Osha reached out to return the second and third stones to the velvet-lined trunk, her fingers moving with a scholar’s careful habit even in the freezing wind. Three of the hollows in the case were now occupied. In the fourth hollow sat a larger sphere of dark, gold-veined mineral, fitted at its side with a heavy key of slotted brass and black iron that had not been forged by any ordinary quarry mason.
Ysabet was watching Osha, not Edris.
When Osha’s wool sleeve brushed the brass key on the fourth stone, the young woman pulled her hand back quickly as if the metal had bitten her skin. Her fingers dropped to the leather handle of her own oak archive case, where she kept her father’s small field notebook and the three verified study copies she had made of the stones they had just read.
“You didn’t pull that fourth stone from the hospice library, did you, Sister?” Ysabet asked quietly.
Osha’s lips parted, then pressed flat. She looked down at the frost in the mortar between the flagstones. “The Precentor brought it from the inner chapter vault when he joined our mules at dawn. Its index number is sealed above my grade.”
