Bitterblue

demonstrative behavior. But leaving without an acknowledgment of all he'd said was not an option. Was there a right thing to do? Or only a thousand wrong things?

Bitterblue walked around the desk to him and placed her hand gently on his shoulder. When he breathed in and out once, raggedly, she obeyed an astonishing instinct, bent, and kissed his dry forehead. He took another great breath. Then he said, 'I will break this cipher for you, Lady Queen.'

* * * * *

IN HER OFFICE with Thiel at the helm, paper passed more smoothly across Bitterblue's desk than it had in weeks.

'Now that it's November,' she said to him, 'we can hope for a response soon from my uncle with advice on how I'm to provide remuneration to the people Leck stole from. I wrote to him at the start of September, remember? It'll be a relief to get to work on that. I'll feel like I'm actually doing something.'

'I theorize that those bones in the river are from bodies dumped by King Leck, Lady Queen,' responded Thiel.

'What?' Bitterblue said, startled. 'Does that have something to do with remuneration?'

'No, Lady Queen,' said Thiel. 'But people are asking questions about the bones, and I wonder if we shouldn't release a statement explaining that King Leck dumped them. It will put an end to the speculation, Lady Queen, and allow us to focus on matters like remuneration.'

'I see,' said Bitterblue. 'I'd prefer to wait until Madlen has concluded her investigation, Thiel. We don't actually know yet how the bones got there.'

'Of course, Lady Queen,' said Thiel, with utter correctness. 'In the meantime, I'll draft the statement, so that it's ready for release at the slightest moment.'

'Thiel,' she said, putting her pen down and giving him a look. 'I'd much rather you spent your time on the question of who's burning buildings and killing people in the east city than on drafting a statement that might never be released! Now that Captain Smit is away,' she said, trying not to imbue the word with too much sarcasm, 'find out for me who's in charge of the investigation. I want daily reports, just like before, and you may as well know that I've rather lost my faith in the Monsean Guard. If they want to impress me, they should find some answers that match the answers my own spies are finding, and fast.'

Of course, her own spies weren't finding any answers. No one in the city had anything helpful to offer; the spies sent to investigate the names on Teddy's list uncovered nothing. But the Monsean Guard didn't need to know that, and neither did Thiel.

Then, a week after Madlen and Saf had gone to Silverhart, Bitterblue received a letter that elucidated— possibly—why her spies still weren't finding any answers.

The first part of the letter was written in Madlen's strange, childish handwriting.

We're recovering hundreds of bones. Thousands, Lady Queen. Your Sapphire and his team are bringing them up faster than I can keep count. I am afraid that I can tell little about them beyond the basics. Most of them are the smaller bones. I have found pieces from at least forty-seven different skulls and am attempting to articulate the skeletons. We have set up an impromptu laboratory in the guest rooms of the inn. We are lucky that the innkeeper has an interest in science and history. I doubt all innkeepers would wish their guest rooms full of bones.

Sapphire wishes to write you a line. He says that you will know the key.

What followed was a paragraph in some of the most indecipherable handwriting Bitterblue had ever seen, so tangled that it took her a moment to confirm that it was, indeed, ciphered. Two possible keys sprang to mind. To spare her own heart, she tried the hurtful one first. Liar. It didn't work. But the second one produced this message: you were right to send your lienid guard and i must thank you for it. they stopped man with knife who came at me in camp when i was wet freezing in no state to fight. wild man, raving, could give no reason, no names for who hired him. pockets full of money. this is how they do it. they choose lost souls to do their work, desperate people with no reason who couldn't identify them even if wanted to, so looks like random senseless crime. be careful, watch your back. are guards watching shop?

Guards are watching the shop, Bitterblue wrote back, using his key. She hesitated, then added, You be careful too, in that cold water, Saf.

The key was Sparks. Bitterblue couldn't help the tiny hope that rose in her heart that she was forgiven.

IN THE MEANTIME, Ashen's embroidery lay, neglected, in piles on her bedroom floor, with three of Leck's books hidden beneath it. She spent as much time as she could spare with her nose in one of those books, scribbling at scrap after scrap of paper, pushing her mind through every kind of decipherment she'd ever read about—or, trying to, anyway. She'd never had to do this before. She'd ciphered messages using the most complicated ciphers she could imagine, and enjoyed the neatness of it, the rapid calculations of her own mind. But deciphering was an entire other beast. She understood the basic principles of decipherment, but when she tried to transfer that understanding to Leck's symbols, everything kept falling apart. She could find patterns, in places. She could find strings of four or five or even seven symbols that reappeared here and there in the exact same sequence, which should have been a good thing. Repetitions of a particular sequence of symbols within any ciphered text suggested a repeated word. But the repetitions were exceedingly rare, which suggested a revolving series of more than one cipher alphabet, and it did not help a bit that the total number of different symbols in use was thirty-two. Thirty-two symbols to represent twenty-six letters? Were the extra symbols blanks? Were they used as alternates for the most common letters, like E and T, to make it difficult for a cipher- breaker to break the cipher by means of examining letter frequency? Did they represent consonant blends like TH and ST? It gave Bitterblue a headache.

Death hadn't made much progress on the cipher either, and was more harried and snappish than usual. 'I may have determined that there are six different revolving alphabets,' Bitterblue said to him one evening. 'Which suggests that the key is six letters long.'

'I determined that days ago!' he practically shouted. 'Don't distract me!'

Watching Thiel as he tottered around her tower sometimes, Bitterblue wondered what her greater reason was for hiding the existence of the journals from him. Was she more afraid of his interference? Or of the damage it would do to his fragile soul to know that secret writing of Leck's had been found? She'd been furious with him for shielding her from the truth, and now found herself with the same instinct.

Rood was back, shuffling around slowly, taking small breaths. Darby, on the other hand, flung himself around the offices and up and down the stairs, flung papers and words about, stank like old wine, and finally, one day, collapsed on the floor in front of Bitterblue's desk.

He muttered incomprehensible gibberish while healers attended to him. As they carried him out of the room, Thiel stood frozen, staring out the windows. His eyes seemed fixed on something that wasn't there.

'Thiel,' said Bitterblue, not knowing what to say. 'Thiel, can I do anything for you?'

It seemed, at first, as if he hadn't heard. Then he turned away from the window. 'Darby's Grace prevents him from sleeping the way we do, Lady Queen,' he said quietly. 'Sometimes, the only way for him to switch his mind off is to make himself blind drunk.'

'There must be something I can do to help him,' Bitterblue said. 'Perhaps he should have less stressful work to do, or even retire.'

'Work comforts him, Lady Queen,' said Thiel. 'Work comforts all of us. The kindest thing you can do is allow us to continue working.'

'Yes,' she said. 'All right,' for work kept her own thoughts from spinning out of control too. She understood him.

She sat on her bedroom floor that night with two of her spies who were cipher breakers. The books lay open before them as they hypothesized, argued, passed weariness and frustration back and forth to each other. Bitterblue was too exhausted to realize how exhausted she was, and how unequal to the task.

At the edge of her vision, a largeness filled the doorway. Turning, trying not to lose her thought, she saw Giddon leaning against the door frame. Behind him, Bann rested his chin on Giddon's shoulder.

'Can we convince you to join us, Lady Queen?' asked Giddon.

'What are you doing?'

'Sitting,' Giddon said, 'in your sitting room. Talking about Estill. Complaining about Katsa and Po.'

'And Raffin,' Bann said. 'There's a sour cream cake.'