“If this is even remotely right,” Huck said, “then Cluj can’t be more than a couple hours’ walk from here. Maybe we can rest here tonight and figure out how to cross the river tomorrow. It’s going to be fine,” he said, as if trying to talk himself into believing it. “We’ll hike to Cluj in the morning and see what happens. Yeah. That’s what we’ll do....”
What neither of us wanted to face was that while Cluj might be only a couple of hours away, it was several more to Bra?ov, where the Zissu brothers hopefully were—and my father.
Wind howled through myriad cracks in the old walls. As my thoughts turned in circles, my gaze roamed past the fire to the walls of animal skulls and the symbols carved into their foreheads. They made me think of the bone ring. How it had made me feel. The bizarre thumping noises. It was so all-consuming that I nearly forgot how the ringlookedinside the glass case. An ugly ring. Human bone... I couldn’t imagine what kind of person would sit down and carve some poor fellow’s leg bone to make a ring. Perhaps that was why it bent to one side, all crooked—because there wasn’t much bone to work with.
Huh.
Funny that it was an altogether different sort of bend on Rothwild’s reproduction ring—the one I’d seen in the photographs stuffed inside Father’s journal. If you’re going to go to the trouble of reproducing a ring in order to confuse people from finding the real one, why not copy it exactly?
Maybe I was remembering it wrong. I sat up and tugged my father’s journal out of my satchel, unwinding the leather strap to pull out the photographs.
“What are you doing?” Huck asked.
“Look at this,” I said, handing him the photographs as I flipped to the final pages of the journal.
“I’ve seen them. Rothwild’s fake ring.”
I held up a finger. “Do you remember how the ring in Sighi?oara looked?”
“Like the one in this photograph.’
“Exactly?”
He started to shrug, and then his brow tightened. “Now that you mention it...”
“It was different, wasn’t it? It didn’t have the same little crook in it like this one does.”
“Maybe not. What’s your point?”
“It’s not an exact reproduction. Don’t you think that’s strange? Look here. This is the next-to-last journal entry, which has the cipher about the boyar’s letter. Remember? This is what my father wrote about the rings—” I pointed at that section of the page:
Seems to me that there are three rings. Two fakes, one real.
I can’t be sure, but I think the actual ring was duplicated in Turkey. Two reproductions were sent back to Romania along with the real ring, and all were distributed to three historic families there for safekeeping. (“The power is in one” is what was written in the boyar’s letter.)
“See?” I said.
“No.”
“Father thought two of them were fake because the boyar’s letter said ‘the power is in one.’ But what if that doesn’t mean that only one ring is real? What if it means there are three rings, and they only work when they are put together as one?”
“Not following.”
“Here,” I said, pointing to the photograph. “See how the ring bends at the top?”
“It’s crooked.”
“And remember the ring in the case?” I asked.
“Also crooked, just in a different way. Terrible jeweler, whoever made it. Someone should ask for a refund.”
“What if it wasn’t sloppy craftsmanship? Maybe it was carved that way on purpose because all three rings fit together to form a knot on top. Like a gimmal ring.” I made circles with my thumbs and overlapped them to show him what I meant. “I’ve seen rings like this before, in the bazaar in Istanbul.”
“The one you were accused of shoplifting?”
I grinned and touched my finger to my nose. “That’s the one! In Turkey, they’re called a wedding ring or a harem ring, and the story behind them was that if the wife took her ring off to cheat with another man, she’d have trouble reassembling it properly and would get caught, which is completely sexist and stupid, by the way.”
“Very stupid,” Huck agreed with a smile. “The wife could just leave the ring on.”
