She wove her fingers into his hair and kissed him back, a soft taunting that made his blood simmer. But he could see how distracted she was. He could feel it in her body, the same tension that was coiling in him.
In a few hours, she would have her own private meal with Moray. In a few hours, she would watch her brother either bleed out on the sand or slay Jack’s father.
This day was already marked with pain and conflicting emotions, and it was only midmorning.
“I’ll return soon,” she said, her fingers drifting from his hair. Jack finally relinquished her. “Lock the door behind me, Bard.”
He trailed her, nodding. “Tell Kae I said hello.”
“I will,” Adaira said as she stepped over the threshold. She didn’t look back as she strode down the corridor, but she had never been one to slow her momentum by glancing behind.
Jack watched until she disappeared around a corner. He bolted the door and sat at the desk.
Where to begin?
He reached for Joan’s broken book, curious to look over what each half held. Skimming through the first half, he recognized some of the lore within it. When he leafed through the second half, though, he encountered stories of the spirits that he had never been taught. Stories and songs that had roots in the west.
And then, perhaps strangest of all, he came upon a note, in the middle of a story:
Iagan frightens me.
I cannot trust his music anymore, or his words.
Something terrible and nameless shines in his eyes when he plays and sings.
Jack paused, staring at Joan’s words. Was this note the reason why the book had been torn in two? Was someone afraid of Joan’s inner worries being shared with others?
Disquieted, he gently put the two halves of the book aside and began to read through Iagan’s composition. The deeper he ventured into the ballads, the stronger the fire burned again in the hearth and on the candlewicks, as if Ash was renewed by Jack’s attention.
A polite knock on the door interrupted his studies. It was already lunchtime, the hours having slipped through Jack’s hands like water. Two attendants waited in the corridor, one bearing a lunch tray of bread and soup, the other a misshapen bundle that hid Jack’s harp and truth blade.
Jack sighed at being reunited with his instrument and dirk. He took a long moment to inspect them, tracing the hilt and the strings with his fingertips. Both were in good condition despite his fears; he had been worried that Rab would smash the harp and destroy the dirk. That both would be lost to him.
Jack forced himself to eat a few bites of lunch before returning to his studies.
He found ballads for all four elements. The song for Ash was the worst, the notes and words twisted into shackles and shame intended to bring the fire low. The song demanded pieces of Ash’s crown, the cloak of his power, the gleam of his scepter. Then came the ballads for the sea, for the earth, for the air. These songs weren’t as harsh as the one for the fire spirits, but they were built on restrictions and limitations, the words woven through with control and measurements, just as the musical notes were.
Iagan’s ballads were like cages. Like a prison.
Jack’s breath caught when he saw the full span of the notes, how they built upon each other. The four ballads fit together to create a hierarchy in the spirits’ realm.
Until this moment, Jack had thought it was Bane who created the hierarchy, for no other reason than to keep certain spirits low and beneath him. To seal their mouths, silencing their voices. Controlling what they could do and say, and how much power they wielded.
But it hadn’t been inspired by Bane at all.
The hierarchy had been made by Iagan’s music.
Torin made a second attempt.
He still had a handful of Orenna flowers and two white blossoms left, as well as a chain from Whin’s crown. He had crushed another batch together on the rock, but his greatest hurdle was now trying to discover what “fire” the riddle required. If it wasn’t flames, then what was it?
“I suppose you can offer me no guidance,” he drolly said to Hap as the two of them walked the hills, Torin aimlessly, Hap deliberately, as if the spirit feared his one and only mortal assistance might fall into a bog if he didn’t shepherd him.
“Only so much can pass from my mouth,” Hap whispered, as if a great power was hindering him. “But perhaps it might help to think of it this way: things need balance in the mortal world, don’t they? The same can be said here, in our realm. Or . . . maybe not balance, but complements and . . . contrasts.”
Torin frowned. He had no inkling what Hap was trying to express. And roaming the hills did nothing for his thinking either.
He decided to go to Sloane, a place he had been avoiding for fear of seeing Sidra. If Torin beheld her, he thought he might go mad. He might find himself unable to leave her side, unable to think critically about the riddle. And yet he needed Sidra’s knowledge again to move forward.
“Would you have chosen my wife to assist you here if she hadn’t been infected?” Torin asked Hap, who remained by his side, deep into the winding city streets.
Hap bit his lip before saying, “Yes.”
Torin snorted. “I knew it.”
“Sidra’s faith in us is profound. She gives us strength, as we give her ours.”
“And don’t forget to add your blight. You gave her that as well.”
Hap came to a halt. Torin took a few more steps before he felt shame, scalding the back of his throat. He paused, glancing at the hill spirit, who suddenly looked like he might crumble.
“The wind,” Hap said, the grass withering in his hair. “It was the wind. He blew the fruit to her. He put it in her path, and I . . . I couldn’t do anything about it.”
Torin opened his mouth, but Hap had gone, turning into the moss that rested between cobblestones.
Alone and full of bitterness, Torin continued to the castle.
When he approached Sidra’s chambers, he hesitated. He longed to see her, and he knew such longings were slowly undoing him, breath by breath. And yet he couldn’t bear watching the blight creep across her skin.
Daring to pass through the door, Torin was relieved to find the room empty. He approached her desk, where the tomes of her healing records sat. It took a few tries before the book would permit him to touch its pages, but soon Torin was leafing through it, examining Sidra’s entries, as well as the notes her grandmother had recorded before her.
If three of the riddle ingredients were plants, should there be a fourth one? An even number, reminiscent of the four points on a compass? The four powers of the wind? The four elements of the spirits? Thinking that perhaps the blood or salt or fire in the riddle was supposed to come from another flower, Torin searched the pages for it.
Balance, complements, contrast.
He mulled over Hap’s cryptic words, but he still couldn’t find meaning in them.