With Fate Conspire

^{PART ONE} February–May 1884

Given enough time, anything can become familiar enough to be ignored.

Even pain.

The searing nails driven through her flesh ache as they always have, but those aches are known, enumerated, incorporated into her world. If her body is stretched upon a rack, muscles and sinews torn and ragged from the strain, at least no one has stretched it further of late. This is familiar. She can disregard it.

But the unfamiliar, the unpredictable, disrupts that disregard. This new pain is irregular and intense, not the steady torment of before. It is a knife driven into her shoulder, a sudden agony stabbing through her again. And again. And again.

Creeping ever closer to her heart.

Each new thrust awakens all the other pains, every bleeding nerve she had learned to accept. Nothing can be ignored, then. All she can do is endure. And this she does because she has no choice; she has bound herself to this agony, with chains that cannot be broken by any force short of death.

Or, perhaps, salvation.

Like a patient cast down by disease, she waits, and in her lucid moments she prays for a cure. No physician exists who can treat this sickness, but perhaps—if she endures long enough—someone will teach himself that science, and save her from this terrible death by degrees.

So she hopes, and has hoped for longer than she can recall. But each thrust brings the knife that much closer to her heart.

One way or another, she will not have to endure much more.

The monster city seethed with life. Its streets, like arteries both great and small, pulsed with the flow of traffic: hackneys and private carriages, omnibuses bursting with riders inside and out, horse trams rattling past on their iron rails. People on foot, on horseback, on the improbable wheels of bicycles. On the river, ships: forests of masts and steam funnels, skiffs hauling cargo to and fro, ferries spilling passengers onto piers that thrust out from the stinking foreshore. Trains thundered in from the suburbs and back out again, the population rising and falling, as if the city breathed.

The air that filled its lungs was humanity, of countless different kinds. The high and the low, glittering with diamonds or the tears of despair, speaking dozens of languages in hundreds of accents, living cheek by jowl, above and below and beside one another, but occupying entirely different worlds. The city encompassed them all: living and dying, they formed part of the great organism, which daily threatened to strangle on its simultaneous growth and rot.

This was London, in all its filth and glory. Nostalgic for the past, while yearning to cast off the chains of bygone ages and step forward into the bright utopia of the future. Proud of its achievements, yet despising its own flaws. A monster in both size and nature, that would consume the unwary and spit them out again, in forms unrecognizable and undreamt.

London, the monster city.

The City of London: February 26, 1884

“Hot buns! A farthing apiece, warm you on a cold morning! Will you buy a bun, sir?”

The cry rose into the air and was lost among others, like one bird in a flock. A burst of steam from the open cut alongside Farringdon Road heralded the arrival of a subterranean train; a minute later, the station above disgorged a mass of men, joining those carried into the City by the power of their own feet. They shuffled along Snow Hill and up onto Holborn Viaduct, yawning and sleepy, their numbers sufficient to stop carriages and omnibuses when they flooded across the street crossings.

A costerwoman’s voice had to be strong, to make itself heard above the voices and footsteps and the church bells ringing seven o’clock. Filling her lungs, Eliza bellowed again, “Hot buns! Hot from the oven! Only a farthing apiece!”

One fellow paused, dug in his pocket, handed over a penny. The four buns Eliza gave in exchange had been hot when she collected her load an hour ago; only the close-packed mass of their fellows had preserved any heat since then. But these were the clerks, the ink-stained men who slaved away in the City’s halls of business for long hours and little pay; they wouldn’t quibble over the truth of her advertising. By the time their wealthier betters came in to work, three hours or so from now, she would have sold her stock and filled her barrow with something else.

If all went well. Good days were the ones where she traced the streets again and again, with new wares every round: laces for boots and stays, lucifers, even larks one time. Bad days saw her peddling cold, stale buns at sundown, with no comfort save the surety that at least she would have something to eat that night. And sometimes a doss-house keeper could be persuaded to take a few as payment, in exchange for a spot on his bench.

Today was beginning well; even a bun of only moderate warmth was a pleasant touch on a cold morning like this one. But chill weather made men sullen in the afternoon and evening, turning up their collars and shoving their hands into pockets, thinking only of the train or omnibus or long walk that would take them home. Eliza knew better than to assume her luck would hold.

By the time she reached Cheapside, following the crowds of men on their way to the countinghouses, the press in the streets was thinning; those still out were hurrying, for fear their pay would be docked for lateness. Eliza counted her coins, stuck an experimental finger among the remaining buns, and decided they were cold enough that she could spare one for herself. And Tom Granger was always willing to let her sit a while with him.

She retraced her steps to the corner of Ivy Lane, where Tom was halfheartedly waving copies of The Times at passersby. “You’ll never sell them with that lazy hand,” Eliza said, stopping her barrow alongside.

His grin was as crooked as his front teeeth. “Wait ’til tomorrow. Bill says we’ll ’ave exciting news then.”

“Oh?” Eliza offered him a bun, which he accepted. “Scandal, is it?”

“Better. There’s been another bombing.”

She had just taken a large bite; it caught in her throat, and for a moment she feared she would choke. Then it slid down, and she hoped that if Tom saw her distress, he’d chalk it up to that. “Where?”

Tom had already crammed half the bun in his own mouth. His answer was completely unintelligible; she had to wait while he chewed enough to swallow. “Victoria Station,” he said, once he could speak more clearly. “Right early this morning. Blew the booking office and all ’alfway to the moon. Nobody ’urt, though—pity. We sells more papers when there’s dead people.”

“Who did it?”

He shrugged, then turned away to sell a paper to a man in a carpenter’s flannel coat. That done, he said, “Harry thinks it was a gas pipe what blew, but I reckon it’s the Fenians again.” He spat onto the cobblestones. “Fucking micks. They sells papers, I’ll give ’em that, but ’em and their bleeding bombs, eh?”

“Them and their bleeding bombs,” Eliza echoed, staring at the remnants of her bun as if it needed her attention. She had lost all appetite, but forced herself to finish anyway. I missed it. While I slept tied to a bench, he was here, and I missed my chance.

Tom rattled on about the Irish, allowing as how they were devilish strong buggers and good at hard labor, but one paddy had come up the other day, bold as you please, and tried to get papers to sell. “Me and Bill ran ’im off right quick,” Tom said.

Eliza didn’t share his satisfaction in the slightest. While Tom spoke, her gaze raked the street, as if frantic effort now could make up for her failure. Too late, and you know it. What would you have done anyway, if you’d been here last night? Followed him again? Much good that did last time. But you missed your chance to do better. It took her by surprise when Tom left off his tirade and said, “Three months, it’s been, and I still don’t get you.”

She hoped her stare was not as obviously startled as it felt. “What do you mean?”

Tom gestured at her, seeming to indicate both the ragged clothing and the young woman who wore it. “You. Who you are, and what you’re doing ’ere.”

She was suddenly far colder than could be explained by the morning air. “Trying to sell buns. But I think I’m about done in for these; I should go for fried fish soon, or something else.”

“Which you’ll bring right back ’ere. Maybe you’ll go stand around the ’ospital, or the prison, but you’ll stick near Newgate as long as you can, so long as you’ve got a few pennies to buy supper and a place to sleep. Them fine gents like to talk about lazy folks as don’t care enough to earn a better wage—but you’re the only one I’ve ever met where it’s true.” Tom scratched his neck, studying her in a way that made her want to run. “You don’t drop your aitches, you ain’t from a proper coster family—I know they runs you off sometimes, when you steps on their territory—in short, you’s a mystery, and ever since you started coming ’ere I’ve been trying to work you out. What’s around Newgate for you, Elizabeth Marsh, that you’ll spend three months waiting for it to show up?”

Her fingers felt like ice. Eliza fumbled with the ends of her shawl, then stopped, because it only drew attention to how her hands were shaking. What was there to fear? No crime in hanging about, not so long as she was engaged in honest work. Tom knew nothing. So far as he was aware, she was simply Elizabeth Marsh, and Elizabeth Marsh was nobody.

But she hadn’t thought up a lie for him, because she hadn’t expected him to ask. Before her mind could settle down enough to find a good one, his expression softened to sympathy. “Got someone in Newgate, ’ave you?”

He jerked his chin westward as he said it. Newgate in the specific sense, the prison that stood nearby. Which was close enough to a truth—if not the real truth—that Eliza seized upon it with relief. “My father.”

“Thought it might be an ’usband,” Tom said. “You wouldn’t be the first mot walking around without a ring. Waiting for ’im to get out, or ’oping ’e won’t?”

Eliza thought about the last time she’d seen her father. Four months ago, and the words between them weren’t pretty—they never were—but she’d clean forgotten about that after she walked out of the prison and saw that familiar, hated face.

She shrugged uncomfortably, hoping Tom would let the issue drop. The more questions she answered, the more likely it was that he’d catch a whiff of something odd. Better to leave it at a nameless father with an unnamed crime. Tom didn’t press, but he did pick up one of his newspapers and begin searching through a back page. “’Ere, take a look at this.”

The piece above his ragged fingernail was brief, just two short paragraphs under the header MR. CALHOUN’S NEW FACTORY. “Factory work ain’t bad,” Tom said. “Better than service, anyway—no missus always on you, and some factories pay more—and it would get you out of ’ere. Waiting around won’t do you no good, Lizzie, and you keeps this up, sooner or later your luck’ll go bad. Workhouse bad.”

“Ah, you’re just trying to get rid of me,” Eliza said. It came out higher than usual, because of the tightness in her throat. Tom was just useful; his corner was the best one to watch from. She never intended more than that—never friendship—and his kindness made her feel all the more guilty about her lies.

But he was right, as far as it went. She’d been in service before, to an Italian family that sold secondhand clothes in Spitalfields. Being a maid-of-all-work, regardless of the family, was little better than being a slave. Lots of girls said factory work was preferable, if you could get it. But abandoning Newgate…

She couldn’t. Her disobedient eyes drifted back to the advertisement anyway. And then she saw what lay below, that Tom’s hand had covered before.

Eliza only barely kept from snatching the paper out of Tom’s hands, to stare at the words and see if they vanished. “May I?” she asked.

She meant only to read it again, but Tom handed her the paper and flapped his hands in its wake. “Keep it.”

The cold had gone; Eliza felt warm from head to toe. She could not look away from the words. Coincidence—or providence? It might be nothing: folk with money babbling on about little “flower fairies,” rather than faeries, the kind Eliza knew all too well. This new society might not know anything that could help her.

But her alternative was waiting around here, with the fading hope that it would do her any good. Just because there’d been another bombing didn’t mean any of the people involved had been here; it could have been pure chance last October, spotting him in Newgate. She’d spent nearly every day here since then, and not caught so much as another glimpse. They were tricksy creatures, faeries were, and not easily caught. But perhaps this London Fairy Society could help her.

“Thank you,” Eliza told Tom, folding the newspaper and stuffing it into the sagging pocket of her shawl.

He shrugged, looking away in embarrassment. “Ah, it’s nothing. You feeds me buns enough; I owes you a newspaper’s worth, at least.”

She wasn’t thanking him for the paper, but saying so would only make him more awkward. “I’d best be moving,” Eliza said. “These buns won’t sell themselves. But I’ll think about the factory, Tom; I will.” She meant it, too. It would be glorious to go back to something like normal life. No more of this hand-to-mouth existence, gambling everything on the hope of a second stroke of luck. After these three months, she’d even go back into service with the DiGiuseppes, just to know each night that she’d have a roof over her head.

If a normal life was even possible anymore, after everything she’d been through. But that was a question for the future. First, she had to catch herself a faerie.

Tom wished her well, and she gripped the handles of her barrow again, wheeling it down Newgate toward a fellow in Holborn who would sell her fried fish, if she could dispose of the rest of her current load. Her eyes did their habitual dance over the crowds as she cried her wares, but saw nothing unusual.

Second Friday. That’ll be the fourteenth, then. A bit more than a fortnight away. She’d keep on here until then, on the off chance that her luck would turn even better. But Islington, she hoped, held the answers.

The Goblin Market, Onyx Hall: March 2, 1884

With a clicking of toenails upon cracked black stone, the dog trotted into the room of cages. A half dozen lined the narrow chamber, three on a side, mostly full with sleeping humans. In the nearest, a young girl lay alone on a floor of filthy straw, curled in upon herself. The dog drew nearer, sniffing. His nose brushed her hair, close by the cage’s wooden bars, and she jerked awake with a cry of fear.

The dog sat down on his haunches and studied her, tongue lolling just a little. It was as close to an appealing look as a scruffy thing like him could come; his black fur was untidy and matted, and a chunk had been torn from his left ear. But when he made no threatening move—merely sat and watched—the girl moved hesitantly from the corner where she’d retreated. Holding one hand out, she inched closer, until her hand was near enough to the bars for the dog to extend his nose and sniff politely. He even licked her dirty fingers, a brief, warm caress.

At that touch of kindness, the girl burst into tears.

“Oi there!”

The dog rose in a swift turn. A squat, ugly figure stood in the doorway, scratching the wiry hairs of his beard. “Get off it,” the goblin said, scowling at him. “’E wants to see you, and not on four feet.”

In the cage, the girl had retreated once more. The dog cast a brief glance over his shoulder at her, then sighed, a peculiarly human sound. Bending his head, he concentrated, and his body began to shift.

He heard a faint whimper from behind him as the transformation finished. However little reassurance his dog form had offered, as a man he was worse; Dead Rick knew that all too well. Ragged trousers stopped short of his bare feet, whose toenails curved thick and filthy to the floor. On his body he wore only a torn waistcoat, scavenged off a dead mortal; he hated the confining feel of sleeves on his arms. His hair was as dirty and matted as it had been when it was fur, and as for his face… he didn’t turn around. He might not be a barguest, with a devil’s flaming eyes, but he’d seen himself in a mirror; the hard slash of his mouth wouldn’t reassure anyone.

He could have changed elsewhere, out of sight of the girl. But she was better off learning this now, that even the friendliest creature down here couldn’t be trusted.

Gresh’s toothy smile would never be mistaken for friendly. “She’s a fine bit, ain’t she?” he asked as Dead Rick came toward him. “Bit old to be stealing out of a cradle, but ’er mother kept ’er there anyway, as they didn’t ’ave nowhere else to put ’er. Living sixteen to a room they was; now it’s just fifteen, and she gets this whole cage to ’erself. Better for everyone!”

Dead Rick doubted the girl would agree, or her mother. Then again, what did he know? Perhaps her mother was a gin-soaked whore, and would be glad enough for one less mouth to feed. The girl might be bought by some kind faerie, who wanted a human child to play with like a doll.

Or angels might fly out of your arse, whelp. But she wouldn’t age here, and disease would never touch her, which was more than anyone could say for life in the streets above.

“Come on,” he said, pushing by Gresh. “You said ’e wants to see me.”

“You don’t need me to guide you,” the goblin said.

Dead Rick paused in the corridor and glanced back. Gresh was standing in the doorway still, shoulders hunched with eagerness. “Don’t,” Dead Rick warned him. “You spoil ’er, and it’ll be your ’ide.”

The goblin glared back. “I don’t need no dog telling me what to do.”

He said dog like it was an insult—like Dead Rick should be ashamed of being a skriker. A habit he picked up from their mutual master. But there were advantages to being a dog; Dead Rick growled low in his throat, holding Gresh’s eyes, and sure enough the goblin backed down first. With grumbling complaints, but he came with Dead Rick, and left the girl to what peace she could find.

Laughter echoed off the stone around them as they went along, its source impossible to determine. The warren of the Goblin Market was packed full, fae and the human creatures they kept for entertainment or use; they crowded almost as close as the East End poor that that girl came from. For every faerie that flitted, going in search of a passage beyond the mortal world, another came here to London. To the Onyx Hall, twisted reflection of the City above, the palace that had once been the glory of faerie England—and now was their crumbling refuge against the progress of humankind.

Traces of that glory were still visible, in the sculpted columns and corner posts, the arches spanning high-ceilinged chambers, the occasional mosaic laid into the black stone of a wall. It had all seen hard use these centuries past, though. Much was cracked, or stained, or half-hidden behind the clutter of the refugees. Curtains strung on cord divided larger rooms into smaller, giving the illusion of privacy; fae defended treasured belongings or mortal pets against the greedy hands of their neighbors. But anything could be sold, if the price was good enough: a human child bargained for mortal bread, an enchanted mirror traded for drugs that could make even a faerie forget his troubles.

Gresh was right; Dead Rick didn’t need the goblin to tell him where to go. He knew his way through the warren blindfolded. The room he headed for had a broken floor, scuffed stone giving way to bare earth, into which someone had dug a pit; down at the bottom, a red-eared faerie hound, his muzzle stained with blood, seized a rat and shook the rodent until its back broke. The observers—mostly fae, a few mortals—roared him on. Dead Rick shoved through the crowd, making his way toward the short staircase that curved at the far end. By the time he reached it, Gresh had disappeared, into the wagering mass.

The staircase still showed a touch of refinement, though the balustrade’s carving had taken some beating over the ages. The room it led to showed a bit more than a touch, largely because the rat-fighting rabble weren’t allowed in. If its chairs were mismatched, some were at least carved of exotic wood, and the carpet on the floor was still vibrant with color. Silks draped along the walls helped cover the cracks behind, the signs of inevitable decay.

And there were only two people inside, one faerie and one mortal. The latter was dressed in a ridiculous parody of a footman’s livery, styles that would have been old-fashioned fifty years before, but that hardly mattered; the more important thing was that he was there, uselessly, feeding the self-importance of his master.

Who scowled at Dead Rick. Nadrett waited for the door to close, then said, “I expects you ’ere when I needs you. Not to ’ave to send my goblins searching for you all over the warren.”

He made an elegant figure, by Goblin Market standards. Not clad in patches and rags, nor parading around in a gaudy assortment of gypsy silks; his waistcoat might be red as children’s blood, but it was restrained in its tailoring. One had to look closely to notice the buttons of bone, the cuff links of knotted hair. He wore no coat, but did affect a gentleman’s silk top hat, adorned with a large pin of crystalline starlight.

None of which hid the fact that Nadrett had clawed his way to the top of the Goblin Market heap by a combination of cunning and brutality. Dead Rick was forced to lower his gaze. “Sorry. I was looking in on the cages—”

“You better not ’ave been touching my property.”

Dead Rick was no good at lying. His hesitation told enough, and Nadrett spat a curse. “That one ain’t ’ere to tithe bread. Got a buyer, wants a girl as stinks of mortality. You go licking ’er, she starts to smell of faerie instead, and then I don’t get as good a price.”

He should keep his mouth shut, but the words came out anyway. “I ain’t ’ere to help your coves in their perversions.”

Quick as a striking snake, Nadrett was there, inches from his face. “Yes, you are,” the faerie spat. “Because you serve me. Those perversions are where I makes my profit, see, and if I don’t profit, then I takes the difference out of your mangy hide. So it’s in your best interests to make sure my customers ain’t unhappy.”

Dead Rick opened his mouth to answer—stupid whelp; you never learn—and Nadrett’s hand closed on his throat. He might weigh a stone less than the skriker, but his grip was iron. “Cross me,” Nadrett whispered, “and I will destroy you. Everything you used to be. You’ll be like this forever, broken, crawling, serving whatever master whips you worst.”

Shame and fear twisted in his gut, like a worm, eating away at his pride. He felt a whine build, trapped under Nadrett’s hand, and rolled his eyes in desperation. When Nadrett let go, Dead Rick turned his head to the side, casting his gaze down. “I won’t cross you.”

His master laughed. “’Course not. You’ll do exactly what I says. And you’re in luck: I’ve got use for you today. Follow me.”

Hating himself for it, Dead Rick obeyed.

Their path was a long one, weaving through the shabby clamor of the Goblin Market. The constant, encroaching decay made it almost impossible to go anywhere directly; too many chambers and connecting passages had vanished. Whole sections were almost completely cut off, their only access being through patches too unsafe to traverse. A faerie who set foot there was liable to come out somewhere else entirely—or not come out at all.

London’s foundation is rotting out from underneath it, Dead Rick thought. People still told tales of the glories of the Onyx Hall, but that was all that remained: tales, and these decaying fragments. And the Goblin Market’s the most rotten of all.

The place Nadrett led him wasn’t quite Market territory, and wasn’t quite not. The night garden didn’t belong to anyone, except the refugees who slept on blankets beneath the overgrown trees. It lay in what had once been the heart of the Onyx Hall, and in past ages had been the favored haunt of courtiers. But now the Walbrook ran foul through its heart, and the flowers grew among choking weeds.

A trio of goblins lounged on a chipped bench, and rose when Nadrett came through the entrance arch. Scots, and not familiar to Dead Rick; he would have wagered human bread, if he’d had any, that they were newcomers. Temporary residents of the night garden, who’d sold their services to the Goblin Market—to Nadrett—in exchange for a leg up. “We’ve cleared it,” the leader said. “Got two fellows watching each of the other doors.”

Nadrett clapped him on the shoulder and turned to Dead Rick. “You knows your job. Get to it.”

He stared past his master, into the abandoned wilderness of the garden. “Who is it?”

“What does that matter? Some mortal. She’s none of your concern.”

Female, then. But not the little girl in the cage. Dead Rick swallowed, tasting bile. Not the little girl; just some other human who likely never did anything to bring this fate on herself.

The mere drawing of Nadrett’s breath was enough to prompt him. Grinding his teeth, Dead Rick shifted back to dog form, and ran out into the night garden.

A welter of smells filled his nose. The refugees might be gone for the moment, but their scents remained: hobs and goblins and pucks, courtly elves and nature-loving sprites, some so new they carried echoes of their homes with them. Cool soil, and the thick mat of vegetation that grew over it; once the garden had been planted with aromatic, night-blooming flowers—evening primrose, jasmine—and some of the hardier ones still survived. Up ahead lay the stinking Walbrook. The crumbling enchantments had mixed the buried river’s reflection with its polluted reality, poisoning the earth around it.

Dead Rick paused near one of the stream’s surviving footbridges, thinking he saw movement ahead. It proved to be just a faerie light, drifting aimlessly through the air. Most of them had abandoned the ceiling, where people said they used to form shifting constellations, but in the distance Dead Rick thought he saw a more solid glow.

He padded toward it, keeping to the underbrush. Yes, there was light ahead, behind that cluster of sickly apple trees. He sank to his belly and crawled forward one paw at a time until he could see.

The mortal was scarcely more than a girl, fifteen years old at most. She sat with her back to a stone plinth, knees pulled tight to her chest. Dead Rick wondered if she knew she was sitting on a grave. Her dress was reasonably fine; she ought to be able to read—but vines had grown over the inscription, making it easy to miss if she didn’t look for it. And her attention was elsewhere, scouring the surrounding area for signs of a threat.

Signs of him.

Faerie lights floated about the small clearing, as if trying to comfort her. They had just enough awareness to respond to others’ wishes; her fear might have drawn them. Or had she called them to her? Don’t ask questions, Dead Rick growled to himself. Don’t think of ’er as a person—just do your job.

The growl escaped his muzzle, without him intending it. The mortal gasped, rising to a wary crouch.

She shouldn’t ’ave been sitting in the light. She’ll be ’alf-blind once she runs.

So much the better for him.

Dead Rick growled again, this time with purpose. There was a gap in the hawthorn bushes; he snaked through it, making no sound, and snarled more sharply. Then circled further: another growl. To a frightened mind, it would sound like she was surrounded.

In every direction except one: the overgrown path that led away from the grave. And sure enough, she bolted.

He was running almost before she moved. She was human, and wearing a dress; he was a dog, and knew his way about the garden. A fallen tree had blocked the left-hand path years ago, so that even if she went that way—and he heard her try—in the end, she had to go right. And Dead Rick was there, waiting to harry her onward.

Nadrett had sent him to do this so often that it was almost routine. But the girl surprised him; she plunged through an overgrown holly bush, hissing as it raked her, to take a less obvious path. Dead Rick cursed inwardly. Two fellows watching each of the other doors—but were they watching all of them? Or only the ones that led anywhere anymore? The arch ahead opened on a corridor that went about fifty feet before fading into a bad patch of the Onyx Hall.

It had been fifty feet the last time he looked. It might be less now.

Dead Rick put on a burst of speed. A dry fountain near the wall gave him an advantage; he leapt up the enormous grotesque at the center, toenails scrabbling on the twisted stone, and launched himself through the air toward the arch. He landed with an almighty crash, but that served him well enough: he heard the girl stumble and fall, then claw to her feet and run in the other direction, away from whatever huge monster was lurking by the arch.

Huge, no. Monster, yes. That’s what I’ve become.

Dead Rick shook himself, as if his gloom could be shaken off like water. If he failed at this, Nadrett would see to it he was more than just gloomy.

He trotted rapidly along the girl’s trail, following her scent. His pause had given her time to get ahead, and in the absence of his snarls she’d gone quiet. The trail led him over the footbridge; he caught a whiff on the railing, as if she’d paused there, eyeing the filthy water. But for a girl in skirts, who likely couldn’t swim, it would just be unpleasant suicide; in the end she’d gone on.

Across an expanse of shaggy grass, almost as tall as he was. Dead Rick leapt over a fallen urn, hoping to cut her off. The gamble worked: she was coming down the path toward him. Renewed snarling sent her the other way, and now he knew how this would end. Normally he trapped them against the wall, but with a bit of herding…

She was nearing the end of her strength. Dead Rick quickened his own pace, baying like a wolf, and burst into the open almost at her heels. The girl flung herself across the torn ground, up the steps of a ruined pavilion, and fell sprawling across the boards of its floor. Dead Rick leapt—

Her scream tore through the air, and then stopped.

Dead Rick’s paws slammed down on her chest, and his jaws snapped shut just shy of her nose. The girl was rigid with terror beneath him, and her mouth gaped open, heaving again and again as if she were screaming still, but no sound came out.

For a moment, the desire was there. To sink his teeth into that vulnerable throat, to tear the flesh and lap up the hot blood as it fountained out. Death was part of a skriker’s nature. It would be easy, so long as he didn’t see her as a person—just meat and fear and a voice to be stolen.

But that was Nadrett’s way, and the Goblin Market’s. Clenching his muzzle until it hurt, Dead Rick backed off, slowly, stepping with care so his rough toenails wouldn’t scratch the girl through her dress.

Nadrett was leaning against one of the pavilion’s posts, tossing a small jar from hand to hand. “That’s a good one,” he said with a satisfied leer. “Prime stuff. That’ll fetch a good price, it will. Maybe I’ll even let you ’ave a bit of the profit, eh?”

If he had any pride left, Dead Rick would refuse it. Since he didn’t, he jumped down to the grass, passing Nadrett without so much as a snarl.

His master laughed as he went. “Good dog.”

Coming from Nadrett’s mouth, the word made Dead Rick ashamed.

Whitechapel, London: March 4, 1884

The shift was vivid, as the street’s name changed from Fenchurch to Aldgate High Street to Whitechapel Road. In less than a mile, Eliza passed from one London to another, from the grand counting houses and respectable shops of the City to the plain brick buildings and narrow back courts that, until a few months ago, she had called home.

She’d argued with herself all yesterday about coming back. A run of good days had given her money for last night’s doss and tonight’s, with enough left over to buy new wares to sell, but a day spent not working was one day closer to starvation. Selling as she went would have gotten her run off by the costers who worked this area, though, and besides, she didn’t want anything linking her to the woman who sold hot buns and other oddments around the City. So her barrow was in the keeping of a woman in St. Giles who could hopefully be trusted not to sell it the moment Eliza’s back was turned, and Eliza herself had taken a day’s holiday. A risk, yes—but no more so than returning to Whitechapel in the first place.

“You’ve got a nerve on you, Eliza O’Malley, showing your face openly around here.”

The call came from the doorway of a rag-and-bone shop at the corner of George Yard. Eliza had gone on three more steps before she realized she could stop: it was no longer necessary, or useful, to pretend she was Elizabeth Marsh, good English costerwoman. Those who would give her trouble here already knew who she was.

So she stopped, turning, and saw Fergus Boyle leaning in the doorway, arms crossed over his chest and one foot on the box he’d apparently been carrying. He grinned when she faced him. “Gave you a fright, did I?”

Her skin was still tingling from the sudden jolt of hearing her name, after months of playacting as someone else. The accustomed accents, though, rose to her lips with no difficulty at all. “Get you gone, Fergus Boyle; haven’t you anything better to do with yourself than bedevil me?”

“With you vanishing the way you did? I don’t.” With his foot he shoved the box to the wall, out of harm’s way. Eliza stood her ground as he came closer. “You should hear the stories. Some think you’ve been slung in gaol, like your aul da. The ones who think you’re cautious say you went to America, never mind how you’d pay for the journey. I put my money on you hiding with the Fenians. Did you and your friends have anything to do with that dynamite at Victoria Station the other day?”

“I’m no Fenian,” Eliza said, casting a wary glance across the people on the street. The bobbies hardly cared enough to keep order in Whitechapel, but since last year the new Special Irish Branch kept a lively ear out for any whisper of sedition.

“Sure,” Boyle said, grinning in a way she didn’t like. “You had nothing to do with Charing Cross last fall. You just happened to see the bomb in time to throw it out the back of the train. Pure chance, that was.”

Not chance at all—but what could she tell him? That the Charing Cross and Praed Street bombings hadn’t been Fenian jobs, not completely? That they’d had help from faeries? Boyle was descended from good County Roscommon stock, the son of a farmer’s daughter and a fellow from the next farm over; they’d brought their stories with them when they came to London during the Great Hunger. He believed in fairies, right enough. But they were creatures you left milk for on the back step, to keep them from witching your cows or tangling your children’s hair in the night. Not city-dwelling goblins who bombed railways.

As for telling him why she’d followed a faerie onto the Underground… she’d tried that before, near on seven years ago. Not Fergus Boyle, but other people. And none of them had listened.

“I can’t stay long,” she said, knowing he’d take her changing the subject as proof that he was right. “What is it you want? Just to tell me I’ve got a nerve on me?”

“Not staying long, is it? And what have you to hurry back to?” Boyle stepped even closer, so that he loomed over her. “Or is it that you’re afraid the Special Branch boyos will catch you?”

Eliza shoved him, hard, at the point on his shoulder that would spin him back a step. “Sure I have better things to do with my time than spend it talking with the likes of yourself.”

Fergus’s mocking grin faded a hair. “Ach, you’re not going to trouble Mrs. Darragh, are you?”

“I’m not.”

She’d always been a good liar, but Boyle still looked at her suspiciously. “Good. Maggie’s been glad to see the back of you—says her aul ma got upset when you were around.”

Now it was Eliza’s turn to look suspicious. “When did you and Maggie Darragh get on such close terms, that you’d be knowing what she’s thinking?”

He grinned more broadly, and Eliza sighed. She knew perfectly well that Maggie didn’t want her around, and was prepared for that; if she had to dodge Fergus Boyle, though, then this would be even more difficult. But she refused to abandon Mrs. Darragh—not when she was the only hope the woman had left.

Best to distract him with a believable lie. “Unlike some people,” Eliza told him, “I have a care for my soul. I’m off to confession—that’s a thing we do in church, that is, as I’m sure you’ve never heard of it.” And lying about that is the least of the things I’m going to Hell for.

Boyle looked dubious. Fortunately, Eliza saw a stick-thin girl crouching over the crate behind him. “You might want to be watching that, you might,” Eliza said mildly, with a nod of her head; then she slipped away while Boyle was busy clouting the girl over the ear.

Her heart beat too fast as she hurried down Whitechapel Road, weaving through the carts and the filthy fog. Four months and more since she’d been here, and it wasn’t long enough. Boyle was right: What if some fellow from the Special Irish Branch remembered her face? She hadn’t been stupid enough to tell them she was the one who threw the bomb from the Charing Cross train; they’d never believe she did it to save the people in the third-class carriage. More than seventy people were hurt that same night, when the other bomb exploded on a train leaving Praed Street. But Eliza was Irish; just being there was almost enough to hang her, and touching the bomb would be more than enough.

That was why she’d done her best to vanish, hiding behind the gift for mimicry and playacting that had always amused Owen so much. With the bloody Irish Republican Brotherhood and their friends in America constantly making trouble, it wasn’t safe to be Irish in London right now. And even less safe to be Eliza O’Malley.

Boyle was right: the cautious thing to do would be to scrape together enough money, somehow, to go elsewhere. America, or Ireland, or at least another city. Liverpool, perhaps. But even if she could give up her search, Eliza was London-born; she’d never known another home. God help her, she even missed the dirty, cramped slums of Whitechapel, so much more familiar than the stuffy businesses of the City.

Not that she had any romantic illusions about the area. It was a sink of vice and crime, filled with the cast-off poor of every race, with tails doing customers in back alleys for tuppence a fuck and gangs taking by threat or violence what little money other folk had managed to earn. But as she passed the narrow alleys and courts Eliza heard familiar accents, and sometimes even the Irish language itself, in raucous and friendly exchange. She pulled her shawl closer about her face and hurried onward, head down, to avoid being seen by anyone else she knew—or seeing them herself. That would just make it all the harder to leave again.

Mrs. Darragh and her daughter lived in a single room in a court off Old Montague Street, with a piece of canvas tacked over the window where the glass had been broken out. At least, they had when Eliza was last here; what if they’d moved on? Boyle wouldn’t have told her. If he and Maggie had some kind of understanding, he might have even helped them into better lodgings.

She knocked at the door, leaning close to listen. No footsteps sounded in response, which at least told her Maggie wasn’t there. She knocked again. “Mrs. Darragh? ’Tis Eliza O’Malley.”

No answer, but the door was unlatched when she tried the handle. “I’m coming in,” Eliza said, and opened it enough to peer through.

With fog and the grimy canvas window, the interior was gloomy as a tomb. Slowly Eliza’s eyes adjusted, and then she made out the figure sitting in the room’s one chair, near the smoldering hearth on the far wall. Right where I left her, four months ago. “Mrs. Darragh, ’tis Eliza,” she repeated, and came in.

The woman stared dully at the floor, hands loose in her lap as if she could not be troubled to do anything with them. The dim light was kind to her face, smoothing away some of the lines that had carved themselves there, but her hopeless expression made Eliza’s heart ache. The loss of Owen had broken his mother, and she’d never mended since.

Eliza left the door open a crack, for the light, and came to crouch at Mrs. Darragh’s feet. All the chatter she’d planned faded in the woman’s presence: it just wasn’t possible to say Oh, how well you look today, or anything else so false and cheerful. What good would it do? Nothing would raise her spirits, save one.

“Mrs. Darragh,” she murmured, taking the older woman’s slack hands in her own, “I’ve come to tell you good news, I have. I’ve almost caught him. The faerie.”

No reply. Eliza pressed her lips together, then went on. “I told you I saw him, last October? Followed him to Mansion House Station, and saw the others there, getting on the train to Charing Cross. He came from near Newgate, though, and that’s where I’ve been—waiting there, hoping to see him again, or another one. But I’m after finding something better. There’s a society in Islington; I’ll be going there in a few days to see if they know anything. Once I catch a faerie—any faerie—I’ll make it talk. I’ll make it tell me how to find Owen. And then I’ll go after the bastards who took him, and I’ll make them give him up, and I’ll bring your son back to you.”

The hands trembled in her grasp. Mrs. Darragh’s lower lip quivered, too, and she had the despairing expression of a woman who could not even summon the energy to cry.

“I will,” Eliza insisted, tightening her grip. Not too hard; the bones felt birdlike in her hands, as if they’d snap. “I haven’t abandoned him. Or you. I—”

The brightening of the room was her warning, and the cold air that swept in with it. “Haven’t abandoned her?” a sharp voice said from behind. “Odd way you have of showing it, Eliza O’Malley, vanishing without so much as a word.”

She didn’t rise from her crouch, or let go of Mrs. Darragh’s hands, but only turned her head. Maggie Darragh stood in the entrance, a heel of bread gripped in one fist, other palm flat against the door. Her battered bonnet shadowed her face, but Eliza didn’t need to see it to imagine her expression.

“You made it clear you didn’t want me around,” Eliza said.

Maggie made a disgusted sound and shoved the door away, so that it rebounded off the wall and swung a little back. “Not clear enough, I suppose, for here you are again, whispering your poison in her ears.”

The hands pulled free of Eliza’s, Mrs. Darragh tucking them in beneath her elbows, hugging her body. In the greater light, the pitiful ragged state of her dress was revealed. “Poison?” Eliza said. “It’s hope I bring, which is more than anyone else can be troubled to give her.”

Maggie’s laughter sounded like the cawing of a crow. “Hope, you call it, that makes Ma cry, and never an Owen to show for it. He’s dead, you stupid fool, dead or run off. Or are you still too much in love with him to admit it?”

Contempt weighted down the word love. They’d barely been grown, Eliza and Owen; just fourteen years of age. Too young for Father Tooley to marry them, though everybody knew that was where it would end. But it wasn’t love that made Eliza say, “He didn’t run off. I know who took him. And I’m going to bring him back.”

“You’ve had seven years,” Maggie said cruelly. “What are you waiting for?”

Eliza flinched. In a whisper, she said, “Not quite seven.” Not until October. Sometimes she felt like there was a clock ticking where her heart should be, marking off the hours and days and years. Running out of time. When the seven years were up, would Owen come back to them? Or would he be lost for good, beyond any hope of rescue?

Not the latter. She would never let it happen. She’d only let the years slip by because she had no clues, no lead to follow; it had been so easy to wonder if she imagined it all, as Maggie thought. But she didn’t wonder anymore. She knew they were real, and she had their scent. She would keep hunting until she caught one, and forced it to tell her what she wanted to know.

“Get out,” Maggie said, and Eliza could hear the angry tears in her voice. “We’ve troubles enough without you bringing more around. Leave Ma to mourn her son as she should.”

Eliza rose, wincing as her knees protested. “I don’t want to bring ye two any trouble, Maggie; you must believe me. Whatever Fergus has been saying about me, I’m no Fenian. I love Ireland as much as the next woman, and God knows it would be grand to get the English boot off our necks—but it isn’t my home; London is. I would never do anything to this city, not for a country I’ve never even seen, and not if it means blowing up innocent people, you may be sure. I didn’t leave Whitechapel because I was guilty. I did it because I thought I might be able to find Owen.”

Maggie stood silent for a moment, digging her fingers into the heel of bread. When she spoke again, her voice was softer, if not friendly. “Get out, Eliza. We can’t live in the past, and there’s no future worth speaking of. Stop dancing it in front of us, like it’ll do me or Ma any good. Just leave us be.”

And that hurt worse than any of it—the hopelessness, the defeated line of Maggie’s shoulders. They’d had such bright dreams, when Owen and Eliza were young, and now they’d been reduced to this ash. That, as much as Owen himself, was what the faeries had stolen from them.

Eliza fumbled blindly in her pocket, grabbed everything there. A little over a shilling in small coins: everything she’d saved, except what she needed to fill her barrow tomorrow, and her doss money for tonight. Those, she always kept in her shoe. She spilled it out onto the bedside table, next to the unlit stub of a candle. “God keep ye safe, Maggie, Mrs. Darragh,” Eliza said, and slipped out before pride could overcome need enough for her friend to protest.

Riverside, London: March 10, 1884

Rank moisture made the stone slick under Dead Rick’s feet. The area always smelled of damp; in the Onyx Hall’s twisted reflection of London above, this was the waterfront, the areas corresponding to the bank of the Thames. Distance from the wall had preserved it against the crumbling caused by the wall’s destruction, but the iron gas mains that ran alongside the new sewers brought their own kind of decay.

As the growing foulness underfoot proved. Dead Rick picked his way carefully, but it didn’t help him when the walls suddenly trembled around him, and the floor jerked beneath his feet; his heel slipped in something softly disgusting, and only a quick clutch at the wall saved him. He waited there, every muscle tense, until the shaking had stopped.

Train. Mostly they went unfelt, even though iron rails ran through the ground all the way from Blackfriars to Mansion House. The Onyx Hall’s enchantments—what remained of them—protected against that disruption; the palace might lie beneath London, but that didn’t mean the engines of the underground railway came charging in and out of their chambers. But this, one of the surviving entrances to the Hall, lay near where the line to Blackfriars Station crossed the buried River Fleet, and so the tremors came through more often.

Here, the truth couldn’t be ignored. Forget the broken wall; forget the cast-iron pipes laid alongside the sewers. Forget the buildings torn down in the city above. This would be what destroyed the Hall in the end: the mortals’ Inner Circle Railway, a ring of iron whose southern reach would spit the palace like a slab of meat over the fire.

Once it was complete. A pair of Cornish knockers in the Market were taking wagers on how long the Hall would survive, after that. So far the numbers ranged from a month to ten minutes. And unless something went disastrously wrong, the railway would be finished before the end of the year.

What would happen then, Dead Rick didn’t know. He was certain of one thing, though: when that day came, it would be every dog for himself. Nadrett wouldn’t protect him. So Dead Rick needed to be ready, and that meant taking care of his debts now, so he’d have something to hoard against that inevitable end.

The darkness had become absolute—no faerie lights to mark his path—but up ahead he heard the rush of water. Nadrett forbade the skriker to leave the Market without permission, but he’d come this way a few times on orders, and knew what to look for; soon his searching hands found the bronze ring bolted into the floor, and the thick rope knotted through it. He wrapped both hands around it tight, gradually trusting his weight to the line as the floor sloped away beneath him, feeling the black stone of the Onyx Hall end, and the brick of the Fleet conduit begin.

Then the brick ended, and there was nothing to do but screw together his trust and leap.

The wet rope shot through his hands, then burned as he seized it tight once more. For a moment, all that existed was sound and the rope: water below, rough hemp in his hands, and the giddy relief of not having fallen. Still glad of that, am I? I suppose if I’m going to die, I want it to be somewhere better than ’ere.

Dead Rick lowered himself into the water, moving carefully at the end. When it rained, the Fleet could rise high enough to drown a man. But the weather outside must have been dry, for when his feet settled flat, the water only came to his knees.

He reached into the pocket of the ulster he’d put on. The coat’s sleeves annoyed him, but less than slinging a bag over his shoulder, and sometimes a man needed big pockets. Dark lantern, candle stub, lucifer; he struck the latter against the wall, and a moment later had light.

Not that there was much to see. The tunnel of arched brick stretched in both directions, entombing the River Fleet below the streets of London. But this was one of the few places where strangers could conceivably stumble into the Onyx Hall, and Dead Rick preferred to keep them out. He found the brick tied at the end of the rope, gave the hole above a measuring look, and on his first try sent the brick sailing back through, taking the rope with it. Any faerie who wanted in could go by another door.

Dead Rick began to make his way downstream, lantern held high. Plenty of threats could kill a man down here—pockets of bad air, sudden floods, fellow travelers—but the one that worried him most lurked within the water itself. River hags were cruel creatures to begin with, and the hag of the Fleet had only gotten worse with time. She’d kill anyone, now, mortal or fae. And while the light might draw her attention, if it came to a fight, Dead Rick wanted to see her coming. With his free hand he drew a bronze knife, and then he quickened his pace.

A shudder of relief went through him at the first hint of fresh air. Dead Rick laughed quietly, shaking his head. “Tough bloke you are,” he muttered. “Spend your days in the Goblin Market, then run away from Blacktooth Meg like a—”

A splash stopped that comparison short. Dead Rick sank into a crouch, knife at the ready—but it wasn’t the hag. Up ahead, a patch of lesser blackness marked the end of the conduit, where the buried river gave onto the Thames; a silhouette had just moved into view there. Dead Rick blew out his light, but it was too late. The figure began to run.

The hunter in him had to pursue. It was why Nadrett used him in matters like the night garden chase; black dogs were a kind of goblin, terrifying as only a death omen could be, and in the countryside they still hounded men to their ends. The mortality in humans drew them, whether death stood near or far off. Dead Rick would have had to try very hard not to chase the man once he began to run.

But his quarry didn’t get very far. Emerging into the sickly brown fog, Dead Rick found the man hip-deep in a sinkhole on the Thames bank, floundering in the waters of a receding tide. The fellow went still when he felt the knife’s edge scrape his throat.

A tosher, Dead Rick guessed—one of the men who scavenged through the sewers, hunting out refuse that could be resold. Armed with a knife of his own, but more inclined to run than fight. It was a piece of luck, coming across him right here at the mouth of the Fleet; that might save Dead Rick an unpleasant hunt through London. It was an hour before dawn yet, he judged, and with so few people on the streets, he could have been hunting a long time.

Even coming out this far made his skin crawl like he was covered in spiders. The Blackfriars bridges leapt across the Thames, nearly overhead: long arches of wrought iron. A smaller piece lay inside the man’s coat, the knife he used against competitors in his trade. Dead Rick was sensitive enough that his bare feet could even feel a tiny bit of iron in the riverbank nearby, some piece of scrap not yet found and resold by a mudlark. Unprotected, shivering at so much danger so close, he pressed harder than he needed to with the knife, drawing a line of blood.

“I’ve got sixpence in my pocket,” the man gasped, stiffening under his hands. “It’s yours, take it—”

“I don’t want your tin,” Dead Rick said. People always offered money first; after that, their minds went straight to enemies. Before the man could ask who sent him, the skriker growled, “Food. ’Ave you got any?”

A portion of the fear dissolved into confusion. “Food?”

“Bread. A sandwich, or biscuits, anything you might ’ave on you.”

Despite the knife at his throat, the man tried to twist around to stare at his attacker. “You chased me because you’re ’ungry?”

Seizing a double handful of the man’s torn coat, Dead Rick hauled him free of the sinkhole and slammed him down again, on his back in the shallow water. “Next time I cut your throat and answer the question myself. ’Ave you got food on you?” Not that it would do him much good to kill the man—but threats did a fine job of helping a man concentrate.

His captive nodded. The motion was spastic; after a moment, Dead Rick realized the tosher was trying to point at his right pocket, without moving anything more than his head. Grunting, the skriker dragged him a little farther up, until they were clear of the water and on what passed for solid ground. Then he shoved a searching hand into the man’s pocket and came out with a packet of old newspaper. The whole thing was soaked now with filthy river water, but grease had stained one end, and the aroma of sausage wafted from it.

“Oi, you there! What do you think you’re doing?”

The question carried such an air of self-satisfied authority, Dead Rick thought at first it came from a constable. He crouched instinctively. Nadrett’s trips above sometimes brought trouble from the peelers, and some of those bastards were too ready with their revolvers. But when he looked up, it was only a man—some sod farther up the shore, in between two of the wharves.

Dead Rick measured the distance between him and the newcomer, wondering if he could change midleap and rip the bastard’s throat out. Man form or no, Dead Rick was still obviously fae, and it wasn’t safe to walk around London like that.

But the stranger’s eyes narrowed, and not like those of a man wondering what he was staring at it. The fellow came forward with three quick strides and said, “You’re jumping ’im for bread, ain’t you? Fucking goblins. Well, I’m the Prince of the Stone, and I’m telling you, let ’im go.”

A disbelieving bark escaped Dead Rick’s mouth. “You? The bleeding Prince of the Stone?”

He’d never seen the man himself, only heard stories. Nadrett often complained about the Prince, poking his nose where it didn’t belong. Oh, supposedly the man’s nose belonged everywhere; he was the mortal ruler of the Onyx Court, after all, consort to London’s faerie Queen, with authority over everything having to do with his kind. Only there wasn’t an Onyx Court anymore: just a group of self-indulgent courtiers enjoying their last pleasures, and a cockney Prince trying to pretend he had control over anything at all. As for the Queen, she’d been gone for years.

Dead Rick peered through the darkness, sniffing past the reek of the Thames for the man’s scent. He could smell the faerie touch that bound the Prince to the Onyx Hall, and see its effect on the fellow’s face: he had a strange young-old look, like a man aged long before his time. Well, that was no wonder, with the palace crumbling apart; they said it had drained the Queen down to almost nothing, in the years before she vanished. Dead Rick would be surprised if the Prince had much more in him.

He’d put one foot on the tosher’s chest to hold him in place; now he felt the man shift restlessly, confusion winning out over fear. The brief flash of sympathy Dead Rick had felt for the aging, exhausted Prince faded, driven back by more important concerns. “This ain’t any business of yours,” he said to the Prince.

“The devil it ain’t. That bastard you’ve got there can barely feed ’imself; you can’t just go stealing ’is food so you can cause more trouble up ’ere!”

The Prince’s sanctimonious reply would have been annoying enough if it were accurate. His complete lack of understanding made Dead Rick furious. Cause trouble? He wished he could afford to waste bread on that. Instead he was out here, with the Blackfriars bridges hanging over his head like two axes waiting to fall, because he needed some kind of insurance against the future, and didn’t want his ears cut off by any of the half-dozen fae to whom he owed a debt. And every minute this Prince stood there lecturing him was another minute Dead Rick had to put up with a weight of iron that made him want to howl and run for home.

So he didn’t bother answering. Instead he just snarled, and threw himself forward.

Trying to change shape out here felt like breaking all of his bones, individually. The iron fought him: it didn’t care whether he was man or beast, but it hated letting him shift between the two. When Dead Rick hit the Prince, he was caught halfway in between, a roaring monstrosity, bowling the man down in a tangle of fur and skin and teeth.

Pain stopped him from doing more; his momentum took him into the wooden pillar of a crane, where an iron nail seared against his back like fire and ice. Dead Rick howled, writhing, and abruptly was in human form again. He lay panting on the ground, trying not to vomit, until he had control enough of his muscles to raise his head.

By then he was alone. The tosher had fled, and so, apparently, had the Prince.

So much for ’im and ’is orders. It seemed the man knew just how far his authority went.

Dead Rick forced himself to his feet. Down in the mud, his knife and the packet of newspaper lay untouched; the tosher hadn’t bothered to collect his food before fleeing. But it wasn’t any use to Dead Rick without the man.

It needed no dog’s nose to track him. The footprints were clear in the mud, heading west, under the bridges and up onto the massive wall of the Embankment. Dead Rick gritted his teeth and began to lope after him. There were iron pipes behind the granite exterior of the river frontage, but that was still better than the bridges, and Dead Rick was light on his feet; he gained rapidly.

The tosher heard him coming, and spun to face him, knife in hand. Dead Rick held out the packet and his own knife alike. Up here, he didn’t have much time; the peelers did watch the Embankment walk. “I ain’t done with you yet. But you do what I tells you, and you’ll get out of ’ere without a scratch. Understand?”

Clearly not, but the man nodded warily, willing to listen whatever this apparent lunatic had to say if it meant saving his own skin. “Take this,” Dead Rick said, tossing the packet back at him. “Now put that down at your feet and say, ‘A gift for the good people.’”

“What?”

Not quite as cowed by fear as Dead Rick thought. “Do it, or lose an ear. Your choice.”

Shaking his head, the man dropped the packet onto the stone of the footpath. “A gift for the good people. Now what?”

“Back up.” He obeyed. In one swift move, Dead Rick snatched up the packet and retreated. “Now you go. Back home, or into the sewers; I don’t care which. Just get out of my sight.”

The tosher didn’t have to be told twice. He turned and continued running upriver, toward Westminster, away from Dead Rick.

Who waited to be sure the man wouldn’t turn back, then stuffed his knife back into its sheath and tore open the soggy, greasy newspaper. Inside was a sausage roll. Not caring if the thing was soaked with river water, he sank his teeth into the end and ripped a chunk free.

Eating it was like wrapping a warm blanket around himself when he’d been standing all this while in the freezing winter air. The pipes in the Embankment, the gaslight lamps above, the bridges behind him—all became nothing more than human artifacts, bits of metal wrought into useful shapes. A church bell could ring in his ear now, and he would only laugh at it. Mortal food, given in tithe to the fae: the only thing that let them walk the streets of London in safety.

And desperately hard to come by, nowadays. Nadrett’s caged mortals served many different purposes, but all of them were forced to tithe bread each day, until they were sold off or ate faerie food or died. It went a long way toward making up for the loss of belief among the people above, who no longer set out food for the faeries, except in scattered pockets far out in the countryside; a long way, but not far enough, not with all the refugees crowding into the Hall. If Dead Rick wanted any hope of surviving once the Market was gone, he had to get some for himself.

He already regretted eating that bite. It meant he had one bite less with which to pay off his debts, or escape London when the time came. But with all these banes around him… he hadn’t been above in ages, had forgotten how terrible it felt.

He sighed, staring at the torn roll.

Then he looked around, at the city he almost never saw. London, full of mortals—not caged and broken, but free men and women and children, millions of them, living in blissful ignorance of the decay beneath their feet. And untouched by the faerie stain that would make them unable to tithe. The longer Dead Rick stayed out here, the greater the odds of his master noticing—but the bite he’d eaten protected for a whole day. With that in his stomach, he could find somebody else to jump, get more bread, prepare for the end that was coming.

He would pay a price for it—he always did—but this once, it might be worth it.

Dead Rick stuffed the remainder of the roll into the pocket of his coat and concentrated. Not much; he wasn’t one of those fae who took pride in all the faces he could invent, making himself look like a fine gentleman or a little boy or anything else. He was satisfied with looking like himself—just without the faerie touch. For his purposes, it was enough.

Then, whistling “Bedlam Boys” to himself, he set off in search of another poor bastard to rob.

The Galenic Academy, Onyx Hall: March 10, 1884

What remained of the faerie palace tended to alternate between rooms overstuffed with refugees and long, empty stretches abandoned even by ghosts. As Benjamin Hodge approached the entrance to the Galenic Academy, the only sound was his own boots scuffing across the floor. But once he passed beneath the silver-and-gold arch, with its motto of SOLVE ET COAGULA curving above his head, noise began to filter down the black corridor. Even before he could make out any details, the sound raised his spirits: this was the one part of the Onyx Hall that felt alive with hope, instead of despair.

Or maybe madness was a better word than hope. Hodge was too young to have seen the Great Exhibition at the Crystal Palace in ’51, but he imagined it must have been a lot like this: a motley assortment of people from all over the world, crowding around displays ranging from the useful to the bizarre, in a crazed display of what human invention could do.

Human invention, and faerie: while there were mortals down here, they were far outnumbered by faerie-kind. The international bit still held, though. For the last century and more, the Galenic Academy had been a place of pilgrimage for anyone from either world who wanted to understand the rules of places like this: not quite Faerie, not quite Earth, but taking on a bit of the nature of both. Some of those who came were philosophers, and they spent their time in the library or various sitting rooms, arguing questions like what ancient curse made iron anathema to European fae, or how it was that a genie could serve the Mohammedan God—but the Presentation Hall which now opened up before him was for the inventors.

As with the Great Exhibition, their work ranged from the practical to the inexplicable. Hodge was very glad of the aetheric engine, which had saved them from the need to find a giant to wind the enormous clock in the Calendar Room every year, but what was the use of an automaton that sang songs like a phonograph? Or a fountain that could be made to pour out any kind of drink? Or the enormous paper wings stretching high overhead?

In truth, the only thing he cared about these days lay at the back end of the long chamber, taking up more space every time he came to visit.

His arrival barely made a ripple in the flow of activity. Passing fae tugged their forelocks briefly—or bowed, in the case of those foreigners for whom it was the customary sign of respect—but otherwise went about their business. Hodge would have done away with even that interruption, if he could; his father had been a bricklayer, and would have laughed himself sick to know his son had become a faerie Prince. An accident of birth, he thought wryly, not for the first time. I was born poor enough to get my start inside the old walls of London—and that’s what matters ’ere, more than blood or breeding.

Not that anybody knew his father had been a bricklayer. Hodge kept that back out of a peculiar kind of shame: he didn’t want anyone knowing his father had laid bricks for the very thing now destroying this place. And then been drowned, when the River Fleet burst its sewer and flooded the railway works. Fate had a sharp sense of humor, as far as Hodge could tell.

Two enormous machines lay at the far end, on either side of the door to the Academy library. One was a thing of gears and levers and cranks and dials, those latter marked with a range of alchemical and other symbols. All Hodge understood about that one was that it was some form of calculating machine; the symbols were a language the scholars had developed for describing the elemental makeup and configuration of faerie things, and the engine helped them predict how such things would interact.

Without it, devices like the one across the central aisle would be nearly impossible to build. This one, Hodge understood even less about, except that it resembled nothing so much as a deranged loom—and it had the Academy Masters very excited indeed.

Damn near every last one of them, mortal and faerie alike, was gathered about the machine, arguing in several different languages at once. Lady Feidelm and Wrain; a Chinese faerie named Ch’ien Mu, a Swedish mathematician named Ulrik Segerstam; Niklas von das Ticken had even hauled his brother Wilhas away from sitting over the Calendar Room like an anxious mother hen. The tallest of the fae, a dark-skinned genie, noticed Hodge first and gave him a respectful bow. “Lord Benjamin. Are you all right?”

Hodge had tried to tell Abd ar-Rashid the bows and titles and so on weren’t necessary. What few courtiers he had left spent their time idling in one of the palace’s remaining gardens and ignoring his commands. The genie, as the Academy’s Scholarch or senior Master, had more authority and did more of actual use than Hodge himself. But Abd ar-Rashid seemed to believe the courtesies were all the more important in these degenerate times, and acted accordingly.

The concern in his deep-set eyes made Hodge reach up to touch his own face. His fingers came away spotted with blood. There were two scratches on his cheek: mementos of that black dog leaping on him. Hodge considered saying as much, but remembered fae and mortals all around them; he might not care about courtesies, but admitting that one of his own nominal subjects had knocked him down in Blackfriars was a bit much. “Cut myself shaving,” Hodge said blandly, and gestured at the loom. “You lot look excited. Tell me you ’ave good news.”

“We do. Or rather, Ch’ien Mu does.” Abd ar-Rashid waved the Chinese faerie forward.

When Ch’ien Mu first came to the Onyx Hall, the embroidered silks he wore had been been splendid things, with dragons coiling sinuously about his shoulders and arms; but unless one was a philosopher, constantly in the library, the Galenic Academy was not a good place for clothes. The silks were much mended, and the dragons glared morosely at the barriers of thread that blocked their movement.

They still distracted Hodge terribly, but Ch’ien Mu’s mind was clearly on other matters. He shuffled a few steps closer and bowed, but instead of folding his hands inside his sleeves—his customary posture while lecturing—he literally rubbed them together with excitement as he spoke. “The threads no more break! It is, as I suspect, a thing of configuration—though my assumption that the helical is the most stable proves very wrong; we try both solar and lunar configurations, but—”

“Master Ch’ien Mu.” Hodge pinched the bridge of his nose, knowing the faerie would go on for half an hour if not stopped. “I knows ’ow to read, and that’s about where it ends. Just tell me what you’ve got.”

This seemed to be a more difficult request than he’d thought. The faerie opened and closed his mouth a few times, as if trying and failing to find words for what was in his head. Hodge doubted it was a problem with his English; more likely the fellow was having trouble bringing his thoughts down from the rarefied heights of theory into simple reality. It was a trouble many of the Academy Masters shared. In the end, the Master gave up and gestured at Niklas.

The red-bearded dwarf grinned and spun a small wheel. The small aetheric engine at his feet hummed to life; then he and Ch’ien Mu together made incomprehensible adjustments to a series of pipes and vessels that sat at the base of the loom. Those, Hodge recognized; they were a sort of alchemical retort, used to distill purified forms of the faerie elements, fire and water and earth and air. After a moment, shimmering threads of something that was not quite light began to lace themselves through the loom, forming what Hodge, with his extremely limited knowledge of weaving, knew was the warp: the lengthwise threads that formed the base of fabric.

Except what this loom wove was not precisely fabric. Ch’ien Mu fed one end of a linked chain of crystal plaques into something on the side of the loom, and then Niklas slammed a lever down with a heavy thunk. Powered by the aetheric engine, the loom sprang into motion.

Warp threads rose and fell, and the shuttle holding the weft flew back and forth between them. There was a general stampede to the far side of the loom, which Hodge joined, and there he witnessed a miracle.

Growing in the air on the other side of the machine was a glamour. Four isolated bits of gold—golden fur—four paws, it was, and as the legs lengthened above them Hodge suspected it was a lion. He’d seen more impressive illusions before; the fae could do tremendous things when they put their minds to it. But there was no mind involved here: the loom was doing the work. Jacquard had invented something like this years ago, to weave brocaded fabrics more rapidly and accurately than a human weaver could hope to achieve. Ch’ien Mu and the others had found a way to do it with a glamour.

“Bloody ’ell,” Hodge whispered, and grabbed hold of Abd ar-Rashid before he could fall over.

Some of it was just the general infirmity that plagued him nowadays. The Onyx Hall drew on his strength to survive the iron threat driving its breakdown, and it was always worse after he’d gone above—necessary departures, for the sake of his mortal sanity, though he kept them as infrequent as he dared. But the rest of his sudden weakness…

It was blinding, delirious hope.

If they could weave the elements of faerie reality into whatever shape they described with those crystal plaques, then they could weave new material for the Onyx Hall.

The genie supported him with one arm under his shoulders, and called for someone to bring a chair. Hodge allowed himself to be lowered into it, too dazed to care about the indignity. Never mind the wings and automata and all the rest; this had been the chiefest project of the Galenic Academy since its founding more than a hundred years ago. Find some way of mending the Onyx Hall. Stop, or better yet undo, the decay that had been going on since the beginning of the eighteenth century.

Hodge had known, even before he became Prince, that it wasn’t likely to happen. The creation of the palace had been a legendary work, carried out ages before, by a faerie woman and a mortal man. But they were long dead, and so were the powers that had helped them: Gog and Magog, the giants of London, murdered. Father Thames, silenced by iron. Hodge couldn’t hope to equal their deeds. He’d devoted his time and energy to slowing the disintegration of the Hall, holding together what remained of London’s faerie court, and preparing for the exodus he knew must inevitably come.

An exodus they might—perhaps—be able to avoid after all.

Someone pressed a cup into his hand, and he drank instinctively. Mead, sweet and fortifying, slid down his throat. Then Master Wrain was there, showing a distress Hodge didn’t understand at all. “My lord—”

If he was being formal, then something really had gone wrong. “What?”

With deep reluctance, the sprite said, “It doesn’t last.”

Hodge’s gaze went past him to the lion, which was now almost completed. The tail lashed, and the paws shifted in place; it was peculiar to see something so apparently real still missing the bulk of its head. No sign of unraveling—but it was in the protected space of the Galenic Academy. The oddly warped relationship between the City and the palace that reflected it meant the Academy lay uncomfortably close to the railway works even now proceeding down Cannon Street—but not so close that it was one of the bad patches of the Hall, where the decay was at its worst.

What the loom produced was pure faerie material. It wouldn’t survive for long, if it came into contact with mortal banes.

“How long?” he asked, and downed another gulp of mead.

Niklas answered for Wrain and Ch’ien Mu, in a gruff voice still colored by traces of a German accent. “Ve haven’t tested it yet. It vould slow the problem—”

“But at a cost,” Wrain finished, when Niklas hesitated. “It wouldn’t just unravel; the elements that make it up would be destroyed. And we cannot generate those out of nothing. To craft new pieces of the Hall, we would have to distill the raw substance out of existing materials.”

In other words, render down the contents of the palace. If that would even be enough. Hodge was out of mead; he stared moodily into the empty cup. Given time, they might be able to find other sources—but even with this machine, time was sorely lacking.

Well, he could set someone to looking, and in the meantime, try to solve the underlying problem. “What would make it last longer?”

Because this was the Academy, he didn’t get a wave of helpless shrugs; he got a deluge of speculative answers, everyone talking over each other. “The original anchoring—”; “—given the capacity of the human soul to shelter—”; “—a more suitable weft, perhaps—”; “—perhaps the Oriental elements—”; “—write to Master Ktistes in Greece; he might—”

Hodge put up his hands, and the speculation trailed into silence. “You don’t know. All right. Get to work on finding out. Wilhas, is the Calendar Room still usable?”

Niklas’s brother, blond haired to his red, chewed on his lips inside the depths of his beard. “Yes. For now. But from the map you showed me, the tracks vill run very close to the Monument. Ven they put those in, it may destroy the room.”

Taking with it anyone inside. But they had to risk it; the Calendar Room, a chamber beneath the Monument to the Great Fire, contained time outside of time. With it, the fae could do months or years of research and planning, at a cost of mere days in the world. “I’ll keep my eye on the newspapers and railway magazines,” Hodge said, as if he did not read them incessantly already. “We should ’ave some warning before they lay any track.”

Nods all around. Wrain began to discuss with the others who would go into the Calendar Room, and who would stay outside. The other machine, their calculating engine, could possibly be used to determine what variable might be added to increase durability; they could look for sources of material. If worse came to worst, they could unravel select parts of the Hall, to weave protection around places like this, that needed to survive.

None of it was anything he could contribute to, not personally. Suppressing a groan, Hodge pushed himself to his feet. “Right, you get to that. Let me know when you’ve got some answers.” For now, the most useful thing he could do for them all was to stay alive.

Memory: April 12, 1840

She both dreaded and longed for the dreams.

Dreaded, because without a doubt they were signs of the madness her mother warned her about, a shameful inheritance from her shameless and lunatic father. But longed for, because in these dreams she could permit her creativity free rein; her conversational partners not only welcomed but encouraged her wildest flights of fancy, never once murmuring about hereditary insanity.

“Of course he will never get it built,” she said to the inhuman creatures that sat on the other side of the tea table. “I hold Mr. Babbage in the greatest esteem, but he lacks the social gifts that would gain him the cooperation of others; and without that, he will never have the funding or assistance he requires.”

The taller and more slender of her guests grimaced into his tea. The name of this one was Wrain, and he was a dear friend of her dreams; she had imagined conversations with him many times over the years. “You don’t say so,” the spritely gentleman muttered, with delicate irony. “We thought to offer him our own assistance, but…”

“But he is even ruder than I am,” the shorter and stockier fellow said cheerfully, with a distinct German accent. She hesitated to call this one a gentleman, given his dreadful manners. Properly he was Mr. von das Ticken, but Wrain mostly just called him Nick.

Because it was a dream, she could allow herself to laugh. “Oh dear. The two of you, attempting to converse… that cannot have ended well.”

“It went splendidly,” Wrain said, “for all of thirty seconds. But we have begun to pursue the notion on our own, you know; it’s too great a challenge to forego.”

Of course he was building it; these were her dreams, after all, and she would dearly love to see the Analytical Engine in operation. That Wrain was not presenting it to her right now could only mean that her mind had not yet fully encompassed Babbage’s intricate and brilliant design. Such insufficiency, however, did not stop her imagination from leaping ahead. “At this point the challenges are quite mundane, simple matters of obtaining funding and suitable engineers. I have already begun to look beyond.”

“I think you underestimate the difficulty of the engineering,” Wrain said dryly, but he was half-drowned out by Nick’s expression of sudden, sharp interest: “Vat do you mean by ‘looking beyond’?”

Happiness lifted her spirit, like a pair of bright wings. These two would not mock her, or warn that she had best confine herself to what was mathematically and scientifically possible. She could tell them whatever she dreamt of, however outrageous. “If we—by which I mean my dear Babbage, of course—can design an Analytical Engine to calculate the answers to equations, can we not design other sorts of engines for other sorts of tasks?”

Frowning, Wrain said, “You mean, other devices that can be instructed by cards?”

“Precisely! Engines which can perform complex tasks, more rapidly and accurately than any human operator could achieve. Composing music, for example: provide the machine with cards that instruct it as to the form of a song—a hymn, perhaps, or a chorale, or even a symphony—and then, by execution of the operations, the engine returns a new composition.” Her love for music was an abiding thing, close kin to her love of mathematics, though she suspected her mother—for all the woman’s knowledge of the latter subject—never quite understood the similarities between the two. “It wants only some means of presenting notes and their relationships in suitably abstract form. Well, that and the design of the engine itself, which of course is no simple matter; I expect it would require tens of thousands of gears, more even than the Analytical Engine.”

Wrain’s mouth fell open by progressive stages during this speech; Nick had gone still as a stone. After a dumbfounded pause, the spritely gentleman said, “With sufficiently abstract representation—”

“Anything,” Nick breathed, staring off into the distance like he had seen a vision of Heaven itself. “Music. Pictures. It could write books. It could—”

His voice cut off. She felt as if she were flying, lifted above the clay of this earth by the power of her own ingenuity. Only gradually did she realize that while her companions, too, were flying, the path they followed was a very specific one. Wrain and Nick were staring at one another, communicating in half-spoken words and abrupt gestures, too excited to get their thoughts out of their heads before leaping on to the next. “Like a loom,” Wrain said; Nick answered him, “But our notation,” and the gentleman nodded as if his dwarfish companion had made a very good point.

It produced a strange feeling in the depths of her mind. If these were her dreams, then why did it feel as if they had abruptly become about something she didn’t understand? A touch of fear stirred. Perhaps Mother is right, and this is the beginnings of madness.

Wrain leapt to his feet and seized her hand, shaking it up and down as if she were a man. His grip felt very hard, and very real. “Ada, dearest Ada, thank you. Oh, I have no idea how to build this thing—we lack even the notation by which to instruct it; I mean, the system of notation we have is dreadfully inadequate, it would not suffice for a Difference Engine, let alone more—but until you spoke I never even conceived of such a device. Not for our own purposes. Will you help us?”

Baffled, increasingly unsure of everything, Ada said, “Help you with what?”

Nick laughed, a rolling guffaw that made her certain he, at least, was deranged. “Building an engine of magic calculation. Something of gears and levers and wheels, that can tell us how to create things, faerie enchantments, too complex for us to imagine on our own. And perhaps, in time, to make them for us.”

No, there was no doubt at all. Ada had taken the first step—or perhaps more than one—down the path of madness her father had followed. Faeries and enchantment, exactly the sorts of things of which her mother disapproved. If she did not turn back now, gambling, poetry, and sexual immorality were sure to follow.

But she did not want to abandon her friends, even if they were phantasms of her diseased mind. Could she not allow herself a little madness, and trust to prayer and the rigorous strictures of science to keep the rest at bay?

Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace, daughter of the infamous poet Lord Byron and his mathematical wife Annabella Milbanke, suspected she knew the answer to that—and it wasn’t in her favor.

“Please, Ada,” Wrain entreated her. “I have seen the disaster that is Babbage’s notes; I daresay you understand them better than he does himself. Or at least can explain them to others, which he patently cannot. We will not be able to do this without help.”

It would have taken a harder soul than Ada Lovelace’s to say no to that desperately hopeful expression. With a feeling of both doom and delight, she said, “Charles Babbage is too rude and too sane to ever help you in this matter. Poor though my own intellect may be, I will bend it to your cause.”

Islington, London: March 14, 1884

Eliza had spent the days leading up to the meeting of the London Fairy Society imagining how things might go. The people might prove to be nothing more than a cluster of bored wives, reading collections of stories from the folk of rural England, clucking their tongues and sighing over the loss of a peasant society none of them had ever seen in person. They might be a group of scholars, documenting that loss and forming theories about what defect of education or brain made peasants believe such ridiculous things. They might be the kind of people Eliza had seen at Charing Cross last fall—working hand-in-glove with the faeries to sow chaos among decent folk.

She imagined telling the story of how Owen was stolen away, to the shock and sympathy of her listeners. She imagined haranguing the society’s leader until he told her where to find a faerie. She imagined finding a faerie there in person and shaking the truth out of him.

She never got around to imagining how she would get into No. 9 White Lion Street.

Eliza had never been to Islington before. When evening began to draw close on the afternoon of the second Friday, she took her nearly empty barrow and began walking up Aldersgate Street through Clerkenwell. She asked directions as she went, and eventually was directed to a lane behind a coaching inn, in a busy part of town.

The building at No. 9 proved to be a house, and a respectable one at that. Eliza stared at it in dismay. The setting of her various fancies had always been vague—a room; chairs; faceless people—she had presumed it would be some kind of public building, like the ones where workers’ combinations sometimes met to plan protests against their masters. Not someone’s house, where it would be impossible to fade into the background.

“See here now—what are you doing, standing about like that?”

Biting down on a curse, Eliza turned, and saw a constable eyeing her suspiciously. All at once she became aware of her clothing: two ragged skirts, layered for warmth and because she had nowhere to keep the second but on her body. Men’s boots, their leather cracked and filthy. A shawl that hadn’t seen a good wash since the last time it rained. Her bonnet had once been some respectable lady’s castoff, but that was years ago; the ribbons she used to tie it did not match, and there was a hole in the brim big enough to poke her thumb through.

And she’d been standing there for several minutes, staring at a housefront as if wondering how to break in.

Out of the corner of her eye, Eliza glimpsed a bearded gentleman in a bowler hat knocking at the door of No. 9. “Would you like to buy some oysters, sir?” she asked the constable, her attention on the other side of the street. A maid opened the door, and let the gent in.

“No, I wouldn’t,” the bobby said, nose wrinkling at their old stench. “Get you gone. The sort of people who live here don’t need the likes of you around.”

The likes of her would never get into that house, either. Eliza ducked her head and mumbled an apology, pushing her barrow past the fellow, carefully not looking at the house as she went.

He followed her to the nearby High Street; she was able to lose him in the crowds there. Tongue stuck into the gap where her father had knocked out one of her teeth years ago, Eliza considered her options.

She didn’t have many. But she wasn’t willing to give up, either. If she couldn’t attend the meeting of the London Fairy Society, then at least she could try to see who did.

Making a halfhearted effort to cry her oysters, she turned left on the next street she found, hoping Islington’s tangle wouldn’t defeat her the way the City’s sometimes did. A few narrow courts gave her no luck, before she found an alley that went through, back to White Lion Street. She gave it a careful look before proceeding, but didn’t see the peeler anywhere.

Eliza hurried down the pavement, barrow rattling before her. Memory served her well: the house across the street and down one door from No. 9 had shutters drawn and locked across its windows, and the lamp at the door was not lit. Uninhabited, or the residents had gone on a journey. Either way, no one was around to object if she hid in the area at the bottom of their basement steps.

She waited until no one was nearby, then hefted her barrow down, trying not to spill the remaining oysters everywhere, or trip in the darkness. Then she threw the more ragged of her two skirts over them to mute the smell, and peeped through the iron bars to see what happened on the other side of the street.

It seemed almost everyone had arrived already, for she only saw one additional person knock at the door. This was a young lady, she thought; it was hard to tell, for the woman made every attempt at secrecy, even tugging her hood forward and darting glances about the street. Eliza shrank back into the shadows, and when she looked out again, the door was closing behind the mysterious girl.

Then it was seven o’clock, and no one else came. Eliza sat on the cold steps to think some more. Should she go around the back? If there was a garden, she might be able to climb into it, and if the meeting was on the ground or first floor… common sense reasserted itself. More than likely she’d be caught, especially with that peeler around.

Better to wait for next month. There were a few people in Whitechapel who owed her favors, or were sympathetic to pleas for help; she might be able to get herself clean and respectable enough to knock on the door.

But that meant a whole month more without Owen. A month closer to possibly losing him forever.

Eliza dug in her pocket and drew out a battered piece of paper, its corners long since torn off by ill handling. She had to stop herself brushing her thumb across the faces, for fear she’d wear them even more indistinct.

Mrs. Darragh, her arms spread wide to embrace the children before her. Little Maggie. Eliza, her black hair unruly even after Mrs. Darragh’s efforts to tame it. And Owen, a knock-kneed boy of twelve. It was the only picture of him, taken in celebration of Maggie’s first communion.

She had to preserve it. Without the photo, Eliza feared she would forget what he looked like.

Shivering, she crossed her arms on her bent knees and laid her forehead against them. He’s dead, you stupid fool, Maggie had said. Eliza had proof to the contrary, of a sort, though she didn’t dare admit it.

The girl might have guessed, if she ever bothered to think about it. Eliza and Owen had never told Maggie about the faeries, but she knew perfectly well about the ghosts. She’d been there when Eliza saw her mother, a full year after the woman had died. And she knew Eliza had summoned others, or tried to—though not why.

It had been a foolish dream, for the likes of her. Most of the women earning fame, and sometimes money, as mediums or spiritualists were of the middling sort: bored solicitors’ wives, ladies too respectable to work for a living, but not rich enough to enjoy their idleness. Not Irish hoydens. And it would hardly have gone over well in Whitechapel, where speaking to ghosts was likely to brand her a witch. But if it had worked…

The ghost part worked well enough. But before she could try and make money at it, Owen had disappeared. The only ghost she’d tried to summon since then was his, every All Hallows’ Eve.

Five years she’d tried, calling for her lost friend, trying to manifest him in the air before her, or at least feel the comfort of his presence in her mind. Five years of failure, and then she’d given up, because she no longer wanted to know. If he came, she would know he was dead. If she didn’t try, she could tell herself he was still alive, and ignore the possibility that perhaps she just wasn’t strong enough to raise him.

It didn’t make sense, but there it was.

To her surprise, she heard the bell of a nearby church tolling eight. Lifting her head once more, Eliza felt the imprint of folded cloth on her forehead. She’d fallen asleep. Bloody lucky, you were, not to be caught by the peeler. Silently calling herself nine kinds of idiot, Eliza stood and looked through the bars again.

Lights still burned in the house across the street, and before long the front door opened. A maidservant emerged, trotting off toward High Street; shortly after she returned, a hansom cab arrived, followed by someone’s brougham. People began to depart—Eliza counted seven, ranging from the gentleman she’d seen before to a matronly woman in the gaudiest bonnet she’d ever laid eyes on. The only one missing was the furtive young woman, and just when Eliza was about to give up waiting, she appeared on the steps.

Followed almost immediately by another woman. “Miss Kittering!”

The first one paused, hands on the edge of her hood, ready to pull it up. The light above the steps of No. 9 showed her to be quite a wealthy young woman indeed; she had obviously taken care to choose plain clothing, but her pert little cap had some very expensive feathers in it. The hair beneath was a glossy yellow, twisted into an elegant knot. Eliza caught only the briefest glimpse of her face, though, before the young woman turned to see who had hailed her.

The other woman was remarkable in her very lack of remarkability. Medium-brown hair; medium-age features; medium-quality clothing that could have belonged to the wife of a middling professional man, perhaps a solicitor or a clergyman with a good living. As she hurried down the steps to join Miss Kittering, though, a strange intensity came into her manner, that gave the lie to her drab appearance. “Will you spare me a moment?”

Miss Kittering glanced behind her, to where one last carriage waited. “I must get back—”

“I understand. Would you perhaps let me ride with you? I have a very particular proposition, you see, that I did not want to make before the others—it is for you only, Miss Kittering, because I can see that you are a more… visionary spirit than the others. I suspect you could accept, even embrace, truths the others are not yet ready for.”

Miss Kittering’s interest sharpened visibly. Eliza curled her hands around the bars, as if they were the only things holding her in place. Otherwise she might fly up the steps and accost this stranger on the spot.

“What truths?” the young lady asked, curiosity clear in her voice.

The other woman hesitated, then stepped closer. Her reply was so quiet that Eliza could only barely make it out. “That the materialistic views which bind so many in this scientific age are not the whole of the story. I know more of faeries than I have admitted publicly, Miss Kittering. And I tell you this: You are in a position to do a great favor to one of them, and receive a favor in return.”

Miss Kittering’s laugh was much louder, and half disbelieving—but only half. “Me? I don’t see how—”

“This is not the place,” her companion said, a tilt of her head toward No. 9 making her meaning clear. “If I may ride with you, though…”

“Yes, of course—I am quite intrigued. And I mustn’t delay here any longer; Mama expects me home. Come, and we’ll talk along the way.” Together they went toward the carriage. Desperate, Eliza risked coming up the steps, as if she’d just emerged from the house’s cellar; she was rewarded by hearing Miss Kittering tell the coachman, “South Kensington, please.” Then they were inside, and the coachman mounted his box once more; with a flap of the reins they were away.

Leaving Eliza standing in the middle of White Lion Street in a daze. Was she lying?

It might be like the fraudulent spiritualists who claimed to summon ghosts, only their manifestations were nothing more than a conjuror’s tricks. Whitechapel had its share of confidence men—and women, too—swindling the gullible, and Miss Kittering was both young and wealthy enough to be a tempting target.

Or that woman might have been telling the truth.

If only Eliza had gotten her name! But—her feet paused on the pavement—she did have Miss Kittering’s name. And a district, too: South Kensington. Should the woman’s claims prove true, Miss Kittering would have her own connection to the faeries.

Which Eliza could make use of. If she found a way to get close. And for Owen’s sake, she would find a way.

She almost forgot her barrow in her haste. Eliza dragged her second skirt back on, hauled the barrow up the steps, not caring if she spilled oysters now. Miss Kittering. South Kensington. With that, I won’t have to wait another month.

Owen—I’m coming.

The Goblin Market, Onyx Hall: March 19, 1884

“Dreams, good and bad! Loved ones back from the dead, very cheap right now, or demons chasing you for just a little bit more… morning there, my canine friend. I ’ear you’re doing well these days.”

Dead Rick scowled at Broddy Bobbin, waving for him to lower his voice. “You think I want that shouted all over the Market, man? Just because I’ve got enough to keep people from breaking my fingers, don’t mean I’m ready to go around flashing my bread like some rich toff.”

The crate Bobbin stood on only brought him to Dead Rick’s height; like most hobs, he was barely child-size. Any child that ugly, though, risked being drowned in a river. He smiled at Dead Rick, but it was a hideous thing, bad enough for a goblin’s face. “So you do ’ave bread. In that case, let me show you—”

The skriker rolled his eyes. “I told you, I’m paying off my debts. Even if I wanted your grubby little second’and dreams, I wouldn’t ’ave anything to spare for ’em. I’m just looking for Cyma.”

Bobbin pouted, but his wounded look was even worse than his smile, and he knew it. Giving Dead Rick up as a lost cause, he jerked one knobby thumb farther down the chamber. “She were talking with Charcoal Eddie a little while ago. You tell that bastard ’e’d better steal some worthwhile dreams next time. That last lot was pure rubbish.”

They were always rubbish these days. Stealing dreams properly took time and effort; the goblins and pucks who did that sort of thing could no longer afford either. Mostly the Goblin Market made do with what it already had, everyone buying and selling the same trinkets and scraps over and over, like a leech feeding on itself. And the wares got more broken and worn out with every exchange.

That didn’t stop them from trying, though. This, the largest of the Market’s actual markets, was full of noise and movement. No mortals—those were sold elsewhere, in a flesh market of squalling babies and people in cages—but a thousand kinds of things, from captive dreams to scratched phonograph cylinders. Fae of all kinds and nations came here, to buy or to sell; the majority might be English, but there were Scots and Irish and Welsh, Germans and Spaniards and French, creatures from so far afield they might be a different sort of being entirely. One pen held an enormous three-headed snake, which the alf standing in front proclaimed was a naga from distant India; it watched the passersby with drugged and unfriendly eyes.

Dead Rick found Cyma standing in front of a cracked mirror, holding a dress of printed cotton against her body. It was a strange-looking thing, with a tiny bodice that went no lower than the breasts, and a narrow skirt falling loose from there. “Where in Faerie did that come from?”

Cyma shook her head at him, amused and pitying. “Don’t you remember? They used to wear these, years ago—mortal women did. During the Prince Regent’s reign. I found them delightful. Very Greek, don’t you think?”

It could have been Chinese for all he cared. Dead Rick sidled closer and muttered, “I can pay you back now. Mostly, anyway—I’m still a bit short. But if you let me keep a bite or two, I can probably get the rest.”

He’d left Cyma for last because she was kinder than his other creditors. She had been a court lady, rumor said, back when there still was a court beyond the Prince’s few followers, but she didn’t spend her time dallying in the surviving gardens with the scant handful of lords and ladies that remained. She couldn’t: Cyma had her own debts, of a sort that couldn’t be repaid in bread, and Nadrett held them. It gave her more sympathy than most; she might forgive him the extra delay.

Dead Rick was startled when she smiled and patted him on the cheek. “You’re a sweet one, aren’t you? Paying me back, when I know you’re all but penniless. You needn’t worry. Keep it for yourself; I don’t mind.”

He stiffened warily. “In exchange for what?”

Cyma’s eyebrows rose. “Why, nothing. I don’t need it, Dead Rick.”

The use of his name was as good as a whole message in code. Nobody else used it; almost nobody in the Market knew it. He was just Nadrett’s dog, a nameless slave. Hearing those words on Cyma’s lips told him she wasn’t playing some game, bargaining forgiveness for some favor from him; she meant it. He didn’t owe her.

Why?

Even if she was leading some mortal lovers about on a string, the bread would have been valuable; with it, she could buy practically anything she wanted. That dress, and everything else the bored puck behind her had to sell. Everything but freedom from Nadrett. “What did you do, loot a bakery?”

She laughed. “No, no. Better than that. I’m leaving, Dead Rick. I’ve had enough of all of this.” One hand swept a graceful arc, indicating the tawdry excesses of the Goblin Market around them. “I’m going away.”

It produced a strange pang in his gut. “You think you can run away from Nadrett?”

“Not run away, no…” Cyma’s expression darkened. “I know what Nadrett is like. But I’ve done what he asked of me, and settled my debt, and now—well, I must look to the future, mustn’t I?”

It echoed Dead Rick’s own thoughts, and made the cramp in his gut worse. “Where?”

She laid a sly finger alongside her nose. “Wouldn’t you like to know. But I know better than to say anything; I don’t want anyone stealing my place. Keep the bread, Dead Rick, with my compliments. Use it to buy your own way free of that dreadful fellow.”

The pain was like a spike through his innards. If only I could.

He mumbled thanks to Cyma for the bread and beat a retreat before his bitterness could overwhelm him. Making his way deeper into the warren of the Goblin Market, he sought out the one thing even scarcer than bread: solitude.

The corridor he went to had once branched off to the left, but the buckling of that delicate arch had brought the stone crashing in, closing the way to anything bigger than a mouse. There was a hob approaching from the other direction as Dead Rick neared that collapse, a surly Irish fellow who did the occasional odd job for Lacca, another Goblin Market boss. The skriker leaned against the wall perhaps ten feet from the fallen stones and dug through the pockets of his trousers, as if looking for something in their empty depths, until the hob had turned the corner and gone into the room beyond.

Then Dead Rick leapt for the rockfall.

It looked solid, and for the most part it was. But an agile fellow could crawl atop one of the larger blocks, and from there it was apparent that the mass behind had left a small gap, just big enough for someone Dead Rick’s size to squirm through. Then he slid on his stomach across a polished bit of marble that had miraculously survived the collapse unmarred, and out into the space beyond.

It was pitchy black, but his hands knew their business. He dropped a dark cloth over the hole he’d come in by, weighted its bottom edge with a thick piece of wood, then found and opened the box. Out floated a trio of faerie lights. Mindless things, they didn’t object to a bit of confinement, and that was the only way he could keep them from wandering off in his absence—wandering, and betraying his secret refuge.

By the standards of the Goblin Market, it was comfort. He had blankets and a few cushions, and what odds and ends amused him but weren’t worth much in the Market. Everything of real value was beneath a loose stone in the floor, toward the back of this space, where the rest of the collapse had blocked the passage completely.

He inspected it, out of nagging fear. A small engagement ring, taken from a dying spinster, holding her unwavering hope that her fiancé would return from his journey to India. A mermaid’s tear, like a lustrous blue-green pearl. A carte de visite photograph of a woman. To that he added five pieces of bread: the debt Cyma had told him to keep.

Five pieces. It was enough to see him well clear of London, and Nadrett’s influence. Then he could make his way across the countryside, skirting the churches and railways, until he found some other court to take him in.

But it would mean leaving the one thing he truly desired—the one thing no hidden cache could buy for him, be it ten times this large.

A voice whispered through the air around him, dry as dust. “How badly do you want it back?”

Dead Rick shot to his feet and flattened his shoulders against the wall. His hackles rose, and a growl rumbled instinctively in his throat. But there was no one to direct it at.

“Snarl all you like,” the voice said, amused. “And when you feel you’ve defended your territory enough, then consider my question, and answer it.”

Enough? How could he defend his territory at all? Dead Rick’s ears were alive to the slightest sound; his nose caught every scent out of the air. No one had crawled over and between and under the stones to his refuge, not even one of the little winged sprites that sometimes flew messages for other fae. No one was hiding anywhere in the small space. He was completely alone—and yet somehow this voice was there with him.

Fae had many strange talents; separating voice from body was hardly the most impressive. But how had the speaker found this place?

“Get out of my fucking ’ome,” he spat, hands curling into useless fists. “I ain’t answering no questions from no faceless bastard. You want to talk to me, you do it somewhere else.”

Unruffled, the voice agreed, “I could do that. But you would still know your sanctuary had been violated—and you would not get what you want. So once again, I put it to you: How badly do you want it back?”

Beneath the anger, the instinct to chase off the intruder, fear stirred. Dead Rick said, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

His eyes darted about as he spoke, as if they would be any use. The voice seemed to come from everywhere at once, and there were no scents to help him. But an accent, yes—the refined tone of a gentleman. And the condescending chuckle of one. “You’re too honest a hound for that, Dead Rick. But if you will not answer a question, then perhaps you will respond to an offer. Very well: I can give your memory back to you.”

“Liar,” Dead Rick snarled, coming off the wall as if there were something he could fight.

“Why assume so? Because Nadrett keeps it locked away? This is the Goblin Market; such things change hands all the time, by fair means or foul. Or perhaps you are suspicious of charity. I assure you, I want something in return. And so we come again to the original question, which is how much your memory is worth to you.”

Had the speaker been in the room, he would have known the answer to that. Every muscle in Dead Rick’s body was rigid with longing. Sweep aside the accumulated dust and rubbish of his time in the Goblin Market, and underneath lay a blank slate—no, that was too pleasant a comparison. Those newer memories were the scab over a wound, concealing the gaping, bloody void beneath. An unhealing wound, robbing him of everything: his past, his self—even his name, until Cyma had given it back to him.

How much would he pay, to regain what Nadrett had taken from him?

Wariness helped him regain control of his voice. “You’ve already got some price in mind, or you wouldn’t ’ave made the offer.”

“Very observant. Yes, I have my price, and what’s more, I think you will find it congenial. I want you to turn on your master.”

Nadrett. The hand on the leash, the voice calling him dog and making the word hurt. It took a lot to make a hound turn on his master, but Nadrett had passed that bar years ago. But—“If I could kill ’im, I would’ve done it already,” Dead Rick said.

“How fortunate for you, then, that death was not what I had in mind. In fact, at present I would prefer him to remain alive; his demise would not profit me. Not yet, at least. But once I have what I want…” The voice laughed. “Then I will slip the chain from around your neck, and watch you tear out his throat.”

The mere thought called the taste of blood into his mouth. To hunt Nadrett through the night garden, until the bastard’s legs and wind gave out and he fell to the ground, and then to leap upon him with teeth bared…

Or just to shoot him, or knife him in the back. Dead Rick honestly didn’t care how Nadrett died. Just so long as he got his memories back.

But, as the speaker had said, this was the Goblin Market. And nobody here could be trusted. “You expect me to risk my neck for you—when I don’t even know who you are?”

Whatever face was on the other end of that voice, Dead Rick could imagine it smiling. “Not at present, no. We will enter into this alliance one careful step at a time, each watching the other for signs of betrayal. For now, what I ask is no particular risk. Merely information, that I want you to find for me.”

Dead Rick spat onto the stone, wondering if the stranger could hear it. “No. I ain’t doing nothing for a cove I can’t see. ’Ow do I even know you can do what you say?”

A sigh answered him. “Very well. As proof of my goodwill, let me give you something: a fragment of your past.”

The skriker stopped breathing, hackles rising again—but not in anger or fear.

“The first task Nadrett demanded of you,” the voice said, “was to steal a mortal from the world above. A young man—little more than a boy, really. Irish, and poor. He had a friend, a girl of the same age; from what I hear, she attempted to kill you when she realized what you were doing.”

A pause. Dead Rick worked spit back into his dry mouth and said, “From what you hear. So you got the story; so what?”

“The story doesn’t end there. Or rather, it doesn’t begin there. The boy you stole, and the girl who was his friend—they were both friends of yours.”

Her screams were one of the first things he remembered, echoing in the empty void of his memory. Only half-coherent—only half-English—he’d never understood what she was saying, but the intent of the words was easy to make out. As was the betrayal on her face.

The voice said, “Nadrett was testing his control over you, making certain you remembered nothing. You would never have harmed either of them if you knew. And it amused him to make you turn on those who trusted you.”

The fury rising inside Dead Rick was a strange thing, with a hollow void at its core. He couldn’t be properly angry for the friends he’d betrayed; he didn’t remember who they were. No, it’s worse than that, he thought, with grim despair. I don’t remember what friends are. Who could he give that name to? Cyma? But the instinct was there, the impulse to loyalty, whatever beating it had taken in the last seven years, and it left him shaking with rage that had nowhere to go. Dead Rick almost howled, just to let something out.

At the moment he reached that breaking point, the stranger spoke again, as if he had measured Dead Rick’s endurance to the last inch. “Nadrett has isolated you from everyone who knew you before, forbidding you to leave the Goblin Market without his orders, cowing those who might be able to say more. I am not bound by his restrictions. For every piece of information you bring to me, every task you undertake on my behalf, I will tell you a piece of your own past.”

The unvoiced howl had lodged like a knot in his throat, painful to swallow down. Thickly, Dead Rick said, “You could make things up.”

“I could. But I won’t; in fact, I may give you ways to verify what I say. But that is beside the point; in the end, the point is to do harm to Nadrett. Will you assist me?”

The thick nails on Dead Rick’s feet scraped against the stone, his toes curling down as if he were about to leap. But which way?

It’s stupid. It’s fucking stupid. Agreeing to work with somebody you can’t even see—you know nobody in this place can be trusted—

But yearning, and the desire for revenge, were stronger than common sense. And the stranger had called him by name.

“What do you want me to do?”

“Excellent.” Pleasure radiated from the word, but quickly gave way to cool instruction. “Tell me: What do you know about passages to Faerie?”

Dead Rick snorted. “Ain’t you the one who came in ’ere pointing out I don’t ’ave no memories?”

“You’ve had seven years to gain more. Do you know nothing?”

The skriker slid down the wall until he was tucked into a comfortable crouch, scratching his torn ear. “Just the usual bosh. Everybody says ’e knows something, and pretty much everybody’s lying.”

“Because most of the passages we knew are gone. The railways are not only a threat to the Onyx Hall; they’ve wrought a great deal of destruction in the countryside. You’ve seen the refugees here, of course. Their homes are the least of what’s been lost. These lines of iron mortals have laid across the land act like dikes and canals, shaping how the water flows. Making the usual roads impassable.”

“You want me to find you some way to get to Faerie?” The first step was easy: leave England. Go someplace that hadn’t been so thoroughly carved up by iron, not yet. And then hope you could find a passage somewhere in the American frontier, or convince the rakshasas or whoever in India to let you through, and take your chances with whatever their part of Faerie looked like.

“No,” the voice said. “I want you to find out what way Nadrett has.”

The skriker’s heart thumped hard against his ribs. “The ’ell with you. ’E don’t ’ave nothing of the sort. Don’t you think we’d know, if ’e did?”

“It depends. The longer Nadrett waits, the greater the desperation; the more fae will pay for the escape he offers. But I suspect he does not have it yet. A new passage to Faerie cannot be a simple thing, or cleverer minds than his would have worked it out by now; they have certainly tried. No, I believe Nadrett is working toward this end, and is close to succeeding.”

No need to ask why the stranger wanted the information; it would be more valuable than bread, more powerful than the empty throne of the Onyx Court. But— “And ’ow exactly am I supposed to find this out for you?”

“In stages. Have you ever heard of a fellow named Rewdan?” Dead Rick shook his head, then realized the voice must not have any way of seeing him, and repeated the denial out loud. “I want you to find him for me. Rumor has it that he went to Faerie—from some foreign land—and returned, on Nadrett’s orders. I’d like to know why.”

Dead Rick licked his lips. He’d be better off keeping his mouth shut, but he had to ask. “Why send me? If you knows the Market, you knows there’s a bloke named Valentin Aspell. ’E buys and sells this kind of information every day.”

“Which means he might very well turn around and sell the news of my asking to someone else. You, on the other hand, are desperate enough to help me, and stand to gain very little by betraying me.”

That was true enough. Still— “Nadrett might find out, though. I ain’t that subtle.”

“Then try harder.”

The annoyed reply was a little victory, and Dead Rick wondered if the speaker noticed it; for the first time, he’d prodded the stranger into an answer that hadn’t been rehearsed. Those three words told me more about ’is real nature than everything ’e said before them. Whoever this cove was, he was accustomed to giving orders, and had little patience for fools. “I’ll do what I can,” Dead Rick promised. “When I ’as something, how will I tell you?”

What followed after was almost as telling as the three words; the stranger regained his composure with speed. “Nadrett permits you the night garden; it won’t attract suspicion if you go there. Bury a bone near the old pavilion, and I will speak to you again back here soon after.”

“No,” Dead Rick said instantly. In part because the choice of a signal felt like mockery, but mostly because of how the conversation began. “I told you to get out, and I meant it.”

The impatience was back, and stronger. “Will you argue with everything I say? There is nowhere else in the Goblin Market that might be considered remotely safe; anyone in this warren would cheerfully sell news of your dealings for a scrap of mortal bread. If you leave the Market too regularly, it will draw Nadrett’s attention, and that would be equally detrimental to my plans. If you insist on defending your territory, then I will promise not to return until your signal—but I will not undertake pointless risks just because of your canine instincts.”

Dead Rick gritted his teeth. The bastard had a point. However little the skriker liked it. “Not until my signal.”

Venemously, the stranger said, “Just don’t take too long.”

Then silence. Dead Rick waited, utterly still, every sense alive; but there was nothing.

He let out his breath slowly, and realized his heart was beating at twice its normal pace. “Bloody shit-sack,” he muttered, and shifted to dog form before circling the whole space, sniffing every last corner. Nothing but cold stone and his own scent, so finally he sank into a wary posture on his pile of blankets, from which he could watch the entrance.

He couldn’t trust a bit of it. But Dead Rick was just desperate enough to agree anyway. And whoever this stranger was, he knew it.

Well, no point wasting time. Turning himself into a man once more, Dead Rick began the hunt for Rewdan.

Cromwell Road, South Kensington: March 24, 1884

The mere sight of No. 35 Cromwell Road was almost enough to make Eliza give up.

She felt uncomfortable simply walking around South Kensington. This was the area where the Great Exhibitions of ’51 and ’62 had been held, before Eliza was born; afterward, some rich gents had decided to build grand museums in the area, and the people who lived around them were grand enough to match.

But even by the standards of the area, the houses along that stretch of Cromwell Road were intimidating. Their fronts stretched five windows wide—twice as much as an ordinary house—and rose a full four stories, plus attics, all of it brilliantly white, even in London’s dirty fogs. The columned entrances looked like a row of maws, all waiting to devour her.

If she’d had to go in one of those doors, her nerve might have broken entirely. But those were never for servants. Instead she went to the western end of the row, where No. 35 stood in detached glory, and found the staircase leading down to the area. Before she could question the wisdom of her plan, Eliza hurried down the steps and rapped on the basement door.

It opened almost immediately, revealing a skinny girl of perhaps twelve. Her hands, red with hot water and harsh soap, marked her as the scullery maid. “If you please,” Eliza said, “I’m here to apply for a job.”

The girl waved her in silently. Eliza stepped through into a narrow entryway, then followed the girl through a dimly lit basement larger than some people’s entire houses. All around her, Eliza could hear people working. How many staff must a house like this employ?

Entering a room dominated by a heavy trestle table, the girl curtsied and spoke for the first time. “Mrs. Fowler, there’s someone here to speak to you.”

A woman sat at one end of the table, counting through a stack of fine linen napkins. Like the table, she was heavily built, with a face like soft dough and eyes like bits of granite. Hoping her nervousness did not show, Eliza echoed the scullery maid’s curtsy and said, “Good afternoon, ma’am. My name is Elizabeth White, and I heard you had a position open for a housemaid.”

Getting that information hadn’t been difficult, not once she found where the Kittering family lived. Servants gossiped here as much as they did in Whitechapel; more, even, because there were so many of them. Eliza had thought it a stroke of unimaginable luck—at first. She soon discovered that open positions were a common thing in the Kittering household.

Mrs. Fowler, the Kitterings’ housekeeper, said nothing at first, but kept counting napkins. Only when she had finished did she stand and say, “Follow me, Miss White.”

The housekeeper led her elsewhere in the basement, to the room that apparently served her as bedroom and office both. It had its own little coal grate, and gas lamps Mrs. Fowler cranked up to a brighter state—luxury that made Eliza’s eyes pop. The room itself was comfortably furnished, with a modern brass bed stand and pictures on the walls. The chair she was gestured into, however, was hard and straight backed: no comfort there.

Mrs. Fowler held out one hand, and after a blank moment Eliza realized what the woman wanted. Trying to appear confident, she gave the housekeeper a paper from her pocket.

She carefully did not hold her breath as the woman read it over with a frown. Getting that paper, and the tidy dress she wore, had taken everything she had: every spare penny, and every favor she could call due from friends back in Whitechapel. Applying for a maid’s position in Mrs. DiGiuseppe’s household had been a simple enough matter; nobody who relied on a single maid-of-all-work could afford to be deeply fussy about the quality of servant she attracted.

But that was the East End of London, well supplied with Italians and lascars and Jews, much less so with respectability. This was the West End, and it might as well have been another city entirely.

A city of privilege, rank, and above all, wealth.

From what she had learned, gossiping with other servants, the previous Mr. Kittering had made a small fortune in a railway speculation, and his son had, through clever investments, transformed it into a very large one. He then married the daughter of a man who imported exotic goods from Japan, and that had made their wealth secure. They were exactly the sort of upstarts that attracted gossip—both of the envious sort, from those who craved money, and of the disdainful sort, from those who insisted that no amount of it could replace good breeding.

It wasn’t hard to guess why Miss Kittering—youngest of six children, and the only one still unmarried—had to go in secret to meetings of the London Fairy Society. Wealth, her mother had; good breeding, she could not buy; that left respectability as the final component of an ideal life, and Mrs. Kittering pursued respectability with everything in her power.

Which posed certain difficulties for Eliza. The easiest way to keep watch over Miss Kittering would be to join the household as a maid. To do that, however, she needed a character from her previous employer. Mrs. DiGiuseppe had been a decent enough sort, but her recommendation would not help Eliza here; the word of an East End Italian would more likely see her kicked out on the spot.

Fortunately for her, the Kittering household could not keep maids for love or money. Mrs. Kittering, it seemed, was the problem; she was a dreadful mistress, eternally sacking maids for trivial shortcomings, and those she didn’t sack soon quit to seek a position elsewhere. Had Eliza been looking for employment on ordinary terms, she would never have applied here. But she only needed to spend a little while in the Kittering household, and the rapid change of staff made the housekeeper more desperate in her hiring choices than she might otherwise be.

Or so Eliza hoped. The character in Mrs. Fowler’s hands was falsified; if she was the sort of sensible housekeeper who visited the previous employer to inquire in person, she would soon discover the lie. But surely she cannot spare such time, not when she’s so often hiring.

Mrs. Fowler sniffed and turned the paper over, as if expecting there should be more to say about a good maid’s morals, honesty, cleanliness, capability, temper, and health. “Elizabeth White,” she said. When Eliza nodded, she shook her head. “Not here, you won’t be. The missus is still mourning Hannah—the only good maid she ever had—and doesn’t see why she should learn a new maid’s name. If you work here, you’ll be Hannah. How often do you go to church?”

Eliza hadn’t attended Mass since last October, but she suspected “never” would be a more welcome word out of her mouth than “Mass.” Mrs. Fowler, according to rumor, was a stout evangelical. “Whenever I can,” she said, “work permitting. I study my Bible at nights, if I cannot go to church.” Why did I just say that? I’ll never be able to afford a Bible.

But it made Mrs. Fowler look pleased. “How would you wash a silk handkerchief?”

Mrs. DiGiuseppe had never owned such a thing. “Gently,” Eliza said, trying to think what would make sense. “I would, ah—soak it for a time, and see if that lifts the dirt free, and if not—ah, perhaps scrub at any stains with my fingers—”

The pleased look faded; clearly there were secrets to the washing of silk handkerchiefs that Eliza did not know. “And the recipe for starch?”

There, she was on firmer ground. “Half a pint of cold water, and one quart boiling, for every two tablespoonfuls of starch; but the hot water must be properly boiling when it’s added. And I stir it with a wax candle to prevent the iron from sticking.”

“Which also gives a smooth appearance to the linen.” Mrs. Fowler seemed satisfied with that answer, at least. “Show me your teeth— Well, I suppose they will suffice. What illnesses have you had?”

“Measles and scarlet fever. And my mum took me to be vaccinated against smallpox.” Actually it had been Mrs. Darragh, behind the back of Eliza’s mother. They had to go to an English doctor for it, and many of Whitechapel’s residents were suspicious of that, even though the vaccination was free. Or perhaps especially because it was.

Mrs. Fowler pursed her lips at Eliza’s character again, as if something about it was bothering her. But after a moment, she folded it briskly and said, “I can take you on as an under-housemaid. You don’t have the skills for more, but if you last here you might learn enough for a better position. Your pay will be twelve pounds yearly plus an allowance for tea, sugar, and beer, and you will have one evening off each week, one day off each month. On Sundays you will accompany me to church.”

She said nothing about an annual holiday; Eliza doubted maids stayed long enough to claim such a thing. “Thank you, Mrs. Fowler. That sounds very good.” And it did, strangely enough. Twelve pounds yearly! Without her having to pay for lodgings every night, or walk miles through London’s streets shouting herself hoarse. It was more than she earned as a struggling costerwoman, and for that matter, more than she’d earned as Mrs. DiGiuseppe’s slavey. So this is what working for wealth looks like.

But it came with a price: working for Mrs. Kittering, and lying about who she was. And an under-housemaid would have less opportunity to spy upon Miss Kittering than one who worked above stairs. Eliza’s enthusiasm was therefore tempered by the time Mrs. Fowler asked, “How soon can you begin?”

“Oh, as soon as may be,” she hastened to assure the housekeeper. “Today, if you like.”

“I will show you the house, then, and tonight you may go fetch your things—” She broke off at Eliza’s muted reaction. “What is it?”

Eliza ducked her head, embarrassed. “There—there isn’t anything to fetch, ma’am. Just this.” She touched one shoe to her bundle on the floor, then jerked her foot back before Mrs. Fowler could notice the shoe was a man’s boot, with cracked leather and worn heel. Every last penny had gone into the dress and the character, with tuppence left over for a bath; shoes could run as much as a shilling, even secondhand. No one in Whitechapel could, or would, spare her that kind of money.

The housekeeper’s expression turned forbidding. “You have nothing else to your name?”

If she didn’t come up with a good explanation, Mrs. Fowler might follow up on that character, and then the entire thing would fall apart. Eliza tried to hide her worry—then thought the better of it, and let her distress show through. “I’m sorry, ma’am—I know it’s disgraceful—it’s my brother, you see, he fell sick. Measles, it was, and I nursed him, because I’d had it before; but then it got into his lungs, and we paid all we had to the doctor, but it wasn’t enough. He’s dead now. This is the last good dress I have, and I sold my good shoes, and—please, ma’am, I need this job. I promise I’ll save every penny, and make myself respectable again as fast as I may.”

Mrs. Fowler sniffed, but her expression softened by a hair. “Very well. Ann Wick is the upper-housemaid; she will lend you a dress until you receive your first week’s pay. I’ll expect you to look better by this day week.”

“Yes, ma’am.” Eliza had risen from her chair during that inspired bit of lying; now she bobbed a curtsy. In one week’s time, I could be gone entirely. But I’ll have four shillings and more to show for it, and that’s never a bad thing.

“Follow me, then,” Mrs. Fowler said, opening the door and leading her toward the stairs. “I’ll show you the room you’ll share with Ann, and then you can begin cleaning the carpets in the morning room.”

The Goblin Market, Onyx Hall: March 26, 1884

“Get ’im! Come on, rip ’is fucking throat out!”

Dead Rick’s lips peeled back in a snarl. Half at the dog across from him, half at the voices egging them on. Stupid whelp, he cursed himself. Should ’ave knowed better than to do your sniffing in dog form. Gives the bastards ideas.

He had plenty of reason to curse himself out. On the one hand, he’d found Rewdan: good for him. On the other hand, Rewdan was the stringy padfoot cur snarling back at him, and the mob was howling for one of them to die.

What the other faerie had done to land himself here, Dead Rick didn’t know. Maybe he’d just wandered by in dog form, as Dead Rick had, and run afoul of some drunk goblin, again as Dead Rick had. Or maybe he’d gotten on the wrong side of Nadrett. They were in the pit outside the master’s chamber, and that was the place for two things: entertainment and punishment.

The crowd was out for blood, sure enough; the pit floor was strewn with the broken bodies of three dead dogs, mortal beasts thrown down here to challenge the padfoot, and if Dead Rick wasn’t careful he’d be the fourth. Rewdan was tired, though, and waiting for his opportunity. Dead Rick circled, crouching low, trying to think of a way out that didn’t involve one or the other of them bleeding his last into the filthy sand of the pit. He couldn’t ask the padfoot any questions if either of them was dead.

The mob didn’t like the delay. A chicken bone clipped Dead Rick’s ear, hurled into the pit by some impatient spectator, and he flinched; in a flash, Rewdan attacked.

Dead Rick twisted under the padfoot’s rush, barely managing to keep his feet. He reared up, trying to get an advantage of height, but the other faerie did the same; their chests slammed together, paws scrabbling for purchase, breath hot in each other’s ears. Dead Rick managed to get a bite of something soft, and Rewdan yelped, but then toenails raked his ribs and he echoed the sound. They broke away from each other, snapping, feinting lunges, and the watchers cheered them on.

Now he had to keep a bit of his awareness on everything else, not just the other dog, for fear he’d be caught by surprise again. But the padfoot was panting hard; he probably couldn’t manage so quick a rush again. Tire him out a bit more, then go for his throat—

They wouldn’t let him stop short of tearing it out, though. Unless…

A shift in the air made him tense, expecting another hurled bone. What it brought instead was a new scent, barely discernible over the blood-stink of the pit, and the oddly sour smell of the other dog. And it gave Dead Rick a very dangerous idea.

Probably won’t work. But I ain’t got nothing better.

He feinted another lunge, then pulled up short as if it pained the bleeding scratches where the other dog had raked him. Rewdan took the bait, and leapt for him again.

This time Dead Rick let himself go under. He kept his paws between their bodies as best he could, fending off the padfoot’s weight, hoping he was right and Rewdan was too tired to resist if Dead Rick tried to throw him off. But he let himself be wrestled onto his back, matted fur grinding into the filthy sand, and the padfoot’s jaws dove for his throat—

A thunderclap obliterated the cheers. Rewdan jerked sideways, and all the strength went abruptly out of his body; he collapsed onto Dead Rick, no longer fighting, his snarls twisting off into an agonized whine. The reek of blood flooded Dead Rick’s nose, obliterating the sour smell: blood, and acrid gunpowder. He squirmed out from under the padfoot’s twitching, dying body, and looked up.

Nadrett stood at the top of the stairs, a smoking pistol in his hand. Raggedly, the arena fell into silence; even those cursing their losses over the padfoot stopped when they saw the cause.

Dead Rick’s master waited until he had quiet, except for the padfoot’s last, gasping breaths. Then he said, “Who put my dog in the pit?”

No one answered. Nadrett lifted his gun again. It was a Galenic Academy design, adapted from the American Colt so as to fire elfshot; the cylinder clicked smoothly around as the master cocked it a second time. “I decide ’ow long my dogs live, and ’ow they die. And I ain’t given no orders for this other one to die. Who put ’im in there?”

Confession would win nothing for the guilty party, except possibly a bullet between the eyes. Betrayal, however, was more profitable. A dozen hands moved to point, at seven different targets. Nadrett aimed his revolver at the one who had collected the most fingers: a puck in a knee-length leather coat. “Nithen, put ’im in the cages. I’ll deal with ’im later.”

The fetch shoved his way through the crowd to obey. Dead Rick, crouching in the pit, didn’t look at the dead padfoot. He’d hoped Nadrett would end the fight; he’d known Nadrett might end it with murder. It told him what he needed to know, which was that the master had, in fact, given the order for Rewdan to die. Which meant there never would have been any chance to question him, regardless of how the fight ended. Dead Rick hadn’t found him fast enough.

The master left the room, trailed by his lieutenants. Only when he was gone did the voices feel safe to rise, grumbling to one another and settling their bets. Dead Rick gathered his back feet under himself, waiting for a small gap to open up in the crowd; with a tired leap he made it to the pit’s edge. Then he wormed his way between the legs until he reached the wall, where he could safely change back to man form.

“Bloody clever of you.” Gresh leaned against the wall nearby, digging in his pockets for pipe and tobacco. “Getting Nadrett to settle it like that. Cost me a mint, you bastard; I’d bet Rewdan wouldn’t drop ’til the fifth fight.”

Maybe there was still some hope of finding out what the padfoot had been doing. “Who was ’e, anyway, and did ’e bite Nadrett in the knackers, or what? ’Ow’d ’e get ’imself stuck down there?”

Gresh shrugged. “Ain’t seen ’im before myself. I ’eard ’e’s some kind of courier, and tried to sell some of ’is shipment to the Academy. You know, make a little bread on the side.”

“Shipment?” Dead Rick straightened, despite the complaints of his weary back. “What was ’e carrying?”

The goblin hawked and spat, then began sucking on the pipe. “The sort of thing the Academy likes. I look like a bleeding scholar to you?” Dead Rick held his breath, not wanting to betray his curiosity by prompting. Gresh got his pipe properly lit, then said, “Compounds of some kind. Lunar caustic, satyr’s bile—valuable, from what I ’ear, but not if it gets you on Nadrett’s bad side.”

Dead Rick knew enough to recognize those as faerie compounds, rather than mortal. Brought in from Faerie itself? Perhaps. One of them must have been what he smelled on the padfoot, that oddly sour scent. Dead Rick opened his mouth to ask what Nadrett wanted them for, but closed it before he could be that stupid. Gresh wouldn’t know—but he’d take note of the fact that Dead Rick had asked. And maybe sell that information to others.

Someone in the Academy might know what they were useful for, at least. Whoever Rewdan had tried to sell to, if that rumor was true. Some of the scholars weren’t above getting their materials from the unclean hands of the Goblin Market.

To distract Gresh from the real point, he said, “Am I going to ’ave ’is friends coming after me?”

“Friends, hah. Think anybody’s ’is friend, after ’e got dropped in there?” Gresh jerked his patchy beard at the pit.

Well, that was one less worry. Now all I’ve got to worry about is Nadrett. “Sorry you bet on Rewdan. I’ll buy you a beer in the Crow’s Head, to make up for it.” One good thing from the breakdown of the palace: it had forced the pub to move from its old location to a spot inside the Goblin Market, where Dead Rick could go freely.

“That don’t ’alf make up my losses,” Gresh complained, but he was never one to turn down beer. And it would give him reason to forget anything Dead Rick had said. Clapping one hand on the goblin’s shoulder with a friendliness he didn’t feel, Dead Rick headed for the pub.

Cromwell Road, South Kensington: March 27, 1884

To the uncritical eye, Miss Louisa Kittering’s bedroom appeared a model of respectable young femininity. It was agreeably papered in a floral pattern, with sunny landscapes and paintings of birds upon the walls, and a soft rose carpet upon the floor. The lace-trimmed curtains at the windows were neatly tied back; the one minor sign of disarray was an embroidery frame balanced upon the arm of a chair, as if the needlewoman had set it down just a moment ago, and would return at any second. But the frame had lain there since Eliza began working in the Kitterings’ house three days ago, and not a stitch had been added to its contents in that time: one of many little marks of Miss Kittering’s rebellion.

Eliza studied the room, running the tip of her tongue absently through the gap in her teeth. She kept being distracted by the Kitterings’ unfathomable wealth; the lace on the curtains alone was worth more than she would earn in a year. Every time she touched something, she felt guilty, as if the basic grubbiness of her own birth would somehow stain the finery. If the Kitterings weren’t so desperate for servants, she never would have had a place here; everything around her, even the servants’ quarters in the garret, shouted that she didn’t belong.

I’m only here for one thing, Eliza reminded herself. Once that was done, she could go back to where she did belong. But first: Where would a young lady hide her secrets?

Not under the mattress. In a house like this, mattresses were turned every day, and the linens aired; Eliza would have seen it her first morning. Nor behind the headboard of the bed, which had been her second guess. She’d had regrettably little time for prying, though; if she fell behind on her tasks, Mrs. Fowler would come looking. And if Eliza were found with her nose in the young miss’s belongings, a sacking would be the least of her concerns.

But she had to keep trying. As quietly as she could, Eliza dragged a chair to the wardrobe, then tossed a rag over the seat to protect it from her shoes. The top of the wardrobe, unfortunately, held nothing more than a shameful quantity of dust, undisturbed by any human touch. Underneath was cleaner, but likewise empty.

She put the chair back, wondering if she dared search the writing desk. There was little reason for any honest maid to be going through those drawers, and if someone were to find her… Eliza told herself it was not merely caution that kept her away, but common sense. Mrs. Kittering was very obviously the sort of mother who had no compunctions about going through her daughter’s letters. If Louisa was keeping secrets—and her behavior in Islington made it clear she was—then she had to be keeping them elsewhere.

Such as inside the wardrobe. Eliza threw the doors open, preparing a variety of suitable lies in case someone were to come upon her, and began to rummage through.

If there were any false panels built in, she’d have to find them another day; she couldn’t spare that kind of time now. But Eliza dug swiftly through the clothes and shoes, making sure there was nothing tucked away in a back corner—and then her eyes fell upon the hatboxes at the top.

Instinct overcame caution. Eliza dragged the chair back over, pulled the front boxes out of the way, and reached for one at the back. It proved to be inappropriately heavy, and when she lifted the lid, a smile spread across her face. “Caught you.”

Whatever hat had once occupied this box was long gone. In its place were books, magazines, and pamphlets. Eliza paged through them, hardly breathing. A pair of gothic novels, showing signs of repeated reading. A book of poems by someone named Oscar Wilde. An advertisement for a mesmerist. Scattered numbers of a few spiritualist magazines, and some pamphlets by Frederic Myers, whose name Eliza recognized. He and some other fellows had done a great deal of research into mediums and ghosts, even forming their own Society for Psychical Research.

Was Miss Kittering interested in contacting a departed spirit, or did she fancy herself a medium? Eliza supposed it didn’t matter. Either way, this collection held a great many things Mrs. Kittering would not approve of in the slightest, not with her insistence upon perfect respectability. Nothing on faeries, not that Eliza could see without a more detailed search—but plenty that spoke of disreputable things.

At the creak of the stairs, her heart leapt into her mouth. Eliza hastily crammed everything back into the hatbox, shoved it into place, threw the doors shut—catching them at the last instant so they would not slam—and put the chair back more or less where it belonged, before flinging herself at the fireplace, where she ought to be hard at work.

When the door opened, she knew that only vanity had saved her from discovery. Not hers, but that of the footman Ned Sayers, who invariably paused to admire himself in the looking glass mounted at the top of the family staircase. Mrs. Kittering did not sack footmen as often as she did maids, because of the necessity of keeping a pair who were reasonably well matched in height and looks; as near as Eliza could tell, Ned Sayers’s face was the only thing keeping him in his position.

She offered him a smile, hoping he wouldn’t notice that she had only just begun to rub black lead into the iron bars of the fireplace grate, when she should have been nearly done. Sayers smiled back, and held up a pair of delicate ankle boots. “Just returning these,” he said.

“I hope they weren’t too much trouble to clean,” Eliza said. Servants’ gossip was her other great hope of learning anything; they knew far more about their masters and mistresses than those employers liked to consider. But Mrs. Fowler, who watched over their meals, had little tolerance for idle chatter; and when Eliza went to bed at night, she was far too exhausted to question Ann Wick, the upper-housemaid whose room she shared. Hoping to get something from Sayers, she added, “From what I hear, Miss Kittering can be dreadful hard on her belongings. A real hoyden, that one.”

The footman shrugged, going past her. “I suppose.” Eliza watched surreptitiously as he opened the wardrobe doors and tossed the boots casually onto the bottom shelf; she prayed he would not notice anything out of place. Then she saw her rag still lying on the chair, and jerked her eyes back to the grate, cursing silently. But Sayers only said, “If you’d like, I could shine your shoes up for you. Such a pretty ankle you have.”

A hand settled on Eliza’s calf, exposed where she knelt to do her work, and she jumped in surprise. Her sleeve caught on the knob of the ash pan; for a moment she was off balance, almost falling. Sayers caught her. Eliza dropped the brush in her haste to be free of him. “Mr. Sayers—”

“Ned, please.” He smiled at her.

Eliza did not like that smile at all. Maids could be turned off for dallying with men; perhaps Mrs. Kittering was not solely to blame for all the departures. But if she made him angry with her, that could be trouble, too. “I’m already behind in my work,” she said, dodging the question of what name to use. Picking up the brush, she frowned; it had rolled off the canvas she’d put down and left a smear of oily black lead on the floor. Then she bit back a curse in Irish, seeing that she’d gotten some of it on her hands, too. Even if Sayers left, there would be no returning to those hidden pamphlets; she’d leave dirty finger marks everywhere.

“You’ll always be behind. Sunup to sundown, and Mrs. Kittering will be displeased at something you’ve failed to do; what’s a bit more, in exchange for some fun?”

It cut too close to the bone. Sayers was right about the work; this house was so big, and the staff perpetually shorthanded, that Eliza found herself busy every waking minute. A stray thought had her wondering how deeply Miss Kittering slept, and that frightened her into sensibility: if she was considering sneaking into the young woman’s room at night, then she had lost every last shred of sense.

All of which made Eliza’s tone harder than was perhaps wise when she said, “I need this job, Mr. Sayers. Mrs. Kittering may be displeased whatever I do, but that’s no reason for me to add to it a-purpose.”

Sayers frowned. She could hardly bring herself to care; surely any trouble he posed would take time to really vex her, and she had no intention of being here long enough to give him the chance. What mattered was Miss Kittering, and her secrets.

“I thought you a more friendly girl than this,” he said.

Eliza almost laughed in his face. Fergus Boyle had said much the same to her once, and she knew well what kind of “friendliness” they were trying to coax out of her. But no; if I laugh he will be angry, and I should avoid that if I can. “I’m sorry, Mr. Sa— Ned. It’s just that life has been miserable hard for me lately, and this position is the best bit of luck I’ve had in ages. I don’t dare risk it. Please, forgive me.”

His given name stuck in her craw, as did the apology, but it had the desired effect; the footman’s hard mouth softened into a more accepting line. And he didn’t even offer to make life easier for her—not yet, anyway. Eliza had little doubt such false promises would come. “How could I not forgive a pretty face like that?” he asked—stretching the truth close to the breaking point, for Eliza knew herself no beauty. Her life had been much too hard for that.

When the door opened a second time, she wasn’t sure whether to be relieved or dismayed, for she was sure it would be Mrs. Fowler, come to thrash Eliza for being a sluggard. But the figure in the doorway was half a foot shorter and half the housekeeper’s size, and dressed ten times more finely: Miss Louisa Kittering herself.

Eliza shot to her feet and curtsied. Sayers rose more lazily, and though he stood behind Eliza, out of her sight, she was sure he tried one of his smiles on Miss Kittering, for the young woman’s mouth twisted in disdain. “Don’t you have work to do?” she asked him.

“Of course, miss.” He had the gall to pinch Eliza’s rump as he left. She went rigid, then remembered herself and curtsied again. “I was just polishing the grate, miss. I’ll come back later—”

“No, help me change clothes.” Miss Kittering shut the door again and tossed her bonnet carelessly toward the bed. It fell short, and rolled across the carpet.

With that black lead on her fingers, Eliza knew she ought to call for Lucy, the lady’s maid. But this was too splendid an opportunity to pass up; Mrs. Kittering was firm on the subject that servants should be seen only when they were needed, and ideally never heard at all, which meant she might never have another chance to speak with the young woman.

So she retrieved her rag from the chair while Miss Kittering’s back was turned and gave her fingers a hard scrub, until the black lead no longer came off at a touch. “A walking dress,” the young woman said, pulling off her elegant little shoes with a sigh; Eliza went to the wardrobe and fetched one out, hoping she remembered the subtleties of ladies’ clothing well enough to have chosen the right outfit.

“It’s a lovely day for walking,” she said to Miss Kittering. Not that she’d put her nose out of the house past taking deliveries at the cellar door, but the last two days had seemed much warmer, and there was even some sun.

Miss Kittering made an unenthusiastic sound in reply. Determined to get more than that, Eliza asked, “Are you going up to Hyde Park, then?”

“Kensington Gardens,” the young woman said. She bent to see herself in the mirror, smoothing her polished golden hair, then straightened so Eliza could unbutton the back of her morning dress. “Mama’s idea, of course. She would send me out in a thunderstorm, if Mr. Twisleton-Wykeham-Fiennes asked.”

“Who?” Eliza bit her lip an instant after the question slipped out. She couldn’t help herself; the name was so absurdly long.

Miss Kittering didn’t comment on her rudeness. “Eldest son of Baron Saye and Sele. Only a baron, as Mama put it—‘but at least it’s not a new barony.’” She spoke those last words in perfect mimicry of her mother’s voice, then sniffed in disgust.

“You don’t care for him, then?” Eliza laid the morning dress aside for later folding.

“There’s nothing wrong with him,” Miss Kittering said, holding her arms up for Eliza to slip the walking dress over her head. “But it’s ‘Louisa, go here,’ and ‘Louisa, go there,’ and ‘Louisa, don’t waste your time dancing with anyone who doesn’t have a title,’ and it’s enough to make me scream. All because she still thinks she could have married that viscount, if only her figure had been of higher quality, and so she’s determined to—”

Miss Kittering stopped there; apparently she had just noticed herself gossiping with a servant. Eliza devoted her attention to the row of little buttons, as if she’d heard nothing at all. So Miss Kittering had a rebellious nature, did she? It didn’t surprise Eliza in the slightest. But what, aside from the general impulse to kick against her mother, did that have to do with faeries?

Experimentally, she said, “I imagine you’d rather just curl up with a book.”

The back beneath her hands stiffened. Eliza cursed her tongue; what if Miss Kittering realized she’d been snooping in the wardrobe? The young woman said, again in mimicry of her mother, “‘Too much reading rots a girl’s brains.’” Then Eliza finished with the buttons and Miss Kittering pulled away. “My ankle boots, and the yellow shawl; it is not so warm out there as all that.”

Eliza curtised and fetched the requested articles. And then Miss Kittering was gone, leaving her with a half-polished grate, and only a few tantalizing hints of an answer.

The Goblin Market, Onyx Hall: March 30, 1884

Even in the Goblin Market, few people paid attention to a dog.

They were too common to mind. The Onyx Hall held some actual strays—mostly pets, abandoned by faerie owners who tired of them. Cats sometimes slipped through the hidden entrances by means no one could explain, but it was a rare dog who stumbled upon one of the holes in the palace’s fabric. There were also faerie hounds, creatures of some intelligence, but no shapeshifting ability. And then there were fae like Dead Rick, who walked equally well as men or dogs: skrikers, padfoots, galley-trots, and more. It was possible to tell the various kinds apart, but only if the watcher paid attention.

So Dead Rick could and did crisscross the warren that housed the Goblin Market without attracting much notice at all. Far less notice than he would have attracted if he’d gone asking for Cyma, when he had such a particular question for her. He finally picked up a trail that smelled more or less recent, and followed it into a quieter part of the warren, until it was drowned out by the overpowering scent of opium.

Dead Rick briefly considered waiting. He hated the opium den; it was full of delirious mortals in varying states of mental decay, easy prey for the fae who had lured them below. And if Cyma had been smoking it herself, she might be in no state to help him.

But he didn’t want to waste any time. And if he stayed low to the ground, out of the worst of the smoke, he could get in and out before it had too much effect on him. Peeling his lips back in annoyance, Dead Rick slipped through the brocaded silk curtains that had taken the place of the den’s missing door.

The light inside was murky, partially from the smoke, partially from the various covers placed over the faerie lights: oiled cloth, colored glass, anything to soften and warm that cold brilliance. He couldn’t smell anything through the opium reek, though, and was glad the abundant shadows gave him useful concealment until his eyes adjusted enough to make his way around the room.

Most of the people he saw were mortal. With the introduction of faerie opium from China, this had become the most common means of harvesting dreams: men and the occasional woman lay in loose-limbed stupor on narrow pallets, and from time to time figures would take shape in the smoky air above their heads. Once bottled, those were worth a bit on the market, though not as much as the clean product. And besides, the only sorts of people fae could usually lure down here were the dregs of London, beggars and cripples and madmen, poor folk who would sell their souls to forget their troubles for a little while. Not much variety to be had from such stock.

The fae who slipped among them weren’t Nadrett’s people. The opium den was under the control of a Chinese faerie with a long, elaborate name that had soon been shortened to Po, and he did business only with Lacca, another Goblin Market boss. Together they defended the opium-dream trade against Nadrett’s attempts to take it over. But they allowed individuals to pay for use of the dens and, as Dead Rick suspected, Cyma was among them.

She was in a back corner, leaning up against a low couch, helping a golden-haired young mortal woman in a nightgown steady an opium pipe carved of ivory. The pupils of Cyma’s eyes were slightly contracted, but he guessed that to be the mere result of sitting too long in the room; the young woman, on the other hand, was thoroughly lost to the drug. After a long drag on the pipe, she opened her eyes, saw Dead Rick, and fell to helpless giggling. He felt disgruntled at her reaction: he was a death omen, after all, not some lady’s idiot lapdog. But perhaps that was the opium at work.

Cyma turned to see what her mortal was laughing at, and frowned at Dead Rick. “What are you doing here?” she whispered.

It was possible to speak in dog form, but not easy. Dead Rick shifted back, then said, “I was going to ask you that.” He, too, kept his voice low, but not out of consideration for the opium smokers. If any of them were alert enough to pay attention, he didn’t want them overhearing more than necessary. “Wasn’t you supposed to be going somewhere? Away from ’ere?”

“Soon enough.” An unfocused smile spread across her face; the drug was affecting her, after all. “Soon I’ll be safe. I’m done chasing mortals for Nadrett… London will be mine, and I won’t need him anymore.”

Dead Rick had no idea what she meant by most of that, but one thing was clear enough to prick his curiosity. “Who did ’e send you after?” His attention went to the girl on the couch. “’Er?”

“No!” Cyma said. It was abrupt enough that he believed it, especially with the way she shifted as if to protect the girl; for a moment, he thought she might say more. But Cyma wasn’t so far gone that she would spill her secrets that easily. “Nadrett’s business,” she muttered, subsiding. Was he imagining the guilt on her face? “It was a man he wanted, and nothing to do with you.”

Could this have something to do with the plan the voice had spoken of? Dead Rick doubted it. Nadrett sent his minions after people all the time; Gresh harvested them regularly from the East End, for bread and less pleasant things. Rewdan’s business was something less usual. “Cyma… do you still talk to that fellow over in the Academy?”

“Yvoir?” Cyma’s gaze sharpened, and she said in something more like her regular voice, “What do you want, Dead Rick?”

He’d practiced the lie until he could tell it convincingly. “I might know ’ow to get my ’ands on some compounds from Faerie. But I ain’t no scientist; I don’t know what they’re good for. And that means I don’t know what they’re worth. I was ’oping you might be able to find out for me.”

“What compounds?”

“Satyr’s bile. Lunar caustic. Maybe some others, but those two for sure.”

The mortal’s hand groped absently through the air, from where she had sagged back along the couch. Cyma caught it, then hung on as if she could read the answer to Dead Rick’s question in the young woman’s palm. He held his breath, waiting. Cyma was the only person he halfway trusted; if she couldn’t help him—or wouldn’t—he’d have to buy the answer from someone else. Valentin Aspell sold information, but it came at a high price.

Cyma frowned. “Won’t your master be angry? If you go making deals behind his back.”

Not ’alf so angry as ’e’ll be if ’e finds out what I’m really doing. “I can’t afford to be safe, Cyma.” He gestured around: at the opium den, the Goblin Market, the Onyx Hall. Maybe at London itself. “It’s all falling apart, ain’t it? Nadrett’s got me chained to ’im now, sure, but I ain’t stupid enough to believe that’ll ’elp me much when the end comes. ’E’ll leave me to drown, I know it. I got to be ready to run on my own.”

Cyma’s gaze softened. One hand reached out to stroke his cheek; he flinched away. To his surprise, he saw the bright glint of tears in her eyes. “We shouldn’t have to run,” she whispered.

The opium was starting to make him light-headed. He fought it back with bitter anger. “Unless you’ve got a new palace stuffed down the front of your dress, we ain’t got much choice. Bloody ’umans are going to crush us underfoot, and never know we was ’ere.” He glared at the oblivious young woman on the couch.

“Some of them know,” Cyma said, and stroked the girl’s hand. “Maybe if they all did—”

“What?” Dead Rick’s skin jumped all over, as if he’d turned around to find Nadrett pointing a gun at him. “Are you bleeding mad? They’d kill us.”

Cyma gestured languorously at the slumped figures all around the opium den. “These don’t. The ones in the Academy don’t. The idea isn’t mine, Dead Rick; you’d be surprised who else agrees. We’re a part of London, damn it—have been for centuries. Why shouldn’t we admit it?”

“Because we’d ’ave priests waving crosses in our faces, blokes shoving us into cages for raree-shows, little girls wanting us to dance in the bloody flowers for ’em. We’re a part of London? So’s the rats. Even the Irish and the Jews would be lining up to kick us.”

Cyma had started giggling at his complaint about the flowers, and was having trouble stopping; she said something half-intelligible about nobody going to church any longer, but Dead Rick didn’t listen. The trouble was, he wanted to agree with her. Wanted to charge up into the streets and shred anybody who threatened his territory, the Onyx Hall. Bare his teeth and say, This place is mine, until the mortals backed down, showed throat, left him in peace.

Stupid whelp. It ain’t your territory. It belongs to the ones strong enough to ’old it—and they don’t care a toss about defending it, not against the bastards upstairs. Curs like you get kicked to the gutters, by both sides.

His thoughts must have shown on his face, for Cyma reached out and took him unexpectedly by the shoulders, too tight for him to easily twist away. “Dead Rick—I’ll help you if I can. When the time comes.”

“’Ow?” he growled, hearing his own rough voice as if it came from a great distance. Nobody touched him, except to hurt him; he wasn’t at all sure that Cyma wasn’t doing the same, to something other than flesh. “You ain’t going to be ’ere, are you?”

“I—I’ll find a way. If what I’m doing works… I’ll come back and tell you. Maybe see if I can help you do the same thing. I promise, I’ll explain everything then. And I’ll ask Yvoir about the compounds; you don’t have to pay me. Is that enough that you’ll forgive me for leaving? Just a little bit?”

He had to get free of her hands, and free of this room, with its gentle smoke beckoning him to let down his guard, relax, slip into oblivion. “Sure. A bit. Just keep it quiet. You’ve got your secrets, and I’ve got mine.”

She seemed about to say more, and would not let him go. His heart beating too hard against his ribs, Dead Rick resorted to changing his shape; Cyma exclaimed and flinched back from the shifting of his skin and bones beneath her hands. A dog once more, he fled into the shadows, stumbling around lost before a breath of cleaner air from the curtains guided him to his escape.

Memory: August 13, 1878

She entered the room in perfect silence, well cloaked by charms. The man in the bed, one Frederic William Henry Myers, did not stir; this had been a bad night, one of several in a row, and he’d helped himself to sleep with brandy.

She’d been waiting for such a night to come. The dreams of mortals were more easily influenced when their hearts were troubled; a man at peace offered her little chance to work this art. Fortunately, the closest Myers came to peace was at the bottom of a bottle, and that created its own kind of opening.

Cyma drew back the curtain, letting the light of the full moon fall upon her target’s face. He stirred slightly, and she waited, allowing him to settle; only when he was quiet did she move again, across the carpeted floor to the side of his bed, where she laid a feather-light touch upon his temple.

For weeks she’d sampled his dreams, sifting from them the face and voice and manner she needed. They were more valuable than photographs, for her purposes; Cyma’s interest was not in what the woman had actually looked like, but rather how Myers had seen her. She’d gathered more information than strictly necessary, perhaps; his mind would fill in any gaps or errors she might make, so long as they weren’t too jarring. But it had been ages since she had this kind of freedom to walk among mortals, protected by their bread, and she could not resist stretching it out for as long as possible.

Which brought her to this night. Closing her eyes, Cyma lifted one foot from the floor, then the other, until she floated above Myers in his bed.

She was not the best at this. But she was good enough, and she owed Nadrett a debt.

Beneath her, Myers dreamt of Annie Marshall. His cousin’s wife, who drowned herself two years ago. Not nearly enough time for the grief to fade. In his dreams, Myers could do as he had never done in life: profess his love for Annie, kiss her lips, touch the flesh he’d only ever imagined. The hard part was not making him dream of Annie; it was making him dream of something other than their unconsummated love.

But Cyma was nothing if not determined. Fear had that effect, even on a faerie. Nadrett had sent her to do this; Nadrett held her debt. Why Nadrett wanted a pet spiritualist, Cyma didn’t know, and didn’t ask. All that mattered was creating the vulnerability in Myers, the belief that his dead inamorata had a message she wanted him to hear. Mediums had not been able to contact Annie on his behalf, though not for lack of trying; but the woman might come to him in dreams.

So she gave herself the face, the voice, the manner of Annie Marshall, and she told Myers what Nadrett wanted the man to hear. That there were people who could help him; that he must seek them out, and they would give him the proof he so ardently desired, proof that the spirit could persist after death. That her suicide meant neither that she was gone from him forever, nor that she had been damned to some tormenting hell. He would have all the reassurances he could want, so long as he found the strangers and shared with them what he knew.

Tears streamed down Myers’s sleeping face, as the moon’s light carried Cyma into the defenseless realms of his mind.

He wasn’t the first man Nadrett had sent her to pursue. But with this one, she was sure, she would find success. He was the perfect target: a scholar of spiritualism, keeping company with similarly learned friends, but wounded at heart as the others were not. Once Nadrett had him, surely the master would be satisfied, and Cyma’s debt would be repaid.

She might even be free as soon as next month.

She believed it, as Myers believed in the ghost of Annie Marshall, and for the same reason. Because the hope kept her going, however impossible it might be.

Adelaide Road, Primrose Hill: April 6, 1884

The lowering of the gas lights had given the room a chill, tomblike aspect. Outside, the night was shrouded in fog, the moon playing hide-and-seek among the clouds. Wind rattled the shutters from time to time, and created a faint moaning in the chimney. It was, in short, a poet’s notion of what a night for a séance should be like.

Cyma hoped it would inspire the medium to her best efforts. Mrs. Iris Wexford was typical of the breed: the wife of a vicar in Aylesbury, past her childbearing years, and bored senseless by her respectable life. She held fast to the conviction that spiritualism was the cure for Christianity’s ills, that it vindicated instead of disproving the Bible, as some claimed.

Like most of her kind, she was probably a charlatan. But Frederic Myers had great hopes for her, and so Cyma was here.

She fancied it was fate, encountering him again. Once Myers had been thoroughly ensnared by his dreams, Nadrett had taken over all dealings with the man, closing Cyma out. Without bread to protect her, she had no way to visit him, and so in time Myers had faded from her thoughts: one more mortal caught up in faerie matters, not likely to emerge intact.

Or for that matter, to emerge at all. That Frederic Myers was still a free man, not someone’s mad slave in the Goblin Market—or dead—told her Nadrett had not yet let go of him, not entirely. In which case it would have been far safer for Cyma to keep her distance. She was almost free of Nadrett at last, and had no desire to trap herself again. But Myers had intrigued her, with his melancholy grief and undying hope of seeing his lost love again, and she could not pass up the chance to see what path he followed now.

Much the same as when she first knew him, it seemed. Testing mediums, hoping to find one who could communicate with the late Annie on his behalf. He sat now around the table with his friends Henry and Eleanor Sidgwick, and various others Cyma didn’t know; unlike those first two, they were not members of the new Society for Psychical Research. She had joined them as one “Miss Harris,” and now sat with her attention more on Myers than Mrs. Wexford. He had not changed: still the same tremulous eagerness in his wide eyes, his slightly parted lips, as Mrs. Wexford’s head sagged to touch the back of her chair.

In a husky voice, the medium said, “I feel the other world draw near!”

Miss Harris, of course, was not cynical in the slightest about these things; Miss Harris had her own ghosts she desperately wanted to see. A dead fiancé, most particularly, for whom she still pined. It gave her and Mr. Myers something in common. But Cyma, beneath her human mask, was impatient. In her time haunting Myers, she’d seen more than enough bored housewives go through similar acts—even exposed a few frauds, when they annoyed her too much—and her initial excitement had long since worn away. She endured this tedium only for the renewed connection to Myers, which she might make use of once she was free of Nadrett.

Then tedium fled, without warning, and every hair on the back of Cyma’s neck stood to attention. “A child,” Mrs. Wexford whispered. “A boy child—oh, he’s like a little angel.”

On the other side of the table, one of the sitters, an elderly woman whose name Cyma had forgotten, pulled her hands free of the circle and clasped them over her mouth, tears springing to her eyes. Sidgwick, who sat to the woman’s right; immediately turned a suspicious gaze upon her; he was far less credulous than Myers, and knew such movements were often used as cover for tricks. His wife Eleanor kept her attention on Mrs. Wexford, in case the upset woman was a diversion for the medium instead.

But if those two had any tricks planned, they could save themselves the effort. Cyma knew when she was in the presence of a genuine ghost.

Mrs. Wexford shuddered, then began to speak in a high-pitched voice. From the conversation that ensued between the medium and the crying old woman, Cyma gathered that this was the lady’s firstborn son, lost years ago, when infection from a rotted tooth spread to his brain. Next to her, she felt Myers heave a silent sigh. Once again, his lost love had failed to appear.

Cyma wondered how the mediums did it—how they called up particular spirits, long since gone. Regular apparitions were one matter, and the recently dead another; both were decidedly less common than they had been in centuries past, but contacting them had never been difficult for those with skill. The little boy’s spirit, however, must have moved on. How had Mrs. Wexford summoned him back? One of countless mysteries about the human soul, whose answers she could not fathom. Cyma was no Academy philosopher, but sometimes she understood what intrigued them so.

Her interest sharpened as something formed in the air behind Mrs. Wexford. Its shape was vague, but it was the right size to be a little boy. Cyma held her breath, teeth sunk deep into her lip. True visitations were rare; true physical manifestations might as well have been unicorns. Real, but almost never seen in this day and age. Myers had found himself a true medium after all.

Upon that thought, his hand slipped from her grasp. He and Sidgwick had promised this first sitting would not be any kind of formal test—too many mediums grew nervous and failed to produce anything at all when they knew scientists would be examining their every move—but it seemed Myers’s curiosity had overcome him, for he crossed the intervening distance in two quick strides and reached his hand out for the manifestation taking shape in the air.

It vanished with a startled jerk, and Mrs. Wexford’s eyes flew open. “I—what—”

She seemed genuinely disoriented, which happened sometimes. The old woman who’d lost her son burst into tears; Eleanor Sidgwick comforted her, while her husband bent over Mrs. Wexford, explaining what had occurred.

Cyma rose and went to Myers’s side, curious. “Was it truly physical?”

“For a moment,” he said distantly, still looking where the ghost had been. “I felt it, so briefly…”

Mrs. Wexford might be able to summon dear Annie for him. Cyma frowned at the notion, and spoke again, to keep Myers’s thoughts on matters scientific. “What are such things made of? Is it some coagulation of the air, a curdling that results from the ghost’s presence?”

Myers came back to himself with a sigh that said his thoughts had gone exactly where she guessed. “No one knows for certain. It felt gauzy against my fingers—”

“Usually it is gauze.” Sidgwick had joined them. He gave his friend a sympathetic, pitying look. “You know such things are so often faked.”

“Often, yes—but always?” Myers shook his head, rubbing his fingertips together as if he could still feel the substance. “I see no wires, Henry, nor mirrors. I believe this one was real.”

Cyma laid a supportive hand on his arm and smiled up into his sad eyes. “As do I. In fact, I’m sure of it.”

“You had a theory about the stuff, didn’t you, Frederic?”

“Did I?” Myers shrugged at his friend. “I don’t recall.”

Sidgwick tapped one finger against the bridge of his nose, eyes closed in thought. “Ectoplasm, you suggested we should call it. Some kind of emanation from the ghost itself—you never told me the details. Spirit made physical, or some such; a thumb in the eye of the materialists, you said. But you never wrote the article you promised.”

They began wrangling amiably about the Proceedings of their society. Cyma didn’t attend to any of it. Spirit made physical. It was one of the basic discoveries of the Galenic Academy last century, that in faerie realms, spirit and matter were the same thing; faerie bodies were a particular configuration of the four classical elements that made up their spirits, intermixed with the aether that permeated their world. Was it somehow possible for human spirits to achieve a similar unity?

She could ask in the Academy—but that might be a very dangerous thing, if it touched on Nadrett’s business.

Cyma knew she should keep silent. You’re almost free of him; knowing will only put you in danger. But encountering Myers last month, after not seeing him for so long—she couldn’t let this go.

Sidgwick went to crank up the gas lights, thoroughly breaking the mood; there would be no more raising of ghosts for now. Experimentally, Cyma said, “I recall reading an interesting theory once, from someone in the Theosophical Society. You’re familiar with their notion of the astral plane?” Myers nodded. “I do not agree with them on the matter of spirits, of course; clearly the souls of the departed do sometimes stay near to comfort those they leave behind. It is not all trickery on the part of the medium. But what if some of it is indeed trickery, as they suggest—on the part of something else?”

His fingers had begun to pull at his beard in a gesture she recognized very well. “Madame Blavatsky’s ‘spooks, elementaries, and elementals,’ you mean. Lower principles cast off by human spirits on their way to a higher existence.”

“Not precisely,” Cyma said, hoping she could invent well enough to keep Myers from dismissing her entirely. What she was about to say was pure balderdash; the point was to see what he said in response. “There is, after all, a long-standing association in folklore between faeries and the spirits of the dead. Is it possible that the spiritual realm—the astral plane, as the theosophists would have it—is in fact shared by those two classes of being? And when a medium is deceived, it is by a creature we might in other contexts term a ‘faerie’?”

She was watching very closely as she said it, recording every movement of eye and brow and mouth. Goblins did sometimes deceive mediums, it was true, but only as an occasional lark. Myers pursed his lips, then shook his head. “I confess, I’ve never given the possibility much thought. It is an interesting theory, at least.”

Not a single twitch, not the slightest spark of recognition.

He doesn’t remember.

Myers had given the possibility some thought, in the days before Cyma handed him over to Nadrett. It was why her master had wanted the man, though what purpose such an erroneous idea could serve, she didn’t know. Did Nadrett think this “spiritual realm” or “astral plane” was Faerie itself? Or did he think to extend his control over such a place?

That question was far too dangerous for Cyma to allow it to remain in her mind. Myers had considered such things, and now did not remember; that meant Nadrett had taken the memory from his mind. Just like he’d done to Dead Rick, though in this case, the removal appeared more precise. Myers was not broken like the skriker.

Perhaps because Nadrett still had use for Myers’s knowledge. After all, he’d let the man walk free, back to his friends in the Society for Psychical Research.

I should get away from him. Cyma was suddenly cold in a way that had nothing to do with the séance. She murmured something inane when Myers took his leave, going to coax Mrs. Wexford into trying again; after a paralyzed moment of standing where the manifestation had been, she slipped out the door and asked the footman to fetch her a cab.

She was almost free of Nadrett. Not even for Frederic William Henry Myers would she trap herself again.

White Lion Street, Islington: April 11, 1884

Eliza smoothed the bodice of her borrowed dress with nervous hands. “Borrowed” might be the wrong word; Ann Wick didn’t know she’d taken it. But the wages she’d saved so far weren’t enough to buy a respectable dress—something that wouldn’t instantly advertise her as somebody’s maid—so she’d sneaked this one from a hook in the room they shared, and changed into it once she was away from Cromwell Road. It wasn’t stealing, not when she intended to put it back.

Thus disguised, she was going to attend a meeting of the London Fairy Society.

It was the best she could think of to do. A fortnight of working for the Kitterings had gotten her no further than those few stolen minutes of nosing through Miss Kittering’s things; she’d uncovered nothing about faeries, and had no further opportunities to speak to the daughter. So, a month later, she was back where she had been before—but this time, with more preparation.

She would never have dared show her face at the meeting, except that she knew Louisa Kittering wouldn’t be present. Mrs. Kittering had decided to host a dinner party tonight, with the Honorable Mr. Twisleton-Wykeham-Fiennes in attendance. The row between mother and daughter had been audible two floors in either direction, and when Miss Kittering lost, Eliza had gone promptly to Mrs. Fowler with news that her mother was gravely ill. That had sparked a second row, nearly as fierce as the first, for with the missus planning this dinner party, the housekeeper needed every servant on hand. But Eliza was a good deal more stubborn than Miss Kittering, and had generally been a good enough worker that Mrs. Fowler was not eager to sack her; and Eliza had sworn she would quit if she were not permitted to go.

A threat that worked because she came quite close to meaning it. Louisa Kittering did not matter very much at all, except as a connection to her friend, the one she’d met at the previous society meeting. Eliza’s time in the Kittering household had failed to show her that woman again, though, or to turn up her name. It was worth risking her position at Cromwell Road to come to Islington, where she had a better chance of seeing the woman again.

Eliza’s optimism had been sufficient that she paid for an omnibus fare out to Islington, rather than walking the whole distance. She even looked respectable enough that a gentleman gave up his seat inside the ’bus so she wouldn’t have to climb the ladder to the knife-board bench on top. Crammed in between a mother with three squalling children and a clerk who somehow managed to sleep through all the disturbances, she’d felt very pleased with herself… until she got to Islington High Street.

Where she had stood for the last five minutes, staring down White Lion Street at the innocent facade of No. 9, trying and failing to convince herself to knock on the door.

The problem was that she still didn’t know what to expect inside. How many people would there be, and of what sort? Her skill at lying went as far as pretending to be English, but she’d never masqueraded as anything other than the lower-class woman she was. She did not know how to be a housewife, or a bookish bluestocking—would there even be women in there? Yes, there must; last time there had been Miss Kittering and her unknown friend. But she didn’t have the first notion what would go on at such a meeting, whether they would discuss books, or poetry…

Or personal encounters with faerie-kind.

She heard a church bell ring the hour. Seven o’clock. The time had come either to go in, or to admit that she was a coward.

For Owen’s sake, she could not be a coward. Eliza squared her shoulders, marched down White Lion Street, and rapped the knocker on the door.

It opened almost immediately. No footmen here, and Eliza recognized the signs about the maid’s appearance that said she’d hurriedly cleaned herself up for door-opening duties, and would go back to dirtier work as soon as the meeting was underway. Which put Eliza slightly more at ease. Any family that could possibly afford a manservant to answer the door had one; that meant the people here were not so high above her as she’d feared.

The maid prompted her, “Yes?”

She’d been so busy thinking that she hadn’t said anything. “Oh! I’m, ah—Elizabeth Baker. I’m here for the meeting?”

“Yes, of course. They’re just getting started. If you’ll follow me?”

Eliza stood aside in the narrow front hall so the maid could close the door, then followed her up the stairs. I’m late. I should have known it; nobody went in while I was standing there, like an indecisive fool.

The house was old and a little shabby, the linoleum scratched in places, the stair railing well worn by countless hands. Voices came muffled through a door on the first floor, which stopped when the maid tapped on it. She waited until she heard a reply, then opened the door. Warm gaslight flooded out, and Eliza had her first proper sight of the members of the London Fairy Society.

There were only seven, but that was enough to crowd the small drawing room, taking up most of the seating. The gentlemen—three of them—stood as she came in, and Eliza dropped into a curtsy before realizing it made her look like a servant. “I’m sorry, I know I’ve come late—is this the Fairy Society?”

She straightened, and found herself staring at Louisa Kittering.

The young woman was seated on a chair by the windows, looking like the very picture of horrified surprise. Eliza feared she mirrored that expression, but her months of lying had been good practice; when she wrenched her gaze away, she saw only mild curiosity in the others’ faces, and nobody was looking between the two of them as if waiting for an explanation.

The remainder were a trio of gentlemen; a pair of middle-aged women who were very obviously sisters; and an elderly woman by the hearth, who answered Eliza. “Yes, do come in—it’s no trouble; we haven’t yet stopped ourselves chattering long enough to do anything like business. What is your name, child?”

Doubt paralyzed her tongue for an instant. Miss Kittering would expect her to say White; the maid had already heard Baker. You’ll already have to do something about Miss Kittering. Don’t connect yourself to Cromwell Road. “Elizabeth Baker,” she said, and made herself lift her eyes to the woman’s face. It was a friendly countenance, wrinkled by many smiles—entirely unlike Mrs. Kittering or Mrs. Fowler, whose forbidding expressions had trained her very thoroughly to keep her gaze cast down.

“Welcome, Mrs. Baker—or is it Miss? Miss Baker. I am Mrs. Chase, and as this is my house, so far I have been the de facto president of our little society, though we have not yet gone so far as to establish rules or any kind of official leadership. We are quite informal here, you see.”

Eliza was profoundly grateful for that informality; she’d already had enough of a fright. Mrs. Chase introduced her to the three gentlemen—Mr. Myers, Mr. Graff, and a Scostman named Macgregor—and to Miss Kittering and the sisters, a pair of spinsters named Goodemeade. “Please, have a seat,” the woman said, after all the greetings were done.

The furniture was mismatched in a way no elegant woman would ever have permitted, a mix of heavy new chairs with thick padding and older, sticklike pieces. Mr. Myers surrendered one of the former to Eliza, startling her; she was more accustomed to gentlemen ignoring or making crude suggestions to her. She settled into it, trying not to fidget with the skirt of Ann Wick’s dress. Mrs. Chase said, “You have an interest in fairies?”

“Oh, yes,” Eliza answered. She glanced around as she said it, partly to see if the others read her heartfelt tone as enthusiasm, but mostly to see what Louisa Kittering was doing. The young woman’s face had settled like stone. It didn’t look like anger, though, or the self-righteous indignation of a girl who had caught her maid in a lie; it looked more like confusion and dread.

Then understanding came, and Eliza fought not to laugh. I’m not the one who’s been caught out—she is!

Mrs. Kittering had forbidden her daughter to go out tonight, because of the dinner party. She was utterly inflexible upon that point. It therefore followed that Miss Kittering must have sneaked out of the house. Her supposed plan for the evening had been to attend a theatrical performance with a friend… but Eliza’s presence made it seem as if the truth had been discovered. In which case she had to be wondering where her mother was, and why Eliza had not seized her by the ear to drag her home.

Let her chew upon that for a while. A plan was taking shape in Eliza’s mind, but it could not be put in motion until the meeting ended.

Which left her with her original purpose in coming. She was disappointed not to see the other woman, Miss Kittering’s friend, who had claimed to know more of faeries than the others here. Still, there might be something of value to learn.

Mrs. Chase had gone on talking, words Eliza only half heard; something about there being a great diversity of interests present. “Mr. Graff, you had indicated that you wished to speak upon—anthropology, was it?”

He rose at her words, tucking his thumbs into the pockets of his waistcoat. “Yes, anthropology. Ladies, gentlemen—I recently returned from missionary work in Africa, and as a result have taken quite an interest in the superstitions of primitive peoples. As some of you may be aware, this often takes the form of animism, totemism, and similar beliefs. Well, the chaps I was dealing with were full of such things, always talking about lion-men or what have you, and it occurred to me that what they were describing were not so different from our own English fairies. More primitive, of course—a reflection of their own lesser development—but the kinship can be seen.

“Visiting places of that sort… it’s like looking back into our own, less civilized past. And so I have begun to wonder whether the fairy beliefs we have here might not be a relic of similar practices back in pagan days.”

Eliza did not like him in the slightest. He did not look at anyone as he spoke, but rather directed his gaze above their heads, which had the effect of lifting his nose to an arrogant angle. She liked him even less when he chose an example to illustrate his point. “Take the legends—very common in the north of England, but found elsewhere as well—of supernatural black dogs. We know that the dog was an object of veneration for ancient Celtic peoples; think of Cú Chulainn, the Hound of Culann. Might there not have been a dog cult in northern England? Perhaps a funerary cult, given the association of such phantasms with death; or perhaps they were warriors, garbing themselves as dogs before going into battle. Then we might very easily explain the legends as folk memory, preserving a faint, distorted echo of past truths.”

Her one comfort, upon hearing those words, was that nobody else in the room looked terribly impressed, either. One of the Goodemeade sisters made a faintly outraged noise at the word distorted; the other laid a quelling hand on her knee.

There was no one to quell Eliza. “What of people who have seen those black dogs?” she asked.

His mustaches did not hide his condescending smile. “What have they seen? Supernatural creatures? Or merely some neighbor’s black-furred mongrel, that startled them along a lonely road at night?”

“If I may,” Macgregor said. The habits of deference made Eliza hesitate, forgetting that she had a right to speak here, and by the time she found her tongue again, the Scotsman had already begun to air his own theory. “I agree that we must look to the past for explanations—but not to superstition. As an educated man, Mr. Graff, you must of course be familiar with Darwin’s theory of evolution…”

As he began outlining a place for fairies in that scheme, Eliza sank back in disgust. If these people believed in evolution, there was no point in wasting her time listening to them. No wonder that other woman took Miss Kittering aside. The young woman was observing all this with condescending amusement, while Mrs. Chase exchanged a look with the Goodemeade sisters, who shook their heads. Eliza wished she could leave the meeting, without drawing unwanted attention.

Mr. Myers finally broke in, interrupting the increasingly heated argument between Graff and Macgregor. “Gentlemen, you are debating theory, without evidence. Would it not be more productive to ask ourselves what proof we have of fairies?”

Graff’s exhalation of annoyance ruffled his mustaches. “What proof do you think exists?”

“People who have seen them,” Eliza said again. Then she hesitated. Now was the moment to tell her own story—

But what would it gain? Graff wouldn’t listen to her; she could tell that just by looking at him. Her suspicion was confirmed when Myers said, “Scholars of folklore have been collecting such stories for some time. Indeed, some claim to have seen fairies themselves, particularly in Ireland—”

“Ireland! Bah!” Graff dismissed that with a contemptuous wave of his hand. “Superstitious peasants, the lot of them, and probably drunk to boot.”

Myers stiffened, giving him a very cold look. “As a scholar, sir, I should look first to the evidence they present, rather than the nationality of those who present it.”

He, at least, might listen if Eliza spoke. But it was clear from what Myers said, continuing his argument with Graff and Macgregor, that he had no personal experience of faeries himself. He could not help her. Glancing across to the silent Miss Kittering, Eliza saw her own frustration mirrored. Of course; she probably came here hoping to meet her friend. Now she’s gone and disobeyed her mother—and been caught out—and all she has to show for it is a stupid argument among men who love the sound of their own voices.

Mrs. Chase finally managed to calm them into something like a truce, once it became obvious that neither of the men was going to sway the others. Unfortunately, she then turned her attention to Eliza. “So, Miss Baker. We have already heard from Mr. Graff, who is the other newcomer among us, but you have been rather quiet. Tell us, what is your interest in fairies?”

I want to know how to catch one and wring his neck. Eliza pasted a vague smile onto her face, covering the anger beneath. “Oh,” she said, “I’ve always found the stories very interesting—the Irish ones particularly,” she added, as a jab at Graff. He snorted.

Mrs. Chase, however, brightened. “Indeed? Then surely you’ve read the works of Lady Wilde?” Eliza was forced to shake her head. “Oh, but you must—she’s quite a famous poet, really, under the name of ‘Speranza,’ and she has been publishing articles based on her late husband’s research. Here, I should have one on hand—”

One of the Goodemeade sisters rose on the old woman’s behalf and found it, and they passed the remainder of the time in listening to Mrs. Chase read. Only Mr. Myers seemed to pay much attention, though, and so the meeting straggled to an unhappy close.

Eliza rose promptly from her chair, intending to go straight over to Miss Kittering. She no longer cared whether anyone guessed they already knew each other. Before she could take a step, though, the Miss Goodemeades appeared in front of her. “We didn’t have a chance to welcome you properly before the meeting, but we wanted to say we’re very happy you came. Did you see the advertisement we placed in the newspaper? Or did a friend tell you about our society?”

“The newspaper,” Eliza said, distracted. Miss Kittering was speaking to Mr. Myers, but she couldn’t hear what the young woman was saying.

“You see?” Miss Goodemeade said to her sister. “I told you that would catch the right kind of eyes! Well, some of the right kind; I fear we’ve pulled in a few we might have done without.” This last was said in a lower tone, easily hidden under the argument Graff and Macgregor had resumed.

“But we’re very glad to have you,” the sister said. The two women were almost impossible to tell apart: both short, both honey haired and honey eyed, in dresses of brightly printed cotton. Only the roses on one and the daisies on the other kept them from being identical; unfortunately, Eliza had forgotten their given names. “In fact, we should like to invite you to join us at another meeting—more a private circle of friends, really, that—”

Eliza risked a glance over at Miss Kittering and Mr. Myers, only to find Mrs. Chase had taken the fellow aside into private conversation, and the drawing room door was swinging shut behind Miss Kittering.

Her heart leapt into her mouth. If she were to salvage anything from the wreck of this evening—and keep it from getting any worse—she could not let the young woman go off without her!

“I’m sorry,” she said, cutting Miss Goodemeade off. “I’m afraid I have to go.”

“Oh, you mustn’t,” the daisy Goodemeade said, trying to catch her hand.

Eliza pulled away, making some half-coherent excuse, not caring anymore that she was catching people’s attention. “At least come back next month—” the rose Goodemeade said.

“Yes, certainly,” Eliza lied; anything to get away without being inexcusably rude. Why do I even care? I’ve no reason to see these people again. But she was reluctant to hurt the sisters’ feelings, when they obviously meant well. “I’m very sorry—I’ve stayed too long already—goodbye.” She flung herself out to the staircase.

Even with her haste, those words proved prophetic. When she got downstairs, Miss Kittering was gone, and the maid nowhere in sight. Eliza hurried out into the street, but it was no use; the gaslight showed her a variety of people and vehicles, but not her quarry. “Stupid girl,” Eliza muttered. “You should have tried to talk to me, bribe me to lie—” Instead, she’d run. To her home? If not there, then Eliza didn’t have the first guess where she’d gone; so Cromwell Road it was.

If she hurried, she might even be able to stop Miss Kittering from doing anything else stupid. The Angel Inn was just on the corner, a few doors down, with cabs standing outside. Cursing the expense, and the optimism that had made her waste money on an omnibus earlier, Eliza went to hire a driver, and try to race Miss Kittering home.

Cromwell Road, South Kensington: April 11, 1884

She saw no one outside when she arrived, and hesitated for just an instant, wondering. Had Miss Kittering gone elsewhere? If she’d come here, and already gone inside, there was nothing Eliza could do for her; by now she’d certainly been caught.

Then she saw a furtive shape dodging from shadow to gaslight shadow, toward the servants’ entrance on Queensberry Place.

Eliza couldn’t be both fast and quiet. She ran, and the furtive shape did, too, throwing herself down the steps to the area. Eliza caught her halfway down, with a grip hard enough to bruise.

Miss Kittering drew breath to scream, until Eliza clapped her other hand over the young lady’s mouth. “Hush, you stupid girl,” she hissed, half her attention on the servants’ door. “Unless you want them out here, before you’ve had a chance to save yourself from what’s waiting inside.”

The struggling stilled. When Eliza was sure Miss Kittering had calmed, she lifted her hand, and the young lady turned to face her.

Standing on a higher step put her at eye level with Miss Kittering, who licked her lips and tried to regain a measure of dignity. “What do you think you’re doing, grabbing me like that? You have no right to treat me this way; I’ll—”

Her voice was far too loud; the basement would be full of servants, swarming like ants in a kicked hill, and if Eliza didn’t stop her Miss Kittering would bring them all out to investigate. But she held an advantage: whatever secrets Miss Kittering might keep, she was a sheltered soul. Eliza, on the other hand, was a daughter of London’s Irish slums. Brendan Hennessy, a petty criminal she’d known in Whitechapel, had once told her people weren’t much different from dogs: the one who came out on top wasn’t necessarily the bigger or the stronger, but the one who growled louder, bit harder, and scared the other into submission.

Brendan Hennessy ended up hanged in Newgate for his growling and biting, and maybe Eliza would end the same way. But it was worth the risk, for Owen’s sake.

She seized hold of Miss Kittering’s shoulders, ignoring the young lady’s indignant squeak. “You’ll close your mouth and listen, you will. You’ve gone and sneaked out, without your mother’s permission, and her with no idea why… sure I could spin her such a tale, it would turn her hair white. A spiritualist meeting, it could be—even a secret lover—”

Miss Kittering went even more rigid. She might not want to marry that baron’s son, but if she lost her reputation, she’d be lucky to get any marriage at all.

“Or,” Eliza went on, before the girl could find her tongue, “I could be telling her something more respectable. It won’t save you the thrashing, and that’s the truth of it—but ’tis better than you’d have otherwise.”

The girl licked her lips again. She had no ability to hide her nerves; how had she evaded her mother’s control for this long? “Why… why would you do that?”

Thank Heaven for sheltered idiots, who don’t see a chance for power when it’s in their hands. But Miss Kittering didn’t know Eliza had told her own lies tonight; she was entirely vulnerable.

Eliza showed her teeth in a smile, and not a friendly one. “Because you’ll be helping me in return, you will. I—”

She didn’t get a chance to say anything more. The servants’ door opened to reveal Ann Wick, bracing a bin of refuse against her hip. The housemaid gaped at them, and Eliza seized Miss Kittering’s arm once more, stepping behind the young woman to hide Ann’s borrowed dress. With an effort, she summoned something more like her usual false demeanor. “She followed me,” Eliza said in a brisk tone, dragging the girl down the stairs. “Heard my mum was sick, and wanted to help; but as soon as she came, I turned around and marched her right home again. We shouldn’t bother Mrs. Kittering, I think, Mrs. Fowler can tell me what to do with the silly chit.”

Miss Kittering, blessedly, had the sense to keep her mouth shut.

The Goblin Market, Onyx Hall: April 11, 1884

Under the cool glow of a faerie light, the carte de visite in front of Dead Rick assumed an otherworldly aura. Who the stern-faced woman depicted in it was, he had no idea; it didn’t much matter. Her image fascinated him. The photograph was shoddy work, nothing to the sharp detail of a daguerreotype, but that very vagueness allowed him to spin a hundred stories about her. She was an upper-class wife, devoting all her time to the pressing question of what pattern her china should bear. She was a suffragist, campaigning to extend the vote to women. She was a frustrated bluestocking, more interested in books than a lady’s pursuits.

All he knew of her was that she was real: that she had lived, and sat for a photographer’s portrait, and given the resulting cards to her friends.

Proof of her existence. I should be lucky to leave so much behind.

The stone of his hidden refuge trembled faintly beneath him. A train, perhaps, or just one of the periodic tremors that shook the Onyx Hall. Dead Rick held his breath, waiting to see if it would grow stronger, but after a few seconds it subsided. As if the tremor had been a bell at the door, the voice spoke.

“What have you learned?”

Dead Rick stuffed the carte de visite into his waistcoat pocket and pushed his back against the wall. Even though he’d summoned the stranger, burying the bone near the pavilion in the old garden, it still made him uneasy to have anyone else sharing this space. Even if that someone else was just words in the air.

He said, “I knows a few things. But afore I go telling you anything, I need some proof.”

“Proof of what?”

“That you can get my memories back.”

The silence that followed sounded a great deal like a suppressed sigh. He could hear the stranger’s irritation echoing in his next words. “Haven’t we been through this before?”

“You told me something I didn’t know, and I think it’s true. But there’s lots of ways you might ’ave learned it. That don’t mean you can get my memories back. Do you know where Nadrett keeps them?” Dead Rick’s crossed arms were pressing in hard enough to make his ribs hurt. “Do you even know what they look like?”

It would be so easy for someone to play him. Dead Rick almost wished the stranger had never come to offer him hope; it made it that much harder to endure his life under Nadrett’s heel. Hope kept him from sinking into the blinding embrace of despair. It meant he had to keep fighting. But he couldn’t make himself give it up, and anybody who knew that could use it to lure him into damn near anything.

The voice was silent for long enough that Dead Rick wondered if it had been a bluff after all, and so easily called. Then came the answer: “Pieces of glass.”

He squeezed his eyes shut, before any tears could escape. It didn’t stop his ears, though, and the memory of sharp, shattering sound. When Nadrett wanted to punish Dead Rick, or just to remind him of the chain around his neck, he broke one of the stolen memories. The wisp of light that escaped was too vague for any detail to be made out, but it carried something—not quite a scent—that told Dead Rick it was his own.

Lost forever.

Through his teeth, he asked the question that really mattered. “Do you know ’ow to put them back?”

This time, the hesitation was much briefer. “No.”

Dead Rick slammed his hand against the floor, hard enough to bruise. “Then what fucking use are you to me?”

“I can get them away from Nadrett; surely that is some use. And it may be I can help you discover how to return them to their rightful place. Once they are in your possession, many things become possible. Now, do you have anything for me?”

The skriker drew a series of breaths, each one deeper than the one before, shoving his knotted emotions out of the way. “You ain’t given me nothing yet. I already knowed about the glass, so you tell me something else. Something I’ve forgotten.”

The annoyance was much more distinct now, but Dead Rick didn’t care. “Are you going to haggle every time we speak? Never mind; I’m sure I know the answer to that. Very well… something you’ve forgotten.” The stranger paused, then said, “You were once a faithful Queen’s man.”

It wasn’t at all what he’d expected. Lune, the Queen of the Onyx Court: he didn’t remember her, but he’d heard stories, even in the seven short years since his mind was wiped clean. How she’d won her throne from the cruel Queen Invidiana, centuries past. How she’d battled a Dragon to save London, twice. How she’d struggled to hold the Hall together, in the face of human destruction.

Noble stories, that all ended the same way: But that was a long time ago. However great a Queen she’d been in past ages, she was gone now. “Me, a courtier?”

“I never said that. Merely that you served her on several occasions—her, and the Prince of the time. And not because they held your leash, either.”

It was like their first meeting, when the stranger had spoken of those mortals as Dead Rick’s friends, the boy he’d stolen, and the girl who damned him for it. A Queen’s man. Against his will, the concept wormed its way under his skin and lodged there, irritating and impossible to ignore. A master—or rather a mistress, and a changing series of masters, the Princes who ruled at her side—more worthy than Nadrett. The stories spoke as much of Lune’s flaws as her virtues, but at least she had some of the latter. More than he could say of his current master.

“Is that why you’re doing this?” Dead Rick asked, the sudden thought dragging him up from the depths of his own mind. “Not the bit where you find a passage to Faerie—the bit where you tear down Nadrett along the way. Is it for ’er sake?”

The voice answered with cold disgust. “No. I do not serve the Queen.”

Which ruled out him being the Prince, even if Dead Rick believed that cockney sod could speak like such a gentleman. “So all you’re after is profit.”

“Is that a problem?” the voice asked, calmly.

His immediate reaction was suspicion—but that was just reflex, born of living in the Goblin Market. Once I’ve got my memories, I can do whatever I like. If I stay, this bastard might demand somebody’s firstborn child in payment for going to Faerie… but I know Nadrett would. And so long as there’s two of them selling, there’s a way to pit them against each other.

Many things became possible, once he had his memories back.

“Not a problem,” Dead Rick said, “if you can give me some proof you ain’t just spinning lies.”

The reply had the unmistakable sound of being delivered through clenched teeth. “More damned haggling. What proof do you want? The Queen, on a platter?”

“If you know where she went, sure—but I was thinking of somebody who knowed me. Before.”

“That will be dangerous,” the voice pointed out. “Nadrett has gone to some effort to cut you off from the life you had before. If he discovers you talking to an old friend, I will not be blamed for the consequences.”

“I don’t care.”

A note of amusement. “So the dog has begun to recover the pride he once had. If you believe I will be patient until you have had your confirmation, you are wrong; tell me what you know, and I will make arrangements.”

He was unlikely to get anything better. Dead Rick slid one hand into his waistcoat pocket, and pulled out the carte de visite. The stranger couldn’t see him, but he held it up anyway, studying the woman’s face once more. “Rewdan was bringing compounds in for Nadrett. Faerie chemicals, not the mortal kind. I asked around, and found out they’re used for photography.”

“Photography?”

He’d been hoping the stranger might see meaning in that, but judging by the surprise in the voice, the hidden speaker was as confused as Dead Rick. “So they say. I guess there’s faerie cameras?”

“In the Galenic Academy, yes… mortal techniques cannot capture our images properly. Issues of light.” Dead Rick wished, not for the first time, that he could see his ally’s face; he would have dearly loved to see the stranger’s expression as he paused for thought. “Are you certain this has something to do with a passage to Faerie?”

Not in the slightest—but he wasn’t stupid enough to admit it. “I ain’t ’eard about nothing else.”

As if musing to himself, the voice said, “Some sort of optical trick, perhaps?… I will look into it. Can you get anything else from Rewdan?”

“Not since Nadrett shot ’im.”

“Ah. Then we will have to proceed on our own. What were the compounds?” Dead Rick named them, and the voice made a thoughtful noise. Then he said, “I can’t keep sending you to the pavilion; someone will notice. Next time, leave a bone near the monument to past Princes, at the other end of the garden. And if I need to contact you, I will put my own sign there, by the flame that burns in its base. A spill of ashes. Keep watch for it.”

Dead Rick nodded, then remembered. “And you get me somebody who knowed me.”

“Yes, yes, I haven’t forgotten.”

Again, no farewell. The voice simply fell silent, and did not speak again. Dead Rick leaned his head back against the stone and thought, Good. Because while you look into this photography business, I’ll be looking into you.

Cromwell Road, South Kensington: April 12, 1884

Tongue stuck firmly in the gap in her teeth, Eliza bent over the brush in her hands, giving the floor of the water closet the hastiest scrub she could without risking Mrs. Fowler thrashing her for it later. The housekeeper was out this morning, which meant everyone was being decidedly slower about their work—everyone but Eliza, who was determined to finish quickly so she could sneak off and talk to Louisa Kittering.

Miss Kittering had been confined to her room, with only the barest contact permitted. Ann handed trays of bread and tea through the door, and Eliza went in long enough to clear away cinders from the grate, fill the lamps with paraffin, and gather up dirty laundry, but all of this happened under Mrs. Fowler’s disapproving eye. She’d had no chance to finish the conversation they’d begun outside the house, after the London Fairy Society meeting.

That was good enough. Eliza sloshed a bit of clean water from the sink to rinse the floor, mopped it up, wiped the tiles dry, and hurried to the servants’ stair. If she was quick about returning her supplies to the basement, she could be out again before anyone thought to question what she was doing next.

A lovely and plausible hope that was dashed when she reached the bottom of the stairs. Almost every single maid and footman in the house was gathered there, gawping and whispering amongst themselves.

Apprehension gripped Eliza’s heart. Had Miss Kittering done something else foolish? If she’s gotten herself banished to the countryside…

It might not be Miss Kittering at all. But a heavy dread had settled upon Eliza, making her go forward, to where Ann Wick peered up at the ceiling as if she could see or hear anything from the floors above. “What is it, Ann?”

Sarah, the little scullery maid, answered before anyone else could, her face bright with curiosity. “A police constable! Come to talk to Mr. Kittering. I wonder if—”

“You shut your mouth,” Ann said, interrupting her. “It isn’t our place to be speculating about the master’s affairs.” But there was no conviction behind it, and she kept looking up.

The word police had made Eliza’s skin jump, as if she’d been splashed with cold water. “Scotland Yard sent a man here?”

“Nothing to fear,” Ned Sayers told her, sidling close. “If it’s burglars they’re worried about, we’ll deal with that right quick. But should you need comforting—”

Eliza tried to sidle away without being obvious, and was helped by Mr. Warren, the butler, who cuffed him sharply. “‘Comforting’ is not what Mr. Kittering pays you for, Sayers. Move along, everyone; Ann is right. This is none of our affair. What would people say, if they saw us hovering about here, like prying little mice? Back to work, the lot of you.”

Grumbling and speculating, the clump of people began to break up. Eliza moved away from the stairs without paying the slightest scrap of attention to where she was going. Her heart was beating double-quick. Scotland Yard, here at Cromwell Road. It might be nothing—burglars, or some difficulty with Mr. Kittering’s business, or a thousand other things that weren’t her concern.

Or it might be a Special Branch man, asking after an Irishwoman with black hair and hazel eyes, answering to Elizabeth O’Malley. Or even a young woman matching that description, without the name and the accent.

I must find out. Her mind began to work properly once more, like a cart getting traction in deep mud. She followed Cook and Sarah back to the kitchen, then stepped into the scullery, where she changed out her mop and bucket for a bottle of ox gall, a soft brush, and a rag. Then she hurried upstairs, to the billiards room.

It was, of course, empty. Eliza had already cleaned the grate that morning, and Ann had dusted the pictures and animal trophies; with the Kitterings’ three sons already married, and Mr. Kittering more often socializing at his club, the room saw only occasional use. Mrs. Kittering would never set foot in such a masculine domain—and besides, at present she was busy answering letters in her boudoir, enjoying her last few minutes of ignorance before someone came to tell her of the damage her family’s respectability was taking from the constable in the house. Louisa was still shut up in her room, and Eliza should have taken advantage of that… but first she had to know what the constable was doing here. Talking to Louisa would do her no good at all if she went to prison ten minutes later.

She dug a small fragment out of the coal scuttle, then went on silent feet to the room’s other door—the one adjoining Mr. Kittering’s library.

There Eliza dropped the coal onto the carpet and ground it in with a merciless heel. It left a gratifyingly black smear. She pocketed what remained of the fragment, then knelt and virtuously began to clean the stain away, every scrap of her attention bent upon the voices coming through the door.

“I fail to see what concern this is of mine,” Mr. Kittering said.

Muffled though it was by the door, the peeler’s reply made her spill too much ox gall over the stain. “’Tis a matter of general safety, sir. Sure ye all will rest better once we catch these fellows and get them locked away.”

Spoken in the clear accents of western Ireland, undiluted by a childhood in London. A great many constables came from Irish stock—and almost every last member of the Special Irish Branch.

She wanted to believe this man was the ordinary sort of constable, but couldn’t lie to herself that convincingly. Eliza bit her lip and forced herself to continue working. Mr. Kittering said, “We certainly would be pleased to see Scotland Yard do its job. But what I do not understand is why you’re sniffing around South Kensington. This is a respectable neighborhood; we have no Irish here.”

“Not even servants, sir?”

The vulgarity of Mr. Kittering’s reply would have given his wife the vapors. “Shiftless, filthy lot—kept an Irish bootboy, once, and he repaid us by stealing. Men like you, Sergeant Quinn, are a credit to your race, but regrettably rare. The rest are good enough for simple labor, nothing more.”

“I understand, sir.”

Eliza tasted blood, and realized her teeth were clenched hard on both her lips, as if nailing them shut to prevent any sound escaping. Aye, we’re good enough for my father to lose an arm digging your damned railways—good enough to make your clothes for pennies a day and pick through your sewers for lost rubbish to sell—but no more than that. And if we starve, or our children die of disease, then surely that’s God’s hand at work, keeping the vermin in check. Sometimes I wish the Fenians would blow the bloody lot of ye straight to Hell.

With thoughts like that possessing her mind, she heard little of what Quinn said next—until she was broken out of her distraction by the word “Whitechapel.”

“Most of the men involved are American Irish,” Quinn went on, while Eliza cursed herself and wondered what she’d missed. “’Tis fair certain we are they’re getting their dynamite from the United States—possibly routing it through France. But they have allies here in London, and we think one of them has come to South Kensington.”

“Well, you won’t find any such criminals in our household, I assure you.”

With the same neutral politeness he’d been using all conversation, the constable said, “I’ve been asked to check all the households, sir; it’s no reflection on you. If you do learn anything, though, don’t hesitate to say. You can write to me at the Special Branch offices in Scotland Yard, or to Chief Inspector Williamson, who’s overseeing these investigations. You may be sure we’ll be discreet.”

“I doubt I shall,” Mr. Kittering said, with monumental disdain, “but very well. Carry on with the good work, Sergeant Quinn.”

“Thank you, sir.”

The stain was only half dealt with. Eliza stared at it, trying to will herself to clean the rest away. Mr. Kittering’s words had left a bitter taste in her mouth. What did she care if these rich toffs had a smear on their expensive Turkish carpet? The entire room disgusted her: all this space, dedicated to billiards, when it was more than Mrs. Darragh and her daughter had for living in. And how many Whitechapel beggars could have been fed on the money that instead went for Chinese silk curtains and Moorish lamps?

Filled with that fury, Eliza snatched up her rag and left the stain where it was, soaked in gall. She almost stormed out the billiards room door, but caught herself at the last instant; although the constable was gone, she could hear Mr. Kittering on the landing, speaking quietly with the butler, Mr. Warren. She waited until the master went upstairs, and Mr. Warren down to the ground floor. Then she slipped through to the servants’ staircase. There would be no going up to talk to Louisa, not right now. Not with Mr. and Mrs. Kittering above, discussing the untrustworthy Irish.

She wondered if she should run. If Special Branch had followed her this far… they must have caught wind of her in Whitechapel, when she called in her favors there. But no, she couldn’t leave, not when she had such a perfect chance to make Louisa Kittering talk!

Eliza slipped her hand into her pocket, feeling the tattered old photograph there. For Owen’s sake, she had to be brave. As soon as she learned what Miss Kittering knew, she could run again. Hide under a different name, hunt the faeries, get Owen back; once that was done, she could do anything. Even leave London, if she had to—though that would be like carving out her own heart, to abandon the only home she’d ever known.

She just had to wait a little longer. You’re not Eliza O’Malley, she told herself, straightening her apron and heading for the servants’ stair. You’re not even Elizabeth White. You’re Hannah, a sorry replacement for the only good maid Mrs. Kittering ever had. Eliza O’Malley would run, and that sergeant would notice. You’ll stay, and be patient, and God willing, get what you want.

The Goblin Market, Onyx Hall: April 12, 1884

Given enough time, Dead Rick could track just about anyone through the Goblin Market. But that was if he knew who he was hunting. His current question was one his nose couldn’t answer for him: who he was working for.

The obvious suspects were the other powers in the Goblin Market, the fae who challenged Nadrett for control. There were three of any importance: Lacca, Valentin Aspell, and a Welsh gwyllion whose name nobody could pronounce, so they just called him Hardface. Any of the three would leap at the chance to steal Nadrett’s idea out from under him.

None of them, however, sounded like the voice that spoke from the air. That didn’t necessarily mean much; he could tell the stranger was making an some effort to disguise his speech. Lacca could lower her voice, Hardface could hide his Welsh accent, Aspell could discard the oily contempt that dripped from his every word. There were other reasons to set them aside, though. Aspell wouldn’t need Dead Rick’s help for something like this; he had plenty of his own spies. Lacca didn’t have the subtlety for it; she would just shoot Nadrett and be done with it. Hardface did have the subtlety, but he’d rather cut off his right arm than ask Dead Rick for help, ever since the skriker had chased him into the sewers six years ago.

It didn’t have to be someone at the top. If there was some way to make a passage to Faerie, control of it would be enough to make anybody a king.

Which might be enough to tempt Charcoal Eddie. The shape-changing puck worked for Nadrett, but believed he could rule the Goblin Market better than anyone if he only got the chance. Creeping about once more in dog form, Dead Rick found Eddie near a busy crossroads of the Market, drinking and boasting to his mates about his exploits this All Hallows’ Eve past. “Scared three men straight to death,” the bird-man said, lowering his voice to what he clearly thought was an impressive growl. “And that’s how it should be, you know? All the time, not just one night a year! Time was, men were afraid to stick their noses out of doors after dark, for fear we’d snap them off; now they’ve got lanterns and gaslight and all, and they’re more afraid of bashers with truncheons than they are of us. Did you hear about the electrical lights they tried on the Embankment?” Charcoal Eddie spat in disgust. “Ought to smash them, I say. Smash it all.”

He got noises of agreement from his listeners, huddled around the old door that served them as a table. But they were only a small knot of goblins and pucks, thoroughly drunk, and none of them with bread enough to do anything about Eddie’s ideas. And it seemed awfully complicated, Eddie trying to get Nadrett’s secret so he’d be rich enough to cause better trouble in London. The puck wasn’t smart enough for that.

Hafdean, on the other hand, was. The hob had managed the Crow’s Head since before fae who weren’t Dead Rick could remember, and he dealt in information, too—sometimes, but not always, on Aspell’s behalf. Spitting out the rank-tasting bone he’d been chewing on for cover, Dead Rick licked an itchy part of his foot instead, considering.

He didn’t get far in his thoughts. Through the constant din of the Market, Dead Rick’s sharp ears caught a swelling uproar, one passage over.

The skriker leapt to his paws and ran to see, weaving through legs that paused as their owners realized there was trouble nearby. Through a broken doorway, around a corner, down a short hall—and then he stopped, because he’d gotten more than close enough.

The half-dozen fae edging their way toward the fork in the passage were not part of the Market; a glance made that obvious. Three were elf-knights, two men and a woman, in ordinary clothing, but with a fineness that stood out in this ragged place. The others were a mixed trio, a puck, a sprite, and a goblin Dead Rick recognized as the barguest Bonecruncher. Every last one was armed to the teeth—in Bonecruncher’s case, quite literally. He snarled at everyone in front of him, eyes flaming red, and pointed his pistols at anything that moved.

The six of them formed a protective ring, weapons facing outward, and in the center of it was a cluster of mortal children. That, in combination with the elf-knights, told Dead Rick everything he needed to know: the Prince had decided to assert his authority over the Onyx Hall, and sent his underlings to carry out a raid.

It happened every once in a while, on no particular schedule. Maybe the Prince heard about some atrocity too big to ignore; maybe he just woke up one day with the burning need to prove he wasn’t completely impotent. Dead Rick always avoided these raids when they happened. Sighing, he turned to go.

And found a gleefully drunk Charcoal Eddie charging straight for the intruders, brandishing his pint glass like a weapon.

The tense stalemate broke instantly. A sound went off like a gun firing underwater, and an enormous web spread itself over Eddie and his friends. One strand at the edge caught Dead Rick’s tail; when he pulled away, all the stuck fur ripped free, leaving him with a bald patch. He howled in pain. Then a second time, when a fleeing hob stepped on his paw.

The rushing crowd parted enough for him to see most of the raiding party fleeing down the right-hand passage. Covering their retreat was the sprite, a slender, almost boyish thing, far too skinny for the absurd-looking gun she held. She whirled to shoot someone else, and Dead Rick saw another web cough out of the barrel, expanding as it went.

Then she ran. But her delay had separated her from the group, and when she reached the fork in the passage, she went left.

Dead Rick wasn’t even sure why he ran after her. To steal that gun, in the hopes of selling it for bread? To point her back toward her friends, in some misbegotten echo of his former self? Or just for the pleasure of the hunt?

None of those three, he realized when he finally caught up to her, and his brain caught up to him. He’d followed because of the brief flicker in her brow when she saw him, before she turned to shoot the others. A flicker that returned when she whirled to shoot him, and saw he was alone. They’d lost the rest of the pursuit.

“Dead Rick?”

He skidded to a halt on the stone, paws splaying wide. Is this who ’e sent?

Sounds behind him. They hadn’t lost everybody, not yet. Dead Rick twisted upward into man shape, grabbed her by the arm. I’m a bleeding idiot. The voice was right; this was dangerous. But he didn’t care.

She swallowed her protest as he dragged her toward a broken slab of stone, leaning against a pillar. Gun shoved into the band of her trousers, the sprite scampered up it with more agility than he could manage in following, but they both made it to safety before the hunt came streaming through.

Perched in the crook where the stone vaulted outward to arch across the small chamber, they waited until the place was as close to silent as it would get. This was too near a bad patch of the palace for anyone to live in the room, though there were fae nearby.

The sprite let out the breath she’d been holding, turning it into a quiet laugh. “Blood and Bone—am I glad to see you. I went the wrong way, didn’t I?” Dead Rick nodded mutely, trying not to stare at her. “I never did learn my way around this warren. Doesn’t help when bits of it keep falling off, either.”

The sight of her mesmerized him. She knows me. I should know ’er. But there was only blankness in his mind.

When he found his tongue, he whispered, “Who sent you?”

Another quiet laugh. “Who else? Hodge, of course. Heard Aspell had a flock of children he was going to trick into swapping places with changelings, so Hodge sent us to get them out. Well, he sent Peregrin and the rest; I begged to come along. Can’t pass up a chance to tweak Aspell’s nose.”

Hodge. It took a moment for him to recognize the name, so few people used it. The Prince. “Nobody else? Nobody told you to come find me?”

She gave him a peculiar look. “Why should they? I thought you’d gone in search of Faerie years ago.”

About seven years, he guessed. Or maybe longer; for all he knew, those lost memories included a hundred years away from the Onyx Hall. But he doubted it. “Peregrin. Or the others. Are they trying to do anything about Nadrett?”

The sprite had begun lowering herself down; there really wasn’t room for two of them in the crook of the pillar. She paused long enough to make a disgusted face at him. “If only they could. We’re fool enough to make the occasional raid, Dead Rick; we’re not suicidal.”

Those two elf-knights would sound like gentlemen, surely; the puck might be able to pretend. And they served the Prince now, not the missing Queen. Dead Rick pursued the sprite back down to the floor. “’Eard any rumors about ’im? Maybe that ’e’s got some secret plan, some way to get to Faerie?”

She’d been brushing her palms off against her trousers; at his words, her hands froze in midair. Dead Rick cursed his tongue, so ready to wag at the first sign of a friend. “A passage, you mean? One people don’t know about?”

Better not to say anything more than he already had. “Something like that.”

Her green eyes went very wide. “If something like that existed… Ash and Thorn, Dead Rick. Half the Onyx Hall would sell their souls to the devil for a path to Faerie. The half that have to worry about iron. What do you know?”

This wasn’t how it was supposed to go. He’d demanded the voice send someone as proof partly because he wanted to learn more about himself, but mostly because it would give him a chance to identify his mysterious ally. So far, he hadn’t made much progress with either. And this was a terrible place to be having any kind of conversation, but his refuge lay too far away to take her there, even if he was willing to show that kind of trust.

Dead Rick compromised by jerking his chin toward the far corner of the room. The sprite watched in interest as he pried up a hinged stone in the floor, revealing a tight passage beneath. “It runs right past a bad patch,” Dead Rick warned her.

She flashed him a grin before dropping into the hole. “I’m not afraid.”

I am. If the bad patch had grown since he last went this way, at best they ended up in another part of the Onyx Hall. At worst, they would find out where the fae who vanished had gone. Dead Rick doubted it was Faerie.

But at least the tunnel was private, even if he nearly planted his knee in his teeth with every crouched step. “I don’t know a lot,” he said, edging his way along. How much to tell her? You were once a faithful Queen’s man. “There’s… rumors that ’e’s got something secret, or ’e’s working on it, anyway. Something really big, and I figures it’s about selling passage to Faerie. But the only secret thing I’ve found ’im doing is photography.”

“Photography? That sounds more like Academy business, not Market.”

“If it ’as anything to do with this, then it’s power. And that’s Goblin Market business.”

“True.” For the first time, a grim note entered her voice. But a howling mob hadn’t been able to depress her spirits for long; neither did this. More cheerfully, she said, “I still have a lot of friends in the Academy. I can ask.”

Dead Rick’s heart thumped harder. “Be careful. This gets traced back to me, I’m dead.”

Then they were at the other end of the hidden passage, and he directed her in how to open the panel. No way to check if there was anyone on the other side, but not much need; the sprite gagged at the smell of sewage that rushed in. Even hardened goblins avoided this spot. Dead Rick climbed out after her, leaving the panel open behind him, and cocked a thumb to the right. “Go through there, turn left, and you’ll see a hole in the stone. It’s where the sewers broke through into the palace. Sorry to put you into the mortal world, but I couldn’t get you to the other doors, not without you ’aving to shoot ’alf the Market.”

“I wouldn’t have minded.” She pulled the web gun from her trousers, cocked it, then looked at him with a sharpness that took him by surprise. “Are you a prisoner?”

His skin jumped as if she’d pointed the gun at him. In the wake of that shock came shame. She knowed me before. I don’t want ’er to know what I am now. But he had to say something, and he didn’t have time to think of a good lie, even if he could tell it convincingly. “No. Not exactly. It’s complicated.”

“Come with me. You can explain as we go.”

Shattering glass echoed in his memory. ’E’d destroy ’em all. “I can’t. Look, you’ve got to get out of ’ere, and I’ve got to get back. Just—if you ’ear anything about Nadrett, can you send word? Without anybody knowing.”

Her mouth quirked at the added requirement, but she said, “If it will help you, I’ll try.”

“It will.”

She turned to go, and the question burst out of him. “Who are you?”

It gave away too much. He saw a degree of understanding come into her green eyes, and prayed she wouldn’t ask. He couldn’t bear having to explain.

She didn’t ask. She merely said, “Irrith,” and then she was gone.

Irrith. He knew that name; she’d once put Valentin Aspell in prison for a hundred years. Can’t pass up a chance to tweak his nose.

Had she, too, once been a friend?

Whispering the name to himself, Dead Rick crawled back into the tunnel and closed the door behind him.

The Prince’s Court, Onyx Hall: April 12, 1884

The door swung open dramatically, and Irrith announced, “I’m not dead.”

None of those gathered in the Prince’s chambers tried to hide their relief. Ever since Sir Peregrin’s raiding party had come back without Irrith, Hodge had been pacing, using up energy he could ill afford. It had been a risk, sending them in the first place. In the early years of Hodge’s reign, Sir Peregrin and the rest of the Onyx Guard had been eager for any chance to strike at the festering sore known as the Goblin Market. Some of them died there, and others fled when the decay brought on by the opening of Blackfriars and Mansion House stations ate great chunks out of the Hall. The rest soon learned pragmatism: if they stood foot to foot with those thugs, they would lose. Especially if the thugs belonged to Nadrett.

His elf-knights were down to three, Sir Peregrin, Sir Cerenel, and Dame Segraine. To that meager strength he added Bonecruncher, Cuddy, and Irrith. That was all he had, to occasionally peck at the evils of the Goblin Market. Losing even one would be too much.

Without fear to keep his knees strong, Hodge sank into a chair. The furniture was ludicrously elegant for him; the whole room was. The chambers traditionally assigned to the Prince had crumbled a few years before, but Amadea—Lady Chamberlain to a court that had long since vanished—made sure he got the best of what was left. The black stone of the walls was carved at regular intervals with decorative columns, fluted into delicate spirals. The tapestries in between showed grand scenes, their colors unfaded by passing centuries, and the wood of the furnishings was rare, exotic stuff, taken equally from Faerie and the Orient. A little island of quality, in the midst of decay.

Wiping his brow, Hodge said, “Where the ’ell did you go? Bonecruncher ’ere said you was there one minute, gone the next.”

“Ran into an old friend,” Irrith said, with her usual breezy unconcern. “And I heard a very interesting rumor. If somebody had a passage to Faerie—here, I mean, or somewhere nearby; not off in a foreign country—how much would people pay to use it?”

“It don’t exist.”

“Pretend for a moment that it did.”

The rest of the raiding party looked just like Hodge felt. Skeptical, baffled, hopeful, confused. “Depends on who’s buying,” Hodge said, after a moment’s thought. “The ones as think they can manage ’ere wouldn’t go if the price was dear—but the desperate ones, they’d pay anything.”

Dame Segraine said, “Oaths, even. All those refugees in the night garden, the Goblin Market—they’d swear fealty to anyone who could promise them safety.”

Irrith dropped heavily into a chair. “That’s what I was afraid of. According to my little bird, Nadrett might have something of the sort up his sleeve.”

Cries of dismay burst from the others, rising above their exhaustion. Having any Goblin Market boss in control of a passage to Faerie would be bad enough, but Hodge would choose Hardface or Lacca—maybe even Valentin Aspell—over Nadrett. “How could he?” Sir Cerenel asked, in a tone that suggested the answer he wanted to hear was, He can’t. “There’s nothing near London, not anymore; we would know if there were. They were destroyed years ago, and it’s not as if we can make—”

He cut off abruptly, a sudden expression of hope fading into horror. Peregrin swore, then asked, “Is that even possible?”

“I’ll ask the Academy,” Hodge said, grim and cold. The means to make a passage to Faerie… that could save any number of lives.

In the right hands.

“I say we avoid the whole problem,” Bonecruncher said, fingering the guns he was never without. His eyes flamed brighter. “Kill that bastard now, like we’ve always wanted to.”

“But if he has something useful—”

“Bonecruncher, if we go after Nadrett we’ll be dead before we get ten steps—”

Hodge thumped the arm of his chair, and got silence. “We ain’t going to kill Nadrett. If ’e does ’ave some way to make a passage, we need to know about it, and get it away from ’im.”

“Small chance of that,” Peregrin said. “For the same reason we can’t kill him. Nadrett’s too powerful in the Market.”

“And anybody who knows anything is surely sworn not to tell,” Segraine added.

A thoughtful smile began to grow through Hodge’s weariness. “Maybe not. Remember La Madura?” Their grins said they certainly did; the Spanish nymph had spent no little time in Hodge’s bed, before he lost the strength for such exercise, and Sir Adenant escorted her to a safer land than London. “She told me something interesting. So far as she knowed, nobody in ’is gang swears any oaths.”

It got him an array of disbelieving looks. Then Irrith’s eyes widened, and she said, “Ash and Thorn. He’s an oathbreaker?”

They were rare, so far as Hodge knew. Faerie oaths were more than just words; they bound their speakers to obey. Breaking one was all but impossible. Any faerie who managed it found he could no longer swear oaths—or receive them. One’s word, given to a fellow who didn’t keep his own, was meaningless.

Someone else could accept oaths on his behalf—a trusted lieutenant, perhaps—but that would require Nadrett to trust his ally. And he wouldn’t want to draw attention to his oathbroken status by such measures, anyway.

Bonecruncher growled low in his throat. “No wonder he’s such a ruthless bastard. He’s got nothing but fear to keep them in line with.”

“Lucky for us, frightened people ain’t the same thing as loyal,” Hodge said. “Irrith, who’s your little bird with the rumor?”

The sprite frowned, fingers twisting about each other. “I’d… rather not say. I think there’s something odd going on there.”

If it was someone in the Market, “odd” probably meant “bad.” But he’d let it pass for now. “Well, can you try to find out more? Maybe nose out somebody in Nadrett’s gang that might turn on ’im, since they ain’t bound by oaths?”

She nodded, and the bands around the Prince’s heart relaxed a notch. Locked carefully away in another room was a stockpile of bread, in preparation for the final collapse. When that day came, he would do his best to ensure that every faerie here had enough to see them clear of London. But if he could give them a path to true safety instead, in Faerie itself…

It was a Goblin Market rumor, one of the most untrustworthy things in the world. The hope was too great to ignore, though.

Sighing, Hodge levered himself to his feet. “Get to that, then. The rest of you, let’s ’elp Amadea with the kids you brought back.”

St. Anne’s Church, Whitechapel: April 13, 1884

Mrs. Fowler might be a stout evangelical, but no one in the Kittering family itself felt any deep religious sentiment. The family attended church regularly because it was the respectable thing to do; some of the servants didn’t even bother with that much. Eliza herself had never been reliable about going to Mass—mostly because she was either working, or too exhausted from work to bother.

But six months and more away from the familiar ground of her parish created a weight of longing that finally broke her common sense. Special Irish Branch was looking for Fenians in South Kensington; going from there to a Catholic church for Easter Mass was very nearly the stupidest thing Eliza could do, short of walking into Scotland Yard and cursing the peelers out in Irish. She knew that, and she didn’t care. She wanted the comforts of the familiar. So she asked for, and received, permission to visit her supposed mother for Easter Sunday, and went back to Whitechapel.

With precautions, of course. She left Cromwell Road before dawn, when the streets of South Kensington were almost completely deserted, and walked along the edge of Hyde Park, up Piccadilly, before plunging into the tangled quarters of Soho. Skirting Seven Dials—as bad a district as Whitechapel, and more dangerous for being unfamiliar to her—she paused in a back alley of Holborn to change into the clothing she’d bought from a secondhand shop, an old-fashioned full-skirted dress with an equally old-fashioned bonnet. It made her look like an old woman, and that suited her very well.

Thus disguised, she took the long way around the City, bending north through Clerkenwell and Shoreditch. Nearly seven miles in total, and the sun was well up when the familar rose window of St. Anne’s came into view.

By then she was hardly alone on the street. Nowadays it was lawful to worship in a Catholic church, even if the English wished no one would; and Easter drew out many people who found more frivolous uses for all the other Sundays in the year. It was easy for Eliza to lose herself in the crowd. If there were any Special Branch men doing the same, out of uniform, they shouldn’t recognize her in these old clothes. And if they’d managed to follow her from South Kensington, without her noticing, they were better than anyone gave them credit for.

Eliza’s throat tightened at the first notes of the choir’s entrance chant. The priests began their procession down the aisle, robed in their Easter vestments, followed by the deacons and the altar boys. That’s Biddy McManus’s youngest boy, Eliza thought, seeing that one of them was much shorter than the others—and that was her undoing.

Tears sprang to her eyes, and would not die down again. She fought not to sob such that others would hear, but every time she looked about, another familiar face met her eyes. Thomas O’Rourke, and Sarah Flaherty, and all the Kinsellas; their eldest daughter was carrying a babe in her arms, and Eliza wondered if it was the girl’s own—had she finally married Will Cleary?—or if it belonged to some relation of hers.

She had no family to miss; her mother was dead, her father in prison, and of her three siblings who survived childhood, Mary and Bridget had gone to America, and Robert had gone to sea. Coming back now, though, she realized she missed something else very profoundly indeed. Whitechapel was her London, from the buildings to the people who lived there, whether they were kin or not. Even the ones she didn’t much like seemed dear to her now, because they were like her. They were not the Kitterings, frantically courting respectability, terrified that someone might discover their human flaws, trying to convince even themselves that they had none; the people here drank and laughed and had fights the whole neighborhood could hear. I don’t remember the last time I screamed my lungs out at anyone, she thought—and then a hysterical giggle rose in her throat, that she could miss something like that.

She choked it down. Father Tooley was among the priests; of them all, he would recognize her if she drew his eye. Instead Eliza lost herself in the comforting patterns of the Mass, kneeling and rising with the rest of the faithful, her voice in the responses only part of a much greater whole. Mrs. Darragh had always made sure she went to Sunday Mass, after Eliza’s mother died in the last cholera. The other woman had stopped going, though, after Owen was taken.

I will pray for him, Eliza thought, while Father Kearney read the offertory verse, beginning the liturgy of the Eucharist. And for myself—strayed lamb that I am.

Upon her knees as he recited the intercession, Eliza bent her thoughts to Owen, lost somewhere among the faeries. The Latin phrases washed over her, their sense known even if their specific meaning was not; she knew when the commemoration for the dead came, and her gut clenched. He isn’t dead. I’m sure of it. I couldn’t call his ghost. But she hadn’t tried in two years.

It was blasphemous to think of such things, especially on Easter morning. Eliza forced the thought from her head. Hands clasped before her like a pious old woman’s, she joined the river of people flowing slowly toward the altar, where the priests had ranged themselves for the Eucharist. Within the depths of her bonnet, no one could see her face as long as she kept her head bowed. But it also meant she could see little of where she was going, and so by the time she realized which direction the eddying movements of the crowd had taken her, it was too late to shift without attracting attention.

She came to the front of her line, and lifted her head to receive the wafer from Father Tooley.

He recognized her immediately, of course. She saw it in the lift of his eyebrows—a brief crack in his well-practiced solemnity. But he would never disrupt Mass just because one errant parishioner had shown up without warning. He murmured “Corpus Christi” and placed the wafer on her tongue; Eliza moved on to receive the wine; and no one who was not watching his face at precisely that moment would have noticed anything out of the ordinary. But now Father Tooley knew she was there.

Eliza returned to her pew and knelt, trying to put such worldly concerns out of her mind. Lord, protect and watch over Your son Owen Darragh, who was betrayed by one he trusted. Guard him against those unholy spirits that envy us our immortal souls. May he return to the family that loves him and the Church that shelters him—and may he do it soon. Help me to save him; ’tis only with Your aid that I have any hope. Amen.

It brought a measure of peace—but only a measure. After the De profundis, her thoughts turned quickly to leaving before anyone else could recognize her. She would have liked to confess her sins, but this was neither the first nor the last Mass the priests would conduct today; Easter brought Catholics popping up like snowdrops after winter, and St. Anne’s could not hold them all at once. Confession could wait until later.

But when she turned to go, a hand caught her sleeve. It was Brian McManus, the altar boy she’d spotted before. “If you please, ma’am,” he said, “Father Tooley wants to see you.”

Brian obviously didn’t recognize her. To a boy like him, anyone over the age of twenty was old, and her disguise was as good as gray hair for making her into a crone. But if she refused, he’d remember that, and oh, she should never have come here in the first place.

She had little choice now. Eliza nodded, and let Brian lead her to the sacristy.

Father Tooley waited there alone. Once the door had closed behind her, Eliza lifted her head; there was little point in hiding now. “Eliza O’Malley,” the priest said, and she could not tell what he meant by it: Disapproval? Concern? Resignation?

“I’m sorry, Father,” she said in a rush, hands bunching up the wool of her old skirt. “I should have confessed before taking communion—not that I’ve committed any mortal sins, I don’t think, but it’s been months, and—”

He stopped her confused apology by coming forward and taking her shoulders in his hands. They were big hands, with big knuckles; those and his broken, florid nose attested to a turbulent past before he joined the priesthood. It made him ideal for this parish, where tending to his flock occasionally meant wading into a drunken brawl and separating his parishioners by force. The warmth of his palms was as much a comfort as communion had been—a reminder that, while her father might be in prison, she still had a Father watching over her.

Which he had been doing, even in her absence. “I wanted to warn you,” he said. Quietly, as if he didn’t want his words carrying beyond the sacristy door. “Fergus Boyle’s been spreading trouble.”

Bloody Fergus. She stopped herself from saying it out loud. “What do you mean?”

“I mean there’s been lads from Special Irish Branch up and down Whitechapel, asking questions. Some of them about you. They think someone here is helping the Fenians, and maybe ’tis you. Maggie Darragh’s kept her mouth shut, but I’m not sure Boyle’s done the same. I’ve heard some rumors you’d gone to the West End, looking for some kind of work there. If he knew anything about that, then ’tis a good bet Scotland Yard knows it now, too.”

This time the curse did escape her. Father Tooley didn’t blink; he’d heard worse before. I should have known it was Boyle that sent the bobbies after me. “He doesn’t know much,” Eliza said, trying to remember what she’d let slip while gathering what she needed to apply for the position in Cromwell Road. Not much, surely, or Sergeant Quinn wouldn’t have been going from house to house through all of South Kensington. “Just that I—”

The priest stopped her with a finger on her lips. “We aren’t in the confessional,” he reminded her. “Don’t tell me anything you wouldn’t want known, if the police asked. But Eliza… if you have anything to confess, come back late tonight. I’ll wait up for you.”

She shook her head, and when he took his hand away, said, “Not like that. I’m no Fenian, Father, and that’s the truth of it. I was at Charing Cross, yes, but not because I went there to blow anything up.”

“The peelers think there’s more trouble planned for the Underground; I got that much from the fellow they sent to question me. If you know anything about it—”

He broke off as her expression changed. Eliza shook her head again, meaning to say that no, she didn’t know anything about it—but it was a lie, because she did know something. She knew that faeries had helped the men who bombed Charing Cross, and maybe the ones at Praed Street, too; and they must have had a reason for it.

Iron, she thought. She’d always assumed it was just goblin mischief, or maybe sympathy for the Fenian cause; maybe Irish faeries immigrated during the Great Hunger, just as mortal folk did, and wanted to see their homeland free of British rule. If they were striking at the Underground in particular, though… but why hadn’t they bombed railways before?

It was all speculation. Just as likely the Fenians were the ones planning more Underground trouble, because it was a good place to make people afraid. With their dark tunnels and clouds of choking steam, they were already a little like Hell on earth.

“Eliza,” Father Tooley said gently.

She gripped his hands in her own and said, “’Tis all right, Father. If I find out anything, you may be sure I’ll not just sit on it. I don’t want to see anyone hurt, any more than yourself—or the peelers, for that matter.” Hesitantly, her mind ventured past that hazy day when she would have Owen back, and thought about what she could do once he was safe. Could be I can do more than just help him, and myself. And that might get the Special Branch boys off my back at last.

He kissed her on the forehead, then blessed her. “But you still need confession,” he said, with kind sternness. “If you’ve spent the last six months as a lily-white saint, then I’m a Methodist.”

Lying, spying, threatening Louisa Kittering. No, not a lily-white saint. But it wasn’t worth the danger of coming back to a place where the constables knew to look for her. “I will when I can, Father,” Eliza promised.

If God granted her prayer, “when” might even be soon.

Cromwell Road, South Kensington: April 14, 1884

When Eliza went up to air out Louisa Kittering’s bedding the next morning, Mrs. Fowler was not on guard at the door, and the bedroom itself was empty.

“Mrs. Kittering reckons church yesterday did her some good,” Ann Wick said, when Eliza questioned her. “Won’t let her out of the house yet, but she’s at least free of her room.” The other housemaid frowned at Eliza and added, “I don’t know what nonsense went on the other night, but you’d best not repeat it, if you know what’s good for you. Mrs. Kittering won’t just have you beaten; she’ll find a way to toss you into prison, she’s that vindictive.”

It hardly mattered. Louisa Kittering was free—free enough that Eliza could contrive a way to speak with her privately—and that meant her time at Cromwell Road might be drawing to an end at last.

Any further doubts that God had heard her prayer were banished when she carried the ashes out to the bin behind the house. The gardener, Mr. Phillips, caught her before she could go back inside. “Miss Kittering says she wants to see you, girl. In the conservatory.”

Eliza thanked him, and added a second, silent thanks to God as she hurried to the conservatory, wiping her hands clean on her apron.

Inside, the glass roof of the structure magnified spring’s faint warmth; that and the blooming flowers made the place a miniature Eden. It formed a pretty background for Miss Kittering, who stood in an ivory morning dress in the far corner, fingering the half-opened buds of an Oriental poppy.

They were alone, and as long as no one shouted, the gardener would not hear them outside. Eliza still dipped into a curtsy out of habit, thinking as she did so that this was not the best way to begin following up on a threat. Before she could say anything, though, Miss Kittering spoke.

“You addressed me in a very unacceptable fashion the other night.” Her fingers brushed the brilliant tips of the poppy petals, then curled around the stem. “In fact, I would go so far as to say you attempted to blackmail me.”

Eliza’s breath drew short. I should have done this sooner. Before she had time to think about it. But if Miss Kittering thought strength of will alone would be enough to protect her, she was wrong. “Call it whatever you like, miss; it doesn’t change anything. I can still tell your mother things that will make life very hard for you, whether they’re true or not.”

“You can—but you won’t.” Miss Kittering turned to face her. The young woman’s face looked pale and bruised, as if she’d not slept well during her captivity, but above the dark circles her eyes glittered like two brown agates. “Because I heard two interesting things lately. One was gossip about a constable who came to question my father the other day. And the other was your voice that night—sounding very distinctly Irish.”

At those words, a lump of lead took the place of Eliza’s heart. It felt like her blood had truly stopped flowing, and metal coldness spread throughout her body.

“I may have secrets,” Miss Kittering said, a small, triumphant smile curving her lips, “but so do you. And it seems we’re each in a position to ruin the other. So this is our agreement: that you will say nothing, and neither will I. Out of gratitude for your assistance the other night, I will tell no one of how you threatened me; but that is all the help you will receive. Whatever further price you intended to extort from me, you can give up on it now—for if you attempt to force me, then you will end in prison. However little I inherited from my mother, I can promise you, that is one thing we share.”

All Eliza’s hope of a moment before had crumbled into ash. Darkness at the edge of her vision made her realize she wasn’t breathing; when she gasped air in once more, Miss Kittering’s smile deepened. How could she rejoice? A boy’s life was at stake, maybe his very soul—

But Eliza had never told her that. And now it was too late. Miss Kittering might have believed, had she heard the tale sooner… but not now, not after Eliza’s terrible misstep. Or rather, if she did believe, she still would have no reason to help. What did a rich, sheltered young miss from South Kensington care what happened to a poor Irish lad from Whitechapel? She wouldn’t give tuppence for Owen, any more than the peelers had when he disappeared.

Eliza refused to give up. Not when she was this close. “Then let me help you,” she said, coming forward with her hands raised in supplication. “If you sneak away again, your mother will thrash you within an inch of your life; but what if I helped you hide it? Say you’d gone to call on a friend, or—or close the windows behind you, if it must be at night.”

Miss Kittering laughed. She’d pulled the bud off its stem, and was now shredding the delicate, half-formed petals, letting them fall to the ground like drops of bright blood. “I have better allies than you, and shan’t have to worry about my mother much longer. Now get out of here; I’ve said what I must, and have no desire to hear anything else you might say.”

Eliza went. There was nothing to be gained by staying; she had missed her chance. But like a drunken man in a brawl, the hits she’d taken only made her angrier, and more determined. Louisa Kittering could go to the devil; Eliza O’Malley would rescue her friend.

She went about her duties like the clockwork doll she’d once seen exhibited in Covent Garden, while her mind wrestled her problems toward a solution. The next meeting of the London Fairy Society was in a bit more than a fortnight. Eliza would be there if she had to quit her position to go—but in the meantime, she might as well stay here. Her long vigil in Newgate had produced nothing, and her earnings as a costerwoman were barely enough to keep her fed. Better to stay where there was actual money, and look for another opportunity to get the upper hand over Miss Kittering. Given the young woman’s behavior, surely she’d have one before long.

Failing that, she could at least get a bit of revenge in parting.

Lips peeled back in an expression that might have been mistaken for a grin, Eliza went about her work.

Sewerside: May 1, 1884

“Remember Moor Fields?” Gresh asked, spitting tobacco juice onto the floor.

He’d been kind enough to spit in the other direction from Dead Rick, and so the skriker didn’t bite his head off for bringing up the painful subject of memory. “What are you talking about?”

“It’s May Day, old chap! We ought to be outside, with bonfires and feasts and such. Dancing. Music. Nymphs from nearby villages, willing to spread their legs for anyone. Mortals we’d lured in, that we’d be nice to for once.” Gresh spat again, then fingered something out of his mouth that didn’t look like tobacco leaf. “But they’ve gone and built all over it. So we sits ’ere and gets drunk, and it’s no different than any other day.”

Dead Rick bent his attention to the dirt under his fingernails, as if that could be his excuse for not answering. Fields, and celebrations in them: two more things he didn’t remember. He felt like punching Gresh.

But an approaching scent brought him into a wary crouch, not sure whether he was about to growl or show throat. Nadrett swept into the room, trailing a trio of other fae: the fetch Nithen, a thrumpin named Old Gadling, and a sprite Dead Rick didn’t recognize, who was lugging an unwieldy leather case. Showing throat it is.

“On your feet,” Nadrett said. Dead Rick stood, warily, not liking the sense of purpose in his master’s posture. “Take these.” His hand flicked outward, twice; Gresh and Dead Rick both caught what he threw. “Now come with me.”

Dead Rick uncurled his fingers, his nose telling him what he held before his eyes did. Bread. Nadrett was taking them outside.

Gresh cackled and threw his piece up into the air, catching it in his mouth as it came down. “Moor Fields!” he said to Dead Rick, chewing. “Think ’e’s laid on any nymphs for us?”

Nadrett was far enough ahead by then that he either didn’t hear or, more likely, didn’t think Gresh worth answering. Nithen did it for him. “Moor Fields has been paved over as Finsbury Circus, idiot, and the only way you’re going to see a nymph there is if you get a head full of Po’s opium first. Now shut up.”

They were still in the Goblin Market; Nadrett would have ripped the guts out of anyone stupid enough to say anything of their purpose where others could hear. It didn’t take Dead Rick long to figure out where his master was leading them, though. There were only four ways out of the Market: two passages to the rest of the Hall, one concealed entrance to Billingsgate above, and the sewers.

His hackles rose as he remembered bringing Irrith here. Had Nadrett learned about that? Stupid whelp; ’e wouldn’t give you bread if ’e ’ad. But they did have bread, which meant they could have gone through the door into Billingsgate without worry. The sewers were mostly used by unprotected fae, willing to brave the filth and the danger of drowning in order to avoid the worst of the iron.

Could be what Nadrett sought was in the sewers.

The black stone of the Hall gave way to a brickwork wall, with a hole knocked in it big enough for a faerie to slip through, so long as he wasn’t a giant. This wasn’t one of the proper entrances, built into the Hall’s fabric; it was a break, a spot worn thin and finally through by the cast-iron gas main running alongside the great intercepting sewer. They couldn’t keep a glamour over the hole for more than a short while, and mostly only bothered when men came through to inspect the tunnel. Any tosher who spotted the gap and climbed through was fair game for the Market inhabitants on the other side: a small compensation for when the sewer flooded through to their chambers.

Dead Rick helped the unnamed sprite maneuver his case through the hole. “Careful, that’s delicate—” the sprite said in a distinct French accent, but swallowed his words when Nadrett spat a warning curse. Dead Rick sniffed, but couldn’t smell anything beyond a hint of leather over the sewer.

He dropped through the gap last, into water that came up past his knees. Nadrett produced a hawthorn box from one pocket, and slid aside a disk on one end until a will-o’-the-wisp floated out of the small hole there. It was considerably safer than a lantern, which could ignite the bad air and kill them all, but Dead Rick didn’t put good odds on the wisp’s survival. Those things couldn’t eat bread. Nadrett covered the hole again and put the box away. “Follow me.”

It was hard going, in water that deep; the brickwork was slick below his feet, and Nadrett had them walking upstream. Dead Rick hoped it wasn’t raining outside, and watched the water in the dim faerie light, ready to flee if he saw it rise. It remained steady, and when they’d gotten some distance away from the Market, Nadrett stopped.

“Tell them,” he said to Nithen.

The fetch grinned. In the scant light, he looked even more cadaverous than usual. His voice echoed weirdly over the sound of the water, making his words hard to understand. “So there’s stories of a ghost in these sewers. Every year on this night, for a couple of years now. We’re going to hunt it down.”

Gresh looked confused. “But it ain’t All ’Allows’ Eve.”

Old Gadling smacked him on the back of his head. Nithen said, “Ghosts can appear at any time. The night they died, for example. This isn’t an All Hallows’ Eve ride, us sweeping away ghosts with the dawn; we don’t want this ghost going anywhere.”

“We’re going to capture it,” Nadrett said.

Dead Rick’s eyes went back to the sprite’s heavy case, which Gadling had taken control of. The water came nearly to the thrumpin’s waist, but he didn’t seem to care; the stocky faerie balanced the case on his head and waded through without apparent trouble. There were ways of capturing ghosts, but none of them—so far as Dead Rick knew—required anything so bulky.

He’d see what it was soon enough. “Where’s the ghost?”

“That’s what you’re ’ere to find out,” Nadrett said. He let out three more will-o’-the-wisps, then gestured ahead, and Dead Rick saw dark shadows along the walls ahead, openings into the smaller sewers that connected to this main trunk. “Start looking.”

That seemed to be directed at him, Gresh, and Nithen. Old Gadling braced his feet and served as a stand while the sprite unlatched the case. And Nadrett, of course, could not be bothered to help. Dead Rick went without complaint. He wanted to be the one to find the ghost—and maybe warn it to flee.

Iron shivered against his senses as he went, not hurting him, but palpably there. They were close to the Underground works, where navvies labored day and night to build the railway’s final extension; no tracks had been laid yet, let alone trains run along them, but there were spades, mattocks, nails for the bracing beams, carts to bring cement and drag the spoil out. The doom of the Onyx Hall, less than a hundred feet away.

Right, left, or straight. Dead Rick went left, climbing the slick bricks to enter the smaller tunnel. The flow here was neither so deep nor so fast, but that was at best a mixed blessing; without the force of the water to scour material away, the passage was much fouler. Dead Rick held his breath as best he could and peered ahead, searching for the telltale flicker of a ghost.

A dead tosher, most like, he thought. People didn’t seem to be leaving ghosts as often as they once did. Or maybe ghosts, like fae, were being worn away by the changes in the world. All he knew was that Gresh complained every year about the loss of the old All Hallows’ Eve ride—an event he missed far more than May Day in Moor Fields—but the inability of the fae to sweep away weak ghosts each year, as they used to do, hadn’t left London neck-deep in phantoms. Maybe some Academy scholar was trying to answer that very question, and Nadrett intended to sell this ghost to him.

Another fork. The side passages were narrower still, barely large enough for Dead Rick to fit through. He didn’t want to go down them. But he was a skriker, a death omen, and instinct led him left.

He didn’t have to go far. Mist floated in the air ahead, where no mist should be; then it eddied as if turning to face him, and took more solid form.

Dead Rick found himself staring. This was no tosher. Nor was it a recent ghost. He didn’t need memories to know that knee breeches had gone out of style generations ago for anybody who wasn’t some rich swell’s footman. And footmen didn’t carry themselves the way this figure did.

It was a young man, slender of build, with the habitual dignity of a gentleman. He seemed relieved to see Dead Rick. “Oh! Thank goodness you found me. I seem to have gotten lost.”

Dead Rick was too startled to prevent his will-o’-the-wisp from streaking away. He hadn’t put on a glamour; despite his human form, he was clearly a faerie. And yet this ghost seemed completely unsurprised. Was it because he was dead, and therefore accustomed to strange things? Or had he seen fae before?

The ghost glowed faintly, just enough for Dead Rick to make him out. The skriker said, “What do you mean, lost?”

A laugh almost as faint as the light answered him. “I mean that unless I am very much mistaken—addled by death, perhaps—I ought to be in the Onyx Hall. But I haven’t seen so much as a bit of black stone in four years, now. Am I in a cesspit?”

The quality of the echoes changed. Dead Rick cursed. The wisp hadn’t bolted; it had gone to fetch Nadrett. They could take simple commands well enough.

Whoever this ghost was, Dead Rick wasn’t inclined to help Nadrett capture him. “Look, you’ve got to get out of ’ere. Go back to wherever you came from.”

“I’m sorry?” The phantom drifted closer, cocking his head to one side as if that would help. “I couldn’t quite understand you.”

Because Dead Rick had spoken quietly, not wanting the untrustworthy echoes to carry his words to Nadrett. He grimaced and flapped his hands, trying to shoo the ghost back, but the young man peered as if he could not quite see, either. Of course not, because I ain’t glowing.

Then it was too late. “Out of the way, dog.”

When he didn’t move, a hand seized the back of his waistcoat and yanked, dropping him onto his arse in the built-up muck. Nadrett shoved him against the sewer wall, then stopped, staring at the ghost. In the light of the gathered wisps, Dead Rick saw a wondering and unpleasant smile twist Nadrett’s lips. “Well, well. Ain’t this an interesting surprise. Evening, milord—out for a walk, are we?”

The ghost frowned. “Do I know you?”

More hands, grabbing Dead Rick under the arms; with slime and shit greasing the passage, Gadling was able to pull him out with only the most casual effort. “If you remember much, you might,” Nadrett said. “Though after this long—a century? No, more—I’ll be surprised if you do. Don’t much matter either way. Chrennois, get to it.”

Nadrett moved out of the way. Dead Rick, climbing to his feet, saw the sprite go to the mouth of the ghost’s tunnel with something in his hands. A box, about the size of a man’s head but wider, with flexible canvas sides that allowed him to extend the front forward. Two silver-rimmed lenses were set into that front board, winking clean brilliance in the dim light.

Wary, but not yet afraid, the ghost said, “What is that?”

Dead Rick answered him silently, held frozen by sudden, half-formed understanding. It’s a camera.

Lunar caustic, satyr’s bile. Nadrett was doing something with photography—or rather, this French faerie was, on his behalf. Were they about to open a passage to Faerie? In the filthy sewers of London? Dead Rick tensed, unsure what he was going to do, but ready to do something.

Chrennois peered through an opening in the top of the box, then pulled a lever set into the side. With a most peculiar noise—halfway between a moan and a huh of surprise—the ghost vanished.

It didn’t even fade; it simply blinked out of existence. The figure of the young man disappeared, leaving behind only faint wisps of phantasmal substance, which dissipated before they could fall to the sludge below. Those weren’t even gone yet when Nadrett demanded, “Did it work?”

The sprite shrugged, collapsing the front of his camera back into the rest of the body. “I’ll have to develop the plate to be certain. But he went somewhere; it seems likely.”

“Good.”

There was no mistaking the malicious pleasure in Nadrett’s voice. For the camera’s work, or the capture of that ghost in particular? Maybe both. He’d clearly recognized the young man, and just as clearly didn’t like him. That alone was enough to make Dead Rick feel sorry for the unknown phantom. But he couldn’t regret the fellow’s imprisonment too much, because it had just handed Dead Rick another piece of the puzzle.

Now if only he could figure out what it meant.

There was certainly no sign of a passage to Faerie. Were Nadrett and Chrennois planning on using the ghost in some fashion, later on? Or was this a test of the photography concept, a stepping-stone on the way to something greater? Dead Rick had no idea; what little he knew about science came by way of the mortal and faerie inventions that occasionally appeared in the Goblin Market. But the voice, he was willing to bet, would know more.

For one unpleasant moment he thought he’d given his intentions away, when Nadrett turned without warning on him and Gadling. In a voice colder than ice, the master said, “You don’t tell nobody about this. Understand? First one to open ’is mouth gets an iron knife through the eye.”

“Nobody,” Gadling said, and Dead Rick echoed him. Nadrett hadn’t guessed his thoughts; it was just the master’s usual vicious caution. Probably he had some hold over Gadling, as he did over Dead Rick, more fearsome than even an iron knife. Nadrett wouldn’t have brought anyone out here he didn’t think he could threaten into silence.

Which meant Gresh and Nithen, too. Half-considering a test of his theory, Dead Rick said, “You want me to go find the other two?”

Nadrett shook his head. “I’ve got no more use for them tonight. They can find their own way back.”

Praed Street, Paddington: May 7, 1884

The nearness of freedom made Cyma brave.

By tomorrow morning, she would be free of Nadrett’s control. No longer dependent upon him for bread or a place within the Onyx Hall; gone where he was unlikely to track her. Free of the Goblin Market, with its grasping, hateful ways. She wasn’t like the rest of them, happy to kidnap humans and tear away their voices and dreams, seeing people as little more than things to either be used or feared. Cyma had been a lady once, in a far-off court, and had come to London because she wanted to live closer to the mortal world, to bask in their bright warmth. She adored the city, in ways fae like Nadrett could never understand.

Soon, it would be hers.

Before that happened, though, she was determined to face the demon.

The building to which her steps led her was entirely innocuous. Twenty years of London smoke had darkened its low walls to the same drab, black-streaked shade as everything around it, but Cyma knew it was only her imagination that gave the stone a sinister cast.

The threat came not from the building, but from what lay below.

She hesitated on the corner of the street opposite, nervous hands twirling her parasol. A dozen times she’d thought of doing this, and a dozen times her fear had gotten the better of her. Philosophers might extol the virtue of confronting one’s fears, but Cyma was generally happy to live without that particular virtue. Yet morbid curiosity compelled her, every time she passed near one of these innocuous low buildings, so that she wasted precious minutes of her protected time standing on corners like this one, arguing with herself.

This is your last chance to see. Starting tomorrow, you need never fear it again; but you should face it once before that happens. So you will know.

Gripping her parasol like a weapon, Cyma crossed the busy street and went inside.

The morning rush had ended; only two people stood in the queue ahead of her, and they made their purchases quickly. Far too soon, she reached the counter, and stood blinking at a posted sign full of names and numbers.

“Where are you going?” the fellow behind the counter asked, not bothering to hide his bored annoyance with her delay.

She must look like a country lady come to the city for the first time. Cyma sat on the impulse to tell the rude young man that she’d lived in London longer than his grandfather had been alive, and scanned the list of destinations. “Ah—Mansion House, please.”

“Single or return?”

Flustered, she asked, “What’s the difference?”

He looked as if she’d asked what the difference was between night and day. “Are you coming back to Paddington later today?”

“Oh—no, I only want to go to the City.”

“Single, then. First class? That’ll be a shilling.” He accepted the half-crown she gave him—a real coin for once, not faerie gold—and gave her a shilling and sixpence and a paper ticket in return. “Across the bridge to the opposite platform. First-class carriages are marked by a sign. Thank you.”

She was too unnerved by this entire experience to give him the set-down his rudeness deserved. Clutching her coins and ticket, parasol tucked under her arm, Cyma ventured deeper into the Praed Street station.

No amount of telling herself there was absolutely no danger would erase her fear. Iron, iron, everywhere she looked; iron fixtures for the gaslights, iron railings on the stairs, an iron bridge crossing over the iron tracks below. With tithed bread in her stomach, none of it could harm her directly, not unless she flung herself from the bridge as a train approached. But these were not the ordinary trains that had been around for ages; these ran underground.

These were the trains destroying the Onyx Hall.

She crossed the bridge with her breath held, and descended the stairs on the opposite side without touching the rail. People ranged themselves along the platform, with third-class undesirables at the far end; many read newspapers, hardly attending to their surroundings, as if this were nothing out of the ordinary. Cyma took a deep breath, grimacing at the damp, foul air, and tried to mimic their behavior.

An attempt that failed the moment she heard the rumble of an approaching train. I will hold my ground, Cyma thought, even as the platform began to tremble beneath her feet—but her nerve broke the moment the engine came thundering into the station.

It might have been some terrible black beast out of legend, belching steam and smoke, its wheels screeching along the rails like the cry of a great raptor stooping for the kill. An enormous weight of iron, moving as if it were alive, radiating the heat of Hell itself—Cyma’s hands ached, and she realized she was pressing them flat against the wall, in the arched brick alcove where she’d instinctively retreated. The only thing preventing her from bolting for the stairs was the irrational, inarguable conviction that if she moved, the creature would see her.

“Are you all right, ma’am?”

For an instant, she thought it was Frederic Myers, come to save her from the beast. But no, it was some stranger, a different bearded gentleman from the one she knew; he stood a polite distance away with one hand outstretched in concern. Cyma opened her mouth to answer him, but nothing came out. Frowning, he stepped closer. “Shall I fetch you a doctor?”

“No! No, I—I—”

People were exiting the carriages, and those on the platform taking their places. It all happened in a rush—down at the third-class end some of the men were even shoving each other aside—as if there were no time to lose. The gentleman cast a brief glance over his shoulder, then clearly abandoned his intention to get on the train. “Come, have a seat on this bench, and I will fetch you a drink.”

“That won’t be necessary,” Cyma said, in something like better spirits, though she allowed him to guide her to the bench. “I’m afraid I just came over faint.” She clamped her jaw shut on anything else she might have said when another gust of steam burst from the train. With a ponderous clanking, its wheels began to turn once more, and the carriages rolled with increasing speed into the waiting tunnel.

The noise precluded conversation; the gentleman waited until it was gone, then said, “It is a common affliction, I fear. The Metropolitan Railway Company insists the air here is very healthful, especially for asthmatics, but I cannot imagine it is so. I take it you have not ridden the Underground before?”

Would you ride something that was trying to destroy you? But that was untrue; trying implied will. The terrifying thing about the trains was that they were not beasts. A creature out of legend could be fought, bargained with, controlled; this was mindless. A machine, doing that for which its maker had built it, without thought or desire. The true problem was people: the men of the railway companies, who had designed such a thing, and the millions that thronged London, making the thing itself necessary—none of them with any notion as to the damage wrought by their iron demon. And she had come here to face it of her own free will. For reasons she could not, at this instant, recall.

She hadn’t answered the gentleman. “I have not,” Cyma said. “In truth, I have a—a phobia of such things, which I thought to conquer by coming here.”

“Alone? I cannot think that wise. If you will permit me, I would be more than happy to accompany you to your destination. You may grip my hand if you become frightened, and if at any point you feel you cannot continue, I will guide you out at the next station.”

A wash of gratitude swept over her. Her glamour was of a woman more than old enough to be married, and therefore to venture out without a companion, but it had indeed been foolish to come here alone. She had enough bread to spare a piece for some other faerie—if she could have found one willing to set foot in this place.

It wasn’t long before the next train came. This time Cyma was prepared, and she had her companion to steady her; he guided her into a first-class carriage, and they found a pair of leather-upholstered seats next to one another. Cyma couldn’t help but exclaim in relief when she saw there were gaslights hanging from the polished wooden ceiling, bright enough that a man might read by them. “Yes, they are a necessity,” the gentleman said. He’d introduced himself as Mr. Harding, and she’d given her name as Mrs. Campbell. “No one would travel underground if they were forced to do so in darkness.”

Even in the Onyx Hall, where goblins and other creatures of shadow made their home, that was often true. Cyma held her breath again as the train lurched into motion.

Natural light vanished almost immediately, as they passed from the glass-paneled roof arching over the station into a proper tunnel. The air was indeed foul, though now and again the train ran through an open cutting, houses rising high to either side, to ventilate the track. Cyma found the noise and motion deeply unpleasant, but so long as she did not dwell upon the terrible mass of iron that was dragging her along at such speed, her fear faded; she did not need Mr. Harding’s hand very much after all.

She wished, though, that he would not persist in extolling the virtues of the underground railway. The movement of cargo into and across the city did not interest her in the slightest, and every time he spoke approvingly of slums razed by the construction, she could not help but think of the Onyx Hall. What would Mr. Harding say, if he knew about that?

It doesn’t matter, she told herself, staring fixedly at an advertisement for bicycles posted on the far side of the carriage. Soon enough, you won’t have to worry about any of this any longer. And that was why she’d come: to face the thing she feared, and to know its power over her would not last.

The train carried them through Kensington, through Westminster, into the Embankment that now chained the great Thames. That, at least, was one improvement she could applaud; the construction of sewers to prevent human waste from flowing into the river was beneficial even to fae. But as they departed Temple Station, she found her hands tightening upon her parasol once more.

Was the shudder that went down her spine her imagination at work? Or did it strike at the exact moment when the carriage passed the buried River Fleet, crossing the line of the old City wall and entering the precincts of the Onyx Hall?

Cyma found herself peering out the window as if she would be able to see the faerie palace in the shadows. An absurd thought; the picks and shovels of mortals would never breach the enchantments, even crumbling as they were. But the rails that now carried her were the ones breaking those selfsame enchantments: them, and the iron pipes for gas, and the loss of the wall itself. But the railway most of all.

Mr. Harding led her out again at Mansion House Station, having explained the situation to a conductor and paid the difference on his own ticket for Charing Cross. They emerged into the heart of the City, a stone’s throw from the Bank of England, as if all the intervening miles of London had vanished. “Will you be all right?” Mr. Harding asked her.

“Oh, yes,” Cyma said, smiling at him with so much cheer he must think her deranged. “Thank you so much for accompanying me. I don’t want to keep you from your business any longer—”

When he was safely on his way back to Charing Cross, Cyma let out a tremendous exhalation of relief and sagged against the blackened wall of the station, not caring if she made her dress filthy. I did it. Faced the demon—rode it—and here I am, alive still.

Perhaps tomorrow she would do it again, and laugh at the thing she had so recently feared.

Made bold by that thought, she stepped toward the road, hand outstretched to wave down a hansom cab. The sun was setting; it was time to go claim her freedom.

Cromwell Road, South Kensington: May 8, 1884

Eliza counted the days like a clock counting down to midnight: twelve days until the next meeting of the London Fairy Society. Ten days. Seven. Four. Three days until she would leave the Kitterings behind forever, and go seek Owen’s salvation elsewhere. She would give her notice the day before the meeting, and shake the nonexistent dust of Cromwell Road from her shoes.

The morning she was to give notice, Eliza went upstairs, as usual, to clean the cinders from the various grates.

Miss Kittering was already awake.

The drapes were thrown wide, and the young woman had what looked like all her garments out of the wardrobe and draped across every piece of available furniture: the unmade bed, the chair, even the writing desk. It might have suggested she was about to run away for good, except that when Eliza entered, she was smiling delightedly into the mirror, holding her least favorite walking dress against her body. More than anything, she seemed like a young girl who had gotten into her mother’s jewels, and was trying them all on with abandon.

Some of her delight faded when she saw Eliza in the mirror. Clutching the dress with a faint air of guilt, Miss Kittering peered across the room as if trying to study her face, then said, “Oh. It’s you. What do you want?”

“Ah…” Eliza was startled enough that she almost answered in her natural voice. Even now, she couldn’t risk others hearing it. When she was certain of her accent, she said, “I’m here to clean the grate, and lay a fire, and open the drapes, miss. Is—is there something you need?”

“Oh, no, I’m quite well—you can go about your work.” Miss Kittering waved her hand vaguely in Eliza’s direction, then hesitated, as if she were not sure of the answer she’d just given.

Was she drunk? Eliza supposed she might have sneaked some of the brandy from the library. Miss Kittering was humming as she sorted through the dresses. She never hummed.

Unsure of what to think, Eliza knelt and began her work on the grate, casting glances over her shoulder when she thought Miss Kittering wouldn’t notice. The third time, Eliza spotted something shoved underneath the bed—something that looked a great deal like a rope made from knotted sheets.

So not the brandy from the library, then. Gin, perhaps, from some gambling hell, that she’d sneaked off to in the middle of the night?

“What are you doing?”

Eliza jerked, thinking Miss Kittering had noticed her staring under the bed. But no; the young woman was looking in perplexity at the grate, where Eliza had begun the task of rubbing in black lead. “I’m polishing the grate, miss,” she said, even more baffled.

“Do you do that every day?”

The clever course of action would have been to answer her questions, and hopefully draw out her reasons for asking them. But Eliza was so unsettled by the oddity of the entire encounter that she said what actually came into her head. “Why in the name of the Blessed Virgin do you care?”

Miss Kittering flinched back. Then she went very still, eyes wide; then she laughed, and in that sound was an unmistakable note of nervous relief. “Oh, I—I suppose I don’t. Carry on.”

It was inexplicable—or so Eliza thought, until an explanation came into her head. An explanation so outlandish, it should have been utterly impossible; and so it would have been, to any young woman not convinced her love had been stolen away by the faeries.

She watched Miss Kittering move about the room, playing with the strands of her golden hair, and saw the way the girl peered at things; and Eliza knew that none of it, from the curiosity to the way she walked, was anything Miss Kittering would ever have done.

Hand gripping the brush so tight it hurt, Eliza thought, That is not Miss Kittering.

She had been stolen away—and replaced by a changeling.

The Goblin Market, Onyx Hall: May 9, 1884

Fae did not dream. It was one of many things for which they envied mortals: the ability to experience strange fantasies as they slept, whether born of fears or their dearest wishes come true. Fae could imagine; under certain conditions they could hallucinate; on rare occasions, they could receive visions, whether of the past, the future, or something happening in a distant land. But when they slept, their minds filled with nothing more than a black absence of thought.

So when the world began to tremble around Dead Rick as he lay in his secret refuge, he knew at once that it was real.

Real, but unimportant. The days when the Onyx Hall did not shake periodically were long enough ago that he couldn’t remember them. Even away from the Fleet entrance, these tremors were reasonably common. Some claimed they were caused by the trains, but Dead Rick doubted it; the trains ran many times each day, through Blackfriars Station to Mansion House and back, and the quakes were not that frequent.

Frequent enough, though, that he’d learned to ignore them. Dead Rick, jarred from his sleep, growled and lowered his head to his paws once more, waiting for the disturbance to end.

It didn’t.

A whine rose in his throat as the trembling went on. No, not trembling; this wasn’t the usual effect. The trains, or whatever caused the quakes, made everything rattle, as if something heavy were being dragged across a wooden floor. This—

Suddenly afraid, he rose to his feet. Then left them again, staggering and collapsing to the stone, as the palace twisted.

For one horrific moment, he had an impression of the Onyx Hall as a beast: an enormous creature, writhing in pain, trying to throw off its tormentor and failing. Nadrett sometimes flogged the people who angered him, making the rest of his followers watch. This was like being inside the faerie chained to the post, feeling the body around him flinch and cringe, recoiling at each fresh blow, trying and failing to avoid the next.

Only a moment; then the impression faded. But Dead Rick, tasting blood where he’d bitten his tongue, knew that nothing had improved. He’d just lost that moment of sympathy, the connection between his mind and whatever spirit might personify the palace.

What in Mab’s name is going on?

His three faerie lights were whirling in agitation—no, only two; the third had somehow escaped. Or been snuffed out? Dead Rick changed to man form, rushing it as much as he could, swallowing a yelp as his body protested the speed. Then he yanked aside the cloth covering the entrance and squirmed through the broken rock to the passage beyond.

He almost didn’t make it; the stones had shifted, narrowing the gap. The collar of his waistcoat caught on something and tore. Terror at the thought of being crushed by a further collapse propelled him forward, until he tumbled into the corridor. For once Dead Rick didn’t care if anyone saw him come from a supposedly closed passage; he was just grateful for the free air. When he looked up, though, he found himself alone.

Another shift, back to dog form; he’d needed his hands to climb, but now four feet would be more stable than two. The tremors hadn’t stopped: occasionally there would be a brief pause, an instant of calm, as if the Hall were fighting against whatever was hurting it, but always another wrench followed, all the worse for that fleeting respite.

Sounds echoed off the black stone from both directions. Shouts, screams, someone weeping; also noises that told him some of his fellow shape-changers had made the same calculation he had. Dead Rick picked a direction and ran.

In the first chamber he came to, all was chaos. A human child sat on the floor, naked and bawling, surrounded by panicking fae. Dead Rick saw a sprite he knew, and slipped through the press until he was close enough to shift back again and speak. “Pollikin—what the bleeding ’ell is going on?”

The sprite opened his mouth to answer. As he did so, however, one of those pauses came; and by now they’d happened enough times that everyone knew what it meant. The noise in the room dropped sharply, half the fae holding their breath—and the pause stretched on, and on, just long enough for the hopeful to think that maybe the trouble was over.

Then the palace bucked around them as if it were a tatterfoal trying to throw off its rider. Pollikin fell into Dead Rick, and they both went down, the skriker cracking his head against the stone.

But it didn’t hurt as much as it should have. As if the stone were not quite there.

“Blood and Bone,” Dead Rick whispered. His eyes met Pollikin’s, and he saw his terror echoed in the sprite’s eyes.

One shove got Pollikin off him; another brought Dead Rick to his feet. For one crazed moment, he wished Nadrett were there—simply because the master would know what to do, and would give Dead Rick some kind of direction, if only by running. But there was no one to lead him, and everyone else in the room looked even more panicked and lost than he was. Seizing on his one good thought—Nadrett running for his life—Dead Rick drew in a lungful of air and bellowed as loudly as he could, “Get out of ’ere, damn it!”

A few fae started moving before he’d even said the words, probably from sheer unfocused panic. Others stared at Dead Rick. He fought the urge to hit them. “The palace is breaking,” he said. By now he had something like silence, aside from the screaming mortal boy, but his voice was still loud, as if his heart were pounding each word out of his mouth. “Never mind if you don’t ’ave bread; right now, London’s safer than this place is. Get out of ’ere.” They were still staring at him, the stupid sods. The stone writhed around him again, and he could almost hear it howl in pain. “Go!”

As if the command had unlocked a door, the room sprang into motion. And sound; screams immediately drowned out the child’s. Dead Rick fought his way through to where he’d last seen the boy, and found him curled into a tight ball on the floor, bleeding where the stampeding feet had kicked him in passing. The skriker grabbed the boy around the middle and tucked him under one arm, using the other to shove people out of the way.

By now the motion had become a river, a torrent of bodies sweeping through the far door and into the warren beyond. Here and there a faerie battled the flow, and soon Dead Rick realized why; they were rushing to save what they owned, whether that was Goblin Market wealth or the few scraps they’d brought when they fled their homelands.

And then he remembered his own scraps, hidden behind the rockfall.

Instinct told him stop; he had to go back! But the moment his feet slowed, a satyr slammed into him from behind, making Dead Rick stagger and nearly drop the child. The boy wailed and clung to the skriker’s hip. Ash and Thorn, I can’t just abandon ’im.

He pressed his back to the wall, on the edge of the flood, and looked back desperately. The bread, he had to get the bread at least; if this wasn’t just a break, if this was the death convulsion of the entire Onyx Hall, then he would need bread to have any hope of making it out of London alive.

But the boy he carried was scarcely more than an infant. Even if he could walk on his own, he’d never survive this chaos, let alone find an exit. And Dead Rick wouldn’t care to wager on the likelihood that being mortal would save this child from whatever was about to happen to the faerie palace.

Nobody would help him. There were fae who believed in the value of mortal life—but none of them lived in the Goblin Market.

Well, maybe one does. And ’e’s a fucking idiot.

Dead Rick shifted the boy higher, cradling him against his chest, and rejoined the river’s flow.

There weren’t many directions it could go. The warren had many passages, but few exits. Two corridors led toward the rest of the Onyx Hall, which might or might not be safe. One chamber contained a hole where the fabric of the palace had frayed thin enough that the two worlds touched; it led into the great intercepting sewer, where he’d sent Irrith. And the last led up: a proper entrance, from the days when the Hall was built, giving into the cellar of a pub near Billingsgate Market.

Dead Rick and the boy were going up, whether they liked it or not.

Along with dozens of other fae. The pace slowed to a crawl as they drew near the entrance, bodies packing in tighter and tighter until Dead Rick was afraid the boy would be crushed. Forget the boy; I might be crushed. This wasn’t any orderly procession; fae were elbowing and shoving, using claws if they had them, and then Dead Rick heard a gunshot, deafening in the tight space. But if it was supposed to scare anyone into getting out of the way, it failed. Everyone was already as scared as they could get. And if the shot was aimed at a body… Dead Rick stepped on something soft and bony a little while later, and smelled blood, but didn’t look down to see its source.

A gust of air made him shiver, despite the frantic heat of so many fleeing bodies. Then Dead Rick realized it wasn’t physical cold. Up ahead, the passage ended in a chamber scarcely large enough for two or three desperate fae, and above lay the mortal world.

Flapping wings shot overhead, some bird-shaped faerie bolting for safety. She didn’t quite make it. The bird flew into the chamber and up; then she fell again, screeching as the atmosphere outside forced her body into a woman’s form. Dead Rick, holding the boy almost on his shoulder to protect him, shuddered in sympathetic pain.

Then he was in the chamber at last, with dubious salvation above. He could feel the chill of nearby iron—tools, barrel hoops, all the metal humans could not seem to do without—but right now, it felt safer than the Hall behind him. The ladder that should lead into the cellar, though, was splintered and broken, only one cracked rung still holding the legs together.

Here, at least, something like help was to be had; the fae behind him, eager to take his place, were more than willing to shove him upward if that would speed his progress. With his free hand Dead Rick clawed for the hard-packed dirt of the cellar floor, bare feet twisting in someone’s grasp, trying not to crush the child he’d brought all this way. He ended up heaving the boy up and onto the floor, then dragging himself after, curving his back over the mortal to protect him when somebody else staggered and fell over them both.

Gasping, he crawled clear, flinching away from the iron all around them. It’s no worse than Blackfriars. You survived that, remember? But he didn’t know how long he would have lasted, if he hadn’t caught that tosher with food.

All at once his will gave out. Dead Rick collapsed against a wall, the rough brickwork scratching him where his waistcoat had torn, and watched fae escape the Onyx Hall. Already they packed the cellar; some must have gone upstairs, into the pub on the ground floor. What would the mortals think, with faeries flooding into their midst like that?

It might not even matter. For all Dead Rick knew, this was the end; whatever indomitable will held the Onyx Hall together had finally given out, just as his own had, and now that shadowy reflection would at last fray into nothingness. And the fae who called it home would scatter to the four winds: some going to Faerie, some finding refuge in what other courts remained, some dying under the oppressive weight of the mortal world’s hostility.

Dead Rick didn’t know which of those fates would be his. And lying against the wall, with a mortal child crying into his bruised ribs, he couldn’t much bring himself to care.