Child of Flame (Crown of Stars #4) 00

Heriburg started, but said nothing. Ruoda leaned forward eagerly, her scarf slipping to reveal honey-colored hair.

“True enough,” agreed Rosvita. “Now we are all stained by it. Knowing what powers he has, we cannot speak against him, since we stood aside and let him use those powers to help us escape Ironhead.”

“I beg you, do not be so hard on yourself, Sister.” He paused, like a fox about to snatch an egg, and then slipped a hand up his sleeve. She heard rustling. “Do you recall the young lay sister, Paloma?”

“The young dove? Poor child, she will soon be withered by that hard work, and in such a lonely place.”

“She is here.”

“Here! In Darre?”

“Hush, Sister.” Was that sweat on his brow? Was he really so anxious? A breeze stirred the stuffy room, enough to waft away the worst of the closed-in smell. She had been cooped up here for many days, recovering from the fever. “I did not recognize her, but she knew who I was. She contrived to meet me after chapel, after Vigils, out among the hedges where I usually go walking until Lauds. She said she’d come from the convent at the order of Mother Obligatia, with a message for you, but that she could not get near enough because of your illness.”

“She could have come to one of us!” exclaimed Ruoda.

“You were not at St. Ekatarina’s,” he retorted. “She did not know you.” He turned back to Rosvita. “She brought this to me instead.”

He drew a tightly rolled length of parchment from his sleeve and handed it to Rosvita as though it were a sleeping snake that might bite. She unrolled it on the small table beside the east-facing window. As the sun nudged up over the horizon, its light splayed across the table, illuminating the lines drawn into the parchment before her.

“A map.”

Fortunatus rose to stand beside her, leaning on the table. Ruoda and Heriburg crowded behind him. They had all seen maps, mostly drawn in the time of the Dariyan Empire, in monastic libraries and at the schola at Autun. Emperor Taillefer had commissioned mapmakers to mark the boundaries of his holy empire but those that remained from that time looked rough and unpolished compared with the efforts of the ancient scholars. The great library in the skopos’ palace also kept a number of crumbling maps from the old days, frail papyrus that flaked away at a touch. This map was crudely drawn and freshly, even hastily done; inkblots had not been scraped off; the coastline of Aosta—well mapped by the sailors and merchants of the old empire—was barely recognizable; off the western coast only a simple oval, marked “Alba,” signified that large island even though Rosvita had seen in Autun a map delineating the southern coast, made in the time of Taillefer’s grandfather, who had married his younger son to the Alban queen.

“What are these marks?” Fortunatus pointed to scratches, like chicken’s tracks, set here and there across the land, erratically spaced, each one numbered. “Some of the numbers are repeated. What can they signify?”

Even without her dream, she would have known them. She had never forgotten reading in the chronicle kept by the holy sisters of the convent of St. Ekatarina. She had never forgotten the conversation she had had that fateful day.

“Mother Obligatia said that the abbesses who came before her believed that the stone crowns were gateways.”

“So they proved to be,” said Fortunatus, “but that does not explain—”

“Nay, Brother, look what she has written here.”

He frowned. “I fear my Arethousan has never been good, Sister. You know my failings. What does it say?”

“Heriburg, would you read it?” Rosvita read Arethousan easily enough, but it was always good to let the young ones shine.

The young cleric colored, looking pleased, and read the Arethousan letters carefully. “‘We have done what we can. Is there a pattern?’”

“What does it mean?” asked Ruoda, never able to keep silent for long.

“These are the stone crowns. That number marks the number of stones reported to stand in each circle. There is Alba, with two crowns recorded, one which has seven stones and one which has nine. Here, the coast of Salia. South of Salia lie the lands where the Jinna heathens have made inroads. East of Salia, Varre, and Wendar. This is North Mark, where I came from, thrusting out into the Amber Sea.”

“What is this land, here?” Fortunatus pointed to a faint line drawn in to the north of the Amber Sea.

“That must be the Eika shore. East of Wendar lie the marchlands and farther east—I see there is nothing marked here. All wilderness.”