Page 88 of High Water

“Without the pillow wall?” I give her a skeptical look.

“I trust you.” Her laughter has faded into a soft smile, and it makes my chest ache with how grateful I am. Those three words give me hope.

THIRTY-FIVE

Aspen

Halfway through a long second day, I’m slowly but surely making my way through the current shovel test pit, looking for any evidence of the missing sword. I have one more site to test after this one, and if those two turn up empty, I’ll have to figure out where to move next for more GPR data. Bishop’s sitting faithfully by my side, doing his best to learn and take notes on how I’m working so he can help with the next round if we’re forced to try again.

“Would a metal detector help?”

“It could if it’s close enough to the surface. Do you know how deep you dug it?”

“That night is a bit of a blur, honestly. I thought I dug it pretty deep, but I had to go through the snow first and then the dirt, you know? So I’m not sure how deep under the ground itself it actually was.”

I nod as I work, scraping another layer of dirt off the surface, when suddenly my trowel hits something. Something hard and… I tap it again lightly. Something that definitely feels like metal. I gently work to move the dirt away and brush the looser bits aside with my hand.

“Aspen?” he questions, just as curious as I am at the discovery.

“I don’t know. I really don’t. It feels like metal though. Get me some of the brushes just in case.” I nod back to the bag where we left most of our supplies.

He jumps up and takes off to fulfill my request while I continue working the dirt away and feeling out the shape of the object. It’s a slow process, gentle removal of the dirt, brushing away, repeat ad nauseam until I can tell what it is.

I manage to get quite a bit of the top layer of soil cleared by the time he brings the brush over, and I use it to brush what’s left of the debris off the tip of the object. It glints in the sun, even with the dirt that’s still stuck to the surface. It’s definitely metal, and as I lean down and tilt my head to get a closer look, I’m almost positive it’s something man-made.

I work furiously for the next few minutes as more and more of the object comes into view, making one final flourish of the brush over the surface to clear as much of the debris away as possible. It’s the hilt of a sword. It has to be. I let out a little squeal of delight.

“Is this it? Is this how you remember it?” I ask him for confirmation.

“I think so. It’s been a long time. I didn’t get the greatest look at it since I was just trying to get rid of it, but how many swords do you think are buried out here?” he jokes.

“With our families? Who knows?” I laugh, and he squeezes my shoulder.

“Fuck. We found it! You’re amazing, Jones. It’s almost like you do this for a living.” He winks at me. “I’ll call Levi down, and he can get Rowan and the rest. Or wait, would you rather do this alone?” He pauses for my input.

“No. No. Tell Levi. I’ll keep going, but get them on their way. Hopefully, it won’t take me too long, and we can get it out of here safely in one piece.” I urge him on, and he grabs his cell as I return to the painstaking task of getting the sword free.

A few hours later, the sword is out of the ground, ensconced in an archival box, and sitting on the table in Grant’s conference room while we surround it in varying states of disarray. The sword looks like the one in the photo from the abbey. Bishop swears it’s the same one, in the same general area where he buried it over fifteen years ago. But the sword was allegedly of the finest quality silver and gold. The legend purported that it was so pure and so rare that it shimmered like the sun, blinding all of Charlemagne’s adversaries in battle. This sword has only spent fifteen years in the ground, and it’s already suffering the effects of corrosion. Parts of it are brittle, and pulling it out of the ground has caused several of the more delicate elements to fall apart in the extraction, despite how carefully we handled it. Something that would only happen if the alloy of the metal was of an inferior quality.

“It’s definitely the sword I buried.” Bishop looks over it again and nods. “Like I said earlier, how many swords were buried on that property in that area?”

“But it wouldn’t corrode like this if it was silver and gold. There’s too much copper alloy in the metal, or something that’s not adding up to what we know about the original,” I explain.

“Maybe the abbey’s records are inaccurate. It wouldn’t be the first time,” Zephyrine adds her thoughts.

“Or it’s not the original. A clever fake.” Charlotte’s expertise lies largely in spotting fakes, for the most part, because in her prior life, she helped create them. “I could run some tests and see.”

“I think we have to. It could be a fake or a replica. Or the records could be wrong.”

“Or the original was there, and someone took it, had a replica made, and put it back in the ground,” Levi suggests. “We know Zephyrine’s brothers were crawling over that property. We have no idea for how long.”

“This would still take years. More than they would have had. And if it was more recent, we would have seen disturbance in the surface soil. We didn’t. It looked like the rest of the ground around it that had been scorched by the fire,” I explain.

“Could the fire have weakened it? If it got hot enough? Parts of it weren’t that far from the surface,” Bishop questions.

“It’s possible, depending on how hot the fire was burning and if there was water in the soil. The more acidic the rain, the more it intensifies processes like this, but it would still have had to have been made from a lesser alloy. Gold is nonreactive to oxygen, and silver can occasionally pit under the right conditions, but not like this.” I shake my head.

“She’s right. There’s something not adding up here.” Levi agrees with my assessment.