hunting dog, nostrils flaring.

“Are you wearing cologne?” she asked. She’d caught something under the booze-and-plastic smell of the party, something that made her think, jarringly, of home.

“No,” Trev said, smiling in amusement as she leaned over shamelessly and sniffed his neck.

“Hmm,” she said.

“Maybe it’s my deodorant,” he said. “Cedar. Manly.”

“It does smell nice,” she said. “But no, I thought—well, never mind.” They were closer now than they had been, and Trev’s friendly eyes had become openly flirtatious, clearly taking her neck-sniffing as a declaration of interest. Esther took a step back. Even if she weren’t taken, he looked like the kind of man who probably owned a lot of recreational outdoor equipment and wanted to teach her how to use it. However, she admired the controlled way he moved his body; it reminded her

of the trainers she’d met at the martial arts gyms she’d been frequenting for years.

She opened her mouth to say something flirty, because she didn’t want to rust, after all, but then her sensitive nose caught that other scent, the one that had distracted her a moment ago. God, what was it? It put her right back in her childhood kitchen; she could see the bulbous green inefficient fridge, the dents and dings of the maple cabinets, the feel of warped linoleum beneath her feet. Vegetable but not a vegetable, almost spicy, and it smelled fresh, which wasn’t common around these parts. Rosemary? Chrysanthemum? Cabbage?

Yarrow.

The answer came to her, words tumbling back to her throat from where they had been perched on the tip of her tongue. Yarrow, achillea, milfoil, plumajillo.

“Excuse me,” Esther said, eschewing social decorum, and turned away from the confused carpenter. She pushed past a cluster of people comparing tattoos by the cereal nook and ducked through the hanging blue streamers someone had taped, seemingly at random, to the ceiling, taking short breaths through her nose. She was tracking the unmistakable scent of the herb, the smell of her childhood, but she knew it was pointless even as she strained for it. It was already a memory again, supplanted by the aroma of pizza and beer and bodies.

She stood in the middle of the room, surrounded by music and chattering strangers, stunned by how strongly the fragrance had hit her heart. Was someone wearing it as a perfume? If so she wanted to put her arms around them and bury her face in their skin. Usually, Esther kept loss at arm’s length; she didn’t think about all the people she’d left behind over the years, she didn’t think about any of the places she’d called home, and aside from the postcards she sent her sister and stepmother once a month, she didn’t think about her family. It was a constant, tiring action, this not-thinking, like keeping a muscle flexed at all times. But the scent of yarrow had unflexed that stern muscle and with its relaxation came a cousin to the same sadness that had poured over her in Pearl’s doorway earlier.

Pearl herself was across the room, face flushed, her teased hair tangled like she’d just stepped off the back of someone’s motorcycle or out of someone’s bed. She was wearing a dark purple lipstick that made her eyes look berry-bright and talking to a woman who was nearly as tall as she was. Esther charged toward them, intent on pulling herself out of this mood as quickly as she’d fallen into it.

“Tequila,” she said to Pearl.

“This is Esther,” Pearl said to the woman she’d been talking to. “Electrician. Esther, this is Abby in maintenance, she lived in Australia last year!”

Abby and Pearl were giggling at each other, cheerfully drunk. Pearl poured all three of them a shot, then poured Esther an extra after she’d gasped down the first. Already she was feeling better, shaking off the malaise that had been clawing at her throat. She was a person made for the present, not the past

. She couldn’t afford to forget that.

The party had done its job in starting to wipe away the over-winters’ protective isolationism, and soon enough there was dancing, more drinking, a weird game that involved shouting the names of birds, even more drinking. A beaker, predictably, puked. Pearl and Abby spent some time screaming happily in one another’s faces about someone they somehow knew in common from Sydney, someone who had a really bad dog, and then Pearl dragged Esther onto the makeshift dance floor and wrapped her long, leggy body around Esther’s shorter one. The music was deep and pulsing and soon they were grinding like they were in a real club and not in a little heated box on a vast stretch of ice, many thousands of miles away from anything that might be called civilization.

Esther pushed Pearl’s hair off her sweaty face and tried not to think about her family or her father’s warnings or about the days that had ticked by since November 2. She focused instead on the present, on the thump of the bass and the feel of Pearl’s body against hers. She thought, I wish I could do this forever.

But there was no “forever” where bodies were concerned, and eventually she had to pee.

In contrast to the noisy clamor of the party, the bathroom down the hall was almost eerily silent when Esther banged through the door and fumbled with her jeans. The sound of urine echoed loudly in the stainless-steel bowl and she could hear her own drunken breath, heavy from dancing, raspy from talking. The flush was a roar. At the sink, she paused in front of the mirror. With one finger she smoothed back a dark eyebrow, batted her eyelashes at herself, wound a few locks of hair around her finger to give her loose curls more definition. Then she stopped. Squinted.

There was a series of small marks along the mirror’s perimeter, brownish red smears that sat atop the glass. They were symmetrical but not identical, one at each corner, a swipe as if with a paintbrush or thumb. She leaned close, examining, and wet a piece of paper towel to rub them off. The towel did nothing, not even when she added soap, her heart climbing into her throat. She tried to scratch the marks off. They didn’t budge.

She stepped back so quickly she nearly fell.

A person didn’t grow up like Esther had without recognizing the sight of dried blood, much less a pattern of it that could not be removed, and no one could grow up like she had without recognizing what that bloody pattern might imply. The smell of yarrow returned to her, though whether it was in her mind or here in the bathroom she wasn’t certain.

Blood. Herbs.

Somebody here had a book.

Somebody here was doing magic.

“No,” Esther said aloud. She was drunk, she was paranoid, she’d been locked in a cement box for six months and now she was seeing

things.

She was also stepping away from the mirror, eyes still locked on her own terrified face, scared to turn her back on the glass. When she bumped up against the bathroom door, she whirled around and slammed through it, then ran down the narrow hallway toward the gym. The cardio room was so bright it seemed to buzz, the equipment standing in mechanical rows on the padded gray floor and the green walls making everything appear sickly pale. There was a couple making out on one of the weight benches, and they squawked in alarm as Esther crashed past them and into the gym’s white, single-stalled bathroom.

The same reddish-brown marks were on the mirror, the same pattern. They were on the mirror in the bathroom by the rec room, too, and the one by the laboratory, and the one by the kitchen. Esther stumbled to her bedroom, heart in her throat, but thank god her own mirror was untouched. Probably just the public mirrors had been marked—a small comfort. She couldn’t smash every mirror in the station without calling attention to herself or getting in trouble.

Esther locked the door behind her, standing in front of her mirror with her hands on the top of her low dresser, leaning her weight on the wood so she could think. Clearly this was some kind of mirror magic, but she was too freaked-out and drunk to recall what that might entail. One of her family’s books could turn a mirror into a kind of mood ring, the glass reflecting a person’s true emotions for an hour or so, and then there was that mirror in Snow White, the one that told the evil queen about the fairest in the land . . . but was that kind of magic just fairy-tale shit, or was it real life?

She needed sobriety, clarity. She hung her head and steadied her breath. On the dresser, bracketed between her hands, sat the novel she was translating from Spanish to English, and she stared at its familiar green cover, at the decorative border and stylized sketch of a dark doorway beneath the title. La Ruta Nos Aportó Otro Paso Natural by Alejandra Gil, 1937. As far as Esther had been able to find, this novel was Gil’s first and only publication—and it was also the only thing Esther owned that had belonged to her mother, Isabel.

Inside the cover was a tightly controlled cursive note; a translation of the title, in Esther’s mother’s perfect hand. “Remember,” her mother had written to herself in English: “The path provides the natural next step.”

Esther’s stepmother, Cecily, had given her this novel when she was eighteen, the day before she’d left home forever, and at the time Esther had needed the translation. Spanish should have been her mother tongue, but Isabel had died when Esther was too young for language, and so it was only her mother’s tongue. But it was the Spanish title she’d gotten tattooed across her collarbones several months later: “la ruta nos aportó” on the right, “otro paso natural” on the left. A palindrome and thus readable in the mirror.

The party felt like it had been hours ago, though the sweat from dancing was

still drying on Esther’s skin. She had stripped down to only a black tank top; now she was shivering. In the glass, she could see the words of her tattoo around the straps of her shirt. When she’d first gotten the ink, she had just fled her home and family and been feeling adrift and frightened in a world that suddenly lacked any kind of structure, so the mere suggestion of a path, much less a natural next step, had been infinitely soothing to her. But now that she was nearing thirty, spoke excellent Spanish, and most importantly had actually read the novel, she understood that Gil’s title was not meant to be soothing at all. Rather, it spoke of a kind of preordained movement, a socially constructed pathway that forced people, particularly women, into a series of steps they’d been tricked into believing they’d chosen for themselves.

These days the words struck her as a rallying cry: not to follow the path, but to veer from it. In fact, this very phrase had helped her make the decision to ignore her father’s long-ago orders and stay in Antarctica for the summer season.

A decision she was now terrified she might come to regret.

“Leave every year on November 2,” he had said, “or the people who killed your mother will come for you, too. And not only you, Esther. They’ll come for your sister.”

For these past ten years, she had listened, she had obeyed. Every November 1 she had packed up her things and every November 2 she had started moving, sometimes driving for that long day and night, sometimes taking a series of buses, planes, trains, not sleeping. From Vancouver to Mexico City. From Paris to Berlin. From Minneapolis to Antarctica. Every year, like clockwork, except this year. This year she had ignored his warning. This year she had stayed.

And now it was November 5, the station was filled with strangers, and one of them had brought a book.

2

The cat was back.

Joanna could hear him scratching at the front door, a plaintive sound like branches skidding across a roof. It was five in the evening and already growing dim, the sliver of sky outside her kitchen window fading from white to a smudgy charcoal gray. The weatherman on the radio that morning had said it might snow and she’d been hoping for it all day; she loved the first snow of the season, when all the faded browns of the sleeping earth were awakened into a new kind of aliveness, everything coarse made suddenly delicate, everything solid turned lacy and insubstantial. Magic that didn’t need words to enact itself year after year.

The cat scratched again, and Joanna’s heart lurched. She’d seen him stalking around her dead garden last week, a young blocky-headed tomcat, skinny and striped, and she’d put out a bowl of tuna one night and a bowl of sardines the next and now he had grown bold. But she couldn’t attend to him right now: the stove was lit, herbs were charring in a pot, and her hands were covered in blood.

That last was her fault. She’d cut too deeply into the back of her left hand and instead of a trickle she’d gotten a flood. Even after she’d measured out the half ounce she needed, her hand bled sluggishly through the bandages, and it hurt more than she’d anticipated. It would be worth it if this worked—but this was her thirty-seventh attempt since she’d begun trying a year and a half ago, and so far, all she had to show for her troubles was a growing collection of thin white scars on her hands. She had no real expectations that now would be any different.

Still, she had to try. She wanted to try.

Tonight, she was experimenting with the new moon, after the last few full moons had yielded no results—not even when she’d had a flash of what she thought was genius and managed to gather a whole half cup of menstrual blood. She had been so hopeful that might be the key. According to her admittedly surface-level research, peripheral blood was nearly indistinguishable from menstrual blood, forensically speaking, and she’d only ever managed to have three of her many books analyzed anyway—so it was absolutely possible the tests that had listed “blood” as the main ingredient of the ink had misled her in terms of where that blood may have come from.

But no. The book she’d written with her period blood was as ineffectual as all the others she’d attempted.

As ineffectual as she knew this one would be.

Still, hope and curiosity kept her at the stove, powdering the blackened herbs in a grinder and then mixing them with the blood from her hand, an egg yolk, a pinch of gum arabic, and honey. The result was a thick, dark paste that would write beautifully when mixed with water, but likely do nothing else. She kept her third ear pricked for any sound that might suggest the ink was more than just a homemade pigment, listening for the bodily hum that ran like syrup through her veins whenever she was near a book . . . but the ink stayed black and silent.

She had planned to write the book tonight, copying the text of one of the smaller spells in her collection, a ten-page sixteenth-century Persian incantation that was now faded but had once called up a fire that blazed without burning for roughly ten minutes. “The egg-cooker,” her father had called it jokingly. But looking down at the quiet paste, her hand still stinging, she knew instinctively that the act of writing would be pointless.

Blinking back tears of frustration, she left the mess on the stove and moved across the kitchen, the green-and-white seventies linoleum buckling here and there beneath her feet. The floor always brought

her father’s voice to her mind, deep and cheerful and so terribly missed; “Gonna retile this soon,” a sentence repeated so often it had taken on the cadence of ritual, but he hadn’t retiled it and no one ever would. She opened a can of tuna to scrape into a bowl, but when she stepped out onto the porch, shivering in the snow-scented air, the cat was nowhere.

It was full night now, no moon to light the sky, but the cloud cover sent down a distilled, silvery gleam that caught in the finger-bone branches of the birch trees lining her cleared yard. Among the pearly birches, the spruce and pine were little more than rustling shadows that dissolved into the darkness of the forest beyond. Joanna squinted through the trees, searching for movement, but other than a faint breeze the night was still.

Disappointment welled in her, black as the blood ink cooling in its cup, and she shook it off with a laugh. What was she doing, anyhow? Trying to lure a wild animal to her door and then what—invite him in? Offer him a bed by the fire, stroke his soft fur, talk to him, make him her friend?

Yes.

She put the bowl of tuna down on the top step and went back into the house.

Joanna had been born in this house and had lived here all her life; first with her whole family, and then, after her sister ran away and her mother moved out soon after, with just her father. For eight years it had been only Joanna and Abe, and ever since Abe’s death two years ago, it had been only Joanna. The house was an old Victorian, too big for one, its formerly white paint now a stained old-tooth gray, the wooden trim aged from gingerbread elegance to stale exhaustion. Even the steep arches of the roof and windows had dulled, like overused knives. The door creaked on its hinges as she swung it closed.

Inside, it was as quiet as the forest. It always was. The dark wood of the front hall gave way to the artificial brightness of the kitchen, tinged faintly amber from the glass shade of the hanging overhead light, and the window above the sink—which during the day looked out over Joanna’s herb garden—was a murky black mirror. Joanna felt herself unintentionally matching her footsteps to the quiet around her, soft, like she was trying not to disturb her own empty home.

More and more this ever-present silence felt like a function of the wards Joanna had lived behind all her life; another kind of invisible bubble that cut her off from the rest of the world, ...