As Alba approached the boy-priest, trying to pinpoint how much he had grown, she found herself distracted instead by the flat thing spread over his lap. The boy did not look up. Biting his lip, he had all his attention focused on a long, narrow reed pinched awkwardly in his fingers. He moved it across the flat panel with painstaking slowness. Wherever he moved it, it left a little black scratch.

Alba could not stop herself from watching. “What is this?” she asked finally.

The boy nodded at another black-scratched panel spread on the ground beside him. “Kerfying,” he said, still biting his lip.

“What’s that?” Alba asked.

“Copying,” he repeated more clearly, dipping the reed into a small pot beside him. “I’m trying to copy a parchment.” He glanced at Alba and, frowning, muttered, “If I show I can do it well, I might be granted a new duty. It’s not what I want to do. It’s not preparing meals… it’s not picking thyme and making stew, but I would not have to guard the chamber, or, as it happens, not guard the chamber and follow the apprentice through the dark to make sure she doesn’t drown. And then some other guard can worry about your rule breaking.”

Alba ignored this, still wondering about the dark marks. “You have to copy those scratches?”

“Words.”

“What words?”

“On the parchment.”

“Where?”

The boy tapped his finger on the panel spread across his lap. He moved the reed to make a slanted scratch—up, down. Again, but straight. Over.

Insect-legs, thought Alba, looking over all the swarming dark marks. Ant-antennae. Spider-knees. Cicada-haunches. Beetle-arms. Again, she asked, “But where are the words?”

“On this day,” read the boy, sighing as he dropped his reed into the pot, “the oracle and her apprentice did receive seven visitors before noon, and eight more before dinner. Forty-three coins were collected. Asked by a merchant whether he should expand his trade across the sea, the oracle did answer, ‘Fortune not carried by fair winds is fortune lost.’ Asked by a father whether his daugh—”

“I don’t remember this,” Alba said. “No merchant has visited recently.”

“I’m reading it. This is what the priest wrote.”

“Wrote?”

“This.” The boy shook the parchment. “What do you think I’m copying? This is the priest’s catalog of the day. Of the visitors to the oracle from”—he squinted at the page—“several years ago. These are his words.”

Alba stared with uncertainty as the boy marked another parade of cicada-haunches and beetle-arms across the blank space. Finally, unable to bear her curiosity longer, she leaned over the boy’s shoulder and touched a tangle of crooked spider-legs.

“Don’t—” the boy cried, pulling the parchment away.

Raising her hand, Alba saw her fingertip had been darkened with something damp and black. She lifted her hand to her lips, sniffed, then touched her finger lightly to her tongue. It tasted sour. Burnt. “No word,” she said. “It’s bitter.” She glanced at the boy, who was now scraping frantically at a cloud that had appeared where the stick-legs were before, as though the insects themselves had been crushed there.