“Do you think it possible that the stone crowns are harbors, gateways from one to the next? That we can actually travel between them?”
“I do not know, but I know what my predecessors thought. They believed it.” She drew a finger over the pages of the old chronicle delicately, as if she feared it might dissolve at her touch. “That is why they recorded the stone circles here. They thought there was a pattern, hidden in plain sight if they could learn to read it.”
A hand bell rang, the call to prayer.
“What have you decided, Sister Rosvita? Will you counsel in favor of Lord Hugh’s plan, or against it?”
“I don’t know. I must pray for God to give me counsel.”
Rosvita closed both books and left them on the lectern as she assisted Mother Obligatia to rise. She offered her arm to her, and although Obligatia braced herself on Rosvita’s elbow, her touch was so insubstantial that it seemed more like a memory than an actual presence.
With Theophanu and Adelheid and their noble ladies in attendance, the chapel was crowded. Its walls curved up into a dome, laden with symbols painted onto the whitewashed wall: St. Ekatarina sits in the center, arms extended to either side, palms out in the gesture of an open heart and complete surrender to God in Unity; a pale crown composed of stars burns at her brow, the mark of a saint; above her, twin dragons twine through hoary clouds, engaged in the fiery battle that denotes the conflict inherent in a creation stained by darkness; beyond that, as if seen from the mountaintop, a palace gleams in the sky, no doubt meant to represent the Chamber of Light where all souls return when the robes of darkness have at last been lifted from their spirit after their ascension through the seven spheres after death.
In deference to the several crippled or old sisters, railings had been set in rows so that, when they knelt, they might lean on wood. The dark grain was well polished, as if over the decades many of the nuns had needed a little such help at their prayers. After so many hours, Rosvita found herself exhausted. She, too, needed the compassionate support of the simple wood railing.
She had been ill for a long time and recovering for a much shorter one, and now she felt flashes of heat, sweat breaking on her forehead and down her spine. The hair at the nape of her neck was damp, and her palms slick.
Ai, Lady, she was tempted. Could Hugh bind the daimone? Could she see it done? She had never seen a daimone, of course, and the intense desire to see what she had never seen before and would likely never see again scalded her heart.
They sang from the Sayings of Queen Salomae the Wise, who had lived long before the birth of the blessed Daisan.
“Do not follow the path of evildoers. Turn aside. Avoid it.
For the evil man cannot sleep unless he has done wrong.
The evil woman cannot sleep unless she has caused someone’s downfall.”
Yet she and Theophanu would become accomplices to Hugh’s misdeeds and his terrible acts if they accepted help from him, if they allowed him to aid them with that same sorcery they had been so eager to condemn him for before.
“For although the lips of the sorcerer drip honey