Catching Epics by Halie Fewkes

Author:Halie Fewkes [Fewkes, Halie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780996169929
Publisher: Tally Ink Publishing
Published: 2017-10-28T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter Eighteen

Allie

I crouched in front of my wooden chest to examine my short sword while Emery stood attentively at the door, watching for the return of trouble. As angry as I was to see my blade tainted, I had to admit the swirls, dots, and twisting shapes were… beautiful. Sav must have been in my room half the day etching them.

“Sav left you a message?” Emery asked.

“Ohhh, they are words,” I realized.

In Escalira, words are made by thick shapes to represent vowels, surrounded by smaller dots, loops, and slanted lines to represent consonants. A name like Allie only contained three marks. Two side by side shapes, for the A and the E, and a tilted loop that meant L, positioned above the E to lead.

Savaul’s thick vowels had a style of their own, nearly running together, and hardly looking like letters at all.

“What’s it say?” he asked.

The vowels were disorienting, so I read slowly, “I am the one from whom you cannot hide.”

“Shanking scat-brained lunatic,” Emery muttered as irritation crept into my chest as well. These blades had been with me longer than I could remember. The simple sun on each pommel was usually a glimpse of familiarity and comfort, and every scratch and dent in the metal had been my own doing, until now. Now they’d been violated.

My irritation began bubbling into anger, so I set my etched blade off to the side and opened the lid to my chest, digging down to the bottom to occupy myself with something else. “Hate to ask, but… Did Karissa get a chance to tell you about Archie?”

“No,” I said, “but Sav did. I know where he comes from, and I know Sav will use me to get to him, in all the worst ways.”

Emery just folded his arms and leaned against the doorway. “What joyful lives we lead,” he muttered.

I tugged at the knot hole in the bottom of my chest, pulling up the false bottom with a woody creak as it scraped the edges.

I gasped as my eyes fell on something even more precious and valuable than I’d imagined.

I would have been happy to find a bar of gold or silver.

I would have been thrilled to find some sentimental family heirloom from my past.

But I was absolutely ecstatic, as I reached down and ran my fingers over an aged leather cover in disbelief.

“Hey,” Emery said, glancing over my shoulder. “It’s your old diary.”

I brandished the book of worn, uneven pages, and would have thrown it at him if it wasn’t so valuable. “You knew this was in here?”

He scowled back and said, “No. If I’d known where you hid it, I would have torn all the pages out and slid them under everyone’s doors.” He shook his head and grumbled, “It’s like you don’t even know me.”

I ignored him and flipped carefully through the pages, past rough sketches and scrawled passages in both Human and Escalira. I saw the little nuances that made my handwriting mine, like the extra curl

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