With Fate Conspire

^{PART TWO} May–August 1884

If she had breath, she would be gasping for air. Exquisite agony still lances through her body, new knives to join the old. When they pierced her, all control vanished; there was no thought, no endurance, nothing but an endless, voiceless scream.

She claws it down, forces herself to think past the pain. Forces her body to stillness, accepting the fresh mutilation. Fighting it will only hurt her more, and so she bends herself around it, drawing back the bleeding edges of her flesh. The further she retreats, the less it hurts, but she knows this has consequences she cannot accept. What those consequences are, she cannot recall, but that much stays with her: that she must not retreat too far.

Pain has the power to startle her, to weaken her control, but it is not the real threat. Her own response is. Like a woman above a great drop, clinging to the edge of a blade, she must not loosen her grip—whatever it costs her in blood.

She remembers this, though she cannot remember why.

And so she will cling on, until memory fades, and oblivion claims her at last.

White Lion Street, Islington: May 16, 1884

The maid escorted Frederic Myers into the ground floor parlor, where Mrs. Chase sat with her mending. The old woman rose as he entered, despite his exhortations for her to remain seated; she moved remarkably well for a woman of her age. Or perhaps it is not so remarkable, he thought, remembering what he knew of her. There was more in Heaven and Earth than even the Society for Psychical Research dreamt of in their philosophy.

“They’re downstairs,” Mrs. Chase said, “but not yet started, I think. I must wait for a few more guests; you may go on down.”

She went to a patch of wall left oddly bare of any pictures or furniture, and brushed her hand over the roses that sprawled across the wallpaper. At her touch, they came to life. The blossoms acquired depth and scent; the vines twined themselves into a flowery arch; and then the wall within that arch was not there anymore, and a set of worn wooden steps led downward.

Myers’s breath quickened at the sight. He’d seen it only once before, and could no more catch the manner of its happening this time than he could the first. They would not let him study it, not yet; for now, he was only a guest in this home. Both of these homes: the one above, and the one below.

Hat in hand, and ducking his head to avoid scraping it against the low ceiling, Myers descended into the hidden realm of Rose House.

Voices trailed up the staircase toward him, one of the Goodemeades speaking. He could not yet tell them apart, not without seeing the embroidery on their aprons. “…loom-thing, whatever Wrain and Ch’ien Mu are calling it, ought to help—but the best it can do is to slow the problem.”

“It may cushion folk against more incidents like last week,” her sister said, and then Myers emerged into the sitting room below.

The second speaker proved to be Rosamund Goodemeade, who popped to her feet the moment she saw him. “Mr. Myers! Oh, I’m so glad you could join us again. Please, do be seated—”

She scarcely came to his belt, but somehow managed a presence much larger than her actual size. Aside from the height, she was almost precisely as she had been when he came to his first meeting of the London Fairy Society back in March: the same honey-colored curls, the same friendly demeanor. Just a foot shorter, and with an odd cast to her features that marked her not as human, but faerie.

Mrs. Chase had said nothing of that when she approached him at the April meeting about joining a second, more select group. Explanations had waited until he came to tea a week later—explanations, and a test; his reactions then, he suspected, had determined whether they would open the rose arch in the wall and admit him to the Goodemeades’ home below. He had passed, and thereby joined the real London Fairy Society.

It was not a topic he’d ever known much about. Myers’s notion of “fairies” owed a great deal to the sort of sentimental picture books published for children nowadays, with delicate winged creatures floating about flower gardens. Instead he found himself in an underground house furnished like an idyllic, rustic cottage, taking tea with a mixture of mortals and fae, none of whom were tiny and possessed of wings. The Goodemeades, while small, were plump, homespun creatures; Lady Amadea was the height of an ordinary woman and statuesque in her beauty. Another short fellow, by the name of Tom Toggin, had a face that could have belonged to some lady’s Chinese pug—though he assured Myers that goblins were often far uglier than he.

And then there were the mortals: men and women carefully selected by the Goodemeades, judged trustworthy enough to know the secret of the faeries’ presence in London. Myers made his greetings to them, then settled himself in a comfortable chair, waiting for the meeting to begin.

He caught Tom’s murmured question to Gertrude Goodemeade. “How many refugees do you think you could pack in here, if you had to?”

“It depends on how well they like each other,” she said—but her levity was a thin mask over real concern.

“I think Hodge is about ready to start—”

Footsteps on the stairs interrupted him. A slender faerie flamboyantly dressed like a carnival barker leapt into the room, struck a grand pose, and announced in a thick Irish accent, “Mistresses and masters, my lady Wilde!”

Startled, Myers rose with the others. The woman who entered was not the grand lady that introduction led him to expect; her shabby-genteel clothing, in widow’s black, spoke clearly of having fallen on hard times. She had the drooping look of a lush-bodied woman reduced by age and circumstance; though Myers judged her to be younger than Mrs. Chase, she moved like the older of the two. Tom hurried forward to help escort her to a chair.

“Lady Wilde?” Myers repeated, when they were introduced. She had not been here the previous month; he would have remembered. “The poetess? I did not know you were in London.”

“I have lived here for some years now,” she said, as he bent over her hand. “With my two sons.” Her own accent was a musical lilt next to her faerie companion’s thick brogue.

Myers bowed again. “I heard your name mentioned at one of the public Society meetings; I might have guessed you would be involved with its more private face. It is an honor to meet you, Lady Wilde.”

People settled into their seats once more. “Who else are we waiting for?” Lady Amadea asked. “You said there was another young woman you were considering—”

Rosamund shook her head. “Miss Baker, but unfortunately she didn’t come to last week’s public meeting. Next month, perhaps. We haven’t seen Miss Kittering again, either, so no decision yet as to whether we should invite her.”

“What about Cyma?” the Irish faerie fellow asked.

The Goodemeade sisters exchanged worried looks. “We haven’t seen her,” Gertrude said quietly. “Not since the earthquake.”

Earthquake? Myers saw his own confusion mirrored among several of the mortals in the room. Not Lady Wilde, though. Or any of the fae. Rosamund took a deep breath and spoke. “It’s time we shared a few things with the rest of you. It—well, it sounds terribly dramatic to say this is the ‘true purpose’ of our Society, particularly since nothing says we must have only one purpose, and all the others must be false. But there is something else Gertie and I had in mind, when we decided to begin these meetings, and given events elsewhere, the time for it has come.”

“The time to talk about it,” her sister corrected her.

Rosamund nodded. “Yes, of course. We don’t want to rush into anything.

“All of you—our human friends—know the difficulties we faeries face here in London. Religion isn’t so bad anymore; people aren’t as pious as they used to be, and it doesn’t hurt too badly if a man uses the name of divinity as a curse, without much believing in what it stands for. It’s still a problem, of course, but not nearly as much as iron is.”

Mrs. Chase had come quietly downstairs while they spoke, having presumably closed the parlor arch behind her. When Rosamund paused, Myers said guiltily, “I neglected to bring bread. But I will fetch some when we are done here, and tithe it upstairs before I leave.” Others echoed him.

“Thank you,” Rosamund said, and it sounded heartfelt. “But unfortunately, while bread helps, it can’t solve our problems.”

Gertrude gestured at the rustic comfort of their home. “Rose House isn’t the only place of this sort in London. There’s another one, much bigger than this, but it’s falling apart; all the changes in the City are destroying it. Soon enough, all the fae who live there now will have to go somewhere else. Out of London. Maybe out of this world entirely.”

“Flitting,” Lady Wilde said. “Collectors of folklore have been gathering the stories for years.”

Rosamund nodded. “But some folk are determined to stay. The two of us certainly are, and we’ll take in whoever we can. We know that someday, though, our house may face the same problem. Likely it will. So we have to think about what we can do to prevent that.”

She drew in a deep breath, then held it, as if unwilling to release the words it bore. Gertrude did it for her. “Rose and I have wondered for a long time now if maybe it wasn’t a mistake, keeping our presence here secret. What might have happened if we showed our faces, right from the start, and been a part of the city as it grew. An open part. We can’t go back and change that, of course—but there’s always the future, isn’t there? And we’re thinking of telling the world that we’re here.”

Again, none of the fae were surprised. It was, as Rosamund had said, a notion they had in mind when they formed this society. But among Myers’s fellow mortals…

“It has been done a bit in Ireland,” Lady Wilde said, while everyone else gaped. “When my late husband withdrew to Moytura and began collecting the local folklore, two Connemara faeries came to him and told him their stories. He never published them, and I myself have not yet decided what to do with the tales. But in Ireland, ’tis still common for people to know about the faeries nearby—if not as common as it once was.”

Myers found his tongue at last. “Are you not afraid that this might be even more dangerous to you?”

“Of course we are,” Gertrude said, with a touch of sharpness. “That’s why we’re being careful. The public meetings to see who’s interested, and then these private meetings for the ones we decide we can trust; and now we’re going to discuss it until we’re blue in the face.”

“And no matter what we decide, we aren’t doing anything yet,” Rosamund added. “Admitting our presence in London won’t save the Onyx Hall—that’s the other place we mentioned—and not everyone there thinks we should do this.” By the faint embarrassment in her tone, the opposition was in a clear majority. “But we intend to talk to the ones who do end up staying in London—especially the ones staying with us—and we’d like to be able to present them with a plan. Some notion of how this might be done, as safely as possible, with the best chance of success.”

Excitement of an unfamiliar sort was building beneath Myers’s ribs. Nothing had fired his imagination like this in years, not even his work with mediums. Annie would have been delighted, he thought. It brought with it a familiar lance of pain—but not as sharp as he would have expected. For the first time since she died, he found himself eager to pursue something that was not about communicating with her spirit. Eager, and guilty, as if he were somehow betraying her by thinking of other things.

Mrs. Chase rescued him from these thoughts by addressing him. “What do you think your friends in the Society for Psychical Research would make of this, Mr. Myers?”

Henry Sidgwick meeting faeries. The very notion made his head hurt. But— “It falls outside the purview of our usual work,” Myers admitted. “Then again, most of our members view fairy tales as a literary matter rather than a scientific one. If I were to write an article, or speak at one of our meetings—”

“Not yet,” Lady Amadea cautioned him.

“No, of course not. What I mean is, once aware of the situation, I imagine they would be eager to investigate.” He laughed ruefully. “They would probably make a new committee, and force me to be in charge of it. But if faeries are willing to meet with them, and show proof of their—your—natures and capabilities, then my colleagues will establish this field of study so quickly, it will make your head spin.”

“Will they be friendly?” the Irish faerie asked bluntly.

Myers blinked. “Why would they not be?”

“What I mean is, sure I don’t fancy being tossed in a cage like some kind of ape for folk to gawp at—”

“Eidhnin,” Rosamund said. Mild though her voice was, it hushed him. “Nobody will do anything until we’re sure. And if we can’t be sure, we won’t do it. But don’t gallop to meet future difficulties before you must. Mr. Myers, please continue. You mentioned committees; what exactly would this one do?”

By fits and starts, with contributions from fae and mortals alike, the London Fairy Society laid plans for a future beyond the death of the Onyx Hall.

Cromwell Road, South Kensington: May 19, 1884

For days the storm built, an unsubtle tension that put all the Kitterings’ servants on their toes, jumping at shadows. Mrs. Fowler struck anyone, maid or footman, who fell short in their duties; even the usually pleasant butler, Mr. Warren, began to employ the sharp side of his tongue. Little Sarah, the scullery maid, ceased to speak to anyone, and more than once Eliza caught Ann Wick looking through the “help wanted” advertisements in newspapers.

The source of the storm, of course, was Mrs. Kittering. Not her daughter; no, the creature pretending to be Louisa seemed the only one unaffected. She flitted through the house like a butterfly, delighting in the smallest things—when she was there at all. Her absences were frequent, despite her mother’s attempts to curb them, and that was the source of Mrs. Kittering’s fury; never tractable at the best of times, Louisa had become a wild thing indeed, and threatened to overturn every plan her mother had for her future.

When at last the thunder came, it was almost a relief. Almost—but not quite, for instead of breaking upon Louisa, the cause of all this trouble, it broke upon the servants.

Eliza’s fears took on sharper form the moment the bell rang on the downstairs wall, as if she could hear doom in that brassy, imperious sound. It signaled the drawing room, a place usually unoccupied at this hour of the morning, and Mrs. Fowler went to answer it. Within two minutes the housekeeper was downstairs again, her brows drawn together like those of an unpitying magistrate, and she ordered every last one of them up to the first floor.

Everyone: not just the maids, but Cook, the footmen, even the gardener and the grooms from the stables. Mrs. Fowler and Mr. Warren lined them all up against the north wall, facing the windows; the curtains had been drawn back, and despite that brilliant light, the gas lamps had also been lit. The effect reminded Eliza of a theater she’d gone to once, when she and Owen had a little money to spare; the searing limelights there had illuminated the actors for all to see. She did not think the staff had been assembled to entertain anyone, though.

Mrs. Kittering was an ominous shadow against the left-most window, looking out over the back terrace into the garden. The missus’s hands were locked above her bustle, and her spine was even more rigidly straight than her stays demanded. Unlike many women who had borne a large number of children, her aging body had not run to fat, and in her dark dress she looked like a skeletal, ravenous crow.

An impression that did not change when Mrs. Fowler murmured that all the servants were present, and Mrs. Kittering turned to face them at last. Eliza could see nothing of the missus’s expression—which was, she was sure, exactly as Mrs. Kittering wanted it. With slow, deliberate strides, the woman paced the length of the room, studying them all; then she pivoted by the grate and came back along their lines. Only when that was done did she speak.

“I want to know,” she said, carving each word into the air as if with a knife, “what has possessed my daughter.”

At the word possessed, Eliza tried not to jump. Fortunately, Mrs. Kittering’s attention was on Ned Sayers at that moment, so she did not notice her under-housemaid going rigid.

“It is not possible to keep secrets in this house,” Mrs. Kittering went on. This time, Eliza was better able to hide her reaction. You like to think that—or maybe you think that by saying it, you can make it be true. “I will discover what Louisa is hiding. Whatever you know, speak up now. I will be very grateful to the one who assists me in this matter.”

Keeping her mouth shut was no difficulty at all. Mrs. Kittering wanted an answer, but she didn’t want the truth; if Eliza spoke, the best she could hope for was a beating and immediate dismissal. Though part of her wanted to do it, just to see the incredulous look on Mrs. Kittering’s face. Your daughter’s gone, and I’m the only hope you’ve got for ever bringing her back.

Her own thought startled her. Bring Louisa Kittering back? Eliza scarcely cared two pins for the girl; had this been some other kind of trouble, she would have abandoned the silly chit to it, and good riddance. But she couldn’t save Owen and leave Louisa behind. Not if she had a chance to rescue both.

She might not. Among the few things Eliza was certain of, one was that the faerie who’d taken Louisa’s place was not the one who had stolen Owen, seven years ago. To begin with, this one was undoubtedly female. But there could not be many faeries in London; it beggared belief to think the changeling and the thief were not connected in some fashion. Find Louisa, find Owen—and then find a way to bring them back. If she could. Should it come to one or the other, Eliza would choose Owen in a heartbeat, and anyway there might not be a choice: in some of the tales it took true love to win a prisoner free, in which case Louisa was out of luck. But Eliza would cheat the faeries of both if she could.

Fortunately, cheating was another thing that happened in the tales.

With a start, she realized Mrs. Kittering was standing in front of her. In a cold voice, the woman said, “Anyone caught keeping secrets on Louisa’s behalf will regret it most acutely.”

Eliza disciplined her face, trying not to look as though her thoughts had been wandering. After a moment, Mrs. Kittering moved on, to stop in front of the coachman and his grooms. “Where has Louisa asked you to drive her, these last few months? I want to know every destination.”

Hearn began to stammer out a list, naming off dressmakers and dancing masters, museums and friends’ houses. He gave dates when he could, and Eliza wondered if Mrs. Kittering heard what she did, that the pattern had changed in recent days. The faerie had different interests than Louisa—strange ones, a fascination with matters that a human considered mundane or distasteful. What well-bred young lady wanted to tour the halls of a hospital, other than as part of some charitable visit?

In almost all these cases Louisa was chaperoned: by a friend, or one of her married sisters, or Lucy, the lady’s maid. Mrs. Kittering descended next upon the maid, interrogating her mercilessly about every last detail of Louisa’s activities. And here arose some oddities, for there were moments for which Lucy could not entirely account; she had become distracted, or occupied in some unnecessary task, and could not swear with a clear conscience that she knew what Louisa had done during that time. Mrs. Kittering soon reduced her to tears, provoking some sympathy from Eliza—but sympathy was soon pushed aside by the realization that Lucy’s distractions had begun before the changeling took Louisa’s place. Faerie trickery, she thought. It wasn’t random; the changeling had been following her target for some time before stealing her away.

It ended as it must, with Mrs. Kittering sacking Lucy, without any of the pay she was owed. “Count yourself fortunate I do not bring you to the attention of the police,” she said, viciously and without much cause; Lucy had committed no crime. But it was a favorite threat in the household, and the Kitterings wealthy enough that they could possibly follow through, condemning their erstwhile maid to the prison, the workhouse, or the lunatic asylum.

Eliza’s relief to have escaped the ax faltered when Mrs. Kittering turned her attention to the remaining servants. “I want to know everything she does. What she reads, from whom she receives letters. She will see no callers without me present; if I am not at home, then you will say that she is not, either. And above all, she is not to go out. Am I understood?”

They all answered promptly and with vigor, eager to avoid Lucy’s fate. It thwarted Eliza’s hope that she might contrive to be the changeling’s companion on a trip out of the house, and thereby corner her away from watchful eyes and ears; she would have to find another way.

She tried to pretend the prospect didn’t call up a note of fear, and failed. It was one thing to force information out of Louisa, a sheltered young woman whose notion of cruelty was to ignore someone at a garden party, but a faerie… Eliza’s breath shallowed at the thought, and her palms grew sweaty-cold. She knew firsthand how cruel they could be.

Think of Owen. Think of Mrs. Darragh, and Maggie. You’re willing to dare the Special Irish Branch for him; surely a faerie can be no worse.

Mrs. Kittering’s eyes were upon her once more. Eliza curtsied, her face a perfect mask of obedience, and left before the missus could guess at the plan forming behind her eyes.

Night Garden, Onyx Hall: May 22, 1884

At first glance, nothing in the night garden had changed. The Walbrook’s foul waters still flowed sluggishly through the rank plants; faerie lights still drifted aimlessly about; the blankets and miserable possessions of the refugees still littered the ground.

But the population of those refugees had changed. In the aftermath of the terrible earthquake, a great many of them had fled, if not in search of Faerie, then to somewhere else less dangerous than London. Into the gaps they left came the dregs of the Goblin Market.

When the first brave souls ventured back into the warren beneath Billingsgate, they found half of that warren had disappeared. Of the two passages connecting it to the rest of the palace, one had fallen in; some of the Cornish knockers tried to dig it out, but new dirt fell to replace what they carried away. That part of the Hall now let into the ground beneath London. Even if they could dig through, there would be no palace on the other side.

Part of Dead Rick’s reason for coming to the night garden was to get out of the Market. The part that vanished had included Lacca’s entire lair, from doss-houses to Po’s opium den; now the goblin woman was fighting tooth and claw—literally—to keep from being forced out by Nadrett and Hardface. And so it went, down to the lowest sprite, everyone kicking and shoving to find new space or keep what they had, and the losers coming here, to the garden.

He didn’t have to claw for a new place—because Nadrett had decided to shorten his leash, keeping Dead Rick in his own chambers more often than not. But if it weren’t for that, he would be homeless. The stone of his refuge had finished its collapse, burying his few treasures under broken marble and onyx. With no bread to shield him, fleeing through London now would be suicide.

The rest of his reason for coming lay near the chamber’s eastern end. Two obelisks rose there, one a gravestone, the other a memorial. The dirty surface of the latter held a list of names and dates, marking the reigns of past Princes of the Stone. In its base, a small flame burned: one of the few things in the garden that wasn’t broken or fallen or stained.

No doubt the names would have meant something to Dead Rick, once. He knew the first one, Michael Deven, belonged to the man buried under the other obelisk, where he’d found and chased that girl. The rest were mysteries to him. Hodge, the only Prince he remembered, hadn’t yet joined his predecessors in the stone; the twelfth and final name carved into the obelisk was Alexander Messina, dead in 1870, long before Dead Rick’s memories began.

The skriker paused, looking at the dates. Doing the precise sums would have taken too long, but a glance was enough to show the pattern: each Prince’s reign had been shorter than the last, for quite some time now. There were two in the middle of the last century who only made it a handful of years each, Hamilton Birch and Galen St. Clair; the next, Matthew Abingdon, had done a good deal better, but after him it went steadily down.

“Probably the palace killing them,” he muttered. “Which one will go first: Hodge or the Hall?”

At the rate of progress on the Inner Circle Railway, it would be the Hall. The navvies were laying a short stretch of rail already, from Mark Lane partway toward Eastcheap Station at the Monument; that had been the cause of the earthquake. From there it was just a short gap to Mansion House, along Cannon Street and past the London Stone. The newspapers said it would be open for service by the autumn.

He scowled and jerked away from the obelisk, with its forlorn list of mortal men who’d served the Onyx Court. The finger bone he’d laid on the ground alongside it was still there, he saw, with no ashes anywhere nearby to signal that his ally the voice had seen it. Dead Rick dug in his pocket and pulled out a beef bone, cracked open for its marrow, dropping it onto the dead grass. Perhaps the finger, placed there after the incident with the ghost in the sewers, was too small, and his ally had overlooked it.

Unlikely. Much more probable that he’d given up. Or been discovered and cut down by Nadrett.

Or been in the Goblin Market when part of it vanished.

Dead Rick nudged the bone into better position with his toes and retreated, not wanting to be seen there. Intending to take a different path out of the garden, he headed toward the center and the Walbrook—only to stop short at the sight of a familiar figure, sitting on the edge of a dry and leaf-choked fountain.

Irrith spotted him at the same time and let out a dry huff of a laugh. “Seven years I don’t see one hair of your tail, and now I can’t turn around without tripping over you.”

“Are you following me?”

It came out hard and suspicious, and her eyebrows went up. “No. I came here because—”

She looked away suddenly, but that did little good against a skriker who sensed the world as much through his ears and nose as his eyes. He heard the catch in her voice, the choked noise after she stopped speaking. He smelled a hint of salt, over the dirt and half-rotted leaves, even if her face hadn’t shown any sign of tears.

Nobody in the Goblin Market cried. Nobody who let herself be that weak lasted long there.

Dead Rick didn’t know what to do or say. He just stood there, wondering if he should go away, until Irrith spoke again. “I used to love this place,” she said quietly, still looking anywhere but at him, across the overgrown tangles of the night garden. “It reminded me of the Vale. I love London, understand—I wouldn’t stay here if I didn’t. But I needed a bit of green, some grass and trees and flowers, to keep from going mad.”

He didn’t know what the Vale was—her original home?—but he heard the ache in her voice, and answered with the only words he had, pathetic and useless as they were. “I’m sorry.”

“So am I.” Irrith hung her head, hands braced against the fountain’s edge so her shoulders hunched up like a hawk’s. Then he heard another laugh, short and hard. “And I keep thinking about Lune.”

The vanished Queen. “What about ’er?”

The sprite gestured with one hand; he couldn’t tell what she meant by it, and maybe she couldn’t, either. “Those speeches she used to make. She would have stood up in front of the court—not just the lords and ladies, but common fae like you or me—and said something about how London is our home, all of us who came here from somewhere else, and we weren’t going to give up on it. People would stay, instead of flitting. And we’d find a way around this problem.”

This problem. As if it were a simple thing, an overturned cart in the road, and all they had to do was figure out which narrow side lane would lead them past it. Harshly, Dead Rick said, “Too bad she’s gone and pushed off with the rest of ’em, and left us behind.”

Irrith’s head came up so fast, he twitched back. “What? Lune isn’t gone!”

“Oh, is that so? Then where is she, eh? You tell me that.”

“I don’t know.”

He snorted in disgust. “Of course you don’t.”

Irrith glared at him, expression darkening. “She’s still here, though. Somewhere in the Hall. Hodge talks to her sometimes; he says—”

“Oh, the Prince, the fucking Prince. Of course ’e’d say; without the Queen, ’e’s nothing but a jumped-up cockney bastard, playing at being King of the Faeries. She’s gone, Irrith.”

“No, she isn’t!” Irrith shot to her feet. “Dead Rick—just who do you think is holding this place together?”

He frowned, not following her. “It ain’t ’olding together. That’s the problem.”

The energy possessing the sprite seemed far larger than her slender body. “You must have felt it. When the tremors hit. Like a body in pain, but trying so hard to hold still, until it gets too bad; then the whole thing thrashes, like it’s screaming—like she’s screaming. I think Hodge hears that, too, though he’ll never say so. She keeps as much of it from us as she can, but even Lune has limits. And she’s being pushed past them more and more often.”

Dead Rick’s skin crawled, thinking of the moment when he woke inside his refuge. That sense of the Onyx Hall as a prisoner chained to a post, writhing beneath the whip.

It’s the Queen.

Irrith nodded. Her cheeks hollowed briefly, as if she were biting the insides of them to keep from crying. “When they laid the rails… sometimes I think it would be better to just pull her away. Let us all move on to something else, rather than hanging on here like the desperate things we are; let the Hall have a clean death, instead of this horrible torture. If I knew where she was, I might try to do it. But I don’t.”

With the railway so fresh in his mind, the answer was obvious. “The London Stone. Ain’t it the ’eart of this place?”

“Yes,” Irrith said grimly. “But where’s the Stone? The part below, I mean; not the part above. Hodge is the only one who knows, and he swore an oath not to tell.”

Human oaths meant nothing. But fae had ways of binding men to keep their word; Hodge’s promise would certainly be of that sort. A secret like that, they couldn’t risk getting out. Even now, control of the London Stone might be a valuable thing.

“Speaking of the Prince…” Irrith sidled closer. “I’ve been thinking about what you told me before. About Nadrett? I was wondering if you knew anything more, or had any proof—”

With a jolt like his brain popping back into place, Dead Rick realized what he was doing: carrying on a friendly conversation with the sprite who recently helped the Prince’s minions carry out a raid on the Goblin Market. In the middle of the night garden. In easy view of any number of Goblin Market refugees, who would be only too happy to sell news of this event in exchange for a place in the warren.

He drew a slow, deep breath through his nose, and spat the last of it back out as a near-silent curse. We’re being watched, all right. By at least one person, and maybe more, if his nose was any judge.

Irrith raised her eyebrows, waiting for his answer. Dead Rick had to end this, before she said anything else that could get him killed. Hoping the sprite’s hearing was good, he whispered, “What I’m about to do—sorry.”

Then he backhanded her across the face.

His knuckles only clipped her cheek; the sprite was fast, and his vague warning had at least put her on alert. She stumbled back out of his reach, staring, halfway to angry. He had to stop her before she could say anything loudly enough to be overheard. “Is that why you came ’ere? Looking for me, thinking you could get me to talk? Went after Aspell, now you’re going after my master—well, you’d better know, you set foot in ’is part of the Market, you won’t get that foot back. And you tell your cockney Prince: Nadrett could kill ’im any time ’e wanted to. And what do you think that would do?”

Every bit of color drained out of Irrith’s face, freezing her anger into sudden horror. Dead Rick cursed his choice of threat. Killing the Prince—if it wouldn’t destroy the Hall outright, it certainly wouldn’t help the Queen any. There were some crazy fae around; he prayed he hadn’t put that idea into anybody’s head. They may not know where she is, but they can sure as ’ell find ’im.

Her jaw clenched hard, and then she drew herself up with contempt worthy of the elf-knights she’d joined for that raid. “Iron rot your soul, Dead Rick,” she spat, and strode off in rigid fury.

He shut his eyes and went through every profane oath he knew. Stupid fucking whelp. Should never ’ave said nothing to ’er. That’s what you get for trusting somebody you don’t even remember.

This was why he’d spent seven years under Nadrett’s thumb. Because he wasn’t clever enough to scheme and lie and trick his way out. The moment he tried, he nearly got himself killed.

But he couldn’t give up. The voice had cracked the shell of despair that had hardened around him, these past seven years; there might be something like hope, if Nadrett’s scheme was real. And Dead Rick could barter that hope for aid in getting his memories back.

If you can get your paws on it.

He couldn’t wait forever for his ally to come back. Stupid whelp though he was, Dead Rick would have to keep going on his own.

Memory: July 7, 1798

Lune’s messenger—a pigeon from the world above, given very precise instructions—fluttered into the chamber and settled upon a small table by the wall. Placing her right hand upon the London Stone and extending her left to Robert Shaw, the Queen said, “It is time.”

The Prince mirrored her without hesitation or outward sign of fear. He was a brave man, a colonel in the Horse Guards, and had distinguished himself in battle before taking up his position as Lune’s consort; if the knowledge that he might not survive the next moments unsettled him, he did not show it. He merely braced his feet, set his own hand upon the Stone, and sank alongside the Queen into the deepest of trances.

Once the Stone had stood alongside the Walbrook, at the heart of the City of London. An ancient relic, placed there long before the creation of the Onyx Hall, it seemed eternal, immutable, the perfect foundation for that edifice of enchantments.

But given enough time, even the eternal changed. The mortals of London had already moved the Stone once, from the south side of Cannon Street to the north, where it would be less of an obstruction to traffic. Now, finding it a nuisance still, they were moving it a second time.

With it, they moved the entirety of the Onyx Hall.

Lune and Shaw prepared themselves for the upheaval. Joining their spirits in concentration, they reached out through their realm, binding it together, from their hidden place within the Queen’s chambers to the farthest reaches of the palace. The frayed edges flared with pain, where the loss of much of London’s wall had damaged the integrity of the whole. There had been some fraying the previous time, too, but it had grown worse in the last fifty years; deep within the quiet of her mind, Lune worried what the effect now would be.

She did not have long to fret. In Cannon Street above, workmen jammed long crowbars beneath the Stone’s exposed base, and began to lift.

A bone-jarring tremor ran through the Stone they touched. This one, suspended from the chamber’s ceiling, was a reflection of the Stone above, the linchpin that held London and its shadow together. The shattering jolts that ensued as its original began to move could destroy the Hall in an instant—if Queen and Prince did not stand together, cushioning the blow.

Whether the ache Lune felt was in her body, or in the Hall itself, she could not say. At that moment, there seemed no difference between the two. Painful as it was, she knew it was only the first stage of the process, and she steeled herself against the next.

The shifting of the Stone to its new home.

Direction lost all meaning as the linchpin, the immovable point around which all else was fixed, began to move. Nausea rose up in Lune’s gorge; distantly, she heard Shaw retch. With her attention spread throughout the entire Onyx Hall, she had little sense of her own vertigo, but she fought to keep that disorientation from the palace itself, fought to hold all the chambers and galleries and entrances to the world above in place. All except the reflection of the Stone itself: not even one of the great powers of Faerie could have held that in position. Once it had resided in a secret alcove at the heart of the Onyx Hall’s power. The first shifting had moved it to Lune’s chambers. Where it would be when this process was done, she could only guess; she had no power to control it.

Still the world shuddered and whirled, until Lune wanted to let go, allow the maelstrom to fling her away. She had no teeth to grit, but she strained every particle of her soul, desperate to hold on. If she released her grip now, it might destroy the Hall; the final moments of this change surely would.

Shaw held on with her, and she felt the Prince prepare himself, sheltering her soul with his own.

In the world above, the workmen grunted and swore, and finally pushed the London Stone into the setting that awaited it.

The exterior wall of St. Swithin’s Church.

Sacred power washed through the connection between the two worlds. Shaw took it into himself, contained it, kept it from flooding on into the Onyx Hall itself. Then Lune, working with him in the shadow of his protecting spirit, reached deep into the Stone. It, too, was an entrance to the Onyx Hall, though it answered only to the Queen and the Prince; but if the palace were to survive having its central point embedded in the wall of a church, that doorway must be closed.

With a sound like grinding rock, the portal sealed, and Lune and Shaw returned to their bodies.

The Queen blinked, dizzy with effort, and looked about to see where they were. The chamber was a larger one than before, perhaps ten paces across, and Lune recognized it as lying in a part of the Hall few fae ever came to; it was very nearly beneath St. Paul’s Cathedral. A consequence, no doubt, of the new placement at the church. She felt peculiar, as if she were looking out over familiar ground from an unaccustomed vantage point.

Shaw wiped sweat from his brow and said, “We’ll need to hide this.”

Yes, they would. Even if few fae ever came here, some did, and the London Stone was a vulnerable point. Extending her hand once more, Lune said, “If you have the strength?”

Robert Shaw’s strength was an endless thing. He wrapped callused fingers around hers, and together they went through the archway into another room, this one larger, just by the stairs that led to the cathedral above. Turning to face that arch, they concentrated, and the black stone grew shut, until it seemed there had never been an opening there at all.

The Onyx Hall would be safe a while longer.

Shadwell, London: May 24, 1884

With much shouting and cursing, the packed body of men surged forward across the dockyard, past the fallen chain that until a moment ago had held them back. Not far ahead, a group of foremen waited on a platform of boards laid across barrels, raised just high enough to allow them to survey the charging mass. As the first runners reached them, the foremen began to bellow with powerful voices, naming off the work they needed done, and calling out the men they would hire to do it.

This was only the Shadwell Basin, not the West India Docks, nor any of the other great pools that had been built in the East End of London to accept the commerce of the world. Even in those places, the foremen could not hire more than a fraction of the fellows who came each morning to beg for work. Here, only a fraction of a fraction met with luck; the rest were turned away, grumbling or silent with despair, to find what employment they could.

Or to drink away what coin they still had. Eliza had watched the scrimmage from the safety of an empty cart along a warehouse wall; she stayed where she was, letting the energetic men depart again, waiting for those who had nothing to hurry on to. As she expected, Dónall Whelan was among the last of these, and one look at him was enough to tell that he’d be lucky to afford a dram of gin, in his current state.

So much the better for her. Eliza hiked up her skirts and jumped over the cart’s rail to land on the filthy cobbles in front of Whelan, startling him from his weary shuffle. She smiled broadly into his surprised eyes. “I knew I’d find you here, for all that you’re too old; sure you know the calling-men will never choose yourself. But I’ve a threepenny bit in my pocket, and that’s enough to get you blind drunk—after you help me.”

Whelan’s face had seen hard wear since she last saw him. He was old for a dockworker, old for any job in the East End; nearly forty, she thought, for he’d been a boy when his father came over during the Hunger. Whelan followed after his mother perished in Galway, waiting for money that never came. His shoulders, though still broad, had taken on a hunch, one riding higher than the other, and most of his hair was long since gone. One of these days he would drown himself in the Thames, or find work and then be killed by it. Or drink himself to death, if he could get enough money to do it in one go.

His rheumy eyes took on what he probably thought was a cunning look, and Eliza wondered if he was thinking of robbing her. Let him try; she had a knife under her shawl, and in his state she was probably the stronger of the two. “You’re looking wondrous fine, Miss O’Malley,” he said, with a mockery of a bow. “Fine enough to be buying a dinner of whitebait, even. And a man can help much better on a full stomach, he can.”

How bad had things been for him lately, that he wanted food more than drink? Against Eliza’s better instincts, a touch of pity stirred her heart. Grudgingly, she said, “Not whitebait, or do you think silver sprouts up wherever I walk? But you’ll have oysters now, and a hot baked potato afterward, if you can keep your hands to yourself. Grab my paps like you did last time, and you’ll have a knee in the bollocks instead, understand?”

Whelan had fewer teeth, too, since the last time she saw them, and what remained were badly tobacco stained. But his smile looked sincere enough. “You always were a spirited lass. Oysters first, and then we’ll talk.”

It was true, she could have afforded more. For all the many things Eliza hated about working on Cromwell Road, her wages were not one of them; between the pace of her work and her own instinct to keep her head low, she’d scarcely spent a penny more than she had to. It might have been nice to go into one of the riverside taverns, get a table in a bay window, have a proper meal of fish and beer—like a normal woman.

But not in Dónall Whelan’s company. They ended up perched on two piles of rope on one of the sufferance wharves, licking oyster juice off their fingers while gulls circled in predatory hope. Eliza kept one eye on the birds and one on Whelan, not trusting him more than an inch. At the moment, though, he was fully involved with his food, bolting it as if he hadn’t eaten in days—and perhaps he hadn’t.

When he paused for breath, she said, “I need to know what to do about a changeling.”

She was glad she’d waited; her statement set Whelan to coughing, and she wouldn’t have wanted him to choke on an oyster. The coughing turned to laughter soon enough. “A changeling? And you with your harsh words before, swearing it would be a cold day in hell before you asked Dónall Whelan’s advice again, on fairies or any other thing.”

Eliza remembered those words very well. She’d gone to Whelan after Owen vanished, because Mary Kinsella said his father had been a fairy doctor in Ireland, with knowledge of how to treat the ailments they brought on mankind. Supposedly the father had passed that knowledge on to his son. If that was true, Whelan had forgotten half of it, and scrambled the other half. He wouldn’t even believe her about what she’d seen, swearing blind these English had no fairies, that they’d run them all out with their soulless Anglican church. But all Eliza knew of changelings was some half-remembered tales; she needed advice, and Whelan’s—bad as it might be—was the only advice she knew how to get.

“It won’t be your missing lad,” Whelan said, picking bits of oyster from between his teeth with one ragged fingernail. “You’d have more panic in you if it were, and more hope. So who’s been stolen this time?”

“’Tis none of your concern, who it might be.”

“I could say it was.” Whelan shifted to find a more comfortable perch on his rope. “Could tell you it matters, for disposing of a fairy. But the truth is I want to know, and I’m thinking you owe it to me—call it an apology. You hurt my feelings something dreadful, last time.”

Eliza scowled. “The devil with you and your hurt feelings. Answer me, or I’ll be off, and you’ll get nothing more than the oysters you’ve already had.”

But Whelan’s gap-toothed grin told her the bluff had failed, even before he spoke. “And you’ll be asking the next fairy doctor instead? If you knew one, you’d be asking him already. You’re desperate, Eliza O’Malley; it may not be your lad who’s gone changeling, but either you care about whoever it was, or you still think you can get him back. So tell me what I want to know, and we’ll go on from there.”

A fellow passed by them, pushing an empty wheelbarrow. Eliza’s skin drew tight, muscles tensing to readiness. She’d taken one of the workmen’s trains that morning, leaving Cromwell Road before five o’clock to pay her fare and join the throngs of laborers on their way to work. She’d reckoned the Underground a safe enough way to go; few people boarded the third-class carriages from South Kensington Station, especially at that hour, and none rode so far around the incomplete Inner Circle, a horseshoe journey north and east and south to the Tower of London. If anyone had followed her, she would have seen. But the peelers kept watch over the docks, and especially over the Irish there, to stop dynamite being brought in. She waited until the workman was gone, then said, “Not that it means anything to you, but Miss Georgiana Barlow.”

It was the first name that came to hand, a friend of Louisa Kittering’s, likewise making her debut in London. “Miss,” Whelan said, as if tasting the courtesy. “Some young nob, is it? And why do you care?”

“I don’t. But as you said, it might help Owen. Now you’ve got what you want; give me what I’m paying for.”

Whelan eyed her, sucking in his hollow cheeks, as if gauging whether he could squeeze anything more from her first. Eliza glared at him, not having to pretend a mounting fury, and he gave in. “Sure ’tis simple enough; I’ve done it a dozen times. Sometimes, with infants, you can give them back: put the changeling on the seashore, or where two rivers come together, or on the edge of a lake, and the fairies will reclaim their own, knowing ’tisn’t wanted. But more often, you have to make it go away on its own.”

She didn’t even know why it had come in the first place, except to disguise the theft of the real Miss Kittering. “How?”

“There’s medicines, but I don’t know how they’re made. Better to be straightforward: beat the changeling, or kick it, or starve it; forcing it underwater can work, or holding it over a fire—”

“I can’t do that!” Eliza exclaimed in horror, cutting off his rambling suggestions. For one fractured instant, her mind tried to imagine dragging the false Louisa down to the kitchen, flinging the pots and saucepans off the top of the range, forcing the screaming young woman into their place. I wouldn’t live long enough to be arrested.

Whelan shrugged. “If the fairy leaves, they have to give the stolen one back. But it isn’t easy to make them leave.”

“How do you know they have to give the human back? They took Owen, and didn’t leave anyone in his place.”

“True.” Was it her imagination, or did Whelan look troubled? He bent his attention to his fingernails, picking at the ragged edge of one until it broke off. “If you’re clever, then sometimes it works to use trickery instead.”

It said something very unpleasant about Whelan that he suggested drowning and roasting before trickery. “Tell me about that,” Eliza said, trying not to let her relief get the better of her. What followed next might not be any better.

But it was better—if not terribly convincing. “Some say if you can trick the changeling into admitting that ’tisn’t human, then it will be bound to leave.”

“How—by asking it questions that the person should know the answers to?”

He shook his head. “No, they often seem to know quite a lot.” And indeed, Eliza knew, that was true of the false Louisa. Whelan said, “I’ve only heard the one story of this, and I don’t remember it well. But there was a woman with a little child that had been stolen away, and she did something unnatural to confuse it. The thing said it had never seen that in all the centuries of its life, and so showed it was a changeling; and after that, it had to go away.”

A much safer path than attacking Louisa Kittering. But still, a thin thread upon which to hang her hopes. Staring out over the filthy brown waters of the Thames, Eliza said, “And that’s the best you can say?”

“Don’t you be insulting me again, Eliza O’Malley—not when I’ve been as helpful as I can.”

She rather thought he had, and forced herself to murmur an apology. Her heart was still heavy, though, and she couldn’t immediately bring herself to move; instead she sat and watched a ship floating gently into the tight quarters of the Shadwell Basin, where dockworkers more fortunate than Dónall Whelan waited to unload its cargo of rice or tobacco or wine. And when the ship’s stern had passed from view behind the high walls of the closed dock, Whelan spoke again.

“I suppose I’m owing you an apology of my own.”

Startled, Eliza turned back to him. Whelan had hunched down upon his coil of rope, fingers jabbing at its tarred strands. A sharp breeze off the water made them both shiver. “For grabbing my paps?”

His unrepentant laugh said she’d missed the mark. Then Whelan sobered. “No. For doubting what you said, near seven years ago. About fairies in London.”

Eliza was off the rope in an instant, tired feet slamming onto the boards of the wharf. “You’ve seen them?”

“No.” The word struck like the grim blow of an ax. “But I’ve had others come asking for help. From West Ham, out past Mile End. Girls have gone missing, and they say the fairies took them.”

The energy of a heartbeat before drained out of her, its place taken by slow horror. “How many?”

Whelan spread his gnarled hands. “Three? That I know about. There might be more. A girl named Eliza Carter, ten or fifteen years old… I don’t remember the other two. The police looked, I think. But of course they found nothing.” He spat onto the planks, still damp from that morning’s rain. “The police never find anything in the East End, unless it went missing from the West. You could murder a dozen women here and never be caught.”

They certainly hadn’t been able to find Owen. One patronizing fellow had told Mrs. Darragh her son probably ran off to America. Eliza never understood it, how one minute these English could talk about the irrational closeness of the Irish family, and the next assume a young man would abandon the mother and sister who needed him. And was that where they thought Eliza Carter had gone?

West Ham. That was on the very edge of the city, a good five miles from Newgate. But the horse-tram was cheap, and Eliza had the whole day off. It might be worth going out there, to see what she could learn.

But first she had a debt to pay. “On your feet,” Eliza told Whelan. “We’re going to find someone selling potatoes, and some butter to put on them, too; and while we do, you’ll be telling me everything you know about this girl and the others. Starting with where their families live.”

The Goblin Market, Onyx Hall: May 26, 1884

There were fae in the Goblin Market who were very good at stealing secrets.

Dead Rick was not one of them.

But he gave it his best try anyway, knowing it wouldn’t be good enough. Counting on it not being good enough. Because when Nadrett asked questions later, the master needed to be satisfied that the story Dead Rick told was true.

So he slipped through the chambers and passages of the Market, making his way toward the one corridor that still led to the rest of the Hall. A lot of fae had to pass through that area, making it the perfect territory for the Market’s biggest buyer and seller of secrets.

When Nadrett asked later, Dead Rick would say, with perfect truth, that he was looking for proof of an alliance between Lacca and Valentin Aspell. The goblin woman no longer had any territory in the Market; if she wanted to survive, she needed help, and about the only thing she had left to sell was the information in her head. So it was reasonable to think she would offer it to Aspell, who traded in such things, in exchange for something that would help her avoid being crushed by Nadrett and Hardface. It was also reasonable to think that Nadrett would be pleased with any faerie who brought him proof of that offer.

Not that Dead Rick was going to succeed. But Nadrett wouldn’t have to question why he tried. For a skriker who was absolute rubbish at lying, it was important to have these things in place beforehand.

A fidgeting sprite stood watch at the edge of Aspell’s territory, no one Dead Rick recognized. Slipping past him was easy; all it took was a charm of concealment, persuading eye and ear there was nothing worth noticing. That was only a doorman, though, not an actual defense. The first layer of that waited in the chamber Dead Rick soon came to, where Aspell’s underlings lounged at their ease on stolen silks, playing cards or talking idly. No dogfighting here, no pit stained with blood; Aspell’s crew was more disciplined than that, if no less ruthless.

Some of these were fae Dead Rick knew. Orlegg, for example, whose thick muscles made him an intimidating enemy. The thrumpin, though, wasn’t half the threat Greymalkin was; her feline nose might not be as sharp as a dog’s, but it was enough to catch his scent on the air. And scent was a good deal harder to charm away than sight or sound.

Dead Rick had optimistically thought he might get past this room, to where the actual guards kept watch. No such luck: Greymalkin’s head came up in swift alert, and then before Dead Rick could decide whether to try and run, they had him.

Orlegg growled impressive threats about breaking his arms, but it was just talk—Dead Rick hoped. Aspell’s minions were disciplined, more so than most in the Goblin Market. They wouldn’t really lay into him until their master gave the order.

And that meant seeing the master.

This was the part that most worried Dead Rick. He didn’t dare ask to see Aspell; people would take notice of that, and while the discipline here also extended to information, he couldn’t trust it wouldn’t get out somehow—maybe on Aspell’s orders. So when Greymalkin asked him what he was doing there, what he had seen, Dead Rick gave the most threatening laugh he could manage, and said, “More than you want to know.”

She swiped his face with her claws, but he smiled through the blood, because one of her companions had gone away with a worried look on his face. When the other faerie came back, he jerked his thumb at the door and said, “Bring him.”

Dead Rick let them drag him; it wouldn’t do to look eager. And for once luck smiled on him, because they shoved him into a chair, bound him in place, and went out again, leaving the skriker alone with Valentin Aspell.

Who studied him with an expression forbidding enough to make Dead Rick hope this wouldn’t turn out to be a fatally bad idea. Aspell’s thin mouth was pinched close, his brows drawn in over sharp green eyes. The wingback chair in which he sat shrouded him partially in shadow, as if it were the hood of a cobra. In a straight-up-and-down fight, Dead Rick would win—he didn’t even think the other faerie was armed—but Aspell knew that, and would never let it come to such a fight. Tied to a chair, with plenty of people just beyond the door, Dead Rick was potentially in a great deal of danger.

So he spoke before Aspell could. “I didn’t see nothing, and I didn’t expect to. I only broke in so I’d ’ave a way to talk to you, private.”

The sharp eyebrows rose. “Oh? There are accepted means of doing so. Violating my territory is not one of them.”

Aspell should have looked ridiculous, dressed as he was. The former Lord Keeper had been imprisoned for a hundred years of sleep, ever since the middle of the last century, and when he awoke he’d been unimpressed with the dreary simplicity and dull color men’s clothing had taken on. He still wore the long, decorated coats of that previous era, usually in a serpentine green, though he’d given up the absurd wigs Dead Rick had seen in old engravings. Seated at the heart of his power, however, Aspell could have worn a pantomime costume and still been terrifying. The skriker had to swallow before answering.

“You’re good, guvner, but you ain’t perfect. I go anywhere near you, I got to assume Nadrett will find out. And if I don’t ’ave a good answer for it, I’m a dead dog. So I’ll tells ’im I wanted to know whether you and Lacca are plotting something, and in the meantime, I tells you I’m ’ere to buy information.”

“Of what sort?”

Dead Rick thought he’d managed to intrigue the other faerie, at least a little bit. Intrigue was good; it gave Aspell a reason to keep listening. “Information that gets close to Nadrett. You see why I can’t ’ave ’im finding out about this.”

Aspell settled deeper into the embrace of his chair, one slender hand stroking its arm with an idle motion. “Indeed. Very well; what do you wish to know?”

After leaving the night garden, Dead Rick had decided he had a choice: give up on his absent ally’s mission, or continue pursuing it himself. The former choice would just sink him back down into the pit of helplessness that had trapped him before. The latter might get him killed—but if it didn’t, he might have something valuable enough to buy the help he needed. “I ’ear tell Nadrett’s got a fellow named Chrennois working for ’im. I wants to know more about Chrennois.” Dead Rick paused, licked his dry lips. “What’s the price for answering that?”

His options for payment were limited. Dead Rick didn’t have anything resembling wealth, not since his little store of valuables had been crushed beneath falling stone. That left information—but selling any of Nadrett’s secrets could get him killed. The skriker curled his bound hands into fists and prepared to bargain hard.

Aspell sat in thought long enough to make him squirm. Then an unreadable smile curled one corner of his mouth, and he said, “You intend to betray your master.”

Dead Rick shook his head. “No, I ain’t that ambitious. I just need to know what ’e’s planning, so I can—”

The former lord put up one hand, silencing him immediately. “You needn’t bother denying it. I know you have been in contact with someone, who has asked to you investigate… let us say, certain of Nadrett’s activities.”

It felt like someone had thrown a bucket of icy water over him. Dead Rick’s skin jumped, and his hands clenched tight. “’Ow in Mab’s name do you know that?”

This time the smile curved Aspell’s entire mouth, but not pleasantly. “You approach me to buy information, and ask how it is I know things? I will not tell you. All that matters, at least for this conversation, is that I do know. But be at ease; I shan’t ask you anything about your master. Instead I want to know about your ally.”

That was safer—maybe. Aspell smelled intent, in a way Dead Rick didn’t like. “I ain’t seen ’im in a while,” he said, hedging.

“Do you meet regularly?”

“No, I—” Dead Rick stopped. On the one hand, this was a betrayal of the voice; on the other hand, for all he knew the owner of that voice was dead or gone. On the third hand—he switched to paws—his scant knowledge might not be enough to satisfy Aspell; on the fourth paw, that made it not much of a betrayal.

Making up his mind, he said, “If you already know ’e exists, that’s the dangerous bit, I suppose. I think the cove’s somebody in the Goblin Market—or was.”

“Was?”

“Like I said, I ain’t seen ’im in a while. Think ’e might ’ave died when everything fell. We’ve got a way of signaling when I wants to talk to ’im, but I did that days ago and ain’t ’eard so much as a whisper.”

Aspell frowned. “Where does he speak to you?”

“In—” Dead Rick stopped again. “In my old ’ole,” he said slowly, thinking. Which is gone. Maybe that’s why I ain’t ’eard back. Could be ’is trick only worked there, or ’e don’t know where to find me now that my ’ole’s gone.

None of which he shared with Aspell. The other faerie asked, “What else do you know about him?”

’E ain’t you, and that’s about all I know for sure. “’E talks like a gentleman,” Dead Rick said. “But ’e ain’t nobody in the court, I don’t think—I asked ’im what ’e thought of the Queen, anyway, and ’e don’t seem to like ’er much. Knows a bit about the Goblin Market, but I think ’e also knows people in the Academy.”

“What else?”

Dead Rick racked his brain, trying to find anything else to say. Otherwise Aspell would declare that wasn’t payment enough, and then he’d end up betraying Nadrett as well as the voice, which was a quick way to end up dead. “’E’s got some ventriloquist trick, making ’is voice sound where ’e ain’t.” Aspell still didn’t look satisfied. Then Dead Rick thought of one more thing. Reluctantly, he added, “And ’e knows some things about me.”

That got Aspell’s interest. “What kind of things?”

“Things I… I don’t remember.”

He wasn’t sure whether to be relieved or not that Aspell didn’t ask what he meant by that. Relieved, I guess. If Aspell’s knowed all this time that I don’t ’ave my memories, ’e ’asn’t used it against me, not that I’ve seen. And that means I ain’t told ’im nothing about myself ’e didn’t already know.

Either way, he’d rather be talking about anything but himself. “Is that good enough?”

“It is,” Aspell said, surprising him. The former lord sounded obscurely pleased. “So—Chrennois. French, as you may have guessed, though not from the Cour du Lys; he originally hailed from some provincial court. He came to the Onyx Hall more than twenty years ago, with the intent of studying at the Academy. If memory serves, he wanted to develop some new kind of faerie photography. But he and Yvoir, another French fellow working on the same topic, had a serious falling out—not surprising, as Chrennois was a cold-blooded sort, far more willing than Yvoir to try… let us say, unorthodox methods.”

The frog worked for Nadrett; by unorthodox, Aspell likely meant horrible. But Dead Rick needed better specifics than that. “Like what? And what kind of photography?”

Aspell spread his delicate hands. “I’m afraid that sort of technical matter falls beyond my expertise. If you truly wish to know, however, I can make inquiries in the Academy.”

No need; the methods didn’t really matter, and as for the kind, Dead Rick could guess easily enough that it had to do with ghosts. As if the voice of his ally were in his head, he thought, But what ’as that got to do with going to Faerie?

He didn’t know, and his ally wasn’t around to ask. On impulse, Dead Rick said, “How much to find out who it is I been talking to?”

Aspell controlled his expression, but Dead Rick heard the hitch in his breath that indicated a suppressed laugh. “When I have only just now gathered the first scraps of information? Once I know the answer to your question, I can quote you a price; until then, I do not know how much it is worth.”

Dead Rick hunched his shoulders and glared, putting as much threat behind it as he could while tied to a chair. “You’d better be quiet about it.”

“Yes, yes; you do not want Nadrett to find out. Your lack of faith in my discretion is really quite offensive. Well, I believe our business here is done…” Aspell smiled in a way that raised Dead Rick’s hackles. “Except for one simple matter.”

The other faerie paused, clearly wanting to make Dead Rick nervous, and to force him to ask. On another day the skriker might have refused to cooperate, but right now, he just wanted out of that chair. “What?”

“You broke into my chambers, Dead Rick. Quite aside from my feelings on that matter, Nadrett will expect to hear you were punished for it.” Aspell ran the tip of his tongue over his lips, considering. “You did not make it very far, I suppose. A simple beating should suffice.”

It could have been worse. Dead Rick nodded, and at some unseen cue the door opened, revealing Greymalkin on the far side. She was a slender thing, but wiry, and her claws were wickedly sharp. Could ’ave been worse—could ’ave been Orlegg—but this won’t be good.

“Take him outside first,” Aspell instructed the waiting faerie. “I don’t want blood on my carpet.”

Cromwell Road, South Kensington: May 27, 1884

In the aftermath of Lucy’s sacking, Ann Wick quit, and Eliza was promoted to the position of upper-housemaid, with her pay increased to a full five shillings a week. She spent most of the additional money on coffee: Mrs. Kittering could not find a lady’s maid who satisfied her, relying instead on Eliza’s clumsy hands, while the new under-housemaid, Mary Banning, was lazy and slow and drank Cook’s sherry when she thought no one would notice. Which meant that Eliza was worked so hard, she could scarcely drag herself out of bed in the mornings. Exhaustion rendered her nerves uncertain; one harsh word from Mrs. Fowler could make her angry enough to murder the housekeeper, or put her on the brink of tears.

The thought of confronting the faerie—even with trickery—terrified her nearly into paralysis. Once taken, such a step could not be called back; the faerie would know that she knew, and what little safety Eliza had would be gone. Then there would be only two paths before her: get Louisa Kittering back, or flee. And it might be that neither one would save her from the faerie’s revenge.

Failure wasn’t the most frightening thought, though. The prospect of success was far, far worse.

Say it tells you what you want to know, Eliza thought, while changing the linens on Mrs. Kittering’s bed one afternoon. Say it confesses, Yes, we steal humans away, and tells you where to find them. Miss Kittering, and Owen, and even Eliza Carter of West Ham, whose sister told you she was so afraid of “them” before she vanished. Then what?

For seven years she’d dreamt of rescuing Owen. With the moment possibly at hand, though, Eliza was learning how little of a hero she was.

It had been easy to pretend, before. When it was a matter of spying on people, and skulking about, and lying. Now the time had come to act directly, though, and the fear gripping her heart made her wonder: Was it really true that she couldn’t act before? All these months since Charing Cross, when she’d had the courage to throw a bomb out the back of a train, but not to catch the creatures who put it there. The six long years before that, when she gave up on searching, telling herself she didn’t know what to do. Keeping herself safe, at every turn.

And all the while, Owen paid the price of her cowardice.

In the middle of opening the curtains in Louisa Kittering’s bedroom the next morning, Eliza’s nerve broke. She looked out onto Queensberry Place, and for an instant she could feel the cobblestones beneath her feet, pounding against her heels as she fled back to Whitechapel. Not to safety, but the relief of failure, of giving up and trying no more.

Under her breath, she snarled, “No.”

Eliza spun, putting the street at her back, and looked toward the bed. The changeling slept there, innocent and false, one hand dangling over the mattress’s edge. Vulnerable—but one cry would bring the other servants running. Instead Eliza took a deep breath, squared her shoulders, and picked up a chair.

She didn’t attempt to be quiet. Mary Banning would be dawdling over the grates in the morning room still, and Mrs. Fowler discussing the plans for dinner with Cook; Louisa’s bedroom was three floors up from where any other servants were likely to be. The only person Eliza was likely to wake was the changeling, and that was exactly what she wanted.

It took less than a minute for the creature to stir and sit up in bed. Where a human might have yawned or rubbed blearily at her eyes, the faerie looked perfectly alert—and then perfectly confused. “What are you doing?”

“Dancing your furniture,” Eliza said. Her breath came in short pants, and her arms were already tiring; Louisa’s chairs, like everything else in the house, were the pinnacle of conventional fashion, which meant heavy and well upholstered. “I’m sorry for waking you—please don’t tell Mrs. Fowler—should have done this yesterday. Has to be done every month, you see.”

The changeling stared as she completed one last, lurching turn and set the chair down. Casting about for something lighter, Eliza decided on a small table, and shifted a potted plant off it into the washbasin.

“Dancing… my furniture,” the faerie repeated, watching her maid begin a second bad waltz about the room.

“Yes!” Whelan’s half-remembered story had involved the mother cooking something strange, but the changeling would never have reason to come down to the kitchen. Eliza had thought of several possibilities; this had been the most immediate to hand.

Out of the corner of her eye, she saw the faerie’s mouth open and close, and her head wag slightly in denial. Say it, Eliza thought, barely keeping the growl behind her teeth. Tell me how old you are, what strange things you’ve seen, but this the strangest of all. Admit what you are. Say it!

“Are you drunk?”

Eliza stumbled, lost her balance, nearly fell into the wall. “What?”

The young woman’s mouth pressed tight. The way she drew her shoulders back was a perfect echo of Mrs. Kittering in a ferment of disdain. “Put that table down this instant, back where it belongs—and then get out. We do not tolerate drunken servants in this house.”

“But—”

She didn’t even know what would have followed that protest. It hardly mattered, though, for the girl smacked one hand against the bedclothes, cutting her off. “Did you not hear me? I said get out!”

Hands cold and shaking, Eliza did as she was told. Table replaced, and the potted plant atop it; then she curtsied like some streetside entertainer’s clockwork automaton and slipped from the room, closing the door behind her. After one frozen instant of staring into the hallway mirror, she fled to the refuge of the servants’ staircase.

She made it halfway up the narrow steps before sinking into a trembling heap. Saints preserve me…

I failed.

Because her effort hadn’t been good enough? Or because she was wrong—and there was no faerie?

The plain, white-painted boards of the wall swam in Eliza’s vision. What evidence had she, that the young woman in that bed was not Louisa Kittering?

Changes in her behavior. An interest in unladylike things. And that brief flinch, weeks ago, when Eliza spoke of the Blessed Virgin.

A flinch only. Shouldn’t there have been more, if the creature truly was a faerie? And the other things could be explained away; after all, Miss Kittering had always had unladylike interests. She might simply be kicking harder than ever against her mother’s control.

The rest could be explained by Eliza’s own fears.

And what of Owen…?

Eliza slammed her fist down onto the step, hard enough to bruise. No. That was no trick of her imagination. Whatever Maggie Darragh thought, that faerie was real; Eliza had seen him often enough to know.

But that was all. The girl in the bed might very well just be Louisa Kittering.

She heard sounds a couple of floors below: a door opening, and footsteps upon the stairs. Eliza shoved herself up and hastily wiped her face with her apron, scrubbing away sweat and tears alike. Bolting upward would only trap her in the servants’ quarters, so she headed down instead, and almost ran into Mrs. Fowler on the landing.

The housekeeper looked at her suspiciously. “I heard a noise. What are you doing up here?”

Eliza dropped a curtsy, hoping it would hide the effects of crying. “I’m sorry, Mrs. Fowler. My foot slipped on the stairs, and my heel came down dreadful hard. I didn’t mean to disturb anyone. I just finished in Miss Kittering’s room.”

But Mrs. Fowler was too practiced at seeing through the lies of maids. “And that sent you up to the attics? You certainly weren’t coming from Miss Kittering’s room just now. You look a fright, girl; what has happened to your hair?”

An exploring hand found sweaty tendrils escaping from beneath her cap, no doubt from her exertions with the furniture. “I—I’m sorry,” Eliza stammered, grasping for any plausible excuse. “I’m afraid I’m not feeling well—”

The housekeeper took her roughly by the shoulder, pressing the back of her other hand to Eliza’s forehead. “You’re very clammy. Perhaps you’re falling ill. Well, we can’t have you coughing and sneezing around the family, can we? You’ll take over that new maid’s duties below stairs; she can do your work above.” Mrs. Fowler released her, and when Eliza did not immediately move, said, “What are you waiting for? There’s stains that need cleaning, and you’ve wasted enough time already. Get on with you!”

A shove sent her stumbling toward the stairs. Eliza caught herself on the railing, and thought, Now is your chance. She could quit—blame Mrs. Fowler’s insistence upon her working while ill, as if she had any right to expect otherwise—and go. Run away before Louisa had a chance to tell anyone what she’d done.

And do what? Without the changeling, she had nothing. No hope except to march up to Scotland Yard and ask the Special Irish Branch whether they arrested any faeries along with their Fenians.

She had nowhere to go, not even Whitechapel. But she had a position here, unpleasant as it was; and if Louisa didn’t have her sacked, then at least Eliza could save a bit more money while she tried to think of a plan.

“Yes, ma’am,” she mumbled to Mrs. Fowler, and made her way downstairs.

Whole minutes passed—whole hours, it felt like—before Louisa Kittering was able to move.

She spent those minutes staring at the bedroom door, as if the maid would come leaping back through, reciting prayers and waving a solid iron cross to banish her. Not that it would do much good; that might overcome the protection of bread, if the human was devout enough, but not the armor that shielded her now. Still, no amount of safety was enough to erase the inevitable flinch, the instinctive fear.

Especially if the maid knew what she was.

An absurd thought. This was not some rural village, where people still believed in faeries; this was South Kensington, literally across the road from the Museum of Natural History, where humans kept the preserved corpses of exotic animals from around the world, and specimens to illustrate their own supposed descent from apes. And while the maid might be from a less scientifically minded part of England, it would be quite a leap for her to think of faeries—especially when the girl who once lived in this room swore she said nothing of it to anyone.

Yet the maid—Hannah, that was what the girl had called her—must have had some reason for waltzing about the room with furniture. And Louisa had heard cautionary tales of fae, innocents less familiar with the mortal world than she, caught by such tricks, forced out of their changeling roles and back to whence they’d come.

She was not surprised to find, as she swung her legs out from beneath the bedclothes, that her feet were trembling. So were her hands. That had been one of the oddities of her new life, discovering that cold bothered her as it never had before; but this was nerves more than chill. For all that her changeling state protected Louisa more than mere bread, she felt naked, exposed, vulnerable. This was no brief masquerade, a glamour thrown over her faerie face and discarded when it was no longer needed. She had taken over the life and name of the girl who was once Louisa Kittering, and until she managed to break free of that young woman’s ties, it meant subjecting herself to the constant scrutiny of those around her.

She was only safe so long as they didn’t know what she was. The Goodemeades and their mad plan to come out of the shadows looked a good deal less appealing, now that she stood to lose very directly by it. Then everyone would know how to recognize the signs of faerie things. As long as they remained ignorant, though, she remained safe—and free.

Gloriously free! Louisa could not help but grin at everything around her, from the pictures on the walls to the brass knobs of her bed, as if she’d never seen any of it before. The touch of her bare toes against the floor steadied her after that fright, and she bounded over to the window to peer out at the street below.

A carriage rolled by, bearing on its doors some peer’s coat of arms; she could not make it out from up here, and likely wouldn’t have recognized it anyway. She’d thought to go along with Mrs. Kittering’s plans and marry that baron’s son, the one with the absurd name—or perhaps someone even more highly placed. Taking on a human life didn’t mean giving up all of her faerie charms, after all, and the glittering beauty of the haut ton did have its appeal. But wedding a peer would limit her freedom too much, unless she kept her husband continually enchanted; and besides, Louisa had never desired to be a faerie bride. She’d known such a creature once, a nymph who left her husband after he struck her three times, and didn’t see the point.

No, she would not marry. There was no need for it anyway. Once she was settled into her new role, she would cut her ties with this family, and go wherever she liked. After Frederic Myers, perhaps. He had a wife in Cambridge, but surely it wouldn’t take much to change that, especially if Louisa Kittering suddenly discovered a mediumistic talent and began channeling the spirit of Annie Marshall. She even looked a bit like the dead woman, if she turned her head to the right angle; Myers had sneaked glances at the girl all through that London Fairy Society meeting, back in March. Now that the face was hers, she could make use of that.

Silly fool, she chided herself. This was her escape from Nadrett, so that she no longer depended on his shelter and bread. She’d known from the moment she saw Myers at the meeting that spending time around him would be… unwise.

But just because Nadrett thinks he might have another use for the man later on, doesn’t mean he will, whispered the part of her that had grown tired of caution and control. With your help, Myers could even take steps to protect himself. Wouldn’t that be better than leaving him in danger? She stood with one foot in each world now; why not make use of that? She could do anything Louisa Kittering could, and more.

But a glance back at the door sobered her. That freedom was hers only so long as she was Louisa Kittering. One direct admission of her true nature, and the bond would be broken. Which was hardly a concern in the ordinary way of things—but what of the maid?

There were other ways to force a changeling out. It all depended on how strong the maid’s nerve was.

Louisa tried to recall what the girl whose place she’d taken had said about the maid. A prying sort—and Irish; yes, now she remembered. Irish, though hiding it, which might explain why her mind went to fae. Louisa shuddered. They had harsh ways of dealing with changelings in Ireland.

Biting her lip in thought, she went to sit in front of the grate, staring at the coals glowing softly in their harmless iron nest. The Goblin Market answer would be to dispose of her. It wouldn’t even be hard; servants vanished all the time, with little or no explanation. Fetch a will-o’-the-wisp from the Onyx Hall and lure Hannah Whoever over the rail of a bridge, or into the path of an omnibus. Easy and sure.

But she’d taken on this life precisely to get away from the Goblin Market—that, and to stay in London, when the Onyx Hall finished its collapse. It would be a poor escape if she brought all those habits of thought and behavior with her.

So what, then?

The door opened. But the woman who came in wasn’t Hannah; it was some other maid, and she stared wide-eyed at Louisa—who realized she was on her feet with her hands raised in defensive claws. She lowered them hastily, and assumed an expression that implied they’d never been raised at all, that she certainly hadn’t been on the verge of attacking the maid. It will take more than a new name to banish my Goblin Market habits, I suppose. “Yes? What is it?”

The maid, a slump-shouldered woman with a nose made florid by drinking, gave an awkward curtsy. “I’m here to help you dress, miss.”

“Oh.” Now Louisa felt even more foolish. She couldn’t get used to all these people about, waiting to help her. In the old days, before the Onyx Hall reached its present degenerate state, she’d been a minor member of the court, and then of course she’d had servants. But the menial work—the lacing of her stays, the cleaning of her shoes, all the little tasks—had been handled by creatures so small and mindless they ranked one bare step above furniture in her notice. Humans relied on people for these things, and Louisa kept being surprised by their presence. “Pick out something—no, never mind; I will do it myself.”

She rummaged through the wardrobe, half her mind on which of her myriad of outfits to wear—It’s morning; I should choose a morning dress; now, which ones are those? It’s been ages since I was able to mind proper fashion—the other half on the problem of Hannah the maid.

I’ll see to it she keeps quiet, Louisa decided at last, fingering the sleeve of a dress. Scare her, if I must. But no sense drawing more attention than necessary, as long as she doesn’t go wagging her tongue where she oughtn’t.

She turned around, garment in hand, and saw the maid’s eyebrows shoot up. Looking down, Louisa found she’d picked up what even she could tell was a ball gown, in eggplant-colored silk. Scowling, she shoved it back into the wardrobe and plucked out something else. But if she threatens more trouble…

If that happened, then Louisa would have to take steps to remove her. Not deadly ones; having her sacked might do. Or reported as Irish, at which point she’d likely be sacked anyway, and no one would listen to a word she said besides. If that wasn’t enough, there were fae in the Onyx Hall who would help out for a price, making sure Hannah went somewhere very far away, and didn’t return.

There were possibilities. But this much was certain: under no circumstances could the maid be allowed to threaten Louisa’s safety. There was still enough Goblin Market left in her to guarantee that.

Riverside, Onyx Hall: May 28, 1884

Coming out of the Crow’s Head, where Nadrett had sent him to question the owner Hafdean, Dead Rick caught an odd scent.

Sour. Sharp. I’ve smelled this before, I know I ’ave—

On Rewdan, the padfoot who’d been Nadrett’s courier from Faerie. Satyr’s bile, Dead Rick guessed; it was a kind of acid. But what in Mab’s name was it doing here?

He stepped warily, following the trail. It led away from people, toward a broken bit of the palace, close enough that nobody wanted to spend much time there. Which made it a perfect place to do secret work—but also to ambush anyone who came looking. Nadrett wouldn’t do that; if ’e wants you dead, all ’e ’as to do is snap ’is fingers. Chrennois might be a different story, though.

The light faded fast, but he could feel that the stone around him was mazed with cracks. This part of the Hall, like the Market, lay close to the riverside; that meant both cast-iron pipes and the forward progress of the Inner Circle were eating away at its structure. Dead Rick’s hackles rose. But there was light up ahead—a faerie light—surely that meant he could trust the fabric to hold together a little while longer.

He paused to sniff the air. Nothing. Just dust, cold stone, and the sour smell of bile. No scent of anyone, faerie or mortal. It didn’t reassure him: How had the acid gotten there, if no one had brought it?

Ears and nose could not answer that question for him. Dead Rick crept forward on silent feet and peered around the edge, into the light.

He saw just one faerie light, drifting slowly through the air. Its weak glow illuminated a round chamber, rings of stone benches surrounding a low depression in the center. Dead Rick didn’t know what the place had been originally—some kind of theater? There were no other exits, just the passage by which he’d come. He strained his senses, afraid someone had followed to trap him in this dead end. Again, nothing.

Except the smell of acid.

He glanced back into the chamber. A lighter smear marked the black stone in the center. Bait, he was sure—but damn it, it worked; he couldn’t leave without investigating.

Gritting his teeth, Dead Rick went down the steps between benches, to the floor of the chamber.

“My apologies for the absence.”

He actually leapt into the air, and only just stopped himself from shifting to dog form as he came down. A strangled noise came from his throat, a growl and several different curses all fighting to get out at once. Dead Rick sucked in a huge breath of air, held it, then spat out, “You fucking bastard.”

The voice didn’t dispute it. “I’m glad you found—and followed—the hint I left for you.”

Dead Rick swiped at the mark on the stone. It burned his fingers faintly: bile, of course. He wondered where the voice had gotten it. “Where in Mab’s name ’ave you been?”

“Had you not taken to sleeping at your master’s feet, you might have heard from me sooner. But arranging a new location in which to speak required some amount of effort, and time. I take it you have news for me?”

More than a little. Dead Rick wrestled with himself. Honesty could get a dog killed—but in this case, so could deception, if Aspell decided to sell what he knew. “Secret’s out. I don’t know ’ow, but Valentin Aspell knows we’ve been dealing.”

A long pause. His muscles all tensed. Just because his ally had never presented himself as anything more than a disembodied voice didn’t mean he wasn’t in danger. There might be an ambush here, after all.

“What did you tell him?”

The question was presented far more mildly than he had any right to expect. Still, Dead Rick was careful to say, “I thought you was gone, understand? Tried to signal you for days, got no answer, but I didn’t want to just give up, and this was ’is price for what I needed to know.”

“Spare me the excuses; just tell me what you said.”

So Dead Rick did. Mostly. He left out any hint that he’d been investigating the voice, trying to find out who he was; but as he’d thought before, the information itself didn’t amount to much. “You was right to be careful,” he added at the end, still wary. “Keeping separate like this—I don’t know nothing to betray.”

“How fortunate,” the voice said dryly. “So, you sold me to Aspell in exchange for something about Nadrett. I think it only right I should have a share in that information, don’t you?”

This time Dead Rick answered with enthusiasm, spurred by relief that his ally had not abandoned him. Maybe ’e’s one of the Prince’s fellows after all. They’re the only ones as play so kind. “I saw the camera. And the cove using it, too.” Quickly, the words stumbling over one another, he related what Aspell had told him about Chrennois.

His ally seemed far more interested in the camera than the sprite behind it. “Where did you see this? And did they use it in front of you?”

“They did. Out in the sewers—west of where it breaks into the Market, and a bit south of the intercepting line. Nadrett ’ad us out there ’unting a ghost, me and a few others, and Chrennois. ’E used it to capture the ghost.” Dead Rick settled himself on the cracked stone of the lowest branch and described the device, and the way the ghost had vanished. “I don’t think ’e’d tried it before. Ain’t many ghosts around anymore, are there? But I guess this one appears every year—proper ’aunting, not just something that ain’t been cleared away yet—and so ’e decided to test the camera on it.”

The voice hummed in thought. “Appears every year… when was this?”

“May Day. It were an old ghost, too; knee breeches, the whole bit.”

Silence. Then Dead Rick heard something he’d never expected from his ally: a bark of laughter. “Knee breeches! Do you mean to say that Nadrett captured the ghost of Galen St. Clair?”

Dead Rick opened his mouth to say he had no idea who that was, then stopped. Because he did know the name; he’d seen it before he talked to Irrith.

On the memorial listing past Princes of the Stone.

“Why would ’e be ’aunting the sewers?” the skriker asked, disbelievingly.

“No direct reason. It must be a consequence of the palace’s disintegration. He’s buried in front of that memorial, you know—well, no; I suppose you wouldn’t. One of two Princes laid to rest in the Onyx Hall. And his ghost appears here every May Day, or used to. But the chamber where that occurred vanished several years ago, and he wasn’t seen again. The general presumption was that his connection here had been broken. It seems he went instead to the place the chamber had been, beneath London.” Another thoughtful noise. “Near the Monument, it sounds like; almost beneath it.”

Dead Rick wasn’t sure what any of it meant. “So Nadrett’s scheme needs a dead Prince?” Then he shook his head, dismissing his own words. “No, ’e was surprised; ’e recognized the cove, but didn’t expect ’im. So ’e just wanted a ghost. Why?”

“That is a very good question.”

In the following silence, Dead Rick tried to think of what a ghost might be useful for. Tithing bread? He doubted ghosts could—and in any case, the Princes all carried a touch of faerie in them, which meant St. Clair, dead or alive, could hand over bread until he was blue in the face and it wouldn’t do any good.

The voice, it seemed, had been thinking about something else. “You didn’t try to demand any price of me, before telling me what you knew.”

Dead Rick shifted uncomfortably on the stone bench. He muttered, “After that bit with Aspell, I figured I’d used up my luck.”

A dry chuckle, much more restrained than the laughter of a moment before. “Wise of you. I think I shall set you a new task—a dangerous one. Consider it penance, if you like.”

“What task?”

“I doubt we’ll be able to determine what Nadrett is doing by force of reason alone. Therefore, we must pursue his photographer.”

The skriker leapt to his feet, shaking his head as if the voice could somehow see him doing it. “No chance. Nadrett would kill me.”

“Only if he discovers you at it. I have faith in your ability to be subtle.”

He might, but Dead Rick didn’t. “I won’t do it.”

The answer carried a note of malevolence he hadn’t heard before. “Yes, you will. What other choice do you have? Who else will help you regain your past? You are running out of time, Dead Rick; your home is crumbling around you. How long before a falling piece of stone crushes your memories to dust?”

Fear rose like nausea in his gut. It might have happened already, in the earthquake of a few weeks before. Dead Rick trusted that it hadn’t only because the alternative was unthinkable.

More quietly, the voice said, “We have a deal. Keep your word, and I will keep mine.”

What’s the worst Nadrett can do to you, anyway? Smash your memories? This bloody sod is right; that’ll ’appen anyway. Kill you? I almost wish ’e would.

Through clenched teeth, Dead Rick said, “All right. I’ll find your fucking photographer.”

The Prince’s Court, Onyx Hall: May 29, 1884

Twisting pain in his gut brought Hodge awake. He sucked in air through his teeth, pressing one hand below his ribs as if that would do any good. This back-and-forth was a familiar pattern: he hurt too much to sleep, until exhaustion beat the pain down and he collapsed in the middle of whatever he’d been doing. When he had energy enough to wake, the pain roused him again, and so the cycle went.

He wiped drool from his cheek and looked ruefully at the wet newspaper that had been his cushion. Some Prince I make. He probably had ink on his face.

These days, he was lucky to get any sleep. Hodge had thought his life difficult before; the laying of the new track had showed him how much worse it could get. And yet, no cloud without a silver lining, and all that rot: the Academy was making progress as rapidly as it could on Ch’ien Mu’s loom. Wrain already had plans to use it as a shield against the next extension of the track, in the hopes that the unsupported material would take the brunt of the effect, cushioning those in the real Hall. Hodge didn’t know if it would work, but he was willing to let them try.

Of course, it meant he had to know when the extension would come. Hence all the newspapers, and railway magazines, and everything else that might contain a shred of information on the progress of the Inner Circle. They made for dreary reading: more tunnel dug, more bricks mortared, more signals set into place. Scowling, Hodge shoved them all aside.

Something fluttered off the edge of the table that did him for a desk. He frowned after it. A piece of paper, folded and sealed. He was almost sure it hadn’t been there when he fell asleep.

Sighing, he reached for it. His valet—and wasn’t that a funny idea, a cove like him having his own valet—knew better than to wake him, on those rare occasions that he got rest; this wasn’t the first time he’d woken to find a letter waiting nearby. Perhaps Amadea had brought more bread from the mortals in that Society the Goodemeades had set up. Or it might be another report from the Academy, telling him of improvements to the loom, that still fell short of it saving them all.

But it wasn’t either of those. The paper was unexpectedly fine, and the seal a sinuous pattern, like a knot. Hodge broke it and began to read.

Hodge stared. The words, crisply inked in an old-fashioned hand, didn’t go away.

A few seconds later, with no memory of having moved, he flung open the door and stormed into the outer room. Three fae shot to their feet in alarm, and Hodge held up the letter in one fist. “When did this get ’ere?”

Irrith and Segraine both looked to Tom Toggin, the hob who served as his valet. Tom peered up at the paper. “What is it?”

“It’s the bleeding letter you left for me to find. ’Ow long was it sitting there?”

His valet shook his head, wide-eyed. “I didn’t leave any letters for you.”

Hodge went very still. It was that or drop the letter—as if the paper held any threat. The threat was long gone, along with whatever faerie had sneaked past these three to leave a sealed note by his head. He knew better than to think they’d left him alone; everybody was far too afraid for his safety to let that happen.

“Who’s it from?” Irrith asked.

Of course she’d be the one to ask. Hodge made sure to pull the letter close before he answered, so she couldn’t snatch it out of his hand. “Valentin Aspell.”

Sure enough, her face immediately went pale with anger. Segraine tensed—possibly to grab Irrith, in case she did something stupid—and Tom, who never seemed to get angry at anything, looked curious. “What does he want?”

“To sell us information.” Hodge’s knees shook; the burst of energy that had carried him through the door was fading fast. Bloody ’ell. You’d think I was an old man. He didn’t like to do the math on how old he actually was. Or rather, how young. I’ve already survived longer than I expected to.

It was mention of his predecessor’s ghost that made him think that way—that, and the pain that had woken him. In blunt terms, Hodge told the others what Aspell wanted, and what he demanded in return.

“You can’t let him near Lune,” Segraine said immediately. “He’s a traitor, and can’t be trusted.”

Hodge watched Irrith. Her delicate face was going through an amazing series of expressions, one piling atop the other: suspicion, worry, anger, hope, disgust. When she noticed the Prince looking at her, she grimaced. “He wouldn’t try to kill her—I think. He knows the Hall would melt right out from around us if he did, and if he wanted to die he’d find some more elegant way to do it. Segraine’s right, though; I don’t trust him. On the other hand, it’s Galen. If Aspell’s telling the truth, and that bastard Nadrett has him…” She shuddered. “We can’t leave him there.”

No, they couldn’t. Hodge had only ever known two other Princes of the Stone: his predecessor, Alexander Messina, and Galen St. Clair. The latter haunted the Onyx Hall—or had, until recently—so as to help those who remained. He’d been a scholar in life, and over the years since his death had contributed far more to the repair efforts than Hodge ever would. They’d be better off with ’im than with me.

But Hodge was who they had, and he needed to know whether Aspell was telling the truth. His offer didn’t give any proof of that; he’d set up a good method for trading for his information, but the information itself could still be a swindle. “Does Nadrett ’ave ’im?”

Tom said uncomfortably, “We just assumed he was gone, after the Prince’s chambers vanished, because that’s where he’d always appeared. And if he’d returned to some other part of the Hall, wouldn’t he have come looking for us?”

“Maybe he couldn’t,” Segraine said. “The Hall has… changed a lot, since his time.”

Hodge snorted at her delicacy. But it wouldn’t do morale any good to suggest the phrase she wanted was, The Hall is falling down about our ears. Irrith said, “Aspell… wouldn’t lie. Not like this. He’s a manipulative bastard—I’m sure whatever he wants Lune for, we won’t like it—but if he says Nadrett has Galen, then he does.” Her mouth pinched, as if that idea caused her pain. Then she drew in a deep breath and went on. “I’d say offer him something else, but I doubt he would take it. So it’s your choice, Hodge: Are you going to let him see her?”

He felt the anticipation in all three of them. Nobody got in to see the Queen; that was common knowledge. Nobody except the Prince.

Hodge stood, crumpling Aspell’s letter in one hand. “It ain’t my choice,” he said, hearing the roughness in his own voice. “It’s Lune’s. I’ll talk to ’er.”

No one said anything, and he couldn’t meet anyone’s eyes. For privacy’s sake, he turned and went back into the inner room, which held only his table, his bed, and a few faerie lights for company.

With the door shut behind him, he laid one hand on the black stone of the wall.

Reaching out hurt. It meant sinking his mind into the torn fabric of the Onyx Hall, feeling every spike of iron, every gap where the wall had been. It always made him think of the old tortures, thumbscrews and pincers and the rack: no wonder men said whatever their questioners wanted, after being put through such pain. But here he was, putting himself through it, and the only reason he could was because he reminded himself that Lune felt the same thing. Constantly. For years on end.

If she could survive that, he could share it for a little while.

Lune?

Her mind stirred, like a sleeper caught deep in a nightmare. Hodge reached out for her, tried to lend her what strength he had. Lune. I… ’ave to ask you something.

He phrased it as briefly as he could: Aspell’s offer, the price, their guesses as to his honesty. By the end of it, she was alert; he could feel her consideration. Do you have any hint as to why he wants to see me?

Hodge never knew if his body actually moved during these conversations, or if the shaking of his head was entirely a mental thing. None. I can try to find out.

If you succeed, I’ll be much surprised; Aspell was always good at keeping secrets, and I doubt he has lost the skill. Lune paused, and Hodge gritted his teeth—or at least thought the action of gritting them—as a train rumbled along the buried track, from Blackfriars to Mansion House. When they could both spare thought for something else again, she said, I will not see him, of course. But I will speak to him, through you; he must be content with that.

He wondered if he should tell her the rest of what they knew about Nadrett, the possibility that he might be creating a passage to Faerie. Would she go, if she could? If it meant bowing to Nadrett, not a chance… but what if it didn’t?

She loved this city. Had loved it for more ages than Hodge could really conceive. Lune had poured so much of herself into preserving the palace, and the court that inhabited it; he wasn’t sure she could abandon it, even if palace and court were gone.

No point in mentioning it, not until they knew if it was more than a dream born from some opium pipe. She would see it as hope, for her subjects if not for herself, and he didn’t want to take that away from her if it proved false. Hodge merely said, I’ll tell ’im. Thank you, Lune.

Surfacing was like pulling a knife from his own flesh: both pain, and the relief from it. Hodge sucked in a great gasp of air as he opened his eyes, and then laid his forehead against the cool stone.

Aspell would not see the Queen. Nobody did.

Not even the Prince.

There was no point. Lune sat in a trance, dedicating every shred of her concentration and strength to maintaining the Onyx Hall. The only way he could talk to her was through the palace. All going to visit her would do was tell other people where her defenseless body rested.

She’d made him Prince—and then left him to it. He hadn’t laid eyes on her in fourteen years.

Valentin Aspell would have to be content with talking. If he didn’t like it, then he and his deal could go to hell. They would handle the problem of Nadrett themselves.

Newgate, City of London: May 31, 1884

“Come out, ye bastards! I know ye’re here!”

Eliza’s shout echoed from the brick and stone facades of the buildings around her. For once it was audible, not drowned out by a hundred others; she didn’t know what time it was, but midnight had come and gone long since, and the streets around Newgate Prison were deserted. She cackled, remembering the clerks she’d scraped after for pennies during her months here, and shouted again. “Buns! Hot buns, only a farthing apiece!”

It made her miss Tom Granger, and his newspapers at the corner of Ivy Lane. He probably thought she’d gone to work in the new factory and never bothered to tell him. “Sorry, Tom,” Eliza mumbled, and took a swig from the bottle of gin she carried, letting it burn down her throat and set her eyes to watering. The gin was responsible for the latter, surely. “Should’ve said goodbye. Or never left. They’re here somewhere, I know it.”

She paused, casting around, and finally pointed toward Warwick Lane. “Over there. That’s where I saw him. Should’ve jumped him then—but I’m a bloody coward, I am, and then I lost them. Missed my chance. But they’re here, I’m sure of it. Ye’re here!” That last was a shout again. She put her mouth to the gin bottle, found it empty, threw it at the entrance to Warwick Lane. It came up short, but shattered satisfyingly against the cobblestones.

Why Newgate? She snorted. Might as well ask, why Whitechapel, where she’d first seen the dog? Why London at all. None of the stories said anything about that, faeries in the city, but they were here—and once you accepted that, Newgate was no stranger than anywhere else. Maybe the faeries were drawn by the money, all the wealth of the City’s bankers. The traitor had told enchanting stories, about a beautiful and tragic Queen with a string of mortal consorts, but no doubt they had all been lies. Like everything else he said.

Eliza’s feet brought her stumbling to the corner of Warwick Lane, where she began to run her hands over the walls, as if she would find something. A hidden door, maybe, that would lead her through into a realm of sunlight where nobody ever got old. But she didn’t get far in her search before a voice stopped her. “You there! What do you think you’re doing?”

She rested her head briefly against the bricks, then rolled it sideways until her shoulders followed, flattening themselves against the wall. That held her up while she focused her eyes on the source of the voice.

A bobby, of course, in his dark coat and hard, round-topped hat. His left hand held a lantern, adding to the dim gaslight in the street; his right gripped a truncheon. Eliza put her hands up in innocence. “Don’t mind me,” she said, offering him a grin. “Only looking for something I lost.”

He frowned and scraped his shoe along the ground, hitting fragments of her gin bottle. “I ought to run you in for public drunkenness.”

“No need, no need.” Eliza straightened up, to prove she didn’t need the wall, and only swayed a little this time. “I’m, uh—I’m on my way home.”

“Is that so?” He came closer, lifting the lantern toward her face. “Where’s home? What’s your name?”

“Eliza,” she said, then cursed herself for telling the truth. And for speaking in her natural voice, she realized belatedly; now he knew she was Irish. Have to give an Irish name. “Eliza… Darragh.” It was the first thing that came into her head, and a stupid answer. Grief rose up in her throat, bringing nausea with it. Owen. We should have been wed by now.

“And where’s your home, Eliza Darragh?” he repeated, showing no sympathy for her distress.

This time, at least, she managed to think before she spoke. “St. Giles.”

His lip curled. The rookeries of St. Giles were even worse than Whitechapel, full of the poorest Irish crammed in ten to a room. But it lay in the right direction from here, if he sent her along—which he did. “Get back where you belong, then. And quietly, mind. I’ll be putting your name on the books, and if you’re caught disorderly again, we’ll see if a night in gaol doesn’t settle you down.”

“Ye lot couldn’t catch a fish if someone gave ye one with a hook through its lip,” Eliza mumbled, moving to obey.

“What was that?”

She laughed at him—then stopped, because it wasn’t really funny; they’d failed to catch the one who took Owen, too. Shuffling off down Newgate, she said to the night air, “Nothing. Nothing at all. Don’t mind me; I’m just a poor Irishwoman. Nobody cares about us.”

Cromwell Road, South Kensington: May 31, 1884

She woke the next morning in confusion, with no idea of where she was. Damp cold had settled into her bones, making every bit of her body ache, but under her cheek was clean dirt, and she smelled flowers nearby. Head swimming, Eliza lifted her head and looked about.

Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, I’m in the garden. The back face of the Kitterings’ Cromwell Road house rose nearby, full of respectability in the morning light; she was lying on the ground behind a bush, with little idea of how she’d gotten there.

The aftertaste of gin in her mouth, and the unsteadiness of the world as she pushed herself upright made her remember drinking—which make her remember Newgate—and the policeman. She’d staggered far enough toward St. Giles to satisfy him if he’d followed her, then turned south, feet carrying her onward while her mind tore again and again at the problem of Owen and the faeries. She hadn’t even meant to come back here, not consciously; yesterday she’d taken the evening off, and left with all her money in the pocket sewn to the inside of her skirt, thinking it might be best just to quit. What was there for her in South Kensington, except a family of rich swells with a rebellious daughter?

But habit brought her here, where she’d climbed the wall into the garden, before being defeated by the locks and shutters on the house. Eliza vaguely recalled sitting with her back against the bricks, meaning only to rest a moment while she considered what to do. And that was the last of it.

Sounds from the mews told her the coachman and grooms were up and doing; well, of course they were, it must be at least nine o’clock. Eliza should long since have been inside the house, and hard at the day’s work. The very thought of walking through those doors made her ill—and then she remembered what her heart had known, what she’d forgotten last night, with the gin fogging her brain. She’d brought her money, but left behind the photo of Owen.

For that, she would go back inside. And then leave, and do… something.

Eliza climbed to her feet and spent a moment ineffectively brushing the dirt and leaves from her dress. Then she went out through the now-opened gate, and around to the western side of the house and the basement door.

Sarah clearly expected some kind of delivery when she opened the door; her eyes widened at the sight of Eliza, who mumbled an apology and pushed past the scullery maid without attempting an explanation. Cook was more difficult to avoid; she sniffed ostentatiously at the reek of gin and said, “You’ll be lucky to avoid a sacking.”

“I don’t care if I’m sacked,” Eliza said, splashing a little water from the tap over her face. “I’m done. I’ve only come to get my things.”

Cook’s exhalation was just shy of being a snort. “Lucky to do that, too. Mrs. Fowler isn’t above confiscating a thing or two, in ‘compensation’ for you quitting.”

“I’ll hit her if she tries.” Maybe it was the gin—or just the boiling frustration of all the time she’d wasted here. Anger built with every step Eliza took up the servants’ staircase, all the more bitter for having no suitable target. She wanted to hit something, and the worst part was, one of the people she wanted to hit was herself.

She heard the voices before she made it past the ground floor. In the Kitterings’ household, where respectability was more precious than gold, someone was shouting.

And it sounded like Mrs. Kittering.

Eliza didn’t care. She didn’t want to know. But the stairs took her right past the concealed servants’ door into the drawing room; it was impossible not to hear.

“—not tolerate it any longer. Do you hear me, Louisa? I will not have it! If you persist in this manner—”

Louisa’s response was too quiet to make out. Every shred of common sense told Eliza to continue up the stairs, to get away from this family and all their troubles, but she found herself instead pressing her eye to the peephole in the door.

It gave an imperfect view of the long drawing room, but good enough to see Mrs. Kittering’s face and her daughter’s back. The missus was clothed with her customary rigidity, but Louisa seemed to be wearing a dressing gown still, with a bright green scarf thrown over her shoulders. Whatever she said to her mother, it made Mrs. Kittering go even more rigid with fury. “I will not have such language in my house. Count your days of freedom, girl; I will have you gone from London this Sunday week. There is a sanatorium… in…”

Her voice trailed off into sudden listlessness, as if she had forgotten what she was saying. Then Eliza’s breath did the same, as she saw Louisa’s left hand float up to grip her mother’s jaw.

No sound issued from the room. But Mrs. Kittering nodded three times, as if the hand on her chin were moving her without visible effort. When the third movement ended, Louisa murmured, “Now, let’s have no more of this,” and let her go.

Whereupon Mrs. Kittering turned and left the room, without another word.

Eliza still wasn’t breathing. She tried to draw air, but fear stopped the motion, as if the creature in the drawing room might hear her. Her fingers ached, pressed hard against the plain-painted surface of the door.

Not until the quiet figure moved did her own paralysis break. And then it broke to flight, for the creature masquerading as Louisa Kittering turned toward the servants’ door.

Eliza nearly tripped on the hem of her skirt, trying to take the stairs three at a time. She’d gone up another two flights before she realized the idiocy of her choice—should have gone down!—but by then she was nearly at the top of the house, with the changeling—Holy Mary, Mother of God, it really is a changeling—somewhere below. She wrenched the door handle around and stumbled through, expecting to see the servants’ garret.

She was one floor short. She’d exited into Louisa Kittering’s bedroom.

Her heart pounded, rattling her entire body, the sound pulsing in her ears. Despite the exertion of flinging herself up the stairs, she felt nothing but cold—shaking cold, that made her hands tremble like leaves. But what had been fear was turning instead to rage.

That beast. That bloody monster. It stole Louisa—like he stole Owen—

All this time, it’s been toying with me—

She never heard the footsteps on the other stair. Or perhaps there were none to hear: another faerie trick. The bedroom door opened, and the creature wearing Louisa’s face stepped through.

“Where is he? Damn you, what have you done with Owen?”

The changeling opened its mouth to speak, but never got the chance. Eliza’s fist smashed into its cheek, stopping whatever charm it might have cast. The creature staggered into the wall; then Eliza’s hands seized that green scarf and some of the dressing gown, hauling the creature up and throwing it farther into the room. She kicked the door shut with one heel and advanced on the fallen changeling, still screaming. “Bloody faerie, you’ve stolen the girl, I know you have—coming into this house, pretending to be her—you’ll tell me where she is, damn your eyes, and Owen, too, if I have to roast you over the kitchen fire—”

By now the creature was shrieking, throwing its arms up to protect its face, leaving its ribs vulnerable. Eliza kicked once, caught her shoe in her skirts, and fell to her knees. “Tell me where they are! Tell me! By all that’s holy—”

Someone caught her arm. Twisting, Eliza found that Mary Banning was trying to drag her off the changeling. It was no difficulty at all to shove her back, sending the maid onto her rump in an undignified sprawl, but the changeling crawled away while Eliza was so occupied. She flung herself after it, sending them both flat to the floor. It curled in on itself while Eliza bit and scratched; she pulled hair; she got the flailing arms pinned back, grinding Louisa’s stolen face into the floor.

Then an arm wrapped around her throat, tight enough to cut off the blood, and by that hold she was dragged back. Eliza clawed at the arm, reached back to try and catch eyes or ears, threw her elbow back into her captor’s groin; Ned Sayers cursed, and his grip wavered. Then a fist slammed into her head, and Eliza went limp.

Sayers wrestled her to the floor, holding her down with one knee in her back. Feet appeared in the doorway, maids and footmen and everyone else crowding into the room; distantly she heard Mrs. Fowler demanding to be let through. Eliza no longer fought. There was no point.

She’d lost.

She’d failed Owen.

God had given her a chance to save him, and she’d thrown it away, in a moment of blind, drunken fury.

Sobbing into the carpet, Eliza waited for the constables to come.

The Galenic Academy, Onyx Hall: June 1, 1884

Dead Rick skulked along, belly close to the ground, only half-believing he was actually making this journey. Nadrett had sent him above again; it amused the master to use a skriker, a death omen, as a courier for the dynamite he sold to dissidents above. If Dead Rick were smart, he would have stayed up there, using that safe time to replace the bread he’d lost in the collapse.

He directed his paws instead toward the Galenic Academy.

He wouldn’t have risked it, except that Cyma had vanished, and with her his one reliable connection to this place. Dead Rick hadn’t seen the faerie woman since before the earthquake. In her absence, his only way to get information from the scholars was to defy Nadrett’s orders and go to them himself.

He smelled the Academy before he got anywhere near it. A welter of chemicals and strange substances, hot metal and steam, burning in his nose. Odd sounds echoed through the corridors: buzzing and humming, clicking and clanging, like some kind of mad factory lay ahead. And voices, too, arguing in a variety of languages, most of them incomprehensible to him.

An arch of moon-silver and sun-gold marked the boundary, tossed only a little askew by the Hall’s tremors. Letters wrought into its length spelled out THE GALENIC ACADEMY OF FAERIE SCIENCES, and beneath that, SOLVE ET COAGULA. Dead Rick knew enough to recognize that as Latin, but he had no idea what it said. Something alchemical, probably; most of what they did down here was alchemy of some kind, so far as he understood it. He paused beneath the arch, searching the area around him with every sense, and only when he was as sure as he could be that nobody was watching did he shift into man form and proceed.

He didn’t get very far before running into someone. Quite literally: a mortal man came unexpectedly out of a side passage, nose buried in a book, and bounced off Dead Rick’s shoulder. “Terribly sorry,” he mumbled, and wandered onward without ever looking up.

Dead Rick paused, staring after him, then down the corridor he’d come from. Which way? He had no idea; Nadrett had never brought him here. Tossing a mental coin, he followed the mortal.

It proved to be the right choice, at least if he was looking for people. The passage opened into an enormous chamber, blazingly well lit; startled, Dead Rick realized that some of the illumination came from electric lights. Also gas lamps, faerie lights, and even some candles scattered here and there, as if someone had decided to try everything at once. After the dimness of the Goblin Market and the crumbling Onyx Hall, it made his eyes water.

When they cleared, he found himself confronted with… he didn’t even know what to call some of it. Machines of various sorts; a few were recognizable as clocks or engines, but others were completely unidentifiable. Chemicals in glass containers, doing things incomprehensible to him. And people of both faerie and mortal kinds, some of them English, some very obviously not; fae came from as far away as China to join the scholars here. They were hard at work all over the hall, tinkering and arguing and ignoring his presence completely.

Dead Rick hadn’t cloaked himself with any charms of silence or invisibility. They wouldn’t do much good, with so many fae around to pierce them, and he had no particular desire to surprise anyone; that led to violence, and he still ached from the beating Greymalkin had given him. But nobody seemed to care that he was standing in plain sight, watching them go about their work. All the bustle and clamor of the Goblin Market, and none of the suspicion.

Not immediately, at least. But if he went on standing there like an idiot, somebody would start to wonder. Dead Rick risked waving down a monkeylike faerie whose clothing marked him as being from India, like the naga he’d seen caged in the Market. Wonder where that poor beast went? Died in the earthquake, maybe. Or got sold to some collector of exotics. Or escaped, though he doubted it. Speaking loudly and slowly, with gestures to help, he said, “Irrith? Where? I’m looking for ’er—”

With a cool look and a flawless accent, the monkey said, “Dame Irrith? I believe she is over by the calculating engine. And if you need an interpreter from cockney to English, I can ask on your behalf.”

“Cheeky bugger,” Dead Rick muttered, embarrassed, and went in the direction the monkey pointed.

Of course Irrith couldn’t be in some quiet part of the Academy, where fewer people would see Dead Rick. He found her in the shadow of an enormous machine, a mass of gears and levers twice the height of a man. She was arguing with a red-bearded dwarf about defenses for something, until Dead Rick drew close; then the dwarf cut her off with a raised hand, scowling suspiciously at the skriker. His distrust was weirdly comforting; at least it was familiar.

That distrust was echoed in Irrith’s eyes when she turned and saw him. Unsurprising; their last meeting hadn’t exactly ended well. “What do you want?”

Uncomfortable, Dead Rick muttered, “Can we talk private somewhere?”

Her mouth pinched a little, but she said, “I suppose so. Niklas, can I have my gun back?”

“Not unless you vant it to blow up in your hand,” the red-bearded faerie said.

The name triggered Dead Rick’s memory—the part of it that hadn’t been stolen. This must be Niklas von das Ticken, one of the pair of German dwarves who served as Academy Masters. The less friendly of the two. No surprise the web-gun was his doing; he could only rarely be talked into making weapons, but those he produced were remarkable.

Irrith stuck her tongue out at Niklas, then sighed. “Fine, I suppose I’d rather keep my hand. Come on, Dead Rick; I think Feidelm’s out of the library. We should be private there.”

Feeling a bit like a puppy who didn’t know if he was going to be whipped or not, Dead Rick followed her. They wove a path down the chamber, dodging various people bent on unknown tasks, past a tall faerie in a turban watching two humans work on some kind of strange loom, and through an oaken doorway into a room filled with more books than Dead Rick had ever seen in a single place. He stopped, gaping at the shelves—and then whirled, but not fast enough, as Irrith kicked the door shut and aimed a pistol at his throat.

“Picked Rumdoring’s pocket as we went by,” she said, in response to his obvious surprise. “Did you think you could just stroll into the Academy, and we wouldn’t care? You work for Nadrett. What in Mab’s name are you doing here?”

She didn’t look like she would shoot him, but the skriker put his hands up anyway. “Are we safe?”

Irrith’s brow furrowed in confusion. “You aren’t, not with me pointing a gun at you. I certainly hope I am.”

“I mean, could anybody be listening to us?”

“Oh.” She paused, considering. “Back up.”

Finding his way with his bare toes, Dead Rick retreated the length of the library, toward the statues at the far end. As they passed each set of shelves, Irrith’s gaze flicked sideways, checking the aisles. He made no attempt to jump her in those moments of distraction, and when they reached the end of the room, she shrugged. “Nobody in here, I don’t think, and the whole Academy is charmed against eavesdropping. Why do you care?”

“Because I ain’t ’ere on Nadrett’s business.”

Her mouth tightened. “Whether that’s true or not, you still work for a slave-trader and thief. What happened to you, Dead Rick?”

He’d been an idiot, thinking she would want to help him. “It don’t matter,” he growled, toes digging into the carpet as if he had any chance to run. “I just came ’ere to ask a question, that’s all. Ain’t no danger to you; it might even be ’elpful. Will you put the bloody pistol down?”

The sprite bit her lower lip, teeth digging a sharp line, then spoke abruptly. “Answer this first. Do you know anything about Nadrett having the ghost of Galen St. Clair?”

His hands dropped like stones. “Blood and Bone—’ow the ’ell do you know about that?”

Irrith sighed, and finally relaxed her arm, pointing the barrel at the ceiling. “Valentin Aspell. He wants to sell the Prince some information about it, but Hodge doesn’t like his price.”

“Blood and Bone,” Dead Rick repeated, this time more quietly, but no less heartfelt. Had his ally sold that news to Aspell, or did it leak out by some other path? Old Gadling, maybe. Or it could be Nadrett, working through the other faerie to demand a ransom.

He hated this feeling, like he was playing some game, with rules he didn’t know and players he couldn’t see. Nadrett and the voice, Aspell and the Prince—even Irrith. Any chance he had of pretending not to be involved was long gone. She asked, “What do you know?”

Dead Rick opened his mouth to answer, then shook his head violently. “No. I can’t. I’m probably dead already, but the more people I go telling, the more likely that is.”

“You can trust me.”

The laugh burst out of him, harsh and unamused.

Irrith paused, then laid the gun down on a table at her side. “But you’ve forgotten that, haven’t you? You’ve forgotten me. Other people, too, I think; you didn’t recognize Abd ar-Rashid out there, did you? Or Niklas—well, he didn’t recognize you either, but that’s Niklas for you. Now here you are, looking like you’ve been run over by a dustman’s wagon, acting as if somebody might knife you in the back any second, and you’re working for Nadrett. What happened?”

The sympathy, the warmth—the guilelessness of her face, as if she wouldn’t know a lie if it bit her. Dead Rick shook his head, backing away again, but he’d run out of space; he ended up in a corner between the wall and a statue’s pedestal. “It don’t matter,” he whispered.

“It matters to your friends. Which is what I used to be. Don’t you remember anything?”

He stared at her: the large eyes, the stubbornly pointed chin, the auburn hair left to fall free of any arrangement. Desperately, he raked through his mind, grasping for anything—even a wisp, the slightest hint of a memory. Anything to tell him that he’d once known this sprite, that he could trust her. That maybe he wasn’t alone.

Nothing.

He didn’t realize he’d said it until her eyes filled with tears. Then she took his head in her hands, and for an instant he tottered on the knife edge of breaking, like a memory dropped onto stone.

With an anguished snarl, he tore himself free, escaping the corner. And found himself staring up at the statue into whose shadow he’d retreated a moment before.

The old-fashioned wig, its curls carefully rendered in marble, made the face beneath look different. Older. But he recognized it, from the sewers beneath London.

The Galenic Academy. Galen St. Clair. The ghost Nadrett had trapped.

“What I came to ask,” Dead Rick said, eyes fixed on that stone face. It was young, and the sculptor had put eternal optimism into the young man’s faint smile. “When I ’elped you out of the Market, I mentioned Nadrett doing something with photography. I saw ’is photographer—a French sprite, Chrennois. Used to be in the Academy, a while back. ’E’s the one as trapped the ghost. Burn my body if I know ’ow it works, but I’ve got to find Chrennois.”

Irrith wiped her eyes with the back of her hand and swallowed, visibly pushing her concern for him to the side. But she is concerned. Ash and Thorn. So that’s what it’s like, to ’ave a friend. “Will you punch me again if I ask whether this has to do with passages to Faerie?”

Dead Rick gave a helpless shrug. “I don’t know. Maybe, though damned if I can see ’ow.”

She nodded, as if that somehow made sense. “All right. Chrennois… I remember. Yvoir hated him. I’m not surprised he went to work for Nadrett; that bastard’s collected more than a few people from the Academy. The nasty ones. I’d assume he’s somewhere in the Goblin Market.”

“I’m looking, but my guess is ’e ain’t there. Nadrett’s keeping ’im somewhere else.”

“Well, he isn’t here, or in Hodge’s court. The night garden?” She frowned. “Or some back corner where no one would think to look. I can—”

She stopped, because the door to the library had opened. Dead Rick whirled again, sinking to a half crouch; his heart instantly began to beat three times as fast. But it was only a mortal, shuffling in with a lost look on his face. From behind him, Irrith spoke, her voice gentled by compassion. “I’m sorry—Feidelm isn’t here. I think she went to talk to Ch’ien Mu.”

The mortal was scarcely more than a boy, only hints of stubble upon his cheeks. The vacancy in his eyes made him look even younger, as if he were an imbecile. And his scent had changed, too; it was contaminated by a thorough faerie stain, losing the markers of his mortal home. But for all of that, Dead Rick recognized him, just as he had the statue.

That boy was the second thing he remembered, in all the world. Right after Nadrett’s face and voice, ordering Dead Rick to go into Whitechapel and steal him away.

The skriker was halfway across the room before he knew he’d moved. The boy cried out wordlessly and fled, running to cower between two of the tall bookcases that stood out from the walls. “Don’t scare him!” Irrith cried, and ran after them both. When she caught up, her steps slowed. “Dead Rick… what is it?”

He was still staring at the boy, who had collapsed into a ball in the deepest shadow he could find. “Where did you get ’im?”

“From the Goblin Market. Amadea bought him off someone there, a year or so ago, out of pity. Do you know him?”

I’m the one as stole ’im. He couldn’t tell Irrith that; bad enough she knew he’d fallen into Nadrett’s grasp, without admitting what the master had forced him to do. “Saw ’im there,” Dead Rick said, which was true enough. “What ’appened to ’im?”

Irrith shook her head, pityingly. “We don’t know. Some kind of botched attempt at a changeling swap, Feidelm thinks. He’s lost more than just his name. Poor lad can’t speak anymore, though he understands us a bit. Latched on to Feidelm like a lost puppy.”

Another Academy Master, a sidhe from Connacht. Dead Rick swallowed. “He’s Irish. From Whitechapel. Probably likes the sound of ’er voice.” He bit his lip, then said, “Is there any way to set ’im right again?”

He didn’t know why he bothered asking. The optimism in the eyes of the statue that watched over them, maybe. But this wasn’t the Goblin Market; if there were such a way, someone would have done it already, out of kindness. He wasn’t surprised when Irrith shook her head again. “Not without knowing what exactly went wrong, and maybe not even then. I don’t suppose you know anything about that?”

Whatever had happened, it was probably Nadrett’s doing. There were more than a few broken mortals wandering around his chambers. But that didn’t tell Dead Rick much. “Sorry,” he muttered, and meant it. They were both friends of yours, the voice had told him. It would have been nice to do something for the boy, healing Nadrett’s damage.

“Come on,” Irrith said, drawing him away. “Let’s not scare him any more than we already have.” Any more than Dead Rick already had, though she didn’t say it. Maybe the boy always stared out with such fear; maybe he didn’t remember the skriker after all.

Once they were on the other side of the library, Irrith said, “Chrennois. You said he trapped Galen in a photograph?” He nodded. “Where’s the picture now?”

“With Chrennois, probably.”

“Not with Nadrett?”

“I doubt it,” Dead Rick said slowly, thinking. Nadrett had some photos around his chambers, mostly death portraits of mortals. He doubted his master would keep anything as valuable as the Prince’s ghost where it might so easily be stolen.

Irrith muttered a curse. “Well, more reason to find Chrennois. I’ll ask Yvoir if he has any ideas, but he’s out right now, and I don’t know when he’ll be back. How long can you stay?”

His expression answered that question. Irrith’s face settled into grim lines, that even he could tell were unusual for her. “I see. Let me ask a more useful question, then: What can I do to help you? Other than finding Chrennois.”

“I’m fine,” he said. It sounded thin even to his own ears.

“Of course you are. I could shoot Nadrett, if you like; I’ve been wanting to for years.”

“Ash and Thorn, no!” He might never get his memories back. Those, too, were well hidden. “I’ve got to get back, is all.”

Irrith frowned, but nodded with reluctance. “And secretly, I assume. There’s a side way out of the Academy; ever since last year, one of the passages leads over to near the Hall of Figures. A small gift, from all the changes in this place. It’s useful for sneaking out.”

Outside the library, she led him left, avoiding most of the crowded hall. Dead Rick was both disappointed and grateful. He couldn’t afford to stay, to speak to the fae who had known him before—but he wanted to. It was easier when I didn’t ’ave nothing to remind me, he thought. But he wouldn’t have traded his current pain for that numb despair, not for any price.

At a bronze-bound door, Irrith stopped, and faced him with a most peculiar expression. It looked like sorrow, turned into a smile. “The first time we met,” she said, “was two hundred years ago, I think. Something like that, anyway. You were part of the Onyx Court before I was, and fought in a war, on the Queen’s side. You mostly spent your time in the Crow’s Head, drinking and playing dice, but I paid you once to help me steal something from the mortals, and after that we were friends. Once I decided to stay in London, you showed me all your favorite bits, and taught me to like coffee.” Her smile brightened into real amusement, for an instant. “Tried to teach me to like gin, too, but nobody can do the impossible.

“I know that’s not very much. If you could stay longer, I’d tell you more, but really—how do you boil two hundred years down into something you can say? So instead I’ll say this: If there’s anything I can do to help you remember, all you have to do is ask.”

Ask. Not bribe, or pay, or bargain. She might as well have been speaking a foreign language, the words sounded so alien to his ears.

Dead Rick didn’t know how to answer it. He clung instead to the familiar. “If you ’ear anything about Chrennois—” How could she get word to him, without Nadrett finding out?

Irrith clapped him on the shoulder, with something more like a natural grin. “I’ll figure something out. Or somebody here will; we have a few sneaky sorts. If you get a message with the words ‘British Museum’ in it, that’s from me.”

He nodded. And then he turned his back on the Academy and left, before yearning could persuade him to stay.

Rose House, Islington: June 6, 1884

Any young lady who had recently suffered an outrage at the hands of a lunatic Irish maid might have been forgiven the desire to stay in bed. Indeed, that impulse was not so much forgivable as required; surely her nerves would demand the chance to recuperate, and in the meantime such bruising as she had suffered would have an opportunity to heal, before anyone saw her disfigured.

Louisa did not care a fig for her bruises, and the longer she stayed in bed, the more she would have to enchant Mrs. Kittering, who showed a most regrettable persistence in shaking off the persuasions laid upon her. Hearn, the Kitterings’ coachman, was more easily managed; as for the drunken maid Mary Banning, she did not even need enchantment. Sherry sufficed for her silence. With conveyance and escort thus arranged, Louisa set out for a spa west of the city, and went instead to Islington.

It was better for her health than any spa could have been. While the mead from which the Goodemeade sisters took their name might not be able to cure everything—a pistol ball to the head, for example, was beyond its powers—Louisa felt worlds better after downing a mug with unladylike enthusiasm. Mortals could keep their foul-smelling and fouler-tasting patent medicines; she would take faerie mead any day, and twice on Fridays.

Some of the effect, she admitted privately, might be credited to her surroundings. Brownies were very, very good at creating comfort, and the sisters had spent several hundred years perfecting it in their hidden home. Louisa was convinced the sisters had invented the notion of stuffing chairs hugely full of padding long before mortals ever thought of it. Rose House always smelled of good, clean things, herbs and flowers and fresh-baked bread, with never a hint of the coal-smoke stink of the world outside their door. And the hospitality, of course, was unmatched. But even had Rose House been a dirty hole furnished only with benches and rushlights, Louisa would have basked in its shelter. Some deep-seated part of her soul still could not quite believe that she was safe in the mortal world; spending so many days there without pause had set her skin to crawling with nervousness.

All of which the Goodemeades, with their splendid care for others’ well-being, seemed to sense. They held their questions back until Louisa had finished the mead and gave a satisfied sigh.

Then Rosamund pounced.

With the flat, disbelieving tone of one who knows the answer and does not expect to be surprised, she said, “What have you done?”

She had the decency to refrain from using a name. The sisters were far from stupid; undoubtedly they remembered a certain human girl who came to a few meetings of the London Fairy Society, and spoke to a certain faerie after the first one. They probably even knew that faerie had come to the meetings in hope of something particular, and it wasn’t just bread. Rosamund might not be able to see the face that lay behind the changeling’s mask, but that wasn’t necessary for her to guess what name that face had formerly borne.

But the woman who was now Louisa Kittering would not have been able to answer to that name, not without losing what she’d gone to such great lengths to gain. So, in gratitude for Rosamund’s discretion, she answered as meekly as she could. Not the question itself; that too was dangerous. Instead she addressed Rosamund’s actual concern. “It’s the only way I could see to stay. It isn’t enough to have a mortal who regularly tithes bread; that person could die, or go away, and besides, eating too much of their food is dangerous, even when it has been tithed. What kind of life would it be anyway, with no more shelter than what you can put in your mouth?”

Gertrude spoke with obvious sympathy. “You didn’t want to leave London.”

“That doesn’t justify—”

Rosamund snapped her mouth shut on the words that almost came out. Louisa hastened to add, “She begged me for it! The girl had a wild spirit; she felt trapped in her life, doomed to a future she didn’t want, but she couldn’t quite bring herself to go through all that running away would require. They would have tried to hunt her down—likely succeeded—and in a way, I suspect she was too soft-hearted to inflict that wound herself.”

“So instead you’ll do it for her.”

Louisa shrugged, seeing no point in denying it. “If I choose to vanish—” She said if, but meant when. The notion of protecting Myers from Nadrett, once in her mind, had not left; she might not even wait for her face to heal before seeking him out. Who knew but that Nadrett might snatch him, while she waited around for the bruises to fade? “I’m far better able to escape their hunt than she was. And I do not care if I cause someone heartache.”

“That’s the problem,” Rosamund said. “This is how it always goes with this kind of thing; the ones who suffer are the family. They don’t understand what’s happened, and you can’t explain it to them.”

Gertrude laid a hand on her arm. “Rose, two souls have been made happy by this—yes, perhaps other souls have been made unhappy, but from the sound of it, that would have happened even if everyone stayed where they were. The girl is free, and—”

She paused, looking at their guest, who gave the name by which they must call her now. “Louisa.”

“Louisa is safe.” Gertrude fixed her with a sharp look. “The girl is safe, too, I hope. Does she have money?”

“Yes. It’s real, too.” Taken from the sale of her better jewels. The absence of which was covered for now, but eventually the deception would be found out. Louisa had half-considered blaming it on the mad Irish maid, but the notion pricked her conscience—and reminded her of why she’d come. It wasn’t to hear a lecture from the Goodemeades.

The brownie sisters had dwelt in London since time out of mind; indeed, since before Islington had been a true part of the city. Their distance from the Onyx Hall meant fae did not visit them as often as they used to—the journey to Islington was fraught with peril, for an unprotected faerie—but they still kept abreast of rumors and gossip, by what means Louisa could only guess. If they could not answer her question, they would find someone who could.

Rosamund was muttering darkly about the odds of a sheltered girl from the better classes surviving on her own in London. When she paused to draw breath, Louisa broke in. “She went freely, but I’ve come across a rumor of another who didn’t. Have you ever seen a boy who looks like this?” From her pocket she produced a battered, ill-quality photograph, showing a woman seated with three children. “Or heard of anyone called Owen?”

Both brownies frowned over the photograph, identical furrows appearing in their brows. “Welsh?” Rosamund asked.

“Irish, I think. At least, the maid who assaulted me was.”

Gertrude’s honey-brown eyes widened. “A maid did that to you? I assumed it was L—the girl’s father!”

“She was a strong maid,” Louisa said sourly, putting the photo away. More like a woman boxer. “She, er…”

While she paused to frame her next words, Rosamund came to her chair, and beckoned with one peremptory hand. Louisa bent obediently and let the brownie’s gentle fingers probe her bruises. When Rosamund let go, she said, “She suspected me for what I am, and tried to trick me into saying things I shouldn’t. When that failed… I’m not even certain she was trying to drive me out; she may not have had any particular purpose in mind, except to vent her spleen upon me. But she shouted a great deal about someone she called Owen, and how she wanted him back.”

Looking to her sister, Rosamund said, “The bombings?”

“Oh!” Louisa said, startled. “I hadn’t thought of that. It would make a good deal of sense. Do you know who’s helping them?”

Gertrude tapped one plump finger against her lip. “Eidhnin and Scéineach… Bonecruncher, though you didn’t hear that from us; Peregrin would kill him if it came out he’s been working with folk in the Goblin Market, even for a good cause… Nadrett supplies the dynamite, but only because he can profit from it. We suspect Valentin Aspell is behind it all, though there’s no proof.”

“Which almost is proof,” Rosamund said, returning to her chair. “No one else is half so sneaky.”

Louisa frowned. “Why should Aspell be so helpful? You can’t tell me he cares about the Fenian cause.”

Rosamund was shaking her head before Louisa even finished. “The Fenians are just a useful cover, a way to act in public without drawing attention. For Bonecruncher, anyway—the Irish fae see it differently, of course. Remember, some of those bombs have been on the underground railway. They can’t destroy the tunnels themselves, not with how alert the police are—but the hope is that it would stop, or at least slow down, the plans to finish the Inner Circle.”

The ring of iron that would destroy the Onyx Hall. Aspell had gone to prison for being a traitor, but he at least claimed he’d been trying to save the palace. Maybe there was some truth to it. “Did they carry off any of the Irish mortals? Bonecruncher wouldn’t, I suppose, but Aspell might.”

Rosamund spread her hands helplessly. “I’m sorry. It’s terrible to say this, but there are so many mortals caught in the Market nowadays, we don’t know who they all are.”

Which meant that if Louisa wanted to know, she’d have to go below once more. With a guilty start, she remembered that she’d promised Dead Rick she would come back, even try to help him get away from Nadrett. There was a dearth of young men in her new life that might be persuaded to change places with a faerie, though. Perhaps she could convince the Goodemeades to divert a few pieces of the London Fairy Society bread from Hodge to Dead Rick; that would be better than nothing.

Well, it wouldn’t kill her to walk into the Onyx Hall; it wouldn’t even endanger her safety as a changeling. She just couldn’t answer to anyone who guessed her old name. Dead Rick might not be the cleverest faerie there, but he would sort that out soon enough.

As for what she would do when—if—she found this Irish Owen… Time enough to decide that once I’ve located him. The maid might just have been deranged, after all.

But Louisa didn’t think so. Not with those screams still ringing in her ears.

“Is there anything I can do for you two?” she asked the brownies, gathering the will to leave their comfortable home.

Rosamund laughed, and it was surprisingly bitter for someone ordinarily so cheerful. “Marry that Watkin fellow, who’s in charge of finishing the Inner Circle, and convince him to stop. Oh, and you only have a few months in which to do it.”

“If I could, I most certainly would,” Louisa said, the warmth draining out of her. It was all well and good to escape to safety, but the Goodemeades had a way of making her feel guilty for those left behind.

“Is there an address where we can write to you?” Gertrude asked. “It may be we’ll have something else you can do—and it would be nice to stay in touch, regardless.”

Louisa wrote the direction on a scrap of paper Rosamund furnished, hugged both brownies, and went back out into the streets of Islington. “Now,” she said to the passing traffic, not caring who stared at her, “I must decide: What do I owe to an Irishwoman who hit me in the face?”

Nothing. But her curiosity had been roused, and would not subside. Sighing, Louisa went to find the coachman.

The Goblin Market, Onyx Hall: June 6, 1884

Nadrett’s boot came down on the back of Dead Rick’s neck, forcing his face sideways, so that his throat was half-crushed against the cold stone. The skriker’s entire body trembled, torn between the need to breathe and the knowledge that fighting would only make his master press harder.

“I sends you out,” Nadrett said in a dangerously soft voice, “for my own purposes. Not yours. When you don’t return on time, you know what that says to me? It says you’ve taken the good bread I’ve given you, and decided to use it for your own purposes. Which sounds an awful lot like stealing from me, don’t it?”

Shallow breaths rasped into Dead Rick’s throat. Nadrett had been busy when he returned from the Academy—off fucking some former court lady, according to Gresh, which always put the master in a better mood—so he’d dared to think he might get away with his disobedience.

He didn’t have that kind of luck. He never had.

“What, dog, was so very important that you decided it was worth stealing from me?”

Dead Rick couldn’t answer. The best he could manage was a hoarse noise, some movement of his lips. Nadrett let him suffer like that for a moment longer, then lifted the boot. “Yes?”

The skriker coughed, then hurried to speak before his master lost patience. “Bread.”

“I know what you stole from me, dog.”

“No. Bread. Debts. Tried to get more, to pay a few coves off.”

Nadrett made a disgusted sound. “’Ow’d you end up with debts? You don’t need no bleeding bread; you never go outside. And don’t I give you everything else you need? Anybody comes to break my dog’s fingers, they’ve got to ask me for permission first, don’t they?” The toe of his boot thudded into Dead Rick’s ribs, and the skriker curled up in pain.

By the time it faded, Nadrett had stepped away, going to an old cabinet in the corner of the room. Dead Rick looked up, cautiously, afraid he would be punished for doing so. But his master’s attention was elsewhere; he unlocked the doors with a small key from around his neck, then opened them to reveal an assortment of shelves and tiny drawers. This was where he kept minor valuables: bread for his underlings, mortal trinkets, other items for his business.

A flat piece of glass, rippling with indistinct shapes.

Black horror rose like bile in his throat. No. He tried to swallow his instinctive whimper—it would buy him no pity—but the sound escaped him nonetheless, thin and weak. Nadrett heard and smiled.

“Been a while, ’asn’t it? Ain’t brought out one of these in ages. This seemed like a good time; after all, I don’t want you forgetting about them, do I?”

Dead Rick licked his lips. There was no dignity, no pride; any self-respect he might have gained by talking to Irrith was gone as if it had never been. He cowered on the floor, showing throat to his master, and said the words he knew Nadrett wanted to hear. “Please. Don’t.”

“You stole from me. You ’as to pay for that.”

“I won’t do it again, I swear.”

“But you’ve already done it, dog. That’s all fine and well for the future, but what about what I already lost?”

He was whimpering again, desperately keening, knowing it would do no good. “Please…”

Nadrett laughed, a soft, cruel sound. “You’re pathetic.”

A pause. Just long enough for him to start hoping—

The glass shattered.

Razor shards rebounded off the stone, scoring Dead Rick’s skin. Physical pain was lost in the anguish that wrenched his heart. Light shone across his eyes for just an instant, like a will-o’-the-wisp; his hand shot out to try and grab it, but the glow slipped through his fingers and was gone, leaving only blood where the glass had cut him.

Another piece of his past, destroyed. Another piece of himself.

Gone forever.

He couldn’t even take strength in rage, for fear Nadrett had more in the cabinet, just waiting to be broken. He just curled around himself, around the pain in his gut, until his master spat, “Get out.”

Dead Rick went. He crawled, belly low, sick and on the verge of tears. Out the door, then into enough of a crouch to flee the bastards in the outer room, hearing their laughter and mockery fading behind him. Into the warren of the Goblin Market, not caring where he went, so long as it was away; surely there must be some place here that would hide him from everyone’s eyes.

Rushing headlong as he was, Dead Rick didn’t notice the woman until he slammed into her. He staggered sideways into the wall, regained his balance, lurched onward—and was pulled up short by her words. “Dead Rick!”

The skriker spun, lips peeling back in a snarl. What in Mab’s name—It was some mortal woman. Obscenely out of place in the Goblin Market, with her silk gown and jewel-pinned hat and unstained gloves; he was surprised she’d made it this far, though if the bruises on her face were any sign, it hadn’t been without trouble. How did she know him? He’d never seen her before.

No, that wasn’t true. His memory was raw, an open wound, left bleeding by the shattered glass; he remembered her face. Laughing, slack in the grip of opium. She’d been there with Cyma.

Then he took a better look, and his jaw fell open.

Her gloved hand came up in a rush, before he could say a word. “Don’t! Think, Dead Rick. You know there are things I can’t say, and it will become very awkward if I have to ignore you saying them for me. But yes—you know me.”

Cyma. Wearing the face and name of her mortal toy. A changeling.

With a furious growl, he whirled and began to run again. But she ran after him, calling his name. “Please! I promised I would come back—Dead Rick, wait—what happened? Let me help you!”

Help him. So bloody generous of her, after running off like that. I’m going away, she’d said. He remembered her coy smile, her refusal to say where she was going. Iron rot your soul, Cyma. But she wasn’t Cyma any longer, was she?

He wasn’t looking where he was going; Dead Rick found himself facing a rockfall, the corridor ahead completely blocked. And that woman was behind him, gasping for breath, one hand pressed to her tightly laced side. That’s what you get for living as a human. Dead Rick spat a curse at her. “Out of my way, bitch.”

“My name,” the changeling said, in between gasps, “is Louisa. Now. And I promised I would try to help you, Dead Rick.”

“You can’t fucking ’elp me.”

He flung the words at her like knives, and she flinched. “I can find a man—”

“Why—so I can be a changeling? Like that would do me any bloody good!”

“Bread, then.”

Another curse. “You’ve got no idea what I need.”

“Then tell me!” The changeling—Louisa—finally managed to straighten up. “I can’t be much use to you if you don’t tell me anything, Dead Rick.”

The pain still pulsed inside him, the gaping awareness of void where his self used to be. Before Nadrett stole it and started breaking it, piece by piece. He didn’t care if she was any use to him or not; he didn’t care about anything at all. Nadrett’s blood. Give me that, and I’ll rest easy. But she couldn’t, and so he just wanted her gone.

Dead Rick spat that last part out, half-incoherent, but she understood. She held out her hands, though, stopping him when he moved to leave. “Please, one thing. It’s small, I promise. Have you seen a mortal who looks like the boy in this photo?”

He’d been stuck in the dogfighting pit on more than one occasion, not just that fight with Rewdan. Simple boxing matches. One time a yarthkin had caught him a solid blow, right where a drunken goblin had knifed him a few days before.

This felt much the same.

The face stared out at him from the tattered paper, stiffly solemn, but alert, self-aware, complete in a way the half-daft boy in the library had lost. That was the face Dead Rick remembered, from those moments before the poor bastard vanished into Nadrett’s control.

“You do know,” the changeling said, staring into his eyes. “Can you tell me where he is? There’s a maid in my household—well, not anymore; she’s been arrested and sent to prison—she’s searching for him. An Irish girl, Hannah someone.”

So that was her name. Two syllables, empty sounds: they meant nothing to him. It might have been anyone’s name.

She had once been his friend.

Both of them had. If the voice told the truth.

“The Academy,” Dead Rick said. It wasn’t Nadrett’s blood on his jaws, but it was a tiny piece of revenge, putting right what his master had sent wrong. “Feidelm’s got ’im. But ’e’s broken.”

“Broken how?”

The skriker shivered. “Like ’e lost half of ’imself. They think somebody tried to do ’im as a changeling, but it went wrong. ’E don’t speak no more, and ’e’s gone soft in the ’ead.”

Cyma—Louisa—frowned. “I’ve never heard of that happening to anyone before. Normally they just lose their names, their identities. Could it be someone tried to force him into it unwilling? I don’t know how they could, but—”

He cut her off with a swipe of his hand. “I told you all I know. We’re done.”

Her animated expression faltered, fell into sad acceptance. “I see. Thank you, Dead Rick. If there’s anything I can do for you—”

“Don’t bother making promises,” Dead Rick snarled, shoving past her. “They ain’t worth the air they’re spoken on.”

The Prince’s Court, Onyx Hall: June 9, 1884

“Now you just drink that down,” Rosamund Goodemeade said, “and you’ll feel good as new.”

She said it every time she gave Hodge a cup of mead to drink, and every time it was a little less true. He didn’t begrudge her the words, though. In his private thoughts, he’d long since decided the mead was the only thing keeping him alive. It gave a man strength, and he needed as much as he could possibly get.

Today more than most. Hodge gulped the sweet liquid down without pausing for breath, then handed her the empty cup. “Thank you,” he said; once, early in his reign, he’d forgotten to be courteous, and Gertrude had smacked him, Prince or no. “Now if you’ll pardon me—it’s probably better if you ain’t ’ere for this.”

The brownie’s expression soured. She didn’t like his plan; even her usually invincible talent for seeing the good in people faltered at times. But he was the Prince, and so long as he remembered to say please and thank you, she wouldn’t defy him once his decision was made. “We’ll be nearby if you need us,” Rosamund said, and hastened out of the room.

Leaving him with his guard of two elf-knights. Peregrin had tried to convince Hodge to put on fine clothes; he insisted the Prince’s dignity demanded it, especially when holding something like a formal audience. Hodge—who hadn’t held anything one could plausibly call a formal audience in his entire reign—flatly refused. He was the son of a bricklayer; he’d never once worn a top hat, and he had no intention of starting now. I’d look a proper fool, I would. And if I can’t take me seriously, who will?

Even Peregrin and Cerenel were there less for dignity and more for protection. None of them expected physical danger—but given that Hodge’s death might very well mean the end of the Onyx Hall, nobody wanted to take any chances.

He took a deep breath, then nodded at Cerenel. The knight murmured to the moth perching on his finger, which fluttered out through a crack in the door.

A moment later, the door opened, and Dame Segraine escorted Valentin Aspell into the room.

Hodge’s fingers curled tight around the arms of his chair. He loathed the fae of the Goblin Market; they indulged in all the worst vices of their kind, at the expense of humans, and flaunted it in his face. Their influence had grown through Lune’s long decline, as she became less and less capable of calling them to heel, but since her seclusion they’d flourished like rats. Hodge’s best attempts to check them on his own were laughably inadequate.

On the surface of it, Aspell wasn’t the worst of the lot: that honor belonged to Nadrett. But he had a distinction the other Market boss didn’t, which was that he was a confirmed traitor, sentenced and punished by the Queen herself. Hodge didn’t trust the bastard an inch.

A spark of anger—the first of many, he was sure—lit in his stomach when Aspell made him an old-fashioned bow. Polite though it looked, he was sure the faerie meant it as mockery. His suspicion strengthened when Aspell said, “Thank you for seeing me, Lord Benjamin.”

The formal courtesy twisted Hodge’s mouth. He said roughly, “Don’t waste my time on fancy talk. Why do you want to see Lune?”

Aspell’s thin eyebrows rose, an elegant display of surprise. But ’e ain’t surprised at all. “That,” the faerie said, “is between me and the Queen.”

“What’s between you and the Queen is me. You don’t answer my question, this meeting’s done.”

By the way things should have worked, Hodge had no right to say that; his authority had to do with the dealings between mortals and fae. Not two faeries. He half-expected Apsell to point that out. But the other merely drew in a vexed breath and said, “If you throw me out, you’ll never hear what I have to say about Galen St. Clair.”

“What’s to ’ear?” Hodge grinned. “We already know Nadrett stuck ’im in a photograph. Oh, I’m sorry—was that what you was going to sell us?”

He could almost hear Aspell’s teeth grinding. You came in ’ere with your notions of ’ow this would go—but I ain’t playing your game. I may be the last Prince this place ever sees; well, I’m going to be the best fucking Prince I can. And that means not letting you dance me like a puppet.

When Aspell recovered his composure, the faerie said, “Do you know where the photograph is?”

“Do you?”

That was the one piece of information Hodge was willing to bargain for. But Aspell’s fleeting hesitation told him he was out of luck. “I can find out,” the faerie said.

Hodge snorted. “So can we. Try again some other time, guv. When you’ve got something of value to sell.”

What looked like real frustration twisted Aspell’s face. The Goodemeades had given Hodge a thorough warning about him; they said he was very good at hiding what he thought. Either this was a pose, or he wasn’t bothering to conceal his feelings. Whichever it was, it boiled down to manipulation. “I am not a fool, my lord. I know the Queen has not been seen in years. Unlike many of her ignorant subjects, I know better than to think her dead—we would have felt it; likely we would not be here—but she cannot be far from her end. Is she even conscious? Is that why you refuse to let me see her, because she has fallen into a coma and can no longer speak?”

It came near enough the truth to make Hodge furious. “No, I won’t let you see ’er because you’re a fucking traitor. Or did you think I’d forgotten that? Even if you told me why you wanted in, I probably wouldn’t believe you; there’s no reason I should. But you stands there with your bloody ‘that’s between me and the Queen’ rot, and you expects me to say yes? ’Ow stupid do you think I am?”

The heat in the faerie’s eyes said, Very. Hodge heard Cerenel shift, as if ready to throw himself in front of the Prince—but without warning, the fire faded, and Aspell relaxed. Too abruptly; Hodge didn’t trust it. Aspell said, “You know of the harm I did this court, of course. But I have also done good on its behalf.”

“I know; you was Lune’s Lord Keeper. That was ’undreds of years ago, mate.”

“Not that,” Aspell said. “Much more recently. Do you think I want to see the Onyx Hall fall into ruin? When the purpose of my treason was to prevent that very thing? I have tried to halt the progress of the Inner Circle, more than once. I arranged the bombs last fall, at Charing Cross and Praed Street.” He grimaced. “There should have been more, a few days ago—enough to break the line completely, and force repairs—but I’m afraid those who took them were not so tractable as I had thought; they chose to direct their efforts elsewhere.”

The Goodemeades had told him their suspicions about Aspell and the bombs. His surprise at hearing the faerie confess it so openly, though, was shouted down by his anger. “Oh, and you expects me to thank you for it? Man, if I wanted the line blown up, Bonecruncher would do it tomorrow. But people got ’urt by that. And I didn’t become Prince so I could ’elp fae murder my own kind.”

“Not even to save faerie lives?”

“You won’t die,” Hodge said grimly. “You’ll just go away.”

He hid the pain the words brought. Even his fellow mortals knew the Fair Folk were leaving; it was a common story in rural parts of the British Isles, as common as the flower fairies supposedly haunting the gardens of middle-class girls. Unlike the flower fairies, the stories of flitting were true. He wondered how many people telling the stories, though, knew their immortal neighbors personally. It wasn’t so easy to accept when the faeries were friends.

Or even enemies, like Aspell. Nothing was showing through that bastard’s mask, not anymore; Hodge might have been some exotic bird, stuffed and put on display for a ha’penny a look. “Your predecessors would have considered that a great tragedy.”

“It don’t matter ’ow great a tragedy it is; I ain’t going to blow up London to stop it.”

Aspell’s gaze flickered, ever so briefly, to either side of Hodge. The Prince couldn’t tell what he was thinking: wondering whether Peregrin and Cerenel would attack? Gauging whether he could fight them himself? Looking to them for support? Whatever Aspell saw, it didn’t seem to please him. The frustration his face didn’t show came through in his oily voice as he said, “I do not want the Onyx Hall to be lost. I have been fighting to preserve it for well over a hundred years. Yes, that has of necessity involved some violent acts—my treason of before, the bombs, the River Fleet—”

The lurch in Hodge’s mind felt like another earthquake, this one internal. “What?”

“Twenty years ago, or thereabouts,” Aspell said. “When they were building the first stretch of the Underground. I feared even then what damage it might do, and loosed the hag of the Fleet from her bonds, so that she broke through into the railway works.”

Peregrin and Cerenel moved forward in one swift, coordinated movement, keeping themselves ahead of Hodge as the Prince catapulted to his feet. “You’re the reason that ’appened?” He didn’t wait for an answer. “My father bloody well drowned that day, you bastard. And you sits there telling about it like you’re proud?”

The former lord’s composure faltered; his jaw hung briefly slack. “I—did not realize.”

Hodge spat a curse. “You didn’t care. Just a fucking mortal life, eh? And those ain’t worth a farthing. You still don’t care, except that you picked the wrong bleeding man to brag to.”

Aspell stepped back, hands out as if they could somehow calm the Prince’s rage. “Please—you do not approve of my methods; so be it—but I can be of better use to you, if you’ll only let me speak with her Majesty—”

A blow to the jaw stopped his words. The elf-knights didn’t try to stop Hodge; they only caught Aspell by the arms and dragged him clear as he stumbled, so he could not strike back. “You ain’t getting within ten yards of Lune. You ain’t going to see so much as the tip of ’er shoe. Only reason I ain’t telling my boys to blow your fucking ’ead off is that ain’t the Prince’s job. Now get out of ’ere before I change my mind.”

He never had a chance to obey or refuse. Peregrin and Cerenel wrenched Aspell’s arms up behind his back and shoved the faerie out the door, leaving Hodge alone with his fury.

Memory: March 30, 1859

Lune could have tried to conceal the truth. There were any number of rooms in which the Queen of the Onyx Court might choose to grant audience to a prisoner; some of them were quite impressive. But this prisoner would learn the truth soon enough. To delay that would only make her look weak.

She instructed the guards to bring Valentin Aspell to the greater presence chamber.

With so many refugees crowding the Hall, fae were living almost everywhere they could pack in—but not there. The chamber was haunted, Lune thought, by the ghost of the Onyx Hall itself, the glory that had once been her court. No one could live in the shadow of her silver throne, still placed like a sentinel against the far wall, guarding an empty hollow where the London Stone used to be. When the guards brought Aspell in, the only people waiting for him were Lune and Alexander Messina, her Prince.

Despite Aspell’s near-flawless control, she saw him check at the threshold. He must have seen signs on his way from the cells beneath the Tower; at the very least, they would have taken a different path than he expected, avoiding rooms and passages that were no longer there. But it clearly had not prepared him for the crack that ran like a scar through the black and white pietra dura marble of the floor, the warped and missing columns where the greater presence chamber had bent during the shift of the London Stone. It violated all the laws of mortal geometry, and carried a chilling message in the language of faerie science.

While he slept for one hundred years, sentenced for his treachery, the world had changed around him—and not for the better.

If the sight of the presence chamber struck him a blow, the sight of him did the same to Lune. Aspell still dressed as he had a hundred years before, in the long coat and knee breeches of the Georgian kings. For nearly a century she’d put him from her mind, but now he came before her, unchanged, a traitor out of the past, who had tried to murder her for the sake of her realm. The unhealed wound in her shoulder, where an iron knife had stabbed her long ages before, throbbed with brief pain.

With four knights flanking him and rowan chains binding his hands and feet, he reached the edge of the dais and bowed.

“Madam,” he said, “my one hundred years are complete.”

He did not, she noticed, claim his punishment was done. Whatever sentence she had passed before, she was the Queen of the Onyx Court, and he, one of her faerie subjects; if she changed her mind, not even the Prince of the Stone could gainsay her. Aspell had never been one to choose his words carelessly.

But she’d been wrong to think him unchanged. Lune saw it in his eyes, when Aspell straightened: no one, not even a faerie, woke from a century-long sleep without consequence. A remoteness clung to him still, as if he gripped wakefulness in his hands, but had not yet claimed it for his own. “They are complete,” Lune agreed.

She let the silence between them grow taut, then said the words she and Alex had argued over for days. Her Prince had never known Aspell, but he knew what common sense looked like, and this, he said, was not it. Lune granted him that point. The time for common sense, though, had passed.

“One hundred years ago,” Lune said, “when I sentenced you to your sleep, I made a prediction. I said that by the time you woke, either the Onyx Hall would be whole once more, or I would no longer be its mistress.”

Perhaps it was the lingering effects of sleep that made Aspell interrupt her, as he would never have done before. “Yet here you stand, with your realm cracking beneath your feet.”

He would have learned it soon enough. Lune hoped that admitting it now, while he stood before her, would prevent the trouble that might otherwise follow. “Can you guess why?”

Shackled hand and foot, with two elf-knights more than ready to stab him should he blink wrong, Aspell tilted his head and studied her. The distant look in his eyes gave her a chill, as if he looked through her. “You have your share of pride,” Aspell said, with uncharacteristic bluntness, “but that, I think, is not it. If you remain, it is because you honestly believe that is best for the Onyx Hall.”

Left unspoken was the qualifier: You may be wrong.

Lune said, very simply, “I remain because I cannot leave.”

His indrawn breath was audible.

With her crippled left hand, she gestured at the warped space of the greater presence chamber, the crack that split its floor. “The destruction begun in the eighteenth century continues today, and the Onyx Hall continues to break. An unwounded Queen would not be able to stop it. She might be able to slow it, better than I have done… but by the time I conceded that possibility, it was too late.

“If I withdraw myself from my bond with the Onyx Hall, the palace will not survive.”

Alex watched silently from her side. There had been a time when she could rule for weeks, even months, without a Prince; it made her bond incomplete, but not fatally so. That time was past. He had been created Prince of the Stone when his predecessor Henry Brandon was not even one day gone, because Lune needed her consort; she could not hold the entire weight of her broken realm alone. If she let go her share of the burden, his mortal frame would not last one hour.

Aspell’s thin mouth did not press into the sharp line she expected. He simply stood, eyes still remote, and then he said, “You have woven yourself too thoroughly into the fabric of your realm.”

The accuracy of his description startled her. He saw it, and his mouth curved into a strange half smile. “Do you know how I passed my one hundred years of sleep, madam?”

Wordlessly, she shook her head.

Aspell said, “In dreams.”

Fae did not dream. Were it not for that look in his eyes, Lune would have tried to correct his words, suggesting that he had experienced hallucinations, or some other kind of vision. But Aspell never chose his words carelessly, and his not quite wakeful state would accept no other term: he had dreamt, and some portion of those dreams held him still.

“I dreamt of many things, as the years slipped by,” he said. “I felt the Hall continue to crumble, though I did not understand what it was I felt until I entered this room. I sensed your presence, madam, working itself into the cracks and gaps of this realm, holding together what would otherwise break apart. I sensed…” He trailed off, then shook his head, as if trying to escape the seductive clutches of something faerie-kind was never meant to experience. “Even now, much of what I dreamt is unclear to me. But I believe that you are right. Having given so much of yourself to preserve your realm, you cannot leave it now.”

But she could have done it before. Lune trusted everyone else in the chamber, her knights and her Prince of the Stone; in front of them, she could admit her mistakes. Her gamble was to do so in front of Aspell. “I wish I had done it sooner. Whether that would have been better or worse, I cannot say—there is more at stake than merely the palace—but I wish I had not left the choice until it was too late.”

Aspell’s eyes widened in unguarded surprise. Then, with careful consideration, he bowed.

Lune did not let herself breathe out in relief. Not yet. “Valentin Aspell. You have been condemned and punished for your treason. If we should grant your freedom, how would you use it?”

As always, he chose his words with care. After a long pause, he said, “I do not know. But I would not seek to unseat or replace you. It would serve no purpose now.”

Hardly a ringing declaration of fealty. But it was what she had hoped for. “Swear to it,” Lune said, “and liberty will be yours.”

He did not hesitate. Valentin Aspell went down on one knee, and swore the oath, and Lune let the traitor go.

St. Mary Abbots Workhouse, Kensington: July 18, 1884

Nothing would stop the shivering. It wasn’t the cold, not anymore; the icy water into which they’d forced her head and most of her upper body had long since dried. The drafts blowing through her cropped hair still made Eliza feel peculiarly naked, but only when she let herself think about it.

She shivered because she was not alone.

Or because she was going mad. She couldn’t be sure of the difference between the two. The gusts of misery and dread that kept surging through her—were those her own? Or did they belong to the woman who had died in this cell? She felt the ghost hovering about her, some poor soul who’d made the same mistake she had—trying to run, trying to flee, as if the workhouse were something that could be escaped. All it did was make things worse. Convinced the workhouse master that Mrs. Kitteirng was right, that Elizabeth White, called Hannah, was a dangerous lunatic in need of the strictest restraint.

How long had she been in the cell? A day, at first; then they’d taken her before a justice and gotten permission to keep her there longer. She’d laughed when they shoved her through the door, calling it a holiday; so long as they kept her in here, she didn’t have to pick oakum or sew shirts or do any of the other tedious labor that was supposed to teach workhouse inmates virtue. But she’d never been forced to sit, for hours and days on end, in a pitch-black cell too small to pace, her only contact with the world coming when they opened the door to deliver food or empty her chamber pot. The single candle they carried hurt her eyes, and if she spoke, they struck her without answering back.

Lights burst across Eliza’s vision, and she realized she was pressing her fingers against her eyeballs, just to have something to see.

Something other than the ghost.

“Leave me alone,” she whispered, forgetting her resolve not to talk to the dead woman. Or to the figment of her imagination, whichever it was. “You want me to kill myself, as you did, and I won’t. I won’t.” A laugh caught in her throat—a laugh or a sob, she couldn’t tell which.

Maybe it would be better to feign madness. Then she might be sent to Bedlam. She’d seen an article in the newspaper once, praising Bedlam for being a model of civilized, enlightened treatment for the mad—far better than a workhouse, anyway. But no, that would never happen; Mrs. Kittering would put a stop to it. Just as she’d prevented Eliza from being sent to the new women’s prison in Brixton, where she might have been able to keep an ounce of dignity. Instead it was hard labor in the Kensington workhouse, and confinement as mentally unsound.

“Please.” It was her own voice, whispering again, and then repeating itself more loudly. “Please. I won’t try to escape again. Just take me away from her—” Then she remembered that she must keep silent, that every word she spoke might keep her in here longer.

When she heard the footsteps outside, she cringed, thinking they had come to punish her for talking. When the door opened, the flood of light made her whimper in pain; it was far more than a single candle. And then she heard a voice, actually speaking to her, for the first time since they shoved her back into the cell. A voice that didn’t belong to the dead.

“Come on, then. Somebody wants to see you.”

A rough hand grabbed the sleeve of her smock. Eliza did not resist. The woman was taking her out of the cell; that was all that mattered. Bringing her back to the world of light and sound—bringing her back to the world.

By the time she felt fresh air on her face, her eyes had recovered enough for her to see. She was being marched across to the main building, past workhouse men who could be trusted with the labor of keeping the grounds tidy. What could they want her for? Please, Mary Mother of God, don’t let them be taking me back to the justice, to ask for more time. If they’ve only brought me out to throw me back in again…

The main building was not a place where she spent much time; only the best of the workhouse inmates were given duties here, where visitors might see them. The matron hustled her through quickly, into a nearly empty room, containing only two things: an ordinary chair, and a much heavier one with shackles on its arms. Eliza swallowed a whimper as they were closed around her wrists. It’s better than the cell. Anything’s better than the cell. Then the matron left, and Eliza had just enough time to wonder what was going on before a man walked in.

He was a round-faced fellow, not much older than she, with alert eyes beneath heavy dark brows. Both whiskers and hair were closely trimmed, and he wore a stern-looking suit, everything buttoned into place. In one hand he carried a leather case, which he set down at his side when he took the chair across from Eliza, and opened to reveal a sheaf of papers. These he took out, but did not look at; they sat forgotten in his hand as he studied her.

Eliza stared back mutely, wondering who he was. Then he spoke, and a shock of familiarity washed over her. The accents of western Ireland, which she had heard before.

“Elizabeth White,” he said. “Formerly a housemaid to the Kittering family of Cromwell Road, in South Kensington. Alias Elizabeth Marsh, formerly a costerwoman. Alias Elizabeth Darragh, a drunkard seen in Newgate. Alias Elizabeth O’Malley, aged twenty-one years, of Whitechapel.”

God help me—it’s the Special Branch man.

She barely kept that behind her teeth. He knew who she was; the last thing she needed was to give away that she’d spied on him when he came to Cromwell Road. Eliza licked her lips and said, “Who are you?”

“Police Sergeant Patrick Quinn.” He folded his hands over the papers he held, continuing to study her. “You’ve been a hard woman to track down, Miss O’Malley.”

Not half hard enough. “Why did you bother?”

He gave her a pitying look. “I work for the Special Irish Branch, Miss O’Malley. As you’ve likely guessed. So let’s pass over the bit where you pretend you don’t know why I’m here.” Now he did look down at the papers, thumbing through them briefly. “In October of last year, you were seen running out of Westminster Bridge Station, after a bomb went off on the train from Charing Cross.”

“I had nothing to do with that.”

“So you told Constable McCawley, when he questioned yourself a few days later. You claimed to be chasing somebody. The real culprits.”

Eliza closed her eyes. She still didn’t know whether it had been a mistake, telling the peeler even that much of the truth. At the time, it seemed like the right idea; after all, she needed to give some reason for why she’d been running that didn’t make it look like she’d been fleeing after dropping the bomb. Not until she had repeated her story several times did she find out that nobody else at Charing Cross had seen the people she was chasing.

Not people: faeries. And that’s why nobody saw them.

She should have said that to McCawley, let him write her off as a lunatic. It would have been harmless enough then. Saying it to Quinn now, though, would only trap her more thoroughly in the workhouse. Opening her eyes, Eliza said, “I don’t know any more now than I did then. If you’ve come to ask those questions over again, you might as well just read your papers there, because they’ll say everything I know.”

To her surprise, Quinn nodded. “No doubt. It’s new questions I’ve come with, about the new bombings.”

“I wasn’t at Victoria Station,” Eliza said immediately, remembering Tom Granger’s news, months before.

Those thick brows drew a little together. “Not Victoria Station. More recent than that. I mean the four on the thirtieth of May.”

Four? She couldn’t hide her startlement. Then she tried to remember when she’d attacked the changeling. Her thoughts were sluggish with cold and isolation; she couldn’t recall.

Until Quinn refreshed her memory. “You were arrested the next day.”

“Not for that!” Eliza protested. “I hit the Kitterings’ daughter.”

“Yes, I know.” Of course he knew; that would have been the easiest thing to learn about her. Far more disturbing was his ability to put that together with her other deeds—especially the ones in Newgate. As if to remind her of that, Quinn said, “One of the bombs was found before it could do harm; the other three went off a little after nine in the evening on the thirtieth. Around two the following morning, Constable Mason found you drunk and disorderly in Newgate. Do you deny that was yourself?”

Not much point in trying, not when she’d foolishly given her name as Darragh. The police kept damnably good notes on everything; they would have a record of Owen’s disappearance, even if they never did anything about it. And therefore a record of her complaints. “That was me,” Eliza admitted. “But I had nothing to do with those bombs. I didn’t even know about them until you told me.”

More glancing through the papers in his hand. “According to the housekeeper, Mrs. Fowler, your evening off was supposed to be June second, the following Monday. But on the morning of the thirtieth, you demanded to be given that night off instead.”

How much did he have on those sheets? None of that had been part of her trial for assault; he must have questioned Mrs. Fowler himself. And probably the Kitterings, too. “I’d heard some bad news,” Eliza said, giving the first explanation that came to mind. “I wasn’t much minded to spend the whole day doing chores for nobs.”

“What sort of bad news?”

Her wrists pulled against the shackles of her chair, involuntarily. She felt as if she’d been staked out for his target practice. If she tried to lie, he’d catch her out; good as she’d become, she doubted she was any match for this man with his friendly face and too-sharp eyes.

But she could hide behind something like the truth. “You know about Owen Darragh.”

“Your childhood love. Disappeared seven years ago.”

Hearing the word “love” from his mouth made her want to snarl, but she confined herself to a nod. “I’d heard a rumor. Thought I might be able to find out what happened to him. But it didn’t come to anything.”

From a pocket inside his coat, Quinn drew out a pencil and a small notebook. Bracing the latter against his knee, he scribbled a few words, while Eliza watched in dread. “What was this rumor?”

Would he never stop asking questions? Of course not. “What do you care?” she asked, her tone deliberately nasty, to distract him. “I went to the police when he was taken, and do you know what they told me? That the Irish are an unreliable race, we are, and I shouldn’t be surprised if he abandoned his mother and sister and me. That he’d probably gone to America, or fallen drunk into the river and drowned. And nobody bothered to search.”

Quinn’s pencil stopped. After a pause, he tucked it back inside his notebook, set the notebook and papers on the floor. Then he leaned forward, putting his elbows on his knees and looking her straight in the eye. “They may have said that, but do you think I would? About my own people? I was born in Castlecarra, Ballyglass, and lived there ’til I was near twenty, I did. We’ve drunkards aplenty, and unreliable sorts, but sure your lad wasn’t one of them. And they did search, you know. Gave up because there was nothing to find. But if you’ve new evidence, I’ll pass it to the fellows in the C.I.D., and see what they can do with it.”

The distraction wasn’t working as she’d hoped it would. Eliza wished he could help—but what could she do? Tell him to arrest Louisa Kittering for impersonating a human? “Ballyglass,” she said, and laughed bitterly. “You’re Irish-born, and yet yourself and your mates in the Special Branch spend yer time hunting Irish for the English.”

Quinn’s expression darkened. “You think I should let them go? Twelve people were hurt in the explosion at the Junior Carlton Club. Several servants at Sir Watkin Williams’s house, one of them badly. Two coachmen and a police constable at Scotland Yard. If a boy hadn’t spotted the parcel at the foot of Nelson’s Column, the fourth bomb would have caught even more people in Trafalgar Square. And that’s just one night’s work; Praed Street hurt more than seventy last autumn. I should turn a blind eye, just because ’tis Irish lads who do the deed?”

“You know what they’re fighting for.”

“And I know this is a devil of a bad way to do it. Parnell’s working for home rule in the Parliament now, and that might do some good—but not if there’s another Clerkenwell outrage, or more murders in Phoenix Park. Your lads poison half the world against them, when they go killing people like that.”

Eliza shifted uncomfortably in her chair. “They aren’t my lads.”

“Aye, you were a babe in your mother’s arms when they blew up Clerkenwell. But now—”

“No, I mean—” She caught herself. What was she doing? All but spitting in Fergus Boyle’s face when he accused her of allying herself with the Irish Republican Brotherhood, then turning around and defending them to Quinn. It made a bad preface for what she said next. “I’m no Fenian.”

As she feared, he didn’t believe her. “We know you’ve been helping them.”

“I have not!”

“I understand being loyal to family, Miss O’Malley. But you have to see that there are things more important than kin.”

He said it so seriously, and yet she had no idea what he meant. “They’re Americans, aren’t they? No kin of mine.”

“But your father is.”

It felt like the chair dropped two inches without warning; her hands clutched the arms for balance. “My father’s in Newgate.”

Quinn didn’t bother to glance at his notes. “Not since the twenty-ninth of May.”

She couldn’t let go of the chair. James O’Malley, out of prison at last. If she’d been in Whitechapel, she would have known. But she’d done her best to hide from her own world, and so it fell to a police constable to tell her about the only family she had left.

Out on the twenty-ninth. On the thirtieth, Eliza asked for the night off, and then four bombs appeared around London.

She’d been visiting him in Newgate, the night she chased the faeries to Charing Cross.

“I haven’t seen him,” she whispered. “You must believe me.” Surely her shock was proof enough. But Quinn just sat there, looking at her, until she asked the question eating away at her heart like acid. “Was he there? Did my da help them?”

“We have a man who says ye both did.”

It wasn’t true. At least for herself, it wasn’t; she knew that beyond a sliver of doubt. In which case, who would—

Boyle. Like a slap to the face, she remembered Father Tooley warning her at Easter. Fergus Boyle’s been spreading trouble. Did he hate her that much, to point a finger at her when the Special Branch boys came calling?

For Maggie’s sake, he might. And that thought was bitter as poison, that Maggie might hate her so much, when they’d been sister-close in the years before Owen was stolen. But now she and her mother were tottering on the brink of starvation, and that made a woman harsh. Maggie could have told them, or told Boyle to do it. Or he’d done it of his own will, to make sure Eliza would never come to trouble the Darraghs again.

“Tell me what you know,” Quinn said, very softly, “and I’ll do what I can for you. No lass should be caught in a place like this.”

The gentleness of his voice startled her. Why such sympathy, such kindness? Then Eliza sniffled, reflexively, and realized she was crying. And Quinn, not knowing her thoughts about Maggie, thought it was guilt that sent the tears down her face.

With the remnants of anger in her belly, she considered—ever so briefly—telling him to look into Fergus Boyle. That was a man she wouldn’t mind seeing locked away; whatever Maggie’s state, she could do better than him. But no: that would make her as bad as him, turning Irish over to the English for no better reason than hate. Quinn at least had a purpose for what he did that went beyond his own feelings.

Sniffing away the tears, wishing she had a handkerchief, or at least could lift a hand to wipe her face, Eliza met Quinn’s eyes. “What my father’s done, I don’t know—but I’m no Fenian, and I’ve never done a thing to hurt the innocent, or to help anyone else do it, either. Do I want Ireland free? You may be sure of it. Christ knows the English haven’t been any good for us. But I was born here; London is my home. I’d never do anything to change that.”

Quinn held her gaze, eyes still creased with that unexpected line of sympathy. “Then why all the lies? What have you been doing, these nine months past?”

She knew it was weak of her, to give in to that sympathy—knew he was probably doing it on purpose, to soften her resolve. Still, she couldn’t stop herself from answering him more honestly than she had any man in seven years. “You’d never believe me. You’d think me mad.”

He didn’t offer her any easy reassurance, even though she might have taken it. Instead he considered the words, then gave a faint, rueful smile. “And then you’d lose what? You’re already locked up as mad, Miss O’Malley. If I don’t believe you, then all it means is staying where you are. But if you know something true, and can prove it to me—”

“I cannot prove it.” Her frustration felt like it would burst out of her skin. “Not from in here, and maybe not out there; but that’s what I’ve been trying to do.”

“Perhaps I could help.”

If he believed her. He never will, she thought, with the wounded instinct of constant failure.

But as he said—what would she lose by trying?

In the end, it was his voice that did it, the familiar Irish cast to his vowels. Castlecarra, Ballyglass. She didn’t know the place, but he was a country boy, and might have heard country stories.

Eliza took a deep breath, and told the truth.

Faeries at Charing Cross. Faeries in Newgate. Faeries that stole Owen Darragh away. Even the stories the traitor had told, about the fading Queen of a dying realm, though Eliza admitted they were probably empty. She held back nothing except Louisa Kittering, and that only because it would do her more harm than good; Quinn would never go after the daughter of such a rich family, and the accusation would make Eliza look mad after all. But the rest of it, she told, and Quinn listened to it all without speaking, almost without blinking.

He didn’t take notes. When Eliza was done, he sat very still, then glanced down at the notebook as if he’d forgotten it was there. After a moment of consideration, he closed it. “Sure that’s a fine queer story.”

“And you don’t believe a word of it.”

“I didn’t say that.” He tucked the notebook away. “I’ve learned something, Miss O’Malley, working for Scotland Yard; I’ve learned not to make up my mind without evidence. And that means not disbelieving you, either. As you say, you’ve no proof—but at least it makes sense of what you’ve done, which is more than I’ve had until now.”

“Let me out of here,” Eliza said, “and I’ll get you proof.” In the form of an unconscious Louisa Kittering, if she had to.

He put up a cautioning hand. “I cannot promise you that. But I’ll look into it, and see what I turn up. If there are faeries in London, I should be able to find them.”

Eliza wished his confidence went deeper. I should, he said, not we should; he wasn’t about to set his fellows in Scotland Yard to hunting. Well, she couldn’t blame him. He hadn’t laughed in her face, though, and that was something.

Quinn stood. “In the meantime, you behave yourself in here, Miss O’Malley,” he said, replacing his papers in the case. “Mind what they tell you, and you’ll have less trouble.”

Spoken like a man always on the strong side of the law, who’d never been subjected to the abuses of a place like this. Eliza gritted her teeth and looked away, rather than speak the words that might have undone all the good of a moment before. Quinn waited for her to say something, then sighed and went out, closing the door softly behind him.

A few minutes passed. Then the workhouse matron came back and unlocked her from the chair. Eliza cringed, thinking of the black cell and its ghost, but the woman took her back to where the rest of the inmates were rubbing their fingers raw, picking oakum. She fell to work gratefully, drinking in every bit of light as if it were water. If Quinn had arranged this, then she blessed him with her whole heart.

Riverside, Onyx Hall: July 24, 1884

Dead Rick’s hackles rose uneasily when he returned to the chamber where he spoke to the voice. It looked worse than ever, cracks mazing the stone until he feared it would fall to gravel at a touch. He stretched one hand out, then stopped, fingers a breath away from touching. It’s the Queen, Irrith said. Trying to keep this place together. Blood and Bone—’ow long ’as she been doing this? Fourteen years since she vanished; he’d asked. But the struggle must have begun long before that.

Back when he was a Queen’s man. “Don’t give up,” he whispered, as if she could hear him through the black stone. “Not yet.”

“Did you say something?”

The skriker jerked his hand back. It was his ally, of course, not Lune; but it made his skin jump all the same. “No, nothing.”

“What a pity,” the voice said, in cold tones. “I was hoping you might finally have word for me of where Chrennois is.”

Dead Rick sat down on the last intact bench, hoping it wouldn’t break beneath him. “’E ain’t ’ere, I’m telling you. Not in any bit of the palace. I’ve searched.”

In the course of their conversations, there had been moments of something like rapport: not friendship—nothing so warm as that—but accord, a feeling that they were working toward the same end, and could lay aside the wary suspicion of the Goblin Market. All that vanished as if it had never been, obliterated by the sudden malice of the voice’s response. “You could not possibly have searched the entire palace yourself. You must have had help from others.”

He had. Irrith’s first report had come while he lay at Nadrett’s feet, watching his master examine a string of mortal slaves; a beetle had crawled into his ear and whispered the sprite’s short message. The sheer audacity of it startled him almost as badly as the bug had. It brought no useful news, though; just the assurance that they were searching. Every message since then had been the same. And Dead Rick scoured every surviving inch of the Market, without luck. Either Chrennois had been taken by one of the smaller earthquakes that continued to rock the palace, or he was somewhere else entirely.

Dead Rick thought of the grief in Irrith’s eyes, and Nadrett’s boot on his neck. The sprite knew his memories were gone; she’d offered to do something about that. And she was brave enough—mad enough—to charge into the Goblin Market to save a flock of mortal children, and to tweak Valentin Aspell’s nose. If he told her about the glass, would she help him steal his memories back?

Maybe. The possibility was enough to make him brave. “I didn’t ’ave much choice,” Dead Rick told the voice, setting his shoulders as if for a fight. “This place may be ’alf gone, but I can’t search it all, not with Nadrett watching me so often. So sure, I got ’elp. If you don’t like it, then you can shove off.”

“Do not tempt me,” the voice said, each word cold and sharp as winter ice. “You are not indispensable, skriker, and if you ruin what I have spent all this time preparing, I will not hesitate to walk away from our arrangement. You may think you no longer need me, but believe me, you are wrong.”

His newfound courage faltered. Differences of accent aside, the voice momentarily sounded so much like Nadrett… seven years of brutal control made Dead Rick want to crawl, show throat, beg for mercy. Swallowing hard, he said, “You said you thought I could be subtle; well, this is the best I could do. Anything else would ’ave gotten me killed, or taken so long we’d all be out on the streets anyway. Besides, all they know is where ’e ain’t—and that’s no use to anybody.”

The voice made an impatient, irritated noise. “They must be wrong. The compounds would not survive long above. The mortal world behaves according to a set of strict natural laws; Faerie follows no laws at all, at least not consistently. Only in the spaces in between can something like this photography be carried out, where the laws are different, but discoverable and amenable to our use.”

It sounded like something an Academy scholar would say. Could Dead Rick have been wrong when he assumed his ally was a Goblin Market faerie? If so, he would stand no chance of guessing the voice’s identity—not when he didn’t even remember the Academy fae he had once known.

He wished he dared ask Irrith—it would simplify things so much, if he uncovered his ally’s secret—but the risk was too great, at least for now. “Someplace else, then,” Dead Rick said. “A faerie realm, but not this one.”

“Close enough by to be of use to Nadrett? The Goodemeades would never let him into Rose House, and there are no others within London.”

There had never needed to be, not when the palace was a city unto itself. Even in its fractured state—

Dead Rick’s eyes widened. ’E’d ’ave to be a bloody madman. That didn’t mean it was impossible, though. Fae dared the bad patches of the Onyx Hall when they wanted to escape the notice of others; that was why he and the voice met here, where no one else was likely to go. A daring enough faerie could take it one step further. “Maybe ’e’s in another part of the palace.”

“Another—” The question cut off short, as his ally realized what he meant. Dead Rick caught the soft exhalation of breath, understanding and incredulity. When the voice resumed, it raced quickly through thoughts much like those in the skriker’s own mind. “One of the bad patches, perhaps, that no longer leads where it used to; except that those are known, and in the public view. There might be an exception, but the more likely answer is some isolated fragment still attached to an entrance.”

The places where the Onyx Hall connected to the City of London above. A great many of them had been lost, in the course of the palace’s decay. Dead Rick curled his lip in a bitter snarl. “I’m no bleeding use to you, then; I don’t remember where they was.”

“I do,” the voice murmured, lost in thought. “Both above and below, but I think it will be necessary to search from the City. If such a thing exists, it would be perfect for Nadrett’s purposes: he and Chrennois enter only from the mortal world, without anyone to see, but the enchantments on the faerie side give them a protected space in which to work. The question is where, and that, you will have to answer for me.”

Dead Rick startled. “Me? Why?”

“Because I have no means of tracking them. The only way for me to determine if their laboratory lies on the other side of an entrance would be to try walking through it, and I don’t fancy playing that particular game of chance. It would be a terrible disappointment if I buried myself in airless dirt or scattered my soul to the four winds, when I am so close to achieving my objectives.”

It almost sounded like humor. Dead Rick was glad the voice had regained a measure of good feeling, but not so glad he lost sight of his own difficulties. “I can’t go up there.”

“I’ll supply you with bread.”

“To ’ell with the bread! Well, I need that, too, I suppose, but Nadrett’s the real problem. I go missing again, ’e’ll ’ave my fucking ’ead off. And then ’e’ll make my ’ead tell ’im where I’ve been, and what I’ve been doing. You don’t want me spreading your secrets around, then send some other dog.”

The silence lasted so long, he wondered if the voice had gone to do just that. Dead Rick wasn’t being a coward; in this case, preserving his own hide went hand in hand with preserving his ally’s. But it seemed the other had simply been thinking the matter through, for when the reply came at last, it didn’t sound angry at all. “I will take care of Nadrett.”

Dead Rick frowned. “Take care of ’im? How?”

“I won’t kill him, if that’s what you’re hoping for,” the voice said dryly. “Not yet. But I think I can arrange a distraction, so that he’ll not realize you’ve gone missing. You will have to be quick—the quicker the better—but a couple of hours should be sufficient for you to visit all the lost entrances, and look for signs that anyone has been through them recently.”

He thought about asking what this distraction might be, then thought the better of it. What I don’t know I can’t give away. Or be scared of. “If they ’ave?”

“Do not go through.” Dead Rick heaved a sigh of relief. “Return to the palace, notify me—by a different signal; we’ve used the night garden too often—and I will tell you what to do next.”

If he moved fast enough, he could possibly even risk going back to the Academy, and telling Irrith what he had learned. But even as that thought took shape in Dead Rick’s head, the voice spoke again. “Before you go, I will have your oath that you will not tell anyone else the location of Chrennois’s laboratory.”

Dead Rick’s mouth fell open. “My oath?”

“Yes.” The word was cold once more. “Since it seems you cannot be trusted to hold your tongue otherwise.”

“Even Nadrett don’t make us swear oaths!”

A contemptuous sound answered him. “For very practical reasons, I assure you; he would make his minions swear six times a day if he could. Fortunately for me, I enjoy more freedom in the matter. You will swear, or we are done.”

Dead Rick could ask Irrith for bread, or go into the City without it. Surely other people remembered where the entrances had been. But did he dare throw this ally away?

He ground his teeth together, remembering the original form of their deal. “Tell me something first. More about myself.”

“After turning to outside help the way you have, you expect me to reward you?”

The coldness was back, and stronger. Dead Rick already crawled for Nadrett; he was damned if he’d do it for this bastard, too. Any more than he had to. “No, I expects you to pay me. Like we agreed.”

Silence made him wonder if the voice had gone away, if that demand was one push too many. But the words came at last, clipped and hard. “You came to the Onyx Hall not long after Lune became Queen. Ostensibly because cities breed disease, and therefore death, which is in your nature; but the truth is that you were lonely in Yorkshire, and liked the notion of companionship. To put it in crude terms, you wanted a pack.”

How in Mab’s name could he know that? Even if the voice had been here centuries ago, he couldn’t be sure what had been in Dead Rick’s head. Unless they’d been friends—no, not a chance. And Yorkshire… that was just unexpected enough to be true. There were Yorkshire fae among the refugees, and their accents sounded nothing like Dead Rick’s. But some fae changed their way of speaking, and others did not. For all I know, eight years ago I didn’t sound like a cockney.

It was the payment he’d asked for, even if it came without proof. He didn’t dare fight for more. Hanging his head, Dead Rick asked, “’Ow do I swear?”

As far back as he could remember, he’d never given his binding word, nor heard anyone else do the same. The voice instructed him, and Dead Rick spoke the oath. “In Mab’s name, I swear not to tell nobody where Chrennois’s laboratory is, except you, or if you says I can.”

It was more than mere words. He felt the promise wrap around him like an unbreakable chain. Shivering, Dead Rick hoped his ally could be trusted. It had just become that much harder to look to anyone else for help.

Hyde Park, Kensington: July 25, 1884

Despite the fine summer’s day, Hyde Park was not well populated for one o’clock in the afternoon. The London Season was nearly done; soon the quality would be departing for their country estates, the men to hunt grouse, the women to visit with one another and either celebrate their escape from the city or bemoan the tedium of rural life, as their dispositions inclined them.

“When will your family be leaving?” Myers asked Miss Kittering, as they strolled down one of the park’s graveled paths.

He was vaguely aware that they seemed to have misplaced the maid who was supposed to be chaperoning the girl. Myers hardly regretted her absence—unpleasant woman—but it was not really appropriate for him and Miss Kittering to be walking alone, even in a public place such as this. Indeed, it might do damage to her reputation.

Miss Kittering did not seem to care. “Not until the fourteenth, I think. Mama is convinced she can arrange a match for me before then, and all my efforts to convince her that I will not do it fall on deaf ears.” She sounded both disgruntled and impressed.

Startled, Myers said, “Do you not care to be matched?”

The young woman hesitated, concealing her uncertainty behind her fan. “I… perhaps I am a foolish girl, too easily swayed by sentiment, but I cannot marry where I have not given my heart.”

Myers’s own heart contracted with an unaccustomed pang. It was foolish, and he knew it; he hardly knew this girl more than twenty years his junior. They’d met only a handful of times, and during the first two of those—meetings of the London Fairy Society—he had scarcely registered her, noting only that she seemed more rebellious against her respectable class than was likely to end well for her. But then they had encountered one another by chance, outside the meetings, and something about her was so oddly familiar…

She reminded him of Annie, no matter how hard he tried to ignore it. The way she held her head, and her manner of speaking; had she not been born years before Annie drowned herself, Myers might have thought her his lost love reborn, like some Hindu tale.

It was foolish, and it was disloyal to Eveleen, his wife. He pushed the unquiet feelings of his heart aside, and answered her as innocuously as he could. “At least being married, or going into the countryside, will save you from your mother’s unwise taste in servants.”

His hand, damn it for a traitor, tried to rise and brush her cheek, from which the bruises had faded. Miss Kittering colored as if he’d done it anyway. “Yes, well—the servant had her reasons. Which is not to say I forgive her, but…”

He thought at first that she she paused so the bored young gentleman passing in an open carriage would not hear her words. But when the gentleman was gone, Miss Kittering was still silent. “But?” Myers prompted her.

The annoyed crease between her brows was mercifully not much like Annie at all. “Oh, I—I can’t get the blessed woman out of my head.”

Myers had the distinct impression that she had almost used a different word than blessed. “Is it guilt, do you think?”

Miss Kittering’s golden head whipped around to regard him indignantly. “Guilt? Certainly not! I had nothing to do with—” She stopped again and gritted her teeth. Then, taking a deep breath, she said, “I trust your good judgment, Mr. Myers. Perhaps you can guide me in a matter which has been troubling me for some time now.”

“I certainly will do my best.”

She looked away from him, fingers playing with her fan. “The maid, as I said, had her reasons for attacking me. She… lost someone dear to her, I suspect; a brother, perhaps. I fear it drove her mad. She somehow got it into her head that I knew something of this—which I most certainly did not—and was attempting to beat that information out of me. For the sake of the one she lost.”

Myers, studying the tense line of her neck, the movement of the fan, considered her phrasing. Most certainly did not. “Have you learned something since then?”

Again that look, both disgruntled and impressed. “How do you know these things?”

I have spent a great deal of time watching women lie, usually about their ability to raise ghosts. Though he was nothing on Sidgwick, for such observations. Myers knew his own desire for success sometimes blinded him. “What you’ve learned—is that what troubles you?”

“No. Well, yes—” Miss Kittering sighed. “The question that plagues me is, what do I owe to a crazed Irish maid who tried to strangle me?”

“You mean, do you owe her your assistance.”

She looked away again, then nodded.

Myers wanted to ask for more details, but her obvious reticence told him not to push. Considered in its most general terms, however, the crux of the matter was clear. “Would it do anyone any good for her to know? Either the maid, or this fellow she lost?”

A long silence answered that, until they had nearly reached the bank of the Serpentine. Finally—grudgingly—Miss Kittering said, “It might.”

“Would it cost you much to help?”

Even more grudgingly, she said, “No.”

“Then, from what you have told me, the only reason to refuse is spite toward this maid, for what she did to you. But your wounds healed, and hers, it seems, cannot. Unless someone helps her.”

Staring out over the placid waters of the artificial lake, Miss Kittering spoke again, sounding oddly lost and confused. “I’m not accustomed to feeling this way. There was a time I would have forgotten her without hesitation.”

Quietly, Myers said, “I must confess, I would think less of you if you did.”

She turned to face him, skirts brushing pebbles into rattling motion. “That, too, is unaccustomed. I never thought I would care so much what you think. But I do; I find I cannot bear the thought of you condemning me.” Miss Kittering sighed. “So be it, then. I know what I must do.”

St. Mary Abbots Workhouse, Kensington: July 27, 1884

Following her release from the black punishment cell, Eliza heeded Quinn’s advice and behaved herself, swallowing every bit of rebellion and reluctance. They churned uneasily in her gut—along with a case of the gripes she got from bad food—but she held her peace. To really get the sergeant’s help, she would need proof, and she couldn’t get it from inside here. Eliza doubted she could win free by model behavior, but it was at least worth a try; and in the meanwhile, she would look for other options. She’d made a mistake, trying to run so early, before she knew enough.

So when the matron came to find her a little over a week later, Eliza was not locked away, pressing on her own eyeballs out of desperation; she was up to her elbows in scalding hot water and soap, scrubbing the battered tiles of the workhouse floor. “Another visitor,” the woman said. “You’re a popular one, aren’t you?”

Her tone made it clear what she thought of that, but Eliza showed no offense. She dried her hands, curtsied, and followed the matron, wondering. Hoping. Quinn back again? Has he found proof of the faeries?

Not Quinn. The matron led her to a different room, which proved to be a small parlor, of the sort where ladies from the Workhouse Visiting Society would take their tea, while being told grand lies about the public good such places did. One such silk-clad lady was waiting in the corner, studying a bad landscape painting on the wall, when Eliza entered, with the matron close behind.

Then the lady turned around, and Eliza stopped dead. It was Louisa Kittering.

Who swept past her as if she weren’t there and took the matron’s hands in her own, nonsense courtesies spilling from her mouth—“So grateful to you, just rest yourself in this chair, please, there’s nothing here you need worry yourself about in the slightest”—whereupon the woman nodded, smiling vacantly, and sat herself down as if she’d forgotten her own name.

“Don’t say anything,” the changeling told Eliza. She said it almost in the same breath, but her tone and entire posture changed, the bright silliness falling away like a costume. “And please, for the love of Mab, don’t hit me again. If I scream, we’ll have half the staff on us in an instant, and I can’t charm them all.”

The creature was between her and the door. Eliza backed away, wishing she had a crucifix. “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph—”

Louisa Kittering’s face showed exasperation. “That won’t do any good against me, you know—it doesn’t even scare me anymore. Will you hush? I’m here to help you.”

Eliza stopped. No, she really had just said that. “You’re a liar.”

“What I am is the one who can help you get him back.” She held up the lost photo of Owen.

For all her apparent calm, the changeling squeaked in alarm when Eliza snatched the picture from her gloved hand. I thought it gone forever. Her heart thudded hard against her ribs. “Why—why would you do that?”

Composure regained, the changeling lifted her eyebrows as if she were wondering that herself. “Before we say anything more, a few basic rules. We aren’t going to talk about who, and what, I am—”

“The devil we aren’t,” Eliza said violently.

A raised hand stopped her. “I’ll have you know the girl you’re so concerned about chose this. She had to; I couldn’t have done… what I did unless she was willing. She’s off to enjoy the life she wants, without fear her parents will chase her down. Isn’t that a gift?”

“And I’m to be believing you did that out of the goodness of your heart?” Eliza snorted to show what she thought of that. “What do you get out of it?”

The changeling smiled. “The ability to stand here in front of you while you fling words of your God at me, without fear they’ll harm me. The safety of knowing my protection won’t wear off, the way other kinds do. The freedom to stay in London, so long as I keep to this life. She and I both got what we wanted.”

For all the tales she’d heard of changelings, Eliza had never thought of the faerie side. She’d assumed the point was to steal mortals away—and maybe for some of them, it was. When it came to the faerie left in the mortal’s place, though, she hadn’t given it much thought, other than to call it mischief on their parts. This one wants to live as a mortal…?

Not fully mortal—not given what she’d just done to the matron, who was still smiling at the far wall, not heeding a word they said. But partially so, enough to protect.

Eliza wouldn’t believe it until she laid eyes on the real Louisa Kittering. But in the end, one spoiled, rebellious young woman mattered far less to her than Owen. For him, there was no aid she would not accept. And this seemed more promising than trying to arrange for the changeling to be delivered to Sergeant Quinn as proof. That, Eliza thought, can come later. “How do you mean to help me?”

The creature who was now Louisa Kittering looked around the workhouse parlor, her mouth forming a pretty expression of distaste. “First, by getting you out of here. Ash and Thorn, what a dreadful place. I confess I felt none too kindly toward you after you beat me black and blue—but I expect you’ve had three blows by now for every one I took. Wouldn’t you agree? Of course you would, if it means seeing this end. It will take a while longer, I fear; it’s a bit of a tricky thing, convincing these people to let you go, and I can’t be quite as direct as once I would have been. You can wait a few more days, can’t you?”

Eliza only stared, listening to the new Miss Kittering talk about workhouse overseers and justices of the peace—not to mention Mrs. Kittering—as if they were only tiny challenges, easily overcome. She collected herself with a snap and said, “What then?”

“Then,” Louisa said, “you go back to Islington. I trust you recall the house where the London Fairy Society gathers? There’s another meeting next Friday week; you should be free by then. Speak to the Goodemeade sisters privately, and tell them…” The young woman paused, and chose her next words with care. “Tell them you come in Cyma’s name, and are searching for the boy in that photo. They will help you get him back.”

“Why should they help me?” Eliza ran one hand over her ragged hair, and felt tears unexpectedly burning behind her eyes. “You still haven’t even said why you’re doing it.”

Louisa became very occupied with her gloves, tugging their delicate seams straight along her fingers. “Someone I… that is, someone convinced me it was the right thing to do. Someone whose good opinion I value, and do not want to lose.” Her mouth quirked, as if at an unfamiliar taste.

Eliza was not about to question it. She was not certain about the changeling’s advice, though. “A few months gone, I heard a lady from the Society tell Louisa Kittering that the others there were not ready for… certain truths.” A lady who, she strongly suspected, had subsequently taken the girl’s place.

“True enough, of some,” Louisa admitted. “But not of others. You needn’t fear saying anything to the sisters; they know more than you could imagine.”

Even if the changeling was wrong—even if the Miss Goodemeades were not so eager to help as Louisa assumed—Eliza would find a way to convince them. “You haven’t said where Owen is.”

Again, Louisa would not meet her gaze. This time, though, she seemed less uncomfortable for herself than for Eliza. “You understand that he’s been among the fae for a long time. And I’m afraid the ones who had him first were… not kind at all.”

Anger and grief alike rose in her throat. “What did they do to him?”

“I don’t know. But he’s being cared for, now—by an Irish lady, in fact; her name is Feidelm—and if there’s a way to mend him, the Goodemeades will find it.”

If. Eliza squeezed her eyes shut, unwilling to let a tear slip free. But what had she expected? For Owen to emerge after seven years lost, smiling as he always had? All this time, the promise she’d repeated to herself over and over again had been, I will get you back. Now it seemed that would not be the end. Clenching her fist until it hurt, Eliza added another promise to it. I’ll find a way to make you well.

And then make the ones who hurt you pay for it.

She opened her eyes to find Louisa giving the seated matron a considering look. “She’ll be coming to before long. When she does, I will go.”

A month ago, the sight of the new Miss Kittering had filled Eliza with fury; now the changeling felt more like the rope that was offering to draw her up from the abyss. Desperate, Eliza stuffed the photo inside her ragged dress, then closed the distance between them and grasped the young woman by her silk-covered shoulders. “Swear to me that all of this has been true. You’ll free me from this place.”

“I will,” Louisa said, her body stiff with surprise.

“If you do not, then my oath to God, I’ll win myself free, and then I’ll hunt you down.”

She meant it, and she saw that the changeling believed her. “I’ll do everything I can. You have my word.”

It would have to be enough.

The City of London: July 30, 1884

The hour was not quite midday, and London’s beating heart was full of life. Men thronged the narrow, old-fashioned streets of the City, the business men nearly as uniform as soldiers in their suits and top hats, the street-sellers and beggars and musicians a less orderly lot. They carried with them a welter of scents, from food to horseshit to the macassar oil on the gentlemen’s hair. Somehow, Dead Rick was supposed to pick his way through that knot to find the few thin strands that might tell him where Nadrett had been—and quickly, before his master noticed he was gone.

Dead Rick’s faceless ally had, as promised, slipped a piece of bread to him. The skriker had found it in his waistcoat pocket earlier today—a trick that unnerved him even more than Irrith’s beetle had, because he didn’t know how it had gotten there. But that was the signal for him to go into the City, so he swallowed it and went. Hoping, with a devoutness few Londoners showed for their divine Master nowadays, that the voice was upholding his other promise, to distract Nadrett from Dead Rick’s absence.

Just don’t ask ’ow ’e’s doing it.

Aldersgate, Crutched Friars, Threadneedle Street, and Ketton Street. Four places for Dead Rick to search. He knew where Aldersgate was—or rather, where it had been, before the gate itself was torn down—and Threadneedle was important enough of a street to be familiar, but for the other two, he would need help. The voice had tried to tell him where to look, but directions meant little when most of Dead Rick’s memories of the City were gone.

He went to Threadneedle Street first. There had once been a well here, the voice said, that gave access to the Onyx Hall, but it was long gone, replaced by pumps. Weakened by the loss of the wall, the palace below had fractured, taking the Queen’s old lesser presence chamber with it. But some piece might remain, cut off from the rest.

Dead Rick circled the area in human form, wondering where the entrance had been, and how anyone would pass through it without the well. He sniffed the air, and got a nose full of smells, but nothing that hinted at Nadrett, Chrennois, or their photographic experiments. ’E should be up ’ere, not me. ’E knows right where they used to be. I ain’t going to find nothing, searching like this.

Scowling, he looked around for a private corner, and found none. In the end he slid under a cab that stood at the corner by the Royal Exchange, and changed in the shadow while the driver and passenger argued. But even in dog form, his nose turned up nothing. Did that mean there was nothing to find—or just that his quarries had left no trace of their passage?

On four paws, he trotted down Cheapside until he reached St. Martins le Grand, then went north more slowly, examining the ground once it became Aldersgate Street. The entrance here had been a tree, long ago, but everything around him was stone and brick, without so much as a shrub or a potted plant to soften the harshness. Dead Rick had to dodge aside when a man tried to kick him out of the way, but went back once the bastard was gone, to make certain he didn’t miss so much as an inch. In fact, so absorbed was he in searching, he made it as far as Barbican before realizing he’d gone beyond the reach of the Onyx Hall.

Back in man form, he retraced his steps to the City and began to ask directions. He ignored the gentlemen; they would look askance at his rough attire and bare feet, and probably only know the principal streets anyway. On Cheapside a seller of newspapers scratched through his whiskers and shook his head. “Crutched Friars, sure—over by the Tower. Go down King William Street, then Lombard, which’ll turn into Fenchurch; then right on Mark Lane, and left at the church—that’s St. Olave ’Art Street—and pretty soon the street will be Crutched Friars. But Ketton? I’ve been selling papers ’ere since I were nine years old, and I ain’t never ’eard of Ketton.”

“The cove told me it were a big street,” Dead Rick said, hoping he could remember the first set of directions. “North of Cheapside, going from west to east.”

The newspaper seller shrugged. “Gresham Street, then, or London Wall. All the rest is little poky lanes, unless you goes more north.”

North would be outside the wall. It had to be one of those two. Even in the City, where streets mostly stayed the same as centuries before, sometimes things changed; what the fae still called the Fish Street entrance now gave onto Queen Victoria Street.

Dead Rick searched Gresham Street and London Wall both, from one end to the other, and the curved length of Crutched Friars, until it became Jewry Street around Aldgate. Every yard of roadway was paved and curbed, lined with buildings and trampled by people, without the faintest hint of any scent he recognized.

It had been a good notion—until it fell apart.

His steps dragged as he turned back toward the Goblin Market. They dragged even more as he went down the rest of Mark Lane, on his way to Billingsgate and the door there; hoardings blocked one side of the roadway, and a piece of paper glued to them promised in bold letters that it wouldn’t be long at all before the new Mark Lane Underground station opened for business. “Bugger you all,” he snarled under his breath, then hunched his shoulders and hurried by. The visible work here was already done, the roadway dug up and tunneled and covered once more, but the navvies were probably right beneath his feet, toiling away at destroying his home.

He wasn’t even certain how safe it was to use the Billingsgate door. It had clung to existence after the rails were laid from Mark Lane to Eastcheap—no, he thought, the Queen ’eld onto it. But if her grip slipped, any faerie in the middle of passing through might go along with the door.

His choice was that or crawling through the sewers, or else going into some other part of the Hall, and hoping nobody noticed him on his way back to the Market. Sighing, Dead Rick went into the pub that now covered the door, and put up a charm to hide himself briefly as he passed the owner on his way to the cellar stairs. Not that he needed it; the man’s wits had been half-scrambled by all the charms used to make him forget the temporary invasion after the earthquake in May.

Down in the cellar, with one hand outstretched to open the door, he stopped.

The entrance was enchanted, just like the rest of the Hall. Enchantment was a faerie thing, and faerie things involved faerie elements. That was very nearly as far as Dead Rick’s knowledge of science went, but he knew two things more. First, that one of those elements was aether.

And second, that the Academy had invented devices for detecting it.

He’d seen one in the Goblin Market, after someone brought in a load of things supposedly from the faerie courts of India and China. Jade figurines, strange weapons, things like that. A Greek trader named Arkheton had been interested in buying them, but only if they were genuine, and so he’d tested them with one of those devices. An aetheric versorium, that was the term.

All but two pieces proved to be false, and Arkheton kept the versorium in case anyone tried to swindle him again.

’E won’t mind if I borrow it, right?

Dead Rick almost didn’t make it out of the Goblin Market with his head attached, but not because Arkheton objected to him stealing the object. The skriker doubted his victim even knew the thing was gone. Right now, you could steal a man’s left nutmeg and ’e might not notice.

His ally, it seemed, had decided to cover his absence by laying an enormous charm over what remained of the warren, confusing both sight and sound. Smell was more or less untouched, and that was the only reason Dead Rick had been able to carry out his purpose; he’d closed his eyes, ignored what he heard, and followed his nose to the incense of Arkheton’s stall. Then nearly lost his ears when Charcoal Eddie, convinced this was prelude to some kind of attack, began waving a rusted sword at anything resembling movement nearby.

“Blood and Bone,” he muttered, climbing with relief back into the cellar. “I thought I was working with somebody subtle.”

But it was effective. Nobody would be able to tell Dead Rick was gone. He didn’t know how much longer the effect would last, though; best to hurry.

Nothing at Crutched Friars. Nothing at Threadneedle. At Aldersgate…

The device looked something like a compass, with a barrier to prevent the needle from swinging about to point at the faerie holding it. On the way up Aldersgate Street, the needle began to twitch, and a thin line of something shimmering copper began to show along its length; the line grew, and the needle moved more strongly as he neared a particular building. When Dead Rick held the versorium out, it pointed steadily toward the building’s corner, and the line steadied to about a quarter the needle’s length.

Not much, for what ought to be the most powerful enchantments in London. But enough to tell him that something faerie still existed there.

Dead Rick had no desire to find out what, not on his own. Chrennois could be inside; so could half a dozen Market bullies, all prepared to kill anyone who walked in without permission. He would leave that to his ally.

And why didn’t that blighter get ’is own versorium and do this ’imself? It don’t need a good nose—so why send me?

Stupid question. Standing out here was dangerous; it might attract attention. Much better, from the voice’s perspective, to send an expendable skriker.

Dead Rick quickly put the versorium behind his back—as if that would save him, had anyone been watching. Then, with a shiver, he went back to the chaos his ally had made of the Goblin Market.

White Lion Street, Islington: August 6, 1884

There would be no waiting for Friday. Eliza walked through the gates of the Kensington workhouse late in the afternoon, and immediately turned her steps toward Islington.

She’d seen nothing more of Louisa, but the changeling must have kept her word; someone had persuaded the authorities to release a woman that only a little while ago had been declared a violent lunatic, a menace to those around her. Eliza kept to her best behavior while waiting for freedom, but couldn’t resist making a rude gesture once she was clear of the gates. They could go to the devil, the lot of them, from the workhouse matrons to the justice who put her there.

Put her there, and then put her back out, with nothing more than the dress and shoes she wore. All her other possessions had vanished somewhere between assault and freedom, save the photograph of Owen, rescued from Cromwell Road. How they expected her to feed herself, she didn’t know. Begging, she supposed. And it would come to that soon enough, when she dared not return to Whitechapel. But before she did that—before she decided what, if anything, to tell Quinn about the changeling—she would do what she’d been trying to do for seven long years.

She would get Owen back.

This time, there was no spying from a neighbor’s front steps, no disguising herself as more than she was. Eliza walked straight up to No. 9 and knocked on the door. When the maid opened it, Eliza said, “I’m here to see Mrs. Chase. Don’t bother trying to keep me out; it’s urgent business I’ve come on, concerning the London Fairy Society and the Goodemeade sisters. If she isn’t at home, I’ll wait until she is.”

Intimidating people wasn’t so very difficult; mostly what it required was an absolute refusal to back down. Eliza was prepared to shove the maid out of the way, if it proved necessary. It didn’t: a door not far down the hall opened, and Mrs. Chase herself looked out. “What on earth… Miss Baker, wasn’t it? Whatever are you doing here?”

The maid stepped clear. Eliza came into the hall—it would be a good deal harder to force her from the house, now—and said, “I need your help.”

Mrs. Chase’s white eyebrows rose. “Oh dear. Do come in—shut the door, Mary; we don’t need the whole of Islington knowing our affairs—and I will see what I can do.”

The parlor had a much more lived-in look than the drawing room upstairs, with faded upholstery and a pattern of roses climbing the wallpaper. Mrs. Chase gestured Eliza toward a seat, but she didn’t take it. “I need to see the Goodemeade sisters,” she said.

The old woman’s brow knitted in confusion. “I’m afraid they aren’t here, Miss Baker.”

“I know that,” Eliza said. Belatedly, she realized she sounded like an Irishwoman. She hadn’t attempted to pass for English since she attacked the changeling; after that, there hadn’t been much point. Now she was out of the habit. It doesn’t matter—I hope. “But you seemed friendly with them; you can tell me where they live.”

Maybe the accent did matter; Mrs. Chase seemed deeply reluctant. “They are… rather private individuals, Miss Baker. It wouldn’t be right of me to direct you to their house, out of the blue, without even asking them first. But if you would like to write a letter—”

“I do not have time for that!” Eliza grimaced, regretting the sharpness of her tone. “Forgive me, Mrs. Chase. This is very important. I come in Cyma’s name; I’m searching for someone, a friend who’s been missing for a very long time, and I was told the Goodemeades could help. Please, I must find him.”

She didn’t miss the way Mrs. Chase’s face stilled at the name “Cyma.” When Eliza finished speaking, the old woman sat in thought, one finger tapping on her lower lip. Then she nodded decisively. “I cannot send you to their house, but I can ask them to meet with you here. Go to the Angel on the corner—” Rising, she pressed a sixpence into Eliza’s palm. “Have something to drink, and settle your nerves. Come back in half an hour, and we will see what we can do.”

What pride Eliza had once possessed was long since gone. She took the sixpence without hesitation; it was all the money she had in the world. But when Mrs. Chase showed her to the door, Eliza did not go to the coaching inn on the corner of High Street. She started in that direction, but stopped as soon as she could watch the door of No. 9 discreetly, and there she waited.

It wasn’t so much that she intended to follow Mrs. Chase—or Mary, if she sent the maid—to the sisters’ house. Simply that there was something decidedly odd about this entire affair. Clearly there was more going on here than Eliza could see, and she’d had enough of that in her life; right now, information and that sixpence were the only things of value she had.

But the door to No. 9 did not open again. Eliza fretted, rolling the coin between finger and thumb. There might be a back way, some garden gate through which the maid could go, though it did not look like that kind of house. She cursed her failure to look out the window during the meeting a few months ago. Or perhaps the explanation was simpler; Mrs. Chase had only intended to get rid of her, and was not contacting the Goodemeades at all. But in that case, wouldn’t she send her maid to fetch a constable? She couldn’t possibly believe Eliza would fail to return.

Twice she had to move to avoid suspicion, but she came back almost immediately, fast enough that she doubted anyone had slipped away in her absence. Which surely they would have done, if they knew she was spying, and wanted to go to the sisters unseen.

Eliza knew her thoughts were running like panicked dogs, inventing one wild theory after another, all of them probably wrong. She couldn’t help it. To be so close, after all these years—her fingers ached, the coin’s edge digging into them. She loosened her grip, and waited for half an hour to pass.

As soon as she thought it had, she marched back down the street and rapped on the door again.

This time the maid was expecting her. “They’re waiting for you in the parlor,” she said.

They? Eliza opened the door and found three women inside: Mrs. Chase, and the mirror images of the Goodemeade sisters. Where the devil did they come from? She was certain they hadn’t slipped past her on White Lion Street.

Upstairs, perhaps. Mrs. Chase wouldn’t be first widow to seek out female companionship in her old age; maybe the Goodemeades lived here, too, and didn’t want that known. It hardly mattered, though. They were here.

Now she just had to convince them to help her find Owen.

“Miss Baker,” the rose Goodemeade said, “we’re so terribly sorry about what you’ve been through. Please, do sit down—Gertrude, the tea, if you would—and we will do everything we can to help you.”

The changeling had told the truth. Dumbfounded, all the arguments she’d prepared dying on her lips, Eliza took a seat. That easily. They scarcely know me, let alone Owen—and yet, without so much as a single question, they offer to help. She accepted the teacup from the daisy Goodemeade, Gertrude, and almost laughed. Sitting in a parlor, drinking tea out of a porcelain cup, as if she were a respectable woman. And preparing to talk about faeries.

Once she’d taken a sip of the tea, the other Goodemeade—Rosamund, that was her name; it should have been easy to remember—smoothed her hands over her skirt in a businesslike fashion. “Now. Where did you hear that name? Cyma, I mean.”

“From Miss Kittering,” Eliza said.

The sisters exchanged glances. “How exactly did she put it?” Gertrude asked.

Eliza thought back. “She said I should tell ye I came in Cyma’s name.”

They both seemed to breathe a sigh of relief. “And she sent you here for help, I imagine,” Rosamund said. Eliza nodded. The tiny woman shook her head in fond exasperation. “Wouldn’t bring you herself, I see. I wish I could say I’m surprised, but—well. Never mind. Tell us what happened, from the beginning.”

A simple request. Yet when Eliza opened her mouth, nothing came out. She had told Quinn the truth, and that was far more dangerous… but what if they doubted her? The others had spoken so much at the Society meeting; she had no idea what these women knew or believed about faeries. Because you left, she remembered suddenly. It had been lost in the panic of chasing Louisa Kittering. They were trying to invite you to something further. If you had stayed to listen…

Rosamund seemed to guess her thoughts. Smiling encouragment, she said, “Tell us everything. Faeries and all. You won’t surprise us, I assure you.”

Hearing the word out of the other woman’s mouth both unsettled Eliza and steadied her. Licking her lips, she began.

“When I was a girl, my friend Owen and I came across a group of boys tormenting a dog. They’d looped an iron chain around his neck, and they were dragging him about, throwing stones to make him yelp… boys do things like that all the time, and most people hardly take notice, but this dog saw me.” Even now, years later, she remembered those eyes. However much she tried not to. “One look at him, and I—I made the boys stop.”

Ran at them shrieking, actually, and knocked the biggest lad down before he could throw the broken bottle in his hand. Its jagged edge gouged her arm as they fell, but Eliza didn’t feel that until later. She’d slammed his head against the ground, and one of the others got her around the neck, but by then Owen had come to her aid. Six boys, and only two of them; but they were fourteen, and the others a good deal younger. Besides, there’d been a fury in Eliza that none of them were eager to face.

Her hands clenched again, in the stained fabric of her skirt. Eliza stared at them as she said, “The dog let me take the chain from its neck. I knew even then it was in an odd way; sure any dog hurt like that would have tried to bite, but it just stood there and let me help. Once the chain was gone, it licked my hand and limped off, and I thought that was the end.”

She brushed her fingertips across the spot, remembering the brief touch of a warm, soft tongue. Owen hadn’t let her go after the dog, even though Eliza wanted to take it in and feed it. You can’t afford it, a stór; just let it go. You’ve done your good for the day.

All three women were listening patiently. Eliza took a deep breath and went on. “A few days later, when I was returning from church, I met a man.” Even then, before she knew anything about him, his eyes had seemed familiar. “He walked up to me in the street and said, ‘Thank you.’ Then he tried to vanish into the crowd, but I chased him; I wanted to know who he was, and why he’d thanked me. He said his name was Dead Rick, and that I’d saved him.”

For the first time since she began, one of the women made a noise. Eliza paused, looking at Gertrude, but the woman waved her on. She obeyed; if she stopped for long, she might not have the courage to go on. “I kept asking questions—what did he mean, that I’d saved him; I’d never seen him before in my life—until finally he turned into the dog.”

No one looked surprised. Rosamund actually nodded, as if Eliza had confirmed what she already suspected. Eliza could scarcely believe their lack of disbelief; she’d scarcely believed the sight when she saw it with her own eyes. The wiry, hard-faced man had thrown his hands up in disgust—if you’re going to keep pushing like that—and then dropped, curling inward, clothes somehow becoming fur, until he stood on four legs before her. Then he’d licked her hand, in the same spot as before.

“How long ago was this?” Gertrude asked.

“A little more than seven years ago.”

More nodding. Only the sisters; Mrs. Chase listened silently, but it was clear the Goodemeades were the true audience for her tale. “Go on,” Rosamund said.

It was almost easier to tell the next part. Painful as the memory was, it hurt less than remembering how things had begun, the friendship they’d enjoyed once both she and Owen knew the faerie’s nature. Running wild through Whitechapel. Tithing bread to him when they could afford it—sometimes when they couldn’t—so he could be among them safely. Telling him of her mother’s ghost, and him teaching her to make use of that gift, so that it might earn her money someday. “A few months later, I went to Mass, and Owen wasn’t there. Mrs. Darragh was in a fine fury, saying Dead Rick had caught them as they were about to go into the church, and convinced Owen to go with him instead. I slipped out before the priest came in and went looking for them, and—”

The words lodged in her throat like a piece of chicken bone. Try as she might, Eliza couldn’t get them out. If she spoke, she would burst into tears, and she refused to do that in front of these women, when she scarcely knew them. Gertrude patted her on the hand, and that nearly broke her. The woman said softly, “For now, just give us the shape of it. If the details matter, we can worry about them later.”

It helped, a little. “The faeries took him,” she said. There, it was out; now she could go on. “Dead Rick betrayed us. All those months we spent together, the friendship—it was a lie; it meant nothing to him. I was a fool to think it did. Faeries can’t be friends with human mortals. The look he gave me, when I asked him how he could turn against us like that—” He might as well have been looking at a wall that suddenly began to scream at him. Mild curiosity, but nothing more. Cold. Empty.

Gertrude reached out again, but Eliza pulled away before the woman could touch her. “I chased them,” she said, hearing her own voice high and tight, “but they got away. And I never saw Dead Rick again, until last year, when he helped the ones who bombed the railways. Since then I’ve been trying to find people who know something of faeries. I’ve told ye my tale; now ye tell me—who is this Cyma, and can ye help me find Owen?”

Rosamund nodded. “Cyma’s name was… merely a sign to us, to make certain we’d listen to you when you came. We already know where your lad is.”

Her calm, casual words struck like a bolt of lightning. “Where?”

The woman hesitated before answering. Eliza nearly leapt from her seat and shook her. “With the fae, still. But not the ones who took him before. Kinder folk, who are doing for him what they can.”

Eliza’s heart pounded in her ears, making her whole body tremble. “Miss Kittering said he was with an Irish lady.”

“An Irish lady faerie,” Gertrude said. “It’s almost the same thing.”

Rosamund spoke before Eliza could find the words to express how far from the same thing it was. “Please believe us, Miss Baker. There are cruel faeries in this world, certainly—far too many of them, and even more who are only good when someone gives them a reason. But there are those for whom it’s in their nature to be kind. You’ve been badly hurt, you and those close to you, and no kindness after the fact will heal that hurt entirely; but please, believe that not all fae are like that.”

The passion in her voice was startling. Mrs. Chase gave Rosamund a peculiar smile, then said to Eliza, “They’re telling the truth. Remember that, Miss Baker—that I, too, believe there are kind faeries in the world. I’ve lived many long years, and seen more than you can imagine; I hope my word will count for something.”

She said it as if her word should somehow carry a different weight than that of the Goodemeades. Eliza didn’t understand, and honestly didn’t care. Kind faeries, cruel ones; there was only one thing she wanted. “Make them give Owen back to me.”

Another hesitation. This time Eliza did leap to her feet, but Mrs. Chase’s outstretched hand stopped whatever she might have done. “He’s eaten faerie food,” Rosamund said. “Lived among the fae for seven years. We’d have brought him out already, but for fear it would hurt him.”

“Then take me to him.” She said it without thinking. Damn the danger; she could be the heroine in this tale, going underhill to rescue her true love.

Even if it’s been seven long years? Even if you need a photograph to remind yourself of his face?

Even then. If her love wasn’t strong enough to win him free, then she would find something else. The faeries would regret the day they took Owen from her.

The sisters exchanged another one of their glances, as if they were carrying on a conversation no one else could hear. Then Rosamund shrugged, and Gertrude smiled up at Eliza. “Very well. We’ll take you to your friend.”

The Goblin Market, Onyx Hall: August 6, 1884

The usual noise of the Goblin Market had taken on a harder edge of late. Voices were grimmer, laughter more shrill; and everyone kept their weapons close to hand.

Hardface’s latest lover, a Greek maenad named Hippagre, told stories about Roman despots who, knowing that soldiers were coming to kill them, spent their final night hosting a grand party, squandering all their wealth and riches at one go. With tremors repeatedly shaking the Hall, the Market felt a good deal like that—though Dead Rick doubted many fae would take poison at the end. It explained the wild celebrations he witnessed: drinking, rutting, the torment of mortals.

But not the violence. That, he feared, was the fault of his ally—at least in part.

The versorium wasn’t the only thing to go missing during the chaos laid over the Market. A great many things of value had vanished, from bread to weapons to enchanted mirrors. Every major power in the Market had been robbed: Nadrett, Aspell, Hardface, even Lacca, who lost most of what little she had scraped together in the last few months.

Dead Rick’s absence had not been marked, but the outrage meant Nadrett kept Dead Rick near constantly on four feet and running at his heels, whether he needed to be there or not. Currently the master was pacing while Old Gadling took a horsewhip to the back of the clurican who had been the guardian of the bread lockbox. It was the third time he’d had the Irish faerie beaten, and Dead Rick was serving absolutely no purpose there, but Nadrett insisted on it anyway.

Slipping away to report to his ally had almost cost him another memory. After he came back, he’d been saved only by a fight outside the room; Lacca’s few remaining allies tried to steal the string of new mortals Nadrett was going to force into tithing bread. Then there had been another earthquake—not as bad as the one that broke the Market, but more than a tremor—and by the time that was done, Nadrett had been distracted from his punishment. The voice insisted Dead Rick go with him to investigate the Aldersgate door, but how he could do that without getting killed on his return, the skriker didn’t know.

Nadrett gestured to Gadling, who lowered the bloody whip and rubbed his right arm as if it were tired. The clurican sagged in his chains, weeping. While the thrumpin unlocked him, Dead Rick learned why Nadrett insisted he be there. “Run ’im out,” the master said, turning away in disgust. “Into the sewers. Let ’im bloody well drown in shit.”

With Nadrett’s temper so uncertain, he didn’t dare hesitate. Dead Rick snarled and advanced on the fallen Irish faerie. The clurican was so exhausted, he didn’t move at first; Dead Rick had to bite his arm before he’d start running.

Then it was out the door, through the desperate merriment and half-veiled hostility of the Market, all the while wondering if any of it mattered one fucking bit anymore. Dead Rick ran heavily, his heart far less into the chase than usual, and he didn’t pay the blindest bit of attention to anything around him until a net dropped onto his head.

It was made of bronze chains, and their weight bore him instantly to the floor. Dead Rick’s snarls changed from menace to fear. Stupid whelp—stupid and blind, and now you’re going to die— He twisted, trying to see who had trapped him, but someone was there, bundling the net around him and then flipping him upside down to be carried out of the room. Dead Rick saw legs, hands, the back of someone’s head—Blood and Bone. Mortals. But who are they working for?

The answer waited not far away. The men carrying him dropped him to the floor again, chains and all, and Dead Rick looked up to see the rich green of Valentin Aspell’s old-fashioned coat.

“My apologies,” the faerie said, sounding not at all contrite. “As you told me before—so very insistently—it is necessary to give Nadrett some explanation for why you ended up in my presence. He will soon be receiving a message that his skriker has become my prisoner, along with various others of his minions; and while he and I negotiate what should happen next, the one who paid me to kidnap you has a job for you to perform.” Long fingers laid a piece of bread on the stone near Dead Rick’s face; then he heard a pocket-watch click open. “His instructions are that you are to meet him on the north side of St. Paul’s Cathedral in half an hour.”

Dead Rick’s jaws had slipped through a hole in the net, which bound him almost as effectively as a muzzle. Aspell said, “My men are going to unbind you now. I do ask that you not attempt to attack me, as I only did this to get you away from your master without suspicion.”

So this was how his ally intended to arrange the investigation of the laboratory. As soon as Dead Rick was halfway free, he shifted to man form and said, “Nadrett ain’t going to bargain. ’E’ll tell you to kill us all.”

“I think not,” Aspell said dryly. “Once again, you have no faith in my abilities. Perhaps I will take that dispute up with you on some future day. In the meanwhile, you have an engagement to keep.”

One that would, at last, answer the question he’d been chasing since spring. And then I’ll make sure that faceless bastard makes good on ’is end of the promise.

Scooping up the bread, Dead Rick flung a glamour over himself and ran for the Billingsgate door.

City of London: August 6, 1884

Dusk was falling over the world above, turning the light murky and gray. Some of the gas lamps had been lit, but not yet all; in the shadows north of St. Paul’s, Dead Rick needed no charms to hide.

He slowed as he reached the spot, ears and nose sharp for any movement. There were mortals about, of course, but that was it; no fae, no one under any glamour.

Because you’re early, fool. Unlike Aspell, he didn’t have a pocket-watch, but it couldn’t have been more than fifteen minutes since he’d left. Dead Rick settled behind a pillar on the curving stairs of the northern portico, where the shadows were deepest, and crossed his arms over his chest to wait.

Before the half hour was up, he saw someone approaching.

It looked like a mortal man, indistinguishable from any of the hundreds of clerks employed by the shops and financial establishments around them. As soon as the fellow drew near, though, Dead Rick sensed the presence of a glamour. The face was of course none he recognized, but—

He found himself staring down the barrel of a pistol. “If you attempt to see my face, I will shoot you on the spot.”

The voice was the one that had spoken to him from the air. His ally had come in person.

Dead Rick licked his lips. Curiosity clawed at him; after so many months, he finally had a chance to see who he’d been working with—which he would need, if his ally backed out on the promise to retrieve his memories. But it wasn’t worth risking right now. Later. When ’e’s not paying attention.

“Sure,” he said easily, not wanting his ally to think about demanding another oath. “If I needs to get your attention, though, what should I call you? Fred? Joe?”

The other faerie uncocked the pistol, looking unamused. “‘My lord’ will do. Come along.”

’E really must be a gentleman. Rolling his eyes, Dead Rick followed him up St. Martins le Grand to Aldersgate Street.

His lordship had to be shown which building to look for. He shook his head slightly when Dead Rick pointed it out, as if surprised by what it had become.

“Is anybody else down there?” Dead Rick asked, looking down as if he could see through the pavement to the faerie palace below.

“I doubt it.” Milord paced around the building’s corner, one hand on his chin in thought.

He doubted it? Dead Rick wished he’d stolen someone else’s gun on the way out of the Market. “What if you’re wrong?”

“Then we will take care of them.” His ally paused and smiled at him, condescendingly. “It is likely to be only Chrennois. Nadrett knows how many can keep a secret.”

Two—if one of ’em is dead. But Nadrett needed the French sprite’s knowledge, so two alive it was. Dead Rick drew his knife and tested its edge. Good enough.

Milord stretched one hand out, just shy of touching the stone. “Take hold of my sleeve,” he said absently, considering the structure in front of him. Dead Rick obeyed. “The alder tree used to envelop those who passed through; this, I think, should—”

The stone flexed outward, and swallowed them whole.

Eager as Eliza was to see Owen, the departure from White Lion Street was delayed when she staggered and nearly fell going down the house’s front steps. Somehow the Goodemeades drew out of her the admission that she hadn’t eaten since her workhouse supper the night before, and then the next thing she knew she was bundled into the Angel coaching inn for a good solid meal. Eliza was on her second meat pie before she realized she’d admitted to being in the workhouse—and that no one had so much blinked at the admission.

As if they already knew. The Goodemeades, and Mrs. Chase; the new Louisa Kittering, and this unknown Cyma: How much information had they shared among them?

It didn’t matter, so long as she got Owen back. Eliza ate as fast as she could, and then Mrs. Chase hired a carriage to take them into the City. Along the way, the sisters extracted a promise from Eliza: that she would offer no harm to anyone who didn’t offer it first. “And that’s harm of all kinds,” Gertrude added. “Fists and feet, any iron or weapons you might have on you—”

“Am I at least allowed to talk?” Eliza asked, meaning it as a jest.

“So long as you don’t speak of religious matters,” the woman answered her seriously.

Of course: holy things had power against faeries. So long as she had her voice, she wasn’t unarmed.

It gave her courage, but only a little. She was going among faeries. And the Goodemeades had made it clear that the experience would be even more strange than she could imagine.

But they’ve done it, and so has Mrs. Chase; gone in, and come out again to tell the tale. You can do the same. You will.

The carriage took them to a narrower road south of Cannon Street. In the light of the gas lamps, Eliza spotted the plaque on the wall: Cloak Lane. Mrs. Chase paid the driver and waited until he was gone, though it didn’t mean they were alone on the street. Giving no heed to the people around them, the old woman took Eliza by the hands. “Trust me,” she said earnestly, for all the world as if the trust of an Irish workhouse convict was a valuable thing to have. “We—myself and the sisters both—will make certain you are safe.”

Eliza pulled her hands free. “Just take me to him.”

“Watch closely, then,” Rosamund said, turning to face the buildings at their side. “If you don’t, you’ll never see it.”

Before Eliza could ask her what she meant by that, the buildings began to shift.

They moved without moving: surely the brick walls stayed exactly where they were, but somehow there was a space between them. It was unmistakable—yet people walked on past, stepping off the pavement into the street to avoid the four women, without ever glancing at the impossibility happening just a few feet away. The gap widened until it was large enough to admit them, and then it stopped; and Rosamund glanced over her shoulder. “Come along, then. It won’t stay open for long.”

Eliza’s heart was beating far too fast, but it was excitement as much as fear. Clenching her hands into fists, she followed Rosamund through the faerie door.

Aldersgate, Onyx Hall: August 6, 1884

“Qu’est-ce que vous faites ici?”

Rootlike stone tendrils were still crawling off Dead Rick’s body when Chrennois spoke. The sprite stood at a table, surrounded by crystal bottles and shallow tubs, and he blinked as if utterly astonished to see visitors.

The other creature in the room didn’t bother with questions. It dove at Dead Rick and his ally with all three heads.

Milord dropped to the floor, slipping out of the entrance’s grasp just as two sets of the serpent’s fangs gashed through the air where he had been. Stone broke in the creature’s mouth. Dead Rick, still trapped, beat desperately at the third head with his free arm, knocking it aside. Then he was clear, and threw himself out of the entrance alcove as the heads came in for another strike.

Blood and Bone—“only Chrennois,” like ’ell. Dead Rick slashed wildly with his knife, and winced when his ally’s gun fired, deafening in the small room. So that’s where the fucking naga went.

It was small comfort to know who’d bought the three-headed snake from the Market. That didn’t tell him how to stop the thing from killing him. Which it was energetically trying to do; its orders from Nadrett clearly said to kill anyone who entered without permission. A second gunshot, and a third. Everything was chaos and noise and scaly coils of snake. Dead Rick’s back slammed into the shelves along one wall, setting the crystal bottles to rocking; he heard Chrennois crying out in alarm. Grabbing the nearest bottle with his free hand, the skriker hurled it, and was rewarded with a hiss from the naga—from all three mouths, and from its skin. Acid. He threw more bottles.

Then they all crashed to the floor, as the naga’s tail swept around to seize Dead Rick. The creature pinned his arms, and reared its heads back to attack. Two more shots: the naga’s body jerked, and one of its heads sagged limply. Dead Rick took advantage of the pause to shift to dog form, gasping as the muscular coils pressed against his changing limbs, and then bit as hard as he could into the topmost coil, digging for the flesh underneath the scales.

The naga dropped him. Dead Rick landed with agility that would have done a cat proud. His knife lay on the floor nearby, but that would require changing again; instead he leapt for another head, seizing it just beneath the jaw, where it couldn’t bite him. Half of him expected to feel fangs in his back at any instant, from the other surviving head, but instead he was dragged along as the naga lunged for Milord and his gun. Blood burst into his mouth; if a snake had a throat, he’d just torn that one out. Dead Rick turned without pausing and leapt upon the remaining head, biting and clawing into the eyes, and then Milord fired his last shot, and the naga finally went still.

Dead Rick spat out a mouthful of foul-tasting blood and flesh and whirled again, intending to deal with Chrennois—but the sprite lay motionless on the floor, in a growing pool of his own blood.

Milord shook his head when Dead Rick’s gaze shifted to him. “An unfortunate accident. The naga moved as I fired.”

Maybe it was true; maybe it wasn’t. Probably is; I think ’e wanted to question Chrennois.

He didn’t feel much pity for the frog, and only a little more for the dead snake; the creature had been trying to kill him, after all. Changing back to man form, and then spitting more to clear his mouth, Dead Rick took stock of the room.

It looked as if it had been enlarged at one point; the entrance had dropped them in a narrow alcove, which widened to perhaps ten feet for half the room’s length, before opening up into something more like a proper chamber. Shelving blocked one archway at the far end, with rubble visible behind, but the other was open.

His ally asked, “Do you think you can recognize the plate in which they trapped the ghost?”

“Recognize it? No. Find it? Maybe.” He didn’t even know what a photographic plate looked like—but he had other things to look with than eyes. Dead Rick plucked a clean rag from the table by Chrennois’s body and wiped the blood off himself as best as he could, then licked an unstained corner for good measure. With the reek of naga thus reduced, he put his head warily through the open archway.

The naga was the only defender here; nothing else could fit. A rockfall closed off the end of the second chamber, and what little space remained was filled with crates. Dead Rick sniffed experimentally. Naga, hawthorn wood, chemicals, and straw.

Behind him, Milord said, “I’ve found his cameras. They’re all empty.”

Dead Rick joined him at the table. There were three cameras, two like the one he’d seen in the sewers, with pairs of lenses rather than single ones set into the front boards. Putting his nose right up against the wood, he sniffed along them both. As he’d hoped, the second still carried a faint stink of the sewers. Now, let’s ’ope Chrennois ain’t been crawling around there regular.

There were a lot of crates in the side room, but one was much smaller, laid atop the others near the door, and it held an elusive trace of sewer reek. “That one?” Milord asked, watching from the door. When Dead Rick nodded, he took it down and pried the lid free. The skriker couldn’t see what was inside, but a triumphant smile curved Milord’s lips. “Excellent. And more quickly found than I expected. We cannot stay long, of course—but let us take a brief look at the materials Chrennois has been using; they may be enlightening, and useful in dealing with this.” He clapped the lid back down and retreated to the larger room.

Dead Rick followed, suspicion coiling into a hard knot in his gut. It was smoothly done—all very natural, as if it were only haste that made the fellow take so quick a glance—but Dead Rick saw with more than just his eyes, and knew his ally had been very deliberate in not letting him see inside the box.

He obediently followed the other into the workroom, and glanced over the carefully labeled bottles as if the words he saw there meant anything to him. Vitreous humor (hawk). Lunar caustic. Vitriol of alder. Most of his attention was on the small box tucked under Milord’s arm. Just as soon as ’e’s busy…

Milord bent forward to examine a camera. In that moment of distraction, Dead Rick snatched the box from his grasp.

Before the other could do more than cry out in protest, he’d torn the top free, uncovering what lay inside. Nestled in a bed of straw was something Dead Rick recognized all too well.

A plate of glass, held in a thin wooden frame.

Dead Rick glared at his supposed ally, furious. “You knowed. This whole bloody time.”

Milord straightened slowly, warily, hands stiff at his sides. “I suspected. I still suspect; I have no confirmation. But the pieces of glass that hold your memories do sound a good deal like photographic plates, yes.”

Before Chrennois stole ghosts, he stole pieces of faeries’ minds. The same technique, advanced over the last few years? Or different things entirely? It didn’t matter. What mattered was that his ally had lied. Promising all this time to get his memories back, but now that they were here, the deceitful bugger would have rushed him right back out again, with never a mention of what he needed to know.

As much as Dead Rick wanted to knock the smug bastard onto his arse, there was one thing he wanted more. He slammed the box down onto the table and ran back into the side room.

“We don’t have the time!” his ally called after him, real desperation in his voice. “I promise, I will help you, but not tonight—it would take too long to search—”

“Iron burn you,” Dead Rick snarled back. “If you think I’m bloody well leaving ’ere without my bloody mind…” Words failed him. His hands did not; they tore the lid off one crate after another, digging through the straw and other contents. Some things were photographic plates; others were not; he didn’t have to look to know none of those were his memories. He would know them when he found them.

“You can be valuable, Dead Rick, staying where you are—work from within Nadrett’s defenses, and it will be far easier to destroy him when the time comes!”

The time to destroy him was after Dead Rick had his memories back. Growling, he burrowed deeper into the room, following instinct deeper than any physical sense, until his hands settled on a particular crate, and he knew.

“Blood and Bone,” he whispered, the lid falling from his hands to thunk against the floor. So many. Instead of straw, this box was lined with notched strips of wood, holding the small plates in tidy rows. Dozens of them, stacked several rows deep—and yet, when he thought about it, that wasn’t so many at all. Not for a faerie’s eternal life. How much did each plate hold?

This had to be all of them. Nothing else in the room called to him.

Dead Rick jammed the lid back onto the crate. It was almost too large for one man to carry, but he would be damned before he asked Milord for any more help. He ended up lifting it atop another box, then turning around so he could tip the weight forward onto his back, with his hands on the bottom edge.

Milord had given up his protests; he was in the outer room, looking rapidly over the bottles and other containers, as if snatching everything he could into his mind. The plate holding Galen St. Clair was tucked securely under his arm. It wasn’t worth trying to grab, not when Dead Rick had his memories at last. The skriker passed without a word, walking carefully to the alcove and positioning himself beneath the fanlike arrangement of stone tendrils. Hands full, he resorted to tapping one with his nose, hoping that would wake it up.

It did. The tendrils came down, wrapped around his body, and lifted him toward the street.

The City of London: August 6, 1884

He stumbled leaving the entrance, and nearly dropped the box. Panic beat in his throat—visions of it falling, the memories tumbling free, every last one of them shattering—

By the time he had it steadied, his heart was racing. Dead Rick squeezed his eyes shut and thanked all the powers of Faerie for his good fortune. Now, to get them back safe in my ’ead.

Which meant going to the Academy, and hoping he could buy help there. Dead Rick opened his eyes and turned his steps toward the Onyx Hall—but not, for once, the Goblin Market. The thought lit a spark of joy in his soul.

A flare that died when he saw three men coming up the pavement toward him. No, not men: fae, under glamour. And the leader was recognizable as Nadrett.

He could have run—if he abandoned the crate. Dead Rick could have more easily abandoned his legs. Then they were there, and it was too late to flee. “Well,” Nadrett said, his voice soft and malevolent. He cocked a pistol, but didn’t point it at Dead Rick. Not yet. “So my dog’s got a backbone after all. You’ll regret finding that, you will.”

Dead Rick’s hands clenched on the box’s corners. “Iron burn you,” he spat. “I ain’t your fucking dog no more.”

A grinding sound, a whiff of new scent: the entrance had done its work once more, and his ally had emerged—at the worst possible moment. Nadrett looked past Dead Rick, and his eyebrows went up. “So that’s what you’ve been doing all this time, sneaking about. Thinking I wouldn’t notice. I notice everything, dog. Who’s your friend ’ere, then?” No answer from Milord, though Dead Rick heard the other faerie’s feet shift, as if he were settling himself to fight. Nadrett said, “I wonder what’s under that glamour, boys?”

Quick as a snake, he raised his pistol and fired.

It brought the entire street to a halt. The enchantments over the door protected against mortals noticing people coming and going from the Onyx Hall, but nothing more; seeing the gun, passersby began to flee. Dead Rick staggered, flinching instinctively away from the shot, and then one of Nadrett’s underlings seized him, unbalancing him still further. For one horrific moment, he was again on the verge of dropping his memories.

Iron. Not elfshot, or lead—the bastard’s shooting iron!

Bread protected against it, but not perfectly. Milord screamed and collapsed to the pavement, and the glamour covering him shattered.

Revealing Valentin Aspell.

The faerie was bleeding from the shoulder; Nadrett hadn’t aimed to kill. Aspell spat curses worthy of the lowest Goblin Market trash, and he sounded neither like his disguised voice nor his usual oily self; and Dead Rick kept staring. Aspell. All this time.

Nadrett was spitting curses of his own. “I thought you was up to something, sending your lackeys like that, not talking to me yourself. I’m going to enjoy—”

He never finished the sentence. Aspell had one more twisty trick prepared. What he pulled from his pocket, Dead Rick never saw; but it exploded into light and smoke. He staggered again, this time into his captor, and on instinct he sank his teeth into whatever part of the fellow was closest to his mouth. He was rewarded with a howl of pain and freedom from the other’s grip.

For half an instant, his mind tossed out images. Putting down the box. Leaping on Nadrett. Helping the wounded Aspell escape.

Instead he ran. Away from the chaos, toward the Onyx Hall, nothing in the world but feet and lungs, his hands and his back holding his memories secure, and a devout hope that he could find safety in the Academy.

The Galenic Academy, Onyx Hall: August 6, 1884

The strangest thing was the familiarity.

Eliza knew well the look of a formerly decent neighborhood fallen to decay; that described many portions of the East End. She hadn’t expected to find it echoed in a faerie realm—even one that seemed to lie below London.

This is where they’ve been, all this time. Beneath my feet. And I never knew it.

Now they were all around her. She saw one, two, a cluster of four, all before she and her guides reached the arch of silver and gold that shone in the otherwise gloomy air. Even the most human-looking creature was nothing of the sort, and could never be mistaken for it. Yet she knew from experience how well they could change to look like humans. Here, in their home, they had no need to hide.

Their home: some kind of grand, crumbling palace, both timeless and very old. Eliza hunched her shoulders inward and wrapped her hands around her elbows, afraid to touch the stone. Mrs. Chase stayed by her side, but the Goodemeades walked as if they knew the way blindfolded.

Past the arch, familiarity vanished, and strangeness multipled a hundredfold. She’d been prepared for green fields, or hollow hills, or castles of crystal—not machines. They weren’t even human things, dragged down here like a crow would drag a shiny bit of metal; they had to be faerie inventions. Even the notion of faeries bombing railways paled into sensibility, next to that.

Owen, Eliza told herself, trying not to stare at everything around her. Owen is the only thing that matters. If she held on to that, she might keep her sanity.

Her escorts hurried her onward, past the knot of folk clustered around something like an enormous loom. One of them greeted her companions, and Gertrude stayed back, asking after someone named Feidelm. “They’ll fetch your friend,” Rosamund said, leading her through into a library. “If you’d like to sit down…?”

She couldn’t. Eliza paced the room, up and down the length of the polished table, past shelves of books containing unknown wonders. Oddly, the two statues dominating the far end of the room seemed to be of a mortal man and woman, in old-fashioned clothing. The plaques at the base named them as Galen and Delphia St. Clair. She wondered who they’d been, and what importance they could possibly hold for faeries, that they would be memorialized here.

The click of a door’s latch drove all such thoughts from her head. Eliza turned, and saw Owen.

The sight of him drove all the breath from her body. Owen, exactly as she remembered him—Owen from seven years ago, as if not a day had passed since they parted.

He’d been among the faeries. For him, time had stopped.

The fourteen-year-old boy shuffled forward, guided by the gentle hands of Gertrude and a tall, elegant faerie with ginger hair. He seemed nervous, uncertain, and he didn’t look at her. Eliza had to force the syllables past her lips, a desperate whisper. “Owen.”

He didn’t react. She might have spoken another name entirely. And that was when Eliza knew the appearance was a lie; his face might be unchanged, but inside, he was not at all the boy she remembered.

They had warned her. But warnings didn’t come close to preparing her for the horror of seeing him like this, fourteen years old and shattered.

By this place.

She made herself walk forward, slowly, hands outstretched. The others hung back, giving her the space she needed. For more reasons than one. The boy looked up at her, confused, wary, but he let her take his hand—

“Ave Maria, gratia plena, Dominus tecum. Benedicta tu in mulieribus, et benedictus fructus ventris tui, Iesus. Sancta Maria, Mater Dei, ora pro nobis peccatoribus, nunc et in hora mortis nostrae!”

The prayer spilled from her lips, as fast as she’d ever recited it. Only years of repetition, though, kept Eliza from faltering as it took effect.

She’d thought the faeries would flinch back, as the changeling had, but stronger. And so they did—but everything else flinched, too.

The walls, the shelves, the floor. The entire world shuddered, like a candle flame in the wind. Cries of utter horror came from within the room and without; machinery ground to a shrieking halt; an ominous rumble filled the air.

And Owen, with whom Eliza had intended to run for freedom—through the door, past the distracted faeries, out into the world above—howled and tore himself away.

The shock of it paralyzed her. Eliza was still standing there, gaping, when the door slammed open so hard it bounced off the wall, and a short, stocky figure charged through, swearing in German. His gaze swept the room, then fixed on Eliza with murderous rage. The ginger-haired faerie caught him as he tried to rush at Eliza, and she began speaking in a rapid Irish voice. “She didn’t know, Niklas; she was trying to help her friend—”

“She is going to kill the Queen and bring this verdammte place down upon our heads!”

Rosamund was at Eliza’s side, clutching her sleeve, babbling away beneath the dwarf’s furious tirade. “You mustn’t do that, oh please, you mustn’t—I know you want to help him, and so do we, but if you pray again you’ll only hurt us all…”

Eliza staggered. It was too much, all of it: the shouting, that disorienting lurch, the peculiar and unsettling feeling that the stone itself had been screaming.

And Owen, huddled in a corner. Terrified of her. Of the words she had spoken, that did not belong to this world.

Vision blurred, slid, vanished into a cascade of tears. Eliza cried, the sobs wracking her body, bending her over until she fell to her knees on the carpet. Oh Jesus, Owen. I’m too late. Seven years too late. God help me—Owen, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry…

Gentle hands stroked her hair, the Irish voice spoke to her soothingly with words she couldn’t understand, and none of it did any good. All of it had been in vain. She had lost Owen forever.