Strike at Midnight(86)
“And Sir Raymond?” I asked, wondering how he had managed to bring Sir Raymond in on the rescue.
“After Rem told me that there were a couple of men who worked for the stupid shit, not to mention the witch, I wasn’t about to come in on my own. I’m not that stupid.”
He was teasing, but he had also been sensible. Kudos to the guy for his forethought.
“I was more than happy to help,” Sir Raymond said as he moved out of the way of the two knights who were hoisting up the goons to take them outside. “You wouldn’t have been in such trouble if it hadn’t been for me.”
“And how the hell did you know how to find Mia?” I asked, and it was Mia who answered this time.
“Sir Raymond escorted me home after the ball, remember?”
“And you let him come to your front door?” I asked, knowing how secretive witches tended to be about their abodes.
“Of course,” she said, “just in case I was needed some day.”
The look in her eyes filled in the gaps just as the smug appearance on her face did. She had already demonstrated that she knew a lot of information that shouldn’t have been known to her, so who was to say she didn’t know this would happen? My guard came up again and I knew I needed to watch my back where she was concerned. I may have been grateful for her help tonight, but I could also be wary and grateful.
“Of course,” I said with a raised eyebrow, and she just winked at me.
“Did you find out anything about the duke?” Sir Raymond asked me, and after one big-ass sigh, I told them everything that Piper had told me. I left out the part about Rem’s brother because that was some news I wasn’t looking forward to breaking. Call me a coward. “We need to look around this place,” I added as my audience processed the information. “There might be some clues around here about where the duke and the others were sent.”
“I’m so sorry for dragging you into all this,” Sir Raymond said, the weight evident on his shoulders at the news of the duke being out there with different memories. “I should never have come to you in the first place.”
“Hey,” I said, walking towards him and putting a hand on his arm for reassurance. “Don’t worry about it.” I couldn’t help but lay a light kiss on his weathered cheek because he looked so damn sad. “I’ll just add a few things to my list of expenses and we’ll call it even.”
He let out a light chuckle and patted my hand. “Very well,” he said, and then he stepped back so we could get started on the search. “Let’s see what we can find.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Luck be a Ledger Tonight
“Find anything?” Mia asked as I walked out of the room where Amana had obviously set herself up. There had been a cauldron in the cold space and a vast amount of strange-looking things in jars. Not to mention skulls and bones and potion bottles. It had given me chills just standing among it all.
“There are two books here,” I said as I carried two leather-bound books in my hands. One had a black cover and looked older than the other. “I think one is a spell book and the other is a form of ledger. I need to have a proper look through them.”
“I’ll take a look through the spell book,” Mia said, taking it from the top of the other. She could have that one, seeing as I wouldn’t know the eye of newt from a batshit recipe.
As I moved off to assess the ledger, I noticed that there was a list of short rhymes next to jumbled words and an amount of gold coins. There were two pages of them as I read through it, and then I came upon one that read “The Sun shined in York, as a man ate with a fork. Even when he sat down for dinner, he was cast a faithful winner. Send him north, make him a sinner. Bake his bread to be a breadwinner.”
A shitty rhyme at best, but it could be a reference to the Duke of York. I studied the jumbled word next to it that read “THWARTER HOY.” After a moment of head-scratching, it jumped out at me that these letters spelled out “Heartworthy” when rearranged in a different way. Of course. Helena Heartworthy. This little addition to the ledger was definitely making reference to the duke, and the listing of ten gold coins confirmed what Helena had paid for the duke’s face.
Maybe the rest of the rhyme had some reasoning too, and it could be a clue to where they had sent him? I doubted that Piper had relied on the ledger as a log for a shoddy attempt at poetry.
I reread the rest of the rhyme a few times over and recalled the places my father used to speak about from his travels. He had shown me maps of where he had been, and there had been actual occasions when I had needed to study ones as a hunter when my quarry tried to skip out of the city. The names of the different places flowed through my head as I recalled the information, and the word sinner from the rhyme kept tugging at my brain. Sin. Sinner…what was so special about that?
And then it hit me…
The Kingdom of Sindina was the next kingdom along, about a three-day trek through the bordering forest. It was a small kingdom compared to the one in which I was standing, but it would be large enough for the duke to have blended in. To bake his bread to be a breadwinner. Had they made him a baker? Could this be a true lead to where he was?
As I read through the other names, I found one that could be related to Lord Camembert: “He reeks of cheese, and tends to wheeze. A rabid dog, with a head of fog. Send him southeast, where he can hide in the trove, become the keeper of a beautiful grove.” The jumbled word next to that one read: VENALHY with fifteen gold coins listed next to his name. Poor Havenly had been charged the higher price by the looks of it, and it appeared that Lord Camembert had been sent to the lands of Troven City. There was a famous orange grove there that supplied a lot of kingdoms with their early morning orange juices.