The heavy oak door of Orsino's study closed with a quiet thud, leaving Sabia alone in the hushed corridor. The corridor stretched long and empty, each polished marble tile reflecting the cold grey light from the clerestory. Three days. Seventy-two hours to expose the forged contract Bettina had planted, or lose the single patron standing between her and a debtor's cell. The bronze clock in the rotunda struck four, each chime ringing hollow against the stones. She retreated to her studio, locking the brass bolt into the doorframe. Pippin, a sleek shadow of umber fur, unwound from the cushion by the unlit hearth. He brushed against her leg, a low rumble in his chest, then leaped onto her drafting table, his tail twitching as he watched her. He nudged her fingers, his whiskers brushing against her knuckles. Sabia pulled the ink-stained tome from its alcove beneath the floorboards. She flipped through the coded entries, desperate for a clue, a forgotten instruction from her younger self. She worked through the measured diagrams and cryptic notes on mordants. Nothing. Her past entries had accounted for stolen dyes and falsified ledgers, yet not for a signed parchment bearing her own counterfeited crest. This trap, sprung by Bettina, felt too blunt, too crude for the elaborate counter-schemes she had meticulously laid. Pippin caught a claw in the calfskin binding, levering his weight against the spine. Sabia frowned. She had run her fingers over every inch of this book countless times. She had pressed, prodded, and even tried to pry apart the hardened glue of the cover. Yet, Pippin’s attention was fixed on a spot just beneath the ornamental clasp, where the leather seemed marginally thicker. She picked at the edge with a steel bodkin. A narrow seam yielded, exposing a hollow slit inside the pasteboard. Her fingers drew out a rolled, yellowed vellum inscribed in the elder Moretti's sloping hand. Dried lavender dust spilled across the desk as she smoothed the crease. “My dearest Sabia,” the lines began. “If you read this, Bettina has moved to erase you from our family register. She doses your evening possets with foxglove and white bryony root to fog your recall and dull your hand. She fears your eye, meaning to pass your weavings off as Lucrezia's and barter your hand for her son's debts. Trust Pippin. He remembers the cedar chest.” Foxglove and bryony. The unexplained morning migraines, the dizzy spells over the loom, the blank weeks when entire cartoons vanished from her sketchpads—not weakness, but poison measured out in porcelain cups. Bettina had spent years dulling her reflexes so Lucrezia could carry off her work unchallenged. “Pippin,” she said. The cat blinked, ears swiveling toward the door. He dropped to the floorboards and padded toward a low cedar chest tucked beneath a velvet drape. Hooking a paw under the brass escutcheon, he struck the recessed spring. The lid popped an inch upward. Inside lay row upon row of spun silk and twisted linen skeins. Pippin dipped his muzzle into the tray, nosing past madder-dyed cords and indigo wool until he tipped over a single ivory bobbin. A dry brown streak ran along its outer wraps. He rolled the wooden cylinder across the rug to her slippers. The elder Moretti's words rang back: silent truths placed in the open. Sabia picked up the wooden core. The strand was stiffened with copperas and oak gall, the very reagent used to seal legal documents before the guilds. Bettina had used the old household spools to bind the false folio presented to Orsino. A drop of vinegar or alkali would bloom the hidden mordant, proving the binder came from Bettina's private stores, not Sabia's kit.

The Tidewater Cat's Gambit