29. Keys and Other Things

30th of Uirra, Continued

"What's the key?" 

I didn't look up, concentrating on transcribing the tiny dots in the text of my father's letter onto larger lines I had drawn on a fresh sheet of paper. There hadn't been anything to write with on the goonter, so I had to wait until we were back aboard the Stryka. Now I was sitting at the table in the council room, a mug of hot, spicy cider in front of me, while Arramy lurked directly behind my chair, not bothering to hide the fact that he was reading over my shoulder. 

"It's my necklace," I said after a moment. That wasn't the whole answer, but he didn't need to know everything.

A few seconds later: "How are the letters assigned to the symbols?"

"That..." I made a point of rechecking my work, searching for any dots I might have missed, "...is a secret." I moved to the next line of my father's handwriting. There had to be some things I could keep to myself. 

"Uh-huh," Arramy murmured. This time he was looking at me and not the papers I was scribbling on. 

"Would you mind moving? You're in my light." 

Arramy grunted, then went to sit at the other end of the table, where he had been plotting things on a large map of the continents. 

I glanced over at him. 

There was a forest of little color-coded pins sticking out of three ports in the Colonies, several stuck in Lordstown, but only one small group clustered on the Continental side of the Marral Sea. I didn't have to get closer to tell that they were all stuck in Garding, Warring Oceanic's home port. There wasn't any other port of origin mentioned in any of Father's documents. 

Arramy's gaze collided with mine, and I had to suppress a shiver. 

When I was twelve, Aunt Sapphine went on an expedition to the hidden temples in North Altyr. She found them occupied by a species of wild mountain wolfdog that the locals told fearsome stories about. These wolfdogs were crafty, incredibly fierce, and capable of taking down prey three times their size.

The sketches she drew of the creatures went up in flames along with everything else in my room, but I could still remember that lazy grin under hooded eyes, and that deceptively relaxed sprawl. Arramy had that same sort of easy stillness, his long legs crossed at the ankle in front of him, his elbows on the arms of his chair, his fingers woven together over his lean middle as if he were patiently waiting for his next meal to wander by, supremely confident in his ability to kill it.

Firming my chin, I went back to work, determined not to be intimidated. 

Face it, you want the big grumpy captain to like you. 

I ground my teeth. No. Not like. I want him to acknowledge that I'm not just some silly, fawning, pampered socialite. That's not the same thing.

Are you sure?

Shut up. This is important. Father wouldn't have coded it if it wasn't.

I reached the end of the letter, triple-checked everything, then made sure I had the right cyphers. There were two systems to solve. The first was my name, underlined, followed by a sentence six words long. The second was the smudge under the 'm' in 'many,' followed by a sentence three words long. I couldn't help glancing surreptitiously at Arramy again to make sure he wasn't able to see anything... which earned me a quirked eyebrow. He was still watching me, waiting for me to prove myself useful. 

Annoyed, I ignored him and unfastened the clasp of my compass rose necklace. Then I placed the pendant on the table in front of me and worked the cypher, lining up South on the larger bottom ring with North on the smaller front ring, jotting down the eight individual combinations of little dots on the eight double spokes of the rose, starting with the one on North. 

It took another few minutes to write out letters beneath each dot symbol, starting with the first letter of my name and skipping by sixes – as indicated by that six-word sentence – till I had used every letter in the alphabet and all eight dot symbols had distinct groups of letters beneath them. Figuring out the message was as simple as writing the groups of letters beneath their corresponding dots in the line of code I had found in the letter. It was fairly easy to 'translate' the groups of letters.

Frowning, I jotted down the solution: LIONS PERCH. 

That was the first one. I moved the top wheel so West was over East, creating a whole new arrangement of dots. Sure enough, they matched the second group of dots I had culled from the text. A few minutes later I had that solved too. BUTTER CONES. 

I wrinkled my nose, baffled. Those were clearly the words Father meant me to find. His cypher rarely produced pairs of words that made sense together if you got it wrong, but the two groups of words didn't seem to make any sense with each other. What, exactly had I just solved? 

Arramy got to his feet and stepped around to look over my shoulder again. This time he bent closer, leaning to place one hand flat on the table next to me, effectively caging me into my chair as he studied my papers. I wouldn't have put it past him to be reverse-solving my father's little code game in his head. Knowing him, he probably could. 

For all my stubborn desire to keep a secret – any secret – to myself, I didn't stop him. I sat there, my heart doing a strange tattoo in my ribs, suddenly very, very aware of how close he was. Close enough to catch a hint of that pinewood and coconut soap. In a flash of insanity, I had the insane urge to bury my nose in the hollow of his throat and taking a deep breath. What an absurd thing to think about a person. Hold still sir, you smell like safety and not-drowning. 

Blushing furiously, I tore my gaze from his rugged jawline. This was business. Arramy was most certainly not caging me in to flirt with me. Why would he? It wasn't as if he enjoyed my company... Much less kissing me. That's right, I told myself. This is simply an economical position in which to view what another person happens to be viewing. There is no seduction going on. More like anti-seduction. He's probably trying to see if I'll lean sideways to avoid being crushed by his arm. Grimly, I focused on the matter at hand. "Does it make any sense to you?"

Arramy was silent, considering something. When he spoke, his voice was a rich rasp by my ear, "There's a Tetton pub in Nimkoruguithu called the Lion's Perch." 

"A pub." A pub might serve butter cones. I actually had done something useful. I hated how ridiculously pleased I was that the captain knew that fact, but I smirked anyway. 

Rapid footsteps sounded out in the Bridge, then, followed by more footsteps and one of the marines calling loudly, "Stop! You need permission to go in there." 

Arramy straightened quickly and stepped away from me.

Then NaVarre was striding into the Council Room, two disgruntled marines trailing along behind him. They might as well have tried to stop a warship under full sail. "Please tell me you've found something," NaVarre said loudly as he slammed the door in their faces, cutting off their objections.

I twisted around to grin at him over the back of my chair. "Alright. I've found something."

NaVarre flashed a big, sparkly, stunningly gorgeous smile and came to stand next to me, bending to take a look at the proofs on my piece of paper. His smile dimmed and he shot a questioning glance at me.

"The Lion's Perch is a pub in Nimkoruguithu," I provided.

NaVarre nodded, his eyes narrowing in thought. "That makes quite a lot of sense, actually. Your father mentioned that he had a trusted contact there. An old army friend, I think." Then he turned to Arramy. "What say you, Captain? Fancy a trip to the Colonies?"

The captain crossed his arms over his chest. "Not with a ship full of civilians and wanted men," he muttered. Then he took a deep breath and let it out on a weary sigh. "But this has to end. If going to Nim K means we find enough to take down these people, I'm in."

"We're agreed then." NaVarre dipped his head, then smiled again. "Excellent work, Miss Warring."