Page 48 of Dare

Finished, she sat back and gestured to a reproduction of Summer’s renowned song. I recognized it from Autumn’s dungeon, when she’d written sentences into that pile of dirt on her cage floor. Though at the time, I’d been more intent on ridding the unsanitary soil from her cubicle, not caring to see her languish among filth.

I processed the lyrics. Unsure why the devil it hadn’t struck me until now, I deduced, “You can read and write.”

She glared. “Yes. We peasants can also count on our fingertips.”

“Spare me the righteous display. You’re hardly the delicate type who cannot handle a simple fact. Unlike in Autumn and Winter, greater percentages of commoners in Spring and Summer are illiterate. This isn’t ignorance, it’s statistics. Likewise, your tongue is more elevated than most of your class.”

“Disappointed you can’t talk down to me?”

My combative lips crooked. “I don’t need a title to do that.”

The beast shook her head, dark waves sweeping her shoulders. “You’re one pompous piece of shit.” When I showed zero intention of defending myself, she huffed. “I see beyond the song lyrics. I see their shapes.”

I squinted. “What’s your point?”

“Have a look, Winter. But don’t look closely. Look far.”

For fuck’s sake. I thought I’d left tedious riddles behind after I last saw Poet. “Do I look like a Spring artist to you?”

“You look like a shipwrecked asshole to me.”

Whatever. Scientists inspected, prodded, researched. They formulated questions and employed tools to determine answers.

Look far? I could not comprehend that.

The beast got to her feet and seized my hand. Her fingers curled around mine, the contact producing a chain reaction that injected bolts of heat into every ligament I possessed. This included my cock, which had been misbehaving for far too long, the phallus twitching like a traitor.

Stumped, I let her guide me backward, away from the song. “Look,” she prompted.

It took me an instant to recover from her digits strapped around my own. An enduring hand. A dangerous hand. With some difficulty, I regarded the sketch, paying particular attention to the angle from which she’d directed me.

Thinking better of it, I pried my hand from hers. “Nothing but verse and rubbish.”

She scowled. “That verse and rubbish is a map.”

Dubious, I took a second look. And squinted. And saw a land mass.

The mad woman hastened to the rendering and used her toes to indicate each location. “This is Summer, and there’s the castle, and there’s the wharf, and there’s the sun. And you see here? The sun’s rays? They’re ciphered in the song, and they make a path—” she revolved her foot over the closing lyrics, “—to this realm.”

Correct. It did resemble a map. A convincing one, sequestered in plain sight.

I moved nearer, stepping around the drawing to view it from all vantage points. Then I lowered myself beside a configuration of the castle. The letters and words, plus the spaces between them, transformed into shapes when one studied them with perception. The sketch arranged everything in such a way that it became a route from the kingdom to this deserted place.

The lines representing the sky denoted wind direction. The sun’s rays indicated a direction seafarers or explorers might be able to master.

Based on the sun’s position, I drew a compass in the sand. This cove faced southeast.

But what of the ambiguous distance? Despite Summer ships enabling faster travel than in any other Season, an uncharted location should have required weeks for us to reach, not the span of one fucking morning. We had to be close to the mainland.

Yet far enough that this place had gone undiscovered since the dawn of time? Preposterous.

Be that as it may, I would accept the map’s existence. Faint proof, with gaps to fill.

I gave the beast a judicious glance. It would have required an acute mind to unravel this cipher. Nonetheless, the map alluded to a person having been here before. Someone had to have brought this location back to Summer’s mainland.

Humoring her, I asked, “Who wrote the song?”

She blinked. “Legends don’t reveal their authors unless they want to. Nature decides what it wants to share with us, as nature knows best, and we shouldn’t question that. But even if it wants to unveil the scribe, legends only allow certain people to be privy to that information.”

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