Page 79 of The Space Between Stars

“Precisely. So what am I missing?”

“Atti… are you sleeping?”

“Yes.”

“Are you getting enough nutrients?”

“Yes, damn you, yes!”

They both looked at the note.

“He relates the silhouette of a crane to the moon,” Attilatia snapped.

“Tea?” Pinto offered.

“Please.” She thumped into a chair and crossed her arms.

Crane…

Attilatia’s mouth popped open. In Azadonia, her mother had been a councilor. She’d had Attilatia tutored in a half-dozen languages with the unrealistic hope that her daughter would one day fill her shoes. There was a Tera’thian homonym for the Nelfinden word “crane” that meant…

Sun?

The flat around her seemed to grow small so suddenly and with such efficiency that her stomach collided with the chair beneath her. She pulled the note closer and squinted. “Get me paper,” she whispered.

Pinto rustled through a cabinet for stationary as she scanned for homonyms.

There were several. First… Third… Puzzle….

A teacup clinked onto the table beside her, and Pinto sat across from her. He smoothed out a sheet of floral stationary between them and handed her a quill.

“Pinto… It’s not a poem. It’s a code.”

In Tera’thian. And that gag-inducing crane line had been the key. How did Roskaad know she understood Tera’thian?

Pinto chuckled again. “Of all the guests I entertain, you are always the most interesting. Back when I was trading in Chori—this was before the Grey Period—I once met…”

His prattle fell on deaf ears as she pieced together what Roskaad was trying to tell her. Nelfinden had a syllabic alphabet; Tera’thian was phonetic. Both lacked the cultural complexity and sophistication of Azadonian symbols. But time and patience allowed her to pen out the real message the General Prime had paid dearly to send her.

‘Ask tesselvelinquash. Stay calm.’

“Tessel Velinquash?” Pinto asked, peering over her shoulder.

“This is a person?”

“Yes. Though I haven’t heard his name since the Grey Period.” Twenty years. “He was just a young lad then. His father and I got together for stackers each quarter. The man had a mind for strategy. This one time—”

“Where can I find him?” She hadn’t the mind for another long-winded yestertale.

“His father fell in the battle of Casowhatan. The mother soon after, I’m afraid. I don’t know about Tessel. Odd, you’d think he would have been an oligarchical contributor, like his father.”

A Skywalk family. Great.

They both squinted at the note and Attilatia’s decryption.

“Ask him what?” Pinto finally murmured. “What time he breaks his fast?”

Apparently Roskaad’s knowledge of Nelfinden-Terathian homonyms didn’t allow for context. “I suppose I’ll just start with how he takes his tea,” she grumbled, taking a sip of her own. It was spiced with liquorice and sweetened with honey, but its pleasure died past her tongue. “Not that I don’t love a good mystery, but I think I might have appreciated a little more in the way of hints from my new prospect.” Better to call him that than ‘patron’. She gestured at the poem. “Not this. Cryptic nonsense.”