Page 50 of The Lies We Conjure
“And I can’t believe you thought of it and your next move wasn’tto go get us. Because you know what our first thought was? Finding you. You, who happened to be already out here without us.” She halts, and Evander nearly runs smack into her. He has to weigh at least twice as much as she does, but Winter doesn’t even flinch. Not that she flinched when I did something similar mere minutes ago. “I know you’re the patriarch. I know that you want to be High Sorcerer too and feel like the title is yours alone to win. But we’re your family—your only family, in fact. And like Auden said last night, we’re on your team. Act like it.”
Evander’s head drops back like it’s filled with bricks.
“You’re right.”
“I am. And you have no excuse. I don’t want to hear you’re tired. Or that you thought it was your responsibility.”
Evander’s shoulders heave in a sigh. “Anything to add, Auden?”
“Nope, I think Win pretty much covered it, except… last one there’s a rotten egg.”
I toss the water bottle straight at Evander’s face and dart past him, past Winter, and around the next switchback. Evander bobbles the bottle, which thuds to the trail, while Winter’s competitive spirit churns into full speed ahead with a squeak and lunge.
In the end we hurtle ourselves to the top of Mercy’s Point in a dead heat of bumping shoulders and jumbled elbows. The toe of my running shoe hits the flat head atop the mountain first—a fact my cousins both register and totally ignore—and we’re there.
The sky is a brilliant, cloudless blue, and beneath it is the outdoor chapel. Five rows of pews, with a pulpit on both the eastern and western horizons. The sun has just crested the eastern pulpit, its rays caught in the moldering planks of the little wooden lectern. It’s something that needs to be stained, or replaced altogether, the wood soft, split, full of holes. The one on the western end isn’t much better. The outer border of the little outdoor chapel is lined with faded red brick, uprooted by time, weather, and probably global warming.
The bricks and the wooden pulpits and benches were pristine the last time I was up here—preserved by Ursula’s spells, just like the garden, lawn, and the plants in her office. Another sand grain of her magic, evaporated. Something we’ll need to remedy.
Evander pulls out his phone and reads the clue aloud.
“When breath became air,” he recites, trailing a pair of thick fingers along the first pew. “The mountain stood tall with forever frost.” He squints around hard enough that his thick brows plunge those circles under his eyes two shades deeper. “We’re not high enough for any summer snowpack.”
“Nowhere on the grounds is,” Winter amends, stealing Evander’s water bottle again and stepping onto the nearest pew—when the wood groans, she thinks better of it and hops back to the dry earth. “But maybe when Shadrack first arrived that wasn’t the case? The earth has warmed about two degrees since he moved west.”
Evander nods and continues. “Though the call of the falcon, and flick of salmon fin, did not dim the fires… we worship.”
It really is gorgeous language, and despite the stress of it all, thepart of me who readsLeaves of Grassis going to be exceedingly disappointed if Shadrack blew all his poetic talent on the first clue.
In a round, Evander tilts his exhausted face to the sky—no falcon; to the ground—no running water featuring salmon nor circle for burning.
“Maybe we have it wrong.”
He sits heavily on a pew, prescient enough to put his weight on theTwhere a leg meets the bench—the most solid part of the rotted wood. “We’ve got the tributary out in the southwest quadrant. It has salmon but they don’t leave deep water to spawn in running water until August at the earliest. And falcon eat fish, but they’re more likely to steal it from a bear than from the stream. Not to mention that’s a pretty low-lying area and the first section is all a mountain covered in trees.”
“You are so literal.”
I plunk down opposite him, straddling the bench, and swipe a bead of sweat out of my eye. He’s grinding his molars and staring at the rock-strewn dirt as if it’ll spit out a tea-leaf answer. Winter hovers somewhere over my shoulder, her shadow falling like a knife slash across the pair of us.
“Evander, the clue is a metaphorical description of the sweeping beauty of the Rocky Mountains,” I explain. “This is the only place on the grounds where any sort of worship has taken place unless you’re counting the groveling the Cerises have been known to do.”
Winter coughs out a laugh.
“And, because you’re the ambassador of the Hegemony Literal Society…” I knock his sturdy hiking boot with the toe of my running shoe. He continues to stare at the dirt between us. “I’ll point out that this is the place Shadrack built to literally worship the beauty of the natural,elementalworld. It’s been magically maintained by every Hegemony after him. Which means every Hegemony, including Ursula, thought it worth their magical energy.”
Her name is heavy this morning, and we sit with its weight for a good minute.
When I feel like I can, I glance to Evander ahead, to Winter behind.
“All three of us, separately, decided it would be the first place we’d look. That means something. And let’s not forget these are supposed to be clues, not riddles. Shadrack, Ursula, every previous High Sorcerer wants us to find the masters.”
We start with everything man-made.
The pews. The bricks lining the space. Then, the pulpits. Evander, being Evander, insists we should divide and conquer, but what he truly means is that he should handle one while Winter and I start with the other.
As expected, they’re in just as bad a shape as the pews—worse even, with more nooks and crannies and joints to collect water and mold. Winter pries the railroad ties Shadrack used as nails free with magic and elbow grease as I steady the top portion of it, the soft wood twisting and splintering, even though I’m holding it with a cushion of air between my fingertips and the rotten construction.
“Without the benefit of magic or modern stain sealant, this thing is basically sawdust,” Winter grumbles, using her own magic to tip up the pulpit shaft now that it’s free from the base, a verdant mist engulfing it. She knocks it with a knuckle and listens hard. Her nose crinkles, sun-hewn freckles showing without her usual heavy makeup. “This one is solid—”
