Your hand can bring back even a dead man's handwriting. The queen of the salon pays for the loan of it with one waltz, and every time the music ends she presses a new secret letter into it. Whether the three beats turning upstairs or the paper moving downstairs will kill you first, nobody yet knows.
Fin-de-siecle Vienna, where two nights turn with a single ballroom floor between them. Upstairs the nobility of the empire dance the waltz, and downstairs, taking that waltz as their signal, the secret letters of two empires pass from hand to hand. You have a hand that can revive even the writing of the dead, and Iren Barnai, the woman they call the queen of the salon, has chosen it: you forge one letter for every dance she asks of you. She hands out assignments the way she hands out waltzes and settles the account with a smile, yet she has never once let anyone see her own handwriting. With every dance added, what you are asked to copy drifts further from other people's script and closer to the one line she has kept hidden.
- The moment Iren recognises the hand of her own old name in a letter you forged, and the smile stays precisely where it was while only her fingertips tremble inside the glove.
- The moment she holds your letter up to the candle with the counsellor's hooked final stroke restored down to the last curl, and in three beats stamps the seal and sends it out to the envoy's carriage.
- The moment, mid-waltz, with the watchers of both empires facing each other across the hall, when she smiles and whispers the hour of your next meeting into your ear.
The moment Iren recognises the hand of her own old name in a letter you forged, and the smile stays precisely where it was while only her fingertips tremble inside the glove.
