“As I was saying, Lael was better at making observations than he was at understanding what to do with them, and being obsessed with the lore of sorcery left his education rather thin in other areas, such as botany. He was never interested in plants except as ingredients.”

The book was filled with notes in a quick, slanting script. The lines of text filled in the spaces around sketches of strange plants, trees shaped like umbrellas, grasses with feathered blades, trees with an odd marbled bark. There were also pressed flowers affixed to many of the pages, blossoms of many colors and petal patterns.

“Most of these are from his earlier adventures,” Quill said. “He has ghostblooms from the Ashlands and tentrumpet flowers from the slopes of the Gnarlfinger Mountains, and crystal moss from the foot of the Frostfever Falls, but on the Craton Auroborea he found this.”

Quill turned over one last leaf and rotated the book to show everyone else a pressed flower. It counted amongst the least interesting of all the flowers in the book and would have been easily overlooked on any afternoon stroll. It had white petals, which indicated a night-blooming flower, if Isabelle recalled correctly, and yellow stamen and petals with gray dots on the edges of the lobes.

Isabelle’s ancestral chorus stirred and muttered at the sight of the bloom, though their garbled response was no help at all in telling her what was so important about it.

“So…” Isabelle said. “A rare plant.”

“Not just rare,” Quill said. “This is a Saint’s Promise flower. It grows wild nowhere on Craton Massif nor on Craton Riqueza nor on any of the skylands wandering the great gyres. Only in the Temple greenhouses in Om are any kept, and even there only with great difficulty. The first of the Temple’s stock was given by Saint Gossamer herself to her daughter the Firstborn Queen Fushimo. After the Annihilation of Rüul and the death of the last Risen Saints, Fushimo passed the flower along to her children, along with the promise their grandmother made, that this bloom would guide them to the Vault of Ages, where it grew in great profusion.”

Quill’s words struck Isabelle like a slap of cold wind, sending a chill down her neck, for she saw the end point of Quill’s deduction.

Lieutenant Vrain said, “Do you mean to suggest that the traitor Lael found the Vault of Ages?” He had a low, sad voice like a professional mourner.

Jean-Claude added skeptically, “Not only found it, but never said anything about it?”

Quill said, “Lael found a field of Saint’s Promise flowers, which he wrote were ‘impressive in their profusion if not their individual construction.’ He didn’t know what he’d found, or what it meant.”

Isabelle cleared her throat and got silence. “Are you sure this is exactly that same flower. Many blooms that look quite similar come from different species.”