The Blackthorn Key (11 page)

I was alone.

For the first time since I'd found him, I was alone.

I couldn't speak. I couldn't breathe. All I could do was sob.

Despair swallowed me, like a demon. It howled in my head, crushed my chest, spiked claws into my soul and pulled.
Come,
it said.
It's peaceful here
. I wanted to go. I wanted to die. I wished so much that the Cult had taken me, too.

A breeze from the window brushed my hair against my eyelids. At my feet, I heard the rustling of paper. It was the page I'd torn from the ledger. Pushed by the wind, it fluttered and scraped across the floorboards.

Despair chanted, reached for me, called me back.

No
, I said.

I punched the table. Hard. It echoed like a hammer. The skin on my middle finger split at the knuckle. Blood oozed out, dripped down, mixed with my master's in the water on the stone.

My hand throbbed. The pain brought me back to life.

Because you
are
alive, Christopher. He kept you alive. That's why he sent you away.

And he left you a message.

The paper trembled in the breeze, then stilled. I
straightened in the chair, pressed against it. The oak dug lines in my back.

I wanted to go to sleep, to sleep forever. To see my master again. And I would.

But not yet.

Master Benedict had left me that message in the ledger for a reason. Whatever was on that page was so important that he'd stayed to write it down instead of running for his life.

He needed me. Three years ago, I'd needed him, and he'd saved me, brought me to Blackthorn, gave me my first real home. That life was gone now, stolen along with his. It didn't matter. He needed me. Even in death.

I wiped my eyes, my heart still burning. I shouted from the flames, so he'd hear me all the way in heaven.
I promise you, Master. Whatever you asked of me, I'll do. I won't cry. I won't rest. I won't fail.

And I'll find whoever killed you. I'll make them pay. Before God and all His Saints, I swear it.

There was a knock on the door. Tom's mother called through it. “Christopher? Is everything all right?”

I looked in the mirror. My reflection spoke back.

“Everything's fine,” it said.

TOM'S MOTHER ADJUSTED MY COLLAR.
“There,” she said. “That's not so bad.”

Tom had grown so big so quickly, she'd had to go back three years to find something of his that fit me. Now I was kitted in a pair of brown wool and linen breeches and a white linen shirt with a burgundy stain down its sleeve. I remembered the shirt. Tom had been wearing it the day I'd met him.

It was three months after I'd first become an apprentice. Master Benedict had given me a book on ancient warfare to study. After reading about catapults, I became fascinated with the idea of building one. Master Benedict let me use some spare wood from the workshop and a fresh
set of maple branches to do it. On Sunday, after service, I'd lugged my miniature siege engine north to Bunhill Fields to test it out, carrying a selection of rotting fruits as ammunition in a burlap sack over my shoulder.

As it turned out, the catapult launched things very well. It just wasn't especially accurate. I stared with horror as the first thing I fired—a profoundly overripe pomegranate—careened wildly to the left and bonked a rather large boy on the top of his head, squirting juice all over his shirt.

Puzzled, he looked up at the clouds, as if wondering why God was pelting him with pomegranates. Then he spotted my little catapult on the grass. He came toward me holding a very young girl in his arms, who laughed with delight as small, burgundy seeds dripped from the boy's hair onto his collar.

My first thought was to run as fast as I could possibly go. I'd grown up surrounded by bigger boys in Cripplegate, so I expected a severe pounding. Instead, he spoke rather calmly, especially considering he now smelled like compost.

“Why are you attacking me with fruit?” he said.

“I'm so sorry,” I said, a phrase I'd end up repeating many times over the next three years. “I wasn't aiming at you, I swear.”

The girl in his arms thrust her tiny fists in the air and cheered. “Do again!” she said.

I pointed at the branch I'd used for the catapult's launcher. “It's supposed to go straight. I think I broke it on the way here.”

The boy studied the bent launcher. “Is that maple?”

I nodded. “It's all I had. I probably should have made it out of yew.”

The boy tilted his head and thought about it. “There's yew trees by the cemetery,” he said. “Do you have a knife?”

We used the new branch of yew to fix the launcher while the girl, Tom's youngest sister, Molly, dug her little fingers into the grass. Then we fired off the rest of the fruit, the three of us cheering every shot. Afterward, I ran home to show Master Benedict my catapult, and to tell him about Tom, my new friend.

I remembered Master Benedict listening, smiling gently. “Very good,” he'd said.

I turned away so Tom's mother wouldn't see my face.

•  •  •

By the time I came downstairs, Tom's father had already hauled his children back to work. The girls were in the side room doing laundry, splashing their baker's aprons with soapy water. Cecily, at twelve years old the most senior of the girls, blew suds into my hair as I passed. The rest of them laughed and scooped up their own fistfuls of bubbles.
I ran out of there before they covered me in foam.

I found Tom at the back door, scrubbing the steps. He shook his head when he saw what I was wearing. “I should've run away.”

“From me or the catapult?” I said.

“You
are
a catapult,” he said, but his heart wasn't in the joke. He sighed. “I'm really sorry about Master Benedict. I liked him.”

“You were afraid of him.”

“Yeah. But he was good to you.” Tom scanned my face, then sighed again, more deeply. “All right,” he said.

“All right what?”

“I'll help.”

“Help with what?”

“Whatever your new scheme is.”

I pulled the ledger page from my pocket and held it up. “We find Master Benedict's killers.”

•  •  •

Tom stared at the last three lines on the page.

†
Δ
esid. A: rapf. O set. age Htsn. oil eh. two leb. Ht4: shg. Uh.
←

↓
M08
→

end.swords

neminidixeris

We'd come inside to read them, smoothing the paper over an empty worktable in the bakery. Though the day's business was done, the smell of freshly baked dough still filled the air like a cloud.

“It's a message,” I said. “For me. Master Benedict wrote it when—” My voice caught.

Stop it
, I scolded myself.
You said you wouldn't cry. You made a promise.

I cleared my throat. “Master Benedict must have known his killers,” I said. “He wrote this for me when he knew he was going to die.”

Tom's eyes went wide. “The murderers' names are in here?”

“I think so. I haven't worked it out yet. The codes—”

“Wait,” Tom said. “If this says who the killers are, why didn't you give it to Lord Ashcombe?”

“Master Benedict said not to.”

“He did?”

“In the last line,” I said.

Tom read it. Or tried to. “
Nemi
 . . . uh . . . what? Is this a word?”

“Two words. It's Latin. It says
‘nemini dixeris.'
Master Benedict didn't hide this in code so that when I saw it, right away I'd know what to do.”

“Steal this page?”

“Keep it secret.
Nemini dixeris
means ‘tell no one.' ”

“Why would he want to keep his killers' names a secret?”

“I don't know,” I said. “But if you have any paper, we can find out.”

•  •  •

We started with the first line of the message. It was hidden by one of the first codes Master Benedict had ever taught me.

†
Δ
esid. A: rapf. O set. age Htsn. oil eh. two leb. Ht4: shg. Uh.
←

“It's gibberish,” Tom said.

“Actually, it's English,” I said. “Plain old English.”

He frowned. “I see
some
words. Set . . . age . . . oil. And two.”

“That's the trick. It looks like those are words, but they're only there to throw you off. Same with the dots. The arrow's the only thing that matters. It tells you what to do.”

He pointed to the left. “Go that way?”

“Yes.”

“I don't get it.”

“On the line,” I said. “Go that way on the line.”

It dawned on him. “You mean go
backward
.”

“Right. Get rid of the dots and capitals . . .” I wrote it down.

esidarapfosetagehtsnoilehtwolebht4shguh

“. . . and then go backward . . .”

hughs4thbelowthelionsthegatesofparadise

“. . . and you'll get the words,” I said.

Hugh's 4th below the lions the gates of paradise

Tom looked impressed. Then: “That doesn't mean . . . was it Master
Hugh
who killed him?”

“What?” I stiffened. “Of course not.”

“But you said Master Benedict would name his killers. Although I did kind of expect more of an ‘Arthur Quackenbush did it, curse his eyes.' ”

“It doesn't say ‘Hugh.' It says ‘Hugh's.' Hugh's fourth.”

“Hugh's fourth what?” Tom said. “And what lions? The ones in the king's zoo? In the Tower?”

“I'm not sure,” I said. “Maybe it's on the second line.”

↓
M08
→

end.swords

“I remember this,” Tom said. “It's the same code as the gunpowder recipe. But aren't there supposed to be numbers?”

“There are.” I held the page out. “Smell it.”

Tom looked puzzled. “Is that a joke?”

“I'm serious.”

Suspicious, he leaned over and sniffed the paper. “Is that . . . ?” He sat up. “Lemons. It smells like lemons.”

“Before Master Benedict sent me out of the shop,” I said, “he asked me to bring him the lemon juice. I didn't understand why, since lemon juice is the treatment for scurvy, which none of our customers had. Then, when I came back, he'd tucked the ledger under the jar on the shelf. It wasn't until I saw the message that I realized what he was doing. He wrote the numbers in lemon juice. He's hiding codes inside codes.”

“Why would he do that?” Tom said.

“Because whatever this is, he
really
doesn't want anyone but me to see it.”

“How do
we
see it?”

“Fire,” I said. “The heat will cook the lemon juice. We need a candle or something.”

Tom used the still-smoldering coals in the baking ovens
to light a wax taper. I asked him to hold it steady. “If the paper gets burnt . . .”

He gripped the wax so tightly, I thought he was going to squash it. I had to steady my own hands as I brought the paper close, hovering above the flame. Slowly, I dragged it across. I smelled the tang of burning citrus. Like magic, dark brown marks appeared on the page.

↓
M08
→
05142020222207201601080420210115 end.swords

For a moment, we just looked at it. Then I wrote out the key to the code.

We translated the message. We sat back in our chairs.

“What does
that
mean?” Tom said.

I STARED AT IT. “I
 . . . I Don't know.”

JSYYAALYUFMIYZFT

Tom scratched his head. “Is it Latin?”

“It can't be,” I said. “There's no letter J in Latin. No U, either.”

“Maybe this is another code, like you said. Maybe this one's really,
really
secret.”

Another code made sense. “But how do I decipher it? Where's the key?”

“Well . . . maybe those symbols mean something. At the beginning.”

†Δ

“Is that a cross?” he said.