“You might have to read over my shoulder.”
Erinna blinked.
Kane gave her a lopsided grin.
Erinna fought rising manic laughter at how utterly ridiculous it was. “This is an absolute mess.”
“Perhaps you wouldn’t be flailing if you had even a bit of curiosity.”
She whirled on him. “Maybe if you were more forthcoming, we wouldn’t be stuck in each other’s hair.”
Kane thought for a moment. “It’s really not too much of a bother. I did get the help of a halfway decent shipwright.”
Halfway decent! She willed death upon the pirate, and for the first time, it looked like Kane might have been slightly afraid of something as he processed her fury.
“I need that lineage book, and then I’m done. We can get to the rest after.”
Erinna cursed herself for not taking more time to review the pages. She thought there was something familiar in those texts, but she wasn’t interested in investing more time than necessary to find what she could on the curse. “Let me go through it first.”
“You have half an hour. And before you try to find a way around this, I have to burn them at the end, no matter what. So make sure it counts.”
Erinna pulled the book from her bag. The lineages had been tracked by Iprix himself for the many decades he’d been alive. She flipped through the rough paper, looking for anything related to the Hargroves. A few notes on marriages, a hastily made map of the Hargrove territory.
The boundaries fell somewhere in the center of the continent surrounded by larger kingdoms and other clans.
There. Hidden in the margins was a note. The Hargroves weren’t a clan; they were a Coven.
She moved from those pages, noting the placement of the Hargrove coven in some old, forested boundaries, near a large circle drawn in ink at the center sat a simple word with a question mark: ‘Starhaven?’ The coven itself had an annotated note as well. The writing was newer, more recently added to the page.
‘Renamed, perhaps a sect of the Starfall Coven?’
“If you must,just rip the pages about your mother out and hand those over. I don’t think I need all of it.” Kane had clearly grown bored of a random book he took from the shelf. He shrugged and dropped it to the ground with a loud thud.
“Would that work with your deal?” she asked, wincing at the loud sound and his indelicate handling.
He shrugged. “Worth a shot.”
Erinna nodded and watched as Kane moved to another journal that caught his attention.
In a rare moment when his focus was situated elsewhere, Erinna picked up a dull splinter from the ground and traced what she could from the pages that contained information on the Hargrove Coven and the two sections that mentioned Twyla by name.
It was a rushed and messy job, but it would suffice. The map took the longest for her to outline.
Her mother was a witch, and the Yaga called her one as well. The reality had not yet sunk in. She ripped the pages and put the rest of the book in her bag, hoping the half-baked plan would work.
The pages of Twyla Hargrove, the information about her mother—her heritage—had been thrown on the ground in sacrifice.
With a harsh flash, flames danced to life in Kane’s hand as he hurled a fireball at the pages. The papers crumbled to ash. Erinna rubbed at her eyes, the burn of smoke tearing her vision.
Kane rubbed at his neck, breathing out a sigh of relief. “This was it.”
Erinna reached for his open bag, for the other bits of information he compiled. Kane danced out of her reach. “Remember, I can’t give them to you. But you can read over my shoulder.” He took a spot on the ground and gestured for her to follow suit. She pressed herself against his side, on her knees, to look over his shoulder.
“Let’s go,” she urged, frustrated with any second of delay. He sprawled the contents out: a few pieces of paper, a map, and pages that were clearly ripped from a book or journal.
Her gaze landed on a letter. The seal was faint but unmistakable. Erinna had only seen it once in her life. The seal of the Chancellor. She picked up the paper with shaking hands.
Why on earth would Iprix be sending her mother a letter? Only when Erinna read the first passage, it was clear that both her parents had been summoned to his side.
