A muscle feathered in her jaw, though like me, etiquette demanded she retain her manners, whether or not he condescended to us. “Have you been, Your Highness?”
“Once, when I was ten. You were very young, but I remember you.” His lips curled in humor. “You were playing with dolls on the grass outside the stables. Your mother called for you to come in and ready for bed, so you took off into the trees, barefoot like a little fire nymph, your hair a riot of curls behind you.”
I glanced at Diara, frozen across from him. She hadn’t moved, but I caught the twitch of her fingers. “I’m sure I didn’t,” she said politely.
He chuckled. “You did.”
Her lips flattened. Unable to argue with an heir, she glanced out the window, ignoring him instead.
Resolving to call him a string of offensive names in my head, I turned away as well, curling my feet under me in a position that would have set Selena’s teeth on edge. Across from us, Hadrian exhaled. I couldn’t decide if he was insulted by our refusal to speak to him, or amused.
Digging Selena’s journal from my bag, I rested my temple against the carriage wall as I squinted at the coded markings.
We didn't speak for an hour, though I could feel Hadrian and Diara sneaking intolerant glances at each other.
I turned page after page, searching for letters I recognized. Sometimes a folded note fell out, written in the same code but by someone else’s hand. A feminine scrawl messier than Selena’s. A masculine one as well, boxy and thin.
“What are you doing?” Hadrian asked me.
I frowned, opting not to look at the prince. “Finding a way to waste my time.”
He groaned softly, and the springs of his seat groaned as he stretched onto his feet. With a grand sigh, he settled on the bench between Diara and me. She raised her eyebrows at him, immediately vacating her place to take his with a glowering stare.
“Decoding your spy manual?” His tone was playful, but I wondered if a part of him was serious.
Who brought you here? Where are you really from? I’ve checked the registrars, they’ve been forged. It’s been very well covered, I have to admit I’m impressed at the lengths someone went to plant you.
“Yes,” I said, my own tone as playful as his, though I threw daggers as our eyes met.
He pursed his lips, glancing side-long at me as he held out his hand. “May I see?”
I stared at him. Even under my flash of annoyance, I supposed it couldn’t hurt—I’d poured over the journal all night and hadn’t found a single word written in Calderian. The pages rustled as I flipped the cover shut and handed it to him.
He leaned back, crossing one leg over the other and licking his thumb to turn a few pages. “What language is this?”
“I don’t know.”
He smiled down at the journal as if he didn’t believe me.
Another flash of irritation, this time stronger, and I stifled the urge to roll my eyes.
“Do you have a pen?”
Sighing, I leaned into my bag, offering my fountain pen to him.
He stared at it for a second, studying the little tool, then took it from me. Tearing one of the blank pages from the back, he began copying markings onto the page. I watched him work, head tilted in curiosity, my long, dark hair tickling the curve of my arm. Marking his place with his index finger, he skipped past markings he’d already copied, adding a new one to his list when he reached it.
After flipping through several pages without adding anything, he smiled. “It’s not written in modern Cyprillic Alphabet. Our alphabet has twenty-six letters, but there’s thirty here. But good news, itiswritten in Calderian.”
“It is?” I glanced down at the pages I’d obsessed over since the night before. “What do you mean?”
He lifted a shoulder. “I study languages, and I recognize patterns. You have your vowels, your common letters, and then these markings, which I think translate to two letters fused together to make their own sound, likeCH.” He narrowed his eyes at the paper, eyeing it the way a fisherman watches a school of tuna swimming under his boat, wondering how best to make his catch.
I watched him traverse the pages, sometimes flipping back to the same secret word, making notes and then crossing notes out, rewriting them below. By the time his page was more black ink than white paper, we’d long since passed the farms and fields, the carriage winding along the ragged coastline. Diara watched him as well, split between interest and dislike.
“It’s a cypher,” he said, running his fingernail below his version of the markings for us to follow and then handing the ink-riddled paper to me. Twenty-seven of the letters wereidentified by his hand. He ripped out a second clean page, copying a random coded line from the journal, and pointed to the first character. “What’s this symbol?”
I glanced at the inked cypher in my hands.“C.”
