Star Cursed

She nods. “Everyone seems nice. Almost everyone, anyway.”

I freeze, anger buzzing through me, scone halfway to my mouth. “Has someone been unkind to you? Who?”

“Cate, you look as though you’re about to brain someone with that scone.” Tess giggles. I flush and put it back on the plate. “No one’s been mean to me, but Alice and Vi aren’t very nice to you.”

I try to shrug it off. “Don’t worry about that. I want you to make friends.”

Tess scowls. “I couldn’t be friends with anyone who doesn’t like you, silly.”

I give her a quick hug, touched by her sweetness. Obviously Maura doesn’t feel the same way. She sat with Alice and Vi at supper last night and again at breakfast this morning.

Tess grins. “Guess what? Sister Gretchen offered to teach me German.”

I grin back. “Mei’s family speaks Chinese at home. I bet she would teach you.”

“Chinese?” Tess shrieks, practically insane with joy. “Really?”

“Truly. Do you want to go ask her? I bet she’s still playing chess with Addie.” I blow out the lamps and Tess grabs the plate and her still-full teacup. She pauses by the table in the front hall.

“That’s pretty,” she says, pointing at the silver letter tray. It’s topped with a fanciful letter rack in the shape of a lyre. As she reaches for it, her tea spills all over the table. “Oops!”

I grab up the lone, tea-stained letter, addressed to Sister Cora, and wave it in the air. “Go fetch a towel from the kitchen.”

“Is the letter ruined?” Tess asks. “You’d better take it out of the envelope before it seeps through.”

I frown at her. “And read Sister Cora’s private post? I doubt she’d appreciate that.” There’s no return address; it must have been hand-delivered. What if it’s something important, and we’ve just rendered it illegible? Tess scurries off, and I slip my fingernail beneath the red wax seal. It’s marked with a letter B.

I don’t have to read it, I decide. I’ll just take it out of the envelope for safekeeping.

As it turns out, I needn’t have worried. The letter is a little browned with tea at the bottom, but the six lines of text are all still perfectly legible—except the letters are arranged in strange combinations that don’t make the slightest bit of sense to me.

Tess comes rushing back with a towel. “Did I ruin it?” she asks, biting her lip as she mops up the table. “Was it something important?”

“I don’t know. I think it’s in code.” I wave the letter at her.

“Really?” She snatches it from me, forehead rumpled. She looks very like Father when he’s puzzling over a translation. “It’s a Caesar cipher,” she says after a minute of squinting.

“Am I meant to know what that means?”

“It’s a substitution cipher, where every letter is replaced by another letter. They say Caesar used three shifts to the right—replaced A with D, B with E, C with F, and so forth. This looks like it’s a left shift of two instead, so . . .” Tess pauses. “A becomes Y, B becomes Z, C becomes A, and so on. That’s good. Not as easy to break.”

I’m gaping at her again, confounded by her cleverness. “But you just broke it in less than a minute.”

She flushes. “I read a book of Father’s on cryptography. You know I like puzzles and equations and all that. I wrote Mrs. O’Hare notes in code for a month afterward. She wasn’t very good at reading them, though; I had to give her the key. Anyway, a normal person wouldn’t figure it out so quickly. Or at all.”

I laugh. Only Tess. “So you mean you can read this?”

“Yes.” Her grin fades as she puzzles out the text. “It says On high alert after the latest report from Harwood. Have arrested 8 girls in last 2 days—I think that’s right, or it’d be 6 girls in 0 days, which doesn’t make sense—without trial. Being kept under heavy guard in basement of National Council building and”—Tess’s voice falters, and I put my hand on her shoulder—“tortured and starved. Would not be surprised if they simply disappear. Even under duress 6 swear they cannot prophesize. 2 have claimed they can but one is mad and one simple. The families are in an uproar. We may be able to use this to our advantage.”

We’re both silent for a moment. “Those poor girls,” I say finally.

It’s me the Brothers want, not them. Eight innocent girls are suffering while I’m safe in my bed at night.

Tess tosses the letter back onto the table and stares up at me. “How,” she demands, “could this possibly be to anyone’s advantage?”

“Sister Cora hopes people are getting sick of the Brothers, that they might be ready for new leadership soon. Shared leadership, between the Brothers and witches,” I explain, pacing the front hall. “The worse the Brothers are, the better people might think of us.”

Tess plants her hands on her hips, scowling. “So she’ll just let those poor girls rot, in the hopes of inciting some kind of riot? That’s not right. There must be something we can do.”

I peer out the window beside the front door. A black brougham drives by in the street below, the horse’s hooves loud in the silence. The red maples are shifting in the wind, waving their bare fingers. “I don’t know what.”

“I’m going to fetch Maura,” Tess decides.

As she scurries off, I grab the letter from the table and head back into the front parlor to relight the gas lamps. Then I sit on the silk chair by the fireplace, staring up at the grapevine cornices and wishing for guidance.

Tess returns with Maura only a minute later. Maura is furious, her blue eyes snapping. “What does Cora mean to do, just let those poor girls be murdered? Who knows how many more the Brothers will snatch up!”

“What else can she do? She’s protecting us,” I point out.

Maura sinks onto the settee. She’s wearing another new gown, sapphire with black pinstripes. “Alice says the war council is meeting right now to talk about possible courses of action.”

“War council?” I ask as Tess sits next to Maura.

“The Sisters’ war council. Alice told me all about it. Cate, you’ve been here a month, don’t you know anything?” Maura sighs. “It’s Sister Cora, of course, and Gretchen, Sophia, Johanna, Evelyn, and Inez. The six most senior members of the Sisterhood. They vote on anything important, but Alice says lately they’ve been deadlocked on everything because Inez and Cora are always at odds.”

Alice says, Alice says. “How does Alice know everything?” I demand, peevish.

“She’s a horrible snoop is how,” Maura confesses, and I laugh. “But it’s useful. She overheard Johanna and Inez talking about Brenna’s latest prophecy, too. Brenna told the Brothers the other oracle is in New London now.” She tucks a red curl behind her ear, preening a little.

“That must be ‘the latest report from Harwood,’” I say, waving the letter. “It’s got the Brothers in a tizzy, hunting for oracles everywhere.”

Tess leans over and takes the letter from me, scanning it as though she’s hoping she translated wrong. “This is all our fault.”