Shadow Road: Book 1 of the Shadows Rising Trilogy

29. Keys and Other Things

30th of Uirra, Continued

"What's the key?"

I didn't look up, concentrating on transcribing the tiny dots in the text of my father's letter onto larger lines I had drawn on a fresh sheet of paper. There hadn't been anything to write with on the fishing goonter, so I had to wait until we were back aboard the Stryka. Now I was sitting at the table in the council room, a mug of hot, spicy cider in front of me, while Arramy lurked directly behind my chair, not bothering to hide the fact that he was reading over my shoulder.

"It's my necklace," I said after a moment. That wasn't the whole answer, but he didn't need to know everything.

A few seconds later: "How are the letters assigned to the symbols?"

Blast the man.

"That..." I made a point of rechecking my work, searching for any dots I might have missed, "...is a secret." I moved to the next line of my father's handwriting. There had to be some things I could keep to myself.

"Uh-huh," Arramy murmured. This time he was looking at me and not the papers I was scribbling on.

"Would you mind moving? You're in my light."

Arramy grunted, then went to sit at the other end of the table, where he had been plotting things on a large map of the continents.

I glanced over at him.

There was a forest of little color-coded pins sticking out of three ports in the Colonies, several stuck in Lordstown and the Illyrian Isles, but only one small group clustered on the Continental side of the Marral Sea. I could tell without looking closer that they were all stuck in Garding, Warring Oceanic's home port. There wasn't any other port of origin mentioned in any of Father's documents.

Arramy's gaze collided with mine, and I had to suppress a shiver.

When I was twelve, Aunt Sapphine went on an expedition to the hidden temples in Al-Ipan. She found them occupied by a breed of wild mountain dog that the locals told fearsome tales about. Crafty, incredibly fierce, capable of taking down prey three times their size.

The sketches she drew of the creatures went up in flames along with everything else in my room, but I could still remember that lazy grin under hooded eyes. That deceptively relaxed sprawl. Arramy had that same sort of easy stillness, his long legs crossed at the ankle in front of him, his elbows on the arms of his chair, his fingers woven together over his lean middle, as if he were patiently waiting for his next meal to wander by, supremely confident in his ability to hunt it down and kill it.

I lifted my chin and went back to work, determined not to be intimidated.

Face it, Bree-hee-hee, you want the big grumpy Captain to like you.

I ground my teeth. No. Not like. Appreciate. Acknowledge that I'm not just some silly, fawning, pampered socialite.

You might as well be. You are well out of your depth, my girl, a minnow swimming with the sharks... A toddler on the third-year playground... What are you doing? All you have to do is hand over everything and leave. Let them sort it all out. That's what you want, isn't it? To leave this all behind? To go back to your life with Aunt Sapphine?

Yes! But Aunt Sapphine will probably wind up dead if I show up at her door. If she hasn't been arrested already simply because we're related...

My pen stilled on the paper at that thought, my heart giving a painful throb. I really couldn't go back. Not until this was over. I would only make things worse for anyone I went back to. For now, I had to stay here and finish what my father started. Translating this message was the first step. Whatever was in this code, it was important enough to hide, which made it important enough to find.