Page 68 of The Grandest Game

Grayson moved like a shadow, silent and swift, directly behind her. “That,” he said, “is not an E. It’s the Greek letter sigma.” He turned his head slightly. “Which makes these three not an E, an X, and a triangle, but epsilon, chi, and delta.”

Lyra chewed on that. “Anyone in this room read Greek?”

“The letters.” Odette’s voice was oddly subdued. “You think they spell something?”

“Not if they appear on every canister,” Grayson declared. “There are too many—”

“—possible combinations,” Lyra finished. It was the Scrabble letters and poetry magnets all over again.

“Yes.”

Lyra hadn’t been aware that Grayson Hawthorne could sayyesthe way he saidno.

“Drawing a singular meaning from them would be an impossible task,” Grayson continued, “even for someone with a certain familiarity with Greek.”

“In other words,” Lyra said, her voice dry, “yes, you can read Greek.”

Grayson held out a hand. “May I?”

Three times he’d asked her that.The dance. The sword. And now.Lyra handed him the sigma tin.

Grayson opened it, examining its contents. “There’s writing on the underside of the lid.”

Even just the sound of his voice made Lyra remember that voice piercing the darkness.Come back to me.

Setting her jaw, Lyra focused on opening tins, one after another after another. Inside each, she found a reel of film, and on the underside of each lid, there was a four-digit number.1972. 1984. 1966.“Years?” Lyra said.

“Fair assessment.” His Majesty seemed to consider that high praise. “Then again,” Grayson continued, “Hawthorne games are full of bits and pieces of information designed to eat up your time and lead nowhere. I would suggest that before we spend any time decoding the writing on the tins, we first complete a rudimentary search of all of them to ensure that none contains anything…extra.”

“Open every canister,” Odette summarized. “Then, assuming we find nothing of note in any of them, turn our minds to the letters and numbers.”

“The code,” Lyra said.

“The code,” Grayson confirmed. “And the cipher.”

Lyra caught his meaning almost instantly. “The symbols. From the film.” She drew the sequence in the air from memory:

“There was another set of symbols at the end,” Odette told her. “You were… otherwise occupied when they appeared on the screen.”

Otherwise occupied.Lyra refused to think about the flashback. Beside her, Grayson knelt, his black suit jacket flaring out around his thighs as he laid the sword on the ground.

“We’ll rewatch the film,” Lyra said, allowing herself to take in the lines of his body, anchoring herself to the here and now. “Right after we go through the tins.”

“Yes.”Grayson Hawthorne and his yeses.

They divided the room into sections, and each of them took one. Lyra fell into the rhythm of the search as time ticked by, stack after stack.Greek letter on the outside. Year and film reel inside. Nothing else.An hour later, Lyra had made it nearly to the end of her section of the room.

The moment she saw the symbol on the tin, she stopped breathing.That symbol.The Greek letter on the tin she’d just picked up was shaped like a horseshoe.Or a bridge.

Lyra sucked in a jagged breath, and the air burned her lungs as the roar of blood pumping in her ears drowned out everything else. Her hands went cold. Her face was on fire. Fighting the flashback was like fighting a riptide. She could feel it trying to pull her under.

Blood.She could feel it, warm and sticky on her feet.

Without warning, Grayson wasthere. “Youwillstay with me,” he said quietly. “Right here, Lyra. Right now.”

His hands. Her face. The past receded—only slightly.

“When I was seven,” Grayson said in that same quiet, steadyvoice, “I once ended up locked in a cello case for six hours alongside a longsword, a crossbow, and a very unruly kitten.”