Chapter 19
Old Man Reilly was a crusty old man who struck fear in children and adults alike with his stern words, icy glare and habit of whacking you with his cane.
He had been the town’s blacksmith before his son had taken over and the job had taken its toll on his health.
He had permanent damage to his hands, back and knees.
I’d always expected his cabin to look like something out of a nightmare, but it was the opposite. O’Reilly maintained a tidy yard. He regularly swept the stoop and painted the trim. He had one of the nicest, well-maintained cabins in Perga.
Ace leaned over me. “Are you expecting him to jump out at us?”
“You’re not?”
Ace shivered. “Let’s get this over with. I don’t want to get caught standing out here.”
I reached forward and opened the door. We quickly entered the cabin and the door snicked shut behind us.
The room smelled of dried lavender and cedar. A neatly folded quilt rested on the couch in the living room opposite a hearth and a neatly stacked pile of wood. The meal prep area had been cleaned with no messy dishes or flies in sight.
“Come on.” Ace nudged me with his shoulder. “This place creeps me out.”
I nodded and followed him as he began checking the rooms.
“Whatever happened to his wife?” I asked. “I don’t remember her.”
“I always assumed she fled after Graham was born.” Ace stomped out of a bedroom. It had taken him less than a minute to search the space. It must’ve been Graham’s, but it held no memories of the old man’s son. Instead, it had a simple bed, an empty dresser and a barren closet.
“I still don’t see what Sley saw in that guy.” Sley had dated Graham but made every excuse to get out of joining him when he went to visit his father.
We walked through the last door to find O’Reilly’s bedroom.
A worn quilt with a crisscrossing red and black pattern covered the mattress, tightly tucked at the corners to create a smooth surface.
A desk sat on the opposite wall under a large window.
The curtains had been pulled back and light streamed into the room to illuminate the papers neatly piled on the desk.
A large irregular stain marred the floorboards. Dried blood, though the smudged edges indicated someone had tried to clean up.
“He died here.” Ace nodded at the stain.
“Your powers of observation never cease to amaze me.”
“And your ability to compliment my talents has my heart aflutter,” Ace replied, tone dry.
I wanted to wipe the grin off his face with my mouth.
Clearly there was something wrong with me. We stood in the middle of a murder scene.
“Where do you want to start?” Ace asked.
I pushed away thoughts of Ace’s lips and refocused on the room. “If he’s as fastidious with his book-keeping as he is with his housekeeping, maybe we’ll find a nicely labelled file on the rogue hunters.”
“We can hope.” Ace went to the closet and started to rummage around the clothes and neatly stacked storage boxes.
I walked over to the desk where neatly stacked invoices sat on the smooth surface.
Tidy printing indicating which ones had been paid.
I rifled through papers until I came across something unusual.
Everything else had been ledgers and invoices.
The handwritten letter stood out. I took a seat and pulled the paper free from the pile.
The letter was unaddressed.
I have given the hunters their orders, but I worry he’ll stay his hand out of sentiment. He must survive long enough to serve his purpose. If we are to succeed, the galeons must learn their secrets can betray them, and the heirs must not survive.
Meet me at the place of the three-marked tree when the moon wanes.
~O
“O as in Orion?” Ace asked, reading over my shoulder.
“Or O as in O’Reilly?” I countered. Ace was letting his personal hatred get in the way. I placed the letter beside the invoices. “See? The writing is the same. This was definitely written by the old man.”
Ace shrugged. “If you say so. But if it was written by O’Reilly, who was he writing to?”
“Could be anyone.” I reread the letter. “Do you think he’s referring to Paul? The one who will stay his hand out of sentiment.”
“It makes sense. He didn’t kill you and we know someone else ordered the hunters to attack. But that means there’s a third person involved here. O’Reilly wouldn’t be sending this to Paul.”
I ran my finger along the writing, wishing for the first time the old man was still alive so I could question him. “And the heirs? As far as I know Titania and Oberon have no children.”
“That we know of. Maybe they’ve hidden them away.” He was looking at me funny. “That flirt also referred to your brother as the heir. Is there a chance you’re the king and queen’s long lost love child? It would explain why the letter mentions secrets and also why you ended up in the orphanage.”
“The king and queen are both galeons,” I said.
Ace tapped his chin. “Good point. So either there are more heirs running around or the heirs the old man was referring to are you and your brother and we’re misreading the letter.” He scowled and glared at the letter.
“What?”
“I wish O’Reilly was still alive.”
“So you could question him?”
“So I could kill him myself,” he growled. “He ordered you dead, Mouse.”
“We don’t know that for sure,” I said.
“Sure, we do.” Ace glowered and stabbed the letter with his finger. “It’s all right here. His own admission to giving the orders. He deserved something far more painful than a direct shot to the heart.”
“You say such sweet things.”
“I mean it.”
“I know.” I folded up the letter and slid it into my pocket. “Let’s see if we can find anything else.”
“Like this?” Ace pulled the corner of a paper sticking out from the pile.
“A map?” I glanced at it. “I already know the area pretty well.”
Ace held it out. “I noticed the symbol in the corner.”
I looked closer. Sure enough, the map of the area had all the common markers of lakes, streams and towns, but odd symbols decorated some of the locations and border. “They look like the same ones from the river and our prison.”
He nodded and leaned over, scanning the map’s details. “Maybe we can use it to decipher some of the symbols. We know the name for Perga.” He poked the map at our location where someone, presumably O’Reilly, had etched the symbols underneath. “Maybe these symbols are a direct translation.”
I nodded and then my gaze snagged on a detail.
The map used the picture of a cabin to mark the locations of towns and small settlements.
Perga, Wast and Vitor were easy to make out and locate.
They were also named. But to the east, closer to the border of Vitor, there was a town marked with a cabin, but no name.
An X had been drawn over the cabin. I tapped the location with my finger. “Have you ever been here?”
Ace frowned, his brows drawing severely down. “No. I wasn’t aware of a town there. Why doesn’t it have a name?”
“I don’t know. I’ve never heard of a town in that location either.” It was beyond my patrolling range, but surely I would’ve at least heard about it. I folded up the map and slid it into the same pocket as O’Reilly’s letter. “And more importantly, why did someone cross out the town?”
“Maybe a mapmaker’s mistake?”
I snorted.
Ace smirked and leaned down to press his lips to the top of my head before moving away to inspect the bookshelf.
I sighed and tried to ignore the fluttering in my chest. Wasn’t this pathetic?
He did something sweet and I momentarily forgot I was framed for murders, on the kill list for both the king and rogue hunters, my brother was somehow apart of all of this, and I still had no idea how all the pieces fit together.
I pushed away from the table and stood. Shaking the feeling back into my legs, I stretched before moving away to inspect the dried pool of blood.
The old man hadn’t been at his desk when he’d been shot.
The stain was too far away for that. He must’ve been standing closer to the fireplace.
I headed over to the mantle. He didn’t hang mementos of his wife or his son, it was bare unadorned brick.
He hadn’t been standing here, looking at artwork or pondering his life choices.
Was he staring into the flames and reminiscing about the hell he came from?
I scoffed and knelt by the ashes.
Wait a minute.
I reached forward and tugged at the charred remains of a book. I pulled it free and a cascade of soot and ash rose from the hearth. I sneezed and then coughed. The ash burned my throat.
The old man hadn’t been reminiscing at all. He was destroying evidence.
The book had a leather cover. I flipped it open and the pages crumbled in my hands, falling to the floor in ashy pieces. Some of the larger pieces showed the same meticulous writing as the letter. This wasn’t a book. This was a journal.
I leafed through the remains. None of the pieces were large enough to make out more than a few letters, much less a whole word or sentence. I kept flipping, letting the flakes of paper and ash continue to fall around me.
I found a longer passage that survived the fire.
—are the blade and the whetstone. They are marked, but marked for what? The boy is malleable, but the other is dangerous…
He was writing about me and Paul. He had to be.
I found another section:
If The Circle falters, the world will burn—
“So he was obsessed with you,” Ace spoke behind me.
I squeaked and jumped to my feet, the journal slipping from my hands and hitting the ground with a loud thump. The journal broke apart into a disintegrated pile of ash.
“I mean, I can’t blame him.” He reached forward and tucked a stray strand of hair behind my ear. “I’m obsessed, too.”
“Just the confused ramblings of an old man, if you ask me.”
“Maybe. But he had one thing right.”
“And what’s that?” I brushed off my hands on my pants.
“You are dangerous.”
That shouldn’t make me feel all warm and fuzzy inside, but it did. I rolled back my shoulders and lifted my chin. “I am.”
“And modest.”
“Learned from the best.” I dropped my gaze and studied the wooden box in Ace’s hand. “What do you have there?”
Ace lifted the item. It was a simple thing with no inlaid designs or carvings, but it was well made. The wood was smooth and stained. The pieces fit together seamlessly.
“It’s the only thing unlabelled in his closet,” Ace said.
Interesting.
“And locked.”
“The plot thickens. Are you going to look around for the key or are you going to ask me to grope you again for the lock picks?”
His grin spread across his face and heat flashed in his gaze. “Do you promise to say yes, if I ask?”
“No.” I paused. “Maybe.”
He chuckled and shook his head. “Sadly, there’s no need for you to manhandle me right now. At least not to open the chest. I went ahead and unlocked it.” He swung the lid open.
An old-looking dagger sat on top of faded black silk. I reached out and ran my fingers along the gem-studded hilt. “It’s pretty.”
“I think it’s phaanon.”
“What makes you think that?”
“I could touch the blade.”
“Huh.” I let my magic out and caressed the metal with my power. It wasn’t iron. It was some other kind of metal.
Something sparked in response to my magic. It didn’t flare or come to life, so much as it sputtered. A tremor of sadness vibrated along my connection to the object before it fizzled out.
“There’s something wrong with it,” I said.
Ace nodded. “I think it’s broken.”
“O’Reilly had a lot more secrets in his closet.” I glanced down. “And fireplace than I ever expected. I just thought he was a grumpy old man. Turns out he was also conniving and plotting the complete collapse of our society.”
“He was full of layers.” Ace nodded.
“Like onions?”
“Exactly. Smelled like one, too.” He closed the lid to the box and shifted it under his arm. “Now will you let me take you home?”
“What about Nala?”
Ace glanced out the window at the darkening sky.
“We’ll stop by Onion’s place first, but we should be quick, and we should stay in the shadows.
I don’t like the idea of walking around anymore than we already have.
We’ve just returned to Perga, and we’ve already visited three cabins.
We’re going to get spotted. We need to figure out when the hunters left and how our presence will be received. ”
I nodded. “I should’ve asked Sley more questions.”
“Let’s go.” He held out his hand. “We need to save your familiar from the inevitable boredom she’s suffering in Onion’s presence.”