Cevic

Chapter 29

 

Say something

I’m giving up on you

I’m sorry that I couldn’t get to you

If anything I would have followed you

Say something

I’m giving up on you

 

-Say Something “The Great Big World”-

 

Revelation

 

Aching everywhere from being soundly beaten up by Rezia, the three of us sat at the dining table again, trying to quiet our minds after the revelation, holding cups of steaming tea in hands.

 James eyed me with a smirk. “Are you alive?”

I rubbed my much-abused shoulder. “No,” I groaned. “This is my ghost talking.”

  Rezia, as if nothing had happened, delicately sipped her tea. “What about the question I asked? The person in the riddle has to be as old as the existence of the riddle itself.”

  I shook my head, drawing in another breath. “It doesn’t have to be that way,” I said, unable to help the bitterness invading my mouth. “That’s because…the previous kings with the same illness were not destined to be saved. Of course, it excepts King Decus’s grandfather, who was only a carrier of the illness.” And died due to being poisoned by Lord Defas.

 “Like fate?” asked James, drumming his fingers against the glass.

 Rezia nodded brusquely. “Yes. That makes sense,” she said, slightly morosely.

It gave me both hope and despair. Despair, because that meant my father had been destined to die from the illness. Hope, because that meant that my brother was perhaps destined to live, because the one in the riddle meant me.

  As if she was thinking the same, Rezia mumbled, “Thank the ancestors of Cevic.”

James leant back in his chair, his brows knitted. “We still have a few gaps here and there, remember?”

 “Yes. The cure is the biggest gap. How will we know it is the cure when we see it?”

Rezia stared lifelessly down at her piece of school foolscap paper where she had scribbled down what we knew so far, and wrote the riddle in two versions, one in English and the other in Cevicïan.

  I glanced at the brown-rimmed clock that had been hung at the kitchen.

We had less than five hours to go before nine-oh-clock. Time was flying past, and still we were crawling.

 “I’m trying to focus more on the pendant.” James’s finger curled around the cup handle. “It must be important, because they say in exchange for the cure.”

 “It must be important in value without the Cevic cure coming in a set with it, because Princess Isha told me to never take it off,” I mused, remembering the then-seemingly too serious promise that we made.