Page 107 of Shadowborne: Reckoning

Then I saw it… a scribble, as if a word had been crossed out. Except it looked precisely like one of the scribbles I’d read as a correction on the message we intercepted from Ruin.

My heartrate picked up again.

“Bren, go write down the message we intercepted. Quickly. Everything you remember—including the mistakes if you can.”

She shot to her feet, hurrying to the desk at the side of the sitting room and leaned over it, hurriedly, dipping the pen in ink and scribbling, while I went back to the codes.

A heavy weight of dread crept up my spine as I flipped through pages, scanning each and asking Voski questions which only served to make me even more certain what I was seeing, and even more frustrated that I hadn’t noticed it in the message we’d intercepted earlier.

Fuck. Fuck.

I felt Voski’s eyes on the side of my face, and knew he’d be thinking exactly what I was—that we’d missed a huge clue in the earlier work, and now we’d be scrambling. Because looking at these pages, it was evident those scribbles hadn’t been errors at all.

Ruin wasn’t suffering struggle with his letters. He hadn’t hurried. Those mistakes had been signals. Indications of how to read the words around them.

And we hadn’t fucking memorized that part.

Please, God, let Benji intercept the message Ruin sent this morning. We needed a new, untouched example. Something we could be certain of. Because one thing was sure: We couldn’t be certain any of the words or statements on that first message had meant anything they’d actually said.

“At least I was right about the locations being reversed,” I muttered grimly.

Voski nodded and pulled one of the papers out of the pile under the one I scanned. “They do it with the major cities as well—we’ll need to watch for that, because the flips aren’t the same. While Draeventhall does refer to Vosgaarde, Vosgaarde City actually refers to Emberholt and… well, you see.”

I did see. And while I was thrilled that Ruin was stupid enough to keep a key written down, and Voski had uncovered it, it didn’t change a damn thing about the hard place we found ourselves in.

Bren trotted back to me and laid her paper, ink still wet, on the table.

She dropped to the couch next to me, thigh to thigh, leaning over the pages, all of us looking and pointing to different places on the note—frustrated because neither Bren nor I had memorized the corrections.

“I think that cross-out was in the previous paragraph,” I said, shaking my head. “But I can’t be sure.”

“I know that there was a scribble on this side, because I got ink on my hand when I flattened the page.”

“But did it align with the end of the paragraph about social fractures, or the beginning of the reference to the merchant?”

Bren slumped. “I’m not sure.”

And neither was I. I couldn’t be sure her placement was even remotely correct. I’d been so eager to parse out the words, it had never occurred to me that Ruin’s errors weren’t errors at all.

We scanned codes and familiarized ourselves with the differences in the scribbles and cross-outs and what they meant. Some heralded a reversal in meaning. Others changed the status of the person or society to which a sentence referred. Still others indicated a statement laid a false trail and should be ignored. And another that confirmed the content as truth.

And all of them so minutely different, so carefully precise, there was no way foggy memories could be sure to give us clues. Any statement could be utterly true, utterly false, or reversing truth, and without knowing the precise markings on the paper, we’d never know which was which.

Shit!

One thing was clear to me though. Abundantly. The intelligence reports I’d seen that were so confusing, had been sent intentionally. Looking at these codes, they had likely reported faithfully—but when read without this key, they were a jumble.

I’d poured over those reports, both alone, with the Council, and later with the king.

If the king had known this code existed, he would have explained it to me—even if only when we were alone. We’d made strategic decisions on battles, missions, and placement of both patrols and troops based on those reports. Hell, he’d sent me here because of our concerns about them. Hurried me and Bren across the border in an effort to subvert whatever was brewing between our neighboring kingdoms.

God, if I could take this code back and go through those reports… we’d know everything.

We missed it. We missed it entirely. I had no memory whatsoever of corrections or markings on those intelligence reports… and then it hit me.

I wouldn’t. Except for the messages sent directly to me by my personal network, the intelligence reports were always copied by a trusted scribe and distributed to the royals, to me, to the Captains if I deemed them important for strategic decisions, and to any other men considered necessary to address the specific news received.

When I thought about it, the idea was genius. Corrections and mistakes would never be deemed important enough to transcribe. Hence, anyone who saw a copy of these messages couldn’t possibly know or understand its true intention.