“It is a Temple,” Oliver said, taking careful steps toward it. “A... smaller one than is standard. But do you suppose it was intended for the king’s use?”
“Are you sure?” Caspian asked, taking a closer look at the doorway that seemed in fine shape despite the disrepair of the rest of the building. “We have a Temple of Light near our home, and it does not have these markings along the archway. Nor does it have...” He dragged his finger over the carvings on the double doors.
I moved up the small stone staircase to inspect the doors myself. “Yes, Oliver is right. These are almost identical markings to the doors where we’re from.” I traced a dragon holding scrolls in its long talons. “The front door of the Temple and the doors to the library are inscribed just like this. And the stained glass. Well, the modern chapel might not have boasted stained glass such as this, but the old chapel, which the priests use for brewing beer, did.”
“There’s a Temple for the king's use already,” Katrinka added. “Maksim took me to pray there before we arrived that first night. It was why we were late. But it is connected to the castle. Not far from the throne room.”
“Maybe my father, or his father, got tired of walking this far to pray, so they had one built into the castle proper?” I guessed, testing the door handles and finding them unlocked. Although I met resistance almost immediately.
I pushed harder, hoping nothing permanent had grown up behind them. Without my asking, Caspian joined me, pushing with all his might. When neither of us was enough, Oliver and Taelon jumped in too. After several attempts and some manly grunting, we were able to push the door back just far enough to squeeze our bodies through a small gap.
The floor of the chapel was almost completely covered with overgrowth. But there was a natural path toward the center. I stepped toward the tree that took up most of the space, but a hand on my bicep stalled me.
“We’re not sure what manner of wildlife could have made this its home,” Caspian warned. “This place has been clearly untouched by men for some time.”
He had a point. But... I took another step, something deep and unnamable inside urging me forward.
“Tessa,” Taelon spoke up, his voice hoarse with wonder. “Let Caspian and me look around before you go farther. Our lives are less valuable than yours.”
His excuse made me laugh. “The Crown Prince of Soravale? And the second and only other son to Vorestra? No, no. You are both of equal import.” I smiled at them and playfully skipped forward. “Let me look around for you.”
“You will not stop her,” Oliver said. “Once she decides something...”
He went on, but something caught my eye. Fireflies buzzed and blinked all around us. But in the center of the tree was another light. One I had seen two other times now.
A small glow, almost identical to the fireflies but unblinking. And there it seemed to wait for me to notice it. Once my eyes had landed on its subtle brilliance, it moved up and down, reminding me of a finger beckoning me.
And then I saw it, something carved onto the tree. The natural path seemed to lead me directly there, making way for each of my steps.
I pressed my finger into the roughhewn letters and thought of the door to this building and the ones at home in Heprin. There was a dragon carved above. Or something dragon-like. It had clearly been carved by someone who was not a master at his craft, so the image was hard to make out.
And below the long talons stretched out in jagged lines were three sets of initials: TF + RP + GA.
The unnatural light moved down, bringing my gaze to a new set of carved words. These were done with a steadier, more skilled hand. “The old way is the true way.”
I bent down to study the difference. I didn’t know how I knew, maybe by the color of the bark or some buried instinct I didn’t know I possessed, but I knew the initials were much older than the words.
The initials were cruder, awkward. Maybe carved by a child. Or children? And the words were... elegant. Meant to inscribe purpose and put meaning to the initials. If that was what they were. Maybe they meant something altogether different.
“What have you found?” Taelon asked over my shoulder. But then he read it out loud anyway: “TF plus RP plus GA. The old way is the true way.”
“We are not the first to find your garden getaway,” Caspian mused, sounding smug. “I don’t think we want to ask questions about the three sets of initials.”
“It is nothing untoward,” Katrinka scolded, sounding sure of yourself. “Two of the sets are clearly our uncle, Tyrn Finnick. And our mother, Gwynlynn Allisand.”
“And the third?” Taelon asked. “RP?”
I had been stumped by all of them, so I had no guess. Neither did Katrinka. But I had questions. “It is not very well done,” I explained, although why I felt so desperate to remove my mother’s name from the list, I had no idea. “I would have guessed a child carved the initials and the dragon. Our mother did not live at the castle when she was a child; if she had, her initials would have been GF, not GA.”
And she had not harbored much love for Tyrn when she had been alive. Although I knew they had been close as children. But she had been disappointed and sometimes embarrassed by him as an adult. I remembered that clearly.
“Besides,” I added. “If our mother had come all this way to carve initials into the tree, wouldn’t she have done our father’s? Why would she carve her brother’s alongside her married initials?”
Caspian crowded near in order to inspect the carvings himself. “That is not a dragon,” he said decisively. “I believe it’s a bird. A crow perhaps.”
Dread spiraled through me, and suddenly, I could not think of the initials on the tree without thinking of the assassins Katrinka had mentioned earlier.
Oliver spun around from where he’d been inspecting the stained glass along the wall. “I would wager it’s a raven.”
