Patrick was leaning on the windowsill, his arms crossed. He smiled faintly, an expression that looked out of place on him. It softened him, and eased the sharp effect of the scar above his eye. “I know it’s not the best quality, but it’s what I could get.”
I beamed as I unlatched boxes to peek inside. Pens, spare nibs, and wax-sealing supplies. “These will work just fine.”
“Will you need anything else?” He cast a cool gaze over the table, as though he weren’t proud of all this, but there was a light in his eyes, and one corner of his mouth tipped up.
“We’ll need lots more paper. Lots of different kinds. Inks. Um.” I touched the unlined papers, trying to recall everything that had been on my father’s writing desk in Aecor. “Rulers. Candles. Cleaning cloths. A blotter. Perhaps copybooks, if we can find any. Samples of other people’s handwriting.”
Patrick nodded, keeping everything in his head. He wouldn’t forget anything we needed. “You don’t actually know anything about forgery, do you?”
I cringed and shook my head.
“It’s fine.” He pushed off the windowsill and slid a notebook toward me. “Your idea was good. We will be a lot more effective if we can deliver false notes and forge official papers, but if we’re going to do this, we need to do it correctly. I’ll figure out what else we need and make sure we get it. You get to work actually learning what you’re doing.”
The simultaneous praise and criticism made my emotions knot up. Patrick rarely complimented, but he was right: I’d rushed into the idea of tricking my way into places, not having a solid foundation of experience behind me.
“You can do this, Wilhelmina.” Patrick patted my shoulder awkwardly; he was two years older, but we were the same height, which I could tell annoyed him. His father had been taller. “I’ll do anything I can to help you get back Aecor. So will the other Ospreys.”
“Thank you.” I took the notebook off the table and flipped through the evenly bound pages. Each sheet was lined and unusually perfect, while the cover was rubbed dull from handling. “This looks old.”
“It’s pre-wraith, I think.”
Ah. From before the ban over ninety years ago, when people used magic to manufacture and power everything. It must have been such a different world then, with the freedom to use magic and the ability to get whatever was needed with minimal inconvenience.
If only I’d been born then. It sounded like a better world than this one.
“You should keep it,” Patrick said. “Practice writing in it.”
“It’s too special for practice. That’s what all the scrap paper is for.” My fingers traveled across the cover, bumping through the shallow grooves where braids or vines had been stamped along the edges, but worn away over the century. “Father kept a diary. I don’t know what he wrote in there—he never let me see—but it might be good for me to write about reclaiming Aecor. When I am queen and you are my top general, historians will read what I write here and our efforts will never be forgotten.”
A pleased smile turned up the edges of his perpetual frown. “So you like it?”
“Yes.” I took a chair and ink and found a pen and nib that wasn’t rusty. The curved end of the nib fitted into the holder perfectly. “I like it very much.”
Patrick sat next to me, watching as I shook and then opened a jar of ink, tested the color and flow on a scrap paper, and wrote my name on the inside of the leather-bound notebook.
Property of Wilhelmina Korte, Princess of Aecor.
The following is an account of my return to my kingdom. It is real and true.
The sharp pen nib scraped the paper, making a pleasant scratch scratch as I wrote the date and location. My pen strokes were slow, careful so that the black lines were an even thickness and had proper spacing, just as my tutor had taught me. In fact, the letters looked exactly like my tutor’s.
“You have nice handwriting.”
Well, my tutor had nice handwriting. But I smiled anyway.
Patrick held open his hand for the pen, and I placed it in his palm. “Can you copy mine?” he asked.
“Let’s see.”
He dipped the pen in ink and wrote on a scrap paper.
I, Patrick Lien, son of General Brendon Lien, do hereby swear my life to helping Princess Wilhelmina Korte reclaim her kingdom, no matter the cost.
I blinked up at him.
“Go ahead.” He slid the paper toward me. “Let’s see what you can do.”
Our writing was very different. Where mine was all elegant lines learned from a patient tutor, Patrick’s penmanship was scratchier, with uneven lines, and he allowed letters to fade at the end of words when the ink ran low on the nib. The letters weren’t the same height, and they didn’t have a uniform roundness. Those were mistakes my tutor would have drilled out of him, but perhaps his didn’t care, or his father wasn’t interested in his studies.
“It’s not as nice as yours.” Patrick shifted away a hair.
I dipped my pen into the ink. “I wasn’t thinking that. I was just studying the differences. But if you don’t like your handwriting, maybe I can help you change it.”
The motion was small, but he nodded. “I’d appreciate that.”
I hid my smile behind a strand of hair as I began copying his words. It was tricky; my training made his scratchy lines difficult to emulate.
The rough paper caught a tine, and all the ink sluiced out of the pen, making a huge inkblot over Patrick’s name.
I slammed the pen on the table and shouted a word I’d heard the older boys use.
“Wil!” Patrick’s voice was sharp. “Not as a queen. Would your mother have ever had an outburst like that? Used that word? Over a pen?”
My mother wouldn’t have lived in a freezing old castle, but I did. There wasn’t another choice. But I shook my head because I didn’t want Patrick to be angry with me.
“Try again.”
I dipped the nib into the ink and began writing. This time, I focused more, letting the point glide lightly over the paper to avoid the rough patches. I rounded or narrowed my letters like Patrick’s, noting which ones he tended to make the same way every time and which ones changed depending on where they were in the word. I caught myself refilling the pen where he’d have let the ink run out, though, so I pressed open the tines and let the black seep back into the bottle before completing the word.
Finished, I sat back to inspect my work.
“That’s not bad.” Patrick cocked his head. “Your lines are still more even than mine. See how mine taper at the tops and bottoms?”
I scowled. “You don’t even do the same things regularly, though. See this g here? You don’t curve the y descender the same way, even though they’re both at the end of the word.”
“That probably makes my handwriting easier to forge, since it’s inconsistent.”
“Oh. Hmm.”
“Try again,” he said. “Then we need to go out and train with the others. Our goals won’t be easy to accomplish, Wilhelmina, and we won’t get Aecor back this year, or even next year. But one day we will. One day you’ll take your rightful place on the vermilion throne, and your parents will be so proud.”
I muttered a thanks, not sure how to respond to such a heartfelt statement from Patrick, of all people.
When I finished the next attempt at copying his handwriting, he gave a sharp nod and minuscule smile. “You have a real talent for this,” he said. “I’ll make sure you have everything you need. Maybe I can even find a tutor.”
I wanted to hug him, but he was Patrick; he didn’t like hugs. Instead, I cleaned the nib, closed the bottle of ink, and said, “Thank you. I hope you know how much I appreciate you, and how happy I am that you’re here with me.”
He placed his palm on my shoulder, carefully, deliberately. “I’ll always be with you, Wilhelmina.”