Lord Elan gestured lazily with his mug as he spoke. “With all the desert lore I’ve read, if I had to guess, I’d say the Well is just beyond Aredann. It’s to the west; it must be.”

“The Well was hidden for a reason,” the Avowed steward who’d arrived with him, Lord Desinn, said. “There’s no point in anyone trying to find it—or wasting time with guessing games.”

“It’s not a guessing game,” Lord Elan snapped. “It’s easy enough to see, when you look at a map. You there—Jae.” He smiled for a split second when he recognized her. “There’s a bundle of papers up in my rooms. One of them is a map. Go get it.”

“Highest, this a waste of time,” Lord Desinn said as Jae started to walk away.

“If you have something better to do, you’re welcome to leave,” Lord Elan said behind her, his voice fading as she hurried off.

The papers were easy enough to find, tied together with gold ribbons and left on top of one of his trunks. She untied the ribbon carefully, amazed at how soft and clean it was, and then leafed through the papers. Most of them were lines and loops of text, which meant nothing at all to her, with a few illustrations decorating the pages. They were drawings of plants: leaves, the kind the trees in the orchard had had during better seasons, and flowers she’d never seen before. Fruit—grapes, melons, and some she didn’t know.

Other pages were less detailed, barely sketches—of the quartered circle that Lady Shirrad and the other Avowed had branded on themselves, and other strange, flowing lines and intersecting circles.

Finally Jae found what she hoped was the map. It was like one of the illustrations but more detailed, with drawings of what looked like houses grouped together. Everything was carefully labeled, but since she couldn’t read, she couldn’t be sure. Still, she pulled it free of the stack carefully and carried it down to Lord Elan.

He just nodded at her, accepted it, and set it aside. The conversation had moved on to something else. He was talking with the Avowed about what they all did at Aredann, laughing and joking about what they might do if the estate was abandoned. Rannith seemed eager to be sent to a new estate, where he’d get to work with a larger group of guards. His booming laugh as he described how pathetic Shirrad’s guard was made Jae shudder.

Finally the conversation died down. Lord Elan reached out to grab her arm as she walked by, and she nearly jumped out of her skin, but all he said was “Put that away, would you? Carefully.”

“Yes, Highest,” she murmured, compelled to speak, even though he probably hadn’t even meant his order to be a question. She took the map and hurried back up to his room, then flitted through the papers, trying to remember where it had been placed. As she slid it back between two pages, she felt an insect wing’s worth of annoyance that they hadn’t even looked at it—and then she stopped, staring at a sketch on the paper beneath the map. More careful lines and shapes, more text she couldn’t read, though it looked somehow different from the writing on the other pages. But at the center of the page was a figure she was sure she’d seen before: four circles, overlapping one another, all coming together in the middle—but she hadn’t seen it quite like that. It was the design in the fountain. She was used to looking at it from the ground, where it looked like columns rather than circles. But from up here…

She went to the window and peered out, just to check. There it was, down in the garden. From the top, the fountain was four interlocked circles. She couldn’t imagine why the fountain would interest anyone enough for it to be drawn on any of Lord Elan’s papers. It had been dry for years, nothing but a useless sculpture.

But when she looked back at the papers, there it was, drawn in dark ink as if it were the most important illustration on the page.

The Avowed had mostly left the dining hall by the time Jae got back to it, including Lord Elan and Lady Shirrad. They were off having a discussion in Lady Shirrad’s library. The meal was over, and though the sun was still high overhead, it was well past noon. Yes, it was still too warm out to work comfortably, but Lord Elan had only ordered her inside while the sun was at its peak. She was free to return to her usual duties—well, as free as she ever was. At least out in the courtyard, she knew what needed to be done, so no one bothered to give her orders, and she was away from the Avowed and their demands.

She stole glances at the fountain as she worked. She knew the four columns—circles, she now realized—represented the four elements, and that mages had once called on those elements for their power. But that didn’t mean the fountain was anything special; the four elements were part of almost every piece of artwork and decoration at Aredann.

As the sun set, Jae took a half jug of water out to the garden so she could try to coax the plants back to life. She set the jug in the fountain’s trough so there was no way someone could kick it over this time, and took a moment to run her hand over the smooth stone of the fountain. Dirt and sand caked its surface, but when she rubbed the grit away, it was a white-silver that almost shone.

The fountain really was unlike everything else at Aredann, she realized as she worked. She’d never paid much attention to it, but where the rest of Aredann was tan and red, the fountain was silver; and the rest of the estate was covered in intricate patterns and designs, but the fountain was solid, plain, and gleaming.

She didn’t have the water to really wash the fountain clean, but she could still scour off most of the dirt. She probably didn’t need to; it wasn’t like the plants, which would die without constant care, and she doubted anyone else would even notice. But she’d know, and besides, she wanted the excuse to examine the fountain in detail.

Jae grabbed the sack that she’d use to gather up weeds later and dropped to her knees at the fountain’s base. She used the sack to rub the worst of the grit off, scrubbing with her whole weight where the dirt was the most caked on.

From this angle, there was no way to see the linked circles of the fountain’s design. Looking up, Jae could see only smooth columns rising from inside the trough. The highest was at the back, the lowest in front, and the crevices where the front column interlocked with the two on the sides were covered in dirt. She scraped off as much of it as she could easily, then scooped it up, using her hand as a makeshift dustpan so she could dump the dirt onto the ground.