Puzzled, I got up from the table and went to the door. I turned the knob and cracked it open, poking my head inside. The room was windowless, being made up of the last usable space under the hob’s overhang, and the ceiling sloped down almost to the floor. But the room wasn’t pitch-dark, as I’d have expected. It was filled with a blue-white glow, reflected in clear beads dangling like strings of gems. I blinked a few times, trying to make sense of what I was seeing.
“Arachnocampa luminosa,” my mother said over my shoulder. “Fungus gnat larvae.”
Packed along every wall were glass cupboards, as one might store fine pottery in. The cupboards were filled with clusters of glowing points of light, illuminating the eerily beautiful strings of beads hanging down toward the ground. I eased farther through the door to better take in the sight, trying to block the morning light in the kitchen.
“Glowworms,” I said.
“In the Mesa prison,” my mother said behind me, “my closest companions were the rock spiders that lived in my cell. I had ample time to study them, and when I was released, I looked for related species on the talus slopes up in the Stellarange Mountains. They led me, eventually, off the mountaintops and inside the mountains themselves. There are caves there—did you know that? The Range is riddled with them. And they’re not empty. The tunnels in the lower elevations are filled with Arachnocampa. So a few of us formed a research team. I’ve fallen in with geologists.” There was undeniable excitement in her voice as she rattled the skillet over the stove.
“These are mucus?” I asked, tapping the glass near a dozen strands of shining beads.
“Mucus on silken threads.” I heard her take the skillet off the heat and come into the room behind me. She wiped her hands on her trousers and pointed to the larvae, hanging in little hammocks from the ceiling of the cupboard. “Each one makes dozens. Their glows act as lures. Any insect drawn to them—even flying adults of their own species—become tangled in the snares. They ingest the silk to draw up their prey, and then—supper. And, Gemma . . .”
She moved to another cupboard, this one shining brighter than any other. “They change their glow depending on when they last ate. The hungrier they are, the brighter their light.” She took a screened box from the top of the cupboard, filled with a soft ruffling sound. Carefully, she opened the glass door of the cupboard and shook out the box. Out fluttered a cloud of meal moths. She closed the door.
The little brown moths fluttered haphazardly around the glass cupboard, blind. Almost instantly, they began careening into the beads of mucus, the threads swinging as if in a breeze. The effect was immediate. The glowworms’ shining lures began to writhe as they slid from their hammocks and started pulling up their threads.
“I’ve got months of data collected,” my mother said as we watched the larvae draw in their prey. “I’ve got three separate papers drafted. What a presentation this could make to the board of biologists! The Journal of Sciences would be at my feet. I could get grants, funds, research power to conduct further studies. Speleothems, extremophiles, fossils . . . there are a hundred different opportunities represented in those caves. But I refuse to let a whisper of them reach that Prelate of yours.”
I forced my fascination with the insects back to the subject at hand. “What’s Shaula going to do with a bunch of bioluminescent larvae?” I asked.
“It’s not the larvae that worry me. Though, funny enough, they bear a similar resemblance to her own student work.”
I looked up in the dim light. “What work? Shaula was a scientist?”
“She took after our parents just like I did. She was a biologist, only instead of insects, she fell in love with myriapods—particularly a funny little millipede that luminesces. It glows, just like these.” She tapped the glass with her fingernail. “Little creatures of light.”
“She always gave me the impression she didn’t approve of the sciences . . . or at least, me taking them up.”
“She made a hard pivot once she got interested in the Prophecy.” My mother gazed at her glowworms, her fists on her hips. “Funny—she and I do have a few things in common, don’t we? A background in crawling things, and a fascination with the Prophecy. Only I get thrown in prison, while her word gets waved around as law.”
I gestured back at the cabinets to try to refocus the conversation. “If it’s not your research you’re worried about, why not release your work to the crown?”
“Because it’s not what we discovered, but where. We’re still not sure of the extent of the cave system,” she said, taking a small, curved object off the top of the cabinet. “I’ve only been as far as the Arachnocampa, but two others on my team mapped several other, longer passages, and in the farthest ones, they hit water. Flooded corridors, underground lakes. They brought back this.”
She handed me the object. It was hard and subtly ridged, the curved surface forming an irregular bowl. I squinted at it. The inside of the bowl sheened in the glowworms’ light.
A mussel shell.
My heart made a strange, erratic leap, and I looked up. “You think the caves go all the way to Lumen Lake?”
“It’s an educated guess right now,” she said. “It’s going to take a lot more surveying to be sure. But no mussel is going to survive in a sterile groundwater reservoir or a glacial pool. They need sun-fed nutrients, which means there must be outlets somewhere. You can understand, then, with the mania to secure Lumen Lake under our own banner, why we might be hesitant to let this information slip to the Prelate?”
I looked back down at the winking mussel shell, casually flashing the wealth of Lumen Lake in its mother-of-pearl interior. For years the Prelacy had preached that the lake was the key to fulfilling the Prophecy of the Prism—that Alcoro’s greatness would finally be realized by controlling the pearl trade, the basis of wealth in the Eastern World. My mother was right—offering an alternate course, besides the long, tedious, and now carefully watched route up the Cypri waterways, would be too good an opportunity to pass up.
I looked from the shell to the glowworms, and back to my mother. Things started to lock into place.
“This Prophecy,” I said. “It’s in the cave?”
“Yes,” she said. “And we’re going to find it.”
“Wait,” I said. “Find it—haven’t you already found it?”
There was a sizzle from the hearth of a pot bubbling over. She waved me back into the kitchen. Still clutching the mussel, I followed her. She swept the boiling water off the fire and streamed it through a strainer of coffee.
“Sit,” she said. “Cream or honey?”
“Both, please.” I sank back into my chair. “Mother—you have found this Prophecy, haven’t you?”
“Tureis did,” she said, swirling cream into the tin cup. “One of my team. He’s the only one to have seen it. He and his partner’s supplies ran out before they could make a second trip.”
“But . . . he wrote it down? Or made a rubbing?”
She made a show of choosing which jar of golden honey to pull off the shelf, poking among the identical containers.
Ignoring the question.
“Mother.”
“He tried to write it down,” she said, selecting one of the jars. “But like most folk, he was never taught Archaic Eastern. He tried to form the cyphers as best he could, but it’s not a particularly readable transcription.”
She dug in her pack and handed me a battered page ripped from a field journal. I turned it over to see a wobbly mess of charcoal marks, some scratched out, some misshapen to the point that I couldn’t tell if they were scratched out or not. A pictorial symbol was below the meandering lines of text—a starburst, with eight uneven points, not six like the Prophecy in Callais.
I looked up. “This man is part of your research team?”
“I admit he’s a crap hand at transcription,” she said, prying the cork out of the honey jar. “But he’s an expert caver—practically a roach, ready to wriggle into any crack that looks big enou
gh. He does the scouting, and then maps places of interest for the rest of us.” Holding the open jar of honey in one hand, she used the other to pull out a thick oilcloth pouch from her field pack. She shook it until I was afraid she’d fling honey over everything—I took it from her and slid out a roll of thick parchment. I flattened it on the table—it was the strangest-looking map I’d ever seen, like a ball of string had been dipped in ink and flung down on the paper. Routes crisscrossed and branched and disappeared, labeled with names like Broken Way, Slick Climb, Belly Crawl, and the Squeeze. I shuddered, feeling the invisible press of dark walls.
“The petroglyphs are off the River of Milk, a dry streambed of calcite deposits,” she said, nodding to the note on the map. “A two-day trip from the cave mouth. And we’ll go there and see them ourselves, Gemma.”
She stirred honey into my coffee and set it down in front of me. The scent was tantalizing after the long, cold night and weary few weeks. But I didn’t drink it right away. I stared first at the unreadable transcription, and then at the map, my gaze traveling along the route to the alleged Prophecy and beyond, to the farthest reaches, where the lines abruptly ended. Slowly, I looked up at her.
“Taking me to see them isn’t going to accomplish a single thing,” I said. “I’ve been arrested.”
“You’re still the queen.”
“Only because they haven’t stripped my title yet,” I said. “I’m awaiting trial. They won’t listen to a thing I say. They won’t believe me.”
She cleared her throat and scooped the fried egg out of the skillet. “No, I suppose not. Hm.”
I watched as she laid the egg over a thick slab of cornbread and gave it a sprinkle of salt. She set it down in front of me, and the steam curled temptingly toward my nose. But I frowned up at her.
“You don’t want me to see them,” I said as it came together in my head. “You want Celeno to see them.”
She held up her hand. “I never said that.”
“You want me to take Celeno to see them,” I said.
“I never said that, either. Eat, before it goes cold.”
I looked down at my plate. She’d made the exact same breakfast we used to eat together in our twirly house. A blob of goat cheese melted over the egg, and the slivered onions were crispy and caramelized. In the summer, we used to eat our eggs over avocados we’d plucked from our tree. In the winter, on cornbread, or a thick slice of roasted squash.
I eyed her. “What about you?”
She sat down across from me with her own battered tin cup. “I run on black coffee and spite. Go on.”
I picked up my fork and pierced the egg, letting the just-right yolk soak the cornbread. “It’s not possible, you know.”
“What isn’t?”
I took a flavorful bite. “Kidnapping the king.”
“I don’t know that kidnap is the right word . . .”
“I’d have to get him out of the palace,” I said, chewing. “He, the most guarded person in the country, perhaps the Eastern World, out of a place where he’s constantly watched. There are never less than four guards with him at all times, and more often it’s twice that, plus his attendants and the odd court noble or two. And that’s if it’s during the day—at night he takes a poppy tincture so strong he sleeps senseless until morning. I once accidentally shattered a clay jar on the hearth, set fire to my skirt, and shrieked like a ghost owl, and he didn’t even twitch.”
My mother sipped her coffee thoughtfully. “They give him poppy just to sleep? Why not stick with valerian?”
“He used to take valerian, until his anxiety got so bad it didn’t work anymore.” I waved a hand, unwilling to be deterred. “Anyway, that’s even assuming I could get in to the palace. I’m an enemy of the crown and now an escaped prisoner. There’s no side courtyard or cellar door that’s not watched, and my face is on a half-dozen portraits inside.”
“A real conundrum,” she agreed, taking another sip.
Suddenly her placidity irritated me. I set down my fork. “It’s not a ‘conundrum,’ it’s flat-out impossible. You’re suggesting something that can’t be done.”
“I haven’t suggested anything,” she said. “I’m telling you there’s another Prophecy. You’re the one trying to drag the king along with us.”
“Because they won’t listen to me!” I said. “I’ll be arrested without a second thought if anyone recognizes me, and nothing I say will make a difference. There’s no point in going if Celeno doesn’t come, too—unless you’d rather bring Shaula along.”
She grimaced into her coffee. “And hear her preach the petroglyphs as sanctified truth the whole way. Tell me, does she still do that thing where she recites her own theorizing as if they’re words of the earliest Prelates?”
Yes, she does.
I pressed my lips together as I speared the final precious sliver of cornbread—I’d been saving it to mop up the last bit of yolk. “A better option would be for you to go document the glyphs in the cave, with rubbings and identical copies, and put them into a formal presentation to present to the council.”
She was silent for a long time as I finished the cornbread and took a generous sip of coffee, sweetened with just the right amount of honey from her beehives. I wondered if she still hummed to her bees as she lifted out the golden combs.
“Gemma,” she finally said. “I’m sure I don’t need to detail to you that I have very little faith in the structure of our government anymore. They locked me up for next to no reason—took years of my life away for charges that were questionable at best. They took you away, and they molded you into what they wanted. They gave you something to fear.”
“I’m not afraid of you,” I said flatly.
“I’m not talking about myself,” she said. “I’m talking about you. They made you fear yourself.”
“That doesn’t make any sense. I’m not afraid of myself.”
She stared me in the eye for a moment, her scratched and calloused fingers curled around her tin cup. Then she stretched out her hand.
“Let me see,” she said.
Heat flared in my ears and neck. “See what?”
She twitched her fingers. “Come on.”
I didn’t want to. I wouldn’t. We had other things to talk about. How had we arrived here? We had the future of Alcoro to discuss.
But . . .
I peeled my left hand off my cup and placed it in hers.
She pushed back my sleeve. I was still wearing my nightshirt from fleeing the Retreat, and the sleeve was loose. It slid back easily to reveal the place where the ordinary desert-brown of my skin gave way to the dark, mottled mark, purple-red. I winced as she pushed my sleeve farther, baring more of the stain.
“It’s darkened,” she said.
“Yes.” I couldn’t tell if the word was audible or just a rasp. Oh, how I’d watched it with horror over the years, praying the color wouldn’t deepen any more, that somehow the mark might miraculously shrink. But it had grown with me, covering my left arm, shoulder, and neck, and running down the front and back of my torso, splitting me in half. Even as my breasts and hips had developed and I’d outgrown my childhood skirts and boleros, it had adapted with me like a terrible exoskeleton I couldn’t shed.
“You remember what we used to call it?” she asked.
I fought against the tightness in my throat. “My palette.”
Just the right color! I’d giggled as she’d tickled me with her paintbrush, pretending to swirl up the pinky-purple to use on her page. I’d liked it then. No one else I knew had such a mark. It was unusual, and interesting.
My mother had always had a high regard for the unusual and interesting.
She brushed both her thumbs over my wrist, a small, gentle gesture that brought a sudden sting to my eyes. I looked away and rubbed my other fist over my cheeks. My mother sighed and pulled my sleeve back down.
“All the long sleeves and collars, Gemma.”
“It’s winter,” I said, hoping I sounded i
ndignant.
“It wasn’t on your wedding day. Nor on the handful of other times I’ve seen you from a distance. Do they ever let you wear short sleeves? A collar that doesn’t come to your chin?”
I withdrew my hand from hers. “It wasn’t only up to them. I was always in the public eye—I didn’t want the stares.”
“Is that why you tiptoed, too?” she asked, her palms facedown on the table. “Is that why you flitted and slipped in and out of the king’s shadow? Is that why you never spoke at public gatherings, or appeared alone?”
“He has a title beyond just ‘king’,” I said. “He’s supposed to bring about action himself—otherwise it doesn’t carry the will of the Light. I knew that going in. I knew that when he asked me to marry him. And I was fine with it—you know I was always happier with just you than with crowds of people. It was no different as queen.”
She pursed her lips but held her silence, her gaze flicking over my face. I took a long swallow from my coffee cup, eventually just letting the liquid wash against my sealed lips.
She sighed and rubbed her eyes, suddenly looking tired—and old. My coffee slopped against my mouth—my mother was old. She’d aged sixteen years since we’d last shared eggs and cornbread around the breakfast table. And she’d been out all night, running around—was she going to get sick? Was she hurt, and not telling me?
I set my coffee back down and shifted in the silence.
“The egg was very good,” I said. “Thank you.”
She didn’t reply, only staring distantly at my empty plate, her cheek on her fist. After a moment, she heaved another sigh.
“Gemma,” she said heavily. “I don’t pretend to know what went on up in those towers, you locked away in the world of the Seventh King. But I’ll tell you what it’s like down here in my world. If I went into the cave and brought back rubbings of the petroglyphs, it would simply be dismissed as another dissenter’s desperate attempt to disprove the Prophecy. Not only would no one take it seriously, but I’d probably be thrown in prison again, just for good measure. You’re right. We need the king to come—we need the weight of his testimony, and we need him to see it with his own eyes. And because of that, I need you.”
Creatures of Light, Book 3 Page 4
