‘What’s going to happen if Wilfred doesn’t come back in time?’ Alex asked.
‘That’s not an option!’ Grandpa Jacob stood up from his chair and started pacing the small room, his footsteps an uneven tread. Step-thump, step-thump, step-thump. ‘I’ll keep calling Neil,’ he muttered. ‘He has to listen to me. He has to bring Wilfred home.’
Leeuie watched the pacing too, fiddling with his hat. ‘Is there something I can do to help in the meantime?’ he ventured. ‘I know I’m not the Fortieth Son, but I go into the forest quite a bit. I know my way around.’
‘No,’ Grandpa Jacob said. ‘It’s too dangerous.’
‘But I could do some reconnaissance.’
Alex gave him an incredulous look. Of course Leeuie would offer to do something like wander into a forest where an evil spirit lived.
‘Absolutely not.’ Grandpa Jacob stopped walking and fixed his piercing dark eyes on the boy. ‘Promise me you won’t go in there.’
‘Okay, I promise,’ Leeuie said, but he didn’t sound happy about it. ‘But we need a plan.’
Grandpa Jacob resumed his pacing. ‘I’m thinking, I’m thinking.’
Alex still couldn’t wrap her head around the fact that her cousin was supposed to be the only person on the face of the earth who could stop an evil spirit from destroying the world. He just seemed so … unlikely. ‘Is there any chance you made a mistake about who the Fortieth Son is?’ Alex said.
Grandpa Jacob stopped pacing. ‘What kind of mistake?’
‘Maybe … it’s not the eldest son in each generation? It could be, I don’t know, the second or third son?’
Grandpa Jacob snorted. ‘It’s not.’
‘Or … maybe you counted down the number of relatives wrong?’
‘I did no such thing!’
‘Are you sure?’ Alex pressed.
‘Positive.’
‘Positive positive?’
He gave Alex a withering look.
‘It couldn’t hurt to triple-check,’ Leeuie said, in what Alex thought was a totally sucky tone. ‘We could count them once more?’
‘Fine.’ Grandpa Jacob did not like having his judgement questioned, but he did take out a large piece of folded paper, which was tucked into the same drawer as the journal, and spread it out on top of the messy desk. ‘Suit yourselves.’
The page was an eye-boggling array of words, written in tiny, spidery letters and connected together with lines. Alex recognised it as a family tree, albeit the most complicated and longwinded family tree she had ever seen.
Right at the top was an intricate drawing. A circle that surrounded a chunky cross and four small triangles, one at the end of each arm.
‘That’s the picture from the fence post!’ Alex said.
‘It’s called the Amarlysa,’ Grandpa Jacob said. ‘It was the symbol of the Chodzanar tribe.’ He smoothed the creases from the paper then tapped his finger to a name written at the top. Moraika Sola Uarcay. ‘This is the warrior I’m descended from.’
And me, Alex thought, sounding out the syllables of the name in her head. Moraika Sola Uarcay.
‘Her name means heavenly daughter of the sun,’ Grandpa Jacob explained. ‘She was, apparently, the bravest and most heroic warrior of the lot.’
Below that, a complicated waterfall of names cascaded over the sheet of paper, each connected with a line to the one above. Alex read through the unfamiliar names. Fila Sole … Pahuac Timme Mait … Kehener Solan Wehner … The names became more modern and familiar the closer she got to the bottom. Alberto Guerrero … Susan Beatrice Sol … Mitchell Renbre … Right at the end were Uncle Neil and Wilfred. Alex and Mum were not listed anywhere.
‘The eldest sons are written in a different colour,’ Grandpa Jacob said. ‘So you can more easily follow the path of the bloodline.’
Alex peered closer. Sure enough, there was one name in each generation that was written in a slightly darker ink.
‘Well?’ Grandpa Jacob drummed his fingers on the table. ‘Did I count correctly?’
The finger-drumming noise and Grandpa Jacob’s self-satisfied tone got on Alex’s nerves, so she counted the names very slowly, just to irritate him. But even after counting them twice more, she came to the same conclusion. Wilfred was the Fortieth Son.
‘Is it possible the prophecy is wrong?’ she said, more to be contrary than because she thought it was a possibility. ‘Like, it’s actually the fifteenth, or the thirty-third person?’
Grandpa Jacob threw his hands into the air. ‘If the prophecy was translated incorrectly, then your guess is as good as mine as to who the Fortieth Son is!’
A tiny nugget of a thought formed in the back of Alex’s mind. She turned her grandfather’s words over in her head. If the prophecy was translated incorrectly … If the prophecy was translated incorrectly … ‘Did you translate it?’ she asked.
Grandpa Jacob shook his head. ‘That happened well before my time.’
Alex mulled over this. ‘What if there was a mistake when it was first written down in English?’
Leeuie’s eyes lit up. ‘You think some words got mixed up?’
Grandpa Jacob gave them a sceptical glance. ‘Why are you trying so hard to prove it’s not Wilfred?’
Alex and Leeuie shared a quick look. Because if the fate of the world rests with Wilfred we’re in real trouble.
‘It’s possible though, isn’t it?’ Alex pressed. She looked over the prophecy again, scrutinising each syllable.
The power returns with the Fortieth Son,
it’s thanks to their blood that the task can be done.
The Son has the gift,
the Guardians, lore
to rebind the spirit before there is war.
And then it hit her. She turned to her grandfather. ‘You said Moraika’s name means daughter of sun or something?’
‘Heavenly daughter of the sun,’ he corrected.
‘And which part means sun?’
‘Her middle name,’ Grandpa Jacob said. ‘Sola.’
‘What if the word for S-O-N and S-U-N got mixed up,’ Alex said, talking fast, ‘and it’s the fortieth person in the bloodline with sun in their name instead!’
Her heart beat a little bit faster as she scanned over the family tree. She’d taken French, Italian and Spanish at school. She had been useless at them all, but there was one thing she remembered: a lot of the words looked and sounded almost the same in all three languages. ‘Look at all the names that have similar words in them,’ she said. ‘Sol, Solis, Sole, Soleil …’
Leeuie gasped. ‘They all mean sun in different languages!’
Grandpa Jacob didn’t even get a chance to react before Leeuie and Alex started poring over the family tree. They read through the names together, pointing out each time a word similar to Sola cropped up.
When they got to the bottom, Alex’s face fell. ‘My great-great-grandmother is the thirty-ninth person, but no one after her has a word that means sun in their name.’
And then she froze.
She remembered what Grandpa Jacob had said when Alex had followed him through the olive grove to feed the alpacas. This Olive Grove belongs to Rosa Surya Ortiz. Surya was her grandmother’s maiden name. It meant sun.
Surya was also Alex’s middle name.
Her heart hammering, Alex grabbed a pencil from the table and started to write on the family tree.
‘What the devil are you doing?’ Grandpa Jacob blustered, but Leeuie stopped him from snatching the pencil from Alex’s hand.
Alex added two rectangular boxes to the bottom of the chart. In the first one she wrote Mum’s name: Elina Susan Ortiz. In the second, below her mother’s and connected by a fine line, she wrote her own name: Alexandra Surya Harris.
Grandpa Jacob looked up sharply. ‘Surya? Your middle name is Surya?’
Leeuie looked from Alex to Grandpa Jacob. ‘What does that mean?’
‘Surya was my wife’s maiden name,’ Grandpa Jacob explained. He stared at Alex as though seeing her properly for the first time. ‘Surya means sun.’
‘But then …’ Leeuie’s mouth fell open. ‘Then you’re the Fortieth Sun.’