That felt like a warning more than a promise.
“Anything less, and you’ll destroy her. And if she is the one…” The old man looked first at Jameson, then at Grayson, then back at Jameson again. “Someday, she’ll destroy you.”
He didn’t make that sound like a bad thing.
“What would she have thought of us?” Jameson asked the question on impulse, but he didn’t regret it. “Our grandmother?”
“You’re still works in progress,” the old man replied. “Let’s save my Alice’s judgment for when you’re done.”
With that, Tobias Hawthorne turned away from them, away from the window, away from the fireworks. When he spoke again, it was in a tone that Jameson recognized all too well. “There are thousands of boards in this tree house. I have weakened one. Find it.”
A test. A challenge. A game.
By the time they found the board, the fireworks were long over.
“Break the board,” the old man ordered.
Jameson wordlessly held it up. Grayson assumed the proper stance, then threw his body into the strike. The heel of his hand hit the board just above the crack, and it split.
“Now,” Tobias Hawthorne ordered, “find me a board that cannot be weakened. And when you find it,” the old man continued, leaning back against the tree house wall, his eyes narrowed but burning with a familiar kind of fire, “you can tell me: Which kind of board are the two of you?”
CHAPTER 65
JAMESON
As instructed by the inscription on the lock, Jameson and Avery went back to the start, to the room where Rohan had laid out the rules of the game.
Leave no stone unturned.
Of all the phrases that the Factotum had used, that was the one that most stuck in Jameson’s mind. “For the first key,” he said, thinking out loud, “there was a spoken clue—smuggle nothing out—and a physical clue in this room.”
“The book.” Avery was right there with him. “If the other keys follow the same pattern, then there are clues here pointing toward wherever those keys are hidden, and those clues—”
“—will tie in to something Rohan said,” Jameson finished. He turned his attention to the walls of the room. The stone walls.
Leave no stone unturned.
Avery laid her hand flat on one of the stones. “First person to find a stone that turns gets to choose the destination for our next trip?”
Jameson smiled. “You’ve got yourself a wager, Heiress.”
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.”