Elisabeth lurched upright. “Has there been anything else about me in the news?”

“No—nothing! That’s why I wanted to . . . it was as though you completely vanished after the Chancellor’s press release.” He glanced over his shoulder. Then he lowered his voice. “Are you on some sort of secret mission for the Collegium? Have you been sent undercover?”

She stared.

“Right,” he said knowingly, tapping the side of his nose. “You wouldn’t be able to tell me if you were.”

“That’s correct,” she said weakly, wondering how much trouble it was possible for a person to get into in one lifetime.

He glanced over his shoulder again. “Well—I have some information for you. I overheard two wardens talking this morning. Apparently, the saboteur struck the Royal Library last night.”

“What?”

“He stole a Class Six grimoire while the wardens were performing a transfer from the vault. They’ve been keeping it quiet, because they don’t want to send the press into a frenzy. But I thought you ought to be aware. For, you know”—he lowered his voice further—“your investigation.”

“Thank you, Parsifal,” she said. “Now, I should get back to—er—” She nodded toward the window, hoping Parsifal would use his imagination.

“Oh, yes, certainly! Is this a stakeout? Are you watching for someone? Right, you can’t tell me. I shouldn’t even be here. I’ll just . . .” He inched toward the doorway. She nodded at him encouragingly and tapped the side of her nose. He hurried out of sight, looking thrilled.

Elisabeth blew out a breath and collapsed back into her chair. At least one good thing had come out of that. If the wardens believed the saboteur had stolen the Codex, they weren’t likely to cast their suspicions toward a lowly maidservant. Perhaps after a few more days had passed, she could turn her full attention to Ashcroft without distractions. Now that the Chronicles of the Dead was on its way to Harrows, the need was more urgent than ever.

• • •

She barely recalled dragging herself home and up the stairs to her bedroom. The only detail that stood out to her was that she hadn’t seen Nathaniel since his nightmare. He had remained shut inside his study all day yesterday, and judging by the emerald light that flickered beneath the door, he was still in there. She wondered if he had even left the room.

Upstairs, she lit a candle. She didn’t change out of her servant’s uniform, aware she might need the salt and iron on hand. Demonslayer went on the floor beside her, within reaching distance, but not close enough to appear threatening. She didn’t want the Codex to perceive her as its enemy.

The grimoire waited under her bed, still inside the sack she had used to smuggle it from the Royal Library. She drew it out and placed it on her lap, feeling the heavy chains clink through the fabric. Seated on the floor, with her back against the mattress, she folded aside the burlap and unraveled the chain onto the carpet. The Codex lay inert and unresponsive. She drew in a fortifying breath, her hand suspended in the air.

“I’m a friend,” she said, willing her intentions to pass down her arm, through her skin, as she placed her palm against the grimoire.

For a moment, nothing happened. No voice howled at her in rage and betrayal. No ominous pressure filled the room. All was silent. Then its pages stirred in an invisible breeze. Slowly, like an old man stretching and rising from sleep, the Codex unfolded itself into her hands.

Hope thrilled through her, followed by a quaver of apprehension. If Ashcroft had spent so much time studying this grimoire without success, why should she succeed where he had failed? Unlike him, she didn’t have the slightest idea what Prendergast’s secret might be about, and she knew next to nothing about codes and ciphers, either. Reaching this step had consumed so much of her attention that she hadn’t had time to prepare for what came afterward.

She scanned the pages that had opened to her. The words swam in her vision, and she tried blinking away her exhaustion, only to discover that her eyes weren’t at fault. It was the words that were moving, the ink bleeding in sluggish rivulets across the parchment. She flipped to a different section, past diagrams labeled with Enochian script, and found the same thing happening there, too. While the text itself was legible, the sentences had crawled completely out of order. Occasionally they aligned in such a way that a single paragraph became comprehensible:

The highborn demons hold their glittering court beneath a sunless sky. Once every fortnight they ride forth on horned white horses, clad in silks, to hunt beasts in the forests of the Otherworld with packs of baying fiends at their sides. The sound of a demonic hunting horn is not soon forgotten; for it is so beautiful, and so terrible, that it freezes the quarry of the hunt in place as if the prey has turned to stone. . . .

But the rest split apart before she could finish, the sentences meandering across the page like lines of marching ants. Frustrated, she turned to the scrying mirror and called for Katrien. When her friend’s face appeared in the glass, she looked as tired as Elisabeth felt, ashen beneath the glass’s patina of frost. They didn’t have time to catch up. They raced through the likeliest possibilities as swiftly as they could, barely pausing for breath.

“The sentences might only fully align at a specific date and time,” Elisabeth theorized, “like midnight on the winter solstice, or during certain conditions, like an eclipse.”

“But Ashcroft’s certain that he can crack it soon, isn’t he? So if that’s the case, either the phenomenon is due to happen sometime within the next two weeks, or—”

“Or the cipher has a different solution entirely,” Elisabeth finished, glum.

“Take a second look at your research,” Katrien urged. “There might be a clue that didn’t seem relevant before. Do we even know for sure that Prendergast hid his secret as a cipher, or is that just an assumption people made without evidence? In the meantime, I’ll see if I can find anything on my end.”

As their time ran out, Elisabeth swallowed back the pitiful urge to beg Katrien not to go, watching her disappear beneath the ice. Loneliness pressed in, made worse by her fuzzy-headed exhaustion. She knew she should go to bed, but she was too tired to get up from the floor and wrap the Codex in its chain.

Instead she found herself idly turning pages, hypnotized by the crawling text. As the sentences strung themselves together, she read lavish, unsettling descriptions of what the demons ate at their feasts, or what they wore to their nocturnal, weeklong balls. Though the fragmented descriptions left her feeling more and more disturbed, she was unable to tear her eyes away.

Swans poisoned to death with nightshade are considered a particular delicacy at banquets. . . .

The most fashionable garment that evening was a gown made of silver moths, pinned alive to the fabric to preserve their luster. . . .

The candle burned lower on the nightstand. Her head nodded. Disjointed images swirled behind her eyelids: demons dancing in elaborate costumes, grinning as they feasted, tearing into flesh. The nightmarish fancies seemed to take hold of her and drag her downward, like the hands of sirens gripping a shipwrecked sailor, towing him into the deep and silent dark.

Abruptly, she woke up.

Or, she didn’t wake up—for this had to be a dream.