Bitterblue (Graceling Realm #3)(62)
Author: Kristin Cashore

"It was on that shelf," Death said, pointing to the bookshelf directly across from his desk, perhaps five paces away.

"Isn't that the mathematics section?"

"It is exactly that, Lady Queen," said Death, "ful of dark, slender volumes, which is why this enormous red thing caught my eye."

"But—when—"

"It appeared in the night, Lady Queen!"

"That's extraordinary," Bitterblue said. "We need to find out who put it there. I'll ask Helda. But are you tell ing me that this book doesn't make Leck's books coherent?"

"Using it as a key, Lady Queen, Leck's books contain gibberish."

"Have you tried using the pronunciation key? Perhaps if you pronounce the symbols, they sound like our words."

"Yes, I tried that, Lady Queen," said Death, joining her behind the desk, kneeling, unlocking the low cabinet with the key he kept on a string around his neck. Bringing out one of Leck's journals at random, he opened to the middle and began to read aloud. "W ayng eezh wghee zhdzlby mzhsr ayf ypayzhgghnkeeoh DASH khf—"

"Yes," Bitterblue said. "You've made your point, Death.

What if you transcribed that horrible sound into our lettering? Does that become a cipher we could crack?"

"I think it's much less complicated than that, Lady Queen,"

said Death. "I believe King Leck wrote in cipher in this other language."

Bitterblue blinked. "The way we do in our language, but in his."

"Exactly, Lady Queen. I believe that all our work identifying the use of a six-letter key was not in vain."

"And—" Bitterblue was now resting her face flat on the desk. She moaned. "That strikes you as less complicated? To break this cipher, not only will we need to learn the other language, but We'll need to learn about the other language.

What letters are used most often, and in what ratio to the others. What words tend to be used together. And what if it's not a cipher with revolving alphabets and a six-letter key? Or what if there's more than one six-letter key? How can we ever guess a key in another language? And if we do ever manage to decipher anything, the deciphered text will still be in the other language!"

"Lady Queen," said Death solemnly, still kneeling at her side, "it will be the most difficult mental chal enge I have ever faced, and the most important."

Bitterblue raised her eyes to his. His entire being was glowing, and she understood him suddenly; she understood his devotion to difficult but important work. She said, "Have you really learned the other language already?"

"No," he said. "I've barely begun. It's going to be a slow and difficult process."

"It's too much for me, Death. I might learn some words, but I don't think my mind is going to be able to follow yours into the decipherment. I won't be able to help. And, oh, it terrifies me that you carry so much responsibility, all alone.

Something this big shouldn't depend so entirely on a single person. No one must learn what you're doing, or you won't be safe. Is there anything you want or need that I could give you to make things easier?"

"Lady Queen," he said, "you've given me all I want. You're the queen a librarian dreams of."

NOW, IF ONLY she could learn to be the queen those with more practical considerations dreamed of.

She final y received a ciphered letter from her uncle Ror, who agreed, with some cantankerousness, to travel to Monsea with a generous contingent of the Lienid Navy. I'm not happy about it, Bitterblue, he wrote. Y ou know I avoid involving myself in the matters of the five inner kingdoms.

I cannot recommend strongly enough that you do the same, and I don't appreciate that you've left me with little choice but to offer my navy as your protection from their whims. We will have a serious talk about this when I arrive.

Her cousin Skye enclosed a ciphered letter as wel , as he always did, for the eighteenth letter in every sentence of Skye's deciphered text always combined to make the key for the next of Ror's letters. Father would do almost anything for you, Cousin, but this one definitely ruffled his feathers. I took an extended vacation to the north just to get away from the yelling. I'm quite impressed with you.

Keep it up. We wouldn't want him to get complacent in his old age. How is my little brother?

It couldn't be too terribly bad if Skye was joking about it.

And it was a great relief to Bitterblue both that she was in a position to influence Ror and that Ror was strong-minded enough to protest. It suggested the potential, someday, for an even balance of power between them—if she could ever convince him that she was grown up now, and that sometimes, she was right.

She did think he was wrong about some things. Lienid's seclusion from the five inner kingdoms was the luxury of an island kingdom, but she thought perhaps it was a trifle disingenuous on Ror's part. Ror's niece was the Monsean queen and his son a Council leader, Ror's kingdom was the seven kingdoms' wealthiest and most just, and at a time when kings were being deposed and kingdoms being born again on shaky legs, Ror had the potential to be a powerful example for the rest of the world.

Bitterblue wanted to be a powerful example with him. She wanted to find the way to build a nation that other nations would like to imitate.

How strange that Ror had mentioned nothing about the remuneration issue in his letter, for Bitterblue had sent her letter asking for remuneration advice before she'd sent the letter asking Ror to bring his navy. Perhaps the navy letter had upset him so much that he'd forgotten the other issue? Perhaps—perhaps Bitterblue could begin without his advice. Perhaps it was a thing she could plan herself, with the help of the few people she trusted. What if she had advisers, clerks, ministers who would listen to her? What if she had advisers who were unafraid of their own pain, unafraid of the kingdom's unhealed parts? What if she weren't always fighting against those who should be helping her?

What a strange thing a queen was. She found herself thinking sometimes, especial y during the few minutes a day Madlen all owed her to knead bread dough: I f Leck came from some land to the east and my mother came from Lienid, how am I the supreme ruler of Monsea? How can I be, without a drop of Monsean blood in my veins? And yet, she couldn't imagine being anyone else; her queenness was something she couldn't separate from herself. It had happened so fast, in the throwing of a dagger. Bitterblue had looked across a room at her dead father's body and known, to her very core, what she'd just become. She'd said it aloud. "I'm the Queen of Monsea."

If she could find the right people, the people she could trust who would help her, would she begin to assume the true purpose of a queen?

And what then? Monarchy was tyranny. Leck had proven that. If she found the right people to help her, were there ways she could change that too? Could a queen with a queen's power arrange her administration such that her citizens had power too, to communicate their needs?

There was something about the kneading of bread that connected Bitterblue's feet to the earth. Her wanderings did it too, her continued castle explorations. Needing candles for her bedside table one day, she went to get them herself at the chandler. Noticing her fastgrowing wardrobe of trouser-skirt gowns, and the sleeves that were converted now back to buttonlessness, she asked Helda to introduce her to her dressmakers. Curious, she burst in on the boy who came every night to clear her dinner dishes away— then wished she'd planned that one more wisely, for he wasn't a boy. He was a young man with startling, dark good looks and fine shoulders and a beautiful way with his hands, and she was wearing a bright red robe with too-big pink slippers, her hair a mess and a smear of ink on her nose.

It was deeply satisfying, the workings of the castle around her. When she crossed the great courtyard in cold that sliced through her, she saw Saf on his platform, and workers clearing the ice from the drains. She saw snow fall ing onto the glass and meltwater pouring into the fountain. In the middle of the night in the corridors, men and women shined the floors on their knees with soft cloths while snow piled on the ceilings above them. She began to recognize the people she passed. No progress was made in the search for a witness to the red dictionary delivery, but when Bitterblue visited Death in the library, she learned the new alphabet, watched him draw alphabet grids and letter frequency diagrams, and helped him keep track of the numbers. "They cal their language by a name we might pronounce as 'Del ian,' Lady Queen. And they—or, at any rate, Leck—cal s ours, more or less, 'Gracelingian.'"

"Del ian, like the false name of the river? Like the River Del ?"

"Yes, Lady Queen."

"And Gracelingian? The name of our language is 'Gracelingian'?!"

"Yes."

Even Madlen's work of articulating skeletons, which had taken over the infirmary laboratories and one of the patient wards, comforted Bitterblue. These bones were the truth of something Leck had done, and Madlen was trying to return them to themselves. It < felt, to Bitterblue, like a way of showing respect.

"How is your arm, Lady Queen?" Madlen asked her, holding what looked like a handful of ribs, staring at them as if they might speak to her.

"Better," Bitterblue said. "And kneading the bread grounds me."

"There's power in touching things, Lady Queen," said Madlen, echoing something Bitterblue herself had once thought. Madlen held the ribs out for Bitterblue to take.

Bitterblue took them, feeling their peculiar smoothness.

Tracing a raised line on one.

"That rib broke once, and rehealed, Lady Queen," said Madlen.

"Your own arm, where the bone broke, is probably a bit like that."

Bitterblue knew Madlen was right: There was power in touching things. Holding this once-broken bone, she felt the pain its person had felt when it broke. She felt the sadness of a life that had ended too soon, and of a body that had been dumped as if it meant nothing; she felt her own death, which would happen someday. There was a sharp sadness in that too. Bitterblue had no peace with the notion of dying.

In the bakery, leaning over the bread dough, pushing and shaping it into an elastic thing, she began to find clarity on one point: Like Death, Bitterblue also had a taste for difficult— impossible—slow—messy work. She would figure out how to be queen, slowly, messily. She could reshape what it meant to be queen, and reshaping what it meant to be queen would reshape the kingdom.

And then, one day at the very start of December, as she pushed her tired arms to their daily limit, she looked up from the baker's table. Death stood before her. She didn't need to ask. From the luminous look on his face, she knew.

Chapter 35

IN THE LIBRARY, Death handed her a piece of paper.

"The key is ozhaleegh, " said Bitterblue, the pronunciation awkward in her mouth.

"Yes, Lady Queen."

"What does that word mean?"