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Dani pushes the door with her whole arm, like she's unveiling a monument, and the six of them step into a room that smells of old wool and colder stone. The gallery is small and low-ceilinged, whitewashed walls bowed with the weight of centuries, and the tapestries hang in a row along the left wall like the pages of some enormous, badly-behaved book. Aria's ears twitch first — the wool has a sound, a faint dry creak as the sea air moves through the fibers — and then her eyes catch up, and she stops dead with her mouth already open. The first tapestry is a hunting scene, except the hunter has lost his braies somewhere in the thorn bushes and the hart he's chasing, a white stag with a very knowing eye, has turned to look back at him over its shoulder. The next one is worse. Or better. Aria can't decide and doesn't try.

Fen walks the row with her hands jammed in her jacket pockets, jaw set, cataloguing — that's what she does, that's what she's always done — and then she hits the third tapestry and stops so hard her boots squeak on the flagstones. A knight in full plate with his visor up and his expression frankly delighted is being pulled into the sea by a mermaid who has wrapped her tail around his waist and her hand around something the weaver has rendered in faithful, specific, unmistakable detail. Fen's ears go crimson. Her neck goes crimson. The color climbs her whole face like a tide, and she does not look away. "That's — " she starts, and then just doesn't finish, because there is no finish. Aria watches her sideways, delighted, and lets the silence do its work for a full four seconds before she says, low and dry, "Allegorical, I'm told."

Fen turns on her, and the crimson hasn't gone anywhere. "The weaver was not allegorizing," she says, flat, and points at the mermaid's hand. "He was drawing from life. That's the thing about us — we put everything on the record and then lie about what it is." She's still not looking away. Mike has come up behind them and is studying the tapestry with the calm of a man reading a circuit diagram, head tilted, one hand in his pocket. "The proportions are wrong," he says finally. "Tail's too short for the torso. He was working from a description." Aria laughs — the bell-sound of it bouncing off the low ceiling — and claps a hand over her own mouth, ears twitching.

At the far end of the row, Dani has found the glass case, and the grin on her face is the kind that precedes either a wedding or an arrest. "Oh," she says, drawing it out. "Oh, you have to come see this." The case is waist-high, walnut, velvet-lined, and on the velvet sits a polished stone object about the length of a forearm, flared at one end, worn smooth in the middle where two thousand years of hands have held it. The placard is handwritten in careful brown ink. Marcus leans in first and reads it aloud, his voice doing that thing it does when he's decided to commit to a bit: "'Functional object, circa 1450. Excavated from the priory latrine. Not allegorical.'" He straightens. "They're being very clear about that." Mike, beside him, has gone entirely still, the way he goes still when a build fails at three in the morning and he's deciding whether to laugh or close the laptop.

Fen mutters, "I need air," and does not move. Not one step toward the door. Her jaw is set, her hands are still in her pockets, and her eyes keep sliding back to the case like she's trying to catch it doing something. Aria catches the look — that specific look, the one Fen wears when she's cataloguing and refusing to admit she's cataloguing — and lets a slow smile spread across her face, the wicked one, the one she knows Fen can read from across a room. Fen sees it. Fen goes, impossibly, a shade redder. "Don't," she says.

Sera has drifted off the row of hunting tapestries entirely, wandering the gallery's far corner with her hands behind her back and her head tilted like a woman appraising bad art at a yard sale, and when she rounds the last panel she stops so abruptly that Aria hears the little scuff of her sneakers on the flagstones. The tapestry there is the biggest in the room — six feet of faded wool, the dye gone the soft ochre of old honey — and it shows a gold dragon the size of a barn rearing up on its hind legs, wings spread to the whole width of the frame, one vast clawed forelimb curled gently around a woman who is, unmistakably and without any allegorical ambiguity whatsoever, entirely naked. The maiden's hair is loose and her arms are open and her face is turned up toward the dragon's snout with an expression that the weaver — working, clearly, from either very good evidence or a very good imagination — has rendered as pure, uncomplicated delight. Sera stands there a long moment. Then she turns, slowly, and finds Aria, and the look on her face is the one she wears when a build compiles on the first try and she doesn't want to jinx it.

"Aria," she says, and her voice is pitched for the whole room, warm and theatrical and absolutely delighted with itself. "Do you think the creator knew about us?" She sweeps an arm at the dragon, the maiden, the whole ridiculous gorgeous panel. "Because I have to tell you, whoever carded and spun and wove this in — what, fourteen-ninety?" She gestures again, grander this time, taking in Aria's pointed ears and Aria's violet eyes and the whole long improbable fact of her. "Here we are. He nailed it. He absolutely nailed it."

Fen is still at the glass case, still not moving, and now she has her phone out — not photographing the object, Aria notices, but photographing the placard. The placard, four lines of brown ink in a careful hand, as if the citation were the scandalous part. "The records, they indicate it was found in…," Fen says to no one, thumbs working, "the priory latrine. They dug it out of the latrine. Which means it was likely dropped, which would imply somebody was *using* it, which means — " She stops. Looks up. Looks directly at Aria. "You're making a face."

"I'm making a face of quiet scholarly respect." Aria's voice does not wobble. From the hunting row, Mike says, without turning around, "She's making the face she makes when she's waiting for someone to crack." Sera, back from the dragon panel with her hands loose at her sides and her grin still going, cuts across the room in three strides and hooks her chin over Aria's shoulder to read the placard for herself. "Functional," she says, tasting the word. "They had one word available in fourteen-fifty and they used that one. Historians." She straightens, addresses the room as if the room were a lecture hall. "This is why I design games. You plant one object and you let the players decide what it's for. You never, ever label it."

Dani has drifted to the back wall and found the visitor's book — a fat, cracked-spined ledger on a lectern, pages soft as cloth, the last two hundred years of names in it — and she is writing in it with the museum's own pen, tongue between her teeth. Aria watches her do it and feels something settle low and warm in her chest, the ordinary fact of it, a woman signing a guestbook on holiday. Fen, still pink, pockets her phone and finally steps back from the case, and Aria lets her get three full paces before she says, gentle as anything, "I'm told they make modern versions you know, you can leave that one here."

Marcus has been gone from the group for eleven minutes, and the group has noticed. He found the manuscript case in the far corner of the gallery — a squat glass cabinet with a single book propped on a wedge, its pages turned to a spread that shows a wide field, a man with a plow, and a border of pea vines twining up the margin in gold leaf — and he has not moved since. Except his mouth. His mouth is moving, softly, and Aria drifts over in time to catch the tail of it. "'…and the good husbandman breaks the virgin furrow with his share, and lets it lie open to the sun before he plants,'" Marcus reads, one finger hovering half an inch above the glass. He straightens, sees Aria, and does not bother to hide the grin. "It's a farming manual. Fifteenth century. And the illuminator has spent the entire marginalia making sure you know that the 'furrow' in question is a woman who has been left lying open to the sun." He taps the glass over a small painted figure — a maiden in a wimple reclining in a plowed field with an expression the artist has rendered, in four square inches of gold and lapis, as frankly available. "Aria. Look at me. The peas are a cover story."

Fen arrives at his elbow with her phone already out. "Where," she says, in the voice of a woman who has found the primary source. Marcus slides aside to give her the glass. "Folio forty-one recto. The gloss says the seed must be planted deep, and the deeper it goes the better the harvest, and — " he pauses, just long enough for the room to lean in, " — the husbandman should not be discouraged if the furrow is narrow, for narrow furrows take the seed most gratefully." Fen's thumb stops moving. Fen's thumb has not stopped moving all day. She looks at Marcus. Marcus looks at Fen. Somewhere behind them, Mike says, without heat, "You're both reading porn out loud in a museum." "We're reading *agriculture*," Marcus says, "which is a different thing, and the illuminator is a coward for pretending otherwise."

Marcus turns the page — not the manuscript's, which is under glass, but the one in his head, and Aria can see it happening, the exact moment the scholar in him loses the fight with the twelve-year-old who got him into this hobby in the first place. "It's not just the peas," he says, and now he's pulled his phone out and is photographing the folio in sections, thumb swiping between shots like he's assembling a puzzle. "There's a whole sequence. Folio forty-two — 'the furrow must be turned thrice, and watered well before planting, for a dry furrow takes no seed.' Folio forty-three, and I want you to hear this in the weaver's own voice — 'let the husbandman be patient, and let the furrow wait, for the ground that is hurried yields nothing but weeds.'" He looks up. He is grinning like a man who has found a loophole in the rules. "Aria. This is a fifteenth-century farming manual. There is no world in which this is about farming."

"It's about farming," Fen says, but she's reading over his shoulder now, close enough that her jacket sleeve brushes his, and she has stopped pretending she's not. "The pea vines are — " she squints, " — they're *labelled*. Look. 'Pisum sativum.' That's a botanical name. Whoever wrote this was being *very* specific about the peas." A pause. Her thumb, which had stopped, starts moving again. "Which means the peas are real and everything else is — " She stops. She looks at Marcus. Marcus looks at her with the specific delight of a man watching someone arrive at his own conclusion two steps behind him. " — a metaphor," Fen finishes, flat, and then, quieter, almost to herself, "I hate this museum."

Behind them, Mike has drifted over with the unhurried gait of a man who has decided he has nothing better to do than watch this. He reads the folio over Fen's shoulder for a full ten seconds — the plow, the furrow, the maiden, the peas — and then says, to no one in particular, "The illuminator put a woman in a field and labelled the vegetables. That's not subtle. That's a man who wanted to draw a naked woman and needed an excuse for his abbot." He straightens. "I've met that guy. He works in my office."