Page 158 of Golden Queen
He turned to begin walking back towards the brothel. I got to my feet to follow him, feeling more despair and heartache inside me than I thought a person should be able to handle.
If he felt it, he made no indication as he strode across the frozen ground in the tracks he had made through the deep snow.
I looked back at the melted area behind us and was not in the least surprised to find the snow had been cleared away in the shape of two enormous, outstretched wings.
He didn't speak until we were back at the brothel. Dawn was beginning to break over the horizon as we went upstairs.
"Get your things and dress warmly," he said as he began to gather his own articles of clothing, putting them in his bag. He even picked up the ruined, burned shirt that we had dropped into the bathtub and stuffed it into his pack.
"Do you have paper?" I asked, pulling open the drawers, looking for something to write with.
"Why, Sera?"
I told him about the burned angels—since that was how I had begun to think of them.
His eyes were wide and his expression worried as I relayed some of the words. "I want to write it down, before I forget the rest," I said.
He pulled papers and a fountain pen from his pack and handed them to me.
He leaned over my shoulder with one hand on the table as I wrote, but he did not touch me, which made it harder to focus since the feeling of him contacting some part of me was something I had come to realize as the dearest thing in the world to me.
So I reached out and wrapped my fingers around his wrist and pulled his arm down and across my chest as tears welled in my eyes.
He didn't pull away, but I felt him stiffen, his body going tight as he dropped his head to my shoulder.
I began writing again with him embracing me, even if it was reluctant on his part. I didn’t care whether he wanted to touch me or not. The moment his head had gone down to my shoulder was the first moment since we left the clearing that I felt like I could catch my breath.
He moved away only when I finished writing and handed him the paper.
My mind was still racing, trying to find the similarities and differences from what I knew of the Totampresario, and I found it difficult to concentrate. "I don't know if these words are true or...or what they mean," I said.
"The prophecy was given to you by the angels, Sera. There is no doubt about whether they are true."
I shook my head. "Those weren't real angels," I insisted. "They were burned, mangled versions of angels."
"I don't think it matters how an oracle receives the words," he said.
"I am not an oracle!"
"Perhaps not, in the traditional sense, my dear. But the literal definition of an oracle is one who is given prophecy from the gods or the angels."
"That cannot be what angels look like!"
"They were here before the cataclysm. Maybe they burned as the world burned."
The words from my dream came back to me then.Idrigard will burn. The words the shadow form of him had said just before I woke. "What does Idrigard mean?" I asked him.
He looked up from the paper as though resigned, but not at all surprised. I was beginning to suspect that he’d had the very same dream as me. "It's the old name for the world—lost to most. One of those secrets kept in Darkwatch that not even the king may know."
"Why is it a secret?"
"I don't know—and neither do the masters stalking the halls of the libraries inside the mountains, devoting their entire lives to the pursuit of a greater understanding of those secrets. Some of them believe something might be summoned just from speaking the name aloud."
I clapped my hand over my mouth, startled that I had spoken the name out loud myself. But Io only chuckled. "Don't worry. When I was a boy and first learned of Idrigard, I said the name more than a thousand times, hoping to find out what dreadful creature might be summoned. It never worked."
I tried to imagine what sort of naughty child he must have been to attempt to summon evil for curiosity's sake.
He folded the paper and tucked it away in his bag. "We'll take these words to Meroway, to the high master. Hopefully he’ll be able to shed some light on them. I can’t help but feel there's something much bigger happening here."
