Page 39 of Creed
He’d been in charge of taking care of his sister, Mavis, since their parents died. Recently, he’d overheard some of the elders of their community making plans for who Mavis should marry.
The girl was only six.
Apparently,The Tamed Soulshad been losing people over the years, and they were desperate to increase their numbers. So, they were encouraging their members to marry earlier and earlier.
Ordinarily, a child’s parents would have the final say in their marriage, but with no living parents, Mavis and Robyn were helpless against the desires of the adults around them.
The moment Mavis was physically developed enough to bear children, she’d be married off, and there was no telling how old her husband would be.
By the end of his explanation, Robyn was clinging to my arm, tugging at me as he begged.
“Please, if you escape from here, please take my sister with you. I can’t watch this happen to her. I’ll do anything.”
Comforting children was never one of my strong suits. I awkwardly patted the boy on the head, hoping it would soothe him at least a little bit, as I shared another look with Kayden.
Even without exchanging a word, we were both in agreement.
“I’ll do you one better,” I said to the boy. “You and your sister can both come with us. But I’ll need something from you first.”
Robyn sniffed and wiped away tears that hadn’t fallen yet, looking up at me with a fearful hope in his eyes. “Anything.”
“First, I need a watch or something that will keep track of time. We can’t even tell if it’s day or night in here.”
Robyn instantly started nodding, even before I’d finished speaking.
I held up a hand to get his attention again.
“And second... what can you tell me about those guards by the door?”
Robyn was right.The guards were suspicious after he took longer to drop off our meal than normal. Now the guards were on high alert, so we wouldn’t be able to act right away. We’d have to wait a couple days until that suspicion calmed down again.
This gave us plenty of time to plan.
Robyn was careful to never loiter in our room again. He delivered the information we needed a few sentences at a time whenever he dropped off a meal.
With each new delivery, a picture began to form in my mind. Many guards gathered around when our door was opened, but other than that, there was usually only one person standing by the entrance to the building. Furthermore, there was a group of guardsmen that patrolled the village at night. They technically covered the entire perimeter of the area, but they didn’t pay as much attention to the north side of the village where most of the buildings were empty.
“Why are you still working on that?” Kayden asked as he continued to file down the nail. It was mostly done, and he just needed to refine the point of the tip into the correct shape.
I looked down at the papers spread out before me where I was still working on cracking the code of the journal. “If my work pace suddenly slows down, they’ll get suspicious. Plus, I can probably buy us some time by handing over part of the journal.”
The relentless sound of iron scrapping against concrete stopped when Kayden set down the nail and came over to look at my work.
“So, you figured it out?”
I held up one of the pages that held legible words. “Partially. It looks like Lisianthus used several different codes in her journal. I’ve managed to figure out one of them. I’m going to make sure there isn’t any dangerous information in the journal, but assuming it’s harmless, I can hand over this part to keep our captors off our backs for a while.”
After pressing a kiss to my temple, Kayden stored the nail up his sleeve and then threw himself down on the mattress.
“What information could the journal hold that would be dangerous for us?”
I tapped my pen against the table. When my mind was too busy, I often calmed myself down by absently writing or doodling. So often, I’d wished for pen and paper when my stress was high and there was nothing to write with.
Now, I had too much to write, and I needed a distraction from my usual distraction.
“Dangerous may not be the right word,” I said as I drew a trail of dots along the edge of one page. “But our captors are looking for something in this journal. Once they get what they’re looking for, they have no reason to keep us around. I want to make sure I don’t accidentally hand over their answer too early.”
The code that Lisianthus used on her journal was a simple one. What made it so hard to decipher was the fact that she used multiple layers of simple code.
