“Since when was anything the old man did ever reallythatsimple?” Nash asked his aunt.
“Do you know how many games I lost, Nash—games of my father’s and games in life—by overcomplicating things? You of all people shouldknow that sometimes, it’s thesimplethings that matter most.” Zara looked from Nash to Libby.
Simple things, Lyra thought.Like Libby and Nash. Like loving the people you love. Like starting a family.
“Simple it is,” Nash replied. “And the simplest option is a code in which one is A, two is B, and so on.” Nash grabbed a pen and converted the numbers to letters, the simple way.
Simple.Without even meaning to, Lyra found herself listing toward Grayson and remembering the way he’d looked in the woods at Mile’s End.
“The flannel, I assume, is your doing?” Zara asked Lyra austerely.
“I like it,” Grayson declared.
“You do not,” Lyra replied.
“I could grow to like it,” Grayson said, and Lyra’s thoughts went from Mile’s End to this unfathomable library in this castle of a House.
“I don’t expect you to,” Lyra told Grayson, and then she shifted her attention to the code, to the sixsimpleletter sequences that Nash had written down:
A C A B E I F C G E
A C L E I F C G E
A C A Y I F C G E
M L E I F C G E
M A B E I F C G E
M A Y I F C G E
For the longest time, all six of them stared at the sequences in silence. Lyra closed her eyes, pressing her fingers into the bark on the side of the desk, thinking about Tobias Hawthorne and that drawing of his—about Alice.
Alice.Lyra’s eyes flew open, and she scanned the six sequences again. And there it was. She brought fingers to rest beside the second of the six options:
A C L E I F C G E
With a glance, Lyra verified that none of the other sequences contained the five letters she’d just searched for.
They didn’t.
“Alice,” Grayson said beside Lyra, his mind falling perfectly into sync with hers. “Rearrange the first five letters of that sequence, and they spellAlice.”
Maybe some things really were simple. “If you go every other letter,” Lyra replied, doing exactly that with her finger, “you don’t have to rearrange a damn thing.”
ACLEIFCGE
It was no wonder that Grayson hadn’t seen it, back when he’d first tried to solve this puzzle, back when he’d been looking for Lyra, before he’d known his grandmother was alive.
“The Gilded Blade,” Lyra said out loud, looking at that drawing of Tobias Hawthorne’s. “The nameAlice.”
“What’s left?” Zara said in a tone that reminded Lyra that Alice was Zara’smother. Lyra didn’t know for sure how much Zara had been told, but it was clear she’d been told something. “If you take awayAlice,” Zara reiterated, “what’s left?”
“C,E,F, andG,” Max said.
“Music notes?” Lyra guessed, thinking back to the Grandest Game.
“No.” Nash leaned over and converted the remaining letters back to their original numerical form: three, five, six, and seven. “Echoes, Gray. All those Saturday morning games, and at least sixty-five percent of the time, when you had four digits, it turned out to be—”