Moments stretched, and mantic sight still didn’t come. The ache in her knees threatened her focus.
Wynn clung to Chap—to the memory of him—burning bright behind the envisioned circle around the symbol of Spirit. Vertigo suddenly threatened to send her falling into the darkness behind her eyelids.
“Wynn?” Chane rasped.
She braced her hands on the floor. As she opened her eyes, nausea lurched from her stomach, up her throat, and seemingly into her head.
Translucent white, just shy of blue, dimly permeated the wood planks beneath her hands and knees. She raised her head slowly, carefully, and the first thing she saw was Shade. Wynn knew what to expect, but foreknowledge didn’t help much.
For the first instant, Shade was as black as a void. But beneath her fur, a powerful glimmer of blue-white permeated her body—more so than anything else in the room. Traces of Spirit ran in every strand of Shade’s charcoal fur. Her eyes were aglow, burning with her father’s Fay ancestry.
Wynn had to look away.
“Chane!” she called through gritted teeth.
“I am here. Work quickly.”
Only then did she feel a hand resting lightly between her shoulder blades, but it wasn’t Chane’s. Through it all, she kept hearing those soft, indistinct whispers behind her from Premin Hawes.
Wynn half closed her eyes as she turned her head, looking for Chane as the only normal image in the room. For while Chane wore the brass ring, even her mantic sight couldn’t reveal him for what he was.
He appeared exactly the same, unchanged, as before Wynn had called her sight. He was her anchor.
Taking in a deep breath, she finally looked down at the scroll. Its surface was no longer completely black ... to her.
The coating of old ink, spread nearly to the scroll’s edges, had lightened with a thin inner trace of blue-white. Whatever covered the words had been made from a natural substance, and even after ages, it still retained a trace of elemental Spirit.
Within that space, pure black marks appeared, devoid of all Spirit.
“Wynn?” Hawes asked.
“I see the words now,” she whispered.
Those swirling, elaborately stroked characters weren’t written as in the other texts. Short lines began evenly along a wide right-side margin. Written from right to left, they ended erratically shy of the page’s left side. The lines of text were broken into stanzas of differing length.
“But the dialect is so ...” she whispered.
“Sound out what is possible by the characters you recognize,” Hawes instructed. “Find anything similar to what you heard me speak.”
Wynn’s dinner threatened to come up as she tried to reach for her elven quill.
Chane grabbed her wrist and guided her hand as she dipped the quill and dropped its point to the blank sheet. Then something halfway down the scroll caught her eyes.
“... and the breath of wind ... sands ... were born ...” she said aloud, but she couldn’t follow most of the writing.
Wynn stopped reading aloud and quickly began copying as much as she could by rote. She had scrawled only a few lines when a sharp wave of vertigo rose inside her.
“Wynn!” Chane rasped.
Almost instantly, she felt the premin’s hand press between her shoulder blades, as if Hawes had felt that wave. Wynn’s vertigo decreased as the premin’s unintelligible whispering stopped.
“That is enough,” Hawes ordered.
“No!” Wynn tried to say, still choking. “I need ... more.”
The quill was suddenly snatched from her grip. A narrow hand flattened over her eyes, blocking out everything, as she heard another whisper, shorter and sharper than the last. The nausea vanished as Hawes pulled her hand away from Wynn’s eyes.
“Try sitting up,” the premin said.
Wynn straightened on her knees, opened her eyes, and turned on Hawes in outrage.
“I barely wrote anything!”
Chane, still crouched close, grabbed her upper arm. “Wynn, that is enough for—”
“No!” she snapped, still glaring at the premin. “Why did you stop me?”
Hawes reached around her for the sheet upon which Wynn had written. “You collected something, but you were growing too unstable. You need instruction before another attempt.”
Wynn only glared, wondering what the premin was up to. She finally calmed enough to ask, “Anything of use?”
Hawes reached out for the elven quill, not even appearing interested in its white metal tip, and began scanning what was on the page. She scrawled and stroked as Wynn waited, unable to see exactly what Hawes wrote.
“‘The Wind was banished to the waters within the sands where we were born,’” the premin read aloud and then paused. “The ‘we’ may be a reference to the Children.”
“How are we to know where any of the Children were born?” Chane asked.
“The war is believed to have begun in the south,” Hawes answered. “Somewhere in the region of what is now the Suman Empire. And likely the ‘empire’ was only separate nations at that time. This line may hint at some place near where the Children were first born, or created as servants of the Enemy. But ...”
Hawes fell silent, frowning slightly as she stared at the page—until Wynn grabbed it from the premin’s hand to look at it. Hawes had scrawled the exact words she’d read in Numanese, using the Begaine syllabary.
“And ‘Wind’ more likely refers to the orb of Air,” Wynn replied. “But the rest makes no sense. The only known desert of ‘sand’ is south of the Sky-Cutter Range. But there are no waters in that region. How could there be, since it’s a desert?”
“You are still missing the full context,” Hawes admonished.
Wynn thought about that for a moment. “You mean time?”
“Yes. What is in this scroll was written a thousand or more years ago ... at an educated guess. What we call the Forgotten History may be even older than that. And how much can a world, or any one region, change in that much time?”
Wynn glanced back at il’Sänke’s translation of the first stanza.
It clearly referred to the orb of Air, but it offered no help in connecting it to the new phrase she had just copied. And neither phrase explained how to find water, let alone a body of such with shallows, in the middle of sand, or any other type of desert.
“How do we ... ?” she began, not even sure what to ask.
Premin Hawes no longer looked at anyone or anything. She appeared to be focused across the room on the blank wall. More disturbing was another rare betrayal of emotion on her narrow face. Her eyes closed to slits exposing slivers of cold gray irises around black pupils. Her features twisted in a blink of revulsion as she spoke.
“I can think of only one person who might decipher such a location—if this new hint is that.”
Before Wynn could press for more, the premin looked at her.
“We have much to discuss,” Hawes said, “and much to do. You will need access to the guild and to me directly.”
Wynn saw little hope in that.
“If she goes back,” Ore-locks replied, “Premin Sykion and the council—your council—will lock her up again.”
“Perhaps not,” Hawes countered.
Chane crouched down beside them. “What do you mean?”
Hawes only looked at Wynn. “I have only one answer, and you may not like it.”
The premin half turned where she knelt, retrieved the parcel she’d left on the bed, and handed it to Wynn. Still lost, Wynn took it and pulled the tie string to unwrap the outer canvas.