A/N: Day 4 (Candy Cane) of the 25 Days of Fic Challenge. Robert Langdon is the property of Dan Brown.

Renowned symbologist Robert Langdon flourished the symbol before the wide, unbelieving eyes of his beautiful and brilliant fourteen-year-old daughter Jacqueline.

He had scarcely believed it when he saw it, after all these months of waiting. Significance shone in its every curve. He had reached for it before experience urged caution. A glance around determined that his only witnesses were a familiar homeless person wrapped in layers of mismatched Land's End woolens and a smiling blond woman with a crooked incisor.

The risk was worth the reward. He had obtained the symbol, moving briskly but not with excessive hurry, talking lightly as if this were an everyday occurrence in the life of a tenured Harvard professor of religious iconography, one whose classes were overbooked and lectures overflowing, one whose fifth book, Symbols of the Lost Sacred Feminine, had created quite a stir.

He had obtained it. He had hurried home to his Back Bay brownstone to share it with his offspring with the lithe and brilliant Sophie Neveu, who had retained her youth and beauty by means of womanly rites of which he knew nothing. Langdon had put aside scholarly curiosity on this matter after his casual mention of the Maiden-Mother-Crone archetype had resulted in his spending a spiritually purifying and numerically significant three nights sleeping on the sofa.

"Do you know what this is?" he asked Jacqueline, urgency making his tone harsh.

"It's a candy cane, Daddy."

"This stick of colorful refined sugar contains a wealth of hidden messages. Think, Jacqueline. What else does it tell you?"

"That you've been to CVS? Did you remember to pick up litter for Bastet?"

"Walgreens. And no." Langdon never spoke of his final visit to CVS, the fatal day he'd tried to explain to the clerk that CVS was a coded reference to cervix and thus a hidden symbol of the eternal feminine.

Walgreen's, of course, was a multilayered message. On the surface, there was the green wall, pointing to the healing gardens of the apothecaries. Translating that into German gave grünewald, the forest; but more importantly, it pointed to Matthias Grünewald, the rebel Renaissance painter whose works were misattributed to Dürer. That, however, Langdon was saving for a keynote address to a properly appreciative audience of fellow experts.

"We are told that in 1672, the choirmaster of Cologne Cathedral requested of a local candy-maker some substance that would quiet the children during the annual performance of the living crèche."

As he warmed to his subject, Langdon paced, one hand in the pocket of his tweed jacket. "This story is startlingly similar to the origins of 'Silent Night,' leading me to hypothesize the existence of a German mystery cult that needed to remind its initiates of the need for silence. Since peppermint is a folk treatment for menstrual cramps, it is all but certain that what they were being silent about was the true nature of the Grail."

"May I have one?" Jacqueline's slender hands were unwrapping a candy cane before she'd finished the question. Langdon's eyes suddenly fixated on her dark hair, where a purple streak—the color of royalty—had appeared, seemingly overnight.

All of his fatherly and symbological instincts flinched. Anyone with eyes could read the clues that Jacqueline was a descendent of Jesus and Mary Magdalene. International conspiracies that had been centuries in the making would converge on the Commonwealth School's spring formal.

"Your hair—" he managed to croak.

"Chill, Daddy. It's just chalk. All the girls are doing it." Jacqueline sucked the candy cane experimentally. "It'll wash out."

"I see." Langdon looked out the window at the snow-covered trees to regain his aplomb. "The German mystery cult disguised this key symbol as a shepherd's crook. It's remarkable anyone even believes that story."

"Why? It looks like as much like a shepherd's crook as anything, and there'd be shepherds in the nativity play. Actually, Mrs. Fenimore says they ought to be goat herds. Herders. Goats were a lot less demanding to raise than sheep, she says."

With the verve given only to top lecturers at Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and perhaps Brown but definitely not Columbia, Langdon resisted being sidetracked into separating sheep from goats.

"That the bishop's crook would be based on the implement of a mere shepherd is, of course, absurd. The true crook comes to us from Egypt, where it was a sign of the highest royalty—"

"I thought Great-Great-Great-Great-Great-Great-Great-Great-Great-Great-Grandpa Jesus called himself a shepherd." Jacqueline arched an eyebrow. "Or was it David who called God that? Either of those two, I'd need a lot more greats."

"A sign of high royalty," Langdon continued, gesturing emphatically. "The other sign of royalty was the flail. A stick with three strands. Father, son, holy wisdom. Father, mother, child. The flail became associated with Osiris, king of the dead. Do you know what a flail is used for? Do you?"

"Flailing?"

"Separating wheat from chaff. By extension, separating truth from lies. When I reached this point, I knew I was steps away from understanding the message so cleverly and surreptitiously left for me."

"Eat more fiber?"

"Egypt was the obvious answer, but like most obvious answers, the wrong one. It was only after cudgeling my brains for fifteen minutes that I looked at a street sign and realized the truth."

"That you were lost? There's no Egypt Street down here. This is why I like Google Maps, Daddy. It'll even give you step-by-step bus directions—"

"That it was a number-substitution code! You remember how we did those together when you were a child?"

"A is one. B is two. C is three. Yup."

"Calculate Egypt for me, Jacqueline. Don't be afraid of what you might find. Just do it."

"E is five. G is seven. Y is twenty-five. P is sixteen. T is twenty. Add them together, and you get seventy-three."

Langdon's pacing reached the end of the reproduction Victorian rug in front of the marble fireplace. He whirled. "And then what happens?"

"Add the digits. Seven plus three is ten. The answer is ten."

"The answer is ten. There is only one place in the United States that contains the word ten and an Egyptian city and a dead king. One." He whipped his gold iPhone 4S from the pocket of his tweed jacket, then tapped and scrolled to find the email confirmation, while he fervently missed the days when an adventurous Harvard professor could whip physical airline tickets from his pocket and flourish them. "You and I and your mother are going there for Christmas. Can you name it?"

Jacqueline shook her head, overwhelmed and out of her depth at her father's mastery of symbology.

Langdon held the phone in front of her wide eyes, just out of her reach. "We're going to Graceland. Graceland, Memphis, Tennesee. We're going to see the King."

A/N: The story owes a great deal to Wikipedia, as well as to Gregory Pullam's Language Log posts on Dan Brown, back in 2004-2006.