“You told me you didn’t know if it was a navigation tool,” Aldwin said. “That’s different from knowing it isn’t.”
“What did it feel like?” I asked. “When you were standing here.”
“Cold,” Aldwin said. “And quiet. Just pages under my hands. Ordinary.”
Ordinary. The word unsettled me more than it should have.
I thought about the morning the psalter had glowed in the archive. The warmth. The pull. The sense of something vast pressing against the edge of my consciousness. I thought about the way the manuscript had reacted to me before, as though some part of it recognized me.
“It called me because of how I was with it,” I said slowly. “Eight years of caring for objects like this one. When I touched it, I wasn’t trying to use it. I was reading it. Attending to it.”
I thought for a moment. “You came here with an agenda.”
He shook his head. “I came here with a need.”
“Yes,” I said. “But the psalter, if it works the way I think it might work, doesn’t respond to need. It responds to…” I searched for the word. “Openness. Attention without demand.”
Aldwin looked at me with the expression of a man who was about to say prove it.
I stepped to the lectern, didn’t think about backward or forward or what I wanted the psalter to do. I just looked at it the way I’d looked at manuscripts my whole career, with the patient attention of someone who understood that old things revealed themselves on their own schedule, not yours as I placed my hand lightly against the manuscript.
Nothing happened. There was no warmth. No pulse beneath the vellum and no shimmer of gold light. Just cool parchment beneath my palm and the faint smell of candle wax drifting through the chapel. The silence settled slowly around us.
Aldwin watched my face carefully. “Well?” he asked.
I swallowed. “I don’t know.”
The psalter had once dragged me through eight hundred years of history with impossible violence. It had glowed in my presence. I had felt it react to me. Now it sat motionless beneath my hand like nothing more than an old book.
And the sudden possibility that I might never go home again hit me hard enough to make breathing briefly difficult as my left knee almost gave way.
Aldwin exhaled slowly. “So it will not answer me.”
I looked down at the silent manuscript. I wasn’t sure that was the problem.
“Could you teach me? How you were with it?”
I looked at him. The tiredness in his face. The stripped-back grief I’d seen for just a moment when he turned from the manuscript.
“Aldwin,” I said carefully. “What happened fifteen years ago?”
He didn’t answer right away. I waited, which I’d learned was the only way to get him to say something he didn’t want to say.
“My father chose the wrong allies,” he said at last. “In a border dispute. The consequences took three years to fully damage us, but the damage was significant. We lost land, standing. We lost…”
He stopped.
“A member of the family. Not to violence. To the cascading effects of a decision made in ignorance that didn’t have to be made in ignorance.”
“Who?” I asked.
“My wife,” Aldwin said. “My first wife. She died in the third winter after the dispute. Not from violence. From the poverty that followed the lost land. From the cold, and poor food, and a castle that couldn’t be properly maintained.”
He said it plainly, like reporting troop movements. “If my father had known which alliance to choose, if someone had told him, she might have lived.”
I was quiet as I listened to him.
“She was twenty-three,” Aldwin said.
