The Traitor's Blade, Kevin Sands [fiction novels to read txt] 📗

E M P L A R S T E M P L A R S T E

M O I U R H J B X A M G X B H B L L

T K

“Next, start with M, go to I, and we get… W.”

T E M P L A R S T E M P L A R S T E

M O I U R H J B X A M G X B H B L L

T K W

I already didn’t like what we were seeing. And I was right not to. Deciphering the whole message left us with nonsense.

T E M P L A R S T E M P L A R S T E

M O I U R H J B X A M G X B H B L L

T K W F G H S J E W A R M B Q J S H

“It didn’t work,” Tom said.

I shook my head. TEMPLARS wasn’t the key.

Tom thought some more. “What about ‘treasure’?”

We tried that next.

T R E A S U R E T R E A S U R E T R

M O I U R H J B X A M G X B H B L L

T X E U Z N S X E J I G F H Q X S U

It didn’t get us anywhere, either.

I sighed. Figuring out a key was never easy. We’d just have to keep going until we found it. Tom and I tried whatever we could think of that fit the riddle. ASSASSIN. LOUISXIV. KING. Even RAVEN.

I really hoped that last one wouldn’t be the answer—and it wasn’t. All I ended up with was a similar jumble of letters that meant nothing.

“Maybe we’ve got the wrong idea,” Tom said.

“How do you mean?”

“What if it’s a different code?”

That was a possibility. If the cipher wasn’t Vigenère, then the square would never give us the answer. But it was just as possible we hadn’t figured out the right key yet. After all, the only cipher we’d used in Paris that needed a key was Vigenère—

Wait.

Maybe that’s what the hint about Paris meant. We were supposed to use the same key we’d used to solve the riddle there.

The key in Paris turned out to be RAI. Excited, I tried it.

R A I R A I R A I R A I R A I R A I

M O I U R H J B X A M G X B H B L L

V O A D R Z S B P J M Y G B Z K L D

But that didn’t work, either.

Now I was totally stumped. Further thoughts were interrupted by a knock on the door.

Dobson had returned. “The Marquess of Chillingham requests your company, sirs. At your earliest convenience.”

Diplomatic, our Dobson. What Lord Ashcombe had likely said was Get those two idiots here now.

“What did you do?” Tom said to me as Dobson led us through the palace.

“Nothing,” I said. “Why do you always assume everything’s my fault?”

He shrugged. “I find it saves time.”

As it turned out, neither of us was in trouble. Lord Ashcombe received us in an office; I wasn’t sure if it was his. Not that it mattered. I’d left the map of Whitehall on the desk, so I had no idea how I’d find this room again.

Lord Ashcombe was staring out the window, looking down at the Privy Garden. The marble statues were lit by torches, glowing against the darkness of the night. The King’s Warden held something. With his back turned, I couldn’t tell what it was.

“Lockdown’s over,” he said.

“What caused it, my lord?”

“Murder. Servant girl of seventeen, by the name of Mary Brickenham.”

Tom covered his mouth in horror.

“When did this happen?” I said.

“She brought lunch to the Countess of Castlemaine at one thirty, so sometime later than that. Her body was found in the charcoal house. Just lying there, atop a pile toward the back.”

I frowned. Given the cold weather, servants would be in and out of the charcoal house all day. It would have been trivially easy for the killer to shovel charcoal over the body, hide it in one of the piles. Mary wouldn’t have been found for days.

So either someone didn’t want to give themselves away by getting charcoal all over their clothes, or… “The killer wanted her discovered.”

Lord Ashcombe nodded. “This murder wasn’t random. There’s a message in it.”

“To whom?” Tom said. “Saying what?”

“I don’t know.”

“Then why do you think it’s a message?” I said.

“The weapon was left in the body. She’d been stabbed through the heart, from the back. With this.”

He slid the item he held across the desk. It was a dagger. Flat pommel, unadorned grip, narrow hilt, long blade.

I stared at it. “That’s the kind of dagger Simon was stabbed with.”

“Exactly.” Lord Ashcombe regarded me. “Whoever killed Mary Brickenham wanted Chastellain dead just the same.”

CHAPTER

9

LORD ASHCOMBE HAD NO ANSWER as to why anyone would want a servant and a French vicomte dead. According to him, Mary Brickenham was well liked and a decent worker, with no suitors or romantic involvements. He’d also been able to discover that Simon had visited Whitehall earlier that day, looking for me.

I regretted being stuck in the palace. Dr. Kemp had promised us Simon would be all right after his surgery, but I still would have liked to check on him. Lord Ashcombe said he’d ask Simon tomorrow if he’d seen Mary while he was here. In the meantime, Lord Ashcombe pointed out both daggers had a symbol on them, pressed into the steel near the hilt.

It was a W, imprinted inside a circle. It reminded me of the witches’ marks we’d seen in Devonshire.

“It’s not that,” Lord Ashcombe said when I mentioned it. “It’s a maker’s mark, hammered by the blacksmith. We’re trying to identify which man made them. And then, from there, who bought them.”

“Any leads, my