Page 64 of Royally Matched
We share an unspoken agreement to proceed, and step into the narrow passageway, our breaths echoing off the stone walls. My heart races with excitement and trepidation, and instinctively, I reach for Sofia’s hand. She grips mine tightly, and I lead the way downwards, my phone illuminating a handful of steps at a time before we reach a wooden door with crisscrossed strips of wrought iron.
I try the door. Locked.
“What? Surely it will open. Try again,” she instructs.
I turn the doorknob once more. “Wait. Didn’t the riddle say something about a key?”
“Of course! We need the key. Where’s the book with the riddle?”
“I left it on the floor up there when we started looking for the gem, but I remember it said to step inside to get the key.” I look back up the stairwell to the light coming from the throne room above.
Again, without saying a word, we climb back up thestairs and begin to feel the cold stone walls, searching for a key.
“Found it!”
I turn to see Sofia holding a large, old-fashioned iron key, the kind they used to use to lock prisoners in the dungeon—and in this case, that might literally have been the case.
“Let’s go see if it works,” she says with a grin.
“The riddle said to turn it twice.”
We clamber back down the stairs, this time with less trepidation and a whole lot more excitement. I watch as Sofia slips the key into the keyhole, turns it once, twice, and pushes the door open.
Predictably, there’s no light in the room, so I shine my phone around the cavernous room.
“Does this remind you of that book about Sammy the squirrel finding a key?” I ask in the dank room, my voice echoing around us.
“You know that story?”
“Who doesn’t know that story? It’s a Ledonian classic.”
My light illuminates a box, resting on the floor in the far corner of the room. “That’s got to be it.”
Sofia bends down and picks the box up. It’s wooden, with a brass royal crest. She glances at me briefly before she opens it up, the lid creaking with age. Inside the box lies a solitary scroll, tied in tattered string.
“Marco!” she says, her eyes wide.
“Pull it out. Let’s look at what it says.”
Carefully, she removes the scroll and unties the string, dropping it to the stone floor. She unrolls it and I hold up my phone to illuminate the words, leaning close to her, so close we could touch.
“It’s not in Ledonian,” she exclaims.
“You’re right.” I read a couple of lines, recognizing one of the words from the royal crest. “That’s old Ledonian, isn’t it?”
“Oh, my gosh, Marco. You’re right!”
Princess Amelia’s suggestion of a professor who can translate old Ledonian suddenly makes sense. Cannonball in a swimming pool, remember?
What do you think it says?” She tilts her head to look up at me. Bathed as she is in the glowing light from my phone, standing so very close to me, I have the sudden urge to reach out and trail my fingers across the soft, warm skin of her exposed neck, to pull her to me and finally get to taste her sweet, plump lips as I?—
Wait.Back up the dang bus a minute.
I can’t go having thoughts like that about this woman! Not only is she a princess, and consequently so out of my league I need binoculars just to catch a glimpse of her, but she’s not for me. She wants to be with my brother.
My.
Brother.