The Burning White (Lightbringer #5) - Brent Weeks Page 0,248

to tear her Ilytian lace undergarments to show her my unbridled desire for her. The roughness following that had . . . not been the result of a rational internal dialectic.

“You can make it up to me—”

“I can, huh?”

“—but there’s nothing to forgive.”

“What?” And then it hits me. “You hexed me?”

“You can’t hold it against me after I confess it, right?”

“Felia!” I don’t know whether to be mad or a little proud of her. She used to be such a stickler for the Chromeria’s rules.

“I wanted you to be rougher,” she says matter-of-factly.

“You could’ve asked.”

“I wanted you to apologize afterward. And to have to make it up to me. Speaking of which, you still need to.”

“Make it up to you?”

“As in, right now. Carry me to our bed. I’m not sure I can walk.”

* * *

“There were a couple of words that have changed meaning in our own language since those earlier translations, but it was all solid scholarship. And then I saw this.” She points to a single point on the lambskin, right where the redaction begins.

“What’s that?” I ask.

“A flaw in the leather? A stray quill mark? A stain of any kind from the intervening centuries.” She shrugs. “A good translator or copyist wouldn’t speculate, but only communicate what she knows. But when I look at the whole scroll, and see what’s missing and how, it seems to me that whoever redacted this was in a hurry here. There are numerous places where he or she was sloppy. These three dots here at the end of the line, if I guess where the lines of text fell, could be all that remains of the three horns of a ‘shin.’ This could be the foot of a ‘khaf sofit.’ It could as easily be ‘resh’ or ‘nun sofit’ or ‘tsadi sofit’ or ‘zayin’ or ‘dalet,’ but when I compare his earlier handwriting, his ‘shin’s were tall and elegant, and his ‘khaf sofit’s extended a little lower than the others.”

She’s getting into the minutiae. But she sees my impatience.

“If I’m right,” she says, “then this dot”—she lays a piece of parchment over the area and draws a delicate curve—“is part of an aspirate, a breath mark, as in the way ‘Or’holam’ was once written. It’s the right time period. Breath marks in punctuation only started falling out of scholarly usage some eighty years later, with Polyphrastes’ Dictions.”

“But this mark obviously isn’t for ‘Orholam.’ You’ve discovered something else,” I say.

“ ‘Discovered’ is too strong. I’ve ‘speculated.’ ”

“Tell me.”

“I’ll show you instead.” She lines up the parchment edge over the original scroll so that one edge just touches the breath mark and, farther down the absent line of text, the three dots of the missing ‘khaf sofit’ protrude. “You understand, what I’m doing here is by no means ‘translation.’ It’s a guess, not scholarship.”

I say nothing, and she picks up a quill, shaved precisely as the ancient Parians shaved theirs to give the proper calligraphic quality to edges and curves. Her lettering is not only beautiful, it is also such a match for the Scriptivist’s handwriting that it would make a forger proud. The spacing and size of the letters is exact. She starts from the breath mark and moves left, unhurried. “There is nothing internally or in the other writings of the Scriptivist to support this,” she says as she draws the ‘khaf sofit,’ its three horns coming above the edge of her parchment to touch the three dots on the scroll. She finishes the phrase and steps back.

“ ‘On a broken stone, the black fires of hell, on earth once more shall unleash the two hundred falling glories of heaven.’ Literally, ‘the falling stars.’ But when it’s ‘two hundred,’ it’s never literal. The ‘two hundred falling stars,’ or ‘fallen stars’—it’s a euphemism sometimes shortened to ‘the two hundred.”

“The celestials,” I say. “The elohim, the old gods.”

“Those who rebelled against Orholam and were cast from His court.”

“Or marched out in defiance of the tyrant, if the heretics have it true,” I say.

“The Braxians?” Felia asks. “The Cracked Landers believe anything that justifies their thirst for power.” She grows quiet. “Like all of us do, perhaps.”

“You mean you and I?” I ask.

For a moment, her eyes are an open door to the soul bleeding within.

I forget, sometimes, that her greater sensitivity means that she suffers more than I even can.

“I don’t want this,” I say. “Do you? Are you perverting this translation so that we can do this to our boys? That’s