Her voice, ragged and chill, grew several degrees colder on these words, and her gaze, startlingly hot, lifted to sear Sanglant where he sat rigid, not knowing what to do, entirely at a loss, routed from the field. She was incandescent with anger, but she went on in a tone like a bell tolling for the dead.

” And a darkness fell over the whole land …”’

She broke off and rose. Even the church folk shrank back from her righteous wrath. The great princes tensed.

“A darkness, indeed! This is the source of the storm that has afflicted us! This is the heresy of the Redemption, and that of the dual nature! Brought into this realm, we now see, by a renegade monastic who strayed from the church and forgot his vows, and passed the poison on into his daughter.”

The words dropped like iron, more damaging than a spear thrust or a sword’s cut.

Only Liath did not appear to notice. She was too busy gazing in wonder at the open page. “Do you suppose it is a forgery, or the truth? How could one tell? It looks old, but the parchment might have been scraped clean and reused. It could have been discolored to appear old. Or it might be as it seems, centuries old. Is the Arethousan gloss written contemporaneously with the original, or was it glossed later? How can we know the truth of something that happened so long ago? One would have to gather evidence from many sources …”

She looked up expectantly. Only then did she falter, and he saw her bewilderment and the slow dawn of understanding.

As he understood, too late.

Hugh knows her better than 1 do.

Hugh had guessed she would betray herself, once the book’s existence was revealed, because she could not stop asking questions. Because she wanted to know the truth, whether the Earth rotated or the sun rotated, or if the winds were born in vast bellows or set in motion by the turning spheres, or why and how arrows shot into the heavens returned to a particular spot on the Earth. If an ancient manuscript was truth, or lie. She cared nothing for the politics of the situation or the church’s traditions of orthodoxy.

In that way, of course, she was a heretic, just not in the way they imagined.

“I don’t know where my father came by this text,” she said. ‘As I already told you, I can’t read it. I only knew a little Arethousan. It was taught to me by Father Hugh.”

“You have already condemned yourself,” said Mother Scholastica. “You admit twice over this is your father’s book.” She turned pages. “Here, a florilegia of sorcery, the arts of the mathematici which were condemned at the Council of Narvone. And here—what language is this?”

“It’s Jinna. This is a copy of the astronomical text On the Configuration of the World—”

“An infidel’s black sorcery!”

“No, it’s just a description of the workings of the heavens, based in part on Ptolomaia’s Tetrabiblos. There’s nothing heretical in that!”