Elowyn's Arc

Chapter 4 of 5

The next morning the chamber felt wrong. Elowyn spread her partial map across the stone table, ready to work. Three seams marked the parchment. Seven more waited to be found, and four days remained before the council judged her. But the room had split. Aldric stood on one side, pretending to sort scrolls. Theron sat on the other, his rune pen idle. Since Aldric's feelings had surfaced, neither man would meet her eyes, and without the two of them working as one, she could draw nothing new. Elowyn tried to push through it. "I need you both on the next spell," she said. "Theron feeds the power. Aldric reads the marks. Same as before." Aldric did not look up. "Theron can read them." "I copied them in your hand," Theron said. "I can't match your notation." "Then learn it." Aldric's voice stayed flat. He set down a scroll too hard. Elowyn watched her crystal. It pulsed, catching the sour weight in the room before she could name it. The two had stopped being a team. Her map would die in this silence. She put down her pen. "Stop. Both of you." She looked at Aldric. "You said something true, and now you won't say anything at all. That costs us the map. The map costs me my life." Aldric's jaw tightened. He pulled off his glasses, wiped a smudge of ink from the lens, and did not put them back on. "I don't need you to take it back," Elowyn said. "I need you to work. We can be careful with each other after the council spares me. Not before." Theron shifted. "She's right. Four days." For a long moment Aldric stared at the dark table. Then he reached into his satchel and drew out the water-stained atlas. He flattened it beside her map. "There's a second fragment," he said. "Farther in. I never copied it. The marks are harder." He tapped a page crowded with his small script. "I can teach you both to read my hand. Tonight. Then we build it tomorrow." It was not forgiveness. It was a plan. Elowyn took it. They worked until the candle burned low. Aldric named each mark. Theron copied the notation. Elowyn matched symbol to seam. By the end, Theron could read Aldric's hand well enough to activate a spell without him hovering. The wall between the two men did not fall, but the three of them moved again. Elowyn rolled her map carefully. The seams she had were real. The method now worked without their friendship intact. But Aldric's second fragment ran deeper than anything they had touched, and deeper marks meant older, stronger council magic. To map the full ward in four days, she would need a true spell, not a copy. And the only true spells lived with the elder who held her life in his hand.