terrible swipe. Since her death, no animals had disturbed her body: there were no bears or coyotes or ravens or other carrion feeders in Ezra’s Wood, but the worms were well into their work.
Sister Ariel looked away, allowing herself a moment to be a woman confronting an acquaintance’s mutilated body. She breathed slowly, glad that Jessie’s body was as far away as it was. She’d been this close for days, and she’d never even smelled decay. Was that a trick of the wind, or magic?
The plaque had been clutched in Sister Jessie’s hands.
Sister Ariel carefully walled up all the emotions she felt and set them aside. She would examine them later, allow herself tears if tears must come. For now, she might be in danger. She looked at the plaque. It was too far away to tell what symbols if any were on its surface, but there was something about it that chilled her to the bone.
The square plaque had hooks embedded in the rope. They looked as if they had formed when the lasso had landed to help her pull it out.
She pulled the plaque close to the ward but kept it on the far side. There was no telling what pulling something that might be magical through the barrier would do. The script was Gamitic, but Ariel found she remembered it surprisingly well.
“If this is the fourth day, take your time. If it’s the seventh, pull this through the ward now,” the script said.
The runes went on, but Ariel stopped and scowled. It wasn’t at all the sort of thing someone would usually write on a plaque. She wondered to whom the words could possibly have been addressed. Perhaps this plaque had been part of some ancient test? A rite of passage for mages? How had Sister Jessie interpreted it? Why had she thought it was so important?
She read on: “Days at the ward, Horse Face. You’re a lousy throw, by the way.”
Ariel dropped the rope from nerveless fingers. She’d been called Horse Face when she was a tyro. She tried to translate the words another way, but the Gamitic runes made it clear that it was a personal name, a specific insult, not generic.
Looking at the way the plaque had caught on the rope now, she was suddenly sure that it had grabbed the rope. As if it was sentient. The hooks weren’t equally placed on opposite sides of the plaque. Instead, it was as if they had grown in response to the lasso’s touch.
The plaque glowed and Sister Ariel stumbled backward in fright.
It was a mistake. Her foot caught in a loop of the rope and as she fell, she yanked the plaque through the ward.
She scrambled to her feet as quickly as her fat limbs would lift her. The plaque was no longer glowing. She picked it up.
“Prophecy,” it said, the Gamitic runes dissolving into common as she touched the plaque. “Not sentience.”
She swallowed, not sure she believed it. The script continued to appear before her, as if written by an invisible quill. “If this is the seventh day, look two stadia south.”
Stadia? Perhaps units of measure didn’t translate. How far was two stadia? Three hundred paces? Four hundred?
Fear paralyzed Sister Ariel. She’d never been the type for adventures. She was a scholar, and a damned good one. She was one of the more powerful sisters, but she didn’t like charging into things she didn’t understand. She turned the plaque over.
“Wards in trees,” Jessie al’Gwaydin had written in a panicked hand. “Don’t trust him.”
Oh, perfect.
Sister Ariel was rooted to the ground. The words Sister Jessie had written could only have been written with magic. Surely Sister Jessie wouldn’t have used magic inside the wood. It would have been suicide.
She is dead.
It could all be a trap. The plaque might have triggered something as it was pulled through the ward. There might be a trap in the trees to the south where the plaque was trying to get her to go. Maybe she should go write down everything, ignore the trap, play by her own rules.
But Sister Ariel didn’t go back to Torras Bend to write in her journal. She’d studied the ward to the south. If there had been a trap, she’d already triggered it.
There was a time and a place for haste. Apparently, that was now and here.
37
So you’re kind of a pain in the ass. Why’d Kylar take you in?” Vi asked.
They’d been on the trail for a week, and if Uly wasn’t