“Shh,” murmured Tan, touching her shoulder to quiet her. “All will be well. Everything will be well. Shh. Let me just see this odd creation now. The key to our hope and all our enemies’ desire, and yet it is so very small.”
Mienthe did not recognize the quote, of course. She only nodded, looking uncertain.
Tan did not try to explain. He only began to reach out—then caught himself and nodded to the young woman instead. “Open it for me, will you, please, for all kindness.”
Mienthe managed a nervous little smile and a nod, and flipped the book open herself. She flipped past several of the heavy, ivory-colored sheets, each as empty as a cloudless sky. She said, “Maybe if you were to write in it—if you were to have nothing in your mind, but only touch a quill to its pages—do you think you might write out what you… what you have? What you hold in your mind?”
“What passes for my mind,” Tan murmured absently. “Perhaps.”
“But I don’t have any quills—”
Without a word, Tan extracted a packet of quills from an inner pocket, held it up with a minor flourish, and set it down by the book.
Mienthe turned another blank page, and another. She shook her head. “There’s nothing. It’s so strange. It’s almost as though there was never anything here at all.”
Tan made a wordless comforting sound, not really attending. He took a quill, a small but neatly made crow’s feather, out of the packet and tested it on his thumb. The ink was black, a good, flowing ink without grittiness or stutters, contained within a well-made quill, exactly what one would expect from the Casmantian king’s own mage. Or ex-mage. From Lord Beguchren Teshrichten, in either case, from whom Tan had acquired the packet of quills. He looked at the book, considering. But when he moved to touch it, to write in it, he could bring himself to do neither. He had a reasonless but intense dread of the book, especially of setting ink to its empty pages. He knew he could not possibly bring himself to write anything at all in it.
“Well?” Mienthe asked anxiously, forgetting to whisper.
Tan shook his head. He laughed, though quietly. “So far out and as far back, and what have we to show for all our weary steps? We are come not even to our beginning, but beyond that. We are looking over ground we shall have to recover to come back to the place where we began—”
“Write something!” said Mienthe sharply.
Tan shook his head again. “I can’t. I daren’t. I don’t know how. This isn’t a book, Mie, it’s something else that’s just in the shape of a book. If it’s legistwork, it’s nothing I recognize, not even now.”
Mienthe’s lips pressed together, and her jaw set in that determined expression with which she faced down mountains and kings. She said, “We’ll take it back to Gereint Enseichen. All the way back to Beguchren Teshrichten, if we have to. He’ll know what to do with it.”
She did not suggest how they might get out of this house and back across town; well, more than likely she did not remember anything of the twisting, difficult route they’d followed to get in. Or how they’d still be trapped outside this house now, save for that strange spiraling path she’d drawn across light and shadow to bring them the last little way, at the end… She flipped the book shut with a sharp, decisive movement.
Tan said suddenly, the pattern leaping out at him for the first time, “There’s a spiral on the cover.”
Mienthe blinked, and looked.
Tan traced the pattern for her in the air, the tip of his finger hovering above the leather. There was a spiral, when one looked for it—or not just one, indeed, but several: interlocking spirals set into the patterned leather among the circumscribed arcs of circles and ellipses. Some of the spirals were raised and turned right, but at least one was concave and turned left.
Mienthe traced the first spiral herself, with no need to be cautious about touching the book. She said, “Earth.”
Tan looked at her, wanting to ask what she meant, fearing to interrupt whatever inspiration she might have discovered.
“Earth,” Mienthe insisted, and traced the next spiral, a smaller one that interlocked with the first and then twisted away in its own direction. And the next, small and twining about the second. “Fire,” she said. “And wind.” She found another, this one pressed deep into the rich leather. When she touched it, her fine eyebrows drew together in something like pain. “Oh. The wild heights.”
“Mie—”
“Yes,” the young woman murmured. She stood up, took the crow-feather quill out of Tan’s hand, walked back into the apartment’s main sitting room, swung chairs aside every which way, kicked aside a rug, and bent to draw a spiral right on the naked boards of the floor.