“You ruined my wordplay, selfish girl,” the sprite whined impishly.
I was seized by a strong desire to hurl the infernal little sprite out of the nearest window.
The sprite gave a weary wheeze. “I shall grant your request, but only this once. You seek the one who will betray you?” The Book paused, as though for dramatic effect. “No need to root them out, Little Arrow, they always find you first.”
My body tensed in fear as I glanced around the hospital ward, scanning the shadows for signs of an unexpected visitor. Finding only the boy with the broken leg, still sleeping soundly, I breathed a sigh of relief and then turned back to the accursed Book.
“Who are you talking about?” I asked. “Who always finds me first?”
The sprite launched into another song, the shrill sound of its voice grating against my ears.
“I am a sprite cursed to the realm I dwell. Neither the future nor past shall I ever foretell.”
Except that was definitely a lie. The sprite had made predictions before. I waited for it to say more, holding my breath tightly in my lungs. The nettlesome sprite only hummed happily to itself, as if thoroughly amused by the way I hung on its every word. I was on the verge of calling it a night, when one last question burned through my resolve.
“Why can’t you tell me who the Heir is?”
The Book clucked in disapproval and trilled, “I cannot speak what is not written in my bones, little maiden.”
I waited, gnawing on my cheek in my anxiety.
“However, I shall direct you to the place where secrets are buried in verse, and oaths are hidden among ivory and prose.”
Excitement bubbled like hope in my chest. “Where? Tell me!”
A pause, and then an invisible hand scrawled out the following verse:
Silver-tongued and moonless
Encrypted in shadow and myth
The Minotaur’s lair eponymous
Awaits the seeker’s gift
Imbibe your poison, this
ancestral haunting
Untangle a tongue or unravel an inch
An inscription of decipherable wanting.
Lies betwixt F-A-R-R-O-W and F-L-Y-N-C-H
A, Tqud, ftuzq aiz nxaap nqefaie pqxuhqdmzoq
My heart sank as I read the riddle once, and then again. Hopelessness washed over me. This was going to be impossible. I shook my concussed head and tried to focus on one line at a time. The Minotaur’s lair eponymous…In Greek mythology, the Minotaur was confined… within a labyrinth! So, the Book wanted me to seek something hidden in Ouverham’s library. But how the hell was I supposed to find an object I knew nothing about among the endless stacks of innumerable books? Even focusing on the library’s volumes on Greek mythology wouldn’t narrow it down much. Not when we only had days before the blood ritual. I frowned as I read over the next few lines.
Imbibe your poison, this ancestral haunting
Untangle a tongue or unravel an inch.
Imbibe your poisonlike Daemon wine? Or did the riddle mean a figurative sort of poison? Many poisons could be swallowed…As for the reference to an ancestral haunting, well—it might refer to ghosts of the past, generational trauma, family histories, etc.
I glanced over the next line.Untangle a tongue… The word “untangle” struck me as odd. Tongues, generally speaking, didn’t tangle in the literal sense; however, they could tangle metaphorically. Tongues that were tangled could not speak—they were silenced. Could this clue be referring to censorship? Untangling a tongue might mean restoring the ability to speak freely? Yes! My heart leapt in my chest. That made sense. But whose tongue was “tangled”? Ostensibly, if I could untangle this silenced person’s tongue, I would be able to “unravel an inch.” An inch of what? The truth? A secret?
I homed in on the last two lines in the stanza.