In truth, Cordelia wasn’t either. Had she seen the symbols only in the book, perhaps that explanation would be plausible. But why on the floor of that disturbing room? Why across the face and throat and hands of her aunt? There had to be a deeper reason.
“What doesAnsuzeven mean?” Eustace asked.
Cordelia read for a bit. “God,” she said.
Eustace appeared puzzled. “I kind of doubt he drew the Lord’s Prayer all over our aunt’s face before burying her.”
Cordelia read some more. “It’s someone named Wodanaz, er…”
Eustace leaned in.
Cordelia met her sister’s eyes. “Odin.”
EUSTACE DROPPED THEbook on the breakfast table, causing Cordelia’s coffee to vibrate in its cup. “I was up all night with this thing,” she grumbled. “There’s a reason I skipped college, you know. Now I understand what the termall-nightermeans. I always thought it was just about sex.”
“Did you crack it yet?” Cordelia asked, trying to steady her coffee mug.
“One does not simply learn ancient Viking in a day,” Eustace admitted. “But I have made progress. I found a surprising number of books on Norse mythology in the library, and I can tell you that this Odin guy is kind of a big deal. For starters, he’s the god of the dead. A necromancer, in fact.”
Cordelia put down her coffee mug, the fine hairs across her knuckles and the tops of her arms beginning to stir. Speaking to the dead was the main thing she’d been reared not to do. And yet the dead kept finding her, kept turning up where they weren’t wanted, complicating her life in ugly ways.
“And get this,” Eustace continued. “He would go around waking up these poor dead witches to ask them questions. Agod.And not just any god, but the head honcho.”
“What’s your point?” Cordelia asked, finding her voice.
“My point is that the witches were the ones with all the answers. Even in death. Even for the gods. That’s a pretty prominent role to hold in a culture.” Her sister gave her a pointed look. “A respectable one. Whatever they practiced, it was valued.Highly.”
She could see what her sister was driving at, but Cordelia wasn’t ready to drop her suspicions because of some myth found in a dusty old volume in the library. Plenty of ancient cultures practiced rituals that would be tantamount to a crime today. Whatever their family was up to, it was obvious their mother was not on board. And that was damning in and of itself. “You saw what I did down there. In what context is that respectable?”
“It’s not always so black and white, Cordy,” Eustace reminded her.
Her sister wouldn’t understand until Cordelia told her everything. They needed to be on the same page if they were going to figure this out, but she was afraid talking about the spirits would only make things worse, maybe as much as talkingtothem. She toyed with the handle of her mug, sighing.
Eustace went on. “Anyway, he’s credited with discovering the runes—the symbols we keep seeing. But unlike our alphabet, the runes are considered more than a written language. They’re magical.”
“So, you’re saying our family encrypted their memoirs in a magical language discovered by an ancient god?”
“Keep up, there’s a lot to unpack here,” Eustace shot back. “The Elder Futhark has twenty-four runes, which can each represent a different letter of the alphabet, but they also have their own meanings—whole words or phrases. Kind of like they encapsulate their own ideas, their own energy. You follow?”
“I think,” Cordelia answered with skepticism.
“When I started trying to figure out how they’re being used here, I realized there are many more besides the original twenty-four. I think in some cases they’re combining them.” Eustace opened the journal to a page and spun it to face Cordelia, pointing.
Cordelia studied the symbol beneath her sister’s finger, a complicated array of lines and angles. It reminded her of Chinese characters and how they are combined to form more complex words. She could almost pick out some of the basic runes within it.
“That’s not in the Elder Futhark or any other runic alphabet far as I can tell. But the Elder Futhark may be in it,” Eustace said, flipping a page in the journal and pointing again, this time to a symbol resembling their mom’s tattoo, the very same one they suspected their aunt was carving into her wall before she died. “Guess whatisin the Elder Futhark, though.This. Algiz—the elk rune. It usually meansprotection,ordefense.”
Running her fingers over it lightly, Cordelia felt a shock, as if the symbol were charged. “Protection from what?”
“Or who?” Eustace sighed this time. “Maybe whoever cut it from her breast? Do you think Mom had a stalker?”
“I don’t know.” Cordelia rubbed at her eyes. “She dated so many weirdos. If she did, she didn’t say. Maybe never knew.”
“Well, I think it definitely means she knew this magical language,” Eustace said. “And that means she was part of it, at least before she left.”
“Part of it?” Cordelia echoed.
“The family craft,” Eustace said. “Some of these pages are diagrams and drawings. Others, like this one, look almost like recipes.” She flipped to one page with a column of writing that did indeed appear to be laid out like a modern recipe.
