He scanned them. ‘Not mine.’
Locating the Tène amid every treasure in the museum could takedays,but her mother had told the Muse it was here, so there must be other clues to its location. She just had to focus.
‘How, exactly, are we going to get the Tène to give us the treasure?’ Bells asked.
Aboutthat, Nicole had no idea.
‘They only give up their treasures for something they deem more valuable,’ Kyan answered. ‘So our best bet is to find it first.’
‘If we end up with too much trouble, maybe Remi can come and sing it to sleep,’ Nicole said. ‘She’s given us a recording of herself that might coax it to move when we find an artefact that looks promising.’
Bells sighed. ‘So cute.’
They were to meet the others at the library in thirty minutes anyway. If they didn’t locate it, they’d come back tomorrow.
They browsed each piece as a group before splitting up. The museum’s colour scheme reminded Nicole of the airy impressionist paintings of Berthe Morisot: the majority of the space painted ethereal white, with details in shades of grey, sandstone, and dark brown.
By the time they wandered into the treasury it was closer to twelve.
The very hour Xinyi had planned for a thief to help Remi and Dylan get their hands on the harp.
Most of the items in the treasury were from Kyan’s time: masterworks of gold jewellery, remnants of ancient boats, delicate cloak-pins, time-eaten stone sculptures, and swords curled in on themselves, now deemed offerings to gods. All of this was just a fraction of the life that he’d lived, a whisper haunting time itself.
The treasury was long and empty of visitors. Its ceiling arched over a floor of floral mosaics interspersed with women in Grecian robes. Nicole walked into the centre, taking in the mosaic. At this point in the room it was a circle, unlike the more oblong shapes at either entrance.
This was the iconography the Wake used for their oaths. But inhere, it looked like a marker. A literal circle drawn around the location; a subtle link to the organisation this artefact could destroy.
A symbol Nicole would always note.
‘Okay, Mum,’ she said, taking in the room and stepping into the circular mosaic. ‘Where is it?’
Nicole scanned the four artefacts boxed at each point around the circle, all silver and as lucent as if they’d been moon-crafted. Each with metalwork so intricate that art historians had deemed them carved by angels.
Nicole stepped closer, gravitating towards the only item that appeared capable of hiding a torc, which also happened to have the type of zoomorphic details a Tène could hide amongst.
Clad in glass, she discovered it was called the ‘Derrynaflan Paten’.
She was surprised that it was Christian artefact, as she’d been keeping her eyes peeled for a pagan one, from a time when Druids or Old Gods had still been prominent in the ideology and design …
Her head tilted.
The paten resembled a deep silver plate, or an ancient mirror. The rim was inscribed in such minute Irish patterning Nicole had to bend closer to make it out. There were stylised shapes in its minuscule weave that included creatures so small they were hard to parse, disguised in its design. Every inch or so around its edge was a glass or enamel stud, and the surface of the metal plate gleamed and danced as if bespelled.
The piece hadn’t been made in Kyan’s time, so could it have been built to hide the torc later on? Or could the torc have been placed inside it somehow for safekeeping?
‘What’s this?’ Bells asked, having joined her.
‘A plate,’ Nicole mused. ‘But the detail is incredible, and the way it catches light …’ It made it look like it was some sort of scrying mirror, or mystic artefact.
Her mind highlighted the iconography of the circle on the floor, which glowed gold in her mind.
Then the shape of the paten itself.
Then the promise of the third circle inside – the torc.
Three circles, like the triple spiral symbol for the Morrígan.
Symbols, hidden in plain sight. Visual clues her mother had so loved to play with.
