For the next two hours, Jareen scoured the quarantine chambers. She rolled up the rug in the center of the main chamber. She sifted through all his stacks of portfolios and books lined against the wall. She inspected the plaster and the extra lamp sconces. The furniture was simple and not too difficult to search. There was no sign or smell of lenoth’ni. She stood in the center of the room, thinking. Something was missing. Coir had spent hours on many nights writing, and she knew he had sealed documents using wax. Yet she had not found any sealed documents. Where was he keeping them?

  She looked at his prone form on the couch. He never used the bed, but she had searched it. The reclining couch was made of a carven wood frame that curved up at one end, covered with an upholstered cushion. A half-back extended from the high end, also upholstered. She knelt down and examined it from below. The bottom of the couch was slatted. Coir was sleeping upon the cushion, but she didn’t care about his comfort at the moment, nor was she weak. He roused a bit as she lifted his upper body forward, but she had dosed him well. He did little more than mumble. His skin was hot to the touch. Sliding her hand under the cushion beneath him, she found a packet of letters. She slid them out and let them fall to the ground, holding Coir up with one arm as she kept searching. Reaching to the corner where the half-back and end-curve came together, she found a leather bag. By the feel, it was waxed to keep out moisture. She pulled it free. Even before she opened it she smelled the lenoth’ni.

  No Noshian man had any business hiding a bag of lenoth’ni tea under the cushion of a couch. All doubt left her. He was faking the Seven Isles Fever.

  But why? She set the waxed bag on the table and picked up the packet of letters. She untied the ribbon and shifted through them. None of them bore the red wax seal that she had seen Coir use, but a few did have seals bearing the insignia of the Archives of Drennos. All of the letters had been opened, and she recognized at least one that had been delivered to Coir by way of the vestibule slot. She opened the canvas envelope and slid out the parchment.

  Her eye fell on Vienwé script, and instinctively she looked for the hand of Tirlav, but something was wrong. The script was Vienwé, but the hand was crude and the writing gibberish. They were not words. She stared at the page, but none of it made sense. She checked another of the letters and found the same—more gibberish written in a Vienwé script. A third letter was merely an expression of condolences in standard Noshian script, sent by a parchment maker in the High Street district. The fourth again was in the Vienwé gibberish. Holding up two of the gibberish letters side by side, she looked closer, comparing to see whether any of the words recurred. They did. She picked out a handful of simple clusters of characters in both letters. There was consistency in the way the Vienwé script was being used, but the words were not Vienwé.

  Whose words were they? The flow of the language was not the way Vienwé was written. The Vienwé language did not conjugate like the Noshian language. In Vienwé, a suffix or prefix added to a root-word determined its usage. Yet the flow of the script looked more like the style of Noshian. Choosing one of the constructions that appeared to recur often, she tested a theory. It was built of only three Vienwé characters, each representing a sound. There was a jel, a tane, and an oel. She sounded it out. Jeto. That was fairly close to the Noshian word for you. She tried another word, and another. Yes. The writer was using Vienwé script to approximate the Noshian language. An absurd idea. There were far fewer characters in the Noshian alphabet, as the Vienwé had to account for both the basic sounds and the tone of those sounds. The transliteration used in the letters was not entirely accurate to the Vienwé sounds, but it was close enough to figure out the intent.

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  Trying to read the letters felt dizzying, but she was probably one of the only people in all of Drennos who could do so. A simple key of Noshian sounds that correlated to the Vienwé script would allow someone to quickly transcribe a letter, but to most eyes, it would most likely appear that Coir was receiving more letters from Vien correspondents. Even were someone suspicious, it would take a Vienwé speaker to work it out. With only a handful of Vienwé speakers on the whole island, the odds of discovery were low. She picked the shortest letter. It did not have a greeting or signature, and it contained only a handful of sentences.

  

The regency will not move if the Sisters do not clear you of the fever. As long as you are in quarantine, you are safe. I still do not know how to see you clear. I am an archivist, not a spy! The money you provided is already running low. I cannot check for letters on the 17th, so do not drop anything. The bulk of the valuable manuscripts are prepared, but it will be noticed during the next rotation.

  She read them all, but none of the letters revealed exactly what was going on. It was clear that the regency was a threat to Coir. He was working with one or two others to try to flee, but they were not sure how to get Coir safely away undetected.

  Drennos was a peninsula—a large peninsula, yes, but a peninsula nonetheless. In some ways, it was more of an island, for it was connected to the mainland only by uninhabitable and impassable salt marshes. Beyond the marshes, there was nothing resembling civilization, a wild of beasts and little more. Drennos, named after Emperor Drennos the II, was founded hundreds of years prior as an overseas colony belonging to a human kingdom that fell to civil war not long after. Drennos was forgotten and would have remained little more than a cluster of fishing villages, if even that, were it not for canny sailors and merchants.

  The wealth of Drennos came from its position in relation to winds and sea currents. The ivories and fine pelts of the interior so coveted by humans also helped. It was the trade agreement with Findeluvié that had truly established Drennos as a capital of wealth, though, just as it had provided Jareen with an opportunity to leave Findeluvié. The heartbeat of Drennos was trade, and to protect their tariffs and investments, the regency had harbor masters and inspectors combing over everything that arrived or departed. An attempt to move large numbers of manuscripts would hardly go unnoticed. It was no wonder that Coir and his co-conspirators were struggling, but it didn’t explain the why of it all.

  The last thing she checked was the window she had seen Coir open before. Pushing up the frame as far as she could, she was able to stick her head through and look down. There was a hedgerow at the ground. Anything dropped would likely fall behind it, hidden from view from the courtyard. He was communicating with the outside this entire time. Jareen indulged in a human curse and replaced the window-frame. Coir mumbled again in his stupor. She walked back over and stared down at the thin man.

  What was she going to do with him?

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