“No.”

“Well then.” Seraph pulled the map out of the other Raven’s hands and set it on the ground in front of her. “Now if I fall to the ground shrieking, feel free to take it away again.”

“Mother? Are you sure you should do this?”

She slanted a look at Lehr. “Allow me the courtesy of knowing my limits. Unless it was an object of worship, or someone used it to kill someone else, it will be fine.”

Before someone else could object, Seraph sent tendrils of magic into the parchment.

“It’s all right,” she told them when the map’s past came to her in whispered bits and pieces rather than an overwhelming wave.

Aside from a few barely formed images, the newest history came to her first, though that was not always the case. She felt Hennea’s hands and the intense quiet that would have told her a Raven had held the map, even if she hadn’t known Hennea.

“Volis had this.” She could feel the cold sweat on his palms and the fear someone might see him. “He stole it.” A new image, closer to her than the theft had been, and she knew that he hadn’t been able to read any of the maps. “He had thought something so carefully hidden away would have been important, but he could see nothing useful in a pile of old maps.”

The map had been undisturbed for a long time. “It was hidden away, for safekeeping. For secret. A wizard holds it, a solsenti wizard—but he understands what he has because language is one of his gifts. A gift that has served him very well in his search for power, for…” She quit talking because she didn’t want to confuse her audience as her reading slipped from nearer past to older and back again. The years were so pale, sometimes it was hard to hold them.

“Mother?”

Seraph blinked up at Lehr’s familiar face.

“Are you all right?”

She nodded. “This is a map made by an apprentice?” The word didn’t fit quite, but it was close. “A student, perhaps. He was disappointed because his teacher judged it harshly and made him redo part of it.” She touched a section in the upper right where he’d had to scrape the parchment and redraw.

“How old is it, Mother?” breathed Rinnie. “Is it really from Colossae?”

“It’s that old.” Seraph’s hands felt cold and heavy from the deep reading. “Once it passed out of the hands of the young man who made it, there was a succession of owners. They held it for such a short time, so long ago, and with such little passion that I could get no more than an impression of a lot of people.”

She looked up to meet Hennea’s gaze and give her a small smile. “It’s emotion that leaves traces behind on things, and a map hardly inspires great passions of any kind. I can tell the age, but not much more for a long time. It was hidden or lost.”

Seraph reached out and touched the satchel that had held the map very lightly with her fingertips and a thread of magic. “It was in this satchel, which is nearly as old.”

Rinnie gave her prize a look of respect. “It doesn’t look old.”

“The preservation spell,” murmured Hennea. “Things can last a long time with a good preservation spell, and the Colossae wizards’ magic was very good.”

“They lay together in secret, the maps and the satchel, for hundreds of years. Then a woman, a solsenti wizard, held it and puzzled over it—she was hoping for treasure, I think. When she first held it as a young woman, but her last touch is dry and aged. She kept them in a secret place, and it lay there for a time, never managing to decipher what it was she held though she knew it was old. About two centuries ago it came into the hands of another wizard.”

She swallowed and looked at the rest of the map scrolls lying about on the floor and touched them, looking for more answers. When she had read them all, she said, “He had a gift for languages. I saw the gates of Colossae, where he was searching for something he desired very badly—power? Not quite, but it was close enough.” She returned her fingers to the first map, the city map. “The next time he touched this he was held by the Stalker’s power; he was the Shadowed. He hid the maps somewhere secret, he didn’t need them anymore. Volis found them and took them—but he couldn’t read them.”

“Can you see him?” whispered Hennea urgently. “Lark tell me you can see who it is.”

Seraph shook her head in frustration. “No. I get scattered impressions and a glimpse of a young man’s face, but not enough to identify him. He just didn’t leave enough of himself behind. I can tell you he became the Stalker’s child almost two centuries ago.”

Hennea swallowed her urgency behind her usual cool facade, though she was paler than normal. “We’ve not had one get so old since the Unnamed King.”

“There have been more?” asked Lehr.

Seraph nodded. “I know of three… four including this one. The Unnamed King was the second. The first one left Colossae with the Elder Wizards who became the Travelers.”

“This is the sixth,” said Hennea. “That I know of anyway. After the Unnamed King, we knew the signs to watch for. Death follows the Shadowed. I don’t see how this one has been hidden from us for so long. Are you certain of the time, Seraph?”

“I may be off ten or fifteen years either way, but not more than that.” She shared Hennea’s apprehension. The Shadowed, like those who were tainted, gained power over the years. “There were the plagues a couple of decades ago—one killed Isolde’s clan except for my brother and me. There were other clans lightened of their members, too.” She hesitated. “The Path started killing Travelers for their Orders about the same time.”

“That is not a coincidence,” agreed Hennea. “Maybe we have grown so few over the last few generations that no one noticed the patterns of death.”

“Mother,” said Lehr suddenly. “If the Shadowed touched other things here, could you tell?”

Hennea answered. “The Path’s Masters, the wizards who came and stole Tier away, left before the temple was finished. If the Shadowed was among them, he did not stay here. Only Volis used the rooms beyond the Great Chamber…” She cleared her throat. “Only Volis and I. I don’t think we’ll find anything else here on which the Shadowed left enough of an impression for Seraph to read anything.”

“If we had not killed Volis, he could tell us where he got that map case,” mused Seraph.

“I’ve apologized for that,” Hennea said.

Seraph looked at her in surprise. “I didn’t like being tricked, Hennea. I never said he didn’t need killing.”

She turned her attention back to the problem of finding the Shadowed. “However, I think if the Shadowed was able to hide what he was from Jes and Lehr for a time, if no Traveler has noticed his existence in two centuries, he has learned how to hide what he is. The impressions from the map are from when he was newly touched.”

“He went to Colossae?” said Lehr. “I thought Colossae was destroyed.”

“Sacrificed,” agreed Hennea. “But the stones were sealed to seal the bindings.”

Seraph hadn’t heard that part before. “What does that mean?”

Hennea smiled suddenly. “I don’t know. What did you see from the maps?”

“The Shadowed saw Colossae,” Seraph said. “So the city must still stand.”

“Do all the Shadowed go to Colossae to become what they are?” asked Rinnie.

“I don’t know,” Seraph said, turning to Hennea.

“I’ve never heard that,” Hennea said. “I don’t know how many people outside of the Travelers even know there was ever a city like Colossae.”

“Have any of the Shadowed been Travelers?” asked Lehr.

“No,” Seraph said firmly.

“The first one was,” Hennea reminded her. “If he came out of Colossae.”

“No,” Seraph said. “He was a Colossae wizard.”

Hennea smiled again. “That’s slicing the roast pretty thinly, don’t you think? We are all descendants of the Colossae wizards.”

“I don’t think so,” said Seraph slowly. “I’ve always thought it was no accident that solsenti wizards are the only ones who have been driven to become Shadowed.”