Chapter Ten #3
He peered down, nose almost touching the parchment.
A strand of hair swung across his cheekbone.
Eyes suddenly wild, he spat into the ink pot, swirled a quill through it, then shuffled through the stacks of parchment on the desk, searching for a blank sheet.
I reached for Prospero’s armillary sphere and placed it before him too.
We rotated the brass rings until the metal sky mirrored the real one outside.
He drew a new chart beside the one we’d found. Today’s sky. When he’d finished, the two were almost exact, but not quite. In Prospero’s chart, the Moon had moved through a number of signs. The Sun, Mercury, and Venus were all nudged slightly to the left.
We compared the two side by side. “If this is today,” he said, “then the chart we just found is for—sixteen days from now? Fifteen? No, sixteen, I think.” He did a quick mental calculation. “The Moon exits Aquarius today and is entering Virgo here.”
The chart breached the surface of the page once again. “But this was drawn long ago. What is going to happen sixteen days from now?”
“Could be a birth,” Roland offered. “Or an heir’s conception?”
“Why hide it away, then?”
Roland had no answer to that, his hope dimming.
What were Eleanor and Prospero preparing for?
Both of us had magic, yes, but not enough to stop this: the planets transiting through the sky, time always failing to hold them back.
I held the candle closer to the paper, dripping hot wax onto my hand, flinching at the sting.
“Perhaps this chart is somehow the key to the cipher?”
Our attention returned to the Book of Hours, but when Prospero’s code rose up in the margins, it was indecipherable, a shifting, random amalgamation of symbols. Roland wrote down the fragments he could glean in his careful hand, but it was useless.
Only a Mercury could make sense of it.
Roland turned to a new page. I leaned over his shoulder, our breaths quick and excited. We waited for the symbols to rise up from the depths of the book, heads bent close, cheeks nearly brushing. His eyes flicked to me, then away.
Legible words finally bobbed to the surface.
In case you look too closely, Uncle.
I shall await your ghost.
Eleanor
The script flashed silver.
Suddenly, a dark wave broke inside of me. My heartbeat slowed, my throat constricting until I couldn’t draw breath.
“Roland,” I gasped.
He glanced up, brows knitted together, just as my body refused to hold me upright anymore.
Catching me in his lap, he cursed at the heat gathering in my cheeks, my bulging eyes.
I was struggling to form words, but I didn’t need them.
He knew precisely what I wanted: Prospero, help, The Celestial Bodies.
He laid my head down gently and tore Charles’s library apart, books splitting at their seams as they crashed to the ground.
Charles had to have a stolen copy. He must. Roland doubled over, then.
A violent cough sprayed his white shirt crimson.
On his hands and knees, his breaths hard-fought, a glint on a spine caught his eye. Prospero the All-Knowing. He shoved the book toward me.
I whipped through pages with none of the careful delicacy I’d insisted upon earlier. I was gasping for air as Roland sank to the floor, panting against my shoulder. I felt each convulsion of his body against mine.
My eyes darted. At birth, a Mercury can speak and understand all tongues known and unknown, including those of animals and some varieties of plant …
hold perfect pitch … distinguish between what is said and what is truly intended …
useful in the negotiations of contracts and treaties, kings have long utilized …
Roland slammed a finger onto the opposite page.
The blood cipher requires careful consideration and study.
The more commonplace a phrase, the more difficult for a Mercury to seal.
The phrase can be read aloud or silently.
When the victim’s mind processes what he has heard or read, the phrase communicates to the body that it is dying.
… The heart will no longer circulate blood; the throat will close …
Outlawed by Parliament after King Bruce VI’s death …
the king read a rival’s letter before his page could open it first and died within minutes …
“It says nothing about undoing it,” Roland rasped, but I was lines ahead of him.
An advanced Mercury may be taught to counter the cipher with a new phrase, which soothes the body.
A rare occurrence, as blood ciphers typically bind the body to death fairly quickly.
Oliver. We needed to find Oliver.
I clutched Eleanor’s book to my chest, and the two of us struggled to our feet.
Roland kicked open the doors by the sleeping guards. Outside, a hot storm brewed. Soon, the court would return, Tom Guildford triumphant and muddied from the yard. Oliver had not been at the joust, so where was he?
“An inn,” Roland managed. “He’s staying at a shabby little inn. Insisted on it.”
There was no time to go searching for him in the city. We would be dead long before that.
I pointed to the great hall, making a gamble.
Each day a meal was laid out on the tables from noon to suppertime, entirely paid for by the Crown.
Any courtier might sit and eat at their leisure.
If Oliver was staying at such a shabby inn, then meager coins rattled inside his purse. He, no doubt, would accept a free meal.
We heaved ourselves along by grasping at tapestries, at walls, but the palace was cold and silent and remorseless. The rain outside had begun in earnest.
By the time we reached the doors to the great hall, Roland could hardly stand. His skin was as clammy as mine was, but he was shivering and pale, while I burnt with fever.
A page boy, standing outside the entrance with his twin, cried out when he saw Roland. They both wore his swan badge on their breasts.
Our throats had nearly closed, so we could only point desperately toward the hall. Despite the depravity of it, we began to crawl, dragging ourselves toward the long feasting tables.
How much did I want to live? I’d never asked myself such a question, but I felt the answer now, as I clawed at the floorboards, as my nails tore from pulling my body forward, curled wood shavings trapped beneath them.
Yes, let me live. I needed to know what this cipher meant; I needed to know who murdered Hal; I needed to live for so much more than myself, and it was me who reached a stunned Oliver first, Eleanor’s evil little book clenched between my teeth.
“Cipher…” I croaked, thrusting the book toward Oliver in the hope he’d understand. Hadn’t I just read that a Mercury could distinguish between what was said and what was truly intended?
We writhed on the floor, struggling to capture fresh air, Roland coughing blood down his chin and linen shirt. He mouthed something I didn’t catch.
Oliver’s quicksilver eyes widened, and he cast about for ink—there was nothing but the red wine in his goblet, or Roland’s blood.
He chose the blood; it was thicker. Roland had slumped over on his side as Oliver dipped his finger into the smear down his chin and neck, then pressed it onto a blank page in the book, dipping and writing until he had a phrase.
Silver symbols burst through the air.
He spun the book around, shoved it toward me. “Read this. Quickly!”
Caught with a blood cipher,
caught in the noose.
I felt the command sink inside of me, waking my body up in small bursts of awareness. For the first time in minutes, I could haul in a deep breath. But Roland was still choking, and as Oliver held him up, I watched the light die in his eyes.
I realized then what he’d mouthed. Her first.
As I had earlier in the day, I grasped for his mind.
This time, there was nothing to hold on to—gone were the things he felt, gone were the memories he cherished.
The sudden lack inside of him was terrifying; he was usually brimming with so much emotion.
I laid my cheek against his heart. Pressed down harder, as if somewhere, deeper in his chest, there might be a flicker of life.
Oliver slid Roland’s lid open and held the book in front of his unseeing eye. “He didn’t read it in time. Bianca, he’s gone.”
“No. He’s not,” I said. “He’s not. Roland. Come back.” I gripped his shoulders, shaking him with all my strength. He flopped limply on the floor. No. Not again. Please not again. No one else. Take no one else from me.
There had already been so much death. I’d had the idea to search Eleanor’s things.
It was my fault we found the cipher. Roland’s blood was soaked on the book, and it was in my gown, and I knew, if he died, it would seep into my very soul.
Prospero’s voice rose out of the past. No magician can raise the dead.
I shook Roland again. I want you to wake up. Roland. I beg you. Please.