"Aha. That sounds more reasonable."

"I don't actually have that great a sense of how much writing she does about any given thing since it's all coded now. Frankly I think she's overreacting, like, the fact that Jayce peeked once could have just prompted her to buy a box with a lock, but, no, cryptography."

"People do occasionally see her writing something. I did, earlier."

"Yeah, but do you know what it was about?"

"No. Because it was ciphered."

"Hence my lack of sense of the thing. Unless you mean this is why a box with a lock wouldn't work in which case I'm pretty sure she'd be more careful about letting people see if she were not writing in made-up letters."

"There is that," he acknowledges.

"Sometimes I look over her shoulder. She's really fast with all the code, I think she's got to have rendered a lot of short common words as their own symbols because there's more than there should be appearing with spaces on both sides, and sometimes there's funny little diagrams. Also she kept normal punctuation, it's cute when there's a long string of exclamation marks."

"...I think it might be best if I didn't hear any more about her cipher," he says.

"How come?"

"Did she not tell you about my memory?"

"Oh, now I remember, she had a little jealous rant and then said she had to double-check all her old ruminations about not screwing with nonessential mind magic and see if any of them come up different now she knows that it's within human variation. But how does knowing about punctuation plus your memory equal anything bad?"

"I can't lose information," he says. "And I have a good head for puzzles, especially ones related to language. No single trivial fact about punctuation or anything else is going to make the difference, but if I hear enough of them, I might solve the cipher without meaning to. I'd rather not risk it, as protective of her privacy as she is."

"Huh. Okay. I've basically exhausted what I actually know about it anyway."

"Well, that's helpful."

"Jayce actually tried to break it once. When Kiri noticed she wrote up a page of stuff she didn't care about and handed it over to see if he could, because if he could she had to change it anyway."

"I see. I wonder if she will do the same with me."

"Well, you are not literally the person she invented the cipher for, so off the top of my head probably not."

He smiles.

"Jayce isn't generally a snoop or anything, incidentally, don't want to give that impression."

"I see."

After a lull, Aleko remarks, "You have one of the nicest Chialto houses. I like Kiri's too, but yours is made of wood and it's got all kinds of stuff done to it from over the years."

"Oh? I look forward to seeing that," he says. "The forest on the estate was similar; I got the impression that at least some of my predecessors must have gone in and done things to trees whenever they were bored."

"Yeah? What kinda things?"

"Many and varied. Some of them grow in loops or spirals; some interweave their branches; one had its trunk shaped to suggest that there was a person sleeping inside, covered by the bark."