Chapter Twenty-One

R ed loved the way the blush colored Galiena's cheeks every time he looked at her. And the way she couldn't seem to stop the corners of her beautiful lips from curving into a small smile. He couldn't help but smile himself, remembering the feel of her in his arms, and the way her body responded to his when he'd made love to her a second time. He'd been reluctant to leave their bed, and he was finding it difficult to concentrate as he fought the urge to carry her back up the stairs and strip her naked to worship her with his body again.

"Red," she chided, the wide smile taking the sting out of her tone. "Quit looking at me that way and focus on the missive."

"Looking at you what way?" Bard asked, emerging from the stairwell.

Galiena's face turned scarlet, and she immediately dropped her attention to the parchment opened on the table.

"If you mean like he's dreaming of a home filled with your bairns," Bard continued, ignoring Red's glare, "rumor has it he's been looking at you that way since he carried you into Hawkspur."

"I've called her ‘wife' since the moment I met her," Red said, "but she doesn't believe I mean it."

"How could it mean anything?" she asked with a laugh. "You didn't even know my name yet."

"You called me ‘husband' before you knew my name," he countered.

"Ho!" Bard hooted in amusement. "Well, then it is true. Time to start filling that house with little, stubborn, red-headed babes."

Sensing that Galiena's embarrassment was turning to true discomfort, Red put an end to the topic. "Bard, aren't you meant to be looking for parchment, quills, and ink?"

"On my way," he said, with a dramatic bow and a sarcastic grin.

Red got up to lock the door again after Bard left, then returned to the table and straddled the bench to sit at Galiena's side. He was about to say something to goad her about being his wife but noticed that her spine was unusually rigid and that she was staring intently at the parchment as though not wanting to look at him. His instinct was to touch her, to ask her what was bothering her, but he sensed she did not want his attention at the moment.

It was a stark contrast to the smiles and blushes from only a short while prior, and it felt like knives lodged in his heart. Had Bard's jesting about her filling Red's house with children caused her unease? She'd told him about losing her daughter, and he couldn't imagine there was anything more painful. It would be enough to make a person vow never to have children again, the fear of another loss being too great.

Red had known from the moment this woman ran into the shelter of his arms that Fate had brought her to him. What he hadn't thought about was the consequences of finding the woman decreed by Fate as his mate, when Fate didn't decree him as hers. Galiena had jolted him to his core from the first moment he saw her, and it was up to him to convince her she was his she-wolf. What they could be together measured more than the risk of loss and pain.

But first, he had to bridge the distance she had put between them. And in this moment, the best way to do that seemed to be reining in his urge to overwhelm her with his presence. He pushed himself back on the bench, giving her physical space. He was searching for something to say when a pounding on the door echoed through the shop. Red rose, pulling the dagger from his boot before moving to the door. "Aye?" he called through the door.

"It's Ox and Wolf," Ox replied in his gravelly voice.

Red quickly removed the wood bar from the brackets and opened the door. The two men entered, carrying casks of ale and buckets of sand. He secured the door behind them and followed them into the back room of the shop.

"The sand is wet," Wolf said. "I took it directly from the beach."

"That is perfect, Wolf," Galiena said, flashing the young man a strained smile. "It will be easier to work with."

Red looked at the young warrior standing next to the table, grinning down at Galiena. It shouldn't gall him so much to see her smile at someone else, and he couldn't blame Wolf for his dazed response, but he didn't like it one bit. He jostled Wolf with his shoulder to get his attention, then ordered in a gruff voice, "Put the buckets down and look for something sharp she can use to write with in the sand."

Wolf had the decency to look abashed when he realized he'd been caught staring at Galiena. He set the buckets on the floor and hurried into the front shop to sort through the weaver's tools.

"How much sand do you need spread out?" Red asked, scooping the heavy, wet grains with his hands.

Galiena spread her hands about shoulder width apart over the end of the table. "About this wide, and the width of the table, but leave room around the edges, please."

Red did as she asked, then handed her the large couching needle Wolf had found.

"This will do nicely," she said, inspecting the tapered metal tool that extended the length of her hand. She stood to make it easier to work in the sand without dragging her sleeves over it, then drew neat letters across the top of the square, starting with the twenty-three Latin letters in standard order and ending with the three symbols for th , wy , and eth .

"Have you been able to discern any more of the code?" Ox asked, pouring ale into tankards from one of the casks and setting them on the table.

She shook her head, still studying the parchment. "I think I need to see the alphabet written in order."

"You believe this can be done without a key?" Ox said, leaning over the table to peer at the parchment.

"If the date on the last line is translated correctly by shifting the letters one position, then it would follow that the other lines are a shift, as well," Galiena responded. "The other lines may possibly be shifted by more than one position." She scratched the last line of the message in the sand as written. "These symbols appear to be numbers and if the dot patterns are vowels, then this group of letters and symbols would translate to 14 December 1284."

She pointed to each letter as it appeared in the alphabetized row, then wrote the letter directly to the right of it under the line of coded letters, substituting an e for the repeated symbol of three stacked dots. "But if I apply this same pattern to the other lines, it doesn't form any discernable words."

Ox looked at the scrawled letters in the sand for another moment, then took a long swig of ale. "I'll have to take your word for it. None of it is discernable to me."

"Doesn't the king have someone working on that?" Wolf asked.

"Aye," Red responded. "But it may take a while for his scribe to decipher the code, and…" he paused, looking at the men thoughtfully, "I have reasons of my own to know who wrote this."

Both Ox and Wolf nodded once, neither man asking for any more details. They knew if he wanted them to know more at this time, he would have told them.

He sat on the bench opposite Galiena and reached for a tankard of ale while he watched her work. She'd written the first line of the message into the sand, and beneath the line, she wrote as if the corresponding letters were shifted up two positions. When that didn't work, she wiped a hand over the sand to smooth it, then repeated the process, shifting the letters three positions. She'd gone through the process nearly a dozen times with no luck, when she dropped the heavy couching needle on the table and plopped down on the bench, huffing out a sigh of frustration.

"Maybe Ox is right," she said. "Maybe the scribe used a key known only to him and the recipient."

"Have some ale and bread," he insisted. Bard had returned with the parchment, quills, ink, and fresh loaves of bread, which the other men were eating in the front room while Red and Galiena worked in the backroom. "And tell me what I can do to help."

"It would be helpful if you would copy the message out onto another piece of parchment, but this time leave space between the lines to write the translations." She took a drink of the ale he pushed toward her, then wiped the sand off the palm of her hands. She picked up a chunk of bread and bit off a piece, chewing slowly as she stared at the line written in the sand.

"Perhaps try shifting backward," Red suggested, pleased at the way her face lit up with renewed energy.

"I'd not thought of that." She pushed to her feet, still gnawing on the bread, and started scratching the letters below the line from the missive in the sand, using the letter shifted one position to the left. When that didn't work, she started the process again, shifting the letters two positions to the left. This time, a recognizable word began to form.

"Look, Red," she said excitedly, pointing to the first word she'd written in the sand. She'd left blanks where the symbols for the vowels were located. " L- blank -n-g-s-h- blank -n-k-s ," she repeated.

He'd been watching her write each letter, his senses starting to tingle as soon as she'd translated the letters. "Longshanks," he confirmed. He'd known then that the first word referred to the king of England, proof that the message would be damning for whoever wrote it. "The king is known as ‘Edward Longshanks'."

Galiena gave him a sidelong glance of confusion. "I thought he was Edward Plantagenet."

"He is, but he's also known as ‘Longshanks'." He stood and circled around the table to look over her shoulder at the letters in the sand. "If the second word is also shifted two positions backward, it says seeks ."

Galiena wrote the letters into the sand, then continued with the translation, substituting the known vowels for the symbols. " Longshanks seeks to weaken ," she read out loud before turning to look at Red. Some of the color had drained from her face, and he knew she understood as well as he did the gravity of what they were uncovering.

"Try the next line," he suggested, but the pattern of shifting two letters to the left did not work. Galiena tried shifting the letters three positions to the left but came up with nothing legible again. She repeated the process three more times until they were shifted five positions to the left, but still, it did not produce anything that made sense.

"Let's try shifting to the right again," Galiena said, wiping the sand clean below the original line, and restarting the process again.

He'd started to think they were on the wrong track again when finally, the fourth shift to the right yielded results. He watched, not saying anything until the entire line was written in the sand. Only then did he read it out loud. " Old ways are threatened ."

Red grabbed the parchment he'd finished copying the coded message onto, and added the translations below the first, second, and last lines, adding an arrow indicating the correct direction along with a number to indicate the number of positions shifted for each line. "There doesn't seem to be a pattern yet as to how many positions or which direction to shift for each line," he said, showing his work to Galiena.

"We will have to just keep repeating the pattern, trying first one direction and then the other." She put her hands on her lower back, leaning backward to stretch.

"The king is expecting us to make an appearance before evening," Red reminded her. "We need to wipe the sand back into the buckets and put away the parchments until we can work on this again. I don't want anyone to happen upon this."

"Do you think we are being watched?" Galiena asked, her eyes wide with concern.

"I don't know," Red admitted, "but I can't rid myself of this gnawing in my gut."

Bard entered the back room as Red said the last and turned a sharp look at him. "We've regretted it when we didn't heed your gut before, Viking."