“Premin, are you in?”
She barely heard footsteps on the other side, and then the door opened with a tiny squeal from its iron hinges.
Wynn faced a mature, slight woman in a midnight blue robe: Premin Frideswida Hawes, head of the branch’s order of Metaology. With the premin’s cowl down around her shoulders, her ash gray, short-cropped hair bristled about her head. Any lines of age were faint in her even, small features, down to her narrow mouth and chin—the latter similar to an elf’s. Though severe looking, she was not unattractive until one fixed on her piercing and pale hazel eyes that made one think of ice.
Premin Hawes held a folded piece of paper in one hand. Her eyes widened for less than a blink at the sight of Wynn; that was the limit of surprise that anyone ever saw on this premin’s face.
“Ah, Wynn ... I wasn’t expecting ...” Hawes trailed off.
It was Wynn’s turn to be surprised, for the premin looked almost distracted. That never happened, as far as Wynn knew, even when Hawes appeared to be lost in thought.
“May I speak with you?” Wynn asked hesitantly. She glanced down the short three-step passage beyond the premin that emptied into the left side of a small chamber. Somewhere to the right and out of sight, a dimming cold lamp lit the space.
“Certainly,” Hawes said, though she hesitated again, which made Wynn nervous. “Come in.”
The premin turned away, and Wynn followed after closing the heavy door.
All she could see from the hallway were shelves pegged in the chamber’s left wall. These were filled with books, bound sheaves, and a few narrow upright cylinders of wood, brass, or unglazed ceramic. But as she stepped into the little chamber, she found stout, shallow tables and squat casements stuffed with more texts along the back wall as well. There were also odd little contrivances and unrecognizable devices of metal, crystal and glass, and wood and leather set erratically on the shallow tables and atop the casements.
Pushed up against the room’s right wall was an age-darkened desk of abundant small drawers below a top covered in stacks of papers, parchments, and sheaves. And there sat a cold lamp, with its dimming crystal inside its glass cover, on the desk’s corner.
Wynn’s gaze roamed over the stacks on the desk, as well as a few mortars and small bowls filled with granules and powders of varied colors. An array of articulated brass arms was anchored to the desk’s far front corner, each arm bearing a framed magnifying lens. All the arms were mounted so that any one or more of the lenses could twist in or out of alignment with the others. The chamber was clearly a workspace whose contents had piled up over many years. Premin Hawes did not go to her rickety and plain desk chair or simply turn to face Wynn.
Instead she settled slowly in the old armchair, of tattered blue fabric, which barely fit into the little room’s right corner beyond the desk. She leaned back, as if lost in a fleeting thought ... still with that folding paper pinched in two long narrow fingers.
“What can I do for you?” Hawes asked absently.
She didn’t even look at Wynn, though she curled her fingers to grip the paper with her thumb as well ... tightly.
Wynn had hoped to convince the premin to let her use mantic sight, and together they might extract and translate another few lines from the scroll’s poem. Chane had already consented to the scroll’s being locked away in Hawes’s office, so at the moment it was within easy reach.
But Wynn hesitated, for the premin seemed so unlike herself tonight.
“Are you ... ?” Wynn began. “Is everything all right?”
“Hmmmm?”
Only then did Hawes’s cold hazel eyes fully focus, and the elder woman’s mouth pursed.
As one of the five members of the branch’s premin council, she was the only person in authority here willing to give Wynn any assistance. Of late, by default, the two of them had begun to trust each other—to a point—in searching out the remaining orbs.
With a soft sigh through her narrow nose, Hawes pointed to the desk chair.
Wynn settled there, now a little more alarmed. “What is it?”
“I received a letter from a master sage in Witeny ... a Jausiff Columsarn.”
“Columsarn?” Wynn repeated. “A relative of Nikolas Columsarn?”
Nikolas was an apprentice sage here in Wynn’s own order of Cathology, and one of the few she could call a friend.
Hawes nodded once. “His adopted father. Master Columsarn has been the prime counselor for a southern duchy on the coast of Witeny for many years. I once knew him ... briefly, though he left the guild for private work shortly after achieving master’s status in Cathology.”
The premin paused so long that Wynn was about to ask for more.
“Nikolas has been called home for a visit,” Hawes added. “Master Columsarn sent him a letter, which included a sealed one addressed to me.”
Wynn’s gaze shifted briefly to the paper clutched in the premin’s hand.
“It is for my eyes only,” Hawes continued, “but he requested that I send him certain texts to study.”
Wynn blinked. She knew Nikolas was adopted and came from Witeny, but she hadn’t known his father was the counselor to a duke, let alone that he was a sage. Then again, she’d never asked Nikolas anything about his past and knew only what little he’d mentioned in passing.
“That isn’t so strange,” Wynn said. “If this Master Columsarn is in such a remote place, likely he has few resources. But why not send such a request to the annex in Chathburh? It is much closer and right in Witeny.”
Hawes pursed her mouth again. “The texts are specific in nature and wouldn’t be part of an annex’s holdings. He has requested that I seal—package—them. Nikolas is not to know what they are ... only deliver them.”
Wynn fell silent. She wanted to ask about the texts in question but feared that if she pushed too hard, Hawes might say nothing about this strange private matter.
Instead she asked, “Why is Nikolas being called home?”
Hawes shook her head slightly once. “I do not know. He sent a young initiate to bring me this.” She rolled her hand upward, displaying the folded paper. “I’ve not spoken to him myself, though I have asked among the initiates and apprentices on duty at the gate. Apparently a package for Nikolas was delivered last night, given to an attendant at the gate, and from what Master Columsarn tells me here, inside the package was a letter for Nikolas and this sealed letter for me.”
“So you don’t know anything about what Nikolas’s letter contained or why he’s being called home?”
Hawes didn’t answer, and her cold eyes locked on Wynn. “You are his friend?”
That wasn’t an easy question to answer. Given Nikolas’s withdrawn nature—earning him the nickname “Nervous Nikolas”—he didn’t have any close friends, except two who had died less than a year ago. But he’d shown her kindness and even loyalty on a few occasions when she’d desperately needed both.
“I know him ... a little,” Wynn answered, though she heard the hesitation in her own voice.
And again Hawes was silent for too long a moment.
“Were I to question Nikolas, he might interpret it as an interrogation,” the premin continued. “If you told him that you learned he’d been called home and expressed friendly concern, he might be more open.”
Wynn straightened up in her chair. Was Hawes asking her to use her friendship with Nikolas to gain information?