Griffyn went still. She must have detected the change in him, because she looked over. “Do you know what it means?”
He shook his head, but his arms had tightened reflexively when he’d heard the last phrase. Vay. Sal.
Vessel.
“Was that all, Gwyn?” he asked carefully.
She nodded miserably. “That was it. Even the priest gave Extreme Unction while he was benumbed. For years he barely spoke to me, then, there at the last, that is what he came up with.”
She straightened herself on his lap more comfortably, and he moved his arm unconsciously to support her. His head was spinning as he tried to focus on her fear and grief, rather than on the first hint he’d had of the treasure’s existence at Everoot. So something was here. What chance Ionnes de l’Ami would speak of a ‘Vessel’ on his deathbed, if there was not something real to be spoken of?
He kissed the top of her head. “Can you sleep now?”
She nodded, but he tightened his arms when she would have slipped off his lap. “Tell me
of such dreams when you have them again.”
She sighed. “I am sorry for the nighttime vigils you’ll be forced to keep.”
He kissed her forehead, then her nose. “I do not mind. Tell me if you recall anything else your father might have said.”
Wary surprise filled her eyes. “You would hear what my father had to say?”
He shook his head. “The power of his words will go if you speak of them, that is all.”
She nodded, but tears started filling her eyes again. “I do not think they will ever leave me. They have haunted me for so long already.”
So, he pulled her down beside him and made her forget the whispered words of a dying man. Later, as she drifted off, she murmured in his ear, “I will tell you anything I remember, Griffyn.”
He turned onto his back, hands behind his head, and lay awake for a long time, his mind turning. How likely was it that Ionnes de l’Ami had believed in legends too? How likely that he had shaped his life, then ended it, intent on a lie?
His heart started thudding a little faster as he stared at the ceiling. What harm could come from simply looking?
Chapter Fourteen
He began the next morning. It was not the only thing he did, nor even the first, but neither was it the last, and he was grimly aware of that.
Slowly, methodically, before the grey light of a mercifully damp dawn lightened the horizon, he was in the offices. A huge tumble of chests and coffers sat on the hard stone floor, rounded lids musty with dampness and pollen and dead bugs. Griffyn shoved several cone-handled torches into the iron rings hanging from the walls and started flinging them open. Each bang of wood against stone or metal bounced off the walls and came back at him, hollow and loud.
He pulled out a sheaf of documents from the first one. A sinking feeling rose inside his chest. Would this speak of the treasure? Would he even recognise it as such?
That is where he needed to rely on Alex. Trained and educated in the ancient mysteries, Alex was a Watcher, one of those who guarded the Guardian. He knew every nuance of Griffyn’s unwanted heritage, every rumour, secret, or legend about Charlemagne and the legacy and what Griffyn was supposed to be. Griffyn carried the papers close to the torch and stood beneath its flickering light, reading.
A long time later, as the dim murmur of Prime bells penetrated the stone walls of the office chamber, every chest had been open and searched. They’d dispensed nothing but old ledgers and deeds, signed with an X by men who’d regarded themselves as mighty, then died like everyone else.
Almost stunned, Griffyn sat back on the stone floor, spine against the wall. He planted the heel of one boot into an uneven edge of flagstone and stared across the icy, empty room. Coldness pressed through his woollen hose.
The rounded lids of the coffers were like flung open like yawning mouths, a dozen of them, baby birds waiting to be fed. Griffyn felt dirty. He’d have been better off as a fisherman. A blacksmythe. Anything but a nobleman.
He got to his feet and brushed himself off. He needed to talk to Alex.
They went up on the battlements in the misting rain just as the guard switched. From far down on the fields, and in the bailey below, rose the sounds of men as they began their daily labours, voices conversing, iron hitting stone, a cock crowing. Up here on the battlements, though, it was all muted, with only the light misting rain to sluice down around them. Tired men in damp hauberks lifted their hands in greeting as they passed inside.
Once they were alone, Griffyn said, “I’ve been looking around a bit.”
Alex kept looking over the battlements. So did Griffyn. “And what did you find?”
“Nothing. But then, I suspect there will be locks my key will not open. Is that not so? I have a puzzle key, don’t I?”