“As much as I love to watch you struggle with a puzzle,” Cirian interrupted my process. “I’ll let you in on the secret. I know because of the wards. Each door in the Cradle has its own wards placed around it that serve as identifiers.” He reached out his hand to this door, his palm pressing against an invisible force a few inches away from the smooth wood.
“You keep him locked away like a prisoner?”
A shower of sapphire sparks rained from Cirian’s hand. “One could also choose to see it as us keeping an unwell man safe and provided for.”
The door clicked open, and Cirian pushed his hand further, finally making contact with the wooden surface. It gave way athis touch, swinging inward as warm light poured out from the opening. The room seemed cozy enough, with a comfortable-looking bed nestled in one corner and a desk in the opposite. A man sat at the desk, his frame hunched over his work as he scribbled furiously across the page of a notebook.
“Malachi,” Cirian spoke softly. “There’s someone here to speak with you.”
Cirian ushered me inside the room, shutting the door behind us. As we drew closer to the pale man, I picked up on the words he muttered to himself as he worked.
“The crow knows naught what the cat has caught, only shiny things show true. It hates the plot of the sunflower pot, and sees only black and blue.”
I looked to Cirian, but he didn’t seem thrown. He stepped closer, coming beside the man and crouching to his level, resting a gentle hand on his shoulder. “Malachi, can you hear me?”
The man continued to mutter, but his gaze lifted from the scribbling, and he stared blankly at Cirian with hollow eyes the color of robins’ eggs.
“Crows know the way.”
“This is Bastien,” Cirian replied, motioning for me to join them. I moved cautiously, still eyeing the mess of ink spread over the pages of the notebook—and most of the desk. “He’s a friend of Sancha and me. We’d like to speak with you, if that’s okay.”
“Salt is for the wounds. Sugar for the tombs.”
Cirian looked up at me and shrugged. “No one’s been able to get a lick of sense out of him since it happened. There have been a few moments when I think he’s understanding something I say, but then he just spouts off this nonsense, and any progress is washed.”
“What about yes or no questions?” I asked, studying the man as he watched me back, those hollow eyes filled with too muchawareness to belong to a man removed of his faculties. “Have you been able to communicate with him using those?”
“We’ve tried, yes. Whatever affliction he suffers from has altered more than his words, unfortunately. If we ask him to nod or shake his head to answer, he’ll thrash his arms or stomp his feet instead.”
“What about these?” I asked, pointing to the intricate pattern of lines that he’d scrawled across the page.
“He picked up the pen after the first day his ailment robbed him of speech. But it would seem he’s lost the ability to write words, so it’s been nothing but unrecognizable shapes.”
“What strange magic,” I muttered, taking out the small leather-bound notebook from my jacket pocket and jotting down a few notes.
“Bonnets on the toads did find that muck and mire refuse to shine.”
I looked up from my page to find Malachi staring at me, his eyes wide as if pleading with me to understand. He was younger than I expected, his face still round with youth despite the clear signs of exhaustion. His dark hair was stringy and unwashed and hung in his pale face like strands of twine, and his clothes were simple garments of Hallowed blue.
“I’m sorry,” I told him, shaking my head. “I don’t understand.”
“The crow knows naught what the cat has caught,” he repeated the same line from before, enunciating each word as if he were speaking to a child.
“Yes, we heard you the first time,” Cirian replied, patting the man’s shoulder.
“Does he often repeat the same phrases?” I asked.
“I’m not sure,” Cirian answered. “It all sounds like childish gibberish to me, so I don’t listen that closely.”
“But if he’s repeating himself, that proves he’s trying to communicate something. And if I had to guess, it’s something gravely important.”
“The crow knows naught!” Malachi interjected, bits of spittle flying from my mouth. He reeled around in the chair, grabbing the notebook and holding it out to me. He pointed wildly at the mess of scribble lines. “The sunflower pot! Thesunflower pot!”
I took the notebook from him, flipping through the pages as Cirian muttered calming words to the man. The black lines were swirling chaos on the page, shapes stacked atop one another in circular patterns that made no sense at first glance. But the longer I stared into the chaos of lines, the more I saw in the spaces between.
Glancing across the room, I spotted a small mirror hanging on the stone wall, framed in gold. I hurried over to it, holding the page in front of me and quickly adjusting the angle. As I found the right vantage, a jolt of electricity shot up my spine.
“Cirian,” I called to him, blinking a few times to make sure my eyes weren’t playing tricks on me. “Look here.”
