Inkthorn the Drawn's Arc

Chapter 7 of 7

Inkthorn lay flat on the page while Lily spread her folder open on the pavilion floor. He read her timestamps for her, tracing each line with a drawn finger. She was pointing at a gap between two call logs when a shout came from the basin. A thin man in a torn coat had climbed over the low wall. He held a knife against the sealed seam and scraped, catching black flakes into a small leather purse with tarnished silver clasps. Inkthorn felt it before he saw it. The seam was part of him now. Every scrape lifted a curl of ink from his own edge. It was the fog feeling, but sharper. He reached for a word inside himself and found the shape of the word half gone. He rose off the page without deciding to. He held three-dimensional form in front of the basin and said, Stop. The man did not stop. He said his wife was sick. He said the ink granted wishes. He said he only needed a purse full. Lily stepped between them before Inkthorn could speak again. She said, He sealed that crack with his own body. If you scrape it open, the ink underneath runs into the dirt and no one gets a wish. She said it flat, the way she read her folder. The pilgrims came running from the shrine at the ice castle, bells ringing on its frame as they pushed past it. The builder woman took the knife. Another pilgrim took the coin purse and tipped the flakes back onto the stained stone under the basin's lip, where the ink could soak in and stay. The man sat down in the sand and cried. Lily knelt beside him and asked his wife's name and wrote it in the back of her folder. Inkthorn held form a moment longer than he needed to. He looked at the seam. A shallow groove ran along it where the knife had worked. He was thinner there. He could feel it the way a person feels a missing tooth. He collapsed back to the page before the pilgrims could see him shake. The builder woman said she would set a watch on the basin day and night. The pilgrims agreed. Lily closed her folder and tucked the man's wife's name inside. Inkthorn understood, from the page, that his gathered ink was no longer only his to guard. Others would guard it now. That was a kind of safety. It was also a kind of debt. He had wanted to escape the book and become real. He had not planned on being something people would fight over while he was still inside it.