AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“Absolutely brilliant, little love.” Desmond flashed her a smile before scribbling down the name in a notebook that appeared on his lap.
“Better get a move on, Desmond, or Claire will take your place as the smartest in the group.”
“I already know that my little love is smarter than all of us combined,” Desmond sniffed at Malcolm.
“I wonder if this is the pre-emptive action that Maxios referenced,” Malcolm thought out loud.
Everett nodded, following the subject change. “I thought he meant the Council orders regarding travel but he might have meant this weapon instead.”
“Would the Council have been able to breach the Elven Forest boundary though?” Desmond wondered out loud, thinking about Claire’s Fortis suggestion. “Winona’s magic was pretty fearsome.”
“The Council is powerful in their own right though,” Everett pointed out. “And if two or more of them were working together, it’s possible they found a back door. Or a weakness in the boundary.”
“Didn’t Toan say Winona suspected a spy in the Capitol?” Claire said, her eyes wide. “What if the same person secured the Fortis?”
“That’s a good possibility,” Desmond said. “Okay, so we have Fortis on the list, what else?”
“What about the Metallicum?” She thought about the metal in their hoard.
Desmond frowned. “I like the thinking but no one but the Energy-wielding Fae can use that and even then only after years of training. I’ll put it on the list though,” he gave her a comforting smile.
Claire returned his smile and bit her lip. “What else would be on the list?”
“There are probably a few other Elven herbs,” Desmond tapped the pen to his chin. “I can look for some of them in the books I brought. There might be a spell or two as well from the witches. That would be a different list of ingredients but I can get on it. I brought a few books with us on powerful spells.”
“I’ll do some reading on poisons. Anything that could mimic the effects of this weapon I think we should consider,” Everett said. “Malcolm, do you want to do some research on things that will take out shifters or dragons?”
“What do you want me to do?” Claire asked as she felt Malcolm nod.
“I think you should dig into your mother’s journals more,” Everett said. “We need to finish putting the bits and pieces together and see if she saw anything in her visions about this ultimate weapon.”
Claire nodded, that made sense. She had been avoiding her mother’s journals even though she knew she needed to read them. To be fair, it wasn’t like they had a lot of down time since they had collected them either. But still, every time she cracked one open, she started thinking of her mother writing the words down and wondering if she saw her death which led to Claire remembering how her mother died and the feelings from the clearing in the Elven Forest and she ended up closing the journals as the feelings of sadness and grief overwhelmed her. And it was much easier to shove those feelings away and avoid them than to feel them. She was going to have to ‘woman up’ and get over it today though. They needed all the information they could get and hopefully some of the answers could be found in the journals.
Ignoring Malcolm’s grumble, Claire sat up and walked across the room to retrieve a notebook and spare pen from Desmond’s stack. Since her mother’s visions were fragmented, sometimes they were hard to piece together especially with the missing journal. Claire could write down the snippets of information in different categories to see if she could start putting patterns together.
Even though the couch next to Malcolm looked super inviting, Claire dragged a few pillows from it onto the floor to give herself more space. Puck quickly made himself comfortable next to her as she stacked her mother’s journals off to one side and spread the notebook out to the other. Pulling the top journal off the stack, she opened it up and began to read, sorting the information as she read until she had several categories listed across the top of the page. Except when she pulled back and looked at the sorted information, it made less sense then it had before
Claire hadn’t gotten anywhere with Winona’s journals previously because they seemed to all be written in code. A code that needed all five journals to break except the fifth journal was missing or taken. Claire bit the end of the pen as she thought.
Her mother’s visions always came fragmented from what Claire could piece together. The closer in time the vision was the more clearly Winona saw it but also the more likely it was to change. She often saw multiple fragments and even multiple outcomes of an event. And if that wasn’t confusing enough, Winona had also created a code that would make it difficult for anyone to read the journals unless they had all of them in their possession. Which was both good and bad. Good because whoever had the fifth journal couldn’t read it but bad that Claire now had to figure out what kind of code Winona would have used and how to break it.
Taking a break from staring at the blank page of the notebook, Claire rolled over onto her back and stared up at the ceiling as she thought. Her brain still hurt from her night of restless sleep and Claire rubbed her temples. Where to start, where to start?
The problem was she didn’t know her mother and didn’t know what she liked and disliked and how her brain worked. If Claire knew her at all, she might have a starting point but she didn’t know her. But… wouldn’t Winona have known that? If she saw multiple outcomes of different scenes wouldn’t it have made sense that she saw one where Claire didn’t find all of the journals in time or even this exact scenario where someone had taken one of the journals? That had to have been a possibility. So if it was a possibility, the code wouldn’t have been based off what Winona would have created but what… Claire would have created?
Claire’s eyes widened and she flipped over quickly, disrupting Puck from his slumber and causing him to let out a sleepy squawk. She ran her fingers over the pages of the first journal. Line by line her fingertips traced over each word.
There.
There was a raised dot on that word. On the top of a C. Claire’s fingers continued on to the next page. There were two dots on that word at the top of a D. Further down the page was a dot and a dash over a W. Two dashes over the A of a word on the next page.
Claire flipped to a new page and started writing down each fragment of vision down that had those raised dots and dashes. They always corresponded to the same letter so she used the letters as the sorting categories. She didn’t think about what she was writing down, instead focusing on sorting it as quickly as possible. A part of her knew that it wouldn’t make sense until she finished with all of the journals. Hours passed and Claire stayed engrossed in her work.
When she closed the pages of the fourth and final journal, her fingers and head ached but her heart was filled with a hopeful optimism. She had cracked it, she knew it. Her mother had written the code in such a way that if Claire had still been blind, she would have been able to still decipher it. Winona was the one that had taken away Claire’s sight after all.
Rubbing her temples, Claire focused back on her notes. She had sorted them into categories based on the letters that the dots and dashes fell on. She had categories for A, C, D, and W.
Bringing the pen up to the first column for the A category, she started reading over the fragments of visions that Winona had seen. In this order, the visions read easily, like a full story. Within the first few words, Claire knew this vision was for her.
