Page 182 of The Priory of the Orange Tree

“You will not like to hear this, Prioress,” she said, “but Kalyba would know.”

Once again, the name stiffened the Prioress. The set of her jaw betrayed her displeasure.

“The Witch of Inysca forged Ascalon. An object imbued with power. This jewel may be another of her creations,” Ead said. “Kalyba walked this world long before the Mother drew her first breath.”

“She did. And then she walked in the halls of the Priory. She killed your birthmother.”

“Nevertheless, she knows a great deal that we do not.”

“Has a decade in Inys addled your senses?” the Prioress said curtly. “The witch cannot be trusted.”

“The Nameless One may be coming. Our purpose, as sisters of the Priory, is to protect the world from him. If we must treat with lesser enemies to do that, so be it.”

The Prioress looked at her.

“I told you, Eadaz,” she said. “Our purpose now is to shield the South. Not the world.”

“So let me shield the South.”

With a sigh through her nose, the Prioress laid her hands on the balustrade.

“There is another reason that I think we should approach Kalyba,” Ead said. “Sabran dreamed often of the Bower of Eternity. She did not know what it was, of course, but she told me she had seen a gateway of sabra flowers and a terrible place beyond. I would like to know why it haunted an Inysh queen.”

The Prioress stood by the windows for a long time, stiff as a turret.

“You need not invite Kalyba here,” Ead said. “Let me go to her. I can take Aralaq.”

The Prioress pursed her lips.

“Go, then,” she said, “but I doubt she can or will tell you anything. Banishment has embittered her.” She used a piece of cloth to pick up the jewel. “I will keep this here.”

Ead felt an unexpected stirring of unease.

“I might need its power,” she said. “Kalyba is a stronger mage than I will ever be.”

“No. I will not risk this falling into her possession.” The Prioress slipped the jewel into a pouch at her side. “You will have weapons. Kalyba is powerful—no one could deny it—but she has not eaten of the tree in years. I have faith that you will overcome, Eadaz uq-Nara.”

42

East

Sweat quivered at the tip of his nose. As Niclays wet his brush and cupped his hand beneath it, unwilling to spill ink on his masterpiece, Laya brought a cup of broth to the table.

“I hate to interrupt, Old Red, but you have not eaten in hours,” Laya said. “If you fall flat on your nose, your little chart will be destroyed before the captain can spit on it.”

“Thislittle chart, Laya, is the key to immortality.”

“Looks like madness to me.”

“All alchemists have madness in their blood. That, dear lady, is why we get things done.”

He had been hunched over the table for what felt like a lifetime, copying the large and small characters fromThe Tale of Komoriduon to a giant roll of silk, ignoring those of middling size. If it proved to be a fruitless endeavor, he would most likely be on the seabed by dawn.

As soon as he remembered the starry vault in Brygstad Palace, he had known. First, he had tried arranging the oddly sized characters in a circle, as Mentish astronomers did, but only nonsense had come out. With a little coaxing, Padar, the Sepuli navigator, had surrendered his own star charts, which were rectangular. Niclays had continued, from that point, to translate each page of text to a pane he had sketched on the silk, keeping them in the order that they appeared in the book.

Once the panes were full of the large and small characters, he was certain they would form a map of part of the sky. He suspected the size of the character was a measure of the radiance of the corresponding star, the larger ones being the brighter.

Somewhere below, the dragon began to thrash about like a beached fish again, rocking the ship.

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