Page 14 of The Trick of It

“Rhys, give me the parcel,” she said, failing to budge the thing from under his hand. “I want to know what it is.”

He sighed, a little too long and too hard to sound sincere, and then took his hand away. “Fine.”

She slid it to herself, blinking down at the address in ribboned, ivory-white ink on the front.

“It doesn’t actually have the address,” she pointed out, frowning. “No mention of the street. And no postmark.”

“Of course no postmark,” he answered, crossing his arms over his chest. “I told you, it was inside another envelope. That one had the postmark.”

“From where?” she asked, blinking up at him. “Where did it come from?”

He stared back at her, frowning so deeply that it made little V-shaped ruts on either side of his chin. “What?”

She blinked, flattening her lips. “Did you keep the envelope, at least? Can’t you check?”

“If no one cleaned my room,” he said, wincing. “Is that how postmarks work?”

She sighed rather than answering and turned the thing over, sliding her thumb under a smudged, mangled seal and cracking it in two.

Inside was a thick, folded card, designed with odd symbols on the outside and a horizontal fold. She opened it and blinked down at the inscription inside. She read it once. And then again.

“Well?” Rhys exploded, lifting the chair against his own arse and shimmying it closer to hers. “What is it?!”

“I don’t know,” she said honestly, tilting the thing toward him. “A poem?”

He squinted down at it, leaning forward so that his curls fell over his cheeks. “A riddle,” he corrected. “Look at that.”

The ink was the same strange, white pigment, twirling and looping around the words in the center of the square.

Is it a hlæw or a lǣw? Time has not told.

Perhaps even lexowia, which is llechwedd of olde.

PRIOR a haon déag, unarddeg, or both?

A truce be required, although you are loathe.

Crumbled and ruined but still standing yet

Not in castle or gatehouse, but a carn be well met.

They were quiet for a long moment, both of them reading it over and over.

“Some of that,” Rhys said after a time, “is Welsh. Much of it isn’t.”

“Some of it is Irish,” she told him, pointing. “A haon déag. Carn.”

“Right, right,” he said, wrinkling his brow and lifting her finger to move it to the two words on the first line. “But what about those two? Not Welsh.”

“Not Irish, either,” she said, touching the outline of them with her fingernail. “English, I think.”

He scoffed. “Certainly not.”

“Old English,” she clarified. “Before the Vikings. Before the Normans.”

“Carn isn’t Irish,” he told her with a sniff, releasing his warm grip on the top of her hand and leaning back. “It’s Welsh.”

“It’s Irish,” she told him with a shake of her head. “‘Cairn.’ Yes?”