“Plans change.” He grunts. “This is Delta of Dead River, and she would like to study the map. Perhaps you can tell her what you’ve learned, and it will loosen her tongue. She’s withholding from the General.”

Withholding. I could spit on him.

“She is welcome to study with me,” the Oracle says, and she raises a pale, willowy hand to beckon us nearer. Reed nudges my back, forcing me into the room.

I approach the table slowly. The Oracle is studying the sheet of metal that the General had the brand copied onto. Beside her is a shallow tray of damp dirt, and she has scraped symbols into it with a twig. Some seem to match the markings of the map. Others are new shapes, illegible swirls and curves. She brings a palm to the dirt, wiping the surface clean before I can get a closer look.

“Guards remain stationed at the library door, so staging an escape would be futile,” Reed says to the woman. “I’ll be back in a few hours.” Despite his blunt tone, he nods to the Oracle and touches his forehead in respect, then leaves without another word.

The Oracle motions to the chair beside her. As I sit, I notice her necklace. Its chain is shorter than the General’s, and it holds just one pendant, but the style and size of the metal is the same. Slender and smooth, the length of my thumb. A star, my mother had called it yesterday.

“Did you help someone escape once?” I ask, still thinking of Reed’s warning to the woman.

“My father did. He was the Oracle before me.”

“What happened?”

“There was a fire. My father burned some of the General’s most prized relics. But that’s not what you came here for, is it?” She angles the map toward me. “What do you see?”

The markings shine up at me from the carved scrap metal, foreign and strange. Crisscrossed lines. Swirling curves. Dots and specks. “A thicket. A dust storm. An unreadable constellation.”

“You cannot read it?”

“Can you?”

The Oracle frowns. “This is an E.” She points to a symbol in the top left of the map, the line I’d noticed the other day with three smaller lines branching from it. “It repeats here.” She moves her finger to the right, where the symbol appears again. “Nothing else makes sense.”

“What’s an E?”

“A letter of the Old World language. When combined with others, the letters form words that can tell stories, reveal correspondences, give directions.” She scowls at the map and returns to writing in the damp dirt beside her. “My father never cracked the map in his time, and all his research was lost in the fire, along with the original map.”

Sir, the guard had said to the General yesterday. Metal can’t burn.