The Zaanics Deceit (Cate Lyr #1)

by Nina Post

  Philip wasn’t done yet. Cate had never seen him stand up to Gaelen, in the limited number of times she’d seen them together.

  “Oh, you had something to do with it,” Philip said, eyes blazing. “Maybe you didn’t give Romane a direct order, but you planted that seed in her so when she was alone in a house with Gregory, she helped.” He gestured to Gregory in his bed. “If Romane didn’t perform this act herself, she certainly did nothing to stop Jason from doing it.”

  Philip’s voice lowered, thickened. He pointed at Gaelen’s chest. “I know you wanted Gregory off the board. You think I exist in some bubble of complete ignorance, but I assure you, I do not. I know you were plotting to remove Gregory from the board, and I know what you did to your father — ”

  Gaelen raised her chin. “And what was that, Philip?”

  “You manipulated him with lies, then once you took what you wanted, you discarded him like he was my collection of antique metal catcher’s masks.”

  “That old chestnut, Philip?” Gaelen chuckled.

  He put out a hand. “And Romane, as usual, copied you.”

  “I told him what he wanted to hear. It was a kindness.”

  “It was a shameless grab for power, and you all but ruined your sister’s life!”

  Gaelen scoffed. “Cate could have followed my lead and saved herself a lot of trouble.”

  Cate wanted to be left out of this.

  “I’ll get you a bracelet,” Noah whispered. “WWGD.”

  “Thanks — it’ll help me remember,” Cate replied, standing to stretch.

  “And then once you had your majority share,” Philip continued, “you tossed him out, sold his house right out from under him, then virtually abandoned him. You’re an absolute nightmare of a daughter, a sister, and a wife, and I will not stay on the sidelines, complicit in my tolerance of every nasty thing you do. It’s not too late for me to actually enjoy my life, and I intend to start now. You will be hearing from my attorney.” Philip started walking off, then shot back, “And he is ten times worse than you are!”

  Gaelen muttered “I doubt it,” then quickly texted someone. She remembered that Cate and Noah were right there and glared at them. “What are you looking at?”

  Cate put a finger to the corner of Gaelen’s mouth. “You’ve got something right … there.”

  Gaelen stalked off.

  “I’m going to stay here tonight,” Noah said. “I don’t want to leave him alone.”

  “Do you want me to stay?” she asked.

  “Nooo. You go, do whatever you … I mean, it’s a hospital, and … not the kind of place …” He pushed his brown curls away from his forehead, then brightened. “The cafeteria, though! One of the best hospital cafeterias in the west. The rice pudding is phenomenal.”

  “I’ll stay.”

  He frowned, waved his hand. “Yes, okay. That would be nice.”

  “Let’s go check out that rice pudding.” She stood and held out her hand. He took it and they walked to the cafeteria together.

  Cate and Noah bought some coffee and rice pudding then found a table in the corner of the hospital cafeteria.

  They hadn’t noticed the elegant woman wearing attending scrubs who placed a bowl of cherry Jell-O on her tray then took a nearby table. She was thinking, as she often did, about her family, and if she was honoring them. She was also thinking of her own death, and her legacy. After years of embedding herself within Dregutchoh Niijevec, she kept her true purpose at the forefront, and as long as she did her best, she hoped to have peace of mind when it was her time. The woman knew that when she died, her journal and the other materials would make their way to Cate, if she didn’t get a chance to tell her what she needed to know.

  Cate put her jacket over the back of the chair and her tray on the table. Noah pulled the chair out for her.

  “Thank you,” she said. “Are you up to working on the Lyr poem and the Severn lists? I think we were close to figuring out how they fit together.”

  “I welcome the distraction,” he said.

  “I have the Lyr poem.” She showed him her phone’s screen. “Do you have your lists?”

  He took a moment to pull it up on his phone, then showed her. She scrolled through the eighteen named lists.

  “I also have the hard copies of both that we worked on at my apartment.” Noah took some papers out of his bag. One paper-clipped stack was the Lyr poem, and the other was a thicker stack of the Severn list of lists — eighteen lists of eighteen words each, in the VZ Yesuþoh.

  Cate looked back to the poem and was quiet for a few minutes. Her head moved side to side like she was listening to two microscopic people deliver brief soliloquies on the table.

  “Okay,” she said. “There are eighteen lists and eighteen stanzas in the poem. The last time we worked on this, I thought I started to see a pattern, and I think this is it. Certain words are used in the poem, only once, and one per stanza. Your lists look random, or haphazard, because you don’t have anything meaningful to connect them to, like you told me before. But they’re not. This word,” she put her fingertip just under heeps, “is in the first stanza of the poem, and it’s also in the first list, Words of the Sun.”

  “Ah, my old friend, Þuruhtut blóð-hlaup,” Noah said. “We meet again.” His mouth kept silently forming words, dubbed kung fu movie style.

  Cate laughed, then identified wand in the second stanza. “Do you see where I’m going with this?”

  “I think so.”

  She beckoned with her hand. “Give me your phone.”

  “Calling someone smarter than I am?” He took it from his pocket.

  “Actually, can you pull up the scans you took of the first Zaanics book?”

  “Sure.” He took a minute to access it, then gave her the phone. She looked back and forth between the phone and the poem and the lists, then set the phone on the table. “I’ll come back to this.”

  “I have the very important job of nodding somberly and eating rice pudding,” Noah noted.

  “You do the next one.” She pushed the papers closer to him.

  Noah studied both stanzas, then eventually looked up. “I think it’s mot.”

  She checked. “I think so, too.”

  He straightened and cracked his knuckles. “We got this.”

  “Oh, don’t say that.”

  “Why, because the very next thing that happens will be an unscheduled demolition of this building, or a city-wide power outage?”

  “Yeah, pretty much.” She looked for the next one. “Þeef.”

  They identified schapen, oathe, Æhte, bokes, crueltee, wraked, lodemanage, eyen, kumelings, vertu, a-rechen, briddis, strenge, and finally, duʒti.

  “Terrific. Now, what does it mean?” Noah said. “Maybe it’ll make more sense if we look at the VZ Yesuþoh and the Middle English together.” Noah grabbed a blank sheet of paper and began writing:

  heeps

  wand

  mot

  Þeef

  schapen

  oathe

  Æhte

  bokes

  crueltee

  wraked

  lodemanage

  eyen

  kumelings

  vertu

  a-rechen

  briddis

  strenge

  duʒti

  Five minutes later, Noah put his head in his hands. “I’ve never felt more stupid in my life. How do they fit? I think I need gene enhancement. Is that available yet?”

  “Says the man who works as a translator for foreign executives. What chance do the rest of us have?”

  Noah scoffed. “That’s different. That’s like 80% etiquette and reading emotions.”

  “I think you’re understating it.”

  He didn’t respond right away, and shifted to a different position in the chair. “While I was learning Yesuþoh, I was having trouble keeping up with my eighth-grade French assignments. It turned out my learning style was at odds with how I was being taught. O
nce I got a better teacher, it clicked. I also learned language after language just to prove to my Dad that I wasn’t an idiot. Hence my current job, which I actually really like, most of the time. But now I kind of feel dumb all over again.” Noah rubbed the back of his neck. “What if we can’t do this?”

  “Then we won’t understand what Gaelen wants to do with the information. But this is a good start. Those words we marked up are important. They’re the key.”

  Noah took the phone and repeated Cate’s action of switching among the scans, the poem, and the lists. He scribbled some notes and doodled some indecipherable shapes. “I can’t figure out this alphabet. Some of the yesuþofoh, the glyphs, aren’t consistent from one word to the next, which I learned to ignore over time.” Noah leaned in over the paper. “But you see that yesuþofoh there?”

  Cate squinted at it. “The one that looks like a shoe with a bite taken out of it?”

  “Yeah. In this word,” he pointed,” that glyph is ‘r’. But over here that same glyph is used to spell ‘k’. In this one it’s some sort of vowel, while in this one it combines with this other character that looks like an angry clam to spell a ‘b’. And here it’s a ‘v’. In this word it doesn’t seem to correspond to any sound at all.”

  Cate pressed a finger to her forehead. “Which sound is the right one?”

  “No one in my family has ever been able to figure it out, and to be honest, nobody worried too much about it. We’ve drawn up correspondence sets, but none of them make any sense. And, of course, the words in the lists themselves don’t make any sense, either. Rather, they’re actual words, but we don’t know why they’re there or if they connect to anything in a meaningful way. Aside, that is, from your discovery that they’re peppered throughout the poem.”

  “That’s what we get for not working together until now,” Cate said.

  “That’s probably another reason why I work as a translator,” Noah said. “I got so frustrated with reciting characters I didn’t understand that I had to learn something I actually could understand, and access in context.” Noah unfolded himself from his chair and towered over her. “I’m going to get another rice pudding. Do you want anything?”

  “Same, please.”

  He turned to go then paused with a pained expression. Cate thought he stubbed his toe. “I should call Jude and tell him what happened.” He deliberated, then took out his phone, called, and left a message. “Got off easy there.”

  He pocketed the phone but Cate saw him use it again while waiting in line. When he got back and set the puddings on the table, he said, “Jude called back. Uh, he’s too busy to come by yet, maybe tomorrow. He mentioned that he thinks he has some insurance information we might need, and told me to stop by his place to pick it up. Apparently he’s too busy to come see Dad.” He shook his head. “I really need to get a DNA test.”

  After he sat down, Cate showed him the scan of the book again, then pointed to a glyph. “Look. I think that glyph changes before Light and Dark vowels.”

  He squinted at the screen. “Um, what?”

  “The lexicon of Zaanics is divided into Light and Dark, depending on the part of speech. It’s based on St. Augustine’s City of God. Did your father ever mention that?”

  “No.”

  “The Light and Dark separation is central to VZ. Light words are characterized by front vowels like ‘i’ and ‘æ,’ and Dark by back vowels, like ‘u.’”

  “No one tells me anything.”

  She smiled.

  After a few more minutes of work, Noah said, “I think we have all the sounds. Don’t we?”

  “Let’s do a test, then,” Cate said.

  “We can start with the name of the language.” Noah tried to write ‘Væyne Zaanics’ in the Yesuþoh.

  It didn’t work.

  “We don’t have all the sounds.” Noah ran a hand through his hair. “Coq au vin,” he muttered.

  They went back over the poem, twice.

  “There’s something missing,” Noah said.

  He stared thoughtfully at her chest. She raised a questioning brow. He grinned sheepishly and shook his head. “Sorry. I was just looking at your necklace. You always wear that, don’t you?”

  Cate slid the locket on the chain. “It was my mother’s. It’s gold and tin. She gave it to me when I was seven.” She unclasped the chain. “It’s one of the few things I have from her. I’ve always been puzzled about one thing, though.”

  “What’s that,” Noah asked.

  Cate opened the locket and showed him the inside, pointing to the left. “The engraving, eus Nods. I looked it up once. It appears to be the phrase Zeus Nods, meaning a matter is decided, but there’s a letter missing. I’m surprised my mother didn’t notice and have it fixed.”

  Noah stared at the inside of the locket with an unusually intense look. After a moment, he said, “I’ve seen that before.”

  “The phrase? Not surprised.”

  “No, the other side. The other engraving.”

  He tapped the odd shape engraved on the right, which she could never figure out.

  “What about it?” Cate asked him. “Do you know what it is?”

  His eyes were bright with excitement but she couldn’t even guess why. “Yes, I know what it is. It’s a glyph.” He took it from her and copied it onto paper. “It’s a yesuþofoh.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “No, I’m not kidding.”

  Cate shook her head. “I never noticed because it never seemed to have any significance to VZ. I didn’t study the VZ Yesuþoh — you did.”

  Noah placed it on the table and grabbed a pen. “Maybe the inscription isn’t an error. Maybe it was inscribed that way on purpose.” He wrote Væyne Zaanics using the new glyph as ‘z’, then checked it against the poem and the lists.

  He spun the paper around and showed her. “It’s a Z. It’s the missing sound. Your locket is the key — the final piece we need.”

  Cate jumped out of her chair with the paper in hand and he picked her up under her arms.

  “We did it,” he said. “Lobster bisque, we did it!” They bounced up and down in excitement.

  “We can finally start translating the book,” Cate said. “At least, I think we can.”

  “A rousing call, not dissimilar from the band of brothers speech in Henry V.”

  She sat down again, then so did Noah. “Well, I’m far from fluent in VZ,” she warned. “And I know you won’t be sure about the character alternations until we start reading the text — but we can try. We have everything we need to start.”

  Noah took his keys out of his pocket. “I’m up for it, but let me stop by Jude’s first and get that insurance stuff that he called about. It’ll be good to clear my head with a quick drive, anyway. Wow. Zeus Nods.”

  The woman with the silver-blonde pageboy lifted her mug of hot tea to her mouth and smiled.

  Chapter 18

  When Gaelen closed the door to Jude’s apartment behind her, she immediately noticed the place was an unholy mess. Jude was leaned over his coffee table, pen in hand, wearing his suit from work, minus the jacket. “There you are,” he said in a low rumble of a voice, pulling her over to him. The table was covered with papers, take-away containers, and bottles.

  “Party?” she asked.

  “What, this? No, just busy. Angling for a promotion at work.”

  She knew better. He was upset about something, presumably his father, not that he’d ever admit it.

  He tried to maneuver her onto the sofa. She resisted. “Come over here.”

  “Stop it.”

  “You’re restless,” Jude pronounced, and poured her a glass of whisky from the half-empty bottle on the table. He pushed off the sofa and tried to give her the glass. She made a face, but took it. “I’m restless too,” he growled, and wound a hand around her hips.

  “I want you to go find Romane,” she told him, twisting her shoulders away but drawing closer to him at the same time, running her hand up
his neck and raking her nails through his honey-colored hair.

  Jude tossed her purse onto the coffee table, where it landed with a soft thud and sent a small bottle skidding off onto the floor. He snaked his hand under her dress. Gaelen dug her nails into the back of the sofa with a gasp.

  “What are you talking about,” he murmured into her ear, breathing warm, “not that I care right now?”

  She had gone in there with every intention of getting him to agree to do one thing, then leaving right after she asked him because she had too much to do. Now she could barely think of what that thing was. She had a plan, something about getting Jude to draw out her sister, but it was far in the distance. Sister? What sister?

  “Now what was that you said?” His liquid voice was inflected with teasing mockery. Jude unzipped and pushed down her dress, then lifted her up and took her into the bedroom.

  Noah pocketed his keys and closed the door. “Jude?” Clothes were strewn over the furniture and floor, so he stepped quietly into the living area, wincing at a sound he heard from the bedroom. He fumbled for his earbuds and put them in, then selected The English Beat to cover any sound coming from the bedroom.

  He went right to the littered coffee table and sifted through piles of what looked like papers from work. He found a blank, sealed white envelope. Figuring it was probably the insurance documents Jude mentioned on the phone, Noah tucked the envelope into his pocket. He didn’t want to be there a second longer than he had to be.

  Cate enjoyed spending time with Benjamin, even if it was at the opera, which she almost enjoyed at certain moments — not that she’d ever tell him that. However, it was still opera, so she welcomed the chance to get out for a few minutes.

  “Excuse me. I have to take this.”

  Benjamin nodded and gave her a knowing smile that said he knew she would gladly take a call from a telemarketer right now. She slipped out of the performance hall and into an empty corridor to call Noah back.