SWNOVELS The Brothers Hawthorne: Chapter 65
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.”
“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.”