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His look shifted to the left and he moved his lantern to his side. “And what is this?”
“It’s a tree—step back.”
Rune did so, taking three long strides backward in the dirt, moving his lantern to see the whole of the mosaic beside the box. A definite tree, though not to scale with the box and with many tesserae missing.
“But this is the art that I think is more interesting.” Elle moved around the corner of the chamber to the adjoining wall, holding her lantern up.
“This is the ring.” She pointed along the wall at the clumps of gold tesserae as she talked. “Oh no, some more of it has fallen. See, it’s missing here and here, but it’s still attached to the wall here and here. And this spot must have just disappeared.” Her hand moved in a large circle as she motioned toward the tiles still in place.
“It is clearly the ring, but down here and up here—I’m not sure what this is, these masses of blues and then the lines of brown.” Her hand waved over the lower and upper parts of the wall.
Rune walked over to the wall and stood beside her, moving his lantern from side to side as he scoured the expanse, searching. Searching for anything that might be a clue.
His breath held, and he reached up, rubbing his forefinger across one of the golden tiles, cleaning it. The light from the lantern caught the tile and it sparkled, catching on fire as if it were alive. Any closer and he might get burned.
He exhaled. “Maybe it’s perspective.”
She looked to him. “Perspective?”
“We can only see little bits of it at a time in this light.” He kicked aside some tiles by his feet to make a flat surface, then set his lantern on the cleared spot. He grabbed the leather strap on his shoulder holding the satchel across his back and he removed it. Opening the bag, he pulled free paper and pencils, handing a stack to Elle while keeping some for himself. “But maybe if we can see it as a whole, the parts that still exist will make more sense if we bring them into the daylight.”
Her eyebrows lifted but she didn’t argue, instead, turning and finding a spot to set her lantern down. “I’m willing to try it. So we sketch?”
He nodded. “We sketch all we can see.” He picked up his lantern and moved back to the wall with the box. “I’ll start on this one and you start on that one.”
Elle nodded, moving her lantern to the far right of the wall with the ring, then stepping back a few steps before making a nook in the dirt on the floor to sit in and sketch.
Rune duplicated her movements at the other wall. “Also, I should tell you, but I don’t want your hopes to rise.”
“Tell me what?”
“Before we left Seahorn I sent for something in London that may help us in our search for clues.”
“What could help us in the search?”
“Papers from Captain Folback. They were a bunch of nonsense—all of us thought that—except maybe they aren’t. I’ve kept them for years for some reason, and I’m having them sent. Maybe somewhere in them there is a clue about the box and the ring.”
“I’m willing to entertain any idea.” Her right hand motioned to the wall, a chuckle at her lips. “The reality is, as interesting as this chamber is, I feel we’re pinning our hope on a very thin thread in here.”
He paused in his motions, his stare settling fully on her. “I don’t.”
She stopped, looking over her shoulder at him. “You don’t?”
“I don’t think it happenstance that the box and you showed up in the same room together at Seahorn.” His voice turned somber. “I don’t think it happenstance that—of all things—you’ve been down in these chambers and even knew they existed. I don’t think it happenstance that Jules had that dream—that vision of where the box needed to go to. I don’t think any of it is happenstance.”
Her head shifted back slightly, her lips pursing for a moment, then she gave him a crooked smile. “I like your faith, Rune. I do. But forgive me if I am more skeptical than you. Maybe if I felt the power of the box or had seen its power over others. But I haven’t. Nonetheless, I will try and share your hope.”
She turned from him and picked up her sketchpad and pencil, silently getting to work.
Two hours later, Rune stood behind Elle, his thumb rubbing along a rogue tile in his palm as he looked down over her shoulder. She’d found another solid spot of rubble to sit upon farther along the wall and was nestled into the dirt of the chamber.
She looked perfectly content, like she was sitting on the finest throne. She hadn’t complained once about the dirt, the muck, the dankness of the chamber. Or even about the occasional splotches of mud that had dripped onto her face from above.
She’d said she loved working down in these chambers and it hadn’t been an exaggeration. And it’d only increased his esteem for her tenfold. She could get dirty and like it.
Before his wayward thoughts yanked him in the direction of rolling about on the piles of dirt with her, smearing mud into parts of her body that should remain covered, he swallowed and focused his attention on the sketch of the lower right corner of the mosaic that she was completing.
Rune assessed the lines of her pencil on the paper in the dim light, then looked up at the half-crumbled mosaic of the ring and the lines behind or around it—he wasn’t sure. He looked back down, bending over her, his arm going over her shoulder to point, his forefinger tracing the edge of the ring she’d sketched and then downward. “There, that line, capture that—it leads off from the ring in the oddest way.”
