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My heart beat hard in my chest as her gaze met mine. I tried to apologize with my expression, but her features only hardened. She tugged on her hand, and I regretfully loosened my grip, letting her slip free.
She scurried backward; the necklace clutched in her grasp.
I said nothing as the dread sank deep.
Words couldn’t fix what she was about to read.
Chapter 14
Quilla
One thing I could not deny about the High Clifter was how neat his penmanship looked, how easy and detailed his notes read, and how absolutely organized his journal was.
The moment I settled myself in a comfortable spot across the campfire from him, my stomach swirled with excitement. This pendant was the key; I just knew it.
I bit my lip and squinted at the leather strips holding the book closed. No matter how I’d tried to undo the tangle of knots binding them together or how hard I tugged at them, they only became more impossible to loosen. Not even a knife’s blade had been able to break the strips. Ergo, they must be spelled with some kind of magic.
With the necklace’s pendant gripped in one hand, I randomly slotted it into the knot and immediately heard it click open as the leather strips fell away from the book, landing in my lap as if relieved they didn’t have to hug the book so persistently anymore.
I lifted my gaze to send the man a superior glance, but he’d bowed his head and was scrubbing his hands over his face as if agitated.
Humph. Sore loser.
Upon opening the front, the first thing I came across was a collapsed sheet of folded parchment that had been pasted to the inside of the cover. I unfolded it carefully and found a map of the Outer Realms that more than doubled the entire size of the book. As I scanned through the eight kingdoms that made up our world, I found places he’d marked that I’d never even heard of before, places probably only the locals in that area knew the name of.
Thinking this might come in handy someday, I tore the map from the book, glancing up when I heard a choked sound of protest sputter from the other side of the camp. The High Clifter gaped at me as if I’d just stabbed him through the heart. Rolling my eyes, I refolded the map and tucked it into a side pouch of my own pack. He really did hold his book in high regard, didn’t he?
“That…” He shook his head, eyes full of torment. “That was just cruel.”
I shrugged and opened the first page. The graphed genealogy I found there made my eyebrows spike. It wasn’t for House Moast that he claimed to belong to, though. No, it was a Graykey family tree.
Interesting.
I glanced at him again. But he had his eyes closed this time. With his head tipped back, he rested it against the tree behind him and clasped his hands tightly in his lap. One might confuse him for praying, save for how pale he was as he tapped his toe anxiously against the ground.
I returned my attention to the family tree, finding my own name almost immediately. He even knew which year I’d been born. When I found an asterisk mark beside it, I frowned, curious to know what that meant. Discovering more similar marks beside the names Taika, Melaina, Questa, Quailen, and a couple more, however, I began to get a suspicion over what they stood for.
I turned the page, and my stomach plummeted.
He’d listed each family member by name and written everything he’d learned about them, including birth year, what atrocities they’d done in their lifetime—names of individuals they had murdered, items they’d stolen, people they’d tricked—and how they had died.
Then I came to a page full of another list of names. This list was titled Unknowns, and it had the asterisk mark next to it, making me think it was connected to the asterisks next to the names on the family tree.
The first name on the list was Qualmer, my first cousin and Melaina’s second son—the one she had stabbed in the eye and not taken on our big escape. Apparently, he’d gone missing from everyone’s radar six years ago without a trace at the end of the Great Lowden War. Under that bit of news was another indented list of all the people he was accused of killing. When I spotted the names Edgar and Emlett Moast among them, I paused.
Moast, huh?
There was no mention of how they were no doubt related to the man who owned this journal; it merely said the two were High Cliff emissaries who’d been in Lowden in the year three-ten, which was when the tenth reaping had occurred.
I lifted my face, but the High Clifter across the campfire was still restlessly tapping his knee with his eyes closed. A thin trail of sweat swept down his temple. My jaw tensed. And I knew he felt my rising ire because he heaved in a deep breath.
I went back to reading.
Number two on the list was Quo Graykey. I remembered him. He’d been a second cousin—I think—and grandson to Grandpa Obediah’s brother, King Orick. He’d been a direct heir of the Graykey crown. But his name had been marked out with an update written to the side, claiming he’d been found six years ago.
Becoming suspicious, I flipped back to the family tree and discovered that he’d
been marked as dead on that page the very same year he was marked as found on this list.
