Bitterblue (Graceling Realm #3)(60)
Author: Kristin Cashore

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. I t didn't work. But the second one produced this message: y ou 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, B itterblue wrote back, using his key. She hesitated, then added, Y ou be careful too, in that cold water, Saf.

The key was Sparks. B itterblue 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 fall ing 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.

Thirtytwo 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 practical y 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 final y, one day, col apsed 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 all ow us to continue working."

"Yes," she said. "Al 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 fil ed 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 Estil . Complaining about Katsa and Po."

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

The cake was motivation, of course, but mostly, Bitterblue wanted to know what sorts of things Bann said when he was complaining about Raffin. "I'm not getting anywhere with this," she admitted blearily.

"Wel , and we need you," Giddon said.

Half stumbling in her slippers, Bitterblue joined them.

Together, they walked down the corridor.

"Specifical y, we need you to lie supine on the sofa," Bann said as they entered the sitting room.

This struck Bitterblue as suspicious, but she complied, and was deeply gratified when Helda loomed out of nowhere and slapped a plate of cake on her stomach.

"We're having some luck with military defectors in south Estil ," began Giddon.

"This raspberry fil ing is amazing," said Bitterblue fervently, then fel asleep, with cake in her mouth and her fork in her hand.

Chapter 34

MADLEN AND SAF were away for nearly two weeks.

When they returned, they made a path through November snow with upward of five thousand bones, and few answers.

"I have managed to reassemble three or four nearly complete skeletons, Lady Queen," said Madlen. "But mostly I've got fragments, and not enough time or space to work out which goes with which. I've found no evidence of burning, but some of sawing. I believe we're looking at hundreds of people, but I can't be any more specific. What would you say to having that cast off tomorrow?"

"I would say it's the first good news I've had in—" Bitterblue tried to calculate back, then eventual y gave up. "Forever,"

she said grumpily.

Leaving the infirmary, stepping into the great courtyard, she came face-to-face with Saf. "Oh!" she said. "Hel o."

"Hel o," he said, also taken by surprise.

He was, apparently, about to climb onto the window- caulking platform and haul it, with Fox, to whatever obscene height today's work cal ed for. He looked wel —the water didn't seem to have hurt him—and there was something quiet in the way he stood there before her, looking at her.

Less antagonism?

"I've something to show you, and a request," Bitterblue said. "Wil you come to the library sometime in the next hour?"

Saf gave a small nod. Behind him, Fox tied a rope to her belt, not seeming to notice them.

DEATH STORED ALL the journals Bitterblue wasn't working on in a low cabinet in his desk. When Bitterblue asked to borrow one, he unlocked the cabinet and handed it to her impatiently.

When, shortly thereafter, Saf walked into her library nook with high eyebrows, she passed it to him. Flipping pages, he said, "What is this?"

"A cipher we can't break," she said, "written in Leck's hand.

We've found thirty-five volumes."

"One for each year of his reign," Saf said.

"Yes," Bitterblue said, trying to look as if she'd already noticed that. As if, in fact, he hadn't just given her a tool to take back to the deciphering team. If each book represented a year, could they isolate similarities between corresponding parts of different journals? Would each book's opening language, for example, relate to winter? "I want you to take it," Bitterblue said, "but you must keep it close, Saf. Show no one outside Teddy, Tilda, and Bren, tell no one, and if no one has any useful thoughts, return it directly. Don't get caught with it."

"No," Saf said, shaking his head, holding it out to give back to her. "I'm not taking it, not with the way things have been.

Someone'l find out. I'll be attacked, they'll get it from me, and your secret will be ruined."

Bitterblue sighed shortly. "I suppose I can't argue. Wel then, will you look through it now and tell the others about it, and let me know what they say?"

"Yes, all right," he said, "if you think it'l help."

He'd gotten his hair cut. It was darker now, and bits of it stuck up endearingly, in new directions. Confused by his will ingness to be helpful and conscious that she was staring, she walked to the hanging while he flipped through the book again. The sad, green eyes of the woman in white calmed her.

"What's the request?" he said.

"What?" she said, spinning around.

"You said you had something to show me," Saf said, gesturing with the book, "and a request. I'll do it, whatever it is."

"You—you will ?" she said. "You're not going to fight me?"

He rested his eyes on her face with a frankness she hadn't seen there since the night he'd kissed her, then found her crying in the graveyard and blamed himself for it. He looked a bit embarrassed. "Maybe the cold water unblocked my head," he said. "What's the request?"

She swal owed. "My friends have found you a hiding place.

If a crisis arises with the crown and you need to hide, will you go to the drawbridge tower on Winged Bridge?"

"Yes."