“We realized that our magic was stronger if we were holding hands, so we did that. Boom, all around us, there were books, shelves, boxes, canisters, including one box that glowed brighter than the others. We got near it, and it opened. The scroll was right inside it. We heard people coming and decided it wasn’t a good place for us to unroll it, but here we are and here it is.”
Connor looked from Rafe to me, an easy smile back on his face. “Well, duh, you should obviously hold hands again to make the scroll reveal its secrets. Maybe we should all hold hands.”
“That must be it,” I blurted. “All of us.” For some reason, it was far less weird for the parchment to require a connection between all the mages on our team versus just me and Rafe. I didn’t really trust anything that required just me and Rafe. I didn’t quite know why, but I definitely didn’t want to think about it too much.
The guys all reached out, and we clasped hands around the table, me finally joining with Rafe on one side, Marcus on the other. No sooner had we done so than images burst into life on the page. Several lines of text, a map drawn inside a square positioned in the center of the parchment, and then more lines of text. I squinted down at the tightly cramped writing, but there wasn’t much I could do to help here.
“What language is that?” I asked.
“Akkadian, I think, or something close to it,” Marcus said, leaning close. “My Akkadian is pretty rusty, but with some time, I can work it out. Top line, though, seems like some kind of command charter or maybe a contract, outlining the preservation of something. I don’t know what this word means—third line?” He glanced at Rafe.
Rafe muttered a few words aloud. The air seemed to shimmer around us, and he winced. We all looked at him.
“What is it?” Marcus asked.
“I don’t know. Whatever it is, it’s important,” he said. “But is it information about a place? A spell? An entity?” He frowned down at the parchment. “I just don’t know. Let’s break apart and see…”
I found myself holding my breath as we unlinked hands, but to my relief, the images stayed in place. Marcus immediately tapped the edge of the paper. “Defiance, definitely that. And—it feels new, doesn’t it? Not like an archival piece at all. I don’t know why I think that…”
“If it’s new, it’s not new from here,” Connor muttered. He drew a finger along the heavy paper. “I’ve never seen paper like this. It doesn’t feel right.”
“Agreed,” Marcus said. “Contraband is the feeling that I get. Like…” He frowned up at Rafe. “You said you found this in the archival building, the secret room you were going for that wasn’t on Twyst property? Was the other stuff in there old?”
Rafe blew out a breath. “We didn’t have a lot of time to explore the other boxes and cases and whatever. We spent way too much time looking into other rooms, and when we got back to where we started, we didn’t stumble on the solution right away. I didn’t really even get a look at the rest of it.”
He glanced at me, but I offered a helpless shrug. “Once the parchment case started glowing like a big neon sign flashing PICK ME, I kind of lost interest in the rest. Geez.” A new, queasy feeling assaulted me. “You don’t think we screwed up, do you? Like, was this some sort of trap?”
Luke grunted, running his thumb over the edge of the parchment. “I don’t think so. I…I don’t know. I kind of like this paper. It feels right to me. I keep thinking I’ve seen it before, or something like it…” He also looked up at me, grimacing. “Something in the queen’s rooms when we were in the Borderlands? I don’t remember there being scrolls there, but—maybe?”
Marcus tapped his edge of the parchment. “Maybe,” he agreed. “The map here doesn’t look familiar to me, though.”
We all looked back at the parchment page, focusing on the map. Especially given Luke’s half recognition of the parchment page, it only made sense that the map would be of the Borderlands, the realm adjacent to the hollow shell of the Mage Trials, which we’d stumbled into quite accidentally. Mountains, a stone tower, and forest were the hallmarks of that land, but that wasn’t what the map depicted at all.
“It’s a desert,” Marcus said, peering at the inscription. “The white desert, it says.”
Now it was my turn to wince, and since we were all so close together, there was no hiding it. Rafe looked at me sharply. “Do you know this place?” he asked quickly. “You’ve seen it?”
A half-dozen harrowing images crashed around me, most of which I’d never shared with the guys, but now… Now I had to, didn’t I? I had to warn them. Because that illustration of the white desert reminded me of nothing so much as the curse I’d been handed regarding the guys—a curse that ended with them lost and abandoned in exactly this type of terrain.
“Ah, what does it say below the map?” I asked, my words a little too high. Without thinking, I reached for Rafe and Marcus, the two of them closest to me. We clasped hands again, and I knew I was gripping far too tightly, but I couldn’t help myself. They squeezed back equally hard, but the pressure only served to make my anxiety spike higher.
Marcus dropped his gaze to the map, keeping his hand locked on mine. “It’s a list of eight names,” he said. “I only recognize one, Bartholomew Twyst.”
“Bartholomew.” Rafe huffed a short laugh, then leaned in to look at the tiny scrawl. “You’re right. He’s the official founder of Twyst Academy. Probably not surprising, finding his name in the archive, except…”
“Except this parchment page seems new,” Luke said. “And foreign.”
“Except that,” Marcus agreed. “The other names I don’t recognize, but they don’t sound all that strange. They could have been ripped out of any history book two hundred years ago—Jonathan Marx, Douglas Wharton, Magnus Bellum…”
He paused, then chuckled. “Okay, I take my comment back. The rest are insane. Mayorkeit, Brillion, Amarisha, Emterra.”
Connor stiffened, lifting Marcus’s and Luke’s hands as he did. “Wait a minute, I’ve heard that second name before. Brillion. I don’t…” He glanced up and away, his mind obviously working overdrive to remember. “Was it here at school? Was it at my family law offices?”
Beside me, Rafe tilted his head as well. “I think I know it too,” he said. “If you’ve heard it and I’ve heard it, then we’re dealing with family business.”
The two locked eyes over the table, and I blanked my mind as much as I could, desperately glad that we’d skipped over the issue of the map in the middle of the strip of parchment. A new energy was building between the guys, their joint intellectual efforts electrifying the air between them in a way that wasn’t exactly magical but could still take my breath away. I needed to protect myself from it, if I wanted my secrets to remain my own.
“I bet there’s a reason we both recognize that name,” Connor said. “But we’re definitely familiar with old Bartholomew. And right now, I can think of one painting in particular that features him.”