The Demon's Covenant

10

Sin on the Market

They stood at the edge of the cliff looking at each other for some time. Mae still could not quite manage to believe the surprised pleasure in Sin’s eyes.

“I liked your style,” Sin told her. “Most of the tourist girls don’t think much of dancers, and as for dancing themselves …” She snorted, scarlet mouth curling scornfully.

“I can’t dance like you,” said Mae, feeling shy for the first time in her life, like a new girl in school humbly lingering at the fringes of a group and wishing desperately to belong.

“You can be taught,” Sin said confidently. With an arch look back over her shoulder at the assembled watchers, she pushed back her hair and ribbons, letting them spill into the wind. “I’m a good teacher,” she continued, the practical words sounding strange and incongruous in her husky voice. “Are you dancing tonight?”

“I wasn’t planning on it,” Mae said slowly, and then she smiled at Sin. “But maybe I will.”

“I would suggest you decide quickly,” said a voice behind Mae, and she turned around so fast she almost toppled off the cliff.

There, where she would have sworn nobody had been an instant before, was Merris Cromwell, her black dress flaring like raven’s wings as she walked toward them. The leader of the Goblin Market stood with fairy lights playing on her talisman brooch and on the white streaks in her black hair, making them glint like Sin’s silver ribbons.

Her dramatic appearance was a little spoiled by her voice, which was slightly rasping and distinctly sour.

“I remember you,” she told Mae.

Mae swallowed, keenly aware of the last time she’d seen Merris, at the House of Mezentius, which Merris wanted to keep secret from the Goblin Market people at all costs.

Mae smiled a small, careful smile. “It’s nice of you to remember,” she said. “We only met once, but I was really grateful that you let me dance. I was hoping I could do it again.”

Merris tilted her head, regarding Mae with what seemed to be a fraction less distaste and more interest. Mae’s message was obviously received loud and clear.

“I suppose it would do no harm,” she conceded eventually. “You do seem to have the right attitude. Who will you be dancing with, child?”

“Me,” said Sin, the single word warm and certain.

Mae looked into her laughing eyes.

“Um,” she said. “I thought that it had to be a girl and a guy.”

“Not necessarily,” Sin told her, that husky voice seeming about to tip into a laugh at every word. “It usually works best that way, but I think we could manage to tempt a demon or two together. Don’t you?”

The whole Market was humming and shining with magic, its leader had welcomed her, and now Sin of the Market reached out and offered Mae both her hands.

Mae let herself relax at last, almost at home amid all the wonder. She took up Sin’s challenge and touched the tips of the other girl’s fingers, which were outlined by fairy lights.

“I’m not totally convinced,” she said, grinning at Sin’s startled look. “But I’m willing to give it a try. Let’s see what you’ve got.”

Sin threw back her head and laughed. She seemed more real suddenly; less like an ideal and more like someone Mae wanted as a friend.

“Try to keep up with me, tourist,” she said with the laugh still lingering in her voice. She swayed away from the cliff edge, already dancing, and called back over her shoulder, “If you can.”

Mae followed her to a place in Tintagel where there was no stone and only a grassy dip in the ground, like a forest grove—if forests were made of ruins instead of trees. There were dancers in the clearing already cutting circles in the ground with ceremonial knives, drawing the lines of communication and intersection between the worlds.

Mae had always had a knack for graphs and maps. She remembered these symbols.

“Hey, Sin,” she said.

Sin turned. “Yes?”

“Let me cut the circles.”

Sin’s eyebrows were the expressive kind, ones that could indicate surprise when the rest of her face was still. Just now the delicate black arches looked about to take flight off her face.

“Pretty confident, aren’t we?”

“Usually,” said Mae, and Sin reached around to the back of her dress and produced a long knife, which she tossed at Mae. Mae crushed down her instinct to duck away from the huge sharp thing hurtling toward her, and caught it easily enough by the handle.

She knelt down on the ground, the dew on the grass soaking the knees of her jeans, and her blade parted the earth easily, forming shapes and angles. It was like doing math equations or reading music, foreign at first glance but making so much sense in the end, and beginning to come naturally.

Once she was done with her own circle of summoning she did Sin’s, the second circle just touching hers.

Only then did she look up and see Sin’s intent eyes as she returned to Mae, holding a bright, firelike fruit.

“I’m impressed.”

“Thanks,” said Mae, and offered Sin her knife back.

Sin took it in one hand and then, fingers moving deftly, she cut the fever fruit in her other hand into gleaming, tempting slices. The golden juice spilled into her palm, then slid slowly down the inside of her wrist, shining in the faint fairy lights against the tracery of veins.

Mae remembered, with a sudden visceral pang of yearning, how the fruit had tasted. All other food had tasted like ashes in her mouth for days afterward.

“It’s all right,” Sin whispered. She held the fruit up to Mae’s lips and said, “Taste.”

Mae leaned forward, mouth brushing Sin’s fingers, and the fruit burst on her tongue, cool and sweet as a promise of love or adventure.

“And now you’re feeling much better, am I right?” Sin asked, withdrawing with a wink and popping a piece of fruit into her own mouth.

“Can I have some more?” asked Mae, and was startled: That hoarse voice did not sound like hers.

“No,” said Sin. “You ate too much last time. You were all messed up.”

Mae remembered standing with Nick in the shadow of trees, her whole body straining into his.

Sin shook her head as if she could read minds. “Nick always needed more than the rest of us,” she said softly. “Guess now we know why.”

Because he wasn’t human, and he had never cared about Mae.

Sin tucked her knife into the sheath that must have been hidden under the frail white dress, which looked as if it concealed nothing but Sin’s body, and that not terribly well. She smiled as if the weight of a knife against her back pleased her.

“So let’s see if you can really impress me,” she said as the drums began. “Let’s dance.”

The music seemed to be coming out of nowhere until Mae saw the ruined wall. Drummers were hidden there like an orchestra concealed in a pit; other people were playing the guitar and the flute, all the instruments coming together in a strange blend of harmonies. There were three people in front, and they were all singing different songs. One was about Tintagel, and one about the Goblin Market—the chorus was “Come buy!”—and the last was singing a stream of nonsense words Mae didn’t even understand.

“Taw, Cenio, Tamar,” sang the woman’s voice, climbing high, as Sin took Mae’s hands in hers.

Mae expected them to be soft, but the long fingers were calloused and strong. She led Mae into the summoning circles, touching but separate, their hands joined over the place where their circles met.

Mae felt the difference as soon as she entered the circle; the ground beneath her feet changed somehow, as if the lines she had cut in the earth were charged with electricity and she had to balance along a humming live wire. The singing was louder now. Mae wasn’t able to make out any of the words. It had all become a delirious rush of noise that mingled with the sound of the sea.

Sin winked at her again and let go of her hands.

“I call on the shadow in the forest who lures travelers to die far from home,” she said, her voice chiming with all the other sounds, imploring and sweet, as if she was begging her lover back to bed. “I call on the dream that turns people from real love and warm skin. I call on she who drinks blood and rises from the ashes. I call on Liannan!”

As Sin spoke, she began to dance, and the lines within the circles began to move, blurring like the spokes on bicycle wheels, and Mae had to move with them. The blurred lines shone beneath her, and she felt as if she had gone dancing on the web of ropes after all, dancing balanced above a dark abyss, just a stumble away from cold, screaming destruction.

Hair lifting in the night wind, Mae grinned.

Sin was spinning in the corner of her eye, a blur of white silk and white fire, better than Mae could ever be, but that was all right. Nick had been better too. Seeing someone do something so well was not only beautiful to watch, it was exhilarating and inspiring. It was a challenge.

The lines between the demon world and the human spun so fast that they seemed to disappear, turned into a shimmering haze like a veil between the worlds. A veil that could be torn. The circle seemed almost to tip into the cold abyss below, like a trapdoor turning beneath Mae’s feet. The singing sounded almost like a distress cry, tense hush had fallen on the audience, and Mae could hear her own and Sin’s harsh breathing forming a rhythm together.

Mae put her hands up over her head the way Sin had on the cliff edge, added a hip sway just for fun, and danced.

The dance came to a natural conclusion, like a fight or a piece of music, the drums slowing as the pulses in her own body slowed. She stood panting and thinking that she’d loved doing it, that she loved the whole Market, and she knew no way to keep any of this.

She’d almost forgotten the reason for the entire dangerous and overwhelming dance when she saw the demon emerging from the point where their circles touched and blazed fire.

The demon woman rose wrapped in magic, like a dark goddess wrapped in a shimmering cloud.

Then magic slid away as if it was really a wrap, pooling and glowing around the demon’s—Liannan’s—feet. She looked like she was standing in a cloud bank.

Mae had never seen a demon who appeared as a woman before.

She didn’t look much like the demon Mae and Nick had summoned last time. Mae had seen Anzu twice, and both times he had been a dark presence, golden beauty under a shadow of rage and wings and claws.

Liannan was soft and shining and lovely, her red hair drifting around her as if it was a second cloud, dyed fiery shades by a sunset nobody else could see. Her eyes gleamed, crystal-colored but full of secrets, like glass balls waiting to tell Mae’s fortune.

The talisman around Mae’s neck hummed and stung like a bee trapped under her shirt. That was when Mae noticed that Liannan’s skin was white not in the way human skin was white, but in the way paper or china was white, too smooth and too blank. The shine of her eyes and the crimson glow of her hair suddenly seemed like the bright flowers poisonous plants grew to lure their prey.

“It’s the beautiful dancer again,” said Liannan. “And you brought a little friend.”

Mae felt disoriented for a moment after she spoke, and then realized why: Mae was used to hearing people use tones when they spoke, use real voices. But Liannan wasn’t talking to Mae, not really. The magic was. The lines of communication in the circle were simply letting Mae know what the demon meant.

All demons were silent, except one.

“I’m not that little,” Mae snapped, and then realized she possibly shouldn’t be talking back to a demon.

Liannan’s eyes swung to her. She smiled slightly, her mouth a vivid red slash in her white face, like blood on snow.

“If you’re not happy with your body,” she said, tracing the outline of Mae’s shape in the night air, “I’ll take it off your hands.”

Her fingers made a sound like Nick’s sword did when he swung it, and after an instant in which Mae could not quite process what she was seeing, she recognized why: Liannan’s fingers were icicles, catching the fairy lights and reflecting them back in a dozen brilliant colors, sharp as blades.

“Think I’ll hold on to it for a while,” she said, a little breathless. Unexpectedly Liannan was reminding her not of Anzu but of Nick: Holding his gaze sometimes felt like this, as if you could hold time while your heart ran a race. “Thanks.”

Liannan smiled. “Pity.”

She lowered her bright sharp hand to her side.

“Liannan,” said Sin, her voice snapping the demon’s head around as if it was a whip around her neck, “I have some questions for you.”

Mae was startled by the change in Sin’s tone, and then she met Sin’s dark eyes through the shining cloud of Liannan’s hair. Sin’s eyes bored into hers, her gaze heavy with a significant and deliberate weight, and then she gave a tiny shake to her head, and Mae understood.

Sin was deliberately distracting Liannan. She was protecting Mae.

It made Mae wonder how many of her dance partners Sin had seen taken by demons.

“Ask,” Liannan commanded.

It dawned on Mae, with a dawning that felt more like an eclipse, something dark and terrible blotting out all she knew, that she was linked to Liannan by the lines of the summoning circle as if the lines were puppet strings.

She’d been aware of Anzu’s rage, but that had been obvious as a battering ram or a storm, and directed at Nick. Liannan’s thoughts were insidious, like a cold draft seeping in under the door of Mae’s soul.

If Mae could analyze them the same way she could analyze problems, if she could work her out, perhaps she could work Nick out and help him to act human.

Liannan looked over her shoulder at Mae, eyes narrowed into chips of ice, and Mae knew suddenly that the demon could feel a little of what Mae was feeling. Liannan’s glance was sharp and cold as a frost-bound twig raking Mae’s face, searching, and the dark rush of Liannan’s thoughts rolled through Mae’s heart like alien and strange thunderclouds in a familiar sky.

The move forward of the petitioners outside the circle attracted the demon’s attention as well as Mae’s. It was a man and a woman, both looking terrified and somehow closed-off at the same time, as if they had shut down half their minds so they could cope with the spectacle of magic and demons.

“Jenny Taylor’s daughter ran away from home three years ago. She wants to know if she is alive,” Sin said. “Is she?”

“Your information is incorrect,” Liannan answered.

For a moment Mae thought that was all she was going to say. Then Liannan’s eyes slid from the woman’s face to the man’s.

“Your daughter never left you,” she said. “Your husband buried her out under the apple trees you planted when she was born.”

The woman’s eyes met Liannan’s then. She looked like a victim caught in a riptide, stunned and cold.

Liannan laughed. “Think it over,” she said. “And when you decide you want revenge, call on my name. I’ll creep inside him and make him so very, very sorry… .”

The man by the woman’s side turned and ran. The Market’s knife seller leaped at him as he went by and brought him down in a wailing, struggling heap to the ground.

Merris Cromwell strode out of the night and drew that poor woman away. Mae squinted and tried to make out their dim gray shapes, fading into the night, and saw the woman’s hands cupped over Merris’s, and then Merris sliding her hand into her pocket.

She was paying Merris for that news, for her daughter under the apple trees.

Mae let one breath come out ragged and hurt, then turned her face away. This was a business.

Sin was looking at Liannan already.

“Enjoyed that?” she asked. The words had a bite to them.

Liannan swayed closer to Sin. “Oh, I did. And that’s your second question, Cynthia Davies, daughter of Stella. Hope you didn’t have any more.”

Sin’s mouth went tight and straight, like a line drawn abruptly under a last sentence so more unwise words could not come spilling out.

“I didn’t.”

Liannan looked at her, demon’s eyes lit in strange ways by the stars and the pale lights shimmering off the sea.

“Four thousand years ago there were girls dancing in Mohenjo-daro under torchlight, as beautiful as you are now,” she whispered. “I remember Grecian girls who danced the Ierakio for their goddess at festivals, who moved just the way you move for me. I saw them fall. You’ll fall too.”

Sin raised an eyebrow. “Not today.”

“Oh,” said Liannan, “I can wait.”

She turned whip-fast toward Mae, hair trailing her like a comet’s tail as she moved and then settling, glorious, around her white shoulders.

“What about you?”

Mae folded her arms. “What about me?”

“You want something,” Liannan said. “I can tell.”

“I could use some information,” Mae admitted slowly.

“Oh, you want so much more than that.”

“Your prices are too high,” said Mae. “You’re like a loan shark. Only desperate people go to you for help. And I’m not desperate—I can help myself, given the right tools. I don’t want anything but information from you.”

Liannan tilted back her head and laughed so Mae could see her rows on rows of pointed teeth, small and white as sharpened pearls.

“You were born for the Market, weren’t you?” she asked. “The dance gets you two questions, and the beautiful dancer used them up. So tell me, haggler for the truth, what else do you have to give?”

“What else do you want?” Mae returned. “Besides the obvious.”

Liannan tilted her head, considering.

“I want a kiss.”

Mae blinked at her. “A—a kiss?”

Liannan stood watching her, silent, as if she felt an echo deserved no reply. She was still smiling a little, razor-sharp teeth indenting her lower lip. Mae was suddenly very aware of the demon’s mouth, red and lush with the promise of ripe fruit. She thought again of poisonous plants.

“A kiss?” Sin echoed from behind Liannan, easy and beguiling. “I have a certain amount of expertise on the subject.”

“No,” Mae said quickly. She appreciated the gesture, but she didn’t want to be rescued from anything she could handle herself. “You can have your kiss. I’ll do it.”

She reached out, her hand trembling, magic lights and darkness flickering around her fingers.

Liannan laughed, and Mae felt it like a knife running along her spine.

“I’ll keep you both in mind for later. But I don’t believe I mentioned who I wanted the kiss from.”

“Ah,” said Mae, feeling both saved and at the same time, terribly embarrassed. “Right.”

Liannan turned away from them.

“I’ve always wanted to do this,” she remarked. “Summon one of you. Make you see what it’s like. I call on the one the Goblin Market calls a traitor. I call on the liar, the demon lover, the murderer. I call on Alan Ryves!”

Alan stepped out of the shadows of ruins and into the moonlight, limping across the night-gray grass to the circles where magic fires were blazing. There was a sudden hiss rising all around the Market, like a nest of snakes waking and uncoiling, ready to strike.

The demon smiled and beckoned Alan on.

“I do hope you won’t think I was being too harsh,” Liannan murmured.

“No,” said Alan. “It was just the truth.”

“It always is,” Liannan told him. “And people always hate hearing it.”

She was standing at the very edge of the place where the circles joined, magic glowing palely at her feet. Alan stopped about an inch away from her, still standing on shadowed grass.

“Come,” Liannan coaxed. “This little girl promised me a kiss, and you know what happens to her if she can’t keep her promise.”

The threat was clear and the thought—possession—like a blow to the stomach, but even though Mae felt sick and winded, she didn’t feel afraid. Alan wouldn’t let it happen. Not in a thousand years.

She opened her mouth, trying to think of some way to phrase, Sorry, I know saucy demon action wasn’t what you had in mind for tonight, but Alan looked at her and smiled with his ridiculous amount of charm.

“It’s all right, Mae,” he said. “It’s all right, Liannan,” he added in the same warm voice. “I don’t mind.”

“And what if the Market folk stone you to death?” Liannan asked. “Will you mind then?”

“I probably will mind that, yes,” said Alan, as calm as she was.

Liannan shrugged, a loose, sinuous movement. “Men have died for less than a kiss from me before now. What do you desire, Alan Ryves?”

They were watching each other. Mae was surprised at how disturbed she felt by the sight of them, both so clearly fascinated.

“Safe passage.”

“Nobody’s ever safe,” Liannan said. “But you will come to no harm from me tonight. Now take it off.”

Alan put one hand up to his shirt collar and flicked open a couple of buttons, then drew out his talisman, crystals catching magic light in a brief moment of beauty. He reached into the circle and placed his talisman in Mae’s outstretched hand, the knotted leather the talisman hung from coiled neatly under it, Alan’s only protection gone.

He closed her fingers over the talisman with his own. Its warning glow was hidden from sight.

Alan stepped into the demon’s place where the circles overlapped and two worlds collided, where Liannan stood waiting for him.

He stood looking down at her. He wasn’t trembling as Mae had been. He looked across his breakfast table at a demon every morning, Mae thought. It made a strange kind of sense that he wasn’t afraid.

Liannan reached out and ran her icicle fingers down Alan’s cheek, light but still drawing blood at the first touch. A bead of blood welled up and then ran down his face to follow her hand, tracing down Alan’s throat to the exposed hollow where his talisman should have rested.

“I have a memory of you,” Liannan said slowly.

“Yes?” Alan asked. “Well, have another.”

Alan reached out and touched the demon creature, beautiful hands gentle on her jaw, tilting her head up a little. He kissed her, light as a shiver in a sudden cold breeze, and then not so lightly.

Liannan’s red hair curled around Alan’s shoulders like bloody tendrils, seeking, trying to wrap around him and bring him closer even as she sighed and melted against the hard line of his body. The air was electric and crackling with magic, the whispers of the demon world too close. Alan curled his fingers around the demon’s neck and pulled her closer.

Then he let her go. They stood in the electric air with eyes locked instead of mouths.

“What price would I have to pay,” Liannan whispered, “for you to let me out?”

“If I loved you,” Alan said, “I’d do it for free.”

“And what does it take to make you love someone?”

Alan smiled then, a small, rueful smile. “I don’t know,” he said. “Nobody’s ever tried.”

Liannan’s hunger reached out with cold tendrils and went all the way through Mae, as if the demon had touched her and pierced her skin, as if it was Mae’s blood on the ice of Liannan’s hands.

“So here’s my question,” Mae said in a calm, clear voice. “Gerald of the Obsidian Circle has invented a new mark for magicians. Tell me about it.”

That didn’t just get Liannan’s attention. The crowd that had been staring, hostile, at Alan and the demon shifted suddenly. A ripple of unease went through them as they absorbed the words “Obsidian Circle,” and remembered who the real enemies were.

That was just a bonus. What Mae really wanted she got as well. Liannan turned away from Alan and fixed her eyes on Mae.

“You want answers about the mark?”

“That’s what I said.”

Liannan smiled at Mae. It was the kind of smile that said, All the better to eat you with. “Then you’ll find the answer on the body of a boy you know quite well.”

Mae stared for a moment, outraged. “That’s not an answer!”

“Oh, it’s an answer,” Liannan said. “And it’s true. Nothing else is required. How useful the answer is to you is your problem. After all, what I took was not all that useful to me.”

“I think I’m slightly insulted,” said Alan, sounding amused.

Liannan laughed. “I was right about you,” she said to Mae.

“What about me?”

Liannan reached out with both hands, as if she wanted to touch Mae’s face, icicles coming right at Mae’s eyes. She felt a rush of sheer horror—Liannan could stab them right out in less than a second, blotting out sight in pain and blood—and flinched back.

“I knew you couldn’t be useful,” the demon told her. “But I thought you might be entertaining.”

She slid those ice-colored eyes from Mae to Alan, and then surveyed the whole Goblin Market at her leisure, like an adult surveying children and their array of silly toys.

“We have no more need of your services, Liannan,” said Sin. “And no need of the mischief you cause, ever.”

The balefire Liannan was enveloped in started to shrink, magic diminishing at Sin’s dismissal. Mae felt Liannan’s hatred pressing down on her chest, heavy and deadly.

Liannan just smiled, beautiful and serene. She put her bloodstained icy knives to her mouth and blew Alan a kiss from their razor-sharp tips. Alan mimed catching it, mouth quirking, and he had to be aware of how this looked to the Market people. Liannan certainly was, going down in flames with that smile on her face.

The circles were dim and still. Alan’s hair turned from gold to blood as the lights went out.

“Are you dancers or what?” Sin asked the bright girls and boys in black clustered around them. She clapped her hands and they ran to their own circles, and the tourists trailed after them, eager for a new show. A few other tourists wandered away to the stalls, and that meant a few Market people had to leave to serve their customers.

Mae let out a held breath in a deep and thankful sigh. She wanted to call it back when Sin followed up her words by coming at Alan like a bolt of lightning in her white dress.

“How dare you come here?”

“Cynthia,” said Alan, his voice far sharper than when he was talking to demons, and Mae remembered what she’d somehow forgotten, since Alan seemed to get on so well with most people: that these two did not like each other.

“Traitor,” Sin said distinctly, in such a white-hot rage that she had to enunciate every word, condemn him with all the clarity she possessed. “Never come back. You are not welcome.”

She spat into his face. Alan just stood there, pale and still. Sin cast him one more burning look and then ran as if she could not bear to be close to Alan for a second longer. Mae started furiously after her.

Alan’s hand flew out and grasped her wrist, his fingers clamping down hard.

“Don’t, Mae,” he said quietly. “Her mother was a dancer who slipped up and got possessed last year. She has every right to hate the demons. And me.”

“Oh,” said Mae.

“Oh,” Alan echoed, sounding tired. He let go of her wrist. “You should go after her,” he said. “She could probably use a friend. Don’t worry about me. Sin’s their future leader and she’s banished me, so nobody else will try anything. I’ll go wait for you in the car.”

Mae looked around at the Goblin Market people, who were still glancing at Alan with eyes glittering under the fairy lights. She stepped in close to him and felt shielded suddenly from wind she had barely noticed before; she always forgot unassuming Alan was so tall. She reached up and clasped her hands around his warm neck, tying together the two ends of the cord on which his talisman hung. She felt his breath stutter against her cheek as her fingers slid along the back of his neck.

She had honestly meant it to be a simple gesture of comfort.

“I’m on your side,” she whispered, and drew back.

“I know,” said Alan, and walked away so she wouldn’t be leaving him in a crowd of enemies. She watched him go, disappearing in plain sight, not making for any ruins or shadows, just fading unobtrusively into the night as he walked with his head down.

She went to find Sin, following in the direction she’d run.

Five minutes later she was stumbling blind down a hill, convinced she’d got turned around at some point and was about to plunge off a cliff, when she lost her footing and fell into what seemed in the moonlight—which was not very much light at all—to be a grassy shelf in the hills where there were wagons.

Mae had never seen real wagons before, not wagons, with high wheels and wooden trim painted red. There was a painted sign on the front of one wagon, with chimes hanging in front of it in the shapes of ballerinas and knives and masks. Mae felt as if a wizened fortune-teller was about to pop her graying head out of the billowing red curtains and demand whether she wanted to dream of her true love tonight.

Sin’s shining head emerged from the curtains instead, hair free of her ribbons and tumbling dark against the vivid material.

“Mae,” she said, and smiled. “Great. Come on in.”

“I can’t,” Mae said. “I came here—I came here with Alan Ryves.”

Sin’s face, lit by sparkling eyes and cherry lips, seemed to shut down, tucking laughter and color away. It made her look quite different.

“My brother had a third-tier demon’s mark,” Mae continued. “Alan took the mark to save him. My brother’s alive because of Alan. If people are taking sides, I’m on Alan’s side every time. I owe him that. So now ask me again to come in. Or don’t.”

Sin’s brown hands grasped at the curtains.

“For your brother,” she said eventually. “I can understand that.” She grinned again, all bright resolve. “Come in.”

Mae grinned back. “Okay.”

Inside the Davies’ wagon was small as expected, and bright in the way Mae would have expected the place where Sin lived to be. She climbed in the door and imagined how someone taller would have banged their head doing it, thankful for once that she was ridiculously short. There wasn’t much in the wagon: a tiny red-covered table with a crystal ball on it, a pile of schoolbooks, a fox’s skull. Three beds took up most of the space, jammed up against each other but with an attempt made to distinguish them: one was a crib rather than a bed and had a blue blanket with teddy bears on it, one was red with black fans stitched on the coverlet, moving gently as if they were being plied by invisible ladies, and one was black with skulls and crossbones.

“My baby sister Lydie loves pirates,” Sin said. “Don’t ask me why. Bedtime stories are about walking the plank all the time. Toby gets nightmares.”

Toby. He’s always escaping from his crib and making his sister worry herself sick.

“I think I met your baby brother earlier tonight,” said Mae.

There was a tightness suddenly to Sin’s smooth brow. “Was he with Trish? She’s meant to look after the kids on Market nights, but he’s always getting away.”

“Alan took him back to Trish,” Mae told her, using Alan’s name deliberately.

Sin made a face. “You’re not going out with him, are you?” she asked, going over to the copper basin on her chest of drawers. There rose petals floating in the water inside. “Because leaving aside the traitor issue, you could still do so much better.”

Mae sat down on the bed with the red duvet and watched as Sin twisted her dark hair up in a knot and splashed her face with the rose-petal water.

“There’s nothing wrong with Alan,” Mae said to her back.

“Well,” said Sin, laughing in a slightly brittle way as she reached for a towel, as if she was trying to make the whole conversation and her own heart lighter by sheer force of will. “He’s not exactly the kind of guy who makes a girl’s heart start racing. I’d be surprised if he could urge anyone’s heart past a gentle jog.”

She laughed again, and Mae reminded herself that Sin was walking a bright, fragile bridge over the cold horror of what had happened to her mother.

Sin glanced over her shoulder at Mae, and Mae blinked. Without her makeup, especially the vivid lipstick, Sin looked quite different. She was still beautiful if you looked at her properly, but it was suddenly possible to overlook her. Her whole demeanor had changed, as if the makeup was a mask that carried a role with it.

“Maybe Alan’s a chameleon,” said Mae. “Like you.”

Sin’s arched eyebrows arched farther, like swallow’s wings in a painting.

“Oh, you’ve noticed that, have you?”

“I’m a quick study.”

“I can see,” said Sin, and spun away from her dresser, ribbons flaring.

She grabbed at the red shawl covering the table and whipped it off with easy grace, the crystal ball on the table not even moving. She flourished the shawl, and it described a red arc and landed on her hair as she leaped onto the bed beside Mae.

“Tell your fortune?”

“You’re a gypsy fortune-teller?” Mae asked.

“No,” said Sin. “But my exotic beauty does make people think so.” She smiled a flashing smile, strong brown legs hooked over Mae’s jeaned lap, as if her beauty was a joke. “Because, you know, dark-skinned girl telling fortunes, what else could I be?”

Sin’s mouth twisted, and Mae searched for something to say that definitely wouldn’t be racist.

The way Sin’s grin turned wicked indicated that she knew exactly what Mae was thinking.

“My dad’s family was from the Caribbean originally. My mother was Welsh, and she told fortunes. So,” Sin said, “let me read the secret of your heart’s desire.”

“No secret,” said Mae, twitching the shawl aside so it fell. “I want …”

To be like you, she would have said before today, but now Sin was a person and not an ideal to aspire to. She had all these problems Mae did not know if she could have dealt with; she had a life that had shaped her into something very different from Mae.

She didn’t want to be Sin, but there was still something about her that drew Mae close, something about the whole Goblin Market. She felt like a moth diving for a succession of jetting flames. She didn’t think she’d be burned if she learned how to dance around them.

“I want to belong here,” she said finally.

Sin unhooked her legs from over Mae’s, leaping to her feet, and went over to her chest of drawers. She took the crown of red flowers she’d pulled from her hair and drew two blossoms from it.

“I thought you’d say that.” She crossed the floor and looked down at Mae, dark eyes steady and serious for once. She took one of Mae’s hands and laid the blossoms in it. “Cross your palm with scarlet,” she said, and smiled. “I’ll let you know where the next Market is being held. And if anyone questions you, show them these.”

“Two flowers means an invitation?”

“Two flowers is an invitation to the Market. One flower’s an invitation to something else.” Sin smiled. “Three flowers, I tell people it means an invitation, and it means I want them killed on sight.”

Mae nodded slowly. “Thanks.”

Sin shrugged. “I love the Market. If you come ready to love the Market too, then I’m your friend.”

“Then you’re my friend,” said Mae, and rose. “I have to go meet Alan now. He’s my friend too.”

“Fine,” Sin said. “I was going to shoo you out anyway. I have a guy coming over.”

“Oh, really,” said Mae, and it was suddenly like talking to Rachel and Erica at school, laughing over lunch about who fancied who. “Someone special?”

At least somebody was getting a little fun from the effects of the fever fruit.

Sin elbowed her. “Oh, he’s something else. Come back to the Market next month, and I’ll tell you all about it.”

Mae backed away, already missing the Market. Alan was waiting, though.

She put her hand on the door and looked back at Sin, who was sitting on the bed doing her makeup fresh. The new lipstick she was applying, smoothly and expertly without a mirror, was a rich, dark red. This was red for something besides attracting a glance. This was a red to linger over.

“I can’t wait to come back,” Mae told her.

Sin smiled at her, slow and deliberate, becoming yet another person.

“I’ll save you a dance.”

The only way Mae knew back to the car was to go through the Goblin Market again. She had promised herself she would not delay, but it was hard walking through all the shadows and the spotlights, hard not to obey the cries of “Come buy!”

She did not stop at any stall. She might have looked around just a little.

There was a stall full of different-colored and labeled lamps. One looked like an old-fashioned lantern, black iron bisecting the light into four steady beams, and had the words BEACON LAMP written on its label. Another was rose pink and tiny, like a rosebud that glowed; it was labeled LIGHT OF LOVE.

“Gives off just enough light to see love by,” the stall owner called out to Mae. “If you can see love in this light, you know it’s true!”

Mae laughed and walked on, promising herself she would stop at that stall next time. She couldn’t allow herself to stop now.

Then she stopped.

There in the busy throng of people buying and selling, dancing and laughing, she saw Sin’s little brother Toby.

Gerald was here, in the very heart of the market, holding the child in his arms.

She strode over to him, her heart pounding too hard in her chest. “Do you want me to tell everyone who you really are?” she demanded as she drew closer. “Then I could have the pleasure of watching you being torn limb from limb.”

He whirled and started as he recognized her. He didn’t draw back from her as she stepped in, though.

“You do seem to turn up a lot, don’t you?” Gerald said.

“I could say the same about you.”

They stood together in one of the spaces of shadow in the Market, just another young tourist couple. Gerald could freeze her right now, hold her trapped in the air like a dragonfly in amber, and maybe nobody would notice.

Mae reached out over the tiny distance that separated them.

“Give me that child,” she said, and tried to make it sound commanding.

She snagged her fingers on the front of Toby’s little shirt, curling around the material, and then slid an arm around the child, even though that meant having her arm trapped against Gerald’s chest.

He did not let go of Toby. Mae looked down at his arm and saw a shadowy mark on the inside of his wrist, but before she could make out the mark Gerald smiled, and his sleeve slithered down past his wrist as if it was alive.

He spoke, and she felt the vibration of his low voice starting in his chest, then soft in her ear. “He was wandering around alone and I picked him up. I don’t wish any harm on a child. And I don’t wish any harm on you. You’re Jamie’s sister.”

“How very reassuring,” Mae bit out. “I know who the child belongs to. Give him to me.”

“If I do,” Gerald said, “you won’t go making any rash announcements to the Market?”

“He is a baby!” Mae hissed. “Not a bargaining chip.”

Gerald was silent. Mae looked away from his face, thoughtful and pitiless in the half-light, and into Toby’s. Toby seemed happy enough caught between them, big eyes staring back at Mae, mouth forming a loose and wondering O.

“Okay,” Gerald said finally, and pushed Toby into her arms.

He was unexpectedly heavy, and she had to shift him awkwardly around to get him at any sort of reasonable angle. Gerald backed away.

“I have somewhere to be, anyway,” he said, uncomfortable as she’d never seen him before, as if displaying mercy was an unforgivable breach of good manners and all he could do was get away and pretend it had never happened.

Then he was gone. She was fairly sure he’d used magic to do it: Nobody really disappeared like that, swallowed up by the air as if it was dark water.

Nobody else seemed to have noticed.

“Necklace, lovely lady?” asked an Asian guy with a grin like a skull and twinkling dark eyes. “Necklace for the pretty baby?”

He looped a necklace over Toby’s head with swift, clever hands, clicking his fingers as he did so.

“Are those bones?”

“Finest bones, lady,” said the man with a hint of reproach. “Rat for brains, bird for song, fox for cunning and—just between you and me—a little human bone to bind the spell.”

“You’re just like a fairy godmother of death,” Mae snapped. “Do you know where I can find Trish? She’s meant to be looking after Toby.”

“Oh,” the man said, his face changing. “Sorry, lady, didn’t know you were one of the Market people. I’m pied, you see.”

“You’re pie?”

He smiled. “Not Market, then. I’m a pied piper. We make the music for the Market, but we’re not Market people ourselves: We use magic. I can start a tune and make children, animals, or pretty young things follow me anywhere.”

Mae grabbed the two blossoms from her pocket and waved them under his nose. “That must be a useful skill. Where’s Trish?”

The piper grinned. “Didn’t mean anything by it,” he said. “Honestly, you’re not my type. And I haven’t seen Trish.”

Toby blew a bubble of saliva into Mae’s ear. “Great.”

The pied piper smiled mockingly at her pain and moved on.

Mae came to a decision. Sin was busy with a guy, but surely she could go knock on the door and Sin could tell her what to do with the kid. Sin didn’t seem the type to be easily embarrassed, and Alan had been waiting long enough.

She marched back in the direction from which she’d come, walking a good deal more carefully with Toby in her arms. Even so, she almost stumbled four times going downhill, and clutched at the baby too tight in panic. He made small crowing sounds whenever she did that. Either she was being mocked by a two-year-old or he was going to grow up to be a fan of danger sports.

Mae put one foot in front of the other, walking blind and burdened, and reached the shadowy gathering of wagons just in time to see Gerald knock on the door of Sin’s red wagon and be let in.