“And these”—Zara crossed to stand over the shorter line of keys, the light from the window casting her shadow over at least half of them—“are the ones whose meaning I have yet to ascertain. If there’s a puzzle here or a story about the Gilded Blade, it’s somewhere in these.”
Gigi squatted next to the second row of keys and took stock.I am one with the world, she thought, taking it all in,and the world is thirty-four keys.
Twenty of them were letter keys, one for each letter of the alphabet except…
“B,D,S,T,W, andZ,” Slate said from above her.
“Gold star,” Gigi told him, and then she looked over at the other line of keys and picked those letters out, one by one. “So originally, every letter of the alphabet made an appearance,” Gigi observed.
That didn’t give them much to work with. There were number keys in both sets as well, only three of which were in the smaller line: four, eleven, and twenty-three. Gigi reached out to lightly touch the outer edges of the number keys. “They’re all different,” she noted out loud. “The flourishes and braids of metalaroundthe letters and numbers—they’re unique.”
“You don’t miss a thing, do you?” Zara said quietly.
“Not much,” Gigi replied, turning her attention to the remaining keys. There were eleven of them, which struck Gigi as a lucky number. One by one, she took them in, focusing on the design at the head of each key:
A pair of cherries.
An acorn.
Five octagons, one inside another.
A cluster of hexagons—ten, total.
A mermaid.
A dragon.
A scorpion.
A swirl of what looked like solid gold barbed wire.
A smaller circle partially covering a larger one, both of them made of vibrant copper.
An eagle.
A harp.
Gigi looked up to see Knox edging toward the door. “Is that aninvitationto jump on your back?” she asked innocently.
Knox glared at her but stayed put, and Gigi decided to take that as her cue to concentrate on the most abstract keys of the bunch. She started with the key with the two copper circles, turning it one way and then another, and then cocking her head to the side. “This one—I think it’s an eclipse.”
One of the benefits of being perpetually chaos-brained was that it was easy sometimes to see things that more orderly minds missed.
“And this one…” Gigi picked up the key with the cluster of hexagons. “I’m guessinghoneycomb.”
Slate crouched beside her and without a word picked up the key with the octagons—five of them, embedded one inside another.
The moment Mattias Slater touched that key, Gigi saw it. “A web,” she said.“Spin, spin,” said the spider to the web.
“Delightful,” Zara said. “The web again, yet another inheritance for which I was passed over. That, it seems, is the story ofmylife.”
Gigi knew what it was like to always be second-best.If that.
“Allow me.” Alisa bent down to briskly pluck three keys from the bunch: the honeycomb, the eclipse key, and the one with what looked like solid gold barbed wire. “These three—I know thestoriesthey correspond to: one Mr. Hawthorne told me when I was nine and two that I was there for. None of them have anything to do with Alice.”
“You and this family.” That was from Knox. “You go way back.”
Alisa neither confirmed nor denied that statement as she transferred the keys to the other side of them.
