Cordelia glared at the frilly leaves. “I thought the plants in solariums were supposed to be sculptural.”
“Maybe Aunt Augusta was into making her own salad dressing?” Eustace suggested. “Among other things.”
Cordelia narrowed her eyes. “Whatotherthings?”
She walked her to a far corner of the pond and pointed out a tall weed in a damp bed with white splaying flowers. “water hemlock. Deadly if ingested.”
“Are you implying someone planted that here on purpose?” Cordelia asked her.
Eustace eyed her. “Remember when I told you some pages in the journal looked like recipes?”
She nodded. “Yes, of course.”
Eustace started for the kitchen, tugging Cordelia by a wrist, and opened the book on the island. Beside it was a notepad with a bunch of scribblings—her attempts at decoding the entries. “I’ve been working on unlocking the meanings of some of these more complicated runes,” she said. “The ones that aren’t part of any alphabet we know of.”
“Okay. What does this have to do with the solarium and garden?”
Eustace flipped to a page laid out similarly to a recipe in a cookbook—with a title, a list of indecipherable words, and a paragraph of unreadable instructions. Cordelia assumed it followed a left-to-right reading layout.
Her finger landed next to a complex symbol that looked like anM, F,andBcombined. “The runes have alphabetical meaning—phonetic, like a letter. But they also have deeper symbolic meanings—whole words or phrases. This one, if you tease it apart and break it down, contains these five runes within it,” she said, quickly scribbling them out. “The central rune is taken for its symbolic meaning, but the others built around it are used phonetically. This first one represents a bull,” she said, pointing to an angular lowercasen.“And these, if looked at phonetically, would beb, a, n,ande.”
“I don’t get it,” Cordelia said as Eustace finished, looking oh-so-pleased with herself.
“Bane,” Eustace told her. “It meansdeathorruin.All together it’sbull bane.”
Cordelia scratched her head.
“Cowbane! It’s another name for water chestnut. Because it can kill livestock who feed on it. Understand?” She watched Cordelia with impatient, flashing eyes. “It’s an ingredient.”
Cordelia backed away from the island. “Why would someone cook with something like that?”
“I don’t think this is a recipe for food,” Eustace told her.
“Then what?” Cordelia stared at her, knowing already what she would say.
“A remedy, or a poison, or a… spell.” The word dropped between them with the weight of a cannonball. “And that’s not all. I’ve been cross-referencing the recipe pages,” Eustace said, flipping between them. “Their similarity is allowing me to decode them much faster, but there’s something strange here I don’t understand. Something they all share.”
Cordelia stepped back to the island and looked down, the scratchy writing coming into view.
She pointed to a kind of elongated asterisk, a rod with three branches at each end. It looked like the rune on their mother’s tattoo, only more rounded and if it were doubled and joined end to end. “This is something personal—something they made up or gave special meaning. It appears to be a variation ofalgiz—which meansprotectiontypically. Later, it developed different meanings when written upright or upside down—lifeanddeathrespectively. But I don’t understand why they’ve joined it here. Or why it’s an ingredient in every single spell and potion recorded.”
“Are you sure it’s in all of them?” Cordelia asked.
“Certain,” Eustace told her. “What would be needed for every one of these—from a healing poultice to a charm to ward off pregnancy to a spell for finding love to a tonic to induce visions?”
Cordelia inhaled sharply, her theory about the bodies coming into startling focus. “Eustace, are you thinking what I’m thinking?”
“Soil,” her sister said heavily.
Cordelia met her eyes. “And blood.”
CORDELIA KNOCKED ATGordon’s door, the ledger Eustace had shown her in hand. When he answered, she flashed him a relieved smile. She wasn’t sure he’d answer after the last time. “Are you busy? I was hoping to ask you about something.”
Gordon gripped the door, taking a moment to answer. “No, not really. Come on in.”
She scooted past him. “You left so early yesterday, I didn’t get the chance to thank you.”
He smiled, a taut bow. “I wanted to start early on that tree. The county can be really slow around here.” He shoved his hands into his front pockets, and for a second Cordelia thought shecould picture him as a boy. He tilted his head, set his golden eyes on her in a way that made her want to cover up.
