40. Idrilia #2
"You are absolutely correct." He sighed.
"That was what people with any sense used to tell him, but he still clung to the stories as if they were real.
" He sighed again. "You know how it starts.
One person thinks they saw something, makes up a fascinating tale about it, and others copy it because people love mysteries and it makes a good tale.
Before long, those stories spread all over, and no one knows who initiated them. "
I tilted my head. "So, you think that no one has actually seen those thin places?"
He shrugged. "I don't want to accuse anyone of violating the Precepts of Truth, but people get lonely on those mountains with only goats to keep them company, and between the loneliness and the altitude they start seeing things.
And when their minds try to make sense of those things, they shape them into something familiar, a story they have heard before. "
It sounded perfectly logical, but a small kernel of doubt took root in my mind.
What if there was something to those tales?
"Someone needs to mount an expedition to those mountains, a long one that will span many weeks, to look for those so-called thin places."
He arched a brow. "By someone, do you mean you?"
"No, not me. After I lost two men to an avalanche while retrieving the Princess, I vowed not to take people up those treacherous mountains again."
What I had actually vowed was not to cross the border to Elucia and not to endanger the people with me.
These tales, though, had been collected on our side of the frontier as much as the other, which meant the flower and its thin places had to occur on Tarinian soil too.
I could go looking without ever crossing the border, provided I listened to my guides when they told me to turn back.
It was a loophole, but I didn't think I would make use of it. My mother would have a coronary if I left for another expedition before the Catonian ball.
Lou smiled. "I have a feeling that one of these days you will either break that vow or find a way around it, Your Highness."
"It's possible," I didn't deny it. "But not before the annual ball in Catonia."
"Right." He adjusted his glasses up his nose. "I hear it's going to be more spectacular than ever this year."
If even he'd heard it, the rumor must have been circulating everywhere.
He showed me more drawings as he read. The Princess in bud, in bloom, in the failing grey state I knew.
The slopes where she grew, mapped and annotated.
The thin places marked with a small symbol the professor had invented, a circle with a single line running through it, scattered along the frontier.
When his voice became hoarse, and he excused himself to go drink some of the tea, I followed him to the serving table.
"Is there any chance you would consider leaving these journals with me for a time?
I promise to treat them like the precious relics they are.
I just want to study them properly, and that is not possible in a single afternoon.
I give you my word that they will come back to you in exactly the state I received them. "
He hesitated, but I had cornered him, and he had no polite way to refuse me. "A loan. Yes. I could do a loan. For how long?"
"As long as you care to part with them. I plan to hand-copy the texts. The drawings are a problem because I have no artistic talent, so I will probably photograph them. I'll keep the photographs and return the originals untouched, and if you want, I can make duplicates of the photos for you."
His forehead was beading with sweat again. "I don't want some clerk handling my father's journals." He sounded on the verge of tears.
I put a hand over my heart. "No one will touch these other than me. I swear."
"Really? Your Highness is going to copy the journals with your own hand?"
"Yes. There is no better way to learn than to absorb the material by writing it, and I don't think there is a way for me to merge minds with court clerks."
It took him a moment to realize that I'd been joking, and then he snorted. "I would advise against attempting such a thing. Your mind is much too bright to merge it with a dim clerk."
After we said our goodbyes, the professor regarded the journals in the way a mother leaving her babies with strangers might. "Take good care of them, Your Highness. They are dear to me despite what's associated with them."
"I know. They are safe with me." I patted his arm and called for Ursa to escort him out and find the driver to take him home.
I returned to the couch and continued turning the pages of the open journal half-idly, looking at one rendering of the bloom after another, collecting information and cataloging it almost subconsciously.
When I reached the end of the journal, I went back and turned to the first full-bloom drawing, and then to the next, and then to a third.
They had been drawn years apart, and the corona of light looked different in each one, which made sense.
A man drawing from his imagination would draw the flower a little differently each time.
Still, at the heart of every open bloom, where the petals drew back, the professor had drawn the same structure.
A ring of fine filaments rising from the flower's center, slender as hairs, each one tipped with a minute swelling, the whole ring identical in count and arrangement in every drawing across years.
He hadn't dressed it up. He'd drawn it the way he drew the petals, plainly, anatomically, the hand of the rigorous botanist.
I had never seen it.
My specimen had never bloomed and never would. I had a grey survivor in a glass box that would hold at exactly this stage and no further for as long as I kept her cold.
The ring of filaments lived only in the open bloom, and the open bloom lived only in situ, high up a mineral slope across a border I had promised never to cross again.