The Storyteller by Traci Chee

Author:Traci Chee
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Young Readers Group
Published: 2018-11-12T16:00:00+00:00

End of the Rope

With the knowledge that her illness was transmitted through the air she breathed, carried in the fine particles of blood she coughed out of her lungs, Mareah decided to turn her copper sword, which absorbed blood on contact, into three masks. The same blade she’d used to execute her parents would, she hoped, protect Lon and Sefia from contracting the same illness that was killing her.

So she unspooled the embossed leather of the grip, broke the wooden handle, and asked Nin to remake the steel into fine-gauge wire.

She cried as she wove the metal thread into a flexible mesh, her tears making her fingers so slippery she pricked herself again and again, her blood soaked up by the thin filaments that were all that remained of the weapon that had been at her side for decades. When she was done, she padded the masks with cotton and slipped one over her head.

Meanwhile, Lon did what he could to ease Mareah’s symptoms and prolong her life.

In the mornings, while Nin watched Sefia in the village below, Lon took to the kitchen, where he brewed draughts and potions, sparkling with magic. Wearing his mask, he’d bring them into the bedroom where Mareah lay, and she would drink them all down, grimacing at the taste, at the burn in her throat.

“I should have been an Administrator,” he said. “Why was I studying books when I could’ve been studying the human body? What good are books when you can’t save the ones you love?”

Mareah replaced her mask and squeezed his hand. “I believe in you.” The corners of her eyes crinkled as she smiled a smile he couldn’t see.

He continued to study the power of the Scribes, slowly mastering the magic required to erase Mareah’s illness and rewrite her future.

Until one day, he learned that it would not be possible.

The Illuminated world was woven of filaments of shared history, individual threads—people, clouds, the turning of the seasons, tender green shoots, blistering changes deep in the earth, every creature, every pebble—all converging and diverging in an infinite web, a labyrinth, a sprawling story of the world.

Some of these strands were so important, so intertwined with other objects, other lives, other stories, that in the Illuminated world they blazed like fire, forming strong, bright connections that could not be severed without ripping away parts of everything they were connected to.

That was how it was with Mareah’s illness. Lon couldn’t remove the sickness from her lungs without shredding the rest of her body. And maybe his and Sefia’s as well.

You see, excision was the simplest of the Scribes’ powers, but it was also the cruelest. It was a hacksaw. It was a seam ripper. It could gouge out parts of the Illuminated world, but it could not heal the wounds it caused.

To do that, to fill in the cavities you’d left, to sew up the rifts you’d made, to stitch the raw edges of the world back together, you had to use the second half of the Scribes’ powers—addition.

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