The abbot sat back from his plate and dabbed the corners of his mouth with his sleeves. “Curiosity is the doorway that invites filth into a pristine mind. Everything right and good is provided through the words of Maribor. All else is unnecessary confusion that leads to idle contemplation that in turn leads to evil thoughts, which breed evil actions.”

Farilane knew the abbot’s “words of Maribor” referred to the Codex of Maribor, the compilation of specific books of antiquity into one monastically approved volume that included Treatise on the Gods, Meditations of Maribor, Book of Nyphron, and Fables. This was the foundational text of the Maribor Monks: their instruction manual, much of which was reputed to have been derived from The Book of Brin. The abbot had substituted words for codex, Farilane assumed because words were not illegal, and the abbot was wisely suspicious of his visitors.

“All right, fine—I guess—but why did you call it the Crescent Forest? I thought it was known as the Mystic Wood?”

Again, came the covert looks tossed and caught between the three.

“Why would it be called the Mystic Wood?” Thorlac asked, expertly stealing her next question.

That’s what Kolby would call a riposte, a shift in direction, forcing me to deal with an unanswerable question, allowing for an attack.

Farilane was not surprised to see the ambush come from Thorlac. He appeared to be the hired intellectual muscle at the table.

“Whereabouts in Merredydd do you hail from?” His tone lacked the honey that sweetened the abbot’s words. The sound of his voice was more like determined footsteps on gravel, the question thrown out like bait on the end of a fishing line.

“We don’t come from Merredydd.” Farilane nibbled the bait, testing it.

She watched the ghost of a smile turn up the corners of Thorlac’s lips. “But you said you came from Merredydd.”

“We did.” Farilane ate a strawberry, enjoying the game, watching the confusion build, and then added, “But we do not hail from Merredydd.”

At this point, she saw two moves for poor old Thorlac: he could restate his question, relaunching his attack from a weakened position, or give up the line of inquiry altogether and regroup.

Farilane didn’t give him the time to decide, treating her non-answer as an answer. My turn. “I’ve always been fascinated by the Monks of Maribor. Your order was started by someone named Bran, wasn’t it?”

“Bran the Beloved.” Hildreth spoke up for the first time, nodding as she did in a grandmotherly fashion far more disarming than Thorlac’s aggression. She followed this with a dreamy voice, as if she were a teenager swooning over her first crush. “He brought us the words of his master, Brin, and taught us to understand them.”