The stones—at least the ones low enough on the wall for them to reach—were solid. Not a single one turned or was even loose.
“Think that table’s too heavy to drag to the side of the room?” Jameson asked Avery, eyeing the stones out of arm’s reach.
“Definitely too heavy.” Avery paused. “Lift me up?”
He did exactly that, like the two of them were dancers in a ballroom, defying gravity as they made their way around the room once more, Avery stretching overhead and Jameson holding her steady as she checked stone after stone.
And still, nothing. There are more stones, higher up. Jameson put Avery down, then hopped onto the windowsill. He tried to find purchase against the stones, tried to climb the wall around the massive window, and all he got for his efforts was a fall to the floor.
Flat on his stomach, Jameson found himself staring directly at the fireplace. It was empty, no logs—and made of stone. Jameson bounded to his feet and across the room, checking the stones on the inside of the fireplace, the backing.
“Nothing,” he said out loud, but he didn’t stop. Instead, he turned his focus to the cutout next to the fireplace, used for storing firewood. Logs were stacked waist high. Jameson started pulling them out, tossing them to the floor, his gaze locked on the stones behind the logs.
And then he felt something carved into one of the logs. “Writing,” Jameson breathed.
Avery was beside him, her body pressed against his in an instant. Jameson placed the log on the ground, flat side up. There, etched into the wood, was the letter F.
Jameson turned back to the remaining logs. Beside him, Avery dropped to the floor, going through the ones he’d already thrown down. “Found one,” she called. “T.”
“Both sides of this one,” Jameson replied. “O and A.”
In the end, there were thirteen letters, carved into eleven logs. F, T, O, A, L, Y, C, R, E, H, S, U, W.
“Pull out the H,” Jameson suggested. “Unless it’s at the start of a word, it probably goes with the S, the C, or the W.” He looked for other obvious pairings. “Let’s try O with U and the L next to the E.”
“E-L or L-E?” Avery asked.
Jameson shook his head. “It could go either way. There aren’t any duplicate consonants, and no B or V, so chances are good that the Y either comes after a common combination, before the L, or at the start of a word.”
Jameson pulled five letters. L-O-F-T-Y. “What does that leave us with?”
“Crush?” Avery suggested. Jameson pulled the letters. That left three. A, W, and E.
“Lofty, crush, awe.” Avery said the words out loud. “We could be looking for a loft. Something heavy. Awe-inspiring.”
Have I taught you nothing, my boy? Jameson didn’t even try to shake off the memory of his grandfather’s many lessons. The first answer isn’t always the best.
He returned the letters—all of them—to the pile. This time, he pulled the Y first. He’d said it himself: It probably came after a common consonant combination, before the L, or at the start of the word.
“Y,” Jameson murmured. “O, U.” He stopped there, just for a moment, then went back and pulled the R. Your.
F, T, A, L, C, E, H, S, W.
“T-C-H?” Avery suggested. The moment the suggestions was out of her mouth, Jameson saw it. The answer. He pulled the W and the A, plus the combination she’d identified, making the word watch and leaving only four letters behind.
F, L, E, and S.
Or, if you reversed the order…
“Self,” Jameson said out loud. Then he laid the message out—a more cohesive one this time than the mix of words they’d gotten before.
WATCH YOURSELF.
Viewed a certain way, that seemed like a warning. But viewed through the lens of the Game—through the lens of all the many games just like this that Jameson had played growing up—it read differently.
“A mirror?” he murmured. “Or a camera?”
He racked his mind for any turn of phrase that Rohan had used during his speech that might offer more specifics but came up blank.
“Watch yourself,” Jameson murmured. “No stone unturned. But of course, this clue and that one might not go together. There are two keys left to find, plus the boxes.”
They’d discovered a clue—but to which puzzle?
His mind and body buzzing, Jameson leaned his head back, his gaze cast upward, thinking, letting the chaos of his racing thoughts fall away until all that was left was a plan. “We keep searching the room,” he told Avery. “Every nook, every cranny, until there’s no clues left to find, and then we’ll try to make sense of them. At the end of the day, we don’t just want one of the remaining keys.”
Avery tossed her hair over her shoulder. “We need them both.”
CHAPTER 66
JAMESON
Forcing his eyes to take in every detail of the room anew, Jameson noted again that the only decorative flourish was on the ceiling: the blue and gold detailing, an elaborate X with squares positioned to look like diamonds on either side. Inside the diamonds, shields. Inside the shields, symbols. Jameson made out a Greek letter or two, a flower, a lion, a sword.
Jameson cycled through key phrases that Rohan had dropped, and nothing registered—until he stopped looking at the details of the ceiling above and started looking at the big picture.
The X.
“As in X marks the spot?” Jameson tossed out.
“Marks,” Avery repeated. “That’s what Rohan said we were playing for. The mark.”
Directly beneath the X was the table. Jameson was on his back on the floor beneath it in a heartbeat. The underside of the table was smooth, plain, except in the corners. And in those corners, Jameson found round disks, each slightly smaller than a coaster.
“Not disks,” Avery said beside him, lifting the word from his mind, her own racing along the exact same path. “Wheels. Do you remember the last thing Rohan said—the very last thing?”
Jameson thought back. “The Game starts when you hear the bells. Until then, I suggest you all let the wheels turn a bit…”
And acquaint yourself with the competition. Jameson didn’t say that last bit out loud, because it was beside the point.
“The wheels.” Jameson met Avery’s eyes. “Turn them.”
She took one end of the table, and he took the other. The wheels didn’t want to turn, but if you pushed them upward and turned at the same time, the resistance fell away. The wheels turned. And once all four of them had been turned—again and again until they would no longer move—a hidden compartment on the side of the table opened.
And nestled in that compartment, there was a key.
CHAPTER 67
JAMESON
The key was old-fashioned, made of gold with bloodred jewels inlaid at the top and center. Golden vines encircled the body of the key, swirling to form a flower at the top. Small pearls dotted the vines. Jameson dragged his thumb lightly over them.
“One key down,” he said. He meant the words for Avery but couldn’t take his eyes off the prize in his hand. “One to go.”
The chances that the key in his hand opened the box—the one they needed to win—were one in three, one in two if Jameson’s assumption that the smugglers’ cave key wasn’t the winning key was correct. But fifty-fifty wasn’t the kind of odds a Hawthorne accepted.
Not when there were better odds to be had.
“Smuggle nothing out, the book, the caves,” Jameson rattled off. “The mark, the table, let the wheels turn. We’ve already uncovered a third clue in the room, but it’s unclear which, if any, verbal clue it corresponds to.”