Count Jonty Um must have reached Zertrum by now. Was the mountain aflame? Had he learned the identity of the thief? Was he on his way back to them? Was he safe?
All four walls were lined with closed cabinets and open shelves, which held what Elodie supposed were relics of Lahnt and brunka history. The Replica could be hidden in a cabinet or even on an open shelf, concealed behind something larger. A person could spend days—a week!—combing through everything. And then there were the chambers of relics High Brunka Marya had pointed out and probably others besides. Lambs and calves! A legion of bees would be needed to search everywhere in time.
Two doors and an archway opened off the chamber: the big outside entry door in the west wall; an archway far to the left of it in the north wall; and a small door on the right side of the east wall, the door the high brunka had taken her through, which led to her distant chamber.
Johan-bee and two more bees stirred up embers in the three fireplaces and added logs until crackling and spitting spiked the quiet.
In the center of the hall, High Brunka Marya spoke softly to a knot of older bees—those, Elodie supposed, who’d been with her for at least seven years, as IT had required. She heard muffled exclamations and cries of distress. When the high brunka finished, they left the hall in pairs, except for the bee who seemed oldest. Elodie deduced the pairs were off to begin the search and perhaps to wake the guests. On their way, a bee detoured to Johan-bee and jogged his arm so that his poker clattered on the hearthstone. Johan-bee looked up, flushing, but said nothing.
They all plague him, Elodie thought.
The oldest bee—a big man with a big head, a bloodshot nose, and a white beard trimmed straight across the bottom—shuffled to the benches that had been placed by the youngest bee. His jowls jiggled as he sat and placed his elbows on his knees, his chin in his hands, facing into the great hall, watching everyone intently.
Elodie turned to investigate the shelf nearest her, which was on the south wall. She hoped that luck might trump the arduous work of deducing, inducing, and using her common sense. Let the Replica be here!
But the shelf merely held a forest of vials made of clay and glass, none big enough to contain the Replica or to conceal it from view. The shelf below was filled with chained books, chained so they could be read but not taken away. Elodie pulled one out and proved to herself that the Replica wasn’t behind it. There! She’d searched two shelves—out of hundreds—and behind one book—out of dozens.
“Son, there will be an excellent reason.” The voice was soft-spoken, educated, the t crisply pronounced, the r’s solid. “High Brunka Marya wouldn’t have roused us for anything insignificant.”
Still holding the book, Elodie twisted to see. Only a few yards to her left, an elderly man and a boy entered the great hall. The man held the boy’s hand and advanced with small steps, as if he were walking in a slow procession.
Son? The man was old enough to be the boy’s grandfather.
Was this “poor” Master Robbie? Elodie opened her book and watched the two while mansioning absorption in the volume. Both wore wooden mourning beads over their cloaks. Did the beads make them both “poor”?
Almost everything about the man was just so, and nothing suggested he’d been surprised from sleep: short gray beard and mustache, neatly clipped; small ears; thin nose onto which round spectacles were clamped. He wore a sober dark-blue cloak of brushed wool edged with a border of rabbit fur, a wealthy costume. Only his hat—wealthy also, orange with a bright-green tassel—veered, in Elodie’s opinion, from just so to too much.
Could he be the thief? He seemed not to need money. If he was the thief, the just-so in him meant he would make a careful, thorough job of it.
How could a thief look so genial? He smiled as if he’d been awakened from happy dreams.
The boy’s cloak, fine brushed wool also, his in moss green, lacked only a fur trim. His shoes, with the old-style round toes that were still customary in Lahnt, were so new they hardly had creases.
Below his neck, he was a just-so boy. But his unguarded face gave too much away, and its forlorn look made Elodie’s breath catch.
An artist could have sketched his portrait almost entirely in straight lines: the head a triangle ending in a pointed chin, a smaller triangle for his nose, a horizontal slash for his unsmiling mouth, two angled strokes for the shadows under his cheeks, roof peaks for his eyebrows, curved lines only for his dark-blue, red-rimmed eyes and for the dot of pink that bloomed at the tip of his nose, probably caused by weeping.
Elodie bent her head over her book, not wanting to seem to pry, but the just-so man noticed her. “Look, Robbie, someone for you to play with. Isn’t that lucky?”
He was Master Robbie!
To her surprise the boy came to her and whispered, “It’s gone. Am I right?”