Toran glanced over to Nes. She’d lifted her head to stare at the castle. With the color leaching from her cheeks and her lips pursed tight, she looked like she might be sick.
Two strokes and the boat slid around an outcropping of rocks. There, tucked against the shadowed, smooth pane of stone, were the symbols, carved straight into the rock.
He leaned forward, his fingers gripping the edge of the rowboat. No, that was wrong. The markings hadn’t been carved. They’d been burned. Deep gouges stained black with the soot of harsh flames. But it was impossible to burn stone in such a manner.
Impossible without magic.
He understood why Genna wanted to bring them here before the tide rose. It was low tide now, and already the water lapped at the bottom of the symbols. At high tide they’d be completely obscured.
He stole his gaze back from the symbols, glancing at Genna just long enough to ask, “Can you read it?”
Because these weren’t like the isolated symbols they’d found in the Drowning Square or the Holy Triad. These were in rows. With spaces between them. They weren’t just symbols. They were words.
“It’s a message.”
Toran jumped. It was as if Nes had plucked the statement right from his brain. She was leaning over the side of the boat, her neck stretched thin as she strained to get closer to the stone. It seemed her curiosity had overtaken any fear.
He watched her, suddenly unable to look away. “From the Witch?”
Both Nes and Genna shook their heads.
“No one knows for sure who—or what—wrote it,” Genna toldhim. “The Brotherhood has been trying to decipher the language since it was discovered decades ago.”
Language.
He stared at the charred rock, at the precise carvings, at their depth and sheer size. A single line was longer than the length of his entire body.
“The monastery knows about this?” Toran asked. “Does the King?”
Genna pulled the oars inside so the boat floated a little ways from the wall. “I’m sure the King knows. But it’s the monastery that’s been working to learn its meaning. My father’s spent years of his life trying to translate it. Ever since I was little, he’s been more devoted to the Goddess and this message than he has his own family.”
Toran knew Genna’s father was a monk in the Brotherhood. To be inducted was one of the highest honors Orlonea had to offer. Brothers in the National Monastery were tasked with ensuring the people’s devotion to the almighty Goddess, Nephele; keeping what little written scripture they had left intact; and recording Orlonea’s history.
They weren’t just monks. They were scholars of the highest caliber. The respect held for them was tantamount only to that for the royal family and, he supposed, himself. But the bitterness in Genna’s voice as she spoke of her father was impossible to miss.
“Years?”
Genna nodded. “And other Brothers have spent decades before him, but they’d only been able to pick up bits and pieces. Never the pattern of the language.”
He turned back to the symbols. They weren’t going to help him. This message—whatever it said—predated the Witch they were hunting now.
“Switch seats with me?” He directed his question at Genna, but his eyes had returned to Nes. She didn’t seem to notice as he and Genna kept the boat even and swapped places. He wondered if she’d forgotten they were there—if she’d forgotten where she was.
Nes, who’d been terrified of getting in the rowboat, now seemedpoised to jump out of it. She had a knee resting on the edge, hands on either side, the majority of her weight suspended over open water.
She looked like a tree. Majestic and curious and thoroughly incapable of ceasing her growth. Her lips moved as she mumbled to herself the same way the leaves on trees brushed and whispered to one another.
“And you?” he asked Genna. If her boastings were true, her expertise on languages ran deeper than any scholar of the last century. “How long did it take you to decipher its meaning?”
Beside him, Genna grinned, the wide stretch of her lips radiating self-satisfaction.
But on his other side, Nes turned her head. Their eyes met. In hers he saw age-old fears. Rings in her irises like the rings of years inside a tree trunk.
“Three years,” Genna said. “It says, ‘I am still here. You cannot kill me.’ ”
Toran didn’t have time to process the translation before Nes’s knee slipped and the boat capsized, dumping them all into the ocean.
19
