Chapter 22 The Modern Era

By 2000, the art of binding had changed, as all things changed, and the change was not all for the worse. Modern ink-binders worked alongside lawyers, accountants, and government officials, the way doctors worked alongside nurses. They wrote contracts for international corporations, for marriages, for custody arrangements, for all the complex agreements of contemporary life, and the old suspicion between the mundane and the bound had softened into a kind of professional respect. The old ways - the blood-signed contracts, the soul bindings, the supernatural penalties - were mostly forgotten, faded like the red ink of Crow's day. Most modern binders didn't even know they existed, trained as they were in the clean, paper-only methods that Catherine had standardized, methods that held without the darker sanctions. But some remembered. In London, the Sawyer family still kept the manuscript, passed down through Catherine to Margaret and beyond. They still taught the old techniques, the blood and the intent and the sunset clause, to those few who sought them. They still bound with mercy, in the old way, when the old way was needed. Catherine's daughter Margaret had become the family historian. She had written three books on the history of binding, careful, scholarly works that documented the spread of the art without exposing its secrets. She had tracked the copies of the manuscript across Europe, following the trail Eliza had laid, and she had found most of them, lost or hidden or kept in plain sight. She had also done something else, something her grandmother and great-grandmother had refused to do. She had made the manuscript public. In 2005, she published a facsimile edition - not the original, but a copy, with translations and annotations, the dangerous parts softened or omitted. She put it in bookstores and libraries. She made it available to anyone who wanted to learn, because she believed that secrecy had protected the art for a century and had also kept it small, and she judged the time had come for it to be larger. The publication was controversial. Some traditionalists argued that the manuscript should remain secret, that exposure would invite the Crows of the world. Others said that making it public would corrupt the art, that mercy could not survive the marketplace. But Margaret believed otherwise. She believed that binding with mercy was too important to keep hidden, that a light kept under a basket was no light at all. She believed that the world needed more mercy, not less, and that an art built on mercy had nothing to fear from being known. And she was right, though the rightness would be tested sooner than she knew. Margaret, in her seventies, lived to see the publication bear fruit she had not dared hope for. The facsimile edition sold in bookshops and sat in libraries, and the art, once the guarded secret of a family and a few friends, became a subject of study, of seminars, of theses, the once-hidden craft laid open on a reading room table. Young binders wrote to her from three continents, and she answered each, the way Alfred would have, with a fair word and a stern one in equal measure. She thought often of the risk she had taken, of the traditionalists who had warned that the publication would call down a new Crow from every shadow, and she conceded, privately, that they had not been entirely wrong. The New School would rise from exactly this openness, would learn the art from exactly these pages, and would twist it. But she also knew that a mercy kept in a vault was a mercy that reached no one, and that the family's whole argument, from Alfred to Eliza to her, had been that the art was meant to be given, not hoarded. The publication changed the family, too. It lifted the weight of secrecy from their shoulders, the weight Alfred had carried in a locked drawer and Eliza in a vault. They could speak of the manuscript now, teach it openly, train binders without the old fear of exposure. The shop on Cheapside became a school in truth, not just in practice, and the line of hands lengthened with every class. She was right, and time would prove her rightness a costly one, because the same openness that spread the mercy also spread the knowledge of how to fake it, and the world, as the manuscript had always warned, was full of those who would write the chain and call it the bond. The New School rose from exactly this openness, learning the art from the pages Margaret had published and reading them backward, the mercy clauses becoming the weaknesses they exploited. She had known it would happen, had said as much to Eleanor, and still she did not regret the publication, because hiding the art had never protected anyone, and giving it freely had been the family's whole argument, from the docks of Alfred's day to the libraries of her own. The facsimile editions gathered in libraries across the world, and in them the story of Alfred and Eliza sat beside the treatises of scholars who had never held the ink, and the art became, for the first time, a thing a stranger could learn without a sponsor, without a patron, without the old gatekeepers who had guarded it for a century. She was right, and the rightness held, even as the corruption it enabled tested it, because the mercy, once given, belonged to no one and everyone, and no school, new or old, could ungive it. The decades that followed proved the double edge of the publication, as Margaret had feared and accepted. The New School rose and fell and rose again, and each time the mercy she had released was the thing that answered it, because a mercy given to the world could not be recalled, and a cruelty that fed on secrecy found itself exposed by the very openness that had freed the art. She lived to see the facsimile editions dog-eared in the hands of students who would never meet her, and she counted that, in the end, as the victory, the only one that mattered: that the art had left the family's keeping and become the world's, for better and for worse, and that the better, in the long count, had outweighed the worse. ---