The Book of Miranda | gxg | ❖

(14) MSTM

The map in Exie's lap crinkles dolefully as she grips its edges. A flake of paper drifts to the floor between us. Exie hastily releases the relic of a thing. It springs shut along its calcified folds. She pries one corner open to check something, then makes a note on her timeline. It's sitting in the lap of another mark, which she taps with the butt of her pencil. "We need something older. These two could be connected."

"Enlighten me," I say.

Exie starts to spin the map towards me, then glances up the library aisle and decides otherwise. She drops her voice instead. "This was drawn two years after the Sectant Expulsion. I'd bet the House wiped out whatever was here and redrew their maps to exclude it."

"What would a town have to do to get that treatment?"

Even as I say it, though, we lock eyes.

"The witch trials," whispers Exie. She jettisons her notebook and starts shuffling through her open books with an alacrity that would do a gambler proud. I snag the map and open it.

The Sectant Witch Trials. Devil-possession-and-witch trials, really; southern Englemark was fraught with them two hundred years ago, until a particularly virulent set of accusations pierced all the way up the ranks of the local Catholic clergy. Faith in the church was shattered overnight. The infighting that ensued distracted the entire region, paving the way for the pre-Protestant House of Heymair to arrange a widespread crusade against Catholicism. The fiefdom they established was itself captured by the dominant church two decades later, but they left an enduring stamp on the countryside.

I sneak a peek at Exie's timeline. I can discern what I'm pretty sure is the second takeover some ways after the two-hundred-year mark, putting the map's creation far closer to the Sectant Expulsion than the House of Heymair's fall. There's only one issue. We're nowhere near the middle of southern Englemark. This patch of dirt and angelic enterprise was so fringe, it's a miracle it didn't start fraying like cheap cloth long before the fall of the local Catholic church.

Unless it did. Unless whatever happened here was deemed too abominable to acknowledge on House of Heymair maps—which, given their own affinity for scandals, would be a dramatic accusation indeed. It's more likely they deemed the place too barren to farm, and therefore too insignificant to bother laying claim to.

Or the map-maker burned a cake in the oven halfway through finishing and never came back to this map. Either works.

"Des?"

I glance up to find Exie's piercing brown eyes fixed on me like she's trying to take up visual trepanation. "The bible," she says. "What's its printing year?"

I don't remember off the top of my head—never cared to remember, really—so I pull out the bible and hand it to her. She finds the dates immediately, and I watch her face as she makes the same series of discoveries I did when I ran the same inspection. She's got nice eyebrows. Also a cute nose, flared wide and button-tipped, like a kindly grandparent liked to pinch it when she was an infant. With love, of course. Though from what I've seen of her parents, I suppose I shouldn't make assumptions.

Exie's pen-tapping intensifies. She's made several marks on her timeline, and some of them line up. The bible edition she has in hand is a spry sixty years old, but it's a bastard child—the original edition was almost two and a half centuries older. That version predates the Sectant Expulsion by a century, but the reprint matches this school building's founding. Something doesn't line up about that older number. Tradition, Exie said, when I asked her why whoever built this place would mimic Gothic style. We figured then that the seat of whatever denomination worshiped here was in the Gothic era, which the bible has now backed up. That original publication date would match this architecture perfectly.