The White Order

VII

CERRYL LAY ON his back, the heavy coarse blankets up to his chin, looking up through the darkness at the wide planks overhead. He could sense, rather than see, the heavy timbers that rested on those planks-the end of the finish timber rack holding oak beams. Almost a dozen score were stacked above Cerryl, seasoning, waiting for a buyer.

Even in designing where his workers’ rooms were, Dylert wasted nothing, not even barn space, since any storage where the rooms were would have been almost inaccessible. Cerryl frowned, thinking about the three men-his father, his uncle, and Dylert. One had failed and died; one had failed, but not died; and one had succeeded. Was it luck? Order? Or had chaos just struck down his father and crippled Uncle Syodor?

He recalled something Syodor had said to Nall-one night when they had thought Cerryl was sleeping-something about his father screaming he could have been High Wizard of Fairhaven had he only come from coins. Somehow, Cerryl didn’t think that being High Wizard was something coins could purchase. Or had his father meant something else? Or had Syodor really recalled what his father had said?

Cerryl inhaled deeply, then exhaled slowly with no answers. His breath no longer steamed like hearth smoke, and the worst of winter had passed, or so he hoped. One eight-day had been so cold that both he and Rinfur had slept by the hearth in the millmaster’s house. The gray-haired woman who tutored Erhana on her letters had not been to the mill in four or five eight-days.

It had taken Brental a two-stone black oak timber to break the ice in the well. Cerryl shivered at the memory, glad that only an eight-day had been that chill.

His eyes went to the board under the cubby, the one he’d spent eight-days loosening. Behind it was the book he’d brought, the one he still kept puzzling over when he could.

That, too, he could sense behind the wood, in a different way, with a faint white glow, not so reddish as a fire, but with the same hidden depths. The book held a key, that he knew, but how could he find it when he couldn’t even read?

He sighed again, his eyes blank, fixed on the planks over his pallet.