Darcy blinked.
Harrowe’s voice did not rise, but it hardened. “His Majesty were raised on farming and ledgers. He reads land the way other men read faces. When the revision came before him in ’69, it weren’t madness moved him. It was memory.”
He tapped the margin, the middle date.1662
“Charles II had renewed the licence after the Restoration—too many charters lost, too many boundaries muddled in the wars. Said records were to be kept close. James granted the first leave for the sake of order. Charles renewed it for the sake of stability. And George kept it for the sake of England.”
Darcy said nothing.
Harrowe leaned back slightly. “A king as reads history proper knows what follows when keepings fail.”
He looked directly at Darcy. “His Majesty weren’t mad when he signed it. He was afraid.”
Darcy sighed. “Very well, Harrowe. You have offered your bona fides. Now… what else do you have?”
Harrowe set the book down with care and reached again into the satchel, this time drawing out a sheaf of folded papers—pamphlets by the look of them, their edges brittle, the print uneven with age. He laid them beside the volume already open on Darcy’s desk and began turning pages without comment, aligning passages with an instinct born of long familiarity.
“Listen to this,” he said. “Not the verse—ignore the verse. That’s there to hide it from the ignorant so it’d be kept in print.”
He tapped a line with one blunt finger.
When keeping fails and men give o’er,
The ground shall take the cry;
Not soft nor mild, but rent and torn,
Till breach be made reply.
Darcy’s gaze tracked the words.
Harrowe flipped the page of the Liber and found the corresponding passage, written in a firmer, more deliberate hand.
When the keeping faileth,
flame shall rise before,
and waters answer in their turn;
the earth shall tremble betwixt them both
till breach be bound, or all shall burn.
Harrowe exhaled once. “It’s the same warning. Two tellings of it, that’s all. This weren’t speculation. They expected it.”
Darcy closed his eyes briefly. The pressure beneath his ribs pulsed in dull agreement.
“It was always predicted,” Harrowe went on, pacing now, agitation bleeding through his earlier restraint. “Not collapse—fracture. A tearing. A refusal to hold. But I believed”—he shook his head—“weallbelieved it would take generations. Centuries, even.”
He stopped and looked at Darcy again. “‘Least, I thought that until two-three months ago. Now, it is happening faster. So fast that one might believe the Lady herself had come to ruin. Or very near it.”
Darcy’s head came up sharply.
“Not ruined,” Harrowe corrected at once, lifting a hand. “Not yet. If she were gone, the ground would show it plain. Worse than this. This is—” He hesitated. “—the edge of it.”
Darcy swallowed and kneaded the palm of his right hand, for it had suddenly shot through with a fresh, stabbing ache.
Harrowe leaned forward, both hands braced on the desk. “You must tell me where she is.”
