be because they'd contained the truth, about something. About anything; it didn't matter. She needed to read them.
"Grella's Harrowing Journey to the Source of the River XXXXXX," she added, suddenly realizing. "Leck forced you to cross out the word Dell throughout."
"No, Lady Queen. He forced me to cross out the word Silver."
"Silver? But the book is about the River Dell. I recognize the geography."
"The true name of the River Dell is the River Silver, Lady Queen," Death said.
Bitterblue stared at him, not comprehending. "But, everyone calls it the Dell!"
"Yes," he said. "Thanks to Leck, almost everyone does. They are wrong."
She leaned both hands against the desk, too overwhelmed, suddenly, to stand without support. "Death," she said with her eyes closed.
"Yes, Lady Queen?" he asked impatiently.
"Are you familiar with the library alcove that has a hanging of a red-haired woman and a sculpture of a child turning into a castle?"
"Of course, Lady Queen."
"I want a table moved into that alcove, and I want you to pile all the volumes you've rewritten on that table. I wish to read them and I wish that to be my workspace."
Bitterblue left the library, holding the cipher manuscript tight to her chest as if it might not actually be real. As if, if she stopped pressing it to herself, it might disappear.
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