Total pages in book: 179
Estimated words: 169943 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 850(@200wpm)___ 680(@250wpm)___ 566(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 169943 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 850(@200wpm)___ 680(@250wpm)___ 566(@300wpm)
Before anyone can ask about Magpie, I step forward. “All of Magpie’s team is here. Hawk is currently on a rescue mission in the tunnels and Magpie couldn’t make it this morning,” I blurt out. “Clams. Lots of bad clams. Vomit everywhere. Really terrible. Never seen anything that color before. And the smell was just horrific—”
Master Tiercel recoils, raising a hand to stop my babbling. “We don’t need the details, thank you.” He looks down the line at us, pausing. Then he straightens and continues. “Very well. Teams, this is an exercise to show off your knowledge of artifacts to Archivist Kestrel. He is not a member of the guild but is very important as the official archivist for the guild itself.”
An archivist? Who isn’t in the guild himself but gets to catalog and pick through all of the guild’s artifacts? I’m hit with a strong surge of envy. It sounds like the ideal job, and for a moment, I wish I were him. No tunnels, no obstacle courses, no backpacks with rocks. Just sitting inside and enjoying time studying artifacts to learn what we can from Old Prell and its ruins.
“Our friend has brought several legitimate and no longer functional artifacts here with him today. We’ve hidden them amongst the training duplicates on the walls here.” He gestures at the laden shelves. “There will be three rounds. Each person on each team will select an object and bring it to their team’s table. The archivist will give you a point for each correctly identified artifact. By the end of the game, the team with the most points wins.”
“Oooh, what do we win?” Lark calls out.
“Honor for your house,” Master Tiercel announces in a stiff voice.
Lark groans.
“I can see it’s not much of an incentive for Magpie’s students,” Master Crow says in an infuriating voice. “So I’ll sweeten the deal for you. The losers have to do the obstacle course in the rain and the winners will eat dinner inside.”
“I’m sold,” Gwenna mutters.
“Take a moment to discuss strategy and then select the order your team will go in,” Tiercel continues.
We huddle, our heads together, with Kipp in the center of our small group.
“We’re fucked,” Lark whispers. “Two of Crow’s men are repeaters.”
“That means they suck, right?” Gwenna asks.
Lark makes a sound of distress. “You’d think that, but they have an advantage. They’ll be familiar with the training artifacts already. They’ve probably done this several times before.”
Mereden looks crushed. “I don’t think I can do the obstacle course again today.”
Gwenna shoots me a warning look, and I know what she’s thinking. She wants me to stay quiet, to hide the fact that I know how to read Old Prellian glyphs. But I’m with Mereden—if I have to hear Master Crow scream for me to “tunnel” one more time, I might lose my mind. “I should go first,” I tell them. “Each round, let me go first.”
“No—” Gwenna begins.
“Yes.” My expression is firm. “I can see if there’s a legitimate artifact and try to get it before they do.”
“How do you know if it’s legit? What, are you some kind of artifact expert?” Lark scoffs.
“No, but I can read Old Prellian,” I say, and before I can add onto that, Master Tiercel rings a bell. I straighten and move to the front of the line of our group, ignoring the curious looks that Lark is shooting in my direction.
When he nods, I step forward for our team, and so does someone for Master Crow’s team.
“Each of you select one artifact and set it on the table in front of your team, and then someone else in your team will take their turn and select.”
I stride forward to the shelves with crisp, authoritative steps, and then move my face a mere handspan away, squinting and examining each thing as best I can. There’s a music box. A spoon. A plate. A tool of some kind. A wand. A goblet. A lamp. An ewer. The scatter of objects ranges from the mundane to the fantastical, and all of them are highly ornate in the style of Old Prell. My vision is terrible without my spectacles, so I pick up one object and hold it practically to my nose, trying to read the writing painted on the underside of a vase.
“Is there a problem, fledgling?” Master Tiercel calls out.
“No, I’m just making sure I don’t miss anything,” I tell him, and set the vase back down on the shelf. It looked authentic and appropriately old enough, the porcelain surface cracked and crazed, but the tidy writing on the underside was absolute gibberish, mimicking Old Prellian glyphs without knowledge of what they mean. It’s obviously a fake.
I squint my way down the rest of the shelf, looking for obvious issues. Several of the “artifacts” have a bold yellow paint on them that makes me pause. Prellians crafted their dyes from minerals and foodstuffs and most of their yellows were murky at best. Blues and reds and earth tones are the colors prominent in Old Prellian artifacts, and I pick up a yellow cup and eye the glyphs crawling along the edge.