But in that instant before I spoke, some tiny fragment of memory was dislodged.
The camp.
The big tent. The big tables under it. The abacus. The pencils. The stakes.
If we’d kept looking, there’d have been metal screens set in shallow wooden boxes too.
“Damn me,” I muttered. “Of course.”
“Boss?”
“Of course what, Mr. Markhat?”
“Lady Werewilk. I assume your House contains a library?”
Lady Werewilk frowned. “Of course. It’s in my suite of rooms.”
“And does this library contain a great number of old books which detail the early years of the House and the grounds?”
“Naturally.”
“I need to be in that library, Lady. Right now.”
“First you’ll tell me why.”
“It’s not your House they’re after. It never was. But there’s something on your land. Buried, probably. That’s what they’ve been looking for. And they’ve been using a map so old the land itself has changed.”
“All that, from looking at the empty camp?”
“I saw a camp just like it, once. Right after the War. Royal archeologists. They were excavating an old Elvish burial site the Trolls had found. They were using stakes to mark out the crypts and the catacombs. An abacus to help with the math. A big tent to bring in loads of dirt and sift through every shovel-full by pouring it through wire grates. Sorcerers all over the place to find old spells and handle the items they dug up.”
“An Elvish burial complex? Here? On my lands? Nonsense.”
“I didn’t say it was Elvish. But I need to have a look at your library. If there are old maps there, maybe I can take the sketches we made of the stakes you found and figure out where they were looking.”
“But they’ve gone now. The camp is deserted. Surely that means they found what they were looking for.”
I thought about the bony hand they left behind, about Weexil’s’ missing corpse, about the banshee in the trees.
“Maybe. And maybe it means they just found out where to dig. Which means somebody will be back. Maybe somebody worse. We need to figure out what they were looking for, Lady. And where. I’ll sleep a lot better if we can find a big empty hole.”
Lady Werewilk sighed. “Very well. Please come this way. You too, young lady. I assume you can read?”
Gertriss nodded, and off we marched.
Chapter Twelve
Lady Werewilk’s rooms took up the entire second floor of the House. Her bed was the size of a wagon. Both Gertriss and I pretended not to see the toe of a Marlo-sized man’s boot peeking out from under it.
The library was a single square room set into the southwest corner of the House. The windows actually let in light, and there were three big comfy leather chairs and three plain but sturdy reading desks, all arranged to take advantage of the sunlight. There was even a fancy globe of the world mounted in a shiny brass apparatus that allowed it to spin at the touch of a finger.
The globe was pre-War. It still showed human cities and settlements out East. It’s all ghosts and ruins out there now, and even if the Trolls let us move back that way it’ll be decades before anyone dips a toe in the Great Sea again.
The walls were covered in shelves, floor to ceiling, and the shelves were stuffed and crammed with books.
Lady Werewilk paused and considered the books, forefinger to her lips.
“Yes. I believe this series is a good place to start.”
With that, she walked to a shelf, removed half a dozen massive old tomes, and plopped them down on the nearest desk.
I carefully took up the oldest one. The leather used to bind it threatened to flake away into dust before my eyes. I took it to my desk, carefully opened it and began to educate myself concerning the Auspicious Origins and Heroic Deeds of the Mighty House of Werewilk, est. in the Year 453 of the Kingdom of Man.
The light from the windows had faded and died before I closed my last book.
Gertriss was bleary-eyed and yawning. Lady Werewilk had retired an hour ago, citing some pressing House business.
But I’d found what I was looking for.
The stakes had been laid out right in the bed of a creek that once cut right through the Werewilk estate. The creek was gone now, and had been for a century, sipped empty by a series of irrigation canals north of here. The tiny trickle that remained fed into the cornfield and never emerged.
But it had been mapped, in those first books. And there was no mistaking it. The surveyors had even marked the creek’s four small tributaries, one of which ran through the very spot where Skin would one day tend his precious bees.
The creek had meandered on, heading South, ending or joining a bigger one somewhere well beyond the concerns of any ancient Werewilk.
What Lady Werewilk’s forebears had mapped was intriguing.
There was the creek. There was the Old Road. There was an old quarry, abandoned even before the first Werewilk laid claim to the oaks.
And there was something else, a place mentioned only twice in the fifteen old tomes we’d read.
They’d just called it the Faery Ring. Called it that, and then issued some pretty stern warnings about “Disturbing, Molesting, or otherwise visiting or Trespassing on this ancient and malevolent Site.”
Literal shivers had run up my spine when I read those faded old words.
Instantly, I wondered who else had read them. During the War, as one old estate after another fell to the Trolls, the Regent made it law that scribes could come in and copy any private library, belonging to anyone, at the whim of the local governor. Even after the War, the law stood, the intent being to prevent unique historic treasures from being eaten by termites. I’d heard getting scribes in to some private libraries required troops and scuffling.
I asked, keeping my tone casual, if the Regency had ever copied the Werewilk books.
“I told them library was destroyed in a house fire a century ago,” Lady Werewilk replied. “The bastards,” she added.
I grinned. The Faery Ring was right on the creek the mystery surveyors were mapping. In fact, I was nearly ready to bet my good boots that the Faery Ring was what they’d been looking for all the time.
Which meant that whatever once lay within that Ring might be more than just a local legend. Someone else out there had a map, a map that hadn’t been drawn by a Werewilk. Even Weexil had never dared Lady Werewilk’s rooms-of that she was sure.
The light had nearly failed. Lady Werewilk took her leave, citing the need to oversee the preparation of the evening meal. I suspected she was instead dying to know whether Marlo had actually taken Burris and headed for Rannit, despite her directives to the contrary.
I figured he’d done just that. I pondered that dark, narrow path beneath those shadowed boughs and I wished them both well.
Gertriss was seated close beside me. She’d been marking our maps with the stake locations and the route of the old creek.
She stabbed her pencil down in the center of the Faery Ring she’d just sketched.
“I don’t think there’s enough daylight left to head out today.”
“We won’t be heading out at all, Miss. Not there, anyway.”
