Haidée awoke to the sound of scratching at the window. She blinked and blearily stared up at the darkness. The sound came again and automatically, she stumbled out of bed, clutching one of the sheets to her chest. She ambled over to the window and tugged away the curtains and peered out into the inky darkness.
A small thin shadow lurked on the left end of the ledge. Haidée found herself opening the right window pane and the small shadow quickly streaked inside just as a gust of wind rammed itself against the building, bringing with it thick drops of rain. She quickly closed the window and fumbled with the tinderbox at the stand beside the bed and eventually lit a candle. The shadow had leaped onto the blankets and had curled up at the foot of the bed. The marten, apparently, knew an accommodating human once it met one.
Haidée sleepily shook her head, trying to process what had happened. In the previous afternoon, she had waited until Renaud had left the spot by the path to go back to the observatory for her to make a move. But once she had climbed back over the wall, the marten had deserted her by quickly climbing up the nearest tree. After that, she didn’t think that she would see the small creature again—even if she had to admit to herself that it was kind of amusing with its antics. Martens were wild creatures and it was highly unusual in the first place that it had associated with her. And she had assumed that the only reason it had picked her was that she had food.
And now, the marten was asleep in her bed. That was quite smart of it, now that she thought more on it. It was beginning to rain outside and certainly, a warm and dry place in a human dwelling was more appealing than some knothole in a tree. She let out an involuntary yawn and thought that she had better get a couple more hours of sleep before daybreak. She had overheard the cook, Madame Boulanger, mutter about having to make more meals because the observatory librarian was going to come by the next day to do some work. Haidée made her own plans which involved getting some information from Davenport.
But as she was about to blow the candle out and head off back to bed, something nearby caught her eye. The solitary flame threw out odd, flickering shadows, but some of those shadows falling upon the desk nearby seemed to be odder than usual—less angular and more rounded. The desk itself wasn’t very remarkable. It was made of heavy, dense wood and there wasn’t anything on it other than the semblance that it had been recently abandoned: a couple sheets of blank paper, a pen, and a cylinder of ink that was more square-like then the vial that Haidée had seen on Legard’s desk or even the ones at the shop in the village.
Haidée approached the desk with more curiosity than caution and raised her candle to look upon it. Set back in the desk were a row of drawers and cubbyholes for sorting out letters and organizing writing implements. But those held little of her interest. It was the sides of the desk—the molding decorating the left side of the small drawers—that held her attention. The shadows cast by those sides didn’t seem to quite fit with everything else.
She ran a hand along the side of the desk feeling smooth wood until her nail caught upon something. A thick card of some sort was wedged in the crevice between the molding and the last drawer. With her thumb and forefinger, she grasped the card and slowly slid it out. It was a card cut into a circle. In the candlelight, the thick paper itself appeared yellow, almost brown, and thick script in black ink was written in a spiral, starting from the center and ending at the edge.
She recognized the type of writing. It wasn’t the usual kind of writing people found in books or that one used to write letters and missives. It was the kind used by people who manipulated nature. Some of the symbols were familiar to her, but most of them not. They had a very stiff and formal feel to them as if they were used for a singular yet complicated process. Haidée wasn’t particularly troubled by these particular runes because although they were formal, they didn’t seem unnatural. The marks did not feel activated. In fact, they didn’t feel like they had been activated in quite some time. Besides, they weren’t anywhere near as disturbing as the marks she had seen used on the dead or dying.
On the other side of the card, it was blank, except for a small signature near the edge that said, “Nicolas Bisset.” Comparing the signature and the symbols, Haidée concluded that the author of both were one and the same. But what exactly was the circular card used for? And who was Nicolas Bisset?
Another yawn interrupted her musing and reluctantly, she placed the card back on the table. She headed back to bed and blew out the candle before curling back underneath the blankets.