The Book of Blood and Shadow

by Robin Wasserman

  The Emperor remains deaf to my pleas, and our worldly possessions are held hostage to his whims. The Court Solicitor, Johannes Leo, has offered himself in our service, and I am inclined to accept his help. Your suspicions of him may be well founded, but your low estimation of my will is unjust. Though less than quick-witted, he has learned the language of the court and, snakelike, has slithered into the Imperial good graces. You need not fear he will slither into mine.

  I leave you now, and beg in return some word of your studies. My mind is afire with imaginings of your life at Ingolstadt. To live without a care but the cares of the mind, is there a truer heaven on earth? Send word, and perhaps you may also send your prayers and your strength. If I am to fulfill my Father’s final wish, I will need them both.

  Farewell.

  30 September 1598 Prague.

  I liked the fact that she didn’t whine. Psychotic father demanding help with some psychotic escape plan; mother who seemed to have abdicated all adult responsibility and, at least in my imagination, spent her days gazing out the window, twirling her hair, twiddling her thumbs, and reminding Elizabeth to marry rich; big brother who was apparently the Little Prince incarnate, too good for the menial labor of family life—she took it all in stride. Less impressive was the fact that she seemed to take it as her due. No feminists in the 1500s, I got that, but did she have to unquestioningly service her father’s every whim, even once he was in the ground? He wasn’t even her father, not technically, and however much she claimed him as her blood, I couldn’t help noticing: She’d kept her own name.

  11

  I started looking forward to the afternoons in the Hoff’s office, to Chris and Max and the hours of quiet. It mattered less than studying for APs or finishing applications, less even than the nights Chris and Adriane and I filled the hours till dawn with movies, midnight drives, urban spelunking investigations of abandoned tunnels and forgotten roofs, even, when we got desperate, the dusty board games in Adriane’s basement, anything to avoid talking about the ticking clock and the day, sometime after graduation, when the rest of our lives would separately begin. The letters mattered less than all of that, but because they did, because they were an escape from anything that mattered—or had mattered to anyone in four centuries—they somehow mattered more.

  E. J. Weston, to her dearest brother John Fr. Weston, greetings.

  You know I would tell you anything, but despite your persistent questioning, I cannot reveal the promise I made to our Father. You cannot understand what he was like in those final days, consumed by that infernal book, determined to finish his greatest work before death stole him away. There were nights when he raved with such fever I feared he might burn before my eyes. I mopped his fiery brow as he raged at the heavens, at the angels, at the Emperor, at me. Forces conspired against him, he alleged, both in this world and beyond. Was he so wrong? There are whispers that his assassin was on a mission from the Emperor himself. Of course, no loyal subject could ever suspect the Emperor of such a crime. And no one can question my loyalty.

  The “infernal book” might have been the Hoff’s precious Voynich manuscript, but even if he’d been around to tell—which he hadn’t in nearly a week—I would have kept it to myself. If Elizabeth was writing about the Book, that meant her letters weren’t so useless after all, and I wasn’t about to invite the Hoff to take them away from me.

  It is loyalty that drives me now. Our Father’s last, greatest work awaits me, and I have finally summoned the courage to complete it. There is a man whose help I must enlist, whose name I cannot divulge. I shudder at things they say about him, the strange mechanical creatures with which he surrounds himself, their eyes glowing with demonic life. But our Father trusted him. I can only hope it is a trust this man will not betray.

  It pains me to hear of your recent illness, and I urge you to tend to your health. I know your childish fear of the leeches, but you must take the advice of your physicians. Only once was I forced to endure the creatures, but their slime on my skin, and that exquisite pain as my blood drained into their engorged bodies, is an experience I will not soon forget. We all do what we must to survive.

  24 October 1598 Prague.

  12

  “ ‘We all do what we must to survive’ … but there’s nothing that explains what she was about to do. What could be so secret that she needs to keep it from the one person she tells all her secrets to?”

  “Sex,” Adriane said. “It’s always sex.” She lay flat on the white shag rug, then smoothly rolled herself into a yoga pose, legs stretched over her head, toes touching the floor.

  I shook my head. “It’s not a guy. It has something to do with their father, and she keeps talking about this book, which I’m sure is the same one that—”

  “Nora. Seriously. No one cares about your dead-girl letters.” Adriane lifted herself into a handstand, legs ruler-straight. “Especially if they’re not about sex.”

  “So what you’re looking for is some dead-girl-letter porn? That’s what you’re telling me?”

  “You have to admit it would be more interesting.”

  “You say that like you were actually listening.”

  “You didn’t tell me I was supposed to listen.”

  “Implied consent,” I told her. “You know what Mr. Stewart said, about how every time you set foot into an airport, you give the government your implied consent to search you? Every time you invite me over here, you give me your implied consent to bore you with the details of my mundane little life.”

  Adriane hand-walked her way over to the wall, then pressed her bare feet against the vintage wallpaper and walked them down to the floor. She held her body in a reverse U, head dangling backward, hair pooling on the rug. “A, it’s not your life, it’s her life. B, maybe your life would be fractionally less mundane if you spent less time obsessing about your homework and more time actually living it. And C, consent rescinded.”

  “Maybe your advice would seem more incisive if I were upside down, too.”

  Her body flowed back into an upright position, as if gravity had been temporarily suspended on her side of the room. “And that’s another thing,” she said. “It wouldn’t hurt you to hit the gym once in a while. We’re not fifteen anymore, and all those milk shakes—”

  “One more word, and I’m reading you another dead-girl letter,” I warned her, brandishing the notebook that held my translations. “Word for word. Slowly.”

  “Enough said.”

  Back when I was still a visitor in the World According to Adriane, rather than a permanent resident, I’d assumed that the constant stretching had been for the benefit of those members of the opposite sex who were frequently in the vicinity when she got one of her sudden urges for half lotus or downward-facing dog. It could and did happen anywhere—waiting in line for a movie, studying for a chem test, decorating for a homecoming rally. You’d turn to say something, and Adriane would be on the ground, skyscraper legs stretched into a split or arcing over her head with calves taut and toes pointed. It took a few months to realize she wasn’t doing it for the attention—although she wasn’t oblivious to the perk. It was just her body’s automatic pilot mode, like complaining about my eating habits and less-than-adventurous social life was her mouth’s.

  She folded herself gracefully into the large blue beanbag chair shoved into the corner of the room, twisting her legs into a pretzel beneath her. The thick rug at her feet was scattered with discarded books. A natural-born speed-reader possessed of a disgustingly good memory, Adriane was a literary magpie, skimming through the Russians one week and the postmodernists the next, with sporadic breaks for cutting-edge tech journals and the latest Nora Roberts. She eschewed history and politics—“You know what they say, make love, not treaties”—but anything else was fair game. Fortunately for her attention span, her credit card had a nearly inexhaustible limit that was barely tested by the weekly Amazon binges; fortunately for her treasured social status, she excelled at playing the shallow sla
cker too cool for anything relating to school. The elementary-school science-fair trophies were kept—both metaphorically and literally—under lock and key.

  Classic closet geek. It was the biggest thing she and Chris had in common.

  “So we can officially start the countdown,” she said—beginning, as usual, in medias res.

  “To …?”

  “Europe. My mom talked to Cammi’s mom, who’s in the Prep Boosters Club with some guy on the trip-planning committee, and he said Paris is a definite. Can you imagine?”

  “Not really.”

  “Because you’ve never been there.” Her voice was hushed, as if she were speaking of a pilgrimage to a holy land. “The Champs-Elysées, the Bon Marché, the Galeries Lafayette—”

  “That’s a mall, right?”

  “Try cathedral of fashion. And then there’s the food, the pain au chocolat, the crêpes Nutella—”

  “You haven’t eaten chocolate since the Candy Bar Incident sophomore spring,” I reminded her.

  “What is your problem?”

  Adriane had been looking forward to the senior spring-break trip for approximately her entire life. I preferred the delusion that it would never arrive, mostly because my scholarship didn’t cover European adventures and the closest to Paris my parents could afford to send me was a breakfast jaunt to Au Bon Pain.

  “I’m just trying to figure out what the big deal is,” I said. Adriane and Chris both knew I was at Prep on a scholarship, as they knew that, unlike them, I didn’t have my own car, credit card, or trust fund. But they somehow still didn’t understand what it meant to never have enough, and I was content leaving them in the dark, because I had no need for their understanding and no use for the pity that would accompany it. “Some of us didn’t spend the last three Christmas breaks slurping down chocolat chaud on the banks of the Seine,” I said, but lightly. “If it was so amazing, why waste half the trip texting me about how you were bored out of your mind?”

  “It was only two Christmas breaks. And everything’s lame when you’re stuck with your parents. This time it’ll be us. Did I mention there’s no drinking age in Europe?”

  “Only about a hundred and six times.”

  “Do you have to be such a pessimist all the time?”

  “It’s not pessimism,” I said out of habit. “It’s realism. And you know it’s your favorite thing about me.”

  “You know what they say about too much of a good thing.” Then she brightened. “Fine. I dare you to be realistically crappy about this: Chris is coming. They always get some college kids to chaperone, and I’m making him sign up.”

  “So I get to tag along with the two of you on your ultra-romantic Parisian getaway?” I grumbled. “Magnifique.”

  “Wheelbarrow,” she said firmly.

  “Yeah, yeah. Wheelbarrow.” I sighed, but mostly for effect. The three’s-a-crowd complaints were proforma at this point, as I could no longer imagine it any other way. Wheelbarrow was Adriane-speak for stop whining, because—as she liked to say—the damn thing would be useless without the third wheel.

  “Besides, this time we’ve got one for you, too.”

  “One what?” I asked, suspicious.

  “One wheel,” she said. “One guy, idiot. Chris is going to get Max to sign up for chaperoning too, and then …”

  “And then …?”

  She waggled her eyebrows. “Parlez-vous la language of love?”

  “Adriane! Not going to happen.”

  “Tell me you don’t think he’s cute.”

  “Ignoring you now.”

  “Or at least acceptable,” she said. “Nice eyes, if you ignore the glasses. And he’s got an interesting smile, sort of. Plus, accent. Always a bonus.”

  “How can you even tell he has an accent? He never talks.” Though, of course, that wasn’t quite true anymore. Over long afternoons and more than a few evenings holed up in the Hoff’s lair—the Hoff himself off napping or drinking or busy with whatever daily ablutions kept him from putting in more than an hour or two of work each week, and Chris taking increasing advantage of the absence to put in quality time with his girlfriend and his PS3—Max had started coming into focus for me. Not as Chris’s shy roommate or Adriane’s double-date accessory, but as the quiet guy who was always equipped with an extra pencil, an extra Latin dictionary, an extra cappuccino, whatever I needed, often before I thought to ask for it. And she was right about the accent. It was subtle, and impossible to place—a hint of Southern drawl paired with a flat Midwestern twang and an undertone of laid-back California surfer boy. “Why are you so obsessed with this?”

  “Is it so wrong to want you to be happy?” she asked sweetly.

  I just stared at her.

  “I can be altruistic,” she said.

  “Since when?”

  “Fine. So maybe I miss it a little.”

  “What?”

  “You know. The new guy. That moment when he looks at you and you don’t know what’s going to happen next. But you know something will. That first kiss …”

  “You’ve been with Chris for two years, not twenty,” I reminded her. “You sound like some bored middle-aged housewife dreaming of an affair with the pool boy.”

  “Do not! Chris is … you know. He’s Chris.”

  “And I’m sure he’d be overwhelmed to hear such extravagant praise.”

  She tossed a throw pillow at my head. “You know what I mean.”

  I decided not to point out to her that, never having spent years blissfully in love with a perfect guy who worshipped the shag carpeting she hand-walked on, I did not.

  “Look, I’m not the one always whining about not having a boyfriend,” she said.

  “No, you’re the one always whining about me not having a boyfriend.”

  “Either way, problem solved.”

  “Last I checked, Max wasn’t throwing pebbles at my bedroom window, begging me to run off into the sunset together.”

  “Just promise me when he does, you’ll say yes.”

  “Is he showing up with a horse or a convertible in this scenario?” I asked.

  “Come on.”

  “What? Into the sunset’s a long ride. I’d want to be comfortable.”

  “Nora …”

  “I’d say yes to coffee,” I granted her. “Maybe even a movie. If he asks. Which he won’t.”

  “But—”

  “But if he did, then yes. A movie. As long as it’s not a crappy one.”

  “Fair enough.”

  13

  The Hoff had given me a key to his office, and whenever I wore out my stay in Adriane’s house or Chris’s dorm, the dungeon of books was always a more tempting refuge than the public library or the nearest Starbucks—both of which were themselves more hospitable than home. Chris still showed up for the nine hours a week he needed to fulfill his history requirement, but most of the time, I found myself alone with Max, both of us scribbling into our notebooks long after the sun had gone down. I had no idea why he spent so much time there, or why, when he had so much work of his own to get through, he kept offering to help with mine. I could hear Adriane’s voice in my head, pointing out that no guy was that into his homework. On the other hand, historically speaking, no guy had ever been that into me, either.

  I turned down Max’s offer, every time. Elizabeth’s mystery was mine to solve, and I was sure that, although so far she’d done nothing but string her brother along with vague references to her dark and dangerous secret, eventually, she’d have to tell him.

  She told him everything.

  E. J. Weston, to her brother John Francis Weston, greetings.

  There are those who would go to great lengths to learn my secret, and even revealing as little as I do in these letters may prove a mistake. Many a morning I resolve never to speak of it again. But then night comes, and with it, the shadows, and I once again crave your strong hand to lead me through the dark. We are no longer children, and I can no longer flee to you for succor from the beas
ts that once menaced my sleep. Even if those beasts have now been reborn in waking life. I have enlisted a dangerous ally, as our Father commanded. My very presence seems to enrage him, and I suspect that were it not for the great reward we both seek, my time would be short. This is the man our Father trusted most in this world? This is to be our salvation?

  Enough. I will stop this now, with apologies for my distress. I have not forgotten that, as our Father impressed upon us, reason is the last and best weapon of the powerless man. He taught me well the many uses of emotion, the blade that can so easily be turned against its wielder. His lessons are engraved on my soul, so quiet your concerns, and trust that, as always, I can tend to myself.

  I will, however, admit, dearest brother, that your suspicions of Johannes Leo were well founded. He has begun to pay me the most absurd of wrongheaded compliments, as if I would believe that my hair smelled of linden leaves or my lips were rubies and my eyes sapphire. If he spoke the truth, I would have jewels enough to outfit our Mother like a queen. He speaks of my beauty as if I were a vase or canvas he coveted for his estate. To my mind, to my words, he gives little thought. He imagines me his Galatea, a mechanical doll with waxen beauty and empty head. Worse, he has begun to speak of the future as if it were a destination we shared. Yesterday he offered a bouquet of lilacs, and the foul scent nearly made me swoon. Weakness, especially my own, repulses me, but for Johannes it is an aphrodisiac. I cannot say, nor imagine, what might have ensued had Thomas not appeared when he did. This is Thomas’s power, always appearing when and where he is most needed, especially when I am the one in need. Johannes, of course, treated him like a dung beetle, simply because of his low station at court. Johannes has worked tirelessly on our family’s behalf, interceding with the Emperor when my own pleas have been ignored, and I am grateful. But on the other matter, my mind is made up. Despite what our Mother may believe, the bounds of gratitude go only so far.