Page 149 of The Thief and the Traitor Bride

Except she didn’t understand the significance of any of it. It was impossible to glean what any of it meant.

Nore let her mind wander as she opened bottle after bottle, stripping them of correspondence: code in Tern’s careful block lettering that she didn’t decipher beyond the word “Isbeta,” notes from Sparrow that reported on other spies in a code so dense she couldn’t parse it, unfamiliar notes in unfamiliar code from unfamiliar others. Most of the letters came in and out of Nettlepool from what she could glean, so Celestine probably had other local stores of letters in her other houses and grounds. She could only hope, a little desperately, that the information Nore needed was still here.

Her gaze skimmed over the shelves and shelves of wine, the bottles stacked three or four deep. She’d never questioned why Celestine hadn’t opened them—it wasn’t uncommon to find collectors who were more interested in displaying than drinking.

She gathered them up until she learned the filing system—each column belonged to a different spy, so she focused on the ones in her column before moving down—and proceeded until she reached the final column. There, she opened a bottle, prepared to skim—and her heart caught in her throat.

Finch,

You know what? I do fucking hate you. I hate the tone you use when you know something that I don’t. I hate the way you speak about work. I hate your accent when you speak Nish. I hate the beauty of your hair. I hate that I know every freckle along your spine. I hate that I think of you every time I see a bird. I hate that you ruined me. I hate that I let you.

Just write soon. Please. I hate you I hate you I hate you I hate you I miss you so much I can’t fucking stand it.

Cas

Heart pounding, Nore set the letter on the desk and grabbed one of the other bottles. She dug her nail into the latch of the next bottle, then the next, and the one after that. All of them contained letters, up to a dozen pages per bottle.

Years, he’d said. Years.

Nore’s thoughts raced back, tracing over the things she knew and the things she didn’t. If he knew Celestine’s trade and how she was involved, if he’d worked with Tern before, of course he’d known that to hide letters in shipments was to send them straight to her—but equally, of course he wouldn’t know that Nore rarely looked at the correspondence that moved through her wares herself.

And if Celestine had known enough to take Caspian’s letters, to make sure she had never seen them… Celestine had been stealing from Nore.

Nore struggled to contain her grief as she tripped the latch in the dozens of bottles, retrieving years of letters, then whatever reports Caspian had sent through Celestine before then. Exhausted, she folded them up and put them with the correspondence from Locke.

She went back to the area where Celestine had kept correspondence from Gail. She needed something else—something stronger, more concrete.

In the final bottle, she found the last reports Tern had collected—and something else. A note, sealed with wax.

Relief flooded through her—it was the final bit of correspondence for Celestine, from Gail. Nore had meant to encode it, to send it on to Celestine, but she hadn’t had the time. She’d handed it to Tern, unopened and uncoded. Celestine had opened it, clearly, the wax cracked.

Nore slid the papers out and skimmed over them, her headache growing, certain she’d made some mistake.

It was not another list. It wasn’t in Gail’s handwriting, either—she thought it was the same as the note she’d been passed in the ballroom. Loren, the High Lady’s guard. And the contents of it were not just a report. Despite her nausea, her brain resisting the calculation, she was sure she’d seen it before.

Nore frowned, digging through her papers until she found what she wanted: the sheets Caspian had copied for her, the unfamiliar spell from the ancient Lindle spellbook.

Nore took a deep breath and laid the pages side by side, Loren’s next to Caspian’s. Loren hadn’t annotated quite correctly—written Lindle magic calculations required specific spacing and grouping, which Loren ignored when transcribing—but it was clear that they had both recorded the same spells.

Nore sat back on her heels, trying to think. She knew she held something important in her hands, and yet she couldn’t make the pieces fit together.

She hoped she had the answers she needed because she was certainly out of time. Maybe Caspian would be able to make something out of the notes from Gail, to help her discover whatever vital piece she was missing—but for that, she needed to go to the prison.

If worst came to worst, Nore thought as she slipped out of the house, there were other places they could go. For all she knew, maybe Grimsby would be more amenable in Nadira.

She is sometimes stubborn and sometimes indecisive, and she is terrible at magic. But my biggest fear? I think she still believes she can do good.

Bittern to Dove, 1621 UCE

thirty-one

IT WAS NEARLY FOUR in the morning by the time Nore reached the prison, and her body was aching, desperate for sleep. But she was almost done—and there would be time, if she made it out of here alive.

Nore approached the prison guards with her head high. Though her stomach tied itself in knots, she knew that her own confidence was what would get her through.

“What business do you have?” one of the guards asked.

Nore flashed her coin. “I’m here to question a prisoner,” she said.