“Oh, I doubt that,” the queen said quickly. “He is too much a
scholar.”
“And another thing,” Holly said, with great indignation. “Dame Cecily
Thorpe, who was one of my acolytes before she decided to train for knighthood,
told me that some of the knights, who are speculating wildly over nothing but
rumor at this point, are planning to search Calluna’s cave for the mysterious
object of power. They can’t just go barging through the sacred shrine, wading
down the water, and shining headlamps on everything. The idea is outrageous.
First they bury the cave and forget it completely; now they want to excavate
it.” She kicked at the water angrily, sent it splashing, dowsing candles in
its wake. She blinked as the queen wiped her face. “I beg your pardon, Your
Majesty. I’m frothing, and it’s all Sylvester Skelton’s fault.”
Perdita got up to relight the candles, tipping flames to smoking wicks along
the pool. “We have to find an earlier version of Calluna’s tale,” she said.
“Lord Skelton may be obsessed by his version, but he’s not at all devious.
If we could prove the cup belongs to Calluna, he could be persuaded out of his
certainty.”
“Or we could just find the cup,” the queen said.
Perdita, lighting a final wick, found the queen’s eyes on her above the
flame. She was looking, her daughter realized, for a reason.
“We,” she echoed. “You mean me.”
“Why not? Nothing in the stars says that only knights should go on this
quest. People are used to seeing you in Calluna’s cave. Nobody would question
your presence there. You could look for the artifact anytime you want.
Tomorrow morning. Before the cave opens to the public.”
Mystes Halliwell lifted her feet, splashed again with excitement. “Yes. That
’s the perfect idea, Your Majesty.”
“I’ve been trained to give tours of the cave,” Perdita reminded them. “I’
ve seen all the images, and I know what the scholars say about them.”
“Scholars,” Morrig said, stirring the water with her fingertips. “Always
getting us into trouble, putting up walls, naming things. You must look beyond
those walls, Perdita. Beyond the designated path. Trespass into the past.”
Perdita sat down again. She contemplated the reflection of the goddess in the
water, and the wild, wide-eyed face in the pool seemed to come alive, her
expressions changing at every flare of candle fire, every riffle of water.
“If the artifact is Calluna’s, it wouldn’t be metal,” she mused. “There
would not be a jewel on it. A river stone, maybe, hollowed to hold water. A
wooden bowl. A clay cup. She might have carried the water in a leaf.” She
paused, thinking again, while the walls of the cave formed in her mind, images
covering them, symbols, the silent language of tales telling and retelling
themselves. “I’ve never looked at the images in the context of that story.
That gesture of the goddess. What would she have used to carry water to a
dying god?” She looked up, aware of but hardly seeing the watching faces of
women, flickering with light and shadow, like the goddess’s reflection. “If
anyone asks, I’ll say that I’m studying the cave as a form of worship. If I
don’t find anything, I’ll try Sylvester’s library again.”
“Be careful around Sylvester,” the mystes warned. “He reads minds.”
“He won’t pay any attention,” the queen said dryly, “if it’s only about
Calluna.”
—
Perdita drove to Calluna’s cave early the next morning. She brought a set of
keys to the outer and inner doors, and a pair of bodyguards, who stationed
themselves at the cave entrance, one watching the stairs, the other the
steamy, murmuring pool. Nobody else was there at that hour. The constant
darkness edging the frail lights around the pool made true time vanish; it
might have been any hour of any lost century Perdita stepped into as she
followed the water flowing away from the pool. She had turned on every light;
most illumined the visitors’ path along the narrow river and the images
carved and painted on the walls. Those—handprints, trees, and flowers
dedicated to the goddess, toads, dragonflies, deer, strange, huge-eyed faces—
she knew well; they were in every souvenir guidebook.
What she did not know so well lay in the dark beyond the path, beyond the
reach of light.