Paper Confines

xiv. Call Me a Sinner / Mock Me Maliciously

PAPER CONFINES.
14. Call Me a Sinner / Mock Me Maliciously

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The cobweb in the corner of Tom's library spun thicker every day. Amoret caught it in the sconce-light that clung onto each string, like little white diamonds, raindrops, beadwork hanging from the ceiling. Its creator crawled in routine: around the polygon's edges, to the middle—feasting on the brown mush of a fly—back into a barely discernable cleft in the wall after caking the web in new silk. At night, Amoret wrote about it in an empty diary from what would be Circe's bed table. She wanted to keep track of the living, and there was very little in a place that had stolen from the dead. This morning, the spider crept from the wall surrounded by little white seeds, fluffed like blooming dandelions. Eggs.

Amoret counted nine, and in each, she imagined hundreds of spiderlings waiting to hatch, the mother-creator poised in her children's defense; she who spun their web and prepared their first meal and gave them life. A new fly writhed in the silk. Amoret wrote on her wrist while Tom wasn't looking, and blew the black ink dry before tucking the number back into her sleeve. His nose was buried in a book and illuminated by a candlestick he'd conjured out of nothing, meanwhile Amoret brought her own from the Great Hall. He was showing off what he could do and what she couldn't, and all she could care about was the spider. It didn't need any tricks to create life, intricate webbings, death traps for those who wandered where they shouldn't. It just did as it knew. Tom was no spider. He was a serpent shedding his skin, and he coiled with poison before he struck.

"Focus," he said.

Amoret glared at him. "I am focused."

The scar she gave him looked hideous now, and he refused petulantly to wrap it. Shades of red and violet threaded the length of it, shabbily stitched and splotched yellow with what might be infection. Amoret's herbs and vials sat unused and un-asked-for in her satchel. She wouldn't grovel for the chance to fix him. If Tom Riddle was so stupid he'd learned sacrificial curses before healing magic, then he could suffer his own damn consequences.

"What are you reading, then?"

"Theories of the Dark Arts."

Tom made a mocking sound. "Thérese Beignon. She specializes in transfiguration, not necromancy. Read something else."

Amoret thought of tearing his stitches out. "You chose the books."

"I had limited options."

"From the school library, yes? Which I can only assume is why I've been stuck reading the same fifteen books over and over again the past month."

"Perhaps." His lack of interest ran like a slow current through his voice.

Amoret set the book on fire. Then he seemed interested.

"You have a poor collection. Maybe toss the shelf full of Latin dictionaries and thesauruses away and steal from a different library."

Tom set out the fire and looked back at his book, but his finger rapped on the spine in irritation, and a small sense of satisfaction coursed her chest for getting a reaction at all. "And what would you replace them with?"

"Solutions to psychological ailments."

He said nothing.

Amoret stood from her seat and the leather yawned at her retreat. She perused the furthest shelf, fingers trailing along the same texts she'd already pulled, grazed the pages of and put back days ago. "Have you found anything, then?"