Chapter 8 – On the Origins of Devils #3
It was on the tip of his tongue to say that he would give her whatever she wanted to sate her every curiosity: cartloads of paper, almanacs going back to the arrival of Ospret Far-Eyes, fleets of secretaries in livery, but now was not the time for that.
Inside, he was bursting with pride, but for now he needed to temper both their expectations so she wouldn’t be too disappointed if there was some flaw in her work.
Above all else, he did not want to discourage her from trying things like this again.
Edemir looked up with surprise as they came into the busy office, far earlier than usual. Remin normally came to collect breakfast and correspondence well after dawn.
“Come and take a look at this, if you would,” Remin said, beckoning him over to an empty worktable. “Her Grace has something to show you.”
He gave her shoulder a squeeze, resisting the urge to say my wife again. Everyone knew that Ophele was a superior wife. He didn’t need to keep rubbing it in their faces.
“I might be wrong,” she said, almost pleading as she clutched her papers to her breast. “I just thought, if I talked to enough of your men, maybe there would be a pattern, but there’s no way to know if I talked to the right men, or enough of them—”
“Perhaps you could explain your idea to us first, my lady,” Juste suggested gently. “We can hear your arguments against it afterward.”
She nodded, with another beseeching glance at Remin.
It was hard to hold his tongue and step back to let her explain, especially when she was so clearly nervous.
But this was her idea. The credit was hers, and likewise the responsibility to explain and defend it.
It was just like one of the squires, Remin told himself firmly.
He couldn’t do this for her, or she would never learn to do it herself.
“W-Well, I wanted to know where the devils came from,” Ophele began, laying out her maps with spring on one side and fall on the other.
“I thought, if the devils were going to the mountains to hide for the winter, then it would be all over the mountains, wouldn’t it?
And that means the soldiers nearest to the mountains should see them first every year, while everyone else saw them later. ”
“That’s what we believed,” Edemir said slowly, bending to look closer.
“But that’s not what happened,” Ophele replied, warming to her explanation.
“The men with His Grace in 823 were on the Talfel Plateau all the way up here, and they saw the devils three weeks before Lord Balloren’s men down here, near the Gellege Bridge, even though that’s right in the foothills.
So, when I saw that, I started asking everyone else when they remembered seeing the devils, and I used the phases of the moon as the markers on the map, and look! It’s the same every year, isn’t it?”
Her fingers traced the bands of moon markers, repeating the same pattern year after year: the full moon to the furthest south and west, then the three-quarter moon, the half-moon, and the new moon, black and foreboding.
Every sighting earlier as the markers marched north and east, leading inexorably to a place about thirty miles northeast of Nandre, where the mountains curved back on themselves in a hook shape.
The Spur was a tricky bit of country that technically still belonged to Valleth, but was so inaccessible it might as well belong to no one.
The place where the devils came from. Without stirring a step outside the city walls, Ophele had found it.
“I thought so, anyway,” she went on, mistaking their dumbstruck silence for skepticism.
“And I…I thought maybe if they were all coming from the same place every year, then they might be going back to it. The same pattern as spring, but in reverse, I mean. But that’s not what happened, either.
In fall, they do seem to go back to the mountains, and to particular places in the mountains, look. ”
She pointed at the labeled dots.
“The Spur, the mines, and the Aven Bede,” she said. “So, you weren’t entirely wrong. They do go to those caves for the winter. They just…don’t come back out. Maybe they die there.”
She frowned at the maps for a moment, as if further contemplation might yield an answer there, too.
“I…I don’t see any other conclusion,” Edemir managed. He looked gobsmacked. “Show me how you produced these points, my lady, please. ”
“Well, most of the men couldn’t remember dates, when I asked them first,” she said, flicking through her papers to produce a neat index.
“But they did remember who they were serving, and what battles they had just fought, and whether or not there was moonlight when the devils came. And once they told me that, then I could use almanacs and histories to narrow it down to a range of days…”
Remin didn’t have to say a word. Edemir and Juste were asking better questions than he would, and all he wanted to do was enjoy the sight of dainty Ophele between his two knights, looking from one to the other as she listened to their questions and then bent over the maps to explain this or that detail, and all the while her mind was working away behind those big, solemn eyes. How wonderful she was.
“We need to verify these points,” Edemir said when she had finished explaining.
His broad face was flushed with excitement.
“My lady. It’s not that I don’t trust your method, but for something like this we have to check the math, so to speak.
And it still may not work out,” he cautioned, as much for Remin as for Ophele.
“Your counterarguments are also valid. Four hundred men is the merest fraction of the ninety thousand that fought. These particular men might not be a true picture of what happened.”
“I did make notes of their lords,” she replied, tapping the stack of interviews. Remin had been present at supper when Juste taught her how important it was to try to invalidate one’s own argument, to strengthen it, and Ophele had done a thorough job of rebutting her own rebuttal.
“We can check this information amongst ourselves,” said Juste, with a rare note of excitement in his voice. “I was in Iverlach in 824. I remember our first sighting of the devils that year. It is consistent with the dates you show.”
“This is very, very good,” Edemir said, and his gray eyes flicked to Remin’s for an eloquent moment before returning to Ophele’s table of contents. “Rem, I’ll put my secretaries on this today. I don’t think we need to check all four hundred interviews, but we need to verify a good number of them.”
“And add our own timelines for the devil sightings,” said Juste, using Ophele’s terminology. “I’ll go to the barracks myself and tell Tounot and Auber to scrap the watchtowers. ”
“Do it,” Remin agreed, with deep satisfaction. It would upend every single one of their plans, but this was a better direction than anything else they had. “Hand me that quill, wife.”
“What are you writing?” Ophele looked at the departing backs of the other men and came around the table to hand him the quill. The color was high in her cheeks.
“I am going to be your four hundred and twenty-fourth interview,” he explained, adding his own timeline in his scrawling, jagged script.
He vividly remembered where he had been every year when he first heard of the devils, though his memories of their disappearance were a little hazier.
It was harder to notice when something wasn’t there, wasn’t it?
He darted a black glance at her. “Four hundred and twenty- fourth,” he emphasized.
“That’s how long you waited to tell me.”
“I’m sorry,” she said, but she could hear the humor in his voice and covered her mouth to hide a smile. “It still might not be right,” she added, worried. “And maybe if I’m wrong, it will be dangerous, or you will miss something you might have found otherwise, it was only a guess—”
“It wasn’t only a guess, and you know it.
” He drew her to his side, hiding her behind the bulk of his body so he could kiss her.
“I am so proud of you,” he said, low, wishing he had the words to tell her how much.
“My clever wife. If you didn’t already have a library on the way, I would make a gift of one to you for this. ”
He thought that would make her laugh. But she only smiled and let herself lean into him for a moment, and something flickered through her eyes, there and gone in an instant.
“I wanted to help,” she said, and there was a wistful note in her voice that he didn’t understand at all.
* * *
“I never put it together,” Davi marveled when they left the offices sometime later, so transparently pleased that for once Ophele was not embarrassed by the praise.
He did have a very big-brotherly air about him as he looked at her, his chest puffing.
“Listened to you day in and day out and not a clue. Even if it doesn’t work out, that was smart and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. My lady. Wasn’t it, Leo? ”
“I have asked you not to call me Leo,” Sir Leonin said with exaggerated patience. But he did look at Ophele and bow his head. “It was an excellent idea, Your Grace. Everyone is very excited about it.”
“Thank you.” That, however, was embarrassing. Ophele looked down, pretending to pick her way around the mud puddles.