Bitterblue

been lined with the queen's fine soldiers who guarded the silver destined for her treasury, her very own fortress of gold.

* * * * *

WHEN PO ENTERED the bedroom sometime later, even wetter than before and with mud-streaked clothing, he found Bitterblue sitting on the floor, head in hands.

'Po,' she whispered, looking up at him. 'I'm very wealthy, aren't I?'

Po came and crouched before her, dripping. 'Giddon is wealthy,' he said. 'I'm exceedingly wealthy, and Raffin is more. There's no word for what you are, Bitterblue. And the money at your disposal is only a fraction of your power.'

Swallowing, she said, 'I don't believe I quite appreciated it before.'

'Yes,' Po said. 'Well. Money does that. It's one of the privileges of wealth never to have to think about it, and one of the dangers too.' He shifted, sat. 'What's wrong?'

'I'm not sure,' Bitterblue whispered.

He sat quietly, accepting that.

'You don't seem to have the crown with you,' she added.

'The crown is not in the shop,' he said. 'Saf has passed it on to the subordinates of a black market underlord who calls himself Spook and is said to live hidden away in a cave, if I was reading him right.'

'My crown is already on the black market?' cried Bitterblue. 'But how will we ever exonerate him?'

'I get the impression that Spook is only involved for safekeeping, Beetle. We may still be able to get it back. Don't despair yet. I'll work on Saf, I'll flatter him with an invitation to a Council meeting or something. When I left, you know, he knelt, kissed my hand, and wished me good dreams. This, after I'd accused him of royal theft.'

'How gratifying for you that it's only the Monsean nobility he hates,' she said bitterly.

'He would hate me well enough if I broke his heart,' said Po quietly.

Bitterblue raised her face to him. 'Have I broken his heart, then, Po? Is that what I'm to believe?'

'That's a question for you to ask him, sweetheart.'

She noticed, then, that Po was shivering. More than that: She saw, as she studied him more closely, something wild and pained flashing in his eyes. Reaching out, she touched his face. 'Po!' she said. 'You're burning! Do you feel all right?'

'I feel like my insides are made of lead, actually,' he said. 'Do you think I have a fever? That would explain why I fell.'

'You fell?'

'My Grace sort of starts warping things when I have a fever, you know? Without eyesight, it's disorienting.' He grabbed his head vaguely. 'I think I fell more than once.'

'You're ill,' she said, upset, standing up, 'and I've sent you twice into the rain, and made you fall. Come, I'm taking you to your rooms.'

'Helda is trying to find some way whereby the fact of my being blind explains what she believes to be the perversity of Katsa and me not having children,' he said at random.

'What? What are you talking about? That makes no sense whatsoever. Get up.'

'I really can't stand it sometimes,' he said a bit erratically, still sitting on the floor, 'hearing other people's thoughts. People are ridiculous. By the way, Saf is not lying about his Grace; he doesn't know what it is.'

He told me so many times that he never lies to me. I suppose I didn't want to believe it. 'Po.' Taking Po's hands and pulling, leaning back, yanking, Bitterblue persuaded him to stand. 'I'm going to walk you to your rooms and bring you a healer. You need to sleep.'

'Did you know that Tilda and Bren live as a couple and they want Teddy to give them a baby?' he asked, swaying, wincing at the room as if he couldn't remember how he got there.

This was too astonishing for words. 'I'm bringing you to Madlen,' Bitterblue said sternly. 'Now, come along.'

BY THE TIME Bitterblue returned to her rooms, the light was fading. The sky was purple like Saf's eyes, and her sitting room glimmered with lamps Helda had taken care to light. In her bedroom, she lit candles for herself, sat on the floor by her mother's chest, and ran her fingers over the carvings on its top.

How lonely she felt, trying to understand all that had happened today on her own. Mama? Would you be ashamed of me?

Wiping a tear that had fallen onto the lid of the chest, she found herself peering more closely at the carved designs. She'd noticed before that Ashen had used some of the carvings as models for her embroidery, of course, but she'd never made a study of it. They were arranged in neat rows atop the lid—none repeated—star, moon, candle, sun, for example. Boat, shell, castle, tree, flower, prince, princess, baby, and so on. She knew, from years of staring at the edges of her own sheets, exactly which ones Ashen had borrowed.

The realization crept into her and all through her. Even before she'd bothered to count, she knew. She counted anyway, just to make sure.

The carvings on the chest numbered a hundred. The carvings her mother had borrowed for her embroidery numbered twenty-six.

Bitterblue was looking at a cipher alphabet.

PART THREE Ciphers and Keys

(Late September and October)

23

IT WAS NOT a straightforward cipher alphabet. When Bitterblue isolated Ashen's twenty-six embroidery designs on the chest and applied the top left-most design, a star, to the letter A, the next in the row, a waning moon, to the letter B, and so on, then tested the resulting symbol alphabet against her mother's sheets, she got nothing but gibberish.

She tried applying the bottom right-most symbol to the letter A and working her way up the chest backward. She tried running up and down the chest in columns.

None of it worked.

Very well, then; perhaps there was a key. What key would Ashen have used?

Taking a steadying breath, Bitterblue removed the repeating letters from her own name and armed herself with the resulting alphabet.

B I T E R L U V W X Y Z A C D F G H J K M N O P Q S

Then she applied it to the symbols on the chest, starting again at the upper left:

Holding tight to the sheet in her lap, she tried it against Ashen's embroidery.

When it yielded results, she separated those results into words and sentences, and added punctuation. Where Ashen had skipped letters, presumably for the sake of speed, she added them too.

Ara comes back limping.

She can't remember until I show it to her. When she sees then it hurts and she screams.

Will I stop telling Ara then? Is it better she not know?

Should I kill them when I know he's marked them for death? Would that be merciful or mad?

HELDA FOUND BITTERBLUE, that first day, in a mountain of sheets on the floor, arms wrapped around herself, shivering. 'Lady Queen!' Helda exclaimed, kneeling beside her. 'Are you ill?'