A Mark in Common

We did not return to the basin to listen again.

That was the first thing I said when Pellune asked whether the circle had missed us. She hovered above the root-carved steps, her lantern wings glowing a cautious green.

“Only a little,” she said. “The stones were beginning to tell each other the same joke.”

Rellin set a flat board across two roots and placed paper on it. The ancient circle remained quiet beneath us. Its basin held no blue light, and the guide’s steady signal was not being used. I had asked everyone to come with what they remembered, not to reach for anything beyond the clearing.

Orivane rested in the crook of my arm, its crystal surface dim. “A comparison of records is safer than a new exchange,” it said. “It cannot establish the source, but it may establish whether the forms are identical.”

“Then we will find out what we can,” I said. “And stop where we cannot.”

Vaust Renn arrived with two clan witnesses. He wore no black-stone instrument; Elder Tavar still kept it sealed in the root vault. Vaust glanced once at the empty basin before joining us.

“You want the shape I saw when the instrument copied the blue signal,” he said.

“Yes,” I answered. “But from memory. We will not bring the instrument here or wake it.”

“I understand the distinction.” He sat opposite me. “I may not like it, but I understand it.”

Rellin gave each of us a sheet. We had agreed to draw separately before showing one another, so no one’s recollection would borrow a detail from someone else’s. I tried to picture the unfamiliar point at the inner edge of the basin, east of the north notch’s line. It had appeared apart from the Hollow’s returning rhythm. I remembered its smallness more clearly than its shape.

My pencil made a dot, then a short curve beside it. I paused. Was that truly what I had seen, or only what I wished I had seen because a curve might mean something?

“Leave the uncertainty visible,” Orivane said quietly.

So I marked the curve lightly and wrote beside it: perhaps.

Across from me, Vaust worked with careful strokes. He had the steady hand of someone used to drawing maps and plans. When we were ready, we placed our papers side by side.

Rellin’s drawing showed the basin’s edge and the point outside the main pattern. Pellune had drawn only the point and the north notch, then added a little lantern beside it for scale. Mine was nearly the same as Rellin’s, though I had made the curve fainter. Vaust’s showed a blue line and a dark response crossing it in reverse, copied from what he had seen the instrument do near the route signal.