Bitterblue

14

THERE WAS LITTLE information in The Book of Ciphers that Bitterblue didn't already know. She wasn't sure if this was because she remembered it from reading it before or simply because ciphers, of various kinds, were part of her daily life. Her personal correspondence with Ror, Skye, with her Council friends, even with Helda was routinely ciphered. She had a mind for it.

The Book of Ciphers seemed to be a history of ciphers through time, beginning with the Sunderan king's secretary, centuries ago, who'd noticed one day that the unique designs in the molding along the wall of his office numbered twenty-eight, as did the letters in the alphabet at that time. This led to the world's first simple substitution cipher, one design assigned to each letter of the alphabet—and worked successfully for only as long as it took someone to notice the way the king's secretary stared at the walls while writing. Next came the notion of a scrambled alphabet that substituted for the real alphabet, and which required a key for decipherment. This was the method Bitterblue used with Helda. Take the key SALTED CARAMEL. First, one removed any repeating letters from the key, which left S A L T E D C R M. Then, one continued forward with the known twenty-six-letter alphabet from the place where the key left off, skipping any letters that had already been used, starting again at A once one had reached Z. The resulting alphabet, S A L T E D C R M N O P Q U V W X Y Z B F G H I J K, became the alphabet for use in writing the ciphered message, like so—

—such that the secret missive 'A letter has arrived from Lady Katsa,' became 'S P E B B E Y R S Z S Y Y M G E T D Y V Q P S T J O S B Z S.'

Bitterblue's ciphers with Ror began with a similar premise but operated on a number of levels simultaneously, several different alphabets in use in the course of one message, the total number in use and the order in which they were used depending on a changing series of keys. Communicating these keys to Bitterblue in a subtle manner only she would understand was one of the jobs of Skye's own ciphered letters.

Bitterblue was astonished—utterly—at Death's Grace. She supposed she'd never quite considered before what Death could do. Now she held it in her hands: the regeneration of a book that introduced some ten or twelve different kinds of ciphers, presenting examples of each, some of which were dreadfully complicated in execution, most of which looked to the reader like nothing more than a senseless string of random letters. Does he understand everything he reads? Or is it just the look of the thing he remembers—the symbols, and how they sit on the page in relation to each other?

There seemed to be little in this rewritten book worth study ing. And still, she read every line, letting each one linger, trying to resurrect the memory of sitting before the fire with Ashen, reading this book.

WHEN SHE COULD make the time, Bitterblue continued her nightly excursions. By mid-September Teddy was doing better, sitting up, even moving from room to room, with help. One night, when nothing was being printed, Teddy let Bitterblue come into the shop and taught her how to set type. The tiny letter molds were awkward to manage.

'You pick it up quickly,' Teddy mused as she fought with an i that would not land base side down in the tray.

'Don't flatter me. My fingers are clumsy as sausages.'

'True, but you have no trouble spelling words backwards with backward letters. Tilda, Bren, and Saf have good fingers, but they're always transposing letters and mixing up the ones that mirror each other. You haven't once.'

Bitterblue shrugged, fingers moving faster now with letters that had a bit more heft, m's and o's and w's. 'It's like writing in cipher. Some part of my brain goes quiet and translates for me.'

'Write in cipher much, do you, baker girl?' Saf asked, coming through the outside door, startling her, so that she dropped a w in the wrong place. 'The castle kitchen's secret recipes?'

ON A MORNING a week later, Bitterblue climbed the stairs to her tower, entered, and found her guard Holt standing balanced inside the frame of an open window. His back to the room, he leaned out, nothing but a casual handhold on the molding keeping him from falling.

'Holt!' she cried, convinced, in that first irrational moment, that someone had fallen out the window and Holt was looking down at the body. 'What happened?'

'Oh, nothing, Lady Queen,' Holt said calmly.

'Nothing?' Bitterblue cried. 'You're certain? Where is everyone?'

'Thiel is downstairs somewhere,' he said, still leaning perilously out of the window, speaking loudly, but evenly, so that she could hear. 'Darby is drunk. Runnemood is in the city having meetings and Rood is consulting with the judges of the High Court about their schedule.'

'But—' Bitterblue's heart was trying to hammer its way out of her chest. She wanted to go to him and yank him back into the room, but she was afraid that if she got too close, she would touch him in the wrong way and send him plummeting. 'Holt! Get down from there! What are you doing?'

'I was just wondering what would happen, Lady Queen,' he said, still leaning out.

'You come back into this room this instant,' she said.

Shrugging, Holt stepped down onto the floor, just as Thiel pushed into the room. 'What is it?' Thiel asked sharply, looking from Bitterblue to Holt. 'What's going on here?'

'What do you mean,' said Bitterblue, ignoring Thiel, 'you were wondering what would happen?'

'Don't you ever wonder what would happen if you jumped out a high window, Lady Queen?' asked Holt.

'No,' cried Bitterblue, 'I don't wonder what would happen! I know what would happen. My body would be crushed to death. Yours would too. Your Grace is strength, Holt, nothing else!'

'I wasn't planning to jump, Lady Queen,' he said with a nonchalance that was beginning to make her furious. 'I only wanted to see what would happen.'

'Holt,' said Bitterblue through gritted teeth. 'I forbid you, absolutely forbid you, to climb into any more window frames and look down, wondering what would happen. Do you understand me?'

'Honestly,' said Thiel, going to Holt and grabbing his collar, then pushing Holt to the door in a manner that was almost comical, as Holt was bigger than Thiel, almost twenty years younger, and enormously stronger. But Holt just shrugged again, making no protest. 'Pull yourself together, man,' said Thiel. 'Stop giving the queen frights.' Then he opened the door and shoved Holt through it.

'Are you all right, Lady Queen?' said Thiel, slamming the door shut, turning back to her.

'I don't understand anyone,' Bitterblue said miserably, 'or anything. Thiel, how am I to be queen in a kingdom of crackpots?'

'Indeed, Lady Queen,' said Thiel. 'That was an extraordinary display.' Then he picked up a pile of charters from his stand, dropped them on the floor, picked them up again, and handed them to her with a grim face and shaking hands.

'Thiel?' Bitterblue said, seeing a bandage peeking out of one sleeve. 'What did you do to yourself?'

'It's nothing, Lady Queen,' he said. 'Just a cut.'

'Did someone competent look at it?'

'It doesn't warrant a healer, Lady Queen. I dealt with it myself.'

'I'd like Madlen to examine it. It might need stitches.'

'It needs nothing.'

'That's a question for a healer to decide, Thiel.'

Thiel made himself tall and straight. 'A healer has already stitched it, Lady Queen,' he said sternly.

'Well, then! Why did you tell me you'd dealt with it yourself?'

'I dealt with it by bringing it to a healer.'

'I don't believe you. Show me the stitches.'

'Lady Queen—'

'Rood,' Bitterblue snapped at her white-haired adviser who'd just entered the room, puffing from the effort