Ink, Iron, and Glass (Ink, Iron, and Glass #1)(28)

Porzia jerked as if the word betrothed had been a slap. Her eyes went wide, then she stalked across the room, fished a ring of keys out of a drawer, and threw it—hard—at Leo’s chest. He was caught off guard, and the key ring hit him and fell to the carpet. He knelt to retrieve it.

“There,” Porzia spat. “Go get yourself killed for all I care.”

Leo stared at the keys. He shouldn’t have said what he did. Whatever else Porzia intended, she’d been a good friend to him, and even now she did not withhold from him what he needed. “I hope it doesn’t come to that—anyone dying—but it might.” He paused. “I’m sorry.”

She made a frustrated noise in the back of her throat. “You’re impossible. Why can’t you simply explain what’s going on?”

“Because it’s not mine to explain,” he said, and left with the keys.

*

Elsa gently placed the burnt books one at a time into the carpetbag, which still held a lingering smell of smoke from the last time she’d transported them. She tried not to think too much about what she was doing. A grain of hope was necessary, but too much hope could easily transmute into crushing disappointment. She tried to think of Leo’s plan not as the miraculous solution to rescuing her mother that she so desperately wanted it to be, but simply as one more avenue of inquiry to pursue.

Elsa jumped when Leo burst through her door without knocking, and she nearly upended the inkwell on her writing desk. “By all means, let yourself in,” she called into the sitting room.

He came to stand in the doorway of her study. Instead of replying to her quip, he said, “I think we should tell Porzia and Faraz what’s happening.”

Elsa looked up from straightening her scriptology supplies. “What! Why?”

“We need Porzia, and not just for the keys,” he said, holding up the key ring. “The Pisanos are not a bridge we want to burn.”

“Have you told them all your secrets?” she asked bitingly.

“I’ve told them … enough. I know it’s a risk telling anyone, but I vouch for them both.”

Elsa scowled at him. How was it someone so proficient at lying could, at other times, manage such raw sincerity? His unguarded expression unnerved her. Jumi had raised her to be self-sufficient and taught her that depending on others was a kind of weakness. But here was this strange boy practically begging her to share her confidence.

Still resistant, Elsa said, “It’s not necessary for them to know.”

“You can’t know what’s necessary when you keep yourself sequestered away from anyone who might help you. If you hadn’t kept the books a secret, we could have gone to repair them two days ago. How much more time are you willing to lose because you refuse to trust people?”

“Says the boy who lies about everything to everyone,” she retorted.

Leo gave her a steady, serious look, his eyes catching the lamplight like twin pools of molten bronze. “My lies don’t matter—my family isn’t coming back.”

Elsa rubbed her face with her hands, wondering if all her meticulous hours of book repair had indeed been needless. “Fine. Fine! I’ll do it.”

Leo instructed Casa to ask the others to meet them in the library. Elsa dragged her heels on the way downstairs, still unsure this was a wise idea. When all four of them were settled in the plush library armchairs, Elsa told them about Jumi’s abduction as succinctly as she could, in a flat tone, without looking them straight in the eyes.

“Wait,” Porzia interrupted, “so you don’t know what became of the Veldana worldbook?”

“No,” Elsa said, her throat tightening.

Porzia covered her mouth with one hand, her eyes wide as saucers at the horror of losing such a world.

Faraz leaned forward in his seat. “And you think this Montaigne fellow may have left a clue behind in one of his worldbooks.”

“They—whoever ‘they’ are—could not have gotten into Veldana without Montaigne’s help, and he always kept his notes and papers inside scribed worlds.” Elsa turned to Leo. “We should get to sleep. It’ll be an early morning.”

She stood and left the library without giving Porzia and Faraz a chance to formulate any more questions. She’d done what Leo asked of her, but she didn’t relish the idea of hanging around to satisfy their curiosity with more sordid details. She’d made it halfway down the hallway before Porzia followed her out, running to catch up with her.

“Wait,” the other girl called.

Elsa stopped and turned. “I have nothing else to say on the matter.”

“But I do,” she said. “Elsa, I’m … I’m so sorry. You’re more than a guest in my home, you are a refugee in a sanctuary, and I fear I’ve treated you rather poorly.”

Elsa, taken aback, said, “I was not fishing for apologies.”

Porzia rested her hands on Elsa’s shoulders in a distinctly maternal gesture, and though Elsa had never thought of Porzia as much of a caretaker, she supposed being the eldest of four children might have something to do with it. “We will find your mother,” she said. “I swear it.”

*

Alek was beginning to wonder if the council meeting would continue all night. Perhaps some archaeologist of the future would unearth the Order’s headquarters in Firenze and find their bones still seated in their chairs.