"You're not taking Her back yourself?"
Caroline shivered at the thought of running the Hunter of Ghosts through airport security. "Not if I have a choice. Besides, I'm going out to the lake to spend a few days on our island. I need to do some thinking."
Alice considered that for a moment. "Fasting?"
"Yeah. Call it a vision quest if you want to get fancy. The whole roots thing up against whiteskin school and my Ph.D. Maybe Grandmother Loon will feel like offering some advice."
Her aunt spent some more time thinking, staring at the ceiling. "Don't let the House tell you what to do. Or Grandmother Walks, no matter how much you miss her. Concentrate on what Caroline needs. The House can sink its damned claws into Peggy or Ellen if it has to."
"They're back?"
"Off to school today. But yeah, they're back. Official Naskeags, scratched and bruised and hungry and damned proud about surviving a week in the Great North Woods on their own. Not eaten by bears or stomped by moose or vanished in some bog. The old hens said they were impressed."
"I'll remember to tell Mom what you think of her."
If the girls were back, the crisis was officially over. And Ben was alive, for whatever good or ill that meant. Alive and recuperating in the tower and wearing his own Dragon, a selkie at last. Maybe he'd quit being such a dickhead now that he didn't feel he had to prove himself. Didn't see himself as a second-class Morgan.
Both Kate and Alice kept glancing back at the coffee table, at that box. "What you got there?"
Aunt Alice looked at Kate.
Kate looked at the coffee table again and shook her head. "I was hoping you'd tell me. It's a birthday present from Grannie Rowley, twenty years late in coming. You're an ethnologist. Tell me what that ethnics."
Okay, maybe we've made it through to "later."
Caroline squatted in front of the coffee table and studied the box. Old, severely simple, with a purity of functional form she'd associated with Shaker woodworking, its clear oil finish showing worn age-darkened pink wood rather than varnish or lacquer. The sort of work she'd expect Aunt Kate to do for herself.
Ivory or bone latch, ivory or bone hinge, both yellowed with the years or oil. Years, for choice — the fine surface cracks and staining spoke of centuries. No metal showing, but made with metal tools. She didn't know the wood. Slight irregularity to the dovetails and grooves and mortises, faint ripples on the surface from a plane, hand work perfectly fitted. Pre-industrial, anyway.
"European or colonial America, at a guess, looks like eighteenth century or earlier. You want an expert for anything more. I don't get into that stuff. What's inside?"
Kate nodded. "Open it."
Aunt Alice leaned forward. So she hadn't seen the whatever, either.
The lid popped open with a slight hiss, air-tight seal and change in atmospheric pressure, and she caught a whiff of cedar over the onion soup. Red cedar, those didn't grow around here. Caroline lifted the lid and looked inside. A book, a big book, old, with crosses on the wooden cover.
Crosses. Could serve as a title, could serve as a binding on the contents. Keep the book under control. But it didn't feel dangerous. She lifted the book out and felt the power flowing into her hands. She set the book beside the box. Opened the book.
Her breath caught in her throat. "Oh. My. God."
Moving in a trance, she stepped back into the kitchen and fumbled inside her duffel bag for conservator's gloves, barely noticing the shrouded Hunter sleeping next to them. Back in the parlor, her whole being focused on the book.
She turned pages. Sheepskin parchment, twin to the earliest Morgan journals. Colored inks, black inks, gilt leaf with a trace of sizing still on the sheet, old ink formulas, she recognized the signs in the way they'd faded or discolored from her research with source materials on the Southwest natives. Some of those Spanish documents dated back to the 1500s. Illuminated letters, fanciful pictures, style seemed Celtic to her. She'd seen something like it in pictures, reproductions . . .
The Book of Kells.
Not this, but like this. A cousin. This was a cousin in perfect condition.
She studied the title page, studied letters, puzzling out an unfamiliar script. She leafed through, found another chapter head, studied it, let the pure beauty of the work sink into her eyes. She found margin notes here and there, a word crossed through with a single fine stroke so you could still read the original, a different word lettered perfectly in blank space nearby, sometimes with commentary, different inks, different hands. A book that was treasured but used, not locked away untouched, unseen.
She concentrated on breathing. She'd been holding her breath, not wanting to breathe moisture on parchment and ink after all those generations sealed in protection. Precious. Unique. Priceless. The words ran circles in her brain. Another chapter head, another. The end. Four chapters.
She squatted back on her heels, breathing. Just breathing. The Brubeck had played through and the room waited silent around her. Aunt Alice seemed ready to sit and watch all day, but Kate looked like she was about to burst from questions. Caroline turned back to the title page and looked at the sprig of rowan leaves and berries under the lettering. It matched the brooch on Kate's shirt. Matched it perfectly, the same number of twigs, number of leaves, number of berries, like original to copy. The stones of the brooch gave back more light than fell on them.
"Rowan's Daughter. You know the origin of the 'Rowley' name?"
"Alice told me."
"It probably had a root like 'cerdinen' before the priests turned it English to make your ancestors look bad. Something along the lines of 'Cwmcerdinen', 'Rowan-vale.' I don't know much Welsh, but I looked that one up. It's a place in Wales."
Kate shrugged with an impatient grimace. "Been Rowleys since forever, always thought we were English. Not about to change it."
"Just
