“That was strange,” Jacinda said.
“Yes, it was,” Foulk replied, but he knew his friend couldn’t possibly understand just how strange it was. After all, if there was as much ferly in this garden as it had seemed, surely the size of the meteorites, troublesome though it might have been, wouldn’t have stopped Morvengarde from acquiring them.
Then, “How have you been?” Jacinda asked. And Foulk forgot all about Deacon and Morvengarde and ferly and worden and all of it. They talked straight through until sunset, and when he left for home, Jacinda kissed his cheek, and the world rewrote itself, with new patterns bursting into existence everywhere he looked.
At some point between the time that Foulk left and the time her mother came out to call her in for supper, Jacinda disappeared.
Late that night, her parents came knocking on Foulk’s door. They had seen the two of them talking in the garden and had hoped the boy might know where she’d gone. And even as he shook his head no, an idea started to take shape in Foulk’s mind, and he began to feel sick to his stomach. Because there was a pattern here, impossible not to see, and he couldn’t believe he’d missed it before.
When Deacon had looked at the garden, she’d agreed that there was a powerful source of ferly there. You are absolutely right, she’d said. Well done. But Deacon had not seemed particularly interested in the meteorites.
Morvengarde, when he’d given Foulk the loupe, had told him to watch out for both relics and reliquaries—people who were living vessels of weyward lumination. And Foulk understood that it could be very, very difficult to tell what the swirling fog that was ferly was actually attached to. When he had looked into the garden and seen it, he’d assumed it had been emanating from one or more of the meteorites. But Jacinda had been in there too, both times, working among the rocks.
What if she had been the source? What if she was a living reliquary?
Morvengarde, when he’d given Foulk his assignment, had said he offered reliquaries a good price to deed their mortal remains to him after they died. But clearly no one had had any sort of conversation with Jacinda’s parents about their sixteen-year-old daughter’s funerary arrangements. Foulk shuddered. The very thought of that conversation was horrifying to him—surely it would’ve been horrifying to her parents as well.
Was it possible Seleucia Deacon and the man in the smoked spectacles had just . . . had just taken her?
The next day, when Jacinda didn’t turn up, Foulk went looking for Deacon and her bodyguard. No one in town had seen them. It was as if he had imagined them both.
He wrote to Morvengarde. The following week, he received a reply: Deacon returned to HQ. Your assessment mistaken. Meteorites purely quotidian. We look forward to next find. M.
Quotidian meant normal. Mundane. But something in that garden had not been quotidian. He wrote back again, and this time he asked the question he needed answered, point-blank: Did she take Jacinda?
The reply was brutally short and equally evasive: Don’t be ridiculous.
Jacinda never turned up again.
A year later, Foulk left home. No one said it, but he couldn’t miss the clues: the whole town thought he’d had something to do with Jacinda’s disappearance. After all, he’d brought the strangers to her garden, and everyone knew there had been strangers, because he’d gone around the next day looking for them. He’d been the last person to speak to her before she’d vanished. His heart hurt, and he couldn’t take the suspicion. He packed a bag and Morvengarde’s loupe, and he took to the roads.
He hadn’t contacted the merchant again, but it wasn’t long before Deacon and Morvengarde tracked him down. Of course, they waited until the worst possible time, when Foulk had run out of money, gotten himself into five kinds of trouble, and could see that he was about to come to a sticky end. Seleucia Deacon swooped in with her big, silent bodyguard and rescued him. She didn’t ask him to commit to working for the company, but she left the door open. And though he managed to resist it for years, inevitably, just before the American War Between the States broke out, Foulk wound up walking through that door. He tucked Morvengarde’s loupe firmly into his eye socket and went in search of ferly and worden, wandering all the trails of the Roaming World.
Over time, Foulk became one of Deacon and Morvengarde’s most profitable chapmen. And eventually, Morvengarde entrusted him with a unique and very special charge. You see, he turned out to have a certain touch of ferly himself: whether he’d been born with it or whether it was a matter of his constant daily interactions with it, the boy—now a young man—never knew. But along with his gift for recognizing systems, he turned out to also have a gift for spotting patterns and systems in time.
Time, of course, is as complicated as ferly. More, even. It can move in what seems like a line, can seem to be measurable by the predictable cascade of sand through glass, but that’s mere illusion. The ability to see beyond the illusion to the truth of it is vanishingly rare, but Foulk could do it. It was a glorious challenge, like the hunt for the obscure hidden pattern that he now understood was the existence of the Roaming World. He had solved that problem, and so he turned himself to the question of time. And his employers bestowed upon him a device that helped him simplify the workings—the reckonings—it took to really see
