Paul sat on the bed and slouched against the wall. “The priest. He had been called to a dying man in the village to the east, and we caught him just as he was about to pass our sentries. He was not pleased that I took that from him. He said it was a gift from the lady, to help ease the man’s passing, and told us that God would punish us for interfering with His work.”

Marcus frowned down at Nesta’s design. It would be her last one for a long while, since she had no more parchment. She must have worked on it all last night and most of today, and the painting showed her haste and exhaustion. Had she lost herself in it, as a form of meditation? Or had the priest mentioned the dying man, and she labored so that a holy image could be brought to him?

“Heading east, not west, you said?”

Paul nodded.

It seemed innocent enough. And, as Paul had said, if Nesta sought to communicate with Carwyn Hir, she did not need to write her words. No doubt the departing servants had relayed the information about the lords and armies coming here.

A bit of wax had dripped on one corner of the parchment, forming a tiny, crusty blob. He reached down and scraped it off with his fingernail while he held the sheet down with his other hand.

The texture beneath his fingertips provoked his attention. Curious, he moved the pads of his fingers slowly and gently, and felt a series of shallow depressions and rises on the surface of the image. In his mind’s eye he saw other fingers doing the same thing, with a different parchment. Rhys had checked one of Nesta’s images this way that evening in his garden.

The parchment had been scraped, Rhys had said, and used after writing had been removed. Marcus let his fingers drift, and found evidence of scraping over the whole surface.

It was commonplace to scrape and reuse parchment, of course. Except that this was parchment that he had purchased for Nesta himself, and it had been new and clean when it reached her.

He lifted the sheet, to study it more closely. As it rose toward him, the light from the candle backlit the upper left corner.

Marcus’s arm froze. Despite the inks, the thinner areas of parchment let the light pass through. An image took form as the lines of scraping joined and flowed.

Marcus found himself looking down at a small, hidden picture of a dragon.

He moved the parchment slowly, so that the candle illuminated more of the scraping. Words revealed themselves, just as the dragon had.

He read a few at the bottom, and his chest emptied out. For an instant only air filled it, not heart and bone. In that moment he deduced the outlines of a treason so audacious that even the air disappeared.