The Demon’s Surrender

The Demon’s Surrender

ALSO BY SARAH REES BRENNAN

The Demon’s Lexicon

The Demon’s Covenant

MARGARET K. MCELDERRY BOOKS

An imprint of Simon & Schuster Children’s Publishing Division

1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, New York 10020

www.SimonandSchuster.com

This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people,

or real locales are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and incidents are

products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or locales

or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 2011 by Sarah Rees Brennan

All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.

MARGARET K. MCELDERRY BOOKS is a trademark of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

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Book design by Mike Rosamilia

The text for this book is set in Dante MT.

Manufactured in the United States of America

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Brennan, Sarah Rees.

The demon’s surrender / Sarah Rees Brennan.—1st ed.

p. cm.—(The demon’s lexicon trilogy; bk. 3)

Summary: Sin’s world is turned upside down when she has to ally with a demon and his brother

to save her beloved Goblin Market from the evil magicians.

ISBN 978-1-4169-6383-7 (hardcover)

ISBN 978-1-4424-2393-0 (eBook)

[1. Demonology—Fiction. 2. Magic—Fiction. 3. Brothers—Fiction.] I. Title.

PZ7.B751645Dg 2010

[Fic]—dc22

2010038480

Contents

Acknowledgments Chapter 1: Summer Past Chapter 2: The Final Test Chapter 3: Throwing the Fever Blossom Chapter 4: Anchor Point Chapter 5: Traitor in the Nest Chapter 6: Attack Chapter 7: Lie to Me Chapter 8: Burning Wishes Chapter 9: My Mother’s Daughter Chapter 10: The Queen’s Corsair Chapter 11: End the Party with a Bang Chapter 12: Look on Tempests Chapter 13: Dark My Light Chapter 14: Pouring Away the Ocean Chapter 15: Brothers in Arms Chapter 16: They Have to Take You In Chapter 17: The Knife That Would Cut Through Anything Chapter 18: Reaching Through the Dark for You Chapter 19: Mavis to the Rescue Chapter 20: The Thief of the Pearl Chapter 21: The Last Answers to the Last Questions Chapter 22: The Leader of the Goblin Market

This trilogy is all about family, and especially about siblings.

So it seems fitting to dedicate the last book in the series

to the sibling who reads my books.

This one is for Gen, my favorite sister.

Okay, my only sister. But if I had another one…

my hypothetical other sister would be seriously out of luck.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Trilogy accomplished! Which means more thanks than I can adequately express go to:

Karen Wojtyla, who was absolutely right about the book needing one last go-round, as she is about so much; Emily Fabre; and Valerie Shea. Also to Nicole Russo and everyone at Simon & Schuster for tireless marketing efforts on behalf of “Oh God, those demon books.”

Kristin Nelson and everyone at NLA, for everything.

Venetia Gosling, Kathryn McKenna, and everyone at Simon & Schuster UK, plus Scott Westerfeld and Justine Larbalestier, for so much, including an awesome UK tour.

All my foreign publishers, who without exception dazzle me.

Holly Black, who stayed up all night in London to read the first draft of this book, made it so half the edits my editor suggested were already done, and is basically a Heroine of the Revolution. If you ever want a liver, Holly, I’ll…get one somehow. Also, thank you for the most fun tour ever.

Cassandra Clare, who organized the secret writing location where half this book was written.

My amazing first readers: Saundra Mitchell, Justine Larbalestier, and Karen Healey.

My family and friends, who for some reason have not yet put me on an iceberg and pushed me out to sea, as I understand the Eskimos do to annoying writers.

And if you’re reading this? Thank you.

The Demon’s Surrender

1

Summer Past

MAGIC WAS LIKE A SPECIAL GUEST IN SIN’S LIFE. IT APPEARED all too rarely, stayed for a brief interval, and she spent the rest of her time preparing for it to come again.

She had taken the day off school so she and her dancers could set up the lights. She and Chiara had spent an hour singing into Phyllis’s new music boxes, which echoed back their voices transformed into strange, sweet melodies. Then she’d had to rush away and help Carl set up his display of knives with luck stones in the hilts.

The magic had been worth waiting for. The Market at Dover Beach was one of the most beautiful Markets she’d seen this year.

The musicians were high on the white cliffs, streaked with shadows by the twilight, and the Market itself was being held on a platform a few steps up from the shingled beach. The sea lay sparkling and still in the curve of the bay, like water held in the hollow of a pale hand, and fainter than the light of the stars, Sin could see the nighttime lights of the French coast.

There were other Goblin Markets held in other countries. She wanted to dance at them all one day.

For now she was glad to be at this one.

Sin was watching Toby while Mama put the finishing touches on the fortune-telling stall. The lanterns swinging over their heads cast rainbow gleams over the surface of the crystal balls, in the depths of the jewels on Mama’s hands. Sin rocked Toby and Mama sang a Goblin Market song to them both as she laid out the cards.

“Hush little baby, don’t say a word. If you have two marks never get a third. Hush little baby, don’t you cry. Mama never falls and demons never lie. Hush little baby, don’t say a thing. Mama’s going to buy you a magic ring. And if your ring won’t give you a wish, We’ll be all right, baby, just like this.”

Sin smiled. “Who are you planning to dance with tonight?”

“The best-looking man who asks me,” Mama replied, and they both laughed.

Mama was in a good mood for the first time in a long time. She had been sick too long after Toby was born and Victor had left with no word since to Mama, the woman he’d said he loved, or to Toby and Lydie, his children.

He wasn’t Sin’s father, and they were better off without him, but money had been tight since he went. What tourists really paid for were answers from demons, and to get those you had to dance. Mama had been too sick to dance, and she never accepted help from anyone. She’d never even let Dad help after he left. They had barely been able to scrape by on what Sin made dancing.

But now Mama was finally ready to dance again, they would be all right. Just like this.

“How about you?” Mama asked.

Sin just smiled, which meant she was holding out for Nick Ryves. He hadn’t been to the Market in a couple of months, so he was due back.

Nick and Sin weren’t exactly friends. It was hard to be friends with Nick.

He was the best dancer she’d ever seen, though, and that made her like him. Sin respected talent, and it was hard to dislike anyone when you loved to watch them move. Besides, you learned a lot about people dancing with them. That was why Sin made sure to dance with every new dancer once.

“Don’t tell me it’s Nick Ryves.” Mama wrinkled her nose. “That boy’s creepy. I’m saying this as someone personally acquainted with fifteen necromancers.”

Sin shrugged. “He’s better than his brother.”

“I don’t see what you have against Alan,” Mama said predictably. “He’s very gifted.”

Alan Ryves was the kind of boy all the parents and grandparents and busybodies of the Market thought everyone should be like: perfect, studious, ever so polite and ever so politely disdainful of the dancers. He got up Sin’s nose more than anyone she had ever met.

“I know. Being so boring and yet so irritating at once, that’s a gift.”

Mama did not respond. Sin glanced up to see that her mother’s eyes had gone wide, pools of brightness reflected from the lanterns, and Sin immediately twisted around to see the threat.

There was no threat. There was just Alan Ryves and his annoying face, and at his shoulder where Nick always stood there was… well, there was Nick.

It wasn’t that Sin did not recognize him. It was unmistakably Nick, all dead-white skin, dead-black hair, and drop-dead stare, but those sullen, too-sharp, and too-strong features of Nick’s had clicked into place: He was almost as tall as his brother now. Muscles that had made him look squat before, like a surly full-grown goblin rather than a kid, fit on his new frame in easy rippling lines as he walked.

He still moved like a dancer, smooth and sure.

This was Nick made new under the burning lanterns, light racing golden along the angular line of his cheekbones, fire kindling in the depths of his black eyes.

Mama whistled.

Sin smiled absently. It wasn’t that she was not interested by Nick’s sudden ridiculous good looks. She was just distracted by something even more unexpected.

She found herself feeling a little sorry for Nick.

Sin had always been a cute kid. She’d known that ever since she could remember: There was no way not to know, when she and Mama had to use it. She’d been using curls and ribbons and a sweet smile to get people to come to Mama’s stall and have their fortunes told since she was five years old.

She’d been dancing almost as long. First just to amuse the tourists, providing entertainment that was more about her smiles and her pretty costumes than the fact that she could dance, and then for the demons, when it was only talent that really counted. But making it look good never hurt.

She was used to attention and admiration. But it did change when you grew up, new and sometimes unexpectedly painful, like aching muscles.

Last year she had been at the stall of a potion-maker she’d known for years, and he’d given her a present because she looked so pretty that night. He’d spelled out her name in dandelion seeds, shining like stars in the moonlight.

He’d spelled it Sin. She’d always spelled it Cyn before. But now people looked at her and saw something different.

Mama had put her arm around Sin’s shoulders as they left the potion-maker’s stall.

“So make the name yours,” she’d said.

A stage name was the truest name a dancer could have. She’d learned to use what people saw when they looked at her. She’d always been a performer.

Heads were turning as the brothers moved through the crowd, and Nick did not look even slightly fazed. Sin saw him meet a few gazes for an instant and then let his eyes slide deliberately away, his mouth curling. Nick, who never wanted to talk or play or be friends, looked as comfortable as he did in the dancing circle with the demons. As if he had always known he was going to be beautiful.

Nick had never been one for performance. But it looked like he knew how to use this new power he had as a weapon.

She could understand that.

Sin rose from her place by Toby’s crib, and took a moment to let the lights of the Market and the wind from the beach wash over her.

Her mother caught her eye and winked. “Go get your partner.”

“Oh, I will, but Nick can wait,” Sin said. “First I want an audience.”

It was the night of the Goblin Market, a night for seeing someone in a new light.

She thought Nick was human at the time.

Sin spotted her mark right away. He was a guy in a suit who had the air of someone who’d been to the Market a few times before and was trying to give the impression it had been more than a few. He was also handing over a lot more money than the German book of witchcraft he was paying for was worth.

“Welcome to the Market,” Sin said.

When he spun around, she was already positioned so that the fairy lights caught the red glints in her hair and left her face wearing shadows and a slow scarlet smile.

It was a lot like placing her mother’s crystal balls on the stall so they were shown off to their best advantage. Sin wasn’t for sale, but it did no harm to let tourists believe she might be.

The man visibly hesitated, then swallowed. “It’s not my first time.”

“Oh,” said Sin. “I could tell.”

“I guess,” the guy said, his eyes traveling over Sin’s bright clothes and gleaming skin. “You’re one of the attractions?”

“I’m the star attraction,” Sin murmured. “Follow the music when it starts, and you’ll see me dance.”

The man took a step toward her and she felt a flash of triumph. She had him, like a fish on a line.

“What are you doing right now?” he asked.

“She’s busy being underage,” said the most irritating voice in the world.

They both looked around to the book stall, which Alan Ryves was leaning his bad leg against, a book in one hand and his usual expression of righteousness on his face.

“So perhaps what you should do right now is leave,” he continued in his gentle voice, the one he used as he limped around the Market charming every old biddy in the place. Such a nice boy, they all said.

Nice boys were such a pain.

“Er, so I’ll just be,” said the tourist, and then stepped backward and away, into the crowd.

Alan gave her a little smile, as if he expected her to thank him for scaring away her audience. As if he’d done something nice for her, and he was expecting her to be pleased. There were fairy lights over his head, too, making his glasses catch the light and his red hair seem to catch fire. He looked even more ridiculous than usual.

He was wearing a T-shirt that said I GET MY FUN BETWEEN THE COVERS. It had a picture of a book on it.

“Hi, Cynthia,” he said.

“What is wrong with you?” Sin demanded. “Besides the obvious.”

Alan’s smile twisted in on itself, and Sin bit her lip as she realized what he thought she’d meant. She hadn’t been thinking about—well, she had been, it was hard not to notice—but she hadn’t intended for him to assume she was talking about his leg.

She didn’t feel like losing any ground before the ever-so-saintly Ryves brother, though, so she just sneered, turning her face pointedly away to look at the rest of the Market. There were a lot of sights that deserved her attention far more than Alan.

One of them was her little sister Lydie, being carried past in Trish’s arms. Trish made fever wine during the day before the Market, but at night she often volunteered to babysit.

“Lydie,” said Sin, and brushed a kiss at the golden curls at her sister’s temple. Lydie looked past her and reached her arms out for Alan.

“Hi, sweetheart,” said Alan, his voice turning slow and sweet as honey. Lydie’s arms stretched forward, questing and imperious, and Alan leaned his weight against the stall and reached out to hold her.

Sin had to look away as he lurched.

“You’re so irresistible to women, Alan,” she remarked. “Pity your charm only works on those over fifty or under five.”

“Poor me,” Alan said. “I just missed my chance of dazzling you. You’re what, seven by now?”

He gave her the smug look of a boy a bare three years older than she was. Sin rolled her eyes.

“Same age as your brother,” she remarked. “And he’s looking pretty grown-up these days.”

Alan’s stance shifted suddenly, and Sin realized that there was one of the Ryves brothers at least who was not entirely comfortable with Nick’s transformation. Alan’s T-shirt might as well have read MY BROTHER IS JAILBAIT. IT’S MAKING ME ANXIOUS.

Sin smiled with glorious and terrible joy.

“You’ve seen Nick,” Alan said, his voice suddenly wary. “Did you talk to him?”

She raised her eyebrows. “I’m sorry. I wasn’t aware that he needed a signed permission slip to play with the other children. I have seen him. I had a lot of fun looking.”

“Yes, all right, Cynthia,” said Alan, who apparently felt he needed to use her full name at all times in order to achieve the maximum possible level of condescension. “Look, I’m just—I’m just saying, maybe be a little careful.”

“Careful?” Sin repeated. “You’re telling me to be careful of your own brother.”

Alan colored a deep, unhappy red. Sin did not give a damn.

Market opinion was divided on what Nick thought of Alan, their guesses ranging from “total indifference” to “sullen adoration.” But Alan had always seemed to love Nick, sticking close to him, taking care of him as Nick scowled about it. It was the only thing about Alan that Sin actually approved of.

She reached out and pulled her sister out of his arms, rocking Lydie when she made a noise of extreme dissatisfaction. She pressed Lydie’s cheek to her talisman, the enchanted web of net and crystal against her heart.

“I can’t count the ways you make me sick,” she said conversationally to Alan. “Besides the obvious.”

She wielded the words with vicious, deliberate emphasis like one of her long knives, and saw them cut deep. The color drained out of Alan’s face.

“Stay out of my way,” Sin ordered. “And don’t you dare interfere with any of my audiences ever again.”

“He was a creep,” Alan mumbled. “It’s wrong to objectify women.”

He turned away toward the piles of books, as if retreating to a refuge, and sounded a little awkward when he said that, like he really believed it but knew it sounded stupid. Alan was supposed to be so smart; Sin could not understand why he didn’t see that he was insulting her by implying she hadn’t known exactly what she was doing, and exactly what that guy was.

She gave Lydie to Trish and stepped in close to Alan, whose eyes widened slightly. Sin ignored her own surprise that Alan was so tall and leaned in closer still, almost resting her chin against his shoulder, so close she could feel his body heat. She concentrated her gaze until he followed it, and saw who she was watching.

She gave him a slow, sweet smile.

“Guess what,” she said. “I’m objectifying your brother right now.”

She left without another look at him, sliding through the Market. She smiled, seeing first-time tourists arrive looking wary about the mysterious invitations they’d received from strangers, and then seeing their faces wiped clean of everything but wonder. The stalls were full of glittering marvels like treasure chests newly discovered and just opened for the first time, and even the stars shone bright as new coins under lamplight against the black velvet drape of a stall. Sin remembered being very small, walking through the Market holding her father’s hand, dazzled by everything.

Sin was part of the marvels now.

As she listened to the pipers, the music from above changed, became something intense, with a beat that rang out to the sky. Sin tipped her head back to see white cliffs painted violet and black by the falling night, the pipers at the edge with their instruments gleaming in the moonlight, and above them walls and a castle keep.

Then she lowered her gaze and saw that everyone was looking at her.

She had already positioned herself under a lantern that beamed white light in a pattern like lace: a lantern enchanted to make everything it touched radiant. Sin knew it was making her silvery dress glow like moonlight on steel, that it made the fever blossoms woven through the pale material and her dark hair kindle with crimson fire.

She sent her body rippling to the music, bringing attention to the shifting whisper-soft material over her skin, to the sway of her hips. Her movement called the other dancers to her, spilling in from every corner of the Market to join her dance.

She swayed a few more times, slow and sinuous. The whispers and gasps of the audience stroked over her like caresses.

When she pulled a fever blossom slowly out of her hair, dark locks unraveling from the flower like ribbons, the noise from the audience rose to an excited pitch.

Clearly, this crowd had been informed that whoever was thrown a fever blossom had the dancer’s favor.

Sin laughed, and threw.

The single point of red drew every eye and painted a fiery streak against the sky, like a tiny falling star.

Nick was standing alone and looking bored, his eyes hooded. He caught the fever blossom in one hand.

Sin left the dance and walked toward him. His lids lifted as she came close. There was a gleam his eyes.

“You ready to dance?” Sin asked.

“With you?”

“Don’t tell me you were considering someone else.”

Nick smirked. “Why, will it break your heart?”

“No,” said Sin. “I just won’t believe you.”

She saw the glint of appreciation touch his cold face, curving his mouth at the very edges. Nick never showed much emotion, but even the smallest hint of a reaction was like a victory. And he’d always appreciated directness.

“Well, I don’t lie,” he said, tucking away the fever blossom and offering her his hand. “And I don’t want to dance with anyone but you.”

The summoning circles were cut, the drums were beating, and Nick was in the circle overlapping hers before she spoke to him again. Even then, he didn’t speak back.

He couldn’t. They always used a speaking charm so Alan could talk to the demons for him.

“Good luck,” Sin murmured, and they both smiled because the idea he might need luck was a joke.

The music had started as a trickle and became a flood now, cascading over the sand and into the ocean, echoing off the pale cliffs, coursing like sweet electric shocks through Sin’s bones. Sin could see the tourists’ heads turning even more than usual, as she looked at them with eyes that lured them into drawing closer and Nick stared at them with eyes that said to draw closer if they dared.

The music from the new drums was better, the tiny rattle of skulls adding an edge to the melody. Lines and circles leaped into fire under Sin’s feet.

She turned to fire with them, muscles burning as she twisted and turned and pushed them to their limit, blood burning in her veins as she spun. She was never so aware of her body as she was when she danced, of her body as a weapon honed to a perfect edge and a decoration polished until it was perfectly irresistible. Every pair of eyes resting on her, every breath she took away, was a triumph.

Sin never doubted the demon would come.

And Anzu did, golden wings meeting over his head like a crown, empty glass-colored eyes fixed on Nick’s. Nick stared back without flinching: a real dancer, who would never in a thousand years stumble or fall.

Alan’s voice came out of the darkness beyond their burning circle, sure and calm. Sin had to admit, he always knew just what to say.

She’d hardly been aware of her partner as she danced, aside from the fact that she could trust Nick never to make a wrong move. But she was always most grateful for Nick when the demons came. Nothing ever frightened him.

Sin looked at him and saw the same satisfaction she felt, the same rush and thrill of daring death and doing it just right, and was absolutely certain that later tonight there would be making out.

Then a magician sent a fireball through a stall.

Merris Cromwell sent the alarm bells ringing for an attack, Matthias and his pipers started playing music to work everyone into a battle frenzy, and Carl from the weapons stall threw an ax at the head of the first magician in the sweeping rush.

Sin and Nick had to stay perfectly still. If they moved, they might break through one of the lines, they might cross the circle, and that meant the demon could tear off their talismans. That meant possession: that meant worse than death.

They were left totally exposed.

“Scared, my beautiful dancer?” Anzu the demon whispered in her ear. “Sure you don’t want to run?”

“I dismiss you,” Alan said coolly, as if nothing was happening. The demon’s fury curled around Sin’s heart like a fist as his balefire started to dim.

Sin lifted her chin and ignored him. Part of dancing was knowing when to stay still.

The demon was leaving, the fire dying. Soon the circle could be broken.

She could see only three magicians, but the three were cutting through the Market people like a spearhead, their demons clearing them a path, their hands streaming lightning and darkness. They rushed down the pier, and Sin realized in a moment of cold horror that they were coming straight at Nick.

The circle would not be broken in time.

Then there was the sharp crack of a gun firing, and the head of the man in front exploded. Blood splashed hot into Sin’s face. There was another shot and the glint of a knife in the night. Sin did not let herself even tremble.

Then there was nothing but three dead men between Alan Ryves and his brother.

Alan stepped over them without a glance, a gun in one hand and a bloody knife in the other.

“Are you all right, Nick?” he demanded, and pulled the speaking charm off Nick’s neck, chain breaking in the hand that held his knife, so Nick could answer.

Nick nodded silently. He had not moved a muscle, and he did not look even slightly surprised.

Once reassured, Alan lowered his knife and looked over his shoulder at the trail of dead bodies he’d left behind. Apparently now he could register that he had killed three people in less than a minute and look a little startled and a little sorry.

That was why Sin didn’t like guns. Apart from the fact that they sometimes didn’t work on magicians, it was too easy to use them. There was no physical, visceral awareness of what you had done when you used one.

She did like knives. And as the last of the balefire died she stepped out of her circle and drew hers, though there was no threat left to face.

It was excellent that there hadn’t been many magicians, that they had been neutralized quickly, that the Market night could go on. But it left her with the blood racing in her veins, her heart battering her chest as if it wanted to take wing.

She had meant to stay and see Mama do her first dance.

Instead when Nick caught her eye and turned away, she followed him.

It was dark and cool down on the shore, white seashells and sand crackling beneath her feet. Sin moved toward the shoreline, where the surf was kissing the sand in a rush of exuberant foam, looked around, and saw no sign of Nick.

Sin walked along the water’s edge, the lights of the Market behind her, sea and sand stretching to either side, and waited until the moon-iced surface of the ocean broke.

Nick pushed back black hair, drenched and sleek as seal fur, and smiled at her. He might as well have beckoned. The angles of his face looked more sharply cut than ever, his shoulders white and wet, all the planes of his body given gleaming definition by moonlight.

She walked into the surf and he walked out of it toward her: the water of the English Channel was cold even in August, rushing up to meet Sin mid-thigh almost at once and hitting her at waist-height as she waded in deeper, washing the sweat off her skin and all the tiredness out of her muscles, leaving her with nothing but a sweet ache along her body.

She reached out and trailed her fingertips down the ridges of Nick’s stomach, curious, until her hand met the cool shock of water and the leather of his belt.

“I’m a little disappointed,” Sin said.

Nick smirked. “I’m a little shy.”

Sin caught hold of the wet rope securing his talisman, knotted it around her hand, and pulled his head down to hers. He caught her small delighted laugh with his mouth.

His skin was cool and his mouth hot against hers, and she stood on her tiptoes to get more. It wasn’t like Sin was short: These Ryves boys were both too tall.

Nick rescued her from the passing and disturbing moment when Alan Ryves crossed her mind by solving her problem and picking her up, hands sure on the small of her back and bending her backward so she was lying on the water like a mermaid in her bed, her hair spreading out with the waves. Then he pulled her back up to him, and she slid her arms around his neck and kissed him again.

“Come on,” Nick murmured against her mouth. “I don’t like the sea. Why don’t we get out?”

Sin smiled. “Why don’t we?”

He carried her out of the ocean and laid her down on the shoreline, the place where the pebbles lay washed by the surf until they looked like jewels. Her soaked hair fanned out in the sand like seaweed, and Sin arched up so he could slide his hands under her back and save her from the chill. He stroked up and down her back obligingly, and slid down her body a little, nudging her talisman sharply to one side as if it irritated him, so the wet rope bit hard against her neck as his mouth opened on her throat, warm and lingering.

Sin pulled his wet hair a little as a punishment for the sting of the rope, and arched up against him again.

Then an alarm shattered the silence from cliffs to sea. Sin went rigid with fear: She levered herself up and met Nick’s gleaming black eyes.

“Alan,” he growled.

“Mama,” Sin said, and now that they’d both named what they had back at the Market, what could be in danger, the spell of a moment was broken. Sin was up and running, not caring if Nick was running too or where he was, only caring that she got back.

She launched herself up onto the cement platform and landed hard, skinning her knees bloody and not caring about that either, rolling to her feet and running.

There were magicians all around them. The first three magicians had been a decoy, something to make them feel as if they were safe from attack. This was real.

Sin saw the tourist Alan had warned away from her, magic glowing in his hand. His eyes went wide as he recognized her.

She was faster on the draw than he was. Her knife was buried in his throat before the magic ever left his hand, and she was running on.

Everywhere across the Market her people were fighting, and they beat the magicians back. Sin was shivering with triumph and exhaustion by the time she finally reached the dancers, ready to find Mama and rest, with her singing that they would be all right.

It was very quiet where the dancers were. It was so still.

Mama was lying facedown in her circle. The balefire had all gone out.

Sin stepped into the dead summoning circle, knelt down on the earth and turned her mother over, so gently. For a moment she was absolutely, blessedly relieved: Mama’s breath was coming steadily, stirring the fall of her golden-brown hair over her face, and Sin thought she was just hurt, that everything was going to be fine.

Mama opened her eyes.

All the light and joy of the Market, all the light and joy Sin knew in this world, drained away in the terrible demon darkness of those eyes.

“No,” Sin said, her voice a lonely whisper, drowned out by the sound of the sea, by the terrible sucking silence emanating from the thing that had moments ago been her mother.

“Mama!” came Lydie’s voice, and Sin looked up to see her little sister come dashing toward them, and thought, No, no, no with the force of a scream she could not let loose, with the force of a prayer.

Alan scooped Lydie up fast as she went by, turning her face toward his with his free hand, talking to her in rapid, soothing tones, comforting her, not allowing her to see.

There was nobody to comfort Sin, and she had to see.

The demon seemed to be registering its success, its body coming to terrible life in Sin’s arms, Mama’s mouth curving into a gradual, awful smile.

Mama was nothing but a shell with a demon inside her; Mama herself was caged in the back of her own mind. That was what happened whenever an ordinary person had dreams of demons and opened a window to let them in. Or whenever a dancer fell in a summoning circle.

In the distance Sin could hear Merris giving the orders to those in the know for taking a possessed person, for dragging the demon-infested body to Mezentius House, where it would be held prisoner until the body rotted away from the inside out, until the body died. The necromancers were coming and the men with chains, those who had spells to throw.

Her mother was still inside there, helpless, with the demon in command.

“Mama,” said Sin, finding her voice in extremity, the words tumbling desperately out. “Mama. I’ll come with you. Don’t be too scared. I’ll come, I’ll stay. Mama, I love you.”

Her voice rose then, in a high childish wail, but she couldn’t afford to be childish now. As the Market people came to deal with her mother, Sin surged to her feet and went to deal with Merris Cromwell.

“You certainly cannot come to Mezentius House,” Merris informed her. “You’re far too valuable to risk.”

Sin had always been awed and scared by Merris before. She’d always seen her at a remove, knowing that her mother would probably inherit the Market someday, since she was a Davies and the best dancer they had. She’d left her mother to deal with Merris.

Her mother was as good as dead. Which meant Sin was the best dancer in the Market, and she was the next in line to be leader.

“My mother’s in there,” Sin said. “I’m going to stay with her. And if you don’t let me, I’ll leave the Market.”

It was an insane thing to say. What would she do if she left the Market, especially now Mama was gone, now Toby and Lydie had only her? She couldn’t do anything but dance. She would have to become one of the dancers not attached to the Market, who danced for demons alone, who usually died in less than a year.

It was an insane thing to say, but she meant it.

“You can let me go to Mezentius House, or you can find a new heir. I will not let my mother die alone!”

Merris let her go. Sin promised Trish and Carl all her tips for the next season, anything, if they would care for Lydie and Toby until she came back. Toby was asleep, but Lydie cried, and Sin was terribly grateful that Alan was still holding Lydie, his eyes wide and so sorry for them both. Sin wasn’t going to let herself cry in front of Alan Ryves.

She cried at the House of Mezentius. She stayed with her possessed mother for three nightmarish weeks, cried and bled and screamed and stayed, until her mother died. And she went back to the Market, still able to dance.

That was one mercy. There was nobody else to inherit the Market, and nobody else to take care of Lydie and Toby.

Sin did not need anyone else. She could do it, just like dancing: It didn’t matter how hard it was. What mattered was never, ever to falter.

She didn’t falter, and she did not fall once over the year and more that passed, not when they found out that Nick Ryves was a demon that had been put in a child and raised among them all this time. Not when they discovered that Alan was the greatest traitor imaginable, someone who had chosen a demon above his own kind. Not when the threat of the magicians became so great and Merris got so sick that they had to make a bargain with the demon and the traitor.

Not even when Alan Ryves, the boy Sin had never liked, gave her a gift she could never have imagined and could never repay when he put himself in the power of magicians to save her brother.

So Sin was not going to hesitate for a moment now, though a demon had strolled into her ordinary London classroom with its graying blackboards and harsh fluorescent lights. Sin’s magic world and her normal world were meant to be kept apart, but here was Nick Ryves at her school.

He looked much the same as he had more than a year ago, when he’d stood looking down at her with wet hair fringed by moonlight.

“Sin?” asked Nick, who she had thought was human once. He seemed, as far as you could tell with Nick, startled and perhaps even pleased to see her.

Sin crossed her legs under her rough uniform skirt.

“I’m sorry,” she said smoothly. “My name’s Cynthia Davies. I don’t believe we’ve ever met.”

2

The Final Test

SIN,” NICK SAID, SOUNDING VAGUELY ANNOYED, “WHAT ARE you—”

He tugged on his school tie as if it was a choke chain and scowled, then fortunately the bell rang and everyone sprang up. The next class was French and their teacher was pretty strict: Nobody was going to hang around and get in trouble, no matter how good-looking the new boy was.

Nobody was paying attention, and in the bustle of the other kids leaving, Sin could seize her chance to act and not be noticed.

She made a point of never being noticed at school.

“Listen closely,” she said, speaking very quietly and exercising great self-restraint by not grabbing Nick by his rumpled tie to make him listen. “We don’t know each other, have you got that? I’m not at all the kind of girl who knows boys like you.”

“What?” Nick said flatly.

“I study really hard: I have to because I’m not that smart. I’m good at gym, and I have some friends on the lacrosse team. In school I never wear makeup, and I don’t talk much to boys. Not that many people notice me and that is the way I like it.”

It was all true, as well. She needed to study, and she didn’t want the attention of any normal boys. This was just the way she wanted to be, as well as keeping her profile low in case the authorities took a second look at her unorthodox lifestyle living in a wagon with two little kids. It wasn’t any more or less of an act than how she was at Market nights.

Nick was frowning at her. “I don’t expect you to understand,” Sin snapped. “But I expect you not to screw this up for me.”

“Fine,” Nick grated out. “We don’t know each other.”

“Good.”

She was just about to take a deep breath and calm down when something else occurred to her: Here was Nick, inserted into their class in the middle of a school day. There was only one person Sin knew who could talk people around like that.

“Your brother,” Sin got out, feeling strange and hesitant about saying the words. “Is he here?”

“Yeah,” Nick said offhandedly. “He’s probably still wrapping stuff up with the headmistress.”

“Okay,” Sin said, and made up her mind. She picked up her own French book and slammed it into Nick’s chest, possibly too hard. “You take this,” she told him. “You need to get to French. I need to—go somewhere else. Um. Right now.”

Nick gave her a blank look, but most of Nick’s looks were pretty unreadable anyway, and Sin did not have time to explain herself. She bolted out of the door, ran down one flight of stairs, stood in the stairwell with another flight to go, and saw Alan limping down the hallway to the main doors.

Then she yelled, “Stop!”

Alan spun around, one hand going to the end of his shirt where she presumed his gun was concealed. Then he stood, squinting up at her through his glasses, looking a little uncertain.

Sin was always conscious of the light she was standing in, and she knew she must be little more than a girl’s shape against the big casement window behind her. A girl’s shape with curly hair escaping from a braid, wearing a bulky gray uniform. Alan had never seen her look anything like this before.

So when he said, “Cynthia?” with a measure of confidence, she understood he’d known she went to school here all along.

She descended the stairs. She was surprised by how much she didn’t want to: She was used to having the advantage over Alan, being in a place that set her off like a stage. Now here they were in a school in Ealing, surrounded by white walls that had gone gray and gray tile worn to white. She was without costume or backdrop or audience.

Sin lifted her chin as she came down. She didn’t need props.

“You wanted Nick to be in class with me.”

“Well, yeah,” Alan said mildly. “We’re all up in London for the same reason, aren’t we? I thought it would be nice for Nick to have someone he knew at school.”

They were all up in London for the same reason. The Aventurine Circle was there: a Circle with magicians in it who would not forgive the Goblin Market’s recent attack, a Circle with one magician in particular who had his mark on Alan and could do whatever he wanted to him at any moment.

Sin nodded. “That’s totally reasonable. Is there any particular reason you didn’t tell me you were going to do it? Is there any reason Nick had no idea until he walked into my class? Do you ever tell anyone anything?”

There was a beat, and Sin realized that it must look like she’d run through the school purely in order to abuse Alan.

His mouth twisted, color rising high on his cheekbones, as if she’d hit a sore spot. “Not often.”

Sin bit her lip. “I didn’t come down here to yell at you.”

Alan looked slightly alarmed. “Did you come down here to throw things?”

“Everything was so crazy before. We had to bury the dead, and organize a move, and I never got a chance to talk to you.”

“Did you want to?” Alan asked, sounding incredulous.

“Yes,” Sin snapped. “I wanted to say thank you.”

Alan looked startled. “For—”

“For my brother,” Sin said.

She heard her voice come out rough again. She knew she was doing this all wrong: She didn’t know how to thank someone for something like this. Sin was a Market girl born and bred. She understood bargains, she understood trading. She had always paid off her debts and tried to be fair exacting her prices.

Now all she could do was say thank you. It felt like revealing exactly how pathetic she was, that she had nothing else to offer.

She could not put a price on Toby’s life. There was nothing she had to give that could ever come close to paying back what she owed. If Alan Ryves ever asked her for anything, she would have to give it to him.

She wished he would ask for something, instead of standing there looking politely surprised.

“Cynthia,” he said, in a gentle voice she hated. That was the way he talked to children. “I would have done it for anybody.”

“I would have thanked anybody!” Sin said, and then there was a sound against the stairwell window like a storm of hail-stones.

Sin’s head turned to a window that showed a clear blue sky. Then she looked back, meeting Alan’s serious gaze, and they both flattened themselves against the walls on either side of the stairs and waited.

The sound was less like hailstones now and more like dozens of fists slamming into the window harder and harder until Sin heard a creak like ice underfoot and then the ringing, tinkling sound of glass hitting the floor.

She slid her knife out of the sheath under her shirt and eased carefully along the wall until she could peep up the stairs.

There was a nightmare creature there, tapping its way through the shards of broken glass like a fastidious old lady. It was made of mismatched bones. It had a fox skull for an elbow, and a human skull perched on top of the whole gleaming construction.

The bones were held together by bits of ribbon. Sin could see the tiny twists of fabric jerk just before the thing moved its bone limbs. They made it look like a huge, horrible puppet.

The long bones it had in the approximate place of forearms looked like they’d been taken from horses’ legs, sharpened to a point.

They didn’t have much time. Somebody was going to come investigating the noise.

Sin waited to hear the click of bones on the stairs once, twice, three times.

Then Alan stepped out from his place against the other wall, took aim, and fired. The human skull on top of the creature exploded into dust and fragments.

Somebody was definitely going to come investigating that noise. And the thing was still advancing.

Sin darted up the stairs, pressing her side to the wall. Once she was a few steps up she launched herself off the wall and into the tower of bone.

Her knife found the ribbon tying the fox skull to the horse leg. When she slashed it, the creature’s arm fell off.

She grabbed at the thing and climbed it, using the pieces of bone as handholds, and scythed ribbons to cut it off at the point that was more or less its knees.

It was still able to lash out at her, now little more than a rattling whirl of bone, like a mobile over a cradle come to life and turned savage and hungry. Shards of bone stung her face. She thrust her knife through the tangle.

The creature collapsed into a heap of knots and bone, not an instant before Sin heard someone clattering down the stairs.

Sin leaped up and away, ducking her head to hide the cuts on her face. When she glanced up apprehensively, she was in equal parts annoyed and relieved that it was only Nick.

He stood with a short sword in hand, the broken window behind him, body braced for a fight. His eyes lit on his brother. “Don’t tell me I missed all the fun.”

“Maybe next time we’ll save you some,” Alan said, grinning.

And then they heard a door open down the hall, and Sin restored her knife to its sheath. When she looked up, Ms. Popplewell was advancing, and Alan and Nick had both hidden their own weapons. Alan was wearing a very convincing air of shock and helplessness.

Nick looked vaguely homicidal, but that was sort of his default expression.

“What on earth is going on here?” demanded Ms. Popplewell.

“That’s exactly what I would like to know,” Alan said. “Does this happen often? Somebody chucked this disgusting heap through the window—any one of us could’ve been really hurt!”

The rising note of indignation in Alan’s voice was good, Sin had to admit. Damn good.

Just in case Ms. Popplewell’s eyes strayed either to the cuts on Sin’s cheeks or Mr. Tall, Dark and Homicidal, Sin decided to attract attention by covering her face and saying in a fraught whisper, “It was just so loud—”

“There, there,” Alan murmured soothingly, patting her on the back.

“I didn’t know what was going on!” Sin exclaimed. She let her shoulders go up and down once, but decided that sobbing might be a step too far.

“Has this happened before?” asked Alan, sounding scandalized.

“No!” Ms. Popplewell exclaimed, her voice harried and not suspicious at all. “Cynthia, perhaps you should go to the nurse’s office. Don’t worry about missing French.”

“Thank you,” Sin offered piteously.

Nick spoke for the first time.

“Can I go to the nurse’s office too?”

Ms. Popplewell looked at him. It obviously took her only one look to decide. “No.”

“I’m traumatized too,” Nick claimed, his voice completely flat.

“He’s a delicate flower,” Alan said under his breath.

Sin started to wend her way obediently toward the nurse’s office just in case those two brought the whole house of cards down on their heads. She made sure to keep her shoulders a little sad and hunched, lest Ms. Popplewell look after her as she went. The key to a performance was in the details.

She did cast one fleeting glance back, caught Alan’s eye, and sent him a small smile. In a flicker almost too brief to notice, the corner of his mouth turned up in response.

That evening Sin slammed into the wagon that Merris used as her office whenever she was traveling with the Market. Merris looked up from a tablet on her desk, her eyes filled with blackness. The chair on the other side of Merris’s desk was occupied by someone who had got there before Sin.

Neither of these things did much to improve Sin’s mood.

“I was attacked today,” Sin announced without greeting either of them.

“Well,” Merris murmured. Her voice always had a different inflection now that she was carrying a demon: almost like a foreign accent, a flavor of some faraway and terrible land. “We are at war.”

“Which I’d understand, if I’d been attacked by magicians!”

Merris’s office was set up to impress, with heavier furniture than a wagon should have, a charm set up on the desk that changed colors depending on whether the people in front of her lied or told the truth, and wall hangings depicting scenes from old books. One was all black strokes on red paper, and it showed a crowd of beggars trying to fight a genie, uncurling from its prison and looking murderous. Sin did not think that would go well for them.

Sin was not in the mood to be impressed. She strode across the floor and threw a small, grubby knot of ribbon down on the desk before Merris’s clasped hands.

“I know what a magician attack looks like. And I know what the necromancers can conjure up. You sent a necromancer’s sharp-edged little plaything into my school! Someone could have been hurt.”

“I take it nobody was,” Merris said. “Well done.”

Sin took a deep breath and said what she’d been burning to say for weeks.

“These tests are crazy, they are a waste of time, and they have to stop now.”

There was a silence. Sin stood at the desk because there was no chair for her and waited for the consequences. She knew what this looked like: It looked like she was weak.

She’d thought it was a joke when Merris first suggested that Mae Crawford might inherit the Market instead of Sin. It wasn’t a good joke: It was insane, offensive and hurtful, but Sin hadn’t been able to think of it as something that could actually happen.

The Davies family had traveled in the Market for four generations. Sin was the best dancer in the Market. Mae was a tourist girl who was really good at dancing for a beginner, and that was all. She didn’t know enough, she didn’t belong, and she’d been brought to the Market, by the Ryves brothers of all people, barely five months ago.

Sin hadn’t been worried.

Now she was.

Merris had set them problems about the economy of the Market that Sin hadn’t really understood. Mae had not only understood them but had come back with suggestions for improvements. A few weeks ago Merris had asked them to choose a spot in London to move the Market to, and while Sin was still asking around, Mae had got on the Internet and then on the phone. She’d chosen the location on Horsenden Hill where they were settled now, which had enough open space to house all their wagons under concealing charms. It was surrounded on two sides by a canal, and was on the site of an ancient hill fort. It was the ideal choice.

Sin knew that understanding real estate and finances wasn’t really important, was nothing more than glorified homework. She knew that it was the heart and the soul of the Market that mattered, something Mae could never touch. She just didn’t know if Merris would see it her way.

“They have to stop now?” Merris repeated, her voice crackling in weird and terrible ways. “I was under the impression I gave the orders here.”

Merris would have died if she had not let the demon Liannan into her body on the basis that she would have control during the day and the demon would take the nights. Sin knew that.

It did not make it any easier to look into her dark-brimming eyes, to hear that voice. It did not make it easy to trust Merris, especially when she no longer seemed to trust Sin.

“I agree with Sin,” said Mae from the depths of her chair.

Merris’s attention turned to Mae, both eyebrows rising. Mae did not flinch at the cold look.

Mae looked small curled up in the chair, the back rising half a foot above her pink hair. She was wearing it in pigtails today.

It was ridiculous that a tourist girl was causing Sin so many problems. This was Sin’s place.

“It’s not good strategy to keep us at each other’s throats,” Mae went on. “You said it yourself, Merris. We’re at war. Stunts like the creatures today—”

“What?” Sin snapped, and grabbed at the desk. “You sent something after Mae? She can’t fight, she’s a tourist. She could have been killed!”

“If she is going to be the leader of the Market,” Merris said, and Sin felt a chill wash all through her body in case Merris was indicating she had made a decision, “then she has to know what it is like to face danger. She handled it all right.”

“I sprayed it with a fire extinguisher,” Mae told Sin, her mouth tilting into a rueful, dimpled smile. “When it slowed down, I hit it with the fire extinguisher. Then I hit it again. It was a triumph of mind and fire extinguisher over matter.”

Sin had to resist the urge to smile back. Then Merris spoke, and Sin no longer felt any temptation to smile whatsoever.

“Of course,” she said, her voice sleek with satisfaction, like a great animal curling up after a good hunt and a feast of flesh, “you did both have help.”

Sin flashed Mae a look of inquiry and was irritated to see Mae directing the same glance her way. She didn’t have to answer to tourists.

She did have to answer to Merris.

“Alan Ryves happened to be there and shot at it. I didn’t ask for his help, and I didn’t need it.”

“Nick worked out what was going on and came to help me,” Mae said, and Sin remembered Nick’s sudden request to go to the nurse’s office. “I didn’t need it either. And it doesn’t matter. The point stands. We have to devote all our energy to stopping the magicians. Can’t we put off this contest?”

“This contest will give you both an edge,” Merris told her. “I want you to push each other to be the best you can. I want you to be motivated.”

“The magicians killed my mother!” Mae snarled. “I am motivated. I don’t need to be distracted.”

Merris glanced at Sin, as if questioning whether she was going to continue with this challenge to Merris’s authority. Sin had a terrible moment of wondering whether this might be the final test, if she should prove her loyalty by agreeing to submit to Merris’s will. She’d always tried to do what Merris wanted; she’d always struggled to please her.

Look how much good that had done her.

She didn’t speak.

Merris looked into the space between Sin and Mae. For an instant Sin thought she was regretting the distance between them, but then she realized that Merris was looking through the open door of her wagon.

Those tar-black eyes reflected nothing, but Sin knew as surely as if she’d seen the setting sun in them that night was coming, and Liannan with it.

“I believe you have both seen Celeste Drake,” Merris said, her voice unhurried, as if the sun and her own body were not slipping away from her.

Celeste Drake was the leader of the Aventurine Circle, the big London Circle that had joined with the Obsidian Circle, which the Goblin Market had just fought. Sin did not think she could ever forget Celeste, and how she had appeared in the midst of the battle when Sin had just started to truly believe they could win. Celeste was small and very fair, wrapped in white, and she had swallowed their victory so casually, as if it was a plum she happened to fancy.

“Yeah,” Mae said warily. Sin just nodded.

“Did you happen to notice the black pearl she wears?”

“Yes,” said Mae, as of course she would. Sin didn’t want to lie to Merris, so she said nothing. Maybe Celeste had worn a necklace, dark against the pallor of her clothes and skin; Sin hadn’t taken much notice.

“It’s supposed to be enchanted to wholly protect its wearer from demons,” Merris said. “No demon charisma can touch you, none of their words sway you: They have no power over you at all. No matter what.”

Sin touched the talisman at her own throat: It warned you of magic coming, protected you from possession unless a demon managed to get it off, shielded you from some spells. The pearl sounded a lot more efficient.

“No matter what,” Mae repeated, and Sin looked sharply over at her. There was a new note in her voice that Sin couldn’t quite understand: Her hands were clasping the arms of her chair too tightly, her whole body straining forward a little.

“Call this the final test,” Merris said. “Whichever of you takes Celeste Drake’s pearl wins.”

“She’s the leader of the Circle trying to kill us!” Sin exploded. “It’s impossible.”

“It’s not meant to be easy,” said Merris. “Nor is taking over the Goblin Market.”

Sin was sure taking over the Goblin Market was not actually impossible, not like infiltrating a stronghold of magicians, any of whom would kill her on sight, and taking a priceless treasure off the most powerful of them all. This was just throwing away their lives.

“Of course,” Merris said, eyes on Sin’s, “there is an alternative. Give up.”

“What?” Sin demanded.

“Either one of you could surrender your claim,” Merris continued as calmly as if Sin hadn’t spoken. “Either one of you is free to give up, and swear to follow the other as their leader.”

Sin glanced at Mae, whose face was set in determined lines.

Mae wasn’t the type to give up on anything. Sin had liked that about her once, the way Mae could go around with that candy pink hair, being as short as she was, and shove her way into being taken seriously anyhow.

She would still like it, if Mae hadn’t been trying to shove her way into Sin’s place in the world.

“No,” Sin said. “I don’t think either of us will be doing that.”

Merris nodded as if they were all in agreement, and Mae uncurled herself from the chair, murmuring something about helping Ivy and Iris with their back catalogue. The silent sisters, who had traded their tongues for the ability to read any language ever written, had taken a real shine to Mae.

Sin had once accidentally landed on top of a lot of papyri when another dancer had thrown her too hard during a rehearsal. The sisters still acted as if she’d landed on a baby.

Sin did not take the chair Mae had vacated, even once she had left the room. She remained standing by the desk, and Merris pushed her chair back and stood as well. They were exactly the same height. That still startled Sin sometimes.

Merris went over to the window of the wagon. There was a crescent moon carved in one of the shutters she opened, and the setting sun filled her hair with red.

It wasn’t just the sun. It was the demon closing its claws around her, her black and silver hair starting to twist in the air like reaching hands, changing as it moved until it was the color of blood.

Sin could not see her face clearly any longer. She was glad.

“I did not understand the bargain I was making, you know,” Merris said quietly.

It was so unexpected that Sin had no idea what to say. Merris had refused to discuss the demon’s bargain she’d made with anyone. Sin had begun to think she’d been a fool when she’d believed Merris felt anything like affection for her at all.

Merris had agreed to be possessed, but it was meant to be different with her. Other people were made into shells animated by demons, but she had her body half the time.

It had been clear from the first that it was not that simple.

“Demons always take more than you can afford to pay,” Merris continued, the alien note in her voice growing stronger. “I knew that. But I thought, if what I received in return was my life…I thought it would be worth it. Only it’s not my life now. It’s hers.”

“Liannan,” Sin breathed, as if she was a magician, as if she could name the demon and control its power.

Merris nodded, hair tangling in on itself like a nest of snakes.

“She’s in here with me, always,” Merris said. “Coloring everything. Wrapped up in everything. Whispering to me, as if she was my own heart. Soon I will only want what she wants. Do you know, when I was a girl, I never wanted anything but to dance? I wouldn’t have wanted to be a leader, at your age. I didn’t even want to be part of a Market. But when I couldn’t dance anymore I made this Market my whole life, and she wants to leave. Every morning I wake up in a place farther from it, farther from you all, and every morning I think to myself that I could stay gone.”

Sin swallowed. She had been able to accept Merris’s bargain because she had thought it was the only way to keep her, because the Market needed her so badly.

That was a demon’s bargain, though. They took more than you could afford, and they gave you back nothing.

Merris had not been saved for the Market, not really.

“But if I had that pearl,” Merris whispered, “I think I could silence her. I think I could stay here, and be myself again.”

Hope was harder to swallow than horror. Sin felt like she was choking, at how the stakes had been raised, how the impossible had now become something that absolutely must be done.

Merris continued talking.

“You know, in all the tests I devised for you Mae has achieved much better results, has shown herself able to be a stronger leader than you could be. You’re too close to the Market, I think sometimes. You have to be able to step back and see it as a business. And something to die for: that too. Maybe you have to be a stranger. I was a stranger here once myself.”

“No,” Sin said.

“I wish it wasn’t true,” Merris told her. “You walked into Mezentius House and back out again unbowed. You know how I feel about you.”

Sin had thought she’d known.

“What good would it be, giving you the Market?” Merris murmured, and Sin drew closer, came to stand at the window by her, and Merris reached up and touched her hair as she’d used to. “If I gave it to you and the Market was destroyed, or you were destroyed by it, what use would this demon’s bargain be? I have to choose right, and I have to choose fast. I wish I could choose you. But I don’t know if you’re the right one: I don’t know if you can bear more responsibility than you already have, if you can turn life and death into a business. If you bring me this pearl, we would have time. I would have time to teach you. I want to believe you can be the leader this Market needs.”

Sin bowed her head under Merris’s lightly stroking hand. She wanted to cry, but she knew Merris wouldn’t appreciate that.

“I am the leader this Market needs,” she insisted past the knot in her throat that wanted to become tears. “This is my place.”

When she looked up, deadly pallor was rushing over her leader’s face, terrible beauty claiming it the same way shadows were claiming the city below as the sun retreated.

From lips twisting into a shape not their own, Merris whispered, “Prove it.”

3

Throwing the Fever Blossom

THERE HAD BEEN A GREAT FOREST BY HORSENDEN HILL ONCE.

The houses of Wembley lay spread at the foot of the hill like a glittering carpet now, but the trees enclosing their Marketplace were tall and strong, the survivors of the ancient forest. Every arching branch bore a lantern swaying in the wind, throwing bright beams of magic against the long grass.

Merris might be lost to a demon, Mae might be impressing the silent sisters, but the night of the Goblin Market had always belonged to Sin.

Tonight was her chance to remind everyone that this was her rightful place.

“Welcome to the Market,” Sin murmured to the first rush of tourists, who were milling about the stalls, watching her.

There was a full moon, a bright circle like a pale, open flower against the dark sky, and Sin had dressed for it. She was wearing black with silver lines shot all through it like spider-webs, silver that caught the moonlight and turned her from shadow to gleaming ghost and then back again, mocking, elusive, the only point of color about her a crown of crimson flowers.

Mae might be smart and she might be cute enough, but she did not know about performing. She didn’t know that if you made a performance good enough you made it true: that by playing a queen Sin could transform herself.

“It takes you awhile to learn the ropes here,” said a tourist walking with his girl, who judging by her wide eyes was here for the first time. “Helps if you’ve got magic blood in you, of course. My mum’s Scottish, so that helps. Very mystical people, the Scots.”

“Good to see you again,” Sin murmured to him as she went past, and he stood and stared after her in pleased bewilderment, thinking she remembered him.

That was part of the performance, making other people feel special, until dozens of people were thinking of you as special. Sin was good-looking, but it took belief to make you the most desirable woman in a crowd. It took an audience to be beautiful.

“Welcome to the—oh, it’s you,” said Sin, almost colliding with a broad chest and tipping her head back to see Nick.

“We thought we should make an appearance,” Nick drawled. “Since we’re meant to be allies.”

It was a jolt to look into his black eyes, after Merris’s. But there was no human struggling in there, Sin reminded herself. There was just this boy she’d known for years; there was just this demon, eternal and cold, and nothing else.

She didn’t know what that meant.

She did know that he was dressed all in black, for dancing, and whether he was boy or demon, he was the best partner she’d ever had.

Sin smiled at him. “Welcome to the Market.”

He looked down at her, dark lock of hair falling into his eyes, mouth curving. He looked like the perfect partner for tonight.

“Did you save me the first dance?”

Beyond Nick’s shoulder Sin saw Alan lingering at Carl’s stall, bright head bent over an array of bows and arrows. She waited for a second, but he didn’t seem aware of the weight of her attention, didn’t look up to catch her eye.

Alan presented a problem, but for the first time Sin had an idea how to solve it. Before the attack at school, it would not have occurred to her that Alan might appreciate a performance.

“Better than that,” she told Nick. “I saved you the last one.”

Sin took a time-out from dances and accepted a plastic cup of water from Chiara. Then she noticed the slice of fever fruit floating in it.

“You’re just basically a bad person,” Sin told her, and sipped.

Chiara gave her a serene smile, which changed into a slightly more wicked smile at a hovering tourist. Sin took a gulp of water, laced with a taste that raced down her throat burning sweet and strong.

She swallowed and said, “What does everyone think about Alan Ryves?”

“I never think about Alan Ryves,” said Chiara.

Matthias the piper, thin as his own instrument, came by and stole the cup right out of Sin’s hand. “Personally, I like him.”

The dancers en masse gave Matthias a very startled look.

Matthias gestured to his throat and said appreciatively, “Beautiful voice.”

“Do you care about anything but people’s voices?” Chiara asked.

“Yes,” said Matthias, considering. “But I can’t think of any-thing I care about half as much.”

Tonight’s theme for the dances, the ones intended to attract tourists who might then stay to pay for answers from demons, was fire: September had come in cold, and the tourists could huddle around the lines of flame and see dancers catapult through them, dance along them, juggle lit torches enchanted to draw scenes on the air. More Market people had come to watch than usual because of the beckoning warmth of the flames.

Nick was taking his own break from the dancing and sitting with Alan on a log by one of the banked-up fires. Alan was talking to Nick and laughing, his hands making shapes of shadows against the firelight.

“Tell you what I’d do,” Chiara concluded after a thoughtful pause. “I’d take them both. That might be fun.”

“They’re brothers,” said another dancer, Jonas. “That’s sick.”

“No, it’s okay because they’re not actually related,” Chiara argued.

“That’s a demon,” Matthias observed mildly. “Nothing about it is okay.”

Everyone fell silent at that reminder. Nobody wanted to think about demons these days, to admit that if demons were unspeakably corrupt, then they should not let Merris lead them. To think about what lay behind Nick’s eyes was admitting that they were all treading on black ice.

Everything had been so much simpler when Sin could just hate both brothers.

Except she had not been able to hate Nick for long, only from the time when she’d learned what he was until she’d met him again.

She’d always found it easy to hate Alan. But she couldn’t do that, either. Not anymore.

“We made a bargain with them,” Sin said. “The Market always keeps its bargains.”

She remembered Merris’s face, and how demons kept their bargains. That did not stop her from swinging to her feet, taking another drink of fever-touched water, and going over to the spot by the fire where Nick and Alan were sitting. Nick was stretched out like a portrait in charcoal, all black and white in lovely lines, and Alan animated and firelit in red and gold.

They looked up as she came toward them, identically wary.

“Time for our dance?” Nick asked.

“Yes,” said Sin. “And I wondered if Alan might like to sing for us.”

Alan stared. Sin widened her eyes at him, schooling her face into a picture of innocent inquiry.

“Are the dancers going to play nice?”

“If you are,” Sin said. “Maybe.”

She didn’t know what she expected, but it wasn’t for things to be easy, after years of being at daggers drawn, as if all she’d needed to do was reach out once.

She reached out and Alan took her hand. She was startled by how that felt: Alan’s hand strong and gun-calloused, but holding hers rather carefully, as if he was worried he might hurt her.

It was ridiculous to be startled. She knew Alan was usually gentle. She’d been watching him play with children for years. And she’d seen Alan kill whoever got in his way, whenever he had to.

She’d just never really thought about the contrast of how he presented himself and who he actually was. Not until he’d stepped between two armies and taken her brother and a magician’s mark.

Sin looked away as he levered himself up from the log—surely he didn’t want her to see him struggling—but she didn’t let go of his hand when he was up. She led Alan to where the dancers were talking, Nick stalking in their footsteps like a jungle cat on bodyguard detail.

“Alan’s going to sing,” she announced.

“Cool,” said Chiara, who knew a cue when she heard one.

“I can’t tell you how pleased I am,” Matthias told Alan.

Alan slid his fingers easily out from between Sin’s, watch glinting in the firelight under the frayed edge of his shirt cuff. He hesitated briefly and then curled his fingers around one of the belt loops on his jeans, as if he felt he should do something with his hand.

“Didn’t you try to throw me to the magicians last time we met?” he asked Matthias.

“Sure,” Matthias replied, flashing his skull-like grin. “But I didn’t mean anything personal by it.”

“That’s all right then,” Alan said, sounding truly amused. He smiled by degrees, like a stage curtain being opened by someone who knew how to do it, making you wait just long enough.

Most of the dancers thawed enough to smile back, and Sin was startled to realize that she had been wrong all this time when she’d assumed Alan was winning over all the old guard of the Market just by being an enormous nerd. He had charm.

He’d just never bothered to use it on Sin.

“We have the exact right guitar for you,” Matthias said, trying to usher Alan away to the other pied pipers. “Don’t ask me how I know. I always know. I’ve been watching your hands.”

“I feel very reassured,” said Alan. “Also a little violated. There is that.”

More than a few dancers laughed as he limped past on his way to the pipers, and Sin was still lost in amazement that it was all so simple: that Alan could make them laugh like he was any guy.

She’d never had a problem charming other guys. There had to be a way to reach this one too. She had to be able to thank him somehow.

Sin was still thinking this over when the drums started a new rhythm and the tourists all took notice. Sin exchanged a glance with Nick, then reached out and took his hand. It felt different, Nick’s fingers strong enough to break her hand and nothing about his still face to make her think he wouldn’t.

The fires were crackling around them both, racing in thin glittering lines on all sides. Sin could see her dancers tumbling through fire, striking poses, getting into position. The audience was waiting. Nothing was moving but the flames, the hissing of the fires like a fraught whisper in the hush.

The drumming and piping rolled together into a soft, thrilling start. The guitar riff rippled out, startling and sweet.

Alan leaned forward, serious and intent. The firelight turned his eyelashes into gold and shadows behind his glasses.

He began to sing.

He had the kind of voice you had to dance to, something that moved honey-sweet and slow through Sin’s blood until his voice rose and flowed like a river, and she found she was already in motion, carried along with the sound. Nick’s hands grasped her waist and lifted her high into the sky, and Sin planted a foot against his chest and launched herself tumbling and hurtling through the air.

Nick caught her as she came back down. Usually the dances for the tourists were so much less thrilling than those for demons, pale shadows of the real dances, the ones that demanded skill.

She wasn’t bored now. Alan was singing a Goblin Market song turned into something new and strange by guitar strings and that voice.

“Sweet to mouth and low to sigh. Come buy, come buy.”

Sin was a bit above average height and all muscle. It was a luxury to have a partner strong enough that she didn’t have to worry about him doing lifts: a partner strong enough for anything. Nick picked her up and spun with her, and she curled her fingers around the tense swell of his arms. She knew the kind of tableau they made. She slanted a glance over at Alan to see if he was paying attention, but his head was bent over his guitar.

New lines of fire were lit and raced between them, bright lines of flame splitting the earth. Their shadows were cast dark and dramatic against the ground. Sin turned away from flames and partner, swaying into the shadows, Alan’s voice following her as she went.

“I have wandered through dark woods, I have been worse than lost.”

Sin was warm from dancing, but she shivered at the sound. She danced a few more steps to the strumming of guitar strings, then dived backward onto her hands, twisting through the air and making it look easy. She was scattering fever blossoms as she went, shreds of scarlet sliding through her hair and down her arms, crushed petals marking the places her bare feet touched.

Through fire and darkness the demon came and caught her. Sin slipped away from Nick once, twice, their shadows tangling though they did not touch. She fought in a stylized mock battle, neither of them using weapons, the audience making small noises as she dived low and Nick pinned her to the grass, muscles weighing her down effortlessly. Sin shimmied out of his grasp on her wrists, thrown up over her head, and leaped to her feet to flee.

Nick grabbed her before she did and threw her, though it must have looked to the audience as if she’d flown. Sin stretched out her arms, her dress billowing around her like shadows, her legs curled under her, tumbling through the air as if it was water. She landed on the stone pillar in the center of the hill, poised as if to take flight.

“I have tasted fever fruit. It was worth the cost.”

Sin stood outlined against the lights of London, feeling the rapt eyes of the audience on her, the eyes of all but one. She drew her hands up along her body to her head, and heard the ripple rising from the crowd as she began to undo the fever blossoms and ivy binding her hair.

Her dancers were moving slowly and gracefully around the pillar where she stood, arms curving over their heads and swaying. Nick just stood, watching her.

Sin cupped the red flower in her hand and then threw it. It arced through the air like a bright bird flying home, like a compass swinging to true north.

Alan caught it almost automatically, and then paused. For a moment he simply sat with one arm around his guitar, his face wiped clean with shock.

Then he ducked his head and looked up again. With sudden color staining his cheekbones vivid red, he met Sin’s eyes and smiled.

If the last smile had been a curtain drawn back, this one was a sunrise.

“This is a trig point,” Alan said.

Sin blinked. This was not the kind of conversation guys typically directed at her after she had thrown them a fever blossom. In fact, this was not the kind of conversation guys typically directed at her at all.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she told him eventually.

“The pillar you ended up on there, when you were dancing,” Alan said. “It’s a trig point. Those pillars were set up all over England in the 1930s, as the points in a measurement system that covered the whole country. You can work out where roads and bridges are in relation to the trig points.”

“Oh, you can?” Sin said helplessly.

“Not really anymore,” Alan told her. “They’re a bit obsolete now we have helicopters and aerial maps and so on. A lot of them are gone. But not this one.” He’d fixed the pillar with an intent gaze, but now he turned back to Sin and smiled. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I just thought it was interesting.”

“It’s not that it isn’t interesting,” Sin said. “I just wasn’t expecting geography right now.”

They were walking alone together through the Market. The other dancers had peeled away after she’d thrown the fever blossom. They all knew the fever blossom meant Sin had decided to spend time with someone this Market night: whether she was just going to flirt with them a bit or draw them away and kiss them depended on how the spending time went. Occasionally a guy would presume that by tossing him a flower she’d promised something more.

She knew how to deal with those guys. Harshly.

She wasn’t sure how to deal with a guy who had seemed pleased by being thrown the flower and then seemed to have no expectations at all, or any hopes.

It was possible Alan was just glad to be getting along with a section of the Goblin Market he’d always had friction with before. It was possible that Alan earnestly talking about geography was his way of turning Sin down, in which case she wanted to tell him that it didn’t matter how good his voice was, she hadn’t decided anything about him yet.

It was possible Alan just thought it was interesting. Sin really had no idea. She was a little warmed by that thought, though: that he wasn’t talking down to her as if she couldn’t possibly understand what he was saying. A lot of guys did that, and she’d always known Alan was really smart. She’d always uneasily suspected he thought she was stupid.

She decided to smile at him. “I’m a bit puzzled by you, that’s all.”

She was expecting Alan to look a little flattered, and to start trying to find out if by puzzled she meant intrigued. She was not expecting him to laugh.

“Well, I’m very mysterious. And inscrutable.”

“You really kind of are,” Sin said, and took his arm.

Any good performer knew how to lie with his whole body as well as his mouth, and Alan could do it: fading into the background as expertly as Sin stood out. But she’d noticed the way he had seemed uncertain about his hand after she’d taken it.

He did react when she took his arm. He hesitated and almost flinched, and she thought she had made a misstep until he put his hand over hers, in an almost courtly gesture that reminded her of the oddly gentle way he had held her hand before, and they walked on.

It was a little disturbing walking like that. Sin was keenly aware of the fact that Alan could not keep in step with her, always favoring his right leg, his walk a little jerky. It made her think of falling, and she felt a little panicked, her heart beating fast.

She didn’t want to pull away.

“So are you going to play for us at the next Goblin Market?” Sin asked.

“I think I could be persuaded,” said Alan. “Cynthia. I was wondering if you could do me a favor.”

He did not say her name with his usual dismissive intonation. Sin found she didn’t mind it like this.

“Yes,” she said slowly, and became aware that her heart was not beating faster purely because of panic. It was so strange—this was Alan Ryves—but there it was. “I think I could be persuaded.”

“My brother keeps pointing out to me that guns don’t always work,” Alan said, and Sin was amazed both at the fact that Alan could think this was a good time to bring up his brother and also at the tone he used, fond and a little exasperated, so normal, when talking about the demon. “Long-range weapons work better for me, for obvious reasons. I saw you with a bow and arrow, in the square at Huntingdon.”

In the square where they had all fought and lost. Sin remembered the weight of the bow and arrow in her hands that night, and remembered too the weight of Toby in her arms when Alan had handed him to her, when she’d thought she would never hold him again.

“I wondered, if I bought a bow, would you teach me how to use it?”

It was a strange thing to ask, but Sin found she didn’t mind. It was something she knew how to do well, and it was nice to get an acknowledgment of that—like a compliment to her dancing that she could be certain had no ulterior motive, nothing but a simple recognition of skill.

“Of course,” Sin said. “We’re meant to be allies now. That means your strength is my strength. I’ll teach you the bow. But this does mean I can call on you at any time for obscure facts about geography.”

Alan laughed, and this time Sin felt it as an accomplishment and not a shock. She noticed that he still had the fever blossom in his free hand, and he was playing with it, turning it thoughtfully over and over around his fingers.

“Fair enough. I also know many obscure historical facts I’m willing to trade.”

“Like what?”

“The Scottish invented suspenders,” Alan said. “And Isaac Newton, the guy who discovered gravity? He invented the cat flap.”

“I can see you’re going to be an invaluable asset to our side,” Sin told him gravely.

She stopped at Elka’s food stall, where Elka sold truth leaves that sometimes got the tourists into a lot of trouble, and where Elka’s son was stirring a vat of mulled fever wine.

On top of the stall there was a bowl filled with the crystallized petals of fever blossoms. Sin took one and let it dissolve on her tongue, leaving behind a faint trace of sugar and a wilder sweetness.

“They’re wonderful,” she said truthfully, and pushed the bowl toward Alan.

Elka smiled at her and Alan both. “Nice to see you taking a break from the demon dances,” she told Sin. “You know you’re supposed to do them every other month.”

This was the first time in a year Sin hadn’t done them. She knew it was important to take a break, and important to be seen walking through the Market talking to people, but she still hated that Mae was dancing and she wasn’t.

Elka might have read that on her face, since she leaned forward over the stall and said in a low voice, “You’re doing a good job. We’re behind you.”

Then she pushed the bowl of petals encouragingly toward them and went to serve another customer. Sin had another petal.

“You don’t want one?”

“No,” said Alan. “I’ve never had any fever fruit. I don’t like being out of control.”

Sin tilted a smile toward him. “Who knows what you might be capable of?”

Alan didn’t smile back, something that surprised her even though they had only started smiling at each other tonight. He just looked at her, eyes wide open and very dark blue, and he really was not very much older than her at all.

“I know what I’m capable of,” said the boy who had set a demon free.

Sin felt a little scared, and that knocked her even further off balance: Somehow she still had a hard time thinking of Alan as dangerous.

She was dangerous too, though.

“I know what you’re capable of too,” Sin said. “You can’t even shoot a bow yet. It’s kind of sad.”

Alan did smile then.

The smile acted on Sin like another fever blossom petal, almost pure sweetness with an edge to it, and she made up her mind and tugged Alan through one of the curtains they had set up from the branches, hiding the brightest Goblin Market lights from the world.

Behind the curtain was a dim little space between the wood at night and the Goblin Market a veil away. Everything was gray and faintly glittering. The autumn air was a little cool, so Sin stepped in close to Alan and his warmth.

“Hi,” she whispered.

“Hi,” he murmured, sounding slightly puzzled but glad to be there, sounding happy and a little amused. She thought that was promising.

“So,” Sin said, moving in closer. “I really am very grateful.”

She closed her eyes and tipped her head back. Her lean in was stopped by a light pressure on her face. She blinked, looking up at Alan through her eyelashes, and then realized what was touching her face. It was the fever blossom.

She let her eyelids drift closed again, the petals of the flower stroking lightly over her cheek, shiver-soft, trailing along her skin and catching at the corner of her mouth. She felt Alan lean down, his breath warm against her ear.

“You don’t have to do this,” Alan said.

Sin blinked. “I know.”

He ran musician’s fingers down her arm, her skin prickling at the light touch, until he touched her hand. For an instant she thought everything was still as she’d planned.

Then Alan whispered, “And I would never want you to.”

He stepped back through the curtain and limped away without a glance.

Sin stood alone outside the Goblin Market. She was shivering a little.

The fever blossom lay, returned unwanted, in the hollow of her hand.

She was going to be the leader of the Goblin Market, and that meant she went out and smiled, welcomed tourists and complimented Market folk, and ignored the fact that she had been utterly and humiliatingly rejected.

It did not mean that she was pleased to be reminded of this fact by running into Nick, who scowled at her. Sin let the fixed smile slide from her face and glared ferociously back, and would have moved on if she hadn’t seen that Nick looked sweaty and tired as well as more homicidal than usual.

“Did something happen to my dancers?” she demanded.

“Everyone’s alive,” Nick snapped. “No thanks to you. What were you off doing while Mae decided to risk her stupid neck dancing with that idiot Jonas?”

“Jonas is a good dancer.”

“Not good enough.”

“Not as good as you,” Sin conceded. “Did you offer to dance with her?”

“Why else would I come here ready to dance?” Nick demanded. “This is only her fourth time, and she could screw up at any moment.”

“Told her that, did you?” Sin asked. “And here you are with not a stab mark to show for it. Mae has such a nice nature.”

Sin might be having issues with Mae about the Goblin Market, but she was ready to be on Mae’s side when Mae was being patronized. She looked around for Mae, and found her pink hair.

She was standing with Alan. Sin felt sheer embarrassment seize her, an almost irresistible compulsion to look down or turn away before he saw her.

Alan did not see her. He was talking to Mae, head bent attentively down to hers, so much taller than her it looked almost silly and very sweet. They were near the silent sisters’ stall. Alan was pointing to a yellowed scroll, his smile like a fire in a hearth, warm and welcoming.

But not for her.

She looked back at Nick. He crossed his arms over his chest and looked down at her with cold eyes. He made her think again of Merris, running through the woods with wild red hair and black eyes, but Sin crushed down the thought and tried to think of him as just Nick Ryves in a strop. She could deal with him then.

“Mae is an idiot.”

“Are you jealous of Jonas?” Sin asked. After a moment, Nick laughed, the sound sharp and unpleasant.

“No. She’s practically my brother’s girlfriend.”

“Is that so?”

“Alan’s mad about her,” Nick said. “She deserves that. They deserve each other. They’re going to be together.”

Mae had said she wasn’t going out with Alan once before, Sin recalled. She’d added that he was pretty attractive.

At the time, Sin had thought she was crazy.

It should have made her feel better, Sin thought. Alan might not have turned her down because he thought she was an idiot or she made his skin crawl, or anything like that. He just wanted someone else. It was simple enough. Sin had made a mistake.

“So it’s that you don’t like being turned down,” Sin said, and smiled deliberately up at Nick.

“Well,” Nick said, “it’s just that it doesn’t happen to me often. It’s like a whole new world. I’d ask for advice, but I imagine it doesn’t happen to you that often either.”

He didn’t smile back, but the compliment was enough to keep Sin smiling, side by side in the shadow of a tree.

“It never happens to me,” Sin told him, her eyes sliding back to Mae and Alan.

Unlike a demon, she could lie.

She’d only glanced over, in time to see Alan reach up to fetch down a scroll for Mae from a high shelf, but when she looked back Nick was gone, silently, as if direct light had hit a shadow.

She did a swift scan of the crowd, used to picking out one face in an audience, and of course saw Nick beside Alan and Mae. Mae scowled up at him, and Nick leaned against the stall and in toward Mae, whispering something in her ear.

Mae’s face turned thoughtful as he spoke. After a moment she nodded briefly and slipped out from between the stall and Nick’s body, setting off purposefully through the Market. Alan stayed behind, a book open in his hand.

He did not look after Mae and Nick, but everybody else did.

Everybody saw Nick at Mae’s back like a shadow that could not be dispersed, a dark sentinel, like the bodyguard to a queen.

Everybody saw Mae moving through the Market. With every step she took the lights nearest her flared into brilliance, the difference as great as if stars were blooming into suns above her head. The light around her hair spread and shone, as if every moment a new golden crown was being placed on her head, a succession of hundreds and hundreds of crowns.

Sin had taken the night off from dancing to make herself seem like the leader of the Market.

The demon had thrown his support behind her rival, undone all her efforts, let Mae shine, and let everyone know his power was at her command.

Sin had no idea how to match this.

The Market was winding down, Sin on the ground directing the people unwinding the wires that held up their lanterns and curtains from around the trees.

“Careful with that,” she called up to one of her dancers. “Break a beacon lamp and we’ll never hear the end of it. Coil up the wire: We’ve got to stow all this away.”

She slid her hands to the base of her spine and arched, feeling her back pop and crack a little in a way that said she would be feeling all this tomorrow. She was going to get only a couple of hours’ sleep, and then it would be time to wake the kids and bring them to school.

“Hi,” Mae’s voice said behind her, and Sin straightened her shoulders despite her back hurting. “Haven’t seen you around a lot tonight.”

“Hope your fourth Market was a good one,” Sin said, keeping her voice warm and the fact that Sin herself had been part of more than a hundred Markets implicit.

Mae’s eyebrows rose, obviously taking Sin’s meaning. She always stood a little combatively, short but filling as much space as she could. Currently her arms were crossed and her elbows sticking out.

“It was, thanks,” she said, her voice slightly stiff. Then she uncrossed her arms and reached out, putting one hand on Sin’s arm. Sin looked down at Mae’s hand, very pale on Sin’s skin, her nails painted bright turquoise. “Look, Sin. I don’t want Merris to succeed in setting us at each other’s throats.”

Sin remembered that Mae’s mother was gone, and as far as she could see Mae’s father and brother were out of the picture as well. She was staying with her aunt Edith in London to be near all of them.

“I don’t want that either,” Sin answered slowly, the words sticking in her throat. “I would have welcomed you to the Goblin Market. You know that. But I can’t—I won’t welcome you into my place.”

“I can’t stop trying for it,” Mae said. “This thing, with Celeste’s pearl. I want it.” She swallowed and continued. “But if you get it before me, I swear I’ll do everything I can to help you. You’ll be my leader too.”

Sin couldn’t say Mae would be her leader. She couldn’t even contemplate that happening. But Mae’s hand was gripping her arm tight, and she’d liked Mae from almost the first moment.

“Thanks,” she said awkwardly. “I appreciate that.”

She usually felt energized by the Market, glowing with all the small victories of the night and filled with new purpose. Not tonight. She summoned up a wicked smile for Mae anyway.

“I like the pigtails you’re working tonight,” she told her, and thought of Mae laughing at the book stall with Alan. “Anyone interesting around?”

Mae shrugged. “My pigtails are not the irresistible mantraps you might think.” She let her hand drop from Sin’s arm, but grinned up at her. “It must be kind of awesome. Being—well, you know.”

“No, tell me,” Sin coaxed, amused.

“Well, being completely gorgeous,” Mae said, and went a bit pink. “You could have anyone you wanted. You wouldn’t even have to try.”

Sin thought about the boys at school and the guys on the street who bothered her because they thought black girls were exotic and easy and not to be taken seriously. It wasn’t something she could turn off, not entirely, so it was something she’d learned to use.

She thought about getting up at six in the morning to stand outside in the raw air, mist lying clammy on the grass, and shave her legs using a basin and some cold water. She’d fixed her hair, hung the lanterns, planned the dancers’ performances and costumes, and now the Market was being packed up and all her success was fading away with the morning. She had tried everything she knew, and she had not even been able to charm Alan Ryves.

Not that she cared about that.

“It’s awesome,” she said. “But it’s not easy.”

Mae rubbed at her face, the only sign she’d given to show she might be just as tired as Sin was. “What is?”

“You’ve got a point,” Sin told her, and felt relaxed enough with Mae to give her a sideways hug before she made for her wagon, already thinking of the luxury of crawling in between soft sheets, the kids breathing slow and steady on either side of her.

She found Matthias the piper sitting on her front step, turning his pipe over and over between his hands.

“Sin,” he said, rising gracefully to meet her. “You did well tonight.”

“Thanks.”

“Not your fault you were outdone.”

Sin refused to lose ground in front of a pied piper, so she made herself smile. “You say the sweetest things.”

“She’s a clever girl, that Mae,” Matthias said. “Maybe a bit too clever. You know she’s been murmuring about a possible spy at the Goblin Market.”

Sin made a face. It was just another of Mae’s hundreds of ideas, like that of making profit and loss sheets, or the crazy suggestion she kept floating about inviting necromancers and pied pipers to travel with the Market.

“Maybe she’s looking for an excuse if the magicians seem like they know too much, and someone wonders where they got the information,” Matthias said. “I heard from a little bird that she’s been seen talking to people from the Aventurine Circle.”

The sleepiness cleared from Sin’s mind suddenly. She was very aware of Matthias’s watchful dark eyes, waiting for her reaction, of the cold grass around her ankles, and of the familiar weight of her knives against her back.

“Do you have any proof?”

“If I had any proof, I’d have brought it,” Matthias said. “You Market people may not think much of the pipers, and we may think you’re a little set in your ways, but neither of us wants a leader beholden to magicians, do we?”

Sin’s mouth shaped the word No, though she did not say it, simply watching Matthias. She’d trusted Mae. She didn’t know if she could trust the piper. They were all mercurial and strange, valuing singing more than speaking, music more than the faces of those they loved.

But if there was any possibility this was true, she could not afford to ignore it.

“Imagine the advantage she has, if the magicians are helping her,” Matthias said. “She could beat you. Imagine what would happen to the Market then.”

Sin licked her lips. “Any ideas on what I should do?”

“We saw the magicians down by the river near Southwark Cathedral,” Matthias said. “Maybe you should go check the place out for yourself.”

Sin nodded slowly. “Thank you.”

“One more thing?”

Matthias walked lightly as all the pipers did, noiseless and barely stirring the grass with his passage. He brushed by her on his way down the hill, and his voice hit her ear like the music of the Market, beautiful and sinister.

“Watch your back.”

4

Anchor Point

N ICK WAS CLEARLY MISERABLE.

At first Sin found it kind of amusing. He’d done what she would have predicted he would if she’d thought about it, and approached the guys who generally hung around the handyman’s shed and smoked while sitting on old buckets of paint.

That had not gone so well. Nobody was sure what had happened in the handyman’s shed at break time, but everyone was talking about it anyway. By lunchtime Sin had heard quite a few compelling theories, and she saw people leaning away from Nick as he prowled sullenly through the playground and made a couple of phone calls to someone who did not pick up.

Sin found herself chewing vengefully on a peanut butter sandwich and thinking perhaps this would teach certain people that demons did not actually belong in school, which was about the time it occurred to her that she was wishing punishment on Nick not only because he’d decided to support Mae, but because she was angry with his brother.

That made her angry enough with herself to get up, murmuring excuses to the girls from the lacrosse team, and go over to him.

“So I heard you tried to kill a guy with a paintbrush.”

“Don’t try to stifle my artistic self-expression,” Nick said. Sin laughed. She saw a few heads on the playground turn, and realized with a sinking sensation that they would remember this, when her goal was always to avoid too much attention, any questions about the Market, any focus on her or the kids.

She remembered Alan’s maddening voice in a sunlit summer kitchen, asking her to stick around and hang out with Nick. He’d offered her a translation worth a month of groceries to do it. She’d taken it, and she’d played nice with Nick.

She didn’t regret it. Those groceries had come in extremely handy.

But she did feel like she owed Nick more than a dismissal now.

“Hey,” she said. “I’m sorry about the way I acted before. I was just surprised to see you here. At school.”

Nick shrugged.

“It wouldn’t have killed your brother to have given us a heads-up,” Sin added.

Nick stared at her with even more murderous coldness than usual.

There was a sudden chill wind in the air, striking Sin’s face and sending cold fingers crawling tip by freezing tip down her back. She looked into Nick’s blank face and thought: possessed, and did not know why she hadn’t seen it years ago, why everyone didn’t see it when they looked at him. There was no human being behind that face, only a creature who owned but could not animate it.

Alan had lived with this for most of his life, knowing exactly what it was. The wave of sympathy that washed over Sin at the thought shocked her with its intensity.

She couldn’t work out what kind of man he was, good or evil, terrifying or terrifyingly misguided. She couldn’t imagine what it would take to bring up a demon.

All she knew was that she’d had him all wrong.

“Shut up about my brother,” Nick said at last. “I know you’ve always hated him, but I don’t need to hear about it.” His lip curled. “He doesn’t think much of you either.”

If Nick had decided to support Mae’s bid to be leader, who was likely to be behind that decision?

Sin picked up her peanut butter sandwich again and bit in.

“I got that,” she said. “Thanks.”

She was in a hurry when she left school, and she didn’t need to be distracted by the surprise appearance of Alan Ryves, at the wheel of an ancient blue car and with his head bent over a book.

It was therefore a complete mystery to her why she took a detour through the side gate, went over, and tapped on the car window.

Alan used one hand to subtly go for his gun and the other to keep his page, then actually looked at her and sent the window whirring down.

“What are you doing here?” Sin demanded, and was horrified by the words coming out of her mouth.

“Picking my baby brother up from school,” Alan told her, sounding faintly puzzled that she would ask something so obvious.

“Well, he’s in detention,” Sin said in what she hoped was a more reasonable voice. “Word is he tried to kill someone with a paintbrush.”

“Little scamp,” Alan said. “Well, boys will be boys. Can I give you a lift anywhere?”

Offended dignity said not in a million years, but Sin had a lot more practicality than pride.

“If you could drive me to my sister’s school, that’d be great,” she said, going around the car and climbing into the passenger seat.

“Happy to,” said Alan, and started the car engine.

She gave him directions, and he turned a corner through the estate by her school and toward Acton town without comment, obviously already familiar enough with the geography of this part of London. Market people always had to know where they were going, and be able to get there fast when they had to.

Sin was not planning on reaching out and being turned down again, so she turned her face away from Alan and watched the buildings go by, gray towers changing to tan-colored Victorian buildings and back again.

“I wanted to talk to you about last night,” said Alan.

Horror and embarrassment sent a burning-hot flash flood through Sin’s veins. But it would be absolutely unacceptable for Alan to know he had inspired those feelings, and since she was a performer, goddamn it, Sin laughed and said lightly, “Really? You have to know it wasn’t a big deal.”

“Yes, I know that,” Alan said, his voice very mild. “But we’re going to be working together for some time. I’d like for us to get on better than we have done in the past. God knows that wouldn’t be hard.”

He doesn’t think much of you.

“Sounds good!” Sin responded, forcing herself to sound a bit incredulous about all the fuss Alan was making instead of desperate for the conversation to be over.

“I had fun at the Market last night,” Alan continued. “A lot more fun than I usually have.”

Until Sin had thrown herself at him. Yes, she understood perfectly. What she didn’t understand was why Alan had to talk so much.

“I just wanted to let you know that I understand,” Alan told her. “And I don’t want you to be embarrassed, or to think I took anything in a different way than it was meant.”

“I wasn’t embarrassed,” Sin said. “I don’t care enough about your opinion of me to be embarrassed.”

“All right.”

There was silence for a moment, during which Sin tried to work out if Alan’s response had sounded faintly incredulous or simply indifferent. It was too hot in the car, the air-conditioning obviously not working right, autumnal sunlight flooding through the windows and filling the car with trapped heat. Sin sent a swift glance toward Alan, not under her eyelashes, because guys noticed that and she always meant them to, but sidelong and carefully casual.

He was wearing two shirts, which was ridiculous considering the sun but which he always did, and looking at the road ahead, lashes bright fringes over his dark blue eyes. She looked away almost immediately.

“Just so we’re clear,” Alan said. “You don’t owe me anything.”

“Okay, Alan, I get it,” Sin snapped.

“As long as you’re still planning to teach me how to shoot a bow and arrow,” he continued calmly. “I mean, I do feel you kind of owe me that.”

“What?” Sin asked, and was so startled she found herself laughing.

“Well, I sang at the Market and everything,” Alan reminded her. “I’m a diffident guy. I had terrible stage fright.”

“I’m not familiar with the concept of ‘stage fright.’”

“It’s pretty awful,” Alan said solemnly. “You end up having to picture the entire audience in their underwear. Phyllis was in that audience, you know.”

“Why, Alan, I had no idea your tastes ran that way.”

“Phyllis is a very nice lady,” he said. “And I do not consider her so much aged as matured, like a fine wine. But I still think you owe me an archery lesson.”

These brothers were her allies, were the Market’s allies, and Alan was right: It would be better for them all to get along. She’d had more fun with Alan than she would’ve expected last night, before being turned down flat.

She wasn’t about to ruin any chance of them reaching an understanding because of being rejected. Lots of people weren’t attracted to her. Merris, obviously. Phyllis, with any luck. If she ever went insane and assaulted Matthias in a frenzy of lust, he would probably run away, shrieking, Your singing voice is nasal! Unclean, unclean!

Alan had saved her brother. She’d judged him wrongly on more occasions than she cared to count at this point, but she felt pretty confident she was right about this judgment: He was worth knowing.

And he was right. It wasn’t like getting along better than they had before would be much of a challenge.

“Drive me and Lydie back to the hill,” Sin said at last. “And you can have your lesson.” She looked at him under her eyelashes and he noticed, as he was meant to; then she grinned. “Plus, Phyllis will be there. I’m sure she’ll be thrilled to see you.”

Lydie’s new school was in a nice part of Acton, far enough away from the Market and Sin’s school to make Sin’s life difficult, but there were trees lining the street where it stood and when Sin peeped through the classroom door before going in she saw Lydie’s fair head tipped to another girl’s, engaged in close and happy conversation.

She had not asked or particularly wanted Alan to accompany her into the school, but he had done so anyway. Sin was making an effort not to be annoyed at him for being interfering. She was sure he meant well.

“I’m Cynthia Davies, Lydia’s sister,” she told the teacher, shaking her hand firmly so there would be no comments about thinking Sin was older on the phone.

There was the usual look that meant the teacher had thought Sin was white on the phone, but people hardly ever said that.

Sin went around to Lydie’s table and tossed her braid over her shoulder, trying for a slight air of glamour. It never hurt a kid to have a cool older sister.

“Having fun?” she asked.

“Sure,” said Lydie, stowing away books and pencil case. Sin put a hand flat against her thin little back in case a hug would be going too far, and Lydie leaned into it a tiny bit. “Alan’s here,” she added in a tone of inquiry but with bright eyes. Sin was instantly very glad Alan had come in.

“Well, he was going up to the hill anyway, and when he heard I was picking you up, obviously he wanted to come along.”

Lydie went off to grab her coat from the cloakroom, and Sin went back to the teacher, who was standing with Alan, apparently deep in conversation.

“… mother and stepfather died in a car accident a while ago,” she heard him say in a confidential tone, and heard the teacher murmur sympathetically. “Their guardian’s a little elderly. It’s a challenge, of course, but Cynthia picks up a lot of the slack.”

“I do what?” Sin asked brightly, deciding that she had not heard anything else he’d said.

Alan gave her a slightly wary look, and she took his arm and squeezed it to show that she was impressed. It was a good lie: The teacher won over to Lydie’s side, the adroit mention of a stepfather meaning that there would never be a question of how she and Lydie were related, and neither parents nor guardian would ever be expected. Sin planned to remember exactly how he’d said it, but she doubted it would have quite the same effect.

“And you’re…” the teacher began inquiringly.

“Alan,” he said, and he shook her hand. “Friend of the family.”

There were not so many hillwalkers on a weekday afternoon in October, but Sin took Alan out to a field near where the Market wagons were assembled anyway, where people would be discouraged by all the don’t-notice-us charms and inclined to overlook whatever was going on without exactly knowing why.

Unfortunately, this meant that when she was setting up targets and Alan was trying out different bows the rest of the Market decided to wander by and take an interest. Jonas started to shoot in order to impress Chiara. Phyllis came and told Alan she hoped he was eating right, and Sin had to hide her smile behind her quiverful of arrows.

“Can I borrow him for a moment, Phyllis?” she asked after she was done grinning like a fool. “I promise I’ll return him. I know he’d be devastated if I didn’t.”

Alan gave her a reproachful look. Sin gave him a dazzling smile and a longbow.

She’d changed out of her school uniform into jeans and a bandanna. It was mostly for practicality but partly to see if being the daughter of the Market—someone who the older ones still sometimes called by her father’s childhood nickname of Thea—was the role Alan would warm to rather than Sin the dancer or Cynthia the schoolgirl. It was funny, which presentations of herself boys sometimes went for.

He hadn’t seemed to notice, though, so she’d decided to be all business.

“This is your most traditional kind of bow,” Sin said. “Not allowed at the Olympics. Pretty difficult to shoot. Best one if you want to kill people. I figured you’d like it.”

“I do like a challenge,” said Alan. “Though I weep for my Olympic dreams.”

He turned the longbow over in his hands as if it was a musical instrument, gentle and a little curious, the same way he touched everything. Then he laid it down on the grass, shrugged off his shirt so he was in only a T-shirt, and slid on a shooting glove. He picked the bow back up again.

“Okay,” he said. “Show me.”

“Right,” said Sin. “So—feet about a shoulder’s width apart, do what you need to do to be steady.”

She didn’t exactly know how to position someone whose balance was necessarily always off, and she was mortified to realize she was a bit flustered as well. There was obviously something to the way the Victorians had kept women all covered up so guys swooned at the sight of an ankle. Sin saw boys in T-shirts every hour of the day, but she’d never seen Alan in one. It struck her more than it really should have.

He wasn’t coiled with muscle like his brother, but he was lean when Sin had thought he was thin, shoulders strong, back a taut arch like the bow. If it hadn’t been for his leg, Sin would’ve thought he looked like a dancer.

Sin rested a hand on his waist and checked he was steady, fingers brushing over cotton and the edge of a hipbone. She made a mental note that it was possibly time for her to find a boyfriend.

“So you nock the arrow in the bow, like so. Firmly on the bowstring,” she said, and put her palm against his elbow. “Bring the elbow of your drawing arm up high.”

Alan was so much taller than she was that correcting the position of his drawing arm and trying to get some idea of his line of sight was pretty difficult. Sin had to lean in against him to do it, a bit too aware of his body against hers.

“Don’t,” Alan demanded, his voice tight.

“I wasn’t—,” Sin began furiously, and then realized that she’d been leaning her weight against someone with a bad leg. “I didn’t mean to,” she said quickly. “I’m sorry.”

“Not to worry,” Alan said, his voice a little too smooth, trying to let them slide past this moment as fast as they could. “What do I do now?”

Sin came around to his side, skirting him a little more widely than she had to. She saw him register that out of the corner of his eye and wanted to explain that she didn’t want to hurt him again, that was all, but she doubted that would help.

“Find your anchor point.”

“What’s an anchor point?”

“Where the hand is positioned and what the bowstring draws to. Choose a point on your face,” she said, and reached out to press her fingers lightly against the corner of his jaw. “Here, or the corner of your eye, or the corner of your—mouth,” she continued, and was angry with herself for the pause she hadn’t intended. “The anchor point is the most important thing in archery. It affects your draw length and the whole force of your shot stems from it. You have to choose your anchor point and always let the arrow fly from it.”

She withdrew her hand. Alan raised his bow from point to point, his face absorbed, and Sin watched as he settled on the corner of his mouth.

“Then hold, tense.” Sin ran a palm over the muscles of his back. She smiled. “Like that. And adjust aim, concentrate, and release.”

Alan didn’t fumble on the release. He let the arrow slip smooth through his fingers, drawing his hand back and loosing the bow. The arrow just missed its target.

“That really wasn’t bad,” Sin told him honestly.

She was expecting either frustration or pride, but Alan just smiled.

“Could be better.”

He took another arrow and strung it. This time he got it right first try, index fletch at his mouth, arms moving easy and graceful and sending the arrow in flight.

It hit the target, though just barely.

“Okay, that was actually good.”

Alan smiled. There was still nothing on his face but good humor and determination.

“Thanks,” he said. “Now can you teach me how to hit the bull’s-eye?”

Alan kept practicing, his draw getting smoother and smoother though his arms must have been killing him. Lydie and Toby were actually being very well-behaved, since he talked to them and they seemed to feel it was a great treat to sit and watch him.

At this point Sin’s role as teacher consisted of a few pieces of advice and a steady stream of insults and insinuations about how impressed Phyllis was going to be, so she sat back on the bank with her arm around Lydie and watched.

Lydie leaned into the curve of her hip. “Maybe he would like to stay for dinner,” she suggested shyly.

The Market usually had a communal dinner, potluck, batches of curry, a lot of barbecue in the summer. It worked for Sin, who was a pretty basic cook. But sometimes they stayed in the wagon, just the three of them, and ate easy things to make like beans on toast. She turned over in her mind the idea of having Alan there too.

Then Alan dropped his bow at her feet.

“I’ve got to go,” he said, his voice tight.

“What?” Sin asked. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing’s wrong,” Alan snapped, and turned on his heel. Sin noticed that he was not heading for his car.

She might not know Alan well enough to recognize when he was lying. Probably nobody knew him well enough for that.

But she could always recognize a bad performance. And Alan was excellent at pretending everything was all right: If he was turning in a bad performance, then something was really wrong.

Sin intended to find out what.

She couldn’t think of what she wanted first, though. Toby and Lydie came first. She ran over to Jonas and asked him to watch the kids for a minute, bring them to Trish if she was gone too long, make sure they were fed. Toby was playing with a tiny bow and looked happy, so she didn’t disturb him, but she stopped and hugged Lydie and told her she was just going to ask Alan if he would like to stay for dinner, after all.

Then and only then was she allowed to run, and she ran, sure and fleet, legs carrying her in easy motion over the fields in the direction Alan had gone. There were a few fences in her way: she ran at them, sometimes clearing them, sometimes hooking a foot in them and launching herself over them without breaking stride. She knew where she was going and what she was doing. Chasing Alan was easy.

Catching up with Alan was hard, because she had no plan of action for what to do when she drew level with him as he limped determinedly beside another fence.

He whirled on her, face very pale, and demanded, “What do you want?”

“What did you think you were doing, running off like that?” Sin asked. “You should’ve known I’d come after you.”

Alan’s mouth twisted. “And of course, I can’t outrun you.”

“Nobody can outrun me,” said Sin.

It was just the truth. But it seemed to knock Alan back a little. He almost smiled, and ran one hand roughly through his hair. It made his hair stand up on end, a glinting riot of curls.

“Cynthia,” Alan said. “Trust me, you don’t want to be here. Will you just go?”

“Trust you?” Sin echoed. “Aren’t you, like, a compulsive liar? No, I think I’m going to stay right here.”

She illustrated her point by perching herself on the fence.

Alan almost smiled again, but insisted, “You really don’t want to—”

He’d been pale before, but now he went gray, his face locked in a spasm of pain. He gritted his teeth for a moment, lips skinned back, grimacing helplessly, and then he fell face forward on the grass.

Sin scrambled off the fence and onto her knees.

“Alan,” she said. “Oh my God, Alan—”

He could not answer, that much was clear. He was moaning into the grass, but they didn’t sound like conscious moans. They sounded like the long, guttural cries of an animal in agony.

Sin manhandled him onto his back, careless of his leg, too desperate to be careful of anything. He screamed once when she was doing it, but she was a dancer, and that meant never hesitating once you were committed to a course of action.

When she had his head in her lap, she realized that she’d trapped herself there, but it wasn’t like she could have abandoned Alan while he had some sort of fit. She couldn’t leave him, not like this, not all alone. So she couldn’t get help.

All she could do was watch his body seizing with what seemed like hundreds of separate convulsions, shaking with another rush of pain before the first had completely passed, face turning away from her even as she stroked his hair. The terrible moaning sound seemed to be ripped right from his chest after a while. It went on and on, helpless and exhausted.

She thought it would never end, and then it did. The sky was gray with evening and Alan’s skin looked ashen as the fading light. His body was still shuddering a little with the aftershocks of pain, but the terrible strained tautness had finally gone out of it.

He blinked up at her. His glasses had gone crooked, and he looked a little confused.

“Cynthia?”

“What,” Sin said, “the hell was that?”

Alan struggled to sit up, his arms bracing his body up, able to drag himself a little away on the grass. Sin was impressed that he’d managed it, though she was less impressed that the first order of business once he was conscious was apparently getting away from her.

Alan looked like he was considering trying to get up, but he wisely remained sitting in the grass. He wiped the sweat off his forehead, and winced even at that movement. “That was the magicians.”

“The Aventurine Circle,” Sin said. “They’re torturing you.”

Alan offered up a tired smile, as if that could possibly convince her this was not as bad as it clearly was. “Something like that. Yes.” He pushed his hair back again with what seemed to be a habitual gesture. His fingers were trembling. “I’m never going to be able to make you believe you don’t owe me now, am I?”

“No,” Sin said, because—well, of course he couldn’t.

She’d already known she owed him everything, and now here was more proof, evidence more terrible than she had dreamed. And it could have been Toby: It could have been her baby.

It occurred to her why he’d said it.

“You don’t have to worry,” she said, lifting her chin. “I’m not going to assault you with sexual favors. This isn’t actually your most attractive moment.”

Alan laughed weakly. “I imagine not.”

“That’s not—,” Sin stopped, and swore. “How are you feeling? Why are they doing this?”

“Horrible,” Alan said promptly, with the same lack of bravado he’d shown about the bow. “And they’re doing this to make Nick do what they want.” He sighed and rubbed the inside of his left wrist. It was the left hand that bore the magician’s mark. “That’s why Gerald marked me, and why Celeste thought Gerald having a mark on me was valuable. They wanted me as a hostage, so they could have a demon on a leash. Killing me would make me useless. But every time they make a demand and Nick doesn’t obey them, they give me a little display of their power.”

That was why things had been so quiet over the last few weeks, when Sin had been expecting the magicians to attack the Market fast and without mercy. The magicians had bigger game to go after, and once they were assured that the demon was theirs to command, they would come for the Market.

Sin should have thought of this, shouldn’t have been counting Nick and Alan as allies so readily. She bet Mae, with all her plans, had thought of it.

“Does Mae know?”

“Yes,” Alan said. “She guessed, so I told her everything. Plus I’m trying not to lie to her anymore.”

His voice warmed when he talked about her, Sin noticed. She got it: Mae was the one smart enough to guess, the special one he didn’t lie to, the one he wanted.

“Aren’t you angry?”

Alan frowned. “What do you mean?”

“You’re being tortured!” Sin almost shouted at him. “And the demon is just letting it happen!”

It was enough to make her laugh, or scream. The magicians had actually overestimated the demon. They had thought Nick would mind about Alan getting tortured, and maybe he was displeased that his human toy was being broken, maybe he was angry, but he was a demon like all the others. So unfeeling that it didn’t matter if Alan had given up everything for him, so cold that he could weigh Alan’s suffering in the balance and find it nothing to affect his behavior at all.

She called herself seven different kinds of fool for being shocked.

He was a demon. They just did not care.

“Nick doesn’t know,” said Alan. “The magicians give me their messages for him. I don’t deliver them. I have warning of when they’re going to attack, and I’ve managed to get away from him every time, get somewhere he can’t hear or see. He has no idea what the Circle are doing.”

“You crazy bastard,” Sin said, in awe and horror so tangled up she could not tell which was which. “What if they decide you’re useless and they kill you?”

A corner of Alan’s mouth went up. “Then they really won’t have any leverage over Nick at all, will they? He’ll be safe. He won’t do anything terrible, except to them. He’ll be allied with the right people. He’ll be all right.”

“You, however, will be dead,” Sin reminded him.

Alan seemed calm, even though he still looked sick and shaky. “I admit the situation is not ideal.”

“Demons always take more than you can afford to pay,” she said in a low voice, remembering Merris and her eyes bleeding into blackness.

Alan shook his head, closing his eyes. He looked too exhausted to keep them open. Sin had a sudden urge to push back his hair herself, take care of him, as if he was Lydie or Toby. He looked so lost and so resigned to it that she thought perhaps nobody had taken care of him in years.

Her care would not be welcome, though. He’d made that pretty clear.

Even when it was worn to a thread held taut with pain, his voice was still beautiful.

“Love always costs more than you can afford to pay,” he said. “And it’s always worth the price.”

They sat together on the cool grass in the gathering evening, silent for a while. Sin had absolutely no idea what to say. She’d been right, he was crazy. Sane people did not do things like this. Sane people did not love demons.

“I don’t understand,” she admitted softly at last. “I don’t see why you’re doing all this.”

“Wouldn’t you,” Alan asked, “for your brother or sister?”

Sin was silent. After a moment, she reached out and took his hand, trying hard to make it clear it was an offer of comfort and nothing more, not shifting any closer. Alan was visibly startled, maybe even a little disturbed, but his fingers closed around hers tight all the same. Perhaps he was just so desperate for comfort he wasn’t going to be choosy about its source.

She would have liked to sit there with him longer, but night was already closing in, and she could not think about what she wanted first.

“I’ve got to go,” she started awkwardly after a pause. “The kids.”

“Of course,” said Alan. “I’m sorry to have kept you from them so long. Thank you.”

“Oh for God’s sake, don’t thank me,” Sin burst out, her voice rough. She didn’t want to cry.

She helped Alan up instead, and he let her. He refused to lean on her, though, so she walked beside him as he made his slow, wavering way down through the fields to his car.

About halfway there Alan’s phone rang, the noise stunning in the still evening. Alan fished the phone out of his pocket, and Sin was not surprised to hear his voice come out suddenly steady and strong.

“Hi, Nick,” he said, and after a pause, “Well, that’s right, I sent you a text. If you insist on killing people with paintbrushes, you have to get the Tube home. Those are my rules. I consider them harsh but fair.” Another pause. “I didn’t think that while I was gone, you’d forget how to use the stove.”

He talked on for a little while, teasing and fond, obviously keeping up about two-thirds of the conversation. He sounded absolutely normal.

If she was Nick, Sin thought, and she found out about this lie, she wasn’t sure the magicians would get the chance to kill Alan. She might do it herself.

Sin let Alan get in the car and drive away, back to the home where he would have to pretend to be tired from learning how to use a bow and nothing more. She went quietly to the wagon, thanking Trish as she went by for putting the kids to bed.

When she swung the door softly closed behind her, she found Lydie awake and sitting up in bed. There was a small radiant sphere of light held between her palms, rays dancing on the walls of their tiny home.

“Lydie,” Sin said, her voice hushed with terror. “Lydie, you know you can’t do that.”

“It was dark,” Lydie told her. She sounded guilty, though, and the light went out.

Sin crawled into her bed between theirs and curled her body around Lydie’s through the sheets. She couldn’t let her muscles be stiff with fear that Lydie could’ve been discovered while Sin was away. Lydie would notice. Lydie was seven years old. Sin couldn’t let her mind dwell on thoughts of how the Market would react to a child who was showing power this strong, this young. It was bad enough to have any magical power. Then you couldn’t really be part of the Market. You had to be a pied piper or a potion-maker or a necromancer.

But people born with too much power, they said, always wanted more. When their sixteenth birthday came, when they came into their real power and made their choices, the people born with too much power became magicians.

Which meant, as far as the Market was concerned, that people born with too much power were born evil.

“It doesn’t matter if it’s dark,” Sin whispered, her arm tight around Lydie’s body. “I’m here. I’ll keep you safe.”

5

Traitor in the Nest

THE NEXT DAY WAS SATURDAY. SIN USUALLY LET HERSELF SLEEP in until nine on the weekends, but today she had magicians to hunt down.

She slid out from between Lydie and Toby, and asked Trish to watch out for them when they woke. She hoped they would sleep late: Not dancing at the last Market had left them with very little money to get by on until next month, and Sin didn’t want to owe favors. Nobody was getting Toby or Lydie’s hair or teeth for any enchantments. That never ended well.

They knew that the Aventurine Circle had buried the stones of its circle under the earth of London, creating a safe space where no magic worked but their own. Mae had told the Market about Nick having to fight stripped of his magic on the Millennium Bridge.

That was what had led the pipers to the river, and Southwark Cathedral. And that was where Sin was going now.

If she could get a glimpse of the magicians, if she could follow them back and find where the Aventurine Circle lived and thus presumably where Celeste Drake kept her pearl, she could work out how to get it.

The Tube was crowded on the way with people going to the Borough Market, which was good: A crowd would be good cover for a girl combing the streets.

Sin was wearing jeans and a light green shirt, more Thea of the Market with two kids to run around after and no time than a schoolgirl trying to blend in or a dancer trying to stand out. A couple of boys on the Tube tried to catch her eye and she gave them the polite smile, no teeth, which discouraged without offending. Then she looked out of the window at the fascinating dark tunnel until they rattled into London Bridge station.

She went right for Borough Market, as if she was just seeking stalls full of delicious organic food. She strolled casually down a cobbled street full of bars and flower shops, around the curve of a Victorian tavern, and across the road from the steel-like wedge of an office building, through the Stoney Street entrance into the market.

This was only a pale shadow of the market Sin was used to, but there was a familiar bustle to the place that made her relax. There were green-painted fences hemming in some stalls, with other stalls set in the stone walls. Cobbled streets radiated out from the market in every direction, as if the market was the hub of a wheel and every street was a spoke. Above it all arched the stone curves of London Bridge.

Along the stalls full of bright fruit and warm bread were throngs of people. Sin watched them go by. She’d seen the magicians of the Aventurine Circle, just once.

That was enough. She’d been trained to remember people’s faces since she could walk. It made people feel good to be remembered, and people who felt good paid well.

She knew Celeste Drake when she saw her.

People were clearing a space for Celeste because she was tiny and beautifully blond in a way that meant she probably got a lot of things, including people not taking her seriously. She sailed past Sin, her white linen dress fluttering in the warm autumn breeze, without a second glance.

There was someone else with her, a short blond guy in a white shirt with a wicker basket on his arm. He was in front of Celeste, so Sin couldn’t see his face, but as she walked and studied them out of the corner of her eye she saw Celeste’s lips move. He turned slightly to catch what she said, and Sin caught the flash of an earring and the sound of his easy laugh.

They looked happy and carefree, out shopping in London on a beautiful morning. Sin was prepared to bet the boy was also a magician, and had sold people’s bodies to demons as readily as the stall owners were selling oranges.

The pipers had guessed right. They must live close by.

Sin ran her fingertips along the rough wood of a stall, making sure she did not keep the same pace at all times but went slower and faster as if she was really browsing. She made herself stop in front of one stall and look interested.

“Gorgeous English strawberries,” the stall owner said encouragingly.

Sin gave him a smile and he smiled back, a spark of interest in his eye. She did not want to be noticed or remembered, so she turned off the smile, quickly bought an apple, and turned away.

The two magicians were no longer in sight.

Sin set her teeth into the flesh of the apple and let herself hurry just a bit, not too much: brisk steps, girl eating an apple, nothing to see here. She came out the other side of the market and saw two blond heads disappearing down the curving stone steps that led to a space signposted Green Dragon Court.

Sin counted to five and then crossed the road after them, starting down the steps as they walked by Southwark Cathedral, the building standing like a castle against the sky with a pennant flying from the top turret and windows glowing orange, blue and evergreen.

Sin followed them, still at a distance, joggers rushing past her as if their destination was far more important than hers. Her teeth were still locked in her apple: She knew she wouldn’t be able to make herself swallow a bite.

The magicians went down into the shadow of London Bridge, across the path by the Thames to a huge white boat, all silver lines and curving surfaces that reflected the gleaming of a clear sky.

A boat that had been there, but that Sin had not really noticed before.

An enchanted boat.

A demon might be after them, so the magicians were living on the river.

The two magicians came onboard, and Sin tossed the apple and finally began to run, down to the path because it was downhill. She reached the boat as its engines purred to life.

She stood close to the deck, one hand on the shining white surface. This was a piece of luck that would be unlikely to come her way again. This might be the only time she had a chance to get close to the magicians. If she climbed aboard and could get her hands on the necklace, she would have won.

If the magicians found her, she would be killed.

Sin looked at the slick white deck and tried to screw up her resolve.

“What are you doing?”

Sin turned and was aware even as she turned that she’d started, and betrayed guilt. The woman standing in front of her had puffy ginger hair and a mouth wearing plum-colored lipstick and disapproval. Sin didn’t recognize her as a magician or see one of the messenger’s tokens on her.

A civilian, then, she thought, and let go of the knife in her pocket.

But if she alerted the magicians to Sin’s presence, Sin was dead just the same.

“I know the guy who owns this boat,” Sin said quickly. “Just wondering whether I should hop onboard and surprise him.”

The woman’s eyes narrowed like doors being closed in front of her.

“I have to agree with this lady,” said Alan.

Sin started again and cursed herself.

Alan was coming down the pathway from the direction of the cathedral. He looked subtly different than usual, the set of his shoulders making his shirt look more starched somehow, his mouth very thin.

“You know you’re not welcome down here anymore, Bambi,” he said.

Sin stared at him for an instant, then glanced at the woman. She was looking intrigued.

Sin reached up and pulled out her hair tie so the waves fell down around her shoulders. She twisted one strand around her finger and gave the woman a slow smile.

“See?” she said. “Told you I knew the owners.”

“You used to know my brother,” Alan corrected primly. “Dad made it very clear that your acquaintance was at an end.”

“You’re so boring, Clive,” Sin drawled. “I knew Nick would be pleased to see me.”

“Nicholas isn’t there,” Alan informed her, with a smug little smile. “And I very much doubt Dad would be overjoyed by your reappearance.”

Sin sort of wished she had bubblegum. She felt that blowing a big, pink bubble would fit right into this role.

She did without, putting her hands on her hips and shifting her stance so her hips rolled beneath her palms.

“You could show me the boat,” she suggested, with another slow smile. “I really would love to have a look around. And I bet you’re just a little pleased to see me.”

The ginger lady looked shocked by how brazen Sin was.

“Not even a little,” said Alan, and the woman’s mouth twisted in satisfaction. “Come along, Bambi. I’ll get you a cab.”

He reached out and took hold of Sin’s elbow, towing her fastidiously along, not bringing her body any closer to his than necessary. He looked over his shoulder as he did so.

“Thanks for keeping an eye out, ma’am.”

“Don’t mention it,” said the woman, lifting her chin proudly.

Sin sighed. “Seems I underestimated you, Clive. I had no idea how boring you could be.”

After a few minutes of being towed, Alan’s pace slowed and Sin risked a glance over her shoulder. She saw the woman’s retreating back, but she also saw the boat pulling out from the bank.

There was that decision made for her, then.

Sin couldn’t decide whether she was relieved or disappointed. On the whole, she was going to call this expedition a win: Disaster had been averted, she had valuable new information, and, well—she couldn’t say it hadn’t been a little fun.

She resumed facing forward, then slid a glance up at Alan. “Bambi?”

“In my defense,” said Alan. “Clive.”

“Just a little obvious, that’s all I’m saying.”

“But it worked.”

“Well, you’ve obviously had a lot of practice, so you were able to carry it off okay,” Sin conceded. “So.”

“So what?”

She gave him the slow, Bambi-style smile that had scandalized the woman by the boat. “Lie to me, Clive.”

One of Alan’s eyebrows came up, and then he smiled a little. He put his hand into his pocket and she saw, cupped in his palm, the glint of his gun. “I was doing a chemistry experiment. I’m so sorry the noise disturbed you; I’m in some advanced classes, and sometimes when I’m studying I lose track of time.”

Sin slipped her knife out of her pocket and showed it to him. “This? It’s a prop. I do a dance with it.” She paused significantly. “A belly dance.”

“And that sound was a car backfiring. My brother’s keen on cars, you see. Don’t worry. I’ll have a word with him.”

“Of course I remember you from the last Market,” Sin said, restoring her knife to her pocket. “Who could forget you?”

“Actually,” Alan said, earnest and clear-eyed, “this is my first time playing poker.”

Sin laughed, delighted, loving the sunlight shining on the Thames and playing a part with someone who understood she was playing.

“What are you doing here?” she asked softly. “Were you following me?”

A few guys had followed her before and it had been shocking, frightening: They had wanted to own a bit of her without her knowledge or her permission. She had been furious.

If Alan had followed her, he’d wanted to help. She wasn’t furious.

She was glad, she thought, and stranger than that, uncertain and blossoming, she was hopeful in a way that was new to her.

Sin had had very few actual crushes, seldom felt interest that survived from one meeting to the next. It was hard to take boys seriously when they were at best diversions and at worst easy marks.

She was taking this one seriously. Alan was looking down at her, grave and attentive, his steady gaze seeing a lot more than people usually did. She wanted him to see more, and to like what he saw.

“I was following someone else,” Alan told her.

Sin said, “I see.”

“Then I saw you, and I thought you could maybe use a hand. Though I’m sure you could have dealt with it yourself.”

“Thank you.” Sin made an effort, painful in a way acting usually wasn’t for her, and tried to smile a casual smile. “Really, I appreciate it. If you need to go find someone, feel free. Thanks again. Unless you’d like my help?”

“No,” said Alan. “I’m all right.”

He took her at her word and began to limp up the slope to the cathedral. Sin looked away automatically, across the water at the magicians’ boat.

Then she knew who Alan had been following, and knew she had no head start on Mae at all.

There on the shining white deck stood Celeste Drake. Beside her and even shorter than Celeste, looking utterly at her ease, was Mae.

Sin realized that she hadn’t believed Matthias when he’d warned her about Mae. Beneath all her jealousy, she’d still thought of Mae as her friend, someone who could ultimately be trusted. These days there wasn’t much for Sin to rely on.

The clouds above the river were parting, sunlight rippling along the surface of the water. Mae’s pink hair shone, and against her hair gleamed a knife in a circle.

The sign of a messenger. Of someone sworn to the service of the magicians.

Sin called her father as she was walking toward the Tube station and offered to come and see him. He sounded tired and abstracted on the phone—he worked too hard—and she said quickly, “I don’t have to. Just thought it might be an idea. I don’t want to be a bother.”

“Please come,” he said, as he always did. “It’s no trouble at all, Thea. It’s always good to see you.”

Sin got back on the Tube, changing for the Circle Line to get to Brixton. It was a long walk from the Tube station to her father’s house, but she had turned down lifts from him so many times that he’d stopped offering.

Usually she liked the walk all right, a time to be alone as she seldom was and think, but today she felt numb. It was all too much: Merris corrupt and almost lost, Mae a traitor, the constant threat that Lydie would betray her magic to someone else, and the whole Market like a beloved but heavy weight placed around Sin’s neck by someone who was trying to drown her. These days she felt like she was never able to break the surface often enough to draw proper breaths.

She walked by the shabby brown library and up the long road past a park and many blocks of flats, taking a left until she reached the residential area with fancy houses and very few shops. There were trees along the street where her father lived, their roots cracking and disrupting the pavement but their leaves forming a soft gold roof above Sin’s head and carpeting the cement they had disturbed with layers of green, brown, yellow and the occasional spot of scarlet.

It was a nice house, she’d always thought, its windows huge rectangles of glass, the roof pointed. It looked like a house belonging to people who were nice and had no secrets. It was a bit ridiculous that there was a room in it that Dad called her room.

It wasn’t her room, not really. She hadn’t slept a night in it since she was a kid, before Mama and Dad split up.

Dad had kept trying to make them settle here, when Mama had never wanted to settle anywhere. Sin had always liked the house, liked her cousins on her dad’s side who had taken her to the Notting Hill carnival and out dancing when she and Dad had reconciled and she was older. She hadn’t been against settling down, but she had been against the idea of settling for less than a dance every month at the Market.

In the end, Dad had settled here without them.

Sin knocked on the blue-painted door, and her dad answered on the first knock as he always did, as if he was afraid she would give up and go away if he wasn’t fast enough.

“Thea,” he said, and put his arms around her. They were about the same height now: He wasn’t very tall. “It’s good to see you. You look beautiful.”

“Yeah, not much has changed,” Sin said, and summoned up a smile for him.

He had lived with Mama for years, so he was a bit too accustomed to playacting. When he released her, he reached out and touched the side of her face with his hand.

“A little tired, though,” he said. “You know, if you wanted to come and stay for even a week, we’d be so pleased to have you.”

“I know,” Sin said, and did her best to breeze through the hall into the kitchen, where Dad had been meaning to lay down fresh linoleum for about three years now.

Grandma Tess was in the kitchen making sandwiches. She gave Sin her usual look, disapproving in a way that reminded Sin of the ginger-haired woman from down by the river, a way that suggested she had seen all she needed to see of Sin to pass judgment.

Basically, whenever Grandma Tess looked at Sin she saw her mother, the gorgeous, unreliable white woman who had snared a good man and refused to settle down with him, who had broken his heart.

Her grandmother didn’t know about the Goblin Market, about what it meant. But her father knew, and he hadn’t been able to understand why Mama would never stop dancing.

“Little bit of notice would be awfully nice,” said Grandma Tess, and put a chicken salad sandwich in front of Sin: Sin’s favorite, with salt and vinegar crisps on the side.

Her grandmother would have loved to have a lot of grand-children who she could spoil rotten and understand completely. Sin thanked her.

“Let me make us all a cup of tea,” said Dad, “and you can tell us how school is going.”

Sin ate her sandwich and delivered her usual edited version of events, making magical references that Dad would get and Grandma wouldn’t, letting neither of them know the full story.

Grandma Tess finished her tea and went upstairs to watch television, always careful not to show too great an interest in Sin’s company. Sin knew she felt Dad was letting down their side by being always too transparently pleased to see Sin, when as far as they knew Sin barely cared enough to come and visit them.

“How’s work going, Dad?” Sin asked a little awkwardly, when she had run out of half-truths.

Just as anxious for something to talk about as she was, he launched into the tale of a particularly difficult client’s account. Sin leaned her head on her arm, her free hand clasped around her teacup, and tried to listen attentively, the adventures of an accountant as strange to her as the life of a dancer was to him.

She woke with the light coming in the window tinted darker with evening drawing close, as if someone had mixed ink in with the air. Her dad was sitting across the table from her, studying the cold tea in his cup. He was getting really grizzled, she noticed, the silver at his temples making deeper and deeper inroads in his black curls.

“Sorry,” she said softly. “I’m really sorry. It wasn’t the company.”

“You’re not still angry, are you?” he asked her. He sounded tired.

She had been very angry, when she was younger: that he didn’t see the glory of the Market, the fact that Mama had been born to dance. She’d been angry because he had left her, too, because that was what happened when you had a kid and you left someone. The kid was left too, even though it was nobody’s fault, even though Dad had always tried his best.

When Victor had left Mama, he’d never got in touch again, never showed any interest in seeing Lydie and Toby. Some guys never even tried.

Sin wasn’t angry anymore. Dad had been right, after all: Mama had been putting herself in danger. Mama had died. It was a lot, to expect a guy to stick around and watch the woman he loved risk her life every month for something he thought of as nothing but a thrill.

“What are you talking about?” Sin asked, and picked up what remained of her sandwich. When she bit in and chewed, it was dry, and she still felt tired and a little sick, but she tried to always eat what Grandma Tess put in front of her.

Besides, it was free food.

She swallowed and said, “I have to get going in a minute.”

“You can’t stay for dinner?”

Sin had been so angry she hadn’t seen Dad for two years after he left, hanging up every time he called.

Mama had stayed angry until she died. Sin figured that meant Mama had always loved Dad best, which should count for something.

When Sin had started talking to Dad on the phone, and then coming to see him, taking trains and meeting at halfway points, it had just seemed cruel to mention Victor. Dad hadn’t had anybody else, not ever. Sin had simply not mentioned it, and then her little omission of the truth had spun out of control, had made another role for her to play.

Dad didn’t know why Sin could never stay. He didn’t know about Lydie and Toby. She couldn’t tell him: They weren’t his kids. What if he wanted to put them in foster care, or simply leave them to the Market and take Sin away so she could concentrate on school or go to college or do any of the stuff he kept talking about, a holiday by the seaside or swimming lessons or something?

This was the only way.

When she had told him Mama was dead, he had wanted her to live with him. He’d promised she could keep dancing, that he would take her to the Market himself, walk through it with her hand in hand as they had when she was young.

She had told him she was going to live with Merris Cromwell, and that she didn’t need him any more than Mama had.

“I’m sorry,” Sin told him, widening her eyes. “I’ve got a lot of stuff to do.”

Her dad rose from the table, using his hands to push himself up as if his limbs felt heavy. He went around the table to stand where she sat, and slipped a little roll of money into the fingers curled around her teacup.

“It was good to see you,” he murmured. “Buy yourself something nice from your old dad.”

“You bet I will,” Sin said.

A week’s worth of groceries was always nice.

She was already catastrophically late, so she leaned her head against Dad’s arm for another few minutes, watching the light fade.

Love always costs more than you can afford to pay, Alan had said to her, his face still drawn with pain. And it’s always worth the price.

Some people stayed, no matter what the cost. But you couldn’t expect people to stay no matter what. Sin didn’t know any way to make someone love her that much.

6

Attack

MERRIS WAS AT MEZENTIUS HOUSE SEEING TO THE POSSESSED that weekend, so Sin had to wait to tell her about Mae. She didn’t know who else she could tell.

Being the only one who knew was nerve-racking, though. Monday morning she found herself sitting in school thinking of all the things the Market people could tell Mae that she could report back to Celeste.

By lunchtime her nerves felt strained enough that she could not bear the idea of making small talk with people who had no idea the world she was worried about even existed. She took her lunch and marched herself over to Nick’s table, where he sat talking on the phone and glowering at anyone who tried to sit down.

“Got to go,” he said, when Sin slid into the bench opposite him.

“Secret girlfriend?”

“Secret traveling circus,” Nick said. “They’re all very special to me. Particularly the Bearded Lady.”

“I’m so thrilled you found love at last,” Sin said. “Are you eating that yogurt?”

“Yes,” Nick said, and glared.

“You sure about that?” asked Sin, since it was rhubarb custard. “If it helps, I can eat it in a sexy way.”

“So can I,” said Nick. Sin gave a philosophical shrug, and he continued, “Do we know each other yet?”

“It’s okay, I’ve given it some thought. The girls at school won’t think we know each other. They’ll just think I want to tap your demonic ass.”

Nick peeled the top off his yogurt and looked around the room with what Sin thought was a flicker of amusement in his cold eyes.

“It’s true women find it hard to resist all this,” he said, gesturing to his own body with a teaspoon. He slid the spoon into the yogurt and ate some, mouth curving around the metal.

“I don’t know how I’m restraining myself,” Sin said. “And yet.”

He did have a great mouth. Unfortunately Sin found herself turning an orange between her palms and thinking of Alan, his steadfast deep blue eyes and beautiful hands, which made her feel angry and impatient with herself, other boys’ mouths, and the whole world.

“Alan told me you were teaching him how to shoot a bow,” Nick said, and Sin started at the name and studied Nick suspiciously in case he could read minds. He looked as blank as ever. “Can you shoot a crossbow?” he asked.

“There’s no artistry to shooting a crossbow,” Sin said. “You just need to know how to aim it and then put a big bolt right through someone.”

“That,” Nick said with conviction, “sounds like my idea of a good time.”

“Well, I’m no expert, but I can teach you the basics.”

Nick nodded. “Alan said you two were friends or something now,” he said with what seemed to be qualified approval.

“I guess,” Sin said, desperately casual. “I mean, we’re friends too, aren’t we?” She laughed a little.

Nick blinked. “No.”

Sin stared at him. “What?”

“I’ve already got one,” Nick told her.

“You’ve already got one—friend?” Sin asked slowly.

Nick nodded. “He’s a lot of trouble. I don’t think I can deal with any more.”

He continued eating yogurt, apparently unaware that he was talking like a crazy person. The Ryves brothers were making a bit of a hobby of rejecting Sin.

“Do you mean Alan?” Sin asked.

“Alan’s my brother,” Nick told her as if she was the one being dense. “You’ve met him. He’s called Jamie.”

Mae’s little brother. The magician who had gone off to be with his own kind.

“That’s who you’re always on the phone with?” Sin asked. Nick didn’t answer. Since he was a demon who could not lie, Sin was going to take that as a yes.

“I wouldn’t have thought that a demon would be overly fond of any magician.”

Nick shrugged.

Sin propped her chin on her fist and regarded Nick with close attention. “And what is Mae?” she inquired. “Since she’s not your friend either, apparently.”

She hadn’t meant to talk about Mae. She’d wanted to lay out all the evidence before Merris, have her decide what to do.

But Merris wasn’t here: Nick was, and he was one of the few people Sin knew who might not instantly condemn Mae.

There were people in the Market who would kill Mae at the mere suggestion that she’d been seen with the magicians. Sin didn’t know how far Mae had gone, how tangled up with the magicians she had become, but Sin had a dead mother and a magician in the family as well. She could understand how Mae might have messed up.

She just didn’t know what she could do to help her.

Nick bared his teeth. “As far as I’m concerned, Mae’s the future leader of the Goblin Market.”

“Yeah,” Sin said in a level voice. “I was wondering, why is that?”

“She wants to be,” Nick said. “So I want it for her. And in my experience, Mavis doesn’t stop until she gets what she wants.”

Sin actually felt a bit better about that, the fact that Nick had apparently chosen Mae as the leader on his own rather than on orders from Alan.

“So if Mae’s the heir to the Market, what am I?”

“Why should I care?” asked the demon.

“I’ll tell you who I am,” Sin said. “I’m the only one who knows Mae’s made a deal with the Aventurine Circle.”

Nick’s hand shot out and he grabbed her wrist, too hard. Sin reached for her knife without even thinking about it. Nick dropped his spoon and went for his.

They sat bristling across a school lunch table, eyes locked, hands on their weapons.

Sin barely let her lips move as she said, “We can’t do this here.”

Nick rose without another word. The muscles in his forearm barely flexed as he pulled Sin smoothly to her feet, as if she weighed about as much as a lunch box. His other hand stayed in his pocket, where Sin had no doubt he had a knife.

They couldn’t be noticed, or if they had to be noticed they could not be followed. Sin made sure to look embarrassed and pleased as Nick stalked out of the cafeteria, sweeping her in his wake.

When the cafeteria doors slammed she snapped the shy, anticipatory smile off her face. He dragged her into the nearest classroom, and Sin glimpsed desks pushed out of order and windows streaming afternoon light, no escapes but the door behind them. She pulled out one of the long knives strapped to her back.

Nick delivered a swift hard blow to her wrist. Pain shot up to her shoulder and the knife went flying. He threw her up against the blackboard, hand pinning her wrist to the chalk-stained surface, his body pressing down on hers so she could not reach the other knife at her back.

He looked at Sin, a lock of his black hair falling in the tiny space between them as he leaned down.

“I’ve got you,” he said softly.

Sin smiled the sweet smile of a girl with a pocketknife already in her free hand, and let the tip of the blade trace the cotton over his tense stomach.

“And I’ve got a knife.” She leaned into Nick’s space, and he didn’t flinch from the blade, just stood there looking down at her with his face so utterly blank and his body so tense he might as well have been made of stone. “I saw her, Nick. She was with the magicians. She was wearing a messenger’s symbol. If I told the Market, they would take her apart.”

There was a long pause. Sin strained, testing the strength of Nick’s hold on her: His body was a solid wall of muscle. If she wanted to get away, she’d have to use the knife.

She wasn’t quite ready to do that yet.

“Well, you’re not going to tell the Market then, are you?” Nick demanded.

Sin took a deep breath.

“I don’t want to,” she said. “I don’t want her hurt. I can see how she might have gone to the magicians and got in over her head. Her own brother’s a magician.”

Mae’s little brother. She’d met him once and found him to be the kind of guy who faded into the background, so intently inoffensive that he was barely memorable.

She’d seen him again protecting the Goblin Market in battle, palm raised and his very eyes alight with magic fire.

She’d seen his power, and how he had chosen to use it, and her heart had leaped as she thought of what that could mean for Lydie.

Only then Mae’s brother had disappeared, and Mae said he had left to join a Circle of magicians.

That was a bond between Mae and Sin that Mae didn’t even know about, something Sin hoped Mae would never find out. Sin had nightmares about what could happen if Lydie came into that kind of power at sixteen, if her sister went off to join the magicians.

“I don’t think Mae meant to betray anyone,” Sin said. “But I can’t let the Market fall into the magicians’ hands. And I don’t know what she’s going to do.”

“I don’t know either,” Nick snarled. “I didn’t know she was doing this!”

“And this is the girl who’s going to be with your brother?” Sin asked. “This is the future leader of the Market? She’s working with the magicians and you had no idea, and you’re not the slightest bit concerned she might betray us all? She might betray Alan. She might betray you.”

Nick’s hand pinioning her wrist was pressing down to the bone. Her wrist was aching in a way that meant it would bruise later. Sin set her teeth and held the knife steady against his stomach.

“She wouldn’t,” Nick snarled.

“How do you know?” Sin demanded.

“If you didn’t know about this—”

“I know her,” Nick said. “She wouldn’t.”

In the end it wasn’t the knife Nick shied away from. Sin hesitated, then slipped it back in the pocket of her skirt, and reached out and touched the place where her knife had rested with her fingertips instead.

He broke away from her with a sudden violent movement, as if she’d tried to brand him. One minute he was there and the next clear across the room, standing at the window with the afternoon light pouring in on his bowed head.

“I don’t want her to get hurt,” Sin said softly. “I’ll talk to her. I’ll talk to Merris. I just want the Market to be safe. I won’t tell anyone else, unless I have to.”

She wanted Nick to look up at her, willed her voice to reach out the way she had.

I know her. She wouldn’t. Nick trusted Mae.

If he’d trusted Mae too and was feeling bewildered and hurt, there could be comfort in that. Sin could feel better, feeling they understood each other.

“Let me make myself clear. I’m not on your side. If you do tell someone,” Nick said, his voice very calm, with no hint that he ever felt anything at all, “if they turn against Mae, if they hurt her, I’ll kill you.”

When Sin got back to Horsenden Hill that evening, Lydie dragging her feet after the long walk from the station, Merris had still not returned.

“Have you heard from her?” Trish asked.

“No, but I’m sure she’ll be back by tomorrow,” Sin said as she collected Toby from Trish’s tent, where Trish had the Market kids gather while she tried out recipes and kept an eye on them. Toby was playing with a couple of Elka’s younger kids, but he lifted his arms up readily for Sin as she approached.

She scooped him up and breathed in the smell of his hair, baby shampoo and milk and dirt, because he’d apparently been digging holes. Even the weight of him in her arms was reassuring, and Sin could use a little reassurance.

Merris had told her she’d only be gone for the weekend.

What if this was it? a voice in her head whispered, cold and terrifying. What if Liannan had taken over, and Merris was gone?

“People are looking for you,” Trish said, and Sin thanked her and quietly panicked some more.

Toby was talking in her ear, a long nonsense story about what he had done that day, small fists pulling on her hair and clothes hard enough to hurt, and Sin’s thoughts were like another child’s monologue in her mind, endless and insistent and devolving into a garbled rush.

What did these people want, how could she run the Market, would she have to condemn Mae to stop her trying to take control, what would Nick do then? She wasn’t prepared, she thought, walking across the expanse of grass to their wagon with the sun setting and newly cool air running down her neck. The future loomed before her like the moment before a fall, she felt sick and winded already.

Sin got the door of the wagon open with one hand, the arm it was attached to still holding Toby, and held it open for Lydie with her elbow.

Mae was leaning against the table that bore Sin’s crystal ball. The sight of her was a shock followed by resentment: Mae looked cool and collected, her pink hair a gleaming brushed bob and her ironed blue T-shirt emblazoned with the words WHEN I PLAY DOCTOR, I PLAY TO WIN. Sin felt rumpled and tired, and her wrist still hurt.

“Mae,” she said, and smiled brilliantly. “It’s traditional to come into people’s homes when they invite you. And when they’re actually in them.”

“I’m sorry,” Mae said. “Phyllis said I should wait in here for you.”

Sin still bet that Mae would’ve hesitated before going into someone else’s actual house. Mae looked genuinely sorry, though, and Sin wasn’t going to make an issue out of it. There were several more important issues to take up with Mae.

There was the Market to think of.

She took a tiny revenge by putting Toby into Mae’s arms. Mae and Toby sent her hilariously similar looks of distress as she did so.

“I’m glad you’re here,” Sin told Mae, pulling off her shirt and starting to undo her blouse. “I wanted to talk to you.”

“Yeah,” Mae said, jiggling Toby tentatively as if she was worried his head might fall off. “Nick—said you might.”

“Did he?” Sin asked. “Really.”

“Hi,” Lydie put in. She’d scrambled up on her bed and was sitting in a red sea of blankets decorated with pirates, staring at Mae with big eyes.

“Oh, hi,” Mae said awkwardly.

Sin didn’t ask Lydie to get lost, or give Mae any help. She shrugged off her blouse and hung it up, keeping her eyes on Mae, who looked a little more uncomfortable.

She met Sin’s gaze head-on all the same.

“I would never betray the Market,” she said. “Or you. I want you to know that.”

“I think you know I have a few reasons to doubt it,” Sin said, sliding out of her school skirt and reaching for a pair of jeans.

“I was offered the earrings,” Mae said. “I took them. I’ve got my reasons.”

“Your brother.”

Sin sat on her bed squashed up against Lydie’s, using one hand to draw Lydie against her side and her other to roll her socks off. Lydie snuggled into Sin’s side, her head butting her sister’s collarbone hard, and Sin tried not to think of losing her, of how that might be.

“My mother.”

Sin looked up, startled, and saw Mae’s face, cold and set as it had never been before her mother fell at a magician onto bloodstained cobblestones.

“The Aventurine Circle killed her,” Mae said. “I’m going to make them sorry.”

Sin thought about her own mother falling, about the world going dark as the creature inside her smiled. If there had been anyone to blame but the demon, if there had been any way to take revenge, she might have wanted it too.

“You want the magician who killed her?”

“No,” Mae said. “I know who brought the Circle into the square. I know who gave the orders. It was the leader’s responsibility. I want Celeste Drake.”

“We all want Celeste Drake,” Sin told her, with great patience. “That’s why we’re here.”

“We don’t all have access to the magicians,” Mae argued. “I do. I know that the reason the Circle hasn’t attacked yet is because Gerald has been—”

“Going after Alan,” Sin finished for her.

Mae stood briefly stunned. Sin could practically see her thoughts regrouping like tiny soldiers behind her eyes, and spoke before Mae found another route of attack.

“Which, I might add, we’d all already know if Alan Ryves hadn’t decided to withhold the information in case it makes his demon brother start helping out the side of evil.”

There was a wry twist to Mae’s mouth that said she might agree on the topic of Alan withholding, but she said loyally, “He’s going through a lot. And it was brave of him to go through it alone.”

Sin closed her eyes for a moment. “I know it was brave.”

“And you don’t understand,” Mae said. “I meant, I want Celeste Drake personally. I want to kill her myself. I’ve got a gun,” she continued, the words tumbling out in a rush, as if she’d been dying to tell someone else her plan. “I’ve carried it every time I went to see the magicians. One day I’ll get the chance to use it and get away afterward.”

Sin stood up and stretched; she couldn’t help a soft, incredulous laugh. “Well. That should be easy.”

Mae certainly didn’t think small. Sin thought about Nick saying Mavis doesn’t stop until she gets what she wants.

The corners of Mae’s mouth turned up a little, tentatively moving toward a smile. “So you believe me.”

Sin rolled her eyes. She reached out and laid a palm for an instant against the curve of Mae’s cheek. “Oh, honey,” she said. “What you’re saying is so completely insane, I have to believe you.”

Mae did smile then, dimple flashing, looking about five years old, and Sin withdrew her hand and tucked away her relief that Mae didn’t mean to betray the Market, that she was still something like a friend.

It didn’t matter what she felt. She had to lead.

“If this puts the Market in any more danger than it’s in already,” Sin said, “you should know, I’ll tell everyone you’re working for the Aventurine Circle. And if I do that, one of us will kill you. The pipers could make you dance out into traffic. I could knife you at thirty paces. There will be nothing you can do to save yourself.”

Mae looked down at the floor and took a deep breath.

“You should know,” she said, “I’m not just doing this for my mother. I’m going to kill Celeste Drake, and I’m going to take the necklace. I’m going to take the Market. There will be nothing you can do to keep it.”

Sin leaned against their tiny stove, standing directly across the room from where Mae was leaning against the little table. There was barely a foot of space between them. When Mae looked up and met her eyes, Sin felt as if they should be standing ten paces away from each other, ready to duel.

There was a knock on the wagon door.

“Cynthia?” Alan said. “It’s—”

“The only person at the Market who calls me Cynthia?” Sin called out. “Come in, Alan. Oh, I’m only half-dressed, but I don’t mind.”

“Um,” Alan said. “I’m bashful. I’d be sure to blush, and I have red hair. It’s not a pretty sight.”

“Since Sin apparently has her kit off, I doubt anyone will be looking at you,” said Nick, and he pulled open the door before Sin recovered from the shock of hearing his voice at all.

When he entered the wagon, Lydie scrambled backward on the bed until she had her back to the wall. Nick’s black eyes followed the movement.

“I didn’t say you could come in,” Sin told him, brushing by him to snag a shirt to put on over her bra.

Alan pushed gently past Nick, as if Nick was a child rather than six feet of well-armed bad temper, and went directly over to Mae, standing close and putting out his arms for Toby.

Of course Alan’s first instinct was to help, and of course Mae responded with a smile of gratitude, dimpled and sweet. She leaned into him and murmured a few words, their bodies curving in toward each other. Sin shrugged on her shirt and did up the buttons, concentrating on the simple task.

If Nick wanted Mae to lead the Goblin Market, Alan probably did too.

When she looked up, though, Alan was closer to her than to Mae. Surprise and a jolt of ridiculous happiness coursed through her: He was holding Toby; he’d probably come to hand over the baby.

He didn’t, though. He shifted Toby comfortably in the circle of his arm, Toby making an approving sound at him and burrowing his face into the curve of Alan’s neck. Alan looked down at her, then leaned in a little.

“You hurt your wrist?” he said, low and inquiring.

Sin glanced down at her shirt cuffs, which covered her wrists completely, and then raised her eyebrows.

“You were looking at my wrists?”

The beginnings of a smile crinkled the corners of his eyes. “I’m a lightning-fast observer. I notice all kinds of things.”

Sin had a response and the move following it ready when Alan’s eyes left her and turned to his brother.

“Are you going to stay in the doorway?”

Nick jerked his head toward Lydie sitting at the top of her bed, her knees drawn up. “Yeah. The kid’s scared of me.”

He said it blankly, as if he was talking about a chair rather than someone’s feelings, and Sin wanted to hit him. Lydie might be shy, but she hated anyone thinking of her like that. She wanted to be a daring adventurer, and Sin was not about to let anyone take that away from her.

Lydie didn’t let anyone take it from her either; Sin had brought her up better than that. She lifted her chin.

“I’m not scared of anything.”

“Oh?” said Nick, and drew the door of the wagon shut behind him.

Lydie took up the challenge and crept down to the foot of her bed, where she sat solemnly regarding Nick. Nick stared back at her, arms folded and eyes bottomless.

Sin stood tense. She could feel Alan standing warm beside her, the baby happy in his arms. She wanted to look at him, but she had other responsibilities: The kids came first, always.

She couldn’t let them down.

If Lydie was scared looking at a demon, if she felt unsafe even for a moment, she had to be able to look around and see that Sin’s eyes were on her, that Sin was there for her.

“Did you guys come here for any particular reason?” Mae asked.

Sin saw the flash of light and movement in Lydie’s eyes. She caught Alan’s shoulder and shoved him down as she dived for Lydie, an instant before the sound of a crash rang out through the Market.

Sin grabbed Lydie and shoved her under the bed.

“Stay down there,” she hissed. “You hear me? Stay down!”

She rose to her feet, drawing both her knives. She glanced toward Alan and saw he’d gone down, Toby cradled against his chest and his gun in his hand. Nick had drawn his sword and opened the door.

Sin looked over at Mae. She had a pocketknife in her hand.

“Let me give you something with reach.”

“No,” Mae told her. “I wouldn’t know how to use a long knife. I have to be able to surprise them.”

“Remind me to teach you how to use a long knife later.”

Sin slipped in front of Mae and followed Nick out the door, the evening-chilled beads hanging in the doorway sliding across her face like frozen teardrops. She waited at the threshold; it was dark, the shapes of wagons gray and all the spaces in between them black. If she knew her people, they were moving quietly through the shadows.

Back in the wagon, she heard Mae speaking in a hushed voice on the phone. Sin felt a flash of exasperation with herself that she hadn’t thought to call the necromancers or the pipers, then stepped off the threshold and did not stop moving. That was crucial when you were moving in the dark: You had to keep moving, like shadows, like light, always watching where you were going but never hesitating.

There was another crash, like a localized windstorm. Sin suspected that it was Ivy and Iris’s wagon. She hoped the sisters had got out.

A man came toward them with his hand raised, palm up, and Nick launched himself at him, magic streaking out before his sword like his sword’s shadow made of light.

Sin stalked the perimeter of the Market, circling the clusters of wagons and pathways in between. If one magician had been wandering alone, there would be others.

There were trees on one side that protected the wagons from wind. Sin used their shadows to hide herself as she moved a little faster.

A twig ran along her face in a slow, deliberate movement, like a skeletal finger tracing a line along her skin.

Sin went very still.

The twig bit into her cheek. Her stomach turned, horror grinding on resolve, and a thin branch lashed out and curled like a whip around her arm. The tree branches rasped together and reached out for her.

The branches lifted her up off her feet. There was a sickening lurch of vertigo at the same time as the twigs stabbed into the small of her back. Wind rushed past her, and dead-leaf whispers crackled in her ears. Sin sheathed one of her knives and drew her legs up to her chest, swinging gently from the grip of those thin branches.

She reached up with her free hand to grab the branch above her, going higher up rather than trying to get down. She lifted herself up a crucial few inches and rolled in midair, onto the branches clawing to reach her.

They formed a shifting web beneath her feet, like a dozen tightropes trying to grab her and pull her down. She sidestepped, leaped, twisted through darkness and landed safe every time.

She could see the magician controlling the tree now, a dark shape down below.

He had his back to her.

He had his back to her because she was captured and helpless, not a threat. Balancing from branch to branch in the night air, Sin found herself wanting to laugh.

She threw a knife instead.

The magician went down with her knife in his back, felled by someone he hadn’t even been paying attention to: someone he’d underestimated.

The branches went still. Sin grabbed the bough above her in both hands and swung herself up, the strain on the muscles of her arms causing a slow, good burn, and then she had her knees up on the branch and her other knife out, crouched and waiting.

Down below she could see the Market spread before her like a picnic. Ivy and Iris’s wagon was the only one destroyed so far. She counted seven magicians: two already dead, three engaged by her people, one by Nick, and one approaching Sin’s wagon.

Sin sheathed her knife and jumped.

She grabbed one branch, then another as she tumbled down, making each one slow her fall without trusting her weight to any of them, and landed in a roll that ended with her on her feet with her knife back in her hand, racing for the wagon.

It wasn’t hit by wind. It exploded into fire.

Sin wasn’t even within ten paces of it when her home burst into an orange ball of flame and wreckage. Her body reacted when her mind refused to do so: She had her arm up shielding her head, fierce heat washing over the exposed skin of her arm, making the material of her shirt billow away from her back. She could smell the ends of her hair burning.

She rolled into a space between two other wagons, dark and cool, leaned her sweaty forehead against her scorched arm, and let a choking noise rip out of her smoke-filled throat.

“Shh,” said a voice beside her.

That brief, simple sound, less than a word, was so harsh and curt that Sin knew who it was, even before she looked up and saw the demon sitting in the dark with her.

The dying glow of the fire lit the white planes and angles of Nick’s face. Shadows moved across him, striping him like a tiger crouching there in the grass. Sin lowered her hand and touched Nick’s sword, lying on the ground between them. The steel was warm and slick with blood.

“They’re dead,” she whispered. Lydie hiding behind her golden hair, Toby who had been one year and nine months and four days old, which nobody in the world but she would remember because she had seen his birth. Her whole heart, lost in an instant of remorseless light.

“Mae’s alive,” Nick said.

For a moment Sin hated him for not remembering his brother first, and then hated herself for thinking of Alan at all.

“Do you think you would just know if she was dead? Why?” she asked, her voice cracking. “Because you’re in love with her?”

Nick stared at her, eyes doorways into the dark.

“I’m a demon,” he said softly. “I don’t even know what that means.”

“Then how?” Sin demanded, and then she understood.

He was a demon. A demon would know if a human was alive if he’d put his mark on her. Which would mean that Nick could tell if Mae was alive, and could tell if she was in danger. He could find her and protect her.

He could kill her, possess her, and control her.

Sin closed her eyes. “Oh, Mae.” Her eyes snapped open. “But she’s alive. So the others…”

Even if Mae was alive, that was no guarantee the others were. Maybe Mae had left the wagon as soon as she’d made her calls.

“I don’t know!” Nick snarled at her.

Sin bowed her head and swallowed. She didn’t know what to do with hope, any more than she had known how to speak of misery.

A shot cracked through the air, not quite like the sound of a bough breaking.

Sin spun, on her feet with joy coursing through her as if there was lightning in her veins, burning and brilliant. It hurt.

“It could be anyone,” she said before it could hurt too much. “Carl has guns.”

She hadn’t heard Nick move, but suddenly he was pushing past her, blade in hand, running toward the sound of the gun. Sin hesitated and then ran after him, through the pathways around the wagons to the other side of the hill. She was pulled up short by the dead body at her feet.

Nick was already kneeling by the body, his hand against its chest. He looked from that dead thing up at Sin, and he smiled a wild smile that made him look handsomer than she’d ever seen him.

“You can’t be sure it was Alan.”

“A shot in the dark, through the heart?” Nick asked. “I’m sure.”

With some people it was a voice they would recognize, with some people a step in the hall. Sin guessed it was fitting that Nick could look at a corpse and see his brother’s skill.

If Alan had got out, surely Toby and Lydie were safe. But she had put Lydie under the bed herself. She had told her, Stay down there.

Nick rose. “Where—”

He was looking at the night beyond them, not the wagons behind them, and Sin knew failing to look both ways wasn’t safe. She glanced around and saw two magicians walking toward them with their hands full of light, ready to hurl.

She launched herself at Nick, tumbling him down into the night-cool grass with hot fire scything through her hair. Nick was breathing hard underneath her, muscles coiled, ready to attack. He didn’t thank her for saving him, just gripped her arm in one hand and his sword in the other.

“If Alan hadn’t asked me to cut my power in half,” he ground out, “in less than half, I could have killed them all.”

And Toby and Lydie would have been safe, Alan would have been safe.

“Why did you give it up?”

“I’m not very bright,” Nick said, and tipped her over into the grass, his body covering hers, pinning her down for a minute. He lifted his free arm, and a bright bolt of magic flew through the air, as if he’d had a knife in his hand when he hadn’t. He grinned down at her in the magic light. “Lucky I’m so pretty.”

Sin shoved Nick off her with a knee against his chest. She rose to her feet, missing her second knife, left in the back of that first magician.

There were two magicians, both men: Nick went for the older-looking one, so Sin went at the younger. He retreated as she rushed at him, and as she drew closer to him and he drew closer to the wagons she saw he was even younger than she’d thought, about her own age. He had dark hair and green eyes with dilated pupils. He looked terrified.

“Listen,” he whispered, low and urgent. “Listen, I don’t want to hurt you.”

Sin smiled her most gorgeous smile at him. “That’s wonderful news! Can you tip your head back just so and expose your jugular?”

The boy magician’s mouth opened. “No! Look, we’ve met.”

“I don’t recall,” Sin snapped. “Maybe it’s the shock of seeing my home set on fire. Perhaps that induced temporary amnesia.”

She slid the tip of her knife up along the boy’s stomach. She felt a twinge of panic at the thought that she might have to kill someone who wasn’t fighting back.

“Sin,” he said. “Where’s Mae? Is she all right?”

A woman’s voice sliced through the air. “What are you doing, Seb?”

“She has a knife,” Seb said quickly, stepping away. He didn’t stay to help either of them, backing into the shadows instead, and Sin made sure to keep watching him out of the corner of her eye even as she turned to face the real threat.

The woman was tall and lean, muscled in a way Sin would like to be one day, when she had more time to work on her routines. She came toward Sin in a series of spare, efficient movements, a sword burning magic in each hand.

“Got a knife, have you?” she asked. “I’m armed myself.”

The reach of those swords was going to be a real problem. Sin looked at her knife, measured her chances, and feinted. When the woman checked herself and looked for a knife that wasn’t coming, Sin threw the knife from a different angle.

The swordswoman was just a hair too fast. She got a sword up to deflect the knife. Sin had thrown hard, and the sword flew from the woman’s hand, but that left her with one weapon and Sin with none.

None that this magician knew about. Sin wasn’t about to tip the woman off about the knife at her ankle.

She waited for a chance to duck and make it look natural, which meant standing there empty-handed as the woman advanced on her.

“Cynthia Davies, I think? My name is Helen,” the woman said. “The Market’s in your hands, in the absence”—her lip curled—“of your leader. Care to surrender it to me?”

“Come and take it,” Sin told her.

Helen ran at her and Sin waited, waited, and threw herself to the ground, curled up in a ball with her hand finally at her ankle as the sword came hurtling down toward her head and—

Stopped.

Sin grasped her knife, and only then looked up.

There was an orange line over her head, drawn on the night sky like a line beneath a sentence. The sword had hit it and stopped.

Helen was staring at a point beyond Sin. Sin followed her line of sight, expecting to see that boy Seb.

Instead she saw her sister. Lydie, running into the fray with both her hands thrown up as if she had a shield in them.

Alan was behind her, limping far more obviously than he usually did, trying to catch up with her. He had Toby in the crook of one arm and his gun trained on Helen. Helen wasn’t looking at him. She had her eyes on Lydie and she was retreating, lowering her sword.

It was the worst possible thing she could have done.

There were a dozen Market people and pipers coming up behind her, Mae and Matthias among them, and all of them saw what Helen was doing.

They saw the magician refuse to fight one of her own kind.

Helen surveyed the new opposition over her shoulder, and then looked back to see Nick appear at Alan’s side. There was fresh blood running down his sword.

“Time to go,” Helen called out.

Matthias’s bow was already strung. He let fly an arrow directly at Helen, who turned with a sweep of her sword and disappeared in a wash of shimmering light, as if she was only the reflection of a woman in a pool and someone had drawn a hand through the water.

The magicians gone, they were left standing and staring at one another. The air was full of smoke and the smell of blood.

“So,” said Phyllis, drawing her dressing gown shut. “There’s a magician among us.”

Matthias had not put his bow away.

Sin backed up, knife in hand, until she bumped up against Lydie, felt Lydie’s small, frantic hands clinging to Sin’s belt loops.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered to Sin. “I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be sorry, baby,” Sin told her, then lifted her voice and spun her knife so that the Market people could not mistake her meaning. “Don’t come any closer.”

“Sin,” said Carl, who was draped with half the weapons from his stall, a broadsword in each hand. “She’s a magician.”

“She’s mine.”

“Think a little, Cynthia,” Carl said, coaxing. “If she can do that at seven, what’ll she do at sixteen when the power really comes in? You know what she’ll do. You know she’ll be one of them.”

Sin saw Mae make a small, angry movement, but there was nothing Mae could say: The whole Goblin Market had seen her brother join the magicians. They always went to their own kind, in the end.

“The issue could be shelved until she is sixteen,” Alan said softly behind Sin. “Now is hardly the time to fight among ourselves.”

“Now is hardly the time for divided loyalties!” Phyllis said, her voice crackling like old wood in a fire. “Iris is dead! We’re not keeping a magician in the nest. It’s not like this is the first time Sin has failed us. She would’ve sacrificed us all for the sake of that baby, last time. It’s not like we don’t have another choice.”

Everyone looked at Mae. Mae lifted her chin, glaring back at them.

“My brother’s a magician too.”

“A lot of us have magicians in the family,” Phyllis said. “And the magicians all left.”

Mae took a deep breath. “I don’t want the leadership like this.”

“But you would step up and take it if you had to,” Phyllis said. “You wouldn’t abandon the Market. That’s what we’re saying. It’s Sin’s duty to send the child away.”

Phyllis had known Sin and Lydie since they were born. Carl too. These were her people, the Market people, closer than an ordinary family, bound together by danger and a common cause.

Sin was amazed by how little that seemed to matter.

She was even more amazed when Matthias the piper, who she had never liked much or trusted for anything but a song at sunset, unstrung his bow with an abrupt motion and said, “Sin’s not abandoning the Market. Throwing ourselves into the arms of a girl we’ve known a couple of months is insane.”

“I have an idea,” Alan said. “If she would agree to leave the girl with magicians—”

“No!” Sin snarled, wheeling on him.

Alan stood with his gun lowered at his side. His eyes were fixed on her, intent and just for a moment, pleading. She knew him well enough by now to know when he was role-playing.