Green. The stone lit up Green.
"What does Green mean, Highness?" Olen asked. His hand was already on the lead tuspak's bridle. "Does it fill our skins? Or is it just another riddle while we die?"
"Wait." I held up a hand.
"He doesn't know," one of the men said.
"We're leaving," Olen said, turning the beast.
"Give me a minute. Just one."
There was no time to go get the poem text. I had to decode it from memory, here, in the sun, with the men watching.
My mouth was so dry that swallowing took effort. That was a problem. Dehydration doesn't impair the body evenly. It hits judgment early on, and I had no way to know how much of my thinking had already degraded. Elias had written about it: a person who is significantly impaired by thirst will feel certain about conclusions he would dismiss as flawed if properly hydrated. I couldn't trust my confidence. I had to be careful. No step skipped. Each one had to be checked against what I actually knew.
The framework I had established had brightness correlated with certainty, color correlated with the nature of fault. That had held for every test. Titan. The Quartermaster. Jorax.
Run the elimination.
Red: malice. Deliberate harm. Bastien would never act with malice and I had already confirmed this with the Truth Stone. He wasn't even subconsciously working to undermine the mission. He had no secret intention. Just despair and desperation. Not Red.
White: no fault. Bastien found nothing, stone says he's innocent, water is gone. But it wasn't White.
Yellow: guilty act, mitigated motive. Jorax stealing the rations for his son. If Bastien had seen something and stayed quiet to turn us home, Yellow. But the Truth Stone had found him completely sincere. He believed what he told me. Not Yellow.
Indigo: external cause. Titan's verdict. Something outside the subject drove the harmful behavior; the subject was almost incidental. Nothing external was acting on Bastien's perception.
That was my full inventory of tested colors. Green was outside it.
Brightness: I checked again. Not dim, the way Titan's had been. It had been dim then because the premise of malice was itself wrong; the stone half-refused to answer a bad question. This was moderate. Steady. The stone had an answer and was reasonably confident in it.
So: a fault was present. Not malicious. Not externally caused. Not a guilty act done from good motive. A fault of a different kind.
I had the green lines from the poem in my head. "The Green light means the ???? is likely negative-one, _But leaves a space for a ???? or two."
Three missing words.
"Negative-one." The lexicon's literal rendering. I had spent days being frustrated by that phrase and ultimately set it aside as untranslatable. Now I needed it.
I had cracked similar constructions before. The Inglix root meaning "right" had become "clockwise" in the lexicon because whoever built the glossary had followed the chain of associations rather than the meaning: right → sun-following direction → clockwise. The original word had collapsed a moral sense and a directional sense into a single root, and the translators, working without context, had grabbed the wrong branch. I had caught that one because Olen handed me a bent wheel spoke and used the word "fault."
The same logic had to apply here, but I had to be careful about which branch I grabbed. The lexicon used whole numbers for truth values. I had confirmed this in multiple entries: zero represented false. Everything else—one, two, any non-zero value—represented true. I had set negative-one aside because it seemed redundant. Why have a separate symbol for true when one already served that purpose?
false → 0
true → 1
also true → -1
The redundancy was the answer. They weren't treating negative-one as a different truth value. They were treating it as an emphatic one. A doubled commitment. The same sign used twice, from opposite directions, converging on the same answer. Not a weaker true. If anything, a more insistent one.
"Negative-one" simply meant true.
The first missing word had no cognate I had ever found. I had circled it for weeks and left it blank every time. But I didn't need a cognate anymore. I had the stone.
The two axes: brightness for certainty, color for the nature of the fault. I had confirmed that across every test. White was the absence of fault entirely. Red was fault at its most deliberate. Yellow sat between them, a real act but with counter-weight. Indigo was fault displaced onto an external cause. Each color named a kind of fault, a position on the spectrum between pure innocence and pure malice.
The same unknown word appeared in the Red stanza — "Severe ???? beneath the watchful eye" — and again in the White stanza — "The ???? ???? of any shame." In the Red stanza it was severe. In the White stanza it was absent. The word named the thing the color axis measured. It was the general term of which Red and Yellow and Indigo and Green were each a species. The poem used it the way a geologist uses fault before specifying whether it's a thrust fault or a normal fault.
And now the stone had just shown me Green for a man I knew to be sincere. He hadn't lied. He hadn't acted from malice or self-interest or external compulsion. He had simply failed to find something that was there. The stone had seen that failure and named it. Whatever the word was, it described exactly that condition: the state of being the cause of harm without having chosen it.
My own tongue had a word for that. So did every language I had studied.
The word was guilt.
"The Green light means the guilt is likely true."
That worked. All three words in the first line resolved.
Now the second: "But leaves a ???? for a ???? or two."
I had two candidates I had never been able to place. The first sat near words for boundary and measurement. Not a gap, not an absence—a bounded allowance. A deliberate room left within a structure. The second was the one I had spent the most time on. The lexicon gave no direct definition, but two nearby entries gave clues. One was "dubious," and the other was "double." Both mapped to a descendant of *dau-* in my own tongue. Perhaps they were related. That same root appeared in "dau‑shen," a common verb meaning "to hold two readings in mind at once." The recurrence of this "two‑ness" element across the mapped cognates made the pattern unmistakable.
What I pieced together was less a definition than a posture: a mind maintaining parallel commitments, neither dismissed nor resolved. Not simple indecision, but a deliberate fork in thought kept from collapsing too soon. From that stance, both missing words revealed themselves.
"But leaves a space for a doubt or two."
The completed line told me something the individual words hadn't.
Moderate confidence. Guilt likely, but not certain. The stone delivered a verdict with qualifications. It was saying that its confidence was limited.
That was the key. Red was clean. White was clean. Those colors carried the certainty of a machine reading something unambiguous: intent, the presence or absence of deception. But Green was the stone attempting something harder. It could read intent with precision. Reading intent seemed to be what it was built for. Measuring the quality of a person's attention and judgment was a different problem, with more variables, less resolution. The stone was doing its best and telling me the margin of error.
Negligence. An incomplete survey by a man who didn't know what he was looking for. Not a choice. An error.
And the verdict having any validity at all required an object. You cannot be negligent for missing an empty hole. The fault required something real to fail to find.
The aquifer was there.
"I know what it means," I announced as I looked at each man's face in turn. "It means he didn't lie." I pointed the stone at the horizon. "Bastien is an honest man who failed to find it. If the water wasn't there, the stone would say he was completely innocent. Green means there was a failure in the search. A failure in the search requires something real to fail to find. It calls him negligent! That means the water is there and he missed it!"
Bastien stared at the stone, his face crumbling. "I... I looked, Elyan. I swear."
"You looked, my friend," I said, lowering the stone. "How could you be expected to do a thorough search, though? The mistake was mine. You looked at the surface. But the stone says you missed the truth."
"I looked, Elyan." Bastien's voice was flat. "I checked the depression. I checked the shadow of both spires. Sand and hardpan."
"You looked for a pool. Or mud," I said. "But maybe it's not that obvious."
"If you're wrong, Highness," Olen said, staring me down, "we don't just die out here. We die knowing you used that thing to walk us into our graves."
I held his gaze. Behind him the men were watching. Bastien was watching. I thought of Olen on the breadline. I thought of Bastien's daughter, born two nights before we left. I thought of the boys on the wall who had saluted us as if we were something more than frightened men walking into a desert. None of that was here with us in this moment. All of it was exactly why we couldn't turn back.
"If I'm wrong, I will walk into the dunes alone."
Olen held for a long moment. He grunted. "Haa! Turn around. To the Spires."
We marched. The last miles were agony. The tuspaks were down from a slow walk to a trudge and nobody pushed them. The men were quiet in the way that men get when they have made a decision they aren't sure about and don't want to discuss. I walked beside the lead wagon and kept my eyes on the horizon.
The Twin Spires came up gradually. Their shapes resolved, unmistakably basalt, black against the red. Two columns, exactly as the survey data predicted. The geology was right. I held onto that. The theory about what lay beneath them was extrapolated, not surveyed, but the structural prediction had been correct. The formation existed. That was one confirmed variable.
The depression between them was invisible until we crested the last dune and looked down into it. It was just as Bastien had described. Cracked hardpan, bone dry. The brush was desiccated to the point where the stems snapped at a touch. No moisture was visible anywhere on the surface. No discoloration in the soil, no darkening at the base of the plants, no capillary rings around the rocks. Nothing.
I had a bad moment standing at the rim looking at it.
My first reaction was to think that Bastien was right. It looked empty in the way that things look when they have been empty for a long time. I had built a careful argument from the stone's verdict and my geology and the poem translation, and all of it was still intact in my head, every step still valid. Yet, standing at the rim, looking down into that bowl of dead ground, the argument felt like exactly the kind of reasoning a man does when he needs a conclusion to be true.
I climbed down anyway. The argument was either sound or it wasn't, and standing at the rim wasn't going to tell me which.
The men lined the rim above me.
I dropped into the depression and went to the nearest brush clump. Snapped the stalk. Dry. I dug my fingers into the base and pulled the root loose. But it held the ground well. Dead roots don't grip ground that hard. At the tip, where it had been pressing deepest into the soil, the fibers were dark. Certainly not wet, but not perfectly dry either.
"Dormant," I said. "Root's still active. No surface moisture, no rain, nothing to explain it except upward pressure."
"It grew long ago," Olen said from the rim. "Before the desert shifted."
I scrambled down the bank. "It's not an open pool," I muttered, clawing at the dirt. "It's down there."
"Elyan." Bastien's voice came from somewhere above me. He didn't say anything else.
"Bring me the auger." I ordered.
Nothing.
"Bring me the auger!" I found Olen with my eyes. "If I'm wrong, I walk. You give me this first."
Olen held another moment. Then he jerked his chin at the tool chest. Two men dragged it to the rim and kicked it down the slope. It hit the hardpan at my feet with a crack.
I threw the latch open.