He cursed under his breath, but continued.
“‘And while the night had been chill and damp when I left the shore of my world, here it was warm and dry. I stepped from the boat onto the white sand of the Island of Glass where Arianrhod waited with her sisters to greet me. As my foot touched the ground, I knew I had been granted what few had before, and few would after me. For here is the beating heart of the power of all worlds.’”
Doyle looked up. “You buy that one?”
“Not enough information, but it’s interesting, isn’t it? Magick is—we can’t deny that one. What if there is a core to it, a heart, a world where it generates? It sure makes sense that Nerezza wants the stars—created there, by the three goddesses. It makes sense if she got them in her evil little hands she’d have all the power, and the ability to destroy, well, everything. So it’s interesting.”
She sat back. “Keep going.”
“If I’d known I’d be reading you a story, I’d’ve gotten a beer.”
“I’ll get you a beer if it saves me from translating.”
“Deal.”
She went up the stairs. “Something else to think about,” she called down.
“I have plenty to think about. What’s your something else?”
“I’d need to run tests to get a better estimate of the age of this journal, but I’m going with ninth century.”
“Okay.”
With a roll of her eyes, she looked down over the rail. “Have some intellectual curiosity, Doyle, and ask why.”
“You’re going to tell me anyway.”
“I am.” She started down with his beer. “They had a mathematical layout for manuscripts in the ninth century, and the scribes ruled the parchment in hardpoint by scoring it with a stylus on the back. Sometimes they cut too hard. You can see the scoring on the parchment in the book. Bo here’s inflated, pretty pleased with his station in life. He’d have some lackey do the scoring. And if it was more like twelfth century—which, by the ink, I don’t think so anyway—they started using a kind of pencil to rule the page.”
“So it’s old, which we knew. What’s a couple hundred years matter?”
“Easy for you to say, old man. It matters, in this case?” She handed him the beer, sat. “Because while I’ve found snippets of the legend of the island that appear to date further back, this is the oldest serious account, and a first-person account. An account of traveling there for the celebration of the rising. When the stars were created, Doyle. It tells us when the stars were born. It’s what we call, in my circles, a discovery.”
“Dating the stars isn’t finding the third one.”
“Sometimes knowledge is its own reward.” She said it dryly, believed it absolutely. “But if I can date this, and somehow authenticate it, we’d know when the queen was born, the stars created. We know this enchanter dude sailed from the coast of Clare—alone. Odds are slim he had to sail far, as he left at night, arrived the same night. Putting magicks aside a minute, we assume the island was here, off the coast of Clare, which I like because so are we.”
Frowning over that, Doyle picked up the beer. “That would make us pretty damn lucky.”
“Considering the last couple months, luck be damned. We’re where we’re meant to be. I don’t know if we’re going to sail out one night and hit that portal, but using this account, putting it together with other sightings, doing the math, calculating currents, maybe we’d have ourselves a location, or an area anyway. There’s always a pattern, Doyle.”
He took a slug of beer. “Now you’re interesting me.”
“Good. This has to be more secondary after today. Logically, we can’t take the star back until we find it. But it’d be to our advantage to have a direction, to give Sawyer some possible coordinates when we do find the third star.
“She’s going to be even more pissed.”
“She’s hurt. Maybe we find it before she’s back in action. And no,” he said when Riley just raised her eyebrows. “I don’t believe that for a minute.”
“Okay then. To round it up. Find the star, find the island, get the job done. Hope getting the job done includes destroying Nerezza.”
“A sword does her, according to our seer.”
“And it would be extra nice if it was yours, but neither of us thinks it’s going to be that clean and done.”
“Bran enchants it with that in mind. It may be time to start working on that part of the deal.”
“It couldn’t hurt.” She’d thought of it herself. “Could be with the spell Bran’s already put on the weapons, we’re already covered there. But . . . Let’s lay it out while we’re here and the others aren’t.”
She could talk straight to him, she thought. Say things to him she’d hesitate to say to the others. Things that weighed against hope.
“If we don’t finish her before we get the stars back to the island, we’ve still saved the worlds. Yay, us. But she’s going to come for us when we’ve done our job. She can afford to wait.”
Her eyes held his, cool and steady as she continued. “Bran and Sasha go off and get married, have a couple kids. Annika and Sawyer are living on some island—on land for him, in the sea for her. They’ll probably even make that work. Me, I’ll find a dig or write a book. Likely both. You’ll do what you do. And she’ll come for us, one or two at a time, and pick us off like flies. She can’t kill you, but she can probably come up with something worse.”