Read Chapter 28: The Rubies' Purpose

Thomas carried the letters and the two halves of the key to his garret above the print shop, bolting the door. The rubies on the necklace caught the candlelight and bled red across the pages of his father's cipher inventory—the one list he had never fully understood.

He placed the letters side by side. The first, the fragment Cecil had given him, named Howard in code broken only by the keyword *Eleanor*. The second, addressed to Lady Jane Grey, sang in the same voice. Same false elegance. Same dagger tucked behind sweetness.

But Thomas was a printer's apprentice. He knew ink.

He ran his thumb across the letters' edges. The paper was heavy, creamy, with the watermark of a Venetian mill owned by a man Cecil had once called "a friend with a long purse." The corners were unblemished. No fold marks beyond the standard sealing. No hidden layer.

He lifted the ruby necklace from the table. Roan had said the fragment of key was hidden inside the stones. But his father had told him something else, just before the poison took him. *The stones are not what they seem. They are a door.*

Thomas looked at the rubies more closely. Seven stones, each cut in the old Portuguese style, with facets so sharp they caught the light like splinters of a mirror. He thought of the cipher he had invented as a child, taught to his father in the garden, the one where letters hid in the reflection of a clear pool.

He set the stones on a clean sheet of paper, face down. On the underside of each setting, stamped into the silver, was a tiny mark—a printer's quoin, the wedge used to lock type. And beside it, a letter.

T. H. R. O. U. G. H.

He arranged them. THROUGH.

Through what?

He pressed the stones against the letters on the page, one by one. The marks matched the watermark's inner line. The Venetian mill's symbol was a tower with a gate. He held the necklace over the gate.

The letters of the ciphertext shimmered—no, not shimmered. The rubrication, the red ink used for the capitals, was not red at all beneath the rubies' lens. It was a deeper red. Almost black. And it formed a second message beneath the first.

Thomas's hands went cold.

This was no ordinary cipher letter. This was a summons.

The second message read: *The seventh stone shall open the flesh of the earth. Come as a ruby, not a man.*

He examined the seventh stone. It was smaller than the others, slightly loose. He pressed it. The ruby's base turned, and a hair-thin needle of silver slid out, etched with a crest: a serpent twined around a book.

The serpent and the book. The mark of an old fellowship—the printers' guild that had gone dark fifty years ago, said to serve the crown in secret. Cecil had mentioned them once, dismissing the rumor as a tale for apprentices. But this was no tale.

Thomas put on the necklace, tucking the stones beneath his doublet. He took his father's old cloak from its peg. If this was a meeting of the ring, he would enter as one of them.

The address from the needle's engraving was a tavern near Blackfriars—the Sign of the Press, a place printers used when they wanted to speak of things that must not be heard. Thomas arrived as the bells tolled ten. The tavern's main room was empty. He stood at the bar, unspeaking, hoping the rubies would do their work.

The keeper, an old man with ink-stained nails, looked at his chest. Thomas let the cloak fall open. The rubies caught the lamplight. The keeper nodded, lifted a trapdoor behind the bar, and gestured him down.

Below, a cellar smelled of lamp oil and old wine. Seven men sat around a long table, their faces half drowned in shadow. They turned as Thomas entered. One of them, a thin man with a scar across his jaw, glanced at the rubies.

"The new envoy," he said. "Sit."

Thomas sat. He said nothing. He let his eyes adjust, counting the faces. He knew one of them—a royal stationer, a man who supplied paper to the palace.

The scarred man leaned forward. "The stage is set. The old fox and the cub think they have us. Cecil's little scholar—" he smiled at Thomas "—has been busy with his letters. But the true stroke arrives tomorrow."

"Tomorrow?" Thomas asked, keeping his voice flat.

"At matins. The Queen will kneel before her prayer book. The pages have been poisoned—the ink, the very ink pressed into the binding. One touch of her fingers to the page, then a face to the lips at the blessing. By the time she rises, the poison will be in her blood."

Thomas's throat closed. The printer's ink. The prayer book.

"Which book?" he made himself ask.

"Her private Book of Hours, newly bound," the stationer said. "A gift from a devoted lord." He smiled. "Howard's own hand placed the order. The poison is in the red rubrics on the hour of prime. She will read the prayer, kiss the page as is her custom, and the tremor will begin within the hour."

The men laughed, low and quiet, like stones rolling over a grave.

Thomas's hand moved to the necklace, to the mark of the ruby. He had walked into the serpent's den. But the serpent had already struck.

The book was already bound. The ink was already dry. And the Queen would kneel at matins.