The dining hall had been hung with laurel boughs in preparation for Kalends—technically, the Kalends of March. There were no Vestals and no Eternal Flame at Roanoke, but all the hearth fires would be extinguished and relit. A special holding pen had been prepared in the menagerie for the hearth salamanders, where they could cavort together. They would be gathered up from the dorms and taken to the pen tonight. Everyone was hoping the weather would remain on the warmer side for one more day.
If it fell below freezing, with no hearth fires and no salamanders, it would be one cold night.
In the morning, a real Vestal Virgin would come from Rome and rekindle the fires. If they were lucky, she would come very early, and the heat would only be off for a short time. If they were not lucky, it would be a very cold day.
Kalends was a sacred day, even among the Unwary; so even Sigfried and Valerie knew it marked the beginning of the nineteen-day pilgrimage of the monks of the god Mars. These monks might choose to join the Vestals and visit the school, or they might not. Every year, their travels were different.
* * *
Late that afternoon, the Vestal finally came. Despite the driving sleet, Rachel joined the crowd gathered on the commons. She had seen Vestals many times. The Duke of Devon was responsible for distributing the newly kindled fire to one-eighth of Great Britain, and, thus, Gryphon-on-Dart was a stop on the Vestals’ procession. In the past, however, she had not known that her grandmother had been a Vestal Virgin before Amelia Abney-Hastings quit the order to marry Rachel’s grandfather. The event now held more significance to her.
The Vestal Virgin floated upon a flying umbrella platform held up by two white umbrellas, the rims of which gave off a faint golden glow. She wore a long white pleated stola, her hair covered by a white shoulder-length shawl with a fringe of red tassels—the same garments sacred virgins had worn since time immemorial—and held before her a simple Roman terracotta lamp that burned with the gold-tinged white fire of the Eternal Flame.
Rachel eyed the small, flattish lamp with interest. There were two such lamps in her house. One was carved in the shape of a dragon with a duck on its back; the other bore the image of a man riding a gryphon. As children, she and Peter had pretended these were Aladdin’s lamp and rubbed them in hopes of producing genies. One time, her grandmother had caught them at it, snatched the lamps away, and chased them from the drawing room. Only now did Rachel realize these objects must have been keepsakes from her grandmother’s previous life.
As she shivered in the rain, she imagined being a grandmother—once the children she and Gaius would have grew up to have children of their own—and finding her grandchildren playing with the souvenirs of her life as an adventurer librarian of the Library of All Worlds, or whatever her future held. She liked to think that she would be kinder to her future progeny.
Beside the Vestal on the floating platform, an acolyte carried a second earthen pot with coals from the sacred fire in the Temple of Vesta that the Vestals had extinguished during Candle Dark in December. It had been relit the next morning using a specially shaped brass pot that gathered and magnified sunlight, focusing it on a single spot where dry kindling could be laid—by law, the Vestals were not allowed to relight their fires from ordinary burning flames but must use pure flame, lit anew from sunlight. This brass pot, or one like it, had been used to rekindle the sacred fires for nearly three thousand years.
Around the floating platform marched bodyguards, four fighting monks of the Temple of Mars, their spears gleaming. Over their Roman armor, the Flamen Martialis wore wolf skin cowls, the upper scalps of the wolves resting upon the crowns of their heads, forming eyed and eared hoods with fangs.
The procession made its way to the Warding Tower in the hemlock forest, north of DeVere Hall. Master Warder Nighthawk and his assistant, Urd Odinson, escorted them to the primary hearth of Roanoke, on the ground floor of that tower. The Vestal circled the tower with the Eternal Flame, with Rachel and the rest of the shivering crowd behind her, and then joined her acolyte in relighting the hearth flame from the coals they had brought from Rome.
Once the new fire grew into a blaze, students from DeVere gathered brands and coals and ran them to primary hearths in other campus buildings. After this, the Vestal and her entourage departed. To Siggy’s disappointment, none of the monks of Mars turned out to be this year’s pilgrims.
Once the primary hearth fires were lit, Flora Towers Skaife, the Mistress of the Beast, and Umberto Sarpento, the custodian, led a second procession returning the salamanders to their hearths. Slowly, the drafty old buildings began to grow warm again.