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Chapter 33

August

Nora had five different copies of the newspaper spread out in front of her, highlighted and scribbled all over and cut out. So far she had managed to anagram Isengrim Followers into Remising Wolf Loser , but that didn’t seem to help much.

“Find anything?” August asked, setting down a paper cup carefully next to her increasingly insane decoupage project. She had dropped the glamour now they were safely locked in August’s darkroom, all lit up on this occasion for Nora to work. No one would disturb them here.

“Nothing yet.” She took a sip of the coffee and pulled a face. “This is terrible.”

“You’re welcome,” August said.

“Thank you for the terrible coffee,” Nora amended.

“It’s from the terrible machine out in the hallway. You owe me two zaub.”

“Add it to my tab. I promise I’m good for it.” Nora pressed her fingers between her eyebrows. “This cannot be that complicated if it is meant for hundreds of people to understand. And hundreds of people are not smarter than I am. They must have a cipher key or something that we don’t.”

She was getting irritated. August had never seen Nora irritated. Honora Holtzfall glided through life without a single trouble. He had to admit he was enjoying watching her get frustrated, energy sparking off her wildly—it made her fascinating to watch. This maddeningly entitled, fascinatingly frustrating heiress.

“This isn’t even true, you know.” She rapped her knuckles against the subtitle of the letter: Holtzfall Factory Wage Cut 12% as Heiress Steps Out in Diamonds.

“They’re sapphires?” August asked.

“Rubies. And my grandmother raised wages just last month. Isn’t there some sort of rule against printing lies?”

August shrugged, sipping on his coffee. “It’s a letter from Isengrim, it’s meant to be inflammatory, not accurate. I mean, look at this.” He leaned over, tapping the note next to it. “ Isengrim’s Sixth Letter to the People of Walstad. I know education in the countryside isn’t what it is in the city, but I swear we’ve had at least two letters a month for the past year.”

In an instant, Nora went still, her eyes darting over the headline. “I need a pen,” she said urgently.

“What did you do with the last pen I gave you?”

“Pen,” she repeated, not looking up, as though if she dared take her eyes off the paper, the letters might escape her.

“I’m not made of pens, you know.” August pulled out the pencil that was behind his ear, intrigued as her mind raced ahead of his, and Nora snatched it from his hand. She leaned over and started scrawling under the libelous headline.

Holtzfall Factory Wage Cut 12%

“Bifntzuff,” August read aloud the jumble of letters she’d written under Holtzfall . “Brilliant, you’ve cracked it.”

She ignored him and kept writing, scrawling more unintelligible letters under Factory and then moving on to Wage . August opened his mouth to say something, but before he could, he realized that this word wasn’t gibberish. Underneath Wage she’d written the word quay .

“Nora…”

“Sixth letter,” she said out loud, barely concealed excitement in her voice. “ Isengrim’s Sixth Letter to the People of Walstad . Count six letters back from w , it makes a q ; six from a makes a u ; g becomes a and e becomes y . And quay looks an awful lot like a place to me.”

August felt his own heartbeat rise, matching Nora’s voice in excitement as he watched her continue. As another word appeared below her pen.

“Won,” he read as she wrote the three-letter word below Cut . “Who won what?”

“Obviously it’s not won . Or it is, but it’s not the verb.”

“One,” August translated, suddenly realizing. “Quay 1 12.”

He felt it again, that sudden charge of energy flaring in the air that separated him from Nora as the realization of what this meant sparked in both of them.

They had a chance at getting close to Isengrim.

“What do you say, Miss Holtzfall.” August glanced up, a grin on his face, a smile slowly creeping onto hers. “Fancy an evening walk down by the water?”