Page 40 of Claiming the Tower (Council Mysteries #1)

Vines grew up the sides, twining through each other, twisting toward the upper stories.

There were four windows Hereswith could count above the door.

Five stories, perhaps. The tower itself was broad, maybe twenty feet across.

Big enough for a room, something perhaps like a lighthouse in design.

It made no sense here, where there were fields and no sign of other living beings besides the wall she’d come from.

Not large ones. Hereswith had listened as she’d walked.

There were no sounds of people, but there had not even been signs in the frost of larger mammals, foxes or stoats or weasels or badgers.

There was a door, and the most logical thing to do was to try the door.

Logical, but perhaps also foolish. She had not been invited here, at least not explicitly.

Implicitly, perhaps. Or this could be the sort of challenge that she was meant to fail, a trap for the unwary.

There were people who would have dozens of charms at their fingertips, to test the door, to open a lock.

Those were not Hereswith’s particular gifts.

Instead, she looked up and up, focusing on the top of the tower. “May I enter?”

There was no response for five breaths. Then, suddenly, out of nowhere, there was a simultaneous burst of thunder and light.

Lightning flashed down, close enough it should have killed her, right overhead.

Hereswith automatically brought her arms up to cover her head.

As she did so, she heard something fall near her, the thud of it hitting the ground between the rumbles of the thunder.

Then, almost as quickly as it had come on, the boom and flashes of light disappeared, leaving a clearer sky.

A warming one, with sunlight that would, in time, melt the frost around her.

Hereswith blinked up, then glanced around to see what had fallen.

It looked like a piece of stone, carved, some sort of finial from the tower above.

It was hard to tell the shape at first, but as she bent over it, she realised it was a bird.

A phoenix, perhaps, the way the wings were outstretched.

It was carved from a stone that she thought had begun as something of fire, jasper perhaps, though the red and orange were muted now with long age, as much as the lines of the carving had worn down.

It was not large, perhaps three inches across.

Hereswith picked it up, feeling the weight of it, brushing it off.

Then she looked up again at the sky. “May I enter?” It was bold to ask again after that, but this time the door shivered and then she heard the decisive click of the lock shifting.

As she put her hand on the latch, the door swung open as if it were light as a feather.

Everything in her told her it was essential to go forward.

She knew well enough that change was a challenge, change was always a challenge.

Much of her professional work had involved talking people into changes they did not want until they were convinced it had been their own idea to start.

And she knew her symbology as well as anyone else in Albion.

Here was the Tower, from the tarot, a card of dramatic change, of tearing down what is no longer needed to build something fresh.

And here in her hand was the phoenix, a bird reborn from fragrant pyres.

The tower before her was of the old world, wars of a different time, when outposts like this were needed to keep watch and give warning.

There had been no war like that on Albion’s soil for decades, even if Napoleon had threatened the seas.

Not since Cromwell’s Protectorate, in truth, and even then castles had not been much of the fighting.

But, on the other hand, whatever she needed to do was apparently inside.

And she could honour the place such a tower had held, once, while considering what came next.

She took her skirts in one hand, to lift them, the finial in her other.

And then she entered. Inside was a smooth wooden staircase, climbing around the edge of the tower.

Nothing but the stairs, not until the top floor, she thought, but it was dark up there and difficult to see.

Hereswith called a charmlight to her hand, set it to rest on her shoulder, and began to climb.

Up she went, past one window, then another.

She climbed floor by floor until she reached the seventh, a little out of breath.

She did not linger there, but as soon as her breath had eased enough, she went through the arch into whatever room lay beyond at the top of the tower.

This was no ancient tower with scrolls rather than books, or rough-hewn weapons.

This was modern, though with candles rather than gas lamps in the chandelier above.

It was something like an office, with papers out on a grand wooden desk.

The room was like what any modern man of the upper classes might have, all mahogany and teak polished to a mirror shine.

Books bound in shades of smooth leather sat in a set of shelves along one wall.

A map was pinned above a chaise longue on the other, and a window behind the desk.

Hereswith’s eyes were drawn to the papers, of course.

Now she had to decide what to do about them.

If she were in the Ministry, she’d ignore them.

She’d been trained in that. Of course, they’d also trained her to keep all delicate paperwork— most all of it— locked away except when she was actively working on it.

There was no one here to alert, no sign of a bell nor anyone nearby.

It would be foolish to assume she wasn’t being observed.

Who was observing, whether they could hear and see her both?

Those were mysteries. But there was no reason she couldn’t explain her actions.

“I am here in what appears to be an office or study. There are books on shelves, a map on the wall, and papers on the desk. I do not know who this room belongs to, if it is friend or foe, or how it is protected or warded. I know I must move forward, whatever that means, and face whatever challenge comes.”

Nothing happened. On the other hand, that suggested she was meant to figure out something from this room.

Hereswith began with the simpler items. The map was…

actually, the map was a problem. At first glance, it might be taken as a map of the British Empire, that was certainly familiar enough to Hereswith.

The first thing she noticed, of course, was that the British parts were not the red-pink of convention.

Instead, they were a sort of teal, a lighter shade than Seal House’s emblems.

A swath of green encompassed not only the German states, but south and a little west, into the Habsburg Realm.

The Italian shades had their own variant shades, though all were some shade of purple.

Switzerland drew from the countries around it, but not in any way that suggested the differentiation was about language.

It was as if half a dozen different shades had been laid down on the map, overlapping and shading without turning into a mucky brown mess.

What Hereswith knew as France was mostly a deep blue.

Spain and Portugal shaded from red into orange, with a golden stripe along the Pyrenees shading into green before the blue to the east.

It did not make sense. Hereswith took a breath and went to look at the books on the shelf.

Those were even more complex. Only a few were even labelled in a language she could be sure of reading.

A few were in English, a few in what looked like Middle English, as opposed to Anglo-Saxon, though not entirely dialects she knew.

There were a handful in Latin, two in Welsh, three in what she was fairly sure was Scots Gaelic.

There were others in French, but after that, she couldn’t even make enough sense of the titles.

Those she could understand all seemed to be some sort of routine record keeping, though the names involved were not remotely ones she knew.

The form of them, though, was the records of this place name in that year.

That part seemed consistent with records she knew.

That left the desk. She circled behind it, checking that there was no obvious risk or trap on the floor.

The papers, like the books, were in a mix of languages.

But here, she could see references to places she knew.

Names, out of Crimea, along with a few names of people, or at least titles.

Perhaps estates would be a better way to put it.

Fewer in France, more as the notes discussed points further east. She didn’t know most of the details, but she could begin to see the patterns.

There were concerns about matters in Crimea, with pressure from multiple sides.

And, unlike the war, it seemed like there was some collaboration or at least conversation among all parties.

Hereswith did not want to rearrange the sheets, but what she could see suggested a risk of something horrible happening, somewhere on the north edge of the Black Sea.

The more she looked, the more it seemed there was a great purpose to this.

“Do you want me to do something here?” She asked the question into the air, as directly as she could.

There was a pulse of light, illuminating the map as if from behind, like the sun shining through stained glass.

It was beautiful, that was her first thought, but then she saw— back at the north of the Black Sea, a ragged blotch that showed up more clearly.

A darkness, rather than light. “That’s where the problem is, isn’t it? ”

There might have been another pulse of the light.

Hereswith came closer, looking at how things were laid out.

“I don’t know if this is accurate to right now.

Or what my moving it will change. Is this—” This was supposed to be a challenge.

What was before her was important, but it didn’t exactly seem to be a challenge.

Not that way. She took a breath. “Shall I indicate where the problem seems to be?” The light pulsed.

“And then what I’d do about it?” Again. “I shall.”

Nothing moved, but Hereswith took a moment to look at all the details.

Then she took one of the sticks, one with a pointer on the end.

“The latest reports I’ve seen about the progress of the war indicate conflict here.

” She showed the spots. “We were just beginning to get reports of a second battle at Bomarsund.” She frowned, then she looked up. “You don’t like the war, do you?”

There was silence, no shift in the light.

Hereswith shook her head. “I don’t like it either.

Not the reasoning behind it, not the way it is being run, not the way it treats the men gone to fight, or the women with them in various roles.

Or the horses and the mules and donkeys and I don’t know what else.

” She let her frustration bubble over. “I don’t know what I can do about it, though.

I don’t have that power. Or that persuasion.

And it is far away, even if we— Britain, Albion— are meddling there. With others.”

Nothing shifted, except for a sort of feeling, deep in her bones. Hereswith took another breath. “The map. That’s a different kind of collaboration, isn’t it? A diplomacy I do not understand. Not yet.”

There was a gentler pulse. And then, inside Hereswith’s head, there was a flurry of images.

She knew all of them. They were memories, the ones that had stuck, the ones that had her awake at night, wishing she’d handled something differently.

It was strong enough, a drum beating against the inside of her skull, that she sank to her knees, the pointer dropping from her hands.

She braced against the floor, as best she could, while the flood washed over her.

There was a growing headache behind her eyes and at the back of her skull, but she couldn’t fail now.

Slowly, painfully slowly, she began to get a pattern.

All the places she had gone along with what was expected, when her heart had wanted something else.

Often her heart, her wits, her knowledge, and her good sense.

Deliberately, she tried to call to mind answers to them.

There were the places she’d argued. The meeting she’d been sent out of, where Blanch had come to speak to her afterwards.

Times she’d held her ground about some plan that would fail instantly, trading it for one that had at least some slight chance of success.

All the times she’d wished to tear down what wasn’t working and do something different, but of course she did not have that power.

The rush of memories slowed, and finally Hereswith managed to look up.

Her eyes were about at the level of the edge of the table, and she blinked to clear her vision.

“You need someone who will make that choice, who will push for it. Who sees what needs to be done, and who will discard how it’s always been handled.

The world keeps changing, the old answers—” She stopped, trying to get her words in order.

“I honour the old answers, and the traditions, and the foundations we’ve built on.

But sometimes they don’t serve anymore. Do they?

” Then, her voice much quieter, the way she spoke to Bess or Papa. “Do you think I can do that work?”

The entire room went dim, and then the light came back, like a dawn.

Everything was gone, except for one door in the far wall.

She was in a circular chamber now, the right size to be the top of the actual tower of the keep.

Hereswith took a deep breath, and stood, careful not to tread on her skirts.

Once she’d taken time to tidy herself and will the headache away— not that it worked— she took a breath.

She made her way to the door to find the handle turning as smoothly as all the others.