Relius rolled his eyes, much harder than I ever rolled mine. “They were copied for me by a friend. The poet is long dead, but his words are still with us, because he wrote them down.” He tapped the sheet of scrap paper in front of me, covered with my wriggling attempts at letters. “And it does no good to write something that only you can read!”

I looked at the poem again. Copied by a friend.

“Yes,” said Relius, well aware of what I was thinking. “Someone loves me very much, even with all my faults, and don’t give me that look. You’ll be in love yourself someday.”

I was quite certain I would not. By then, I knew why the guard Legarus stared with such anger and misery at Baron Xortix’s younger son and how Relius had been arrested for treason when his lover had turned out to be a spy for the Mede emperor. One would have thought Relius would be done with love and lovers, but I’d seen a veritable parade of them. None of his affairs lasted long, and I’d already witnessed several spats when he showed someone the door. If this friend had loved Relius for years, he or she was quite the anomaly.

Relius tapped the page in front of me. “Keep practicing,” he instructed.

Yawning, I arrived one morning to find him nowhere in the office or in the rest of the apartment. This was not unusual, as he often spent his nights elsewhere. What was unusual was the intricately folded parchment on his worktable. I shouldn’t have touched it, but I did, curious to see how it opened. Only when I had it mostly unfolded did it occur to me that Relius might not be pleased. I hesitated and then threw caution to the winds. When it was open, I hunched over the message inside, parsing its meaning little by little until I reached the end and sighed with relief at Kamet’s instructions on how to make the folds crisp again with a straightedge.

I knew the one Kamet meant and used it to carefully refold the parchment. Then I slipped down from the stool to stretch my leg and turned to find Relius sitting in his armchair by the little stove where he heated water for his coffee.

“You become too absorbed in your work,” he said. “You are used to people ignoring you, but you cannot ever assume that they are. Do you understand?”

I nodded.

“As you are interested in Kamet’s message, I suggest you write back to him. Can you make the same folds with a fresh piece of parchment? Good. Tell him I am traveling. He knows where. Tell him that if the message arrives unopened, he should be safe. Add anything else you like, but be sure you put that in.”

What if I get the folds wrong?

“You’ll do fine. Worry more about your handwriting. Take it to Teleus in his office by noon tomorrow. He will send it on its way. You will need this,” he said, handing me a key, which I took and looked at, perplexed.

“I will be gone a week or two. You may continue to come here to my study at our usual time. Keep at the History of Savoro. I’ll ask you how far you’ve gotten when I get back.” Then he said, “The king will be wanting you by now,” and waved me out the door without any other farewell.

I did not see him again for more than a month, and his plans for me were already astray by the next morning. When I went to the study, I was surprised and dismayed to find Baron Orutus, the new secretary of the archives, going through Relius’s papers. I backed out of the doorway before he caught me watching. When I returned later, I found a new hasp screwed to the door and securely locked. I had no way to write a message and nothing to write it on.

I went first to the library in search of writing material. Though there was paper and parchment in plenty, there was nothing I could use. I tried to find a map of the empire, curious about Kamet’s journey to Attolia, but when I went to a map case, I was chased away by one of the scholars, who knew I had no business there.

Frustrated and angry, I retreated almost as far as the garden before I remembered that Relius had been very clear that the message had to go to Teleus before noon. I knew there were pens and paper in the king’s writing desk, but I could not fetch them without someone seeing me, and I knew better than to draw attention.

My erstwhile tutor had returned to the offices of the queen’s indentured, a whole wing of the palace dedicated to the bureaucracy of the state, business, taxes, record keeping, all of it on paper. I hurried there to make a pest of myself, wandering through the offices until I found my old tutor, who tried to ignore me as I stood stubbornly looking over his shoulder. He was writing out a letter describing the crown’s commitment of funds for the repair of a royal road somewhere in the west. I knew that once he was truly annoyed, he would throw down his pen in frustration and run his hands through his hair. When he did, I picked up the pen, and his inkpot as well.

“Oh, no,” he protested. “No, no, no.” But I was already walking away.

“Oh, let him go,” I heard someone say. “It’s worth an inkpot to get rid of him.” I felt a smile spread across my face that disappeared when I remembered parchment. I turned back.

“Take it, take it,” one of the indentured said, offering a sheaf of papers, which I let him slide under my arm. “What?” he said. “What else?” I looked from him to his desk and back. “Parchment?” he asked, astonished. “Do you know what it costs?” But he gave me a sheet of that too, as he pushed me, fairly gently, on my way.

Pleased with myself, I took the supplies out to the garden, where I could work without anyone looking over my shoulder. Hiding in the shrubbery, the paper in the dirt, I practiced a message to Kamet, complaining that I was locked out of Relius’s office while he was away and telling him that if the message arrived with its intricate folds intact, he was safe. I copied it onto parchment, folded it as carefully as I could, and took it to Teleus’s office. He accepted it without comment, and he too waved me on my way.

With no clear idea how far away Kamet was, I expected a reply every day. I returned again and again to check Relius’s door, but it remained locked. One morning I slipped into the library before dawn to sit in the dark, waiting for enough light to see the maps. I spread them out over the tables as I looked for one that showed the Mede empire. The sun cleared the horizon, and I was able to make out the fine print before a librarian arrived to chase me out.

In the end, Relius was back before a package arrived from Kamet. One of the palace errand boys delivered it. He made a face at me, and I stuck out my tongue at him. Relius let these gestures of mutual respect pass without comment. A year earlier, the boy would have made a sign to stave off bad luck, and I would have made one as if to curse him. When Relius had gotten the package open, he handed me a squashed flower of tightly folded vellum. Unfolded, it turned out to be Kamet’s map.

I’d seen the maps in the library. I’d watched Relius carefully adding information to a map of his own.

“But this one is yours,” said Relius.

To keep? I wondered.

Relius nodded and tapped the key hidden under my shirt. “Out it in the garden,” he suggested. So, he knew about the box I’d found while he was gone. I had hollowed out a space at the back of a hedge to call my own. In it I’d built a little shelter out of stones—stolen from the edges of the gravel paths—to keep my new pens and paper dry. One day, the shelter was gone, the stones all restored to their borders, and a brass-bound wooden box sat in its place. It had a lock and a key on a string long enough to wear around my neck.