Rowan Hartley's Arc

Chapter 2 of 4

Rowan stayed up with the letters until dawn. She lined them across the shed floor and waited for words to make sense. They did not. The handwriting was tight and clean, but the letters were not letters. They were marks. Loops, dashes, tiny shapes she could not read. She pulled one page close to the lantern. A shorthand. A private code, used by one hand for one reader. Her mother had kept these for years and could read every line. Rowan could read none. Her careful system, her three years of work, hit a wall she could not climb. She shoved the pages aside and found the small wooden box that had held them. She had missed it before. A fox was burned into the lid. Each side held a carved puzzle, sliding tiles and pressed grooves, and faint code along the wood. The box itself was the key. Whoever wrote the letters had built the lock and the language together. Rowan worked the tiles by lantern light. One side clicked. Another slid free. A thin drawer opened in the base. Inside lay a folded square of paper, a rough map, and at its center a small drawing — a stone arch with a white fox cut through its middle. She set the map beside the photograph. The shorthand still meant nothing. But the box had given her a place. Not a confirmed location. A direction. Rowan folded the map into her jacket, blew out the lantern, and stood up. She was going.