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.
P A R T T H R E E
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?"
"My mother had a servant named Ara who disappeared," whispered Bitterblue. "I remember."
"Lady Queen?"
"She embroidered in cipher, Helda! Mama did. She must have been trying to create a record she could read to remember what was real. It must have taken her hours to write a single small passage! Here, help me. My name is the keyword. A star is a B. A waning moon is an I, a candle a T, the sun an E, a falling star an R, a waxing moon an L, the ring constellation a U. My name is made of light," she cried out. "My mother chose symbols of light for the letters of my name. Is Po—" Po was ill. "Is Giddon truly gone?"
"He is, Lady Queen. What in the world are you going on about?"
"Tell no one else," Bitterblue said. "Helda. Until we know what it means, tell no one, and help me arrange them."
They pulled the sheets out of her closets and off her bed and took an inventory: 228 sheets with embroidery lining the edges; 89 pillowcasings. Ashen seemed not to have dated anything; there was no way to determine the order to place them in, so Bitterblue and Helda arranged them in neat, arithmetically divided piles on her bedroom floor. And Bitterblue read and read and read.
Certain words and phrases recurred often, sometimes filling up an entire sheet.