Tuesday Tales: From the Word SIMPLE

Tomorrow marks the official first day of autumn. Personally, I’m hoping for more summer, but Mother Nature has been anything but predictable this year. Our word this week is SIMPLE. I’m continuing with The Bonds of Time.

Hezekiah, a lawyer friend of Meg’s had accompanied her to France and had helped her deal with all the paperwork. The fact that the area was too unstable to recover the bodies had been upsetting, but he would continue to ask the authorities to try. They’d left France for London a week ago, and he’d settled her in a simple but elegant flat in Mayfair while he finished getting her English inheritance settled. Strange how she hadn’t known that she’d been born in the UK or that her mother had a twin brother. As soon as she was healthy enough, Meg would pack up their lives in Canada and join her. The plan had been to travel from London to Wiltshire together, but the note had arrived and changed everything.

After she’d spoken to Meg, she’d called Hezekiah. Her call had gone to voice mail. He had yet to return the call, but her mind was made up. She needed to get to the bottom of this sooner rather than later, and the idea that people she trusted were keeping secrets from her didn’t sit well. She reread the note.

Danger haunts thee both, my Fairie Queen,

Evil threatens the world that was once serene.

Together, ye can save Keltoi and humanity

Act now to protect and preserve thy destiny.

The message, written in an old Celtic dialect, one long dead that few would understand, a language she’d studied in her quest to be an archeologist like her parents, had been slipped under her door three days ago. No doubt she’d mistranslated the honorific Fairie Queen, which was probably more likely my lady or something equally banal. She had no idea to whom the both referred, unless it was her and Aunt Meg, and that made little sense. How she could save Keltoi and humanity was a mystery, but that whoever had sent the missive thought that the danger was real vibrated off the page. From what or from whom, she had no idea, but the poet-messenger had activated her senses of responsibility as well as curiosity. Meg had spent years instilling the idea that “Curiosity killed the cat,” as she often said, but after everything that had happened to her in the last six months, the losses she’d suffered, what could possibly go wrong now?

Don’t forget to check out the other Tuesday Tales.