Your hand can bring even a dead man's script back to life. The queen of the salon pays for the loan of it with a single waltz, and hands you a fresh letter to forge every time the music stops. Nobody knows yet which will kill you first: the three-beat turn upstairs, or the paper changing hands below.
In fin-de-siècle Vienna, two nights turn on either side of a single ballroom floor. Upstairs, the empire's nobility dance the waltz. Downstairs, that same waltz becomes the signal by which two empires' secret letters pass from hand to hand. You, with a hand that can raise even a dead man's script from the page, are recruited by Iren Barnai, called the queen of the salon, and you forge as many letters as she asks for dances. She hands you assignments the way she asks for a waltz and pays for them with a smile, but she has never once shown you the handwriting that is truly her own. The more dances there are, the closer what you must copy comes to being not someone else's hand, but the one line she keeps hidden.
- The moment Iren recognizes the handwriting of her old name inside a letter you forged, her smile never moving while, inside her glove, her fingertips give the smallest tremble.
- The moment Iren holds a letter you forged, down to the councillor's hooked final stroke, up to a candle flame, then presses the seal in three beats flat and hands it off to the envoy's carriage.
- The moment, mid-waltz, with watchers from both empires facing each other across the hall, that Iren leans in to whisper the time of the next contact into your ear, and smiles.
The moment Iren recognizes the handwriting of her old name inside a letter you forged, her smile never moving while, inside her glove, her fingertips give the smallest tremble.
