The candles benttoward the chapel. Not flickered. Bent. I had been in the lower hall with my father and Aldwin, listening to a messenger discuss the road conditions between Thames and Runnymede for the third time, when every flame in the room leaned eastward at once. Thin and gold and straining toward the wall as though a hand had passed through them and pulled.
No one spoke. Then Father William appeared in the doorway, pale in the morning light from the hall windows.
“Geoffrey,” he said.
That was all it took. I was already moving as Aldwin followed. Behind us I heard my father speak a sharp word to the messenger and then his own footsteps, slower than ours.
The corridors passed in fragments of stone and torchlight. The turning stair. The chapel doors, which were open.
Harper stood before the lectern with her hands folded loosely at her waist, the way she stood when she was deliberately not touching something.
The psalter glowed. Gold leaf shifting beneath the vellum like sunrise caught and held, brightening a fraction as I crossed the threshold and settling when I stopped.
It had been waiting. For her, or for all of us, I could not tell.
Father William moved past me to the wall and made the sign of the cross with the absent precision of a man who had crossed himself a thousand times that month and would cross himself a thousand more.
“I didn’t do anything,” Harper said quietly.
Her face was pale in the gold light. The same expression she wore when the household accounts revealed something she had not expected.
“How long?” I asked.
“Maybe ten minutes. It started on its own. I came in to look at the altar carvings and it flared…” She gestured.
“Doing this,” Father William supplied.
“Doing this,” Harper agreed.
I took a step closer to the lectern. The light brightened against my face, almost imperceptibly, then settled.
Days before Runnymede and before she said the world would change, the manuscript that had carried her here had apparently decided that proximity to that moment was reason to begin offering its work back to her.
Behind me Aldwin spoke for the first time. “Will it answer me now?”
Harper turned slowly. “ I don’t know.”
He had not moved further into the chapel. He stood just inside the doorway with his arms loose at his sides and his shoulders set. My brother looked, for one moment, exactly like the man I remembered from the winter Elise had died.
Father William said nothing. Neither did my father, who had come up behind me without my registering it.
“If I try,” Aldwin said carefully, “what would you have me do differently.”
Harper considered it. “Not need,” she said finally. “Attention without demand. Be willing to leave with nothing.”
“And if I am willing to leave with nothing?”
“Then maybe it will tell you something.”
Aldwin looked at the psalter.
The light had not dimmed at his presence. It was simply continuing, steady and gold, as though it had not yet decided who it was speaking to.
Aldwin crossed the chapel moving slowly. My brother walked through most rooms as though they belonged to him, but he approached the lectern as though it might speak. He placed his hands on the open page.
The chapel went very still. Father William bowed his head. My father leaned closer. Harper stepped back as Aldwin closed his eyes. I watched the gold light beneath his palms. For one moment nothing changed. Then the light beneath his hands began to recede.
Not vanish. It pulled away from his fingers in slow concentric pulls, like water drawing back from a stone, until the vellum beneath his palms was simply vellum and gold and nothing more.