With Fate Conspire

^{PART THREE} August–October 1884

Even the tiniest shock threatens her grip, now. The substance of her spirit has been stretched as far as it will go; there is not much of the Hall to protect any longer, but not much of herself to cover it, either. Despite her resolution to protect her mortal consort, she finds herself drawing on his strength more and more, to hold on through these final days.

The worst of it is not the physical pain, not now. It is the knowledge that everything she has fought for all these centuries must end. Some few fae may find a way to stay in London; they will become changelings, or subsist on mortal bread until their spirits are altered beyond recognition. The era of the Onyx Court, though, is over. No more will faeries be a hidden part of the city’s life. Magic will pass a little further out of this world, to fade and be forgotten.

She no longer even has the strength to rage against that loss.

All she can do now is postpone it for as long as possible. Hold on, and give her people as much time as she can.

They are fae. Miracles are not something they pray for.

The Galenic Academy, Onyx Hall: August 6, 1884

By the time he reached the gold and silver arch of the Academy boundary, Dead Rick was completely blown. His lungs burned and his fingers ached with the weight of the box, but he didn’t dare pause or set it down. He’d run all the way from Aldersgate to Cloak Lane, all the way from the entrance to here, until at the end he was staggering like a drunk, for fear Nadrett’s men might be following him. And they might still—but if they burst into the Academy, somebody would stop them.

He hoped.

Certainly the fae and mortals there looked as if they might stop him, when he lurched into the main hall. Dead Rick kept moving, both to avoid any questions, and because once he stopped he doubted he could start again. The library was a quiet place, the safest he could think of; if he collapsed there, surely Irrith would find him.

With his hands full, he resorted to using his foot to open the door. The room beyond was dismayingly full of people, but at that exact moment the only thing he cared about was the table, on which he could lay his burden at last.

He drew in one shuddering, relieved breath, hearing it loud in the silence around him. Then the silence was broken by a single, murderous word. “You.”

It was all the warning he got. Dead Rick’s reflexes were shredded by exhaustion; he hadn’t even turned his head before a body slammed into him from the side and carried him to the floor.

He howled, reaching out instinctively to protect his memories. Hands slapped his aside, then reformed into fists, striking his face two swift blows. The habits of seven years in the Goblin Market took over: he got one arm between them, grabbed the side of his attacker’s head, threw her hard to the floor. He rolled with her, his free hand moving to crush her throat—

The strong arms that wrapped about his shoulders and arms to drag him back weren’t necessary. He’d already stopped, frozen by the sight of the face beneath him. Seven years older, but he recognized that thick dark hair, the upturned nose, the furious hazel eyes. And the voice, shrieking curses at him, in which he recognized the name Owen.

He couldn’t even answer. All he could do was sprawl on the floor, Feidelm pinning his arms like a wrestler, and stare at her. Of course she was here. The boy was, after all, and Dead Rick remembered her screams when he’d stolen the boy away. Of course she would come after him, no matter how long it took.

They’d gathered quite an audience. An old mortal woman and two fae under glamour; they’d been there when he came in. More crowded the doorway, crouching or stretching or in one case hovering on dragonfly wings to see past their fellows, until a voice said, “Let me through.”

It wasn’t a loud voice; it didn’t have to be. The authority in it parted the crowd like a knife through soft flesh, making a gap for a tall, dark-skinned figure to pass.

Irrith had been right when she said Dead Rick didn’t recognize the faerie. He didn’t have to, though, to know this was Abd ar-Rashid, the genie who was Scholarch of the Galenic Academy. He murmured a quiet request to the ink-stained sprite at his side, and soon the door was closed once more, with Abd ar-Rashid and Niklas von das Ticken inside.

The genie’s dark eyes glinted like two chips of the Onyx Hall’s stone as he took in Dead Rick’s presence and appearance. Still in that quiet, authoritative tone, he asked, “What is happening here?”

Feidelm had finally released Dead Rick. He remained slumped at her feet as she stood and answered. “The Goodemeades brought Miss Baker here to see the boy in my care. Then this one came in, and she attacked him.”

The mortal girl scrambled upright and pointed at Dead Rick, her hand shaking. “He’s the one who stole Owen, he is.”

Abd ar-Rashid turned his gaze back to Dead Rick. “Is this true?”

The skriker was too exhausted to lie, even if he thought it would have fooled anyone. “Yes. It’s true.”

The genie gestured to the box on the table. “And what is this?”

That gave Dead Rick the energy he needed. He was up before he knew it, bracing himself between the genie and the box as if he would last two seconds in another fight. “It’s my fucking property, is what it is, and anybody so much as tries to touch it, they’ll bleed.”

Niklas made a low, amused noise, and cocked a pistol that seemed to have come from nowhere.

Where was Irrith? Dead Rick wasn’t doing a very good job of winning friends here. But he had a card to play, one he thought they’d like. “Before your dwarf there goes shooting me, you should know—I can tell you where the ghost of Galen St. Clair is.”

“Nadrett has him,” one of the glamoured fae said.

“Not no more, ’e don’t.” Presuming Aspell had gotten away with the plate. He was a tricky snake, maybe tricky enough to escape Nadrett. “Keep that girl from tearing my throat out—give me some ’elp on a little matter of my own—and I’ll tell you ’ow to find your dead Prince.”

“Dead Rick.” It was the other glamoured faerie. She spoke his name gently, and came forward with slow, careful steps; then the glamour fell from her, revealing the same kind face on a brownie half the height. The mortal girl made a stifled noise and retreated sharply. The faerie said, “You don’t remember any of us, do you?”

He knew enough to guess who she was. Within two tries, anyway. Even in the Goblin Market, he’d heard of the Goodemeades, the brownie sisters that had dwelt in Islington since the earliest days of the Onyx Hall. Whether she was Rosamund or Gertrude, she would try to help him—if he let her. The pity and sorrow in her eyes threatened to choke him. They had him pinned with his back to the table, surrounding him in an arc with no way to escape, and if it weren’t for the crate behind him he would have tried to bolt for safety… but that would mean leaving his memories behind.

Then the door opened, and Irrith stood framed in the gap. “He doesn’t remember anything,” she said softly, with a grimace of apology to the skriker. “Niklas, don’t shoot him; I don’t want to see what he’d do to you if you tried.”

Dead Rick’s shoulders knotted until they ached. That easily, his secret was betrayed. I never should ’ave come here. It’s that bloody sprite’s fault. Now his vulnerability was in the open, for all to see. If anybody took so much as one step toward the box he guarded, Dead Rick would rip their throat out.

But Abd ar-Rashid asked him again, “Is this true?” And there was no way out but to answer.

“Yes,” he snarled, hands cramping with the need to use them. To fight his way free. “Is that what you wants to ’ear? I don’t know none of you. I been Nadrett’s dog for seven fucking years because of that, and the only reason I came ’ere is because I ’oped somebody could put my memories back where they belong. You do that, I tells you where your dead Prince went.”

Everybody’s eyes went past him, to the box. Dead Rick’s lips skinned back in a snarl, and Abd ar-Rashid held up his hands in a calming gesture. “Peace, my friend. No one will harm you. What you’ve said explains a great deal, and we will do what we can to help.”

A furious noise burst from the mortal girl. “After what he did to us?”

“He didn’t have a choice—” Irrith began.

“Peace,” Abd ar-Rashid repeated, quieting them both. “Miss Baker. There is a man in this place—a mortal man, like you—whose duty is to oversee such matters, the affairs between humans and fae. It will be for him to decide what the answer for that crime should be. Until then, we will do what we can to address the matter of memories.”

They were going to give him over to Hodge? Well, he could bargain with the Prince, and run if bargaining failed. After he got his self out of the glass and back into his head.

Sounds behind Dead Rick made him whirl, nerves coming alive once more. The crouched figure that had begun to emerge from behind a bookcase flinched back again, but not before Dead Rick saw him. The half-witted mortal. With the box of his memories so close, it gave him an inspiration.

“Your boy there,” he said to the mortal girl. Miss Baker; Hannah, Cyma had said. Still just empty syllables, without meaning. “I might know what ’appened to ’im.”

“You happened to him,” she said bitterly.

He shook his head. “After me. My mas—the bastard who was my master. ’E’s got some trick with cameras. Used it to steal my memories, and a ghost; might be ’e used it on your boy, too. Took away some part of ’im, and stuck it in glass.”

“Cameras!” She laughed in disbelief, but Feidelm and Abd ar-Rashid came alive with curiosity. “What—are you saying a photograph took Owen’s soul?”

And there it was, laid out in a few simple words. Dead Rick’s mouth sagged open. “That’s exactly what ’e’s doing.”

His memories: he’d thought of them more than once as his self, torn away, so he no longer had any notion of himself. This boy’s mind, mangled as if half gone. The ghost of Galen St. Clair. That was the technique Chrennois had been developing for Nadrett, refining it over the last seven years.

Abd ar-Rashid said, “There have been inquiries of late—”

Cyma, and probably Aspell, too. “Satyr’s bile,” Dead Rick said. The genie nodded. “I’ve been trying to find out what ’e’s up to for a while now. You ’elp me, I tells you what I know.”

Irrith let out her breath in a frustrated sigh. “Dead Rick, stop bargaining. We’re already going to help you.”

Her protestation made him twitch. He couldn’t stop the words bursting out: “Why should you?”

The Goodemeades made identical noises of affront, but Irrith just grinned. “Why? Because I know something you don’t: who you used to be. And I’ll bet you every piece of bread I’ve got that as soon as you get your memories back, you’ll help us in return. Not as trade, but because you want to. Because that’s the kind of fellow you are. Or were, and will be again.”

He couldn’t help looking around to see what the others thought of her declaration. The Goodemeades were nodding, but the one that hit him like a blow to the gut was the mortal girl. She was biting her lip as if fighting something inside. As if she didn’t want to agree with Irrith, but a part of her did anyway.

If he wanted to be any use, he couldn’t wait until his memories were restored. He might have wasted too much time already.

He opened his mouth, and felt the oath he’d sworn to Aspell binding his tongue tight. Dead Rick growled in frustration, then stopped when he realized how carelessly that oath had been worded. “I can’t tell you where to go,” he said, enunciating clearly, so they would understand what he meant. “But if some of you was to follow me… you might see something interesting.” If they were fast enough, they might even get Nadrett himself.

Abd ar-Rashid clapped his hands once, a sharp sound, calling everyone to attention. “Go, and we will follow.”

They left in a rush, shuffling the box somewhere safe, gathering a small war party to accompany the skriker. When they were gone, Eliza fumbled a chair out blindly and sank into it, knees limp as rags.

Dead Rick. There and gone. She’d spent seven years dreaming of the revenge she’d have when she got her hands on him, and now she’d let him go.

“Would you like a cup of tea, dear?”

Eliza abandoned her chair and skittered backward when she realized the question came from Gertrude Goodemeade. Who was now a good two feet shorter than she’d been before, and so was Rosamund. “Ye’re faeries, ye are!”

They had the grace to look apologetic. “With the story you told,” Rosamund said, “we didn’t think you’d take kindly to finding out halfway through that we were brownies.”

Outraged, she turned to Mrs. Chase. “And you—”

“I’m as human as you are,” the old woman said serenely. “And a friend to these sisters since I was a child. My house is built atop theirs, you see.”

None of it was what she’d expected. Eliza couldn’t muster the will to fight when Gertrude took her by the arm and led her back to the chair. “Just rest awhile, my dear; you’ve had a great many shocks today.”

They were the only ones left in the library—the four of them and Owen, who had crept into a corner once more. “I was going to kill him,” Eliza said numbly, staring at the carpeted floor. “Seven years, I planned it. And now—”

Gertrude reached out as if to clasp her hands, but stopped before Eliza could pull back. “I can imagine,” she murmured. “To keep searching for your boy, after all that time—you must have been very angry, and very determined, too. But if you want a target…”

“Then you should look to Nadrett,” her sister finished, in a colder tone than Eliza had yet heard from either of them.

The name had gone by, briefly, in Dead Rick’s rage. Eliza hadn’t been able to follow any of it, dead princes and photography and all the rest. But she was willing to consider including someone else in her anger. “Who is he?”

For all the delicacy with which the Goodemeades phrased their answer, Eliza could read between the lines. Whitechapel had men like that, leaders of gangs who profited off the suffering of others. And they had ways of keeping their followers in line—if nothing so exotic as this.

Stolen memories. It was as if she’d been fumbling around a darkened room, and then someone lit a lamp, showing her in full what she’d only felt the outlines of before now. The blank unfamiliarity in Dead Rick’s eyes, when they took Owen away—if the Goodemeades were right, if they were telling the truth, then nothing that day had been his choice.

Mrs. Chase had fetched tea, and now was coaxing Owen from his corner. Eliza could barely look at him; the sight bid fair to break her heart. More things she didn’t understand. “How could a camera do that to a person?”

Rosamund gestured around. “This place we’re in is the library of the Galenic Academy. It’s a school of sorts—”

“More like the Royal Society,” Gertrude broke in, naming Britain’s foremost scientific institution.

Her sister gave her a mild glare for the interruption, then went on. “We have our own sorts of scholars and scientists, just as you do. One of the things they’ve been working on is photography. Light doesn’t behave the same down here, you see, and neither do some other things, so the cameras used in your world don’t work. Nadrett, it seems, has managed to bend it to another use.”

“But why do ye need cameras in the first place?”

“Why do you need them?” Rosamund asked. “Capturing an image like that, all at once, exactly as it looks in life, and then being able to share it with others… we can do a great many things with glamours and illusions, and our memories don’t fade the same way yours do, but why shouldn’t we want photographs as well?”

“Because ye’re faeries,” Eliza said stupidly. Her anger couldn’t stay hot, not forever; it was fading down to a sullen glow once more, and leaving her exhausted in its wake. Her thoughts kept chasing around in a little circle, everything coming back to the same inescapable point. Dozens of faeries, living beneath London. “And what the devil do ye need with bombs?”

“Bombs?” They both looked entirely innocent, but Eliza no longer trusted it. Mrs. Chase looked confused; that part, she did trust.

“The Fenians. Dynamiting the railway, and other things in London. Don’t pretend ye had nothing to do with it; I saw Dead Rick, and other faeries, too. Why do ye care so much about Ireland?” A sudden, wild thought struck her. “Is that why ye were trying to recruit me, at the meeting? To help them?”

“Gracious, no!” They seemed utterly dumbfounded that she might suggest it. Rosamund said, “We would never get involved with a thing like that. Some fae want Ireland free, and some want to stop the railway, and a few—like Nadrett—just want to profit, but we are trying to prepare for the future.”

In something of a confused muddle, Gertrude correcting Rosamund, Rosamund correcting Gertrude, and Mrs. Chase guiding Eliza past their arguments when she could, they told her why the Underground was a threat to this place, the Onyx Hall. It echoed the stories Dead Rick had told, years ago, about a faerie Queen ruling over a dying realm; but he had never told her that realm was here. “We’ve tried all manner of things to stop it,” Gertrude said. “When the overland railways came in, we encouraged the City men who wanted to keep them out; that’s why they all stopped at Paddington, King’s Cross, places a bit farther out. We were afraid so much iron, moving in and out like that, would be a problem even if it was aboveground. Then we tried to prevent plans for an underground railway, and when that failed, we tried to stop the Inner Circle.”

Mrs. Chase added, “Do you recall all those delays on finishing it? Sir Edward Watkin of the Metropolitan Railway and Mr. Forbes of the Metropolitan District Railway, all the arguments between them—that was also faerie interference. Though admittedly, those two loathed each other from the start.”

Eliza had no idea what the woman was talking about; the affairs of railway directors were hardly the kind of thing she concerned herself with. All she knew was what she’d seen, when they crossed Cannon Street on their way to Cloak Lane. They didn’t have much time left at all. “So what are ye about, then? If not trying to save this place?”

“We’d do that if we could,” Gertrude said. “But our thought is, maybe your people need to know faeries are here. That’s what we’ve been doing with the London Fairy Society.”

“Originally it started as a way to get more bread,” Rosamund added. “You know about bread? There isn’t enough anymore, with so few people believing in faeries. So we set out to make new friends, like Lady Wilde. But then we began to think—”

“Have thought, for a long time,” Gertrude interjected.

“—that perhaps we’d be better off coming out of hiding.”

Eliza blinked. Gertrude’s words a moment ago had taken a little while to seep through to her understanding, and she still wasn’t sure she had them right. “Ye… ye’ll announce yerselves?” She just barely held back the Jesus, Mary, and Joseph that wanted to follow. “And ye think that will make anything better? For the love of—just ask the Irish how it is, living among people who don’t want ye here!”

Quietly, Rosamund said, “And how is it, living among people who don’t even know you’re here? We’re already being killed and driven from our homes. At least if we announce ourselves, some people can be convinced to help.”

And some would be convinced to try harder to eradicate them. Still, Eliza couldn’t help but feel a touch of sympathy. There had been folk in Ireland who felt the same way, during the Hunger; they refused to leave their homes, too, no matter how bad times became. Many of them had died of it. But she understood the impulse.

Her thoughts were no longer running in a tight circle; they were rambling, drifting from one thing to another, exhaustion slowing their pace. Owen had drawn near when she wasn’t looking, crouching on the floor with his hands wrapped around his knees. Did he remember something of her? Or was it just that she was human, in this faerie place? She had to find a way to help him.

Hesitantly, she slipped from her chair and reached out one hand. Owen did not look up from the floor, but he let her brush the hair gently from his eyes. It had grown shaggy; that much change, at least, seemed capable of happening down here. But his face—so young…

She’d seen her own face enough times in the Kitterings’ mirrors. Hardened by work and grief, it belonged to a woman older than twenty-one. What would Owen think, when he had his wits back? What would they be to each other now, after everything that had passed while they were apart?

Eliza had no answers. But she didn’t need them, not yet. First, help Owen; everything else could follow after.

Aldersgate, Onyx Hall: August 6, 1884

Fast as the Academy fae were, Nadrett was faster.

By the time Dead Rick led them to the Aldersgate fragment, the chambers had been emptied out. Not completely; the corpses of Chrennois and the naga still lay sprawled across the floor. The shelving and tables remained, too. But the cameras, the bottles of chemicals, and all the photographic plates: those were gone.

Niklas von das Ticken cursed in German and kicked a shard of bottle across the room. It nearly hit a faerie kneeling beside the naga’s body. It was the same monkeylike fellow Dead Rick had seen when he came to the Academy before; Irrith had introduced him as Kutuhal. His expression as he looked down at his dead kinsman was bleak. If ’e asks, I’m telling ’im Aspell did it.

His former ally was long gone, too, though he’d left behind a bloodstain in the street above. Stains were about all they had to study: Yvoir, the Academy’s expert on photography, had come down once they knew it was safe, and was investigating the shattered fragments of the bottles Dead Rick had thrown. The sour smell of satyr’s bile mixed with other unpleasant odors, under the stench of blood. The French faerie kept murmuring to himself, too quietly for even Dead Rick’s ears to make out, and pointing a finger back and forth as if putting pieces together in his mind. The skriker hoped he was getting something useful out of this that he could apply to undoing whatever Chrennois’s process was.

“Can you follow them?” Irrith asked. She kept bouncing on the balls of her feet, as if chafing to do something. Probably to hunt Aspell, given her long-standing hatred—though she presumably wouldn’t say no to Nadrett, should he present himself.

Dead Rick shrugged. “Maybe—but they both know I’ve got a sharp nose. They’ll ’ave done something to cover their tracks. Don’t need no scent to tell me where Nadrett’s probably gone, though; ’e’s back in the Market by now.” Unless he had another bit of palace to hide in, but the skriker doubted it.

Irrith grimaced. Going after Nadrett there would mean war; it was why Hodge never did more than send his knights on occasional raids. Nadrett, like the other bosses, kept his fellows well armed. And even if the Prince’s men could beat them in a straight up and down fight, nothing in the Goblin Market ever went straight; within ten seconds it would be every faerie for himself, with bloodshed the Prince was too soft-hearted to risk. He certainly wouldn’t do it for something like this.

Aspell was a more interesting question. Would he go back to the Market, as well? There might be war there already, now that Nadrett had uncovered his treachery. If Dead Rick were Aspell, he wouldn’t risk it; he’d go to ground somewhere else, away from underlings that might take the chance to seize advantage for themselves.

He needed to find Aspell; he needed that photograph to help him bargain with Hodge. Irrith might help him out of the goodness of her heart, but he couldn’t count on any such sympathy from the Prince. Especially not if the Prince recognized Dead Rick as the dog who had attacked him in Blackfriars a few months ago.

Yvoir sighed and stood up from the pitted floor stone he’d been examining. “There is not much here I did not already know. I will look at the plates you brought; perhaps they will tell more.”

Perhaps was a thin word for Dead Rick to hang his hopes on—but it was better than he’d had yesterday, because at least he had the plates. “I’ll try to follow Aspell,” Dead Rick said, even though weariness dragged at him like lead.

Irrith immediately drew her gun, as if she expected him to find the sod as soon as they went outside. “I’ll come with you.”

Uncomfortable, he said, “You don’t ’ave to.”

“What are you going to do, yawn at him? He may be bleeding, but that doesn’t mean he isn’t a threat.” The sprite’s lip drew up in a delicate snarl. “I didn’t trust him not to be a threat even when he was in prison for a hundred years. And it looks like I was right.”

Aspell wasn’t half the threat Nadrett was. But Dead Rick could tell there wasn’t much point in trying to convince Irrith of that. So long as she didn’t shoot their quarry on sight, he supposed it couldn’t hurt to let her come along. She was better company than Old Gadling or Gresh, at least.

In the end, though, it didn’t matter whether she came or not. There were no trails he could follow in the street above. The snaky bastard was gone, along with the ghost of Galen St. Clair.

Leckhampton House, Cambridge: August 12, 1884

“If you need me,” Eveleen Myers said in coolly polite tones, “I will be in my workshop.”

Contradictory impulses twisted Frederic Myers’s heart as his wife turned and swept down the corridor. He should stop her going; they should not leave matters as they were, angry and distant. But what could he say to mend that rift, when his mind kept drifting to another woman? Perhaps a few hours of work over her beloved photographs would calm her, and then they could talk. And in the meanwhile, he was guiltily glad of her absence, which would give him time to work on matters he could not share with her.

Had Louisa Kittering not come to possess his thoughts, he would not have hesitated to ask the Goodemeades and Mrs. Chase whether he could share the London Fairy Society—the true one—with his wife. Eveleen was not a psychical researcher herself, but the secret of the faeries’ presence would surely fascinate her. Yet now, with the two of them more estranged every passing day, he worried what she might do with that secret. Would she use it against him? Even betray the faeries’ trust?

Six months ago, he would have said no. But now his thoughts were so tangled, he could no longer tell what was sound judgment, and what merely the fearful whispers of his poor, overtaxed brain.

Work might settle Eveleen; it might settle him, too. Sighing, Myers went to his study.

He had promised the rest of the Society that he would draw up a plan for how they might introduce themselves to the larger world, if they chose to begin with the Society for Psychical Research. It was difficult, when he himself was so new to their world; he could scarcely be sure anything he might say to Sidgwick and the others would even be accurate. Where did faeries come from? How did the realm of Faerie itself relate to this world, and to Heaven and Hell? Was there any truth in Miss Harris’s theosophical speculation at the séance a few months ago, that a connection existed between the fae and the spirits of the dead? Fjothar, one of the faerie members of the Society, had given him three books written by their own scholars, describing the elements that made up their reality, but after reading through them all Myers still hardly understood it.

But he had promised, and he would try. The Goodemeades expected the fae had at most a few months before they must abandon London. Those who remained—in Rose House, or sheltering by other means—would wait until the exodus was complete, and then begin their emergence. It was the agreement they had formed with Hodge, the one they called Prince of the Stone. “By then, I won’t be in no condition to stop you anyway,” he’d said, with a gallows grin. Myers shuddered to think of what the fellow meant.

Safely closed away in his study, Myers searched for an empty notebook he could use to write up his plans. One he could hide from Eveleen. I never used to hide things from her… The thought slipped away, to be replaced by another. Louisa came to a few Society meetings. I should ask if she might be permitted to join us for the private ones. I should very much like to share them with her.

There ought to be plenty of empty notebooks, but he could not find them. I haven’t filled them already, have I? Eveleen would know, but he did not want to ask her. Frowning, Myers rummaged around in drawers, on the shelves, wondering where they might have gone. Finally he came across one he might use; there was writing inside, but it could not have been anything important, for its cover was unlabeled, and the notebook lay at the bottom of a towering stack that must have lain untouched for years.

Paging through, looking for empty pages he might use, Myers caught a word slipping past. Ectoplasm. Now, where had he heard that before?

From Sidgwick, at that séance—the one with the physical manifestation, where Miss Harris had proposed her theosophical theory. Curious, Myers turned back until he found the word again. The page was filled with bits of Greek and Latin, combined into different possibilities; not just ectoplasm but also teleplasm and various other alternatives, all under a header reading An Emanation of the Spirit, which was underlined twice.

All of it in his own handwriting—but he had no recollection of writing it.

Curiosity deepened. Myers went back to the beginning of the notebook. The pages were undated, but a reference to a row he had with Edmund Gurney told him it must have been started in early 1879. Strangely, it began with speculations not far afield from those of Miss Harris: links between ghosts and faeries, jotted notes about legends from different parts of the country, and then other things written down as if they were the true story, though he’d marked no references for them. Three kinds of apparitions, he’d noted; recent; recurrent; recalled. The recent, this notebook claimed, were swept away by the faeries every All Hallows’ Eve, sent on to their eventual rest. Different kinds of fae could see them: fetches, skrikers, church grims, and more. Then musings on where exactly these spirits resided—the astral plane of the theosophists?—and how someone might not only call a ghost from that realm, but enter it physically. But he had abandoned that line of inquiry at the page headed An Emanation of the Spirit, and pursued instead the question of the gauzy substance that accompanied true physical manifestations.

Here he found the word aether, both underlined and circled.

Aether. Myers straightened up, staggering as his legs protested; he did not know how long he’d been crouched by that pile, but it hardly mattered. He unlocked a drawer in his desk and pulled out the books Fjothar had given him. Aether, according to An Explanation of Alchemical Principles, was the defining characteristic of faerie spaces; it was the fifth of their elements, after the classical four.

Fascinating material—and he did not remember writing a single word of it.

Nebulous dread tightened his throat. This was no mere absentmindedness; it was an entire branch of research he had undertaken—on the topic of faeries!—and yet he’d forgotten it completely. Were it not for Sidgwick’s comments at that séance, he might even believe these notes had come from someone else’s pen, and dismissed the similarity of handwriting as mere coincidence.

Eveleen would not like him going back to London so soon, but he had to ask the Goodemeades what this meant. Myers was accustomed to wondering if he was going mad—he feared he had for a short time, after Annie died—but this was unlike anything he’d felt before, a growing, clawing fear, as if someone had stolen part of his mind while he wasn’t looking. Eveleen could not help him with that. Everything he needed lay in London, and he could not endure the thought of delay.

Cromwell Road, South Kensington: August 13, 1884

Louisa began to suspect she had been rather too liberal in her use of charms upon Frederic Myers when he showed up at Cromwell Road, the day before the Kittering family was due to leave.

Or rather, two members of the Kittering family, and a selection of their servants. She had not the faintest intention of going with them. There had been entertainment in spurning every potential suitor Mrs. Kittering brought forward, but now those revels had ended; it would be the countryside after this, tedium without end, and that held no interest for Louisa. Her plan was to part company with them at the train station tomorrow, in such fashion as to ensure they didn’t notice her absence until they arrived in Bath. That would give her plenty of time in which to vanish for good.

What she would do after that, she had not decided; and then Frederic Myers showed up at her door.

Mr. Warren did not want to let him in; the argument echoed down the corridor and into the morning room where Louisa sat with her toast. She went out, saw Myers, and swept forward to intervene. Distracting the butler, she dragged Myers into the unoccupied dining room, where the chairs and table had already been covered with sheets against dust. “What are you doing?” she whispered, a seed of alarm taking shape beneath her delighted surprise at seeing him. “A married man cannot call upon an unmarried lady, Mr. Myers, not in such a manner—”

“Louisa,” he said, and she nearly jumped from her skin. A married man should certainly not call an unmarried lady by her given name—not in that tone of voice. “I have discovered the strangest thing—”

What had been a mere seed of alarm grew, within seconds, to become a strangling vine, cutting off her air. The problem of his affection for her paled into insignificance next to this: that Myers had discovered the gap in his memories, the ideas Nadrett had stolen from him.

How could she have forgotten it herself? She had known, ever since that séance back in April; and she had known then that she ought to stay away from Frederic Myers. But then she’d taken on this name, this life, and then…

Horror had drowned out the words coming from his mouth, until she heard him say “Goodemeades.” Louisa came back to herself with a jolt. “They have another society, you see,” he was telling her, the words tumbling over one another. “I should not tell you too much of it—I should ask their permission before I do—but I suspect they may know something of these ideas, and be able to help me—”

“You aren’t going to tell them!” she said, panic clutching her tight.

He blinked at her in confusion. “I am on my way there right now, only I had to stop and see you.”

Out in the entrance hall, she could hear Mrs. Kittering’s strident voice. Moving swiftly, Louisa wedged a chair under the dining room door so it would not open. Then she turned back to Myers, and took him by the arms.

She was no prophet, but she could see this future clearly enough. If he went to the Goodemeades and told them of the notebook, they would investigate, and that would draw Nadrett’s attention. He would not like anyone looking into his secrets. What he would do to the brownies, she couldn’t say—they had survived plenty of danger in the past—but the mortal man standing before her was all too fragile. Nadrett would either claim him once more… or dispose of him entirely.

And she could not let that happen.

The doorknob rattled, and Mrs. Kittering, thinking it locked, demanded the key from Mr. Warren. There was no time for subtlety, such as she had employed in the past—or thought she had; Louisa rose onto her toes and kissed Frederic Myers hard on the lips, willing him to love her.

As she loved him back.

Pulling back just far enough to look him in the eyes, she said, “Frederic, you must listen to me. What you have there is dangerous; you must not tell anyone of it. Do you understand? Your only safety lies in fleeing. We will go together, my love; I cannot be parted from you. Do not go to Islington, and do not go back to Cambridge; they will find you there. I will meet you in Hyde Park tonight, by the Serpentine, where we walked before. At midnight. We will hide until we can go away together, and find some place we can be happy. Please, my love, promise me—”

My love. Words she had spoken many times, as Annie Marshall, as the countless other women she pretended to be, through the long ages of toying with humans. She had never meant them before. Fae did not love, not unless they chose to—not as humans did. Passion could not sweep them away; devotion could not creep into their hearts unnoticed. And so the new Louisa Kittering had told herself that what she felt for Frederic Myers was only a rebirth of her early fascination.

She had not realized that a changeling’s heart did not lie wholly under her control.

Now he loved her back, as fully as she did him. Frederic wrapped his arms about her and crushed her mouth to his own, kissing her with all the blind passion faerie enchantment could create, until Mr. Warren managed to force the door open, and they were dragged apart. Then there was shouting and crying, accusations and threats of arrest, and too many people for Louisa to charm into cooperative indifference—but they could not hold her, not if she was determined to get away. Tonight she would go to Frederic, and together they would find a way to escape Nadrett forever.

East End, London: August 14, 1884

Eliza soon discovered the Goodemeade sisters were the sort of well-meaning meddlers who couldn’t see two people in conflict without wanting to heal the breach. That was made quite clear by their all-too-innocent suggestion that she take Dead Rick with her to find Dónall Whelan.

She refused, of course. The man who was supposed to pass judgment on him, this Prince of theirs, hadn’t yet gotten around to doing so; he was busy with other matters, they said. Trying to save their Onyx Hall. Until he decided on a punishment, she was forbidden to take her own vengeance—she still didn’t know how they’d wheedled such a promise out of her. Given that, the last thing she wanted was to spend time in the skriker’s company.

But that was before she wasted a week in the East End, trying and failing to locate Whelan. He wasn’t among the crowds of men seeking work at the docks. He wasn’t in a pub, pickling himself with whiskey. He wasn’t in the tiny room he rented above a butcher’s shop in Limehouse, either, and his rent was due to run out today. The landlord didn’t know and didn’t care where his tenant had gone; nobody did.

If there was a photograph with part of Owen in it, nobody knew where it was, and she couldn’t assume it would ever be found. Which meant she needed the fairy doctor’s help. Which meant she needed help finding him.

The skriker walked beside her in human form, not saying a word. That was how Eliza wanted it. There was nothing he could say to her that she wanted to hear, except for directions to where Whelan might be—and nothing he wanted to say, it seemed. But she couldn’t help sneaking glances at him as they made their way through the dockside streets. The hard face that had once been so familiar had hardly changed; it was perhaps a shade harder now, marked with cynical distrust, but he hadn’t aged, any more than Owen had. It felt unfair, that everyone else should have stood still, while years of her life ground away.

At the butcher’s shop, she led him up to Whelan’s room. A simple thrust of his shoulder did for the latch; then he paced around like the dog he sometimes was, bending to sniff the bedclothes, an empty bottle, a lewd photograph tacked to the wall. “You have his scent?” Eliza asked, and when he nodded, she said, “Find him, then.”

The faerie exhaled sharply, not quite a snort. “All of London to search in, and you think I can find one bloody man. My nose ain’t that sharp.”

He’d always sounded like a cockney, but these days his speech had a rougher edge: less colorful slang, more bitter swearing. “I know where he spends his time,” Eliza said. “You can track him—”

“If we’re lucky.” He stiffened, and she knew he’d noticed the same thing she had, that casual use of we. “Come on,” he growled, and shoved past her to the stairs.

A little way into the slow process of quartering the riverside districts, Eliza remembered there was something she wanted to hear from Dead Rick. “Last year, in October—when the railway was bombed. I saw you, didn’t I?”

She was trailing behind him, letting his nose do the work; she saw his shoulders tighten, and that was answer enough. “The Goodemeades told me about the Underground. I’m surprised ye fellows stopped at a few bombs. Why not go further? Why not kill everyone working on them, until nobody will do it anymore?”

He whirled suddenly enough that she almost ran into him. “Because there’s two kinds of people in the Onyx Hall,” he snarled, inches from her face. “The ones as are too soft-hearted to kill mortals, and the ones as don’t care a twopenny damn what ’appens to anybody else. The first keep thinking there’s got to be some other way, and the second are too busy getting their own to do anything useful.”

Eliza set her jaw. “And which kind are you?”

His mouth twisted with self-loathing humor. “The third kind. What gets buggered up the arse by the second.”

He started off again. After a moment, she followed. He didn’t remember anything, the little green-eyed faerie had said. In the library, Eliza had been too angry to think much about what he said and did, but observing him now, the difference was painfully obvious. His face might be the same, but the man beneath it had changed profoundly.

Or had he? They could make illusions to cover their real bodies; maybe they did the same with their behavior. It could have been an act, before, and only now was she seeing the real Dead Rick.

She didn’t think so, though. He’d always been such a bad liar. And the man he’d become was too raw for him to mask, even when he tried.

That makes two of us, Eliza thought.

They tried docks and pubs, boardinghouses and brothels. In desperation, Eliza pointed Dead Rick north, into Whitechapel; Whelan was a Galway man, and might have looked to others from that county for help.

They asked in all the quarters Eliza could think of, but with no luck. Not until they left one of the narrow back courts into which the poor Irish crowded, and Dead Rick stopped, then knelt without warning to sniff the base of a brick wall.

He gathered odd stares from those passing by. “What is it?” Eliza whispered, crouching over him.

The faerie grimaced. “Piss and puke. Might ’ave been ’im. Three days ago, would be my guess.” He straightened and scratched at the back of his neck with dirty fingernails. “’E don’t smell too good. Sick, I mean.”

Sick. Eliza grabbed Dead Rick’s arm, dragging him up Turner Street, following a hunch.

The Royal London Hospital lay a stone’s throw away on Whitechapel Road, across from the Jews’ cemetery. Its beds were filled with the sick poor, and more waited for the next that might open up; sometimes the nurses didn’t even have time to change the sheets before a patient took the place of a corpse. Fortunately, when Eliza gave her name as Whelan and claimed Dónall as her father, she discovered he wasn’t in the infectious ward. When she asked what ailed him, the nurse snorted. “Too much drink, not enough food, old age… he’ll recover or he won’t; there isn’t much we can do for him. But Father Tooley asked that we give him a bed, so.”

Father Tooley? Whelan hadn’t set foot in a church since coming to England, but as the priest had once said, it didn’t matter how far a sheep had strayed from the flock; it still needed a shepherd’s care.

They were directed to a third-floor ward, thick with the smells of chemicals and sickness. Eliza spotted Whelan along the left wall, but when she tried to hurry to his side, Dead Rick’s hand clamped around her arm like a vise. “Careful. ’E’s dying.”

She froze. “What? How can you tell?”

His hard mouth twisted in something that wasn’t a smile. “Skriker, ain’t I? Death omen. I know when a man’s about to snuff it.”

They’d said he wasn’t infectious—but doctors had been wrong before. “What’s killing him?”

“Who knows? I don’t see the way, only the when. Don’t touch ’im, is all.”

He released her arm, and Eliza went forward more carefully. Not that she’d been intending to throw her arms around Whelan in the first place, but now she kept a wary distance. “Mr. Whelan… Dónall Whelan, can you hear me?”

He didn’t look like a dying man, any more than usual. But he didn’t rouse at her voice, until she wrapped her shawl over her hand—she hadn’t had gloves since the workhouse—and touched his shoulder. A firmer shake brought his head rolling across his pillow, and he opened his rheumy eyes. At first she wasn’t sure he recognized her, but then he said, “You’re no nurse.”

“I’m not.” Eliza wet her lips. Damn that faerie. The questions she wanted to ask had all but flown her mind; all she could think was that the man in front of her was dying. “Has it come to such a bad pass, Dónall Whelan, that you’d be looking to the priests for help?”

He mumbled something indistinct, and probably sacrilegious. Then, more clearly, he said, “I’ll be up and about soon enough—if these doctors don’t kill me. Never trust a doctor. Did you find the girls? The ones from West Ham?”

She swallowed. Those disappearances that Whelan had told her about in May. She’d clean forgotten about them, with everything that happened in between.

Instinct made her look up at Dead Rick, but he just shrugged. Whelan followed her gaze. “Who’s that?” He blinked, as if he could not quite focus on the skriker. For once, he didn’t reek of spirits; it must be illness that blurred his eyes.

Eliza bit her lip, wondering how to answer. With the truth; he deserves it. “It’s a faerie, Mr. Whelan,” she said, addressing him with far more courtesy than she’d used in the past. “I found them, just like I said I would. And I found Owen. That’s why I’ve come, because Owen needs your help.”

“A fairy?” He reached out blindly. Dead Rick hesitated, until Eliza gestured impatiently; then he took Whelan’s hand, his thin lips pressed together until they nearly disappeared.

Eliza said, “Yes, Mr. Whelan, a fairy. Just like you used to see, back in Ireland.”

His laugh was a dry, hacking thing, indistinguishable from a cough. “Never saw one,” he whispered, when he could speak. “Only ever knew what my father said. The rest, I made up.”

Her heart sank into her gut. She’d always thought the fairy doctor half a fraud; but it was another thing entirely to hear him confess himself one complete. “All the changelings you said you’d driven out—”

“Stories, lass. Stories.” He turned to look at her, still gripping Dead Rick’s hand. “Did they work?”

“I never tried them,” she lied. What was she supposed to do—tell this broken and dying old man he’d done her no good at all? But no, he’d done some; she was sure her farce with the furniture had confused the new Louisa Kittering. Just not enough to make the changeling admit what she was. “What Owen needs is something else. He’s half gone, Mr. Whelan—like they tried to make him a changeling, but it went wrong. He doesn’t speak, he doesn’t seem to understand much; he doesn’t even recognize his name. Sometimes I think I’m the only one who remembers it. Like it’s been taken from him somehow.”

Whelan’s breath rasped in and out for a few moments, and his eyes drifted shut; she was afraid he’d fallen asleep, or worse. Then he spoke. “To prevent a child from being taken changeling, you baptize him.”

“Owen was baptized. It didn’t save him.”

He mustered enough energy to be impatient with her. “If he’s lost his name, you give him a new one. Baptism, lass. To wash their stain from him.”

Dead Rick grimaced when she turned to him. “It turns a faerie human; it ought to do some good for ’im.”

“But what about his memories? Will he get those back?”

The skriker shook his head, free hand twisting up to show he didn’t know. Whelan mumbled, “At least he’ll be human.”

It wasn’t everything, but it was more than nothing. Especially if it kept Owen from wasting away after he left the faeries’ realm. “Thank you,” Eliza said, and strengthened her voice. “You should get some rest, now.”

Whelan nodded, already drifting off. His hand slipped from Dead Rick’s and fell to the mattress. For a moment Eliza thought Whelan had died, but the skriker shook his head again. When they were a few steps from the bed, she asked him quietly, “How long?”

“Tomorrow,” Dead Rick said. “At the latest.”

She didn’t dare wait that long; too many people had seen her, and might tell Special Branch where she’d gone. Eliza hadn’t decided yet what to do about her impulsive confession to Quinn, back in the workhouse, and he wasn’t the only man working for them. Still, Whelan had awoken pity in her heart. She hated to leave him here, forgotten and alone.

Dead Rick stepped into the path of a passing nurse. The woman opened her mouth to snap at him, but closed it when he lifted his hand, a silver crown winking between his fingers. “The Irishman there. This is for ’is care. You give ’im a good supper, and some whiskey if ’e wants it; you treat ’im well, understand?” His voice hardened. “If you don’t, I’ll know.”

She bobbed a curtsy, and snatched the coin from his hand. “Treat ’im like a prince, I will, sir.”

Eliza stood, openmouthed, as the nurse hurried on down the ward. When Dead Rick saw it, he shrugged uncomfortably. “Irrith says I used to be a decent cove. I figures, if that’s true, maybe I should act like one.”

A decent cove who didn’t mind the occasional threat—but that was more like the faerie she’d known, seven years ago. “The money’s faerie silver,” he added roughly, before she could say anything. “It’ll turn to a leaf tomorrow.”

She closed her mouth and followed him to the stairs.

The Prince’s Court, Onyx Hall: August 15, 1884

“Still no sign of him,” Bonecruncher said, wiping blood from his face and dabbing his nose, which seeped red. A souvenir of his venture into the increasingly chaotic Goblin Market. “I can tell you one thing, though: it isn’t some cunning plan of his. Unless Aspell really thinks he’ll gain something by letting his entire gang fall apart for lack of leadership.”

The barguest didn’t sound like he believed it, and neither did Hodge. They knew Aspell had been shot, with iron. Had he crawled off somewhere to die? Dead Rick had said it didn’t look like a lethal wound, but the death might have been too far off for him to sense.

Hodge didn’t care much what happened to the old traitor, just the photograph he’d been carrying. Admittedly, the Prince had bigger problems than a cove who was already dead. The impending end of the Onyx Hall, for example. Common sense said he should let Galen St. Clair go.

But one thing stopped him: Lune. He knew the stories; she’d loved her first Prince, Sir Michael Deven, hundreds of years ago. His successors had been friends and partners, nothing more. Still, she cared about them, all those names carved into the memorial in the ruins of the night garden. Just as she cared for her subjects, and her realm—but if Hodge couldn’t save those, he could at least save one bloody ghost.

And there was the faintest outside chance that it might do some larger good. Nadrett, after all, had taken that photograph for a reason. If only they could figure out what it was.

A question from Bonecruncher interrupted his thoughts. “Guess who else is missing from the Market?”

Quite a lot of fae; there wasn’t much Market left to hold them, not with the Inner Circle so close to completion. But Bonecruncher wouldn’t have said anything if he just meant the general exodus. Stomach sinking, Hodge asked, “Who?”

“Nadrett. And about half his lieutenants, too.”

Hodge stared, not sure whether to be overjoyed or appalled. His heart settled on the latter; instinct—not to mention his entire reign as Prince—told him that anything Nadrett did couldn’t be good. Including going away. “Where’s ’e gone?”

Bonecruncher shook his head, then dabbed again at his face. “Got my nose broken for asking. But it isn’t like Aspell, vanishing without a trace. Nadrett’s people, the top ones, know what’s going on. They just aren’t telling.”

His pulse quickened. Maybe it ain’t just humbug. Hodge believed there was something going on, deep within Nadrett’s lair—but surely if it were a passage to Faerie, they would know by now. People were fleeing, the palace emptying at a steady rate; if they could flee beyond this world, rumor would have spread like wildfire. Could be Nadrett just didn’t have it finished, but something about that didn’t fit together in Hodge’s mind.

He would ask the Academy blokes, but first, he had someone better. A former minion of Nadrett’s, who had no reason to love him now. And he’d been meaning to deal with the blighter anyway.

“Bring Dead Rick to me,” he said.

I wonder if ’e realizes I’m the one as knocked ’im down in Blackfriars.

Dead Rick had vaguely hoped Abd ar-Rashid’s comment about turning him over to Hodge had been something to mollify the girl. But that would require his luck turning good, and aside from getting his memories back, he hadn’t seen much sign of that happening. Yvoir was doing his best to sort out what exactly Chrennois’s cameras had done, but so far he had nothing useful to say, and they were running out of time.

At least the Prince’s court wasn’t much to speak of. Dead Rick had nothing to go by save Cyma’s occasional nostalgic recollections, but he had an imagination; what he’d imagined for the court had been a lot grander than this. There was little ceremony, and even he could recognize the spindly furniture as old-fashioned. The Prince himself dressed like a working man, even down here, in trousers and shirt probably bought ready-made, if not secondhand. It gave Dead Rick the thin consolation that his punishment might be something as ordinary as a beating. Hodge didn’t look like the sort to get creative.

To be honest, he looked too tired for it. Maybe the darkness that night in Blackfriars had just hidden the sick exhaustion in the man’s face, but Dead Rick would have bet anything other than his memories that the Prince had weakened more since then, as the rails raced to join up in Cannon Street. All those earthquakes, at best half suppressed. The Queen’s got it worse, he thought, remembering what Irrith had said. He wondered if the rest of what she’d said was true, that Hodge heard the Queen screaming.

The Prince sat with his face in his hands, scrubbing wearily at his eyes; then he drew in a breath and straightened. It was just three of them in the room, Hodge and Dead Rick and one of the Prince’s knights, Sir Cerenel. Dead Rick wasn’t even chained. Without warning, Hodge said, “Passages to Faerie. What do you know about ’em?”

Dead Rick blinked in surprise. He’d expected the Prince to read him a lecture about that mortal boy, not question him. Stupid of him; of course Hodge would want to know about Nadrett. “Scarce more than I did when I saw Irrith in the Market. Got the notion from Aspell; ’e comes to me—in secret; I didn’t know it was ’im—saying Nadrett’s trying to find a way to make one. I been looking for months, though, and the only thing I found was this business with the photos.”

“I know about those. But what’s ’e using them for?”

The question had been plaguing Dead Rick since that moment in the sewers. He wasn’t any closer to an answer now than before. “Blowed if I know. I can’t even invent nothing. It don’t make sense.”

Hodge pinched the bridge of his nose. “But you know Nadrett. Better than any of us do. Even if you don’t know ’ow the thing works, you can guess about ’im.”

Dead Rick would have preferred never to think about the bastard again, except to tear his throat out. He couldn’t get there without doing this first, though. “’E loves power; that’s what I know. Loves being the biggest rat in the sewer, with everybody afraid of ’im or owing ’im debts. If this place weren’t falling apart, ’e’d probably stay right where ’e is, fighting Hardface and all the rest until there ain’t nobody to challenge ’im no more. I’ll lay a clipped penny to a loaf of bread, ’e wants to make sure ’e don’t lose that when this all falls down. And that means making sure ’e’s got something everybody wants.”

“Something everybody wants,” Hodge muttered, “and people to sell it to. Did you know ’e’s vanished from the Market?”

“What?”

“Some of ’is lieutenants, too. We’re thinking they’ve shoved off to Faerie already. But I keep wondering: Why would ’e go, and leave everybody else behind? What use is it being a king in Faerie, if you’ve got nobody to rule over? Does ’e think ’e’s going to conquer ’imself a kingdom there, using cameras?”

Dead Rick frowned. “Could be ’e’s making ready for people to follow—”

“Then why ain’t ’e saying nothing? Getting everybody outside the door, ready to leap through?” Hodge got up from his chair and paced, not like a man with too much energy, but like one who simply couldn’t bear to remain still. “Something ’ere don’t make sense.”

Sourly, Dead Rick said, “I ain’t the one to tell you. My ’ead’s more ’ole than memory, you know.”

Hodge stopped, muttered to himself, turned back to face him. “Why did ’e take your memories, anyway?”

With Dead Rick’s mind buried in the other matter, it took him a moment to understand Hodge’s. “What?”

“I ’eard what ’e did to you. What was the point? What was ’e going to use ’em for?”

“Nothing,” Dead Rick said, frowning. Irrith had told him to trust Hodge; he made himself answer more fully. “That is—they was just for keeping me in line, is all. Whenever I disobeyed ’im, ’e broke one. ’E wouldn’t do that, right, if ’e was going to use ’em for something else?”

“Probably not. But do you think you knowed something, and ’e wanted to steal it, or—”

The Prince stopped again, and they both stared at each other. “Or destroy it,” Dead Rick said, with lips and tongue that had gone quite numb.

He’d never prodded too hard at that ragged, bleeding edge within his spirit, the place where everything had been torn away. It hurt too much, and Nadrett seemed to know when he was thinking about it; his master had kept him close in those early days, and broken more than a few memories to teach his dog his place. But now—

“What’s the first thing you remember?” Hodge asked.

The boy, Dead Rick thought, but it wasn’t true. That was just the farthest back he ever really let himself think about. Before that…

His breath came faster, his heart pounded harder, his knuckles ached from the tightness of his fists, but he made himself think back. Before the girl’s screams, before the boy’s trusting cooperation, even before Nadrett’s orders.

The earliest thing was pain.

Being thrown down onto a stone floor, puking-sick with pain that didn’t come from his body, and only white light when he blinked. “Somebody ’ad been flashing a light in my eyes,” Dead Rick said, hearing his voice flatten out with tension. “And somebody—Nadrett, I think—’e said, is that the lot, and whoever ’e asked must ’ave nodded or such, because ’e said, good. And then they dragged me out of the room, and somebody else chained me up, a chain around my neck like I was a dog even though I was a man, and then—” He stopped, unable to go further, and shook his head. There was nothing worth telling, no hint of whether he’d once known something useful. Something Nadrett would shred his mind to get.

Cerenel stepped forward, and Dead Rick nearly jerked into violence; he’d forgotten the elf-knight was there. Cerenel’s hand floated just above the butt of his pistol, though he didn’t draw. Dead Rick realized his own body had drawn wire-tight; to anyone watching from the outside, it must look like he was on the verge of something dangerous. Like hurting the Prince. Drawing in a slow breath, trying to convince himself it was calming, Dead Rick unclenched his hands. His knuckles creaked at the release.

Hodge was chewing on one fingernail, half-turned away as if trying to give Dead Rick some privacy. “Yvoir’s got to put you back together. If you knows something we can use, I want to know it, too.”

Swallowing down the memory of sickness, Dead Rick shook his head. “If I ever did, it’s gone now. That would’ve been the first bit Nadrett smashed.”

“We won’t know until you do, will we?” Hodge’s breath caught, his scent giving off a wash of unexpected pain, and he slumped abruptly down into a different chair. When he’d let the air out again, he said, “I’ll tell Yvoir to ’urry it up.”

After a brief wait, Dead Rick figured out that had been a dismissal. Startled into lack of caution, he said, “That’s it? Ain’t you going to—” His common sense caught up, and he snapped his mouth shut.

But Hodge understood him anyway. “Ain’t I going to punish you, for that business with the boy? Blood and Bone, Dead Rick—you just stood there and told me as ’ow Nadrett tortured you into being ’is dog. I suppose I could make you pay for what ’e did—but ain’t I got worse problems?”

Dumbfounded, all Dead Rick could think to say was, “The girl—”

“The girl’s got ’er own problems,” Hodge said with exhausted finality. “’Ere’s an idea—you two take care of yourselves, and save me the trouble.”

Whitechapel, London: August 16, 1884

The light showing through the canvas over the broken window was dim, no more than a single candle’s worth. But it was enough to tell Eliza that someone was at home, and so she raised her hand to the weathered panels and knocked.

This time she heard footsteps: slow, dragging ones, the steps of a woman exhausted past the will to raise her feet. They might have belonged to an old woman, but when the door opened, Eliza saw it was Maggie Darragh. The narrow court in which they lived was dark as pitch, and with the candle behind Maggie her face was entirely in shadow, but she was too tall for Mrs. Darragh, and her shoulders slumped with weariness, not defeat. “What do you want?” she said dully.

Eliza drew a careful breath. She’d been given a mirror to look in, before leaving the Onyx Hall; she knew the face she currently wore was not her own. Seeing Maggie fail to recognize her, though, both reassured and unnerved her.

It made her task more difficult, too, which was regrettable, but necessary. She still hadn’t decided what to do about Sergeant Quinn, and after her suspicious release from the workhouse—not to mention the way she’d vanished after—she doubted the man thought well of her. The Darraghs’ room would be the first place he’d come, if he went looking. So if Eliza wanted to come here, she needed a disguise, and a better one than just a deep bonnet. She needed a faerie illusion—a glamour, as they called them.

Now she needed to convince Maggie to let strangers into her lodgings.

“Miss Darragh?” she said, and the shadow in the doorway nodded. “Father Tooley sent us. May we come in?”

At the word us, Maggie squinted past her into the darkness of the court, where Eliza’s companions waited. “Sent ye? Why?”

“For your mother’s sake,” Eliza answered. “We belong to a charitable society, and would like to help you if we can. I promise we won’t ask more than a few minutes of your time.” It happened occasionally, that well-meaning women from the better classes decided to help out the less fortunate. They didn’t come by at night, when few honest people were out and about, but she hoped Maggie wouldn’t think of that, not before she let them in.

From behind Eliza, a friendly voice spoke up. “We’ve fresh biscuits to share.”

Maggie hesitated as if fighting with her common sense, but the delightful smell that suddenly filled the court decided her. “Ma’s asleep, so be quiet.” She stood aside to let them in.

With the weak light of the candle now falling on Maggie’s face, Eliza saw what shadows had previously hidden. The young woman’s eyes were red-rimmed as if she’d been straining them on too little sleep, and indeed, a half-finished pair of trousers were draped across a three-legged stool, next to the room’s one light. Other fabric scattered around showed that this was no bit of personal mending; Maggie had taken on piecework to earn a few more coins. Not enough coins, if her hollow cheeks were anything to go by. Heart cramping with sympathy, Eliza wondered if the biscuits would be the first thing Maggie had eaten that day.

The small room seemed even smaller once six people were crowded into it. Mrs. Darragh lay on the bed, crumpled even smaller in sleep, with a moth-eaten wool coverlet pulled tighter over her shoulder. Maggie stood over her protectively, facing Eliza and the other three. With the door closed, they were alone as anyone could get in the back alleys of Whitechapel, where eavesdroppers were only a thin wall or floor away.

The plump woman who looked exactly like Rosamund Goodemeade, only a little taller, unfolded the napkin in her basket, revealing the biscuits inside. Their smell was sweet heaven in the drab little room, and Maggie twitched as if she wanted desperately to seize them in both hands. Rosamund gave them over freely, but Maggie just stood clutching the basket. “What is it ye want?”

Eliza wet her lips. After seven years, the moment had come; she was surprised to find it terrified her. Whatever speech she’d thought up, to explain everything in a quick and sensible way, had vanished from her mind, leaving a roaring blank. But she had to speak; Maggie’s suspicion was growing with every silent moment. The words burst out of her. “Maggie, ’tis me. Eliza. I’ve found Owen.”

Maggie’s hands went white on the basket. She gripped it now as if she would swing it into someone’s face, should they gave her half a reason. “What the devil kind of joke—”

“It isn’t a joke! The faeries had him, Maggie, as I always said, but I’ve found him, and I brought him here, but we had to disguise ourselves in case—” Eliza stopped herself. That didn’t matter; all that mattered was bringing Owen home. “Rosamund, show her—”

Like a breath of wind whispering over the fine hairs of her arms and legs, the glamour she wore fell away. And Maggie, eyes wide and unblinking, hands still white on the basket’s handle, stood rigid for a full three seconds. Then her legs gave out, and she fell hard to her knees on the floor beside the bed.

It woke Mrs. Darragh, who made a plaintive noise and rolled over. Her eyes opened; for a moment they swept over the room in unfocused confusion. When her gaze sharpened, she gave a wordless cry and sat bolt upright, one hand pressed to her heart as if it would give out on the spot.

Her own heart pounding like a navvy’s hammer, Eliza turned to see for herself. Owen stood swaying by Feidelm’s side, his face wrinkled with apprehension and uncertainty. Eliza didn’t know if her plea to Rosamund had been meant to include his glamour or not, but the brownie had taken it that way, dropping them both at once. The two faeries’ glamours still stood, but they were hardly needed; they could have been a pair of fire-breathing dragons and neither of the Darraghs would have paid an ounce of attention. They had Owen back at last.

Mute, half-witted, snatched out of time. Mrs. Darragh did not seem to see; she stumbled free of the bedclothes, moving faster than she had in ages, to throw her arms around a boy who did not recognize her but had nowhere to retreat. The last seven years might never have happened; for her, it was still 1877, and Owen the age he should be.

But Maggie saw.

Some part of her understood, even if she couldn’t yet put the knowledge into words. Eliza read it in the desperate look Maggie directed at her. “How—” the young woman began, shaking her head; and Eliza answered her.

She kept it to the simplest points. They had never told Maggie about their friend Dead Rick; that had been their secret, hers and Owen’s, not for a little sister to share. And the part about Nadrett would only confuse her now. What mattered was Owen’s condition—and the solution Dónall Whelan had given them.

“We tried to take him to St. Anne’s first,” Eliza admitted. The boy had struggled free of Mrs. Darragh, not understanding why she was so desperately glad to see him; Rosamund diverted the woman from him, breaking the news of his situation as gently as she could. “I would have liked to bring him back more healed than this. But he panicked on the steps and wouldn’t go in. Will you go fetch Father Tooley here instead?”

Maggie’s senses were apparently still reeling; she didn’t ask why Eliza’s companions couldn’t go. They could enter churches, so long as they had bread to protect them, but neither Rosamund nor Feidelm was eager to explain this matter to a priest. Maggie nodded, still sitting on the floor. And she stayed there until Eliza added, “Better if ’tis sooner.” Then the girl blinked and scrambled to her feet.

Feidelm stepped over to murmur in her ear once Maggie was gone. “The mother… is she well?”

Tears burned in Eliza’s eyes at the question. Mrs. Darragh was busily telling Rosamund about Owen’s apprenticeship to a bicycle maker, while her strayed lamb of a son investigated the biscuits Maggie had left behind. “No,” she whispered back. “Her wits left when Owen did. I pray having him back will do her some good, but…” But no priestly ritual could mend what had gone wrong with her.

Whether one could help Owen remained to be seen.

The church was only a few streets away, and Maggie had gone out the door like a woman determined to drag the priest back by his collar if necessary. She returned in almost no time at all with Father Tooley at her heels—looking, Eliza was glad to see, more curious and concerned than upset at being rousted.

He stopped in the doorway as if he’d slammed into a pane of glass, staring at Owen.

Maggie nudged him in before the neighbors could grow too curious, and shut the door behind him. “A mhic ó,” Father Tooley breathed, crossing himself. “’Tis true, then.”

He listened as Eliza repeated her explanation, this time going into more detail on what Whelan and Dead Rick had said. She looked to the fae for confirmation, only to realize they’d slipped out while she was talking; how had they done that, without drawing attention? Faerie magic, perhaps. They’d done right, though. Rosamund and Feidelm had come with her because Owen needed looking after, and trusted them more than the family that were strangers to him now. The question of what to do with him, though, belonged to the mortals.

To Father Tooley most of all. He folded his big hands into a neat package while she spoke, a sure sign that he was thinking hard; when she finished, he stood silent for a long moment. Then he shook his head. “’Tisn’t that simple, Eliza. Or perhaps I should say, ’tis simpler. Once a child’s been baptized, he cannot be baptized again. There’s no need for it; God’s grace is indelible. The Devil himself could not wipe it away.”

For all her doubts about Whelan, it seemed some part of Eliza’s mind had seized upon his suggestion as the answer to their problems. Her bitter disappointment at Father Tooley’s words surprised her. “Your baptism didn’t do much to protect Owen, now did it? Could be you aren’t priest enough to do it right.”

It was unfair, and he frowned at her. “Anyone can baptize, Eliza—even a Jew, so long as his words and intent are right. But I don’t know if ’tis true that baptism protects against such things. That… is not the sort of thing they teach in seminary.”

“But look at him.” Helplessness made Eliza’s gesture violent, flinging her hand out to where Owen had curled up on the bed, with Mrs. Darragh stroking his hair. “They say the faerie tried to take his soul, Father. You’ll be telling me next that no one can do that, and maybe ’tis true, but the bastard took something. And if we don’t find some way to wash Owen clean, he can never come back to us, broken or whole. He’s eaten too much of their food. It would kill him, and that’s the truth of it.”

“If you pray—”

“You think I haven’t?”

Father Tooley conceded the point, but still he frowned. “Some other rite, perhaps—an exorcism—”

Maggie made a furious noise, like a dog defending her pup. A pup who had once been her older brother. Eliza said, “Can you tell me honestly that you think he’s a demon in him?”

The priest looked at Owen for another long moment, then shook his head. “No.”

While he grappled with that question, Eliza’s own mind had snatched up one of its own, from something Father Tooley said before. “You said anyone could baptize.”

“Don’t you think of it for one moment,” he said, alarmed. “Ministering the sacrament to an infant who won’t live long enough for the priest to come—to a Protestant converting on his deathbed—that’s a worthy thing, Eliza. But to do it when a priest has refused, when you know the boy has already been baptized, would make a mockery of the sacrament. And sure that would be a grave sin.”

“Then what should I do?” she demanded, forgetting to keep her voice low. “Let him waste away? Abandon him to the faeries? If you think—”

She wanted to keep talking when he raised his hand, but his suddenly thoughtful expression silenced her. “I could,” he began, then stopped.

“Could?” Maggie prompted him, fierce with hope.

Father Tooley grimaced. “The bishop would have my ears for even considering it, he would,” he muttered. “But better to be sure than sorry, and if there’s a chance it might do him good… when I said anyone could baptize, it was true, but not the whole truth. If a heretic administers the sacrament, who’s to say they had the form and meaning of it right?”

“So you baptize the person again,” Eliza said.

He made a cautionary gesture. “Not again. A baptism done wrong doesn’t count in the first place. But if you don’t know for sure, there’s conditional baptism.” A hint of rueful humor crept into his voice. “’Tisn’t much different from the ordinary thing. Si non es baptizatus, that’s all I add—if you aren’t already baptized. If you are, then all you get is a bit of Latin and a bit of water on your head, and no harm to anyone.”

Maggie turned swiftly, as if something could be hiding from her in the tiny room. “Water—I can go to the pump on Old Montague—”

“No,” Eliza said. “Sure it would be better in the church. During Mass—”

Father Tooley barked a laugh. “Oh, no. Think ye two are going to march him up the aisle, and me explaining to everyone what on earth we’re doing?”

Then Eliza remembered Owen’s refusal to enter St. Anne’s. She described it to Father Tooley, and he folded his hands again, tilting his head as if arguing with himself. The debate ended with a decisive nod of his head. “This is what ye’ll do. Next Friday—”

“Next Friday!”

He gave Eliza a quelling look. “’Tis the feast day of St. Symphorian, and the octave of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary. He’s a patron of children, and if Owen is too old to qualify for his help, we can still beseech the Virgin to intercede. Ye bring him to the church a few hours before dawn. The rite begins on the steps outside; if we can’t get him through the door, then I’ll do it all in the street. And pray God it does some good.”

Owen shivered and curled tighter. He’d gone into that posture, Eliza thought, when they began speaking of God. The faerie stain, no doubt. They couldn’t keep him out here much longer; soon he would have to go back to the Onyx Hall.

Silently, she offered up her own prayer. Blessed Virgin, Mother of God—for Mrs. Darragh’s sake, if no one else’s, help our Owen be well.

Humming an old lullaby beneath her breath, Mrs. Darragh bent over her son and kissed his forehead. “Sleep, my boy,” she whispered. “Sleep.”

The Galenic Academy, Onyx Hall: August 17, 1884

Yvoir’s workshop stank of chemicals. Dead Rick made the mistake of trying to smell them apart, and sneezed four times in quick succession. The French faerie smiled at him. “Be glad you aren’t mortal. I’m fairly certain the compounds they use have killed a number of photographers.”

“And yours are safer, are they?”

He shrugged. “To mortals, perhaps not. But we are not so easily killed, are we? A moment, please.” Yvoir returned his attention to the bowl in front of him, and the strainer balanced on its rim. The latter held a stone-green blob that jiggled as the faerie lifted it and scraped viscous material away from its underside.

Fascinated despite himself, Dead Rick asked, “What is that?”

“Cockatrice egg.” Yvoir carelessly dumped the yolk into a bucket on the floor. “Almost any sort of egg should work, but I find the albumen of a cockatrice egg is more stable, if slower to develop the image.”

Dead Rick came closer, peering into the bowl, which proved to hold a large quantity of clear, viscous sludge. “This is for photographs, then.”

Yvoir nodded and tossed the strainer into a basin of water, then wiped his hands clean on a towel. “Not like yours, though. Have a seat, and I’ll tell you what I’ve learned.”

The skriker’s heart beat more quickly at the words. The message hadn’t said anything about Yvoir’s progress, just that the scholar wanted to talk to him. He hadn’t quite dared let himself hope that the news would be good. Too excited to relax, he perched on the edge of the chair and said, “Can you put them back?”

“This is what I called you for, is it not? I have a sense now of what Chrennois did.” Yvoir steepled his fingers and glanced around his workshop. The walls were covered in more photographs than Dead Rick could count, of all different kinds; some had the silver gloss of daguerreotypes, while others glowed a warm amber, or showed the delicate colors of hand-tinting. Mostly they showed people—fae were always fascinated by people—but a few depicted landscapes, sometimes from as far away as Egypt or China.

His accent thickened by distraction, Yvoir said, “They are not quite photographs, not in the way I have created. Not images. You could not put them up on the wall like these. Chrennois was finding a way to capture the… essence of things.”

The essence of Dead Rick’s memories. A growl rose in his throat at the thought, but he swallowed it down.

Yvoir searched through a pile on the table by his left arm and produced one of the thin glass plates. Dead Rick had spent untold hours staring at them, after the failed attempt on Aldersgate. The other faerie was right; they didn’t show images like a photograph. Still, he thought he could see something swimming in their depths—as if, should he stare long enough, he could make out the secrets they held. He’d gone half blind trying.

“This,” Yvoir said, tapping the glass—Dead Rick held his breath in apprehension—“is like a daguerreotype. It is on glass instead of copper, but I believe it was coated in moon-silver and then in some fashion sensitized before being exposed, though I do not know how. Willow smoke, perhaps. Are you familiar with the alchemical connections of willow and the moon?”

Dead Rick waved off what sounded like an impending lecture. “Just get to the bit that’ll ’elp me.”

The Frenchman blinked as if not at all clear why anyone would want to skip the details, but he obeyed. “The coating on the plate was made reactive to things less visible than light—thoughts, passions, memories. Which is very intriguing—and so is this.” His stained fingernail traced a nearly imperceptible line down the center of the rectangular plate, which Dead Rick had noticed before. “It seems he took two photographs at once.”

“Two?” Dead Rick frowned. “What in ’ell would ’e want with two?”

Yvoir smiled, like a conjurer about to reveal his completed trick. “Have you ever seen a stereograph?”

Dead Rick shook his head.

The other faerie bounded to his feet and went to the nearest wall, hand floating across the assortment of pictures. “It should be… ah, yes. Here.” He lifted a frame down, then rummaged in a cabinet until he found a small wooden contraption with a clamp at one end. After a bit of fumbling, he got the picture out of its frame and put it in the clamp, then handed the whole to Dead Rick. “Look through the lenses.”

He glanced at the picture before doing so, and saw it was a pair of identical images, showing some tremendous chasm in the wilderness, probably on the American frontier. When he put his eyes to the lenses, though, the two images blended into one—and came to life. He pulled back with a stifled yelp, and found Yvoir grinning at him; grinding his teeth, Dead Rick looked again.

Nothing moved; it wasn’t “life” in that sense. But he felt as if he were standing where the photographer had been, seeing not a flat image, but depth. “’Ow in Mab’s name…”

“It mimics the way your eyes work,” Yvoir said. “You see a slightly different image with each eye, so if the photographer takes two images the correct distance apart, and you view the prints the same way, it creates the effect of proper vision. Don’t you see? It’s like an illusion that mortals have learned to make for themselves!”

The excitement in his voice made Dead Rick sour. Putting down the stereograph, he said, “It weren’t no illusion they did to me.”

Yvoir sobered quickly. “No, of course not. But the point is that the stereoscopic image has depth, in a way that a flat photograph does not. I suspect this is the key to your memories being taken from you. If we were to use Chrennois’s techniques, but with only one lens, we would make only a copy—of a memory, or a thought; perhaps even a soul.” He looked thoughtful. “Or perhaps not. Souls are more complicated. The stereoscopic camera may be a necessity for that. But had Nadrett wished only to copy your memories, he could have done so, I think.”

It lent credence to the idea that Nadrett had wanted to destroy them completely. Or at least a specific one. “You know about this passage to Faerie business?” Dead Rick asked. Yvoir nodded. “’Ow could that fit in with this?”

The thoughtful look deepened to a frown. “I do not know. Stereography creates depth; I could imagine that being useful if one wishes to make a path that leads somewhere else. But photographs to make a path?”

“Photographs of ghosts and souls,” Dead Rick reminded him.

Yvoir nodded acknowledgment of his point. “If I were to do this, I would be photographing faerie minds, not mortals. Gather different notions of Faerie, perhaps—copies only—from those with clear memories of it, and then set them side by side. It would create something that is a combination of the two, and more than a flat image. But I still do not see how that makes a path through to Faerie, even with depth.”

Neither did Dead Rick. Maybe Hodge was right, and the answers lay in his own glass plates. “Well, put my memories back in my ’ead, and I’ll tell you if the answer’s in there somewhere.”

The faerie put up an apologetic hand. “I cannot—not yet.”

The skriker’s mood was an unstable thing these days, swinging easily from hope to rage. He almost put his fist into Yvoir’s face. “What do you mean, you can’t? Why call me ’ere, then? All this bloody lecturing about things what don’t matter, but when it comes to the only thing that does, you’re bloody useless!”

He knew he was angry; he didn’t realize how much until Yvoir flinched back. “Soit patient s’il te plaît! I mean, I know how to do it—I believe so, at least—but it cannot be done yet. You must be patient.”

The fear in Yvoir’s voice reminded Dead Rick, yet again, that he was no longer in the Goblin Market. The differences kept taking him by surprise. Hodge’s mercy, Irrith’s gentle teasing, and now Yvoir’s fear, because to these people he was scary. They had not lived with the likes of Nadrett or Lacca.

Or am I that much scarier than I used to be?

There was no need to cringe or scrape here, to show throat and beg for mercy. For the first time in ages, Dead Rick felt strong. Only for a moment, though: then his eyes went to the fragile glass of his memory, and he remembered how easily strength could be taken from him.

He took a slow breath and made himself think about what Yvoir had just said. “What are you waiting for, then?”

“Are you familiar with absinthe?”

A surprised snort puffed out of him. “That green stuff the mortals drink?”

Yvoir looked contemptuous. “What they drink is a pale imitation of the real thing. In Faerie, wormwood is an herb of the moon; the mortals know this, for they call it Artemisia absinthium, after the Greek goddess. And it will assist in visions, which is what we need. I have written to France, to obtain some. As soon as it arrives, we will try.”

Something in the way he said it made Dead Rick apprehensive. “And the bit you ain’t telling me is…”

“I said what they drink is a pale imitation. True absinthe—the Green Faerie itself—is much more powerful. You may find its effects… distressing.”

The anger was still there. It had always been there, every moment he lived under Nadrett’s heel, only now he could admit it without fear of dying. Dead Rick stalked toward Yvoir, who abruptly went rigid and did not move, and growled very quietly into the other faerie’s face, “More distressing than ’aving everything of who I was—every bit of me that ain’t Nadrett’s dog—stuck in glass?”

A tiny, tremulous shake of Yvoir’s head was his only answer.

Dead Rick’s lip curled in a mockery of a smile. “Let me know when you gets your wormwood. I’ll be more than ready.”

St. Anne’s Church, Whitechapel: August 22, 1884

Eliza had grown accustomed to having her heart in her mouth every time she went to Whitechapel. Usually it was because of Special Branch, but this time, her fears were of another sort entirely.

What if it doesn’t work?

The question had no answer. If it didn’t work, then… no. It had to work. Had to, because Eliza lacked any alternative, and surely God owed her this much.

Blasphemous thoughts to have in her head as she slipped through the Whitechapel night to church.

With Owen following like a meek and frightened lamb, she avoided the pimps and the whores, the cutpurses and the drunkards staggering through the streets, making her way to a place such sinners rarely frequented. St. Anne’s was a solid, comforting bulk in the darkness, silhouetted against a surprisingly clear sky. Eliza was grateful for the lack of a moon, which would help to conceal what they did here tonight.

Grateful, at least, until a shadow detaching itself from the outer wall of the church made her nearly jump from her skin. “We’ve a problem.”

Eliza pressed one hand over her pounding heart and glared at the Maggie Darragh–shaped shadow. “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, Maggie, you scared me half to— What do you mean, a problem?”

Owen had scurried to hide behind Eliza, keeping her between him and the sister he didn’t recognize. Or perhaps it was the church he cowered away from, or his mother, who followed her daughter into the street. Maggie gestured at him. “He needs sponsors, doesn’t he? A godmother and a godfather, to answer for him, since he’s no voice. I didn’t think of it until now. Ma can’t, not for her own child. I suppose I might, but shouldn’t there be two?”

Eliza’s heart sank. She hadn’t thought of it, either, but should have. Even when an adult converted, they had sponsors at their side during the baptism, and Owen’s position was more like that of an infant. It might be possible to do it with only one—she could ask Father Tooley—but her instincts rebelled against doing anything that might undermine the sacrament.

But who would they find to be his godfather? Not liking it, but not seeing any other choice, Eliza said, “Fergus—”

Maggie was already shaking her head, as if she’d known Eliza would suggest him. “It would never work; he hasn’t come to church in years. And he—he doesn’t know about my brother, not yet.”

Now wasn’t the time to ask why. Eliza bit her lip. Dónall Whelan had been buried days before, with more faerie silver to pay his way; but he, like Fergus Boyle, had been an unrepentant sinner, not a man in good standing with the church.

Did the second sponsor have to be a man?

Owen was a silent, timid presence at her back. In the days since she’d found him, he’d come to trust her, a little, if not as much as Feidelm and the others he knew better. She’d dared the police and the world under London to find him, and a godmother was supposed to stand between her godson and sin…

If she sponsored him through this baptism, though, they would be family. And they could never marry.

She’d been avoiding the question ever since she went into the Onyx Hall and saw her lost love, caught seven years back in time. Even if Owen regained his wits, he was just a boy. Eliza had spent a third of her life apart from him, growing and changing, not always in good ways. Would he remember her? Would he still love who she’d become?

Did she still love who he was now?

Another question with no answer. It couldn’t be answered, not until Father Tooley baptized Owen and they saw what good, if any, that did. But Eliza had to make her choice now.

The creak of a door made them all jump. It was just the priest, though, emerging from the church in his robes and violet stole. He cast a quick glance around, then hurried over to join them.

In the few seconds it took for him to reach them, Eliza made her decision.

All that matters is helping Owen. You can’t let anything get in the way of that.

She just hoped the decision wasn’t cowardice, a way of avoiding the questions she couldn’t answer.

“Father Tooley,” Maggie said, “we didn’t arrange for sponsors. I’ll be his godmother, but for the other—”

“I’ll do it,” Eliza said, cutting her off. The declaration came out too loud, and she lowered her voice. “If two godmothers isn’t blasphemy, I’ll be the other.”

Maggie gave her a sharp look, and Father Tooley one so filled with pity and kindness that Eliza flinched away from meeting it. She expected the priest to remind her of what that meant, or say she couldn’t do it, but to her surprise— “I thought of that already, and arranged a godfather for him.”

“Who?” Maggie demanded, before Eliza could find her tongue. For one irrational, bewildered moment, she thought of Dead Rick. But the Goodemeades had already told her that baptism was too dangerous a thing for them to go near, bread or no.

Father Tooley said, “I think that’s him at the corner, there.”

She and Maggie both whirled. In the darkness, with a cap on, the man’s face was too deeply shadowed to make out the slightest detail, but Eliza didn’t need it. The left sleeve, knotted at the cuff where a hand should be, made him recognizable at any distance.

She didn’t know she’d cursed until Maggie elbowed her, and for a moment they might have been sisters again. Eliza spun again and glared at Father Tooley. “You’d call my father a good Catholic? Good enough for Owen?”

The priest had the grace to look awkward. “In the general sense, no, but—he’s made confession, and done his penance. And he wanted to see you, Eliza.”

By then James O’Malley had drawn close enough to overhear. Eliza snapped her mouth shut, too many emotions warring inside for her to be sure what would pop out. Her father was much as he had been when she visited him in Newgate last year: still a big-boned man, though with less flesh on him than before, and his face scarred by a life harder than Eliza cared to think. She knew what trials he’d been through—and she knew they didn’t excuse his flaws. Other men went through as much without becoming drunkards, or beating their wives and children, or falling into a life of petty crime.

That he should stand as Owen’s godfather was unthinkable.

He said nothing, and the silence grew tighter and tighter, until Eliza finally snapped, “Where the devil have you been, then—other than with the Fenians?”

Maggie drew in her breath sharply. James O’Malley’s jaw hardened. But he didn’t growl back, as she expected; he just said, “That’s something we’ll be speaking of later. For now, I think we’ve other things to do.” He paused, his gaze on Owen. “Christ. Something has gone wrong with the boy, hasn’t it?”

“Yes,” Father Tooley said hastily, “and we ought to take care of that before someone notices what we’re about. Eliza, he needs a godfather, and James says he’s willing to stand for it. Will that do?”

She wasn’t at all sure that it would—but she could hardly ignore the priest when he said Owen needed this. Her answer came out unsteady, but it came out all the same. “It will—but pray God this works.”

In all seriousness, Father Tooley said, “I have been. Come, let’s get started.”

It took all Eliza’s coaxing to get Owen to even approach the steps of the church. The closer they got to the door, the more he fought her, face twisting in apprehension, just as it had before; and Mrs. Darragh was no use, making soothing noises that influenced her son not at all. But finally Eliza got him onto the steps, and Maggie said, “Father Tooley, we bring this boy to be baptized.”

The priest waited, then prompted her with a gesture, but the girl only looked confused. No one calls him by name, Eliza thought. Not anymore. They hadn’t for years—three or four, now that she thought of it. That must have been when Nadrett took it from him.

In a strong voice, she said, “’Tis Owen Darragh they bring.”

Father Tooley accepted that and began. “Quid petis ab Ecclesia Dei?” What do you ask for from the Church of God?

James answered the questioning on Owen’s behalf, giving the short responses in badly pronounced Latin. Then the priest began to cross Owen, first with breath, then with his thumb. Maggie held her brother by the shoulders; he twitched and gasped at each sign of the cross, and let out a wordless, desperate cry when Father Tooley placed his hands upon the boy’s head and began to pray. Eliza bit down on her lip. If prayer alone hurt him like that, what would the blessed salt do?

Owen fought to avoid it, clamping his mouth shut and twisting his head away; mouth set in a grim line, James pried his jaw open with his one hand, while Maggie held her brother and wept into his hair. When Father Tooley set the salt on his tongue, Owen went completely rigid, and Eliza tasted blood—but as James said the last “Amen,” the boy relaxed, his eyes opening once more and his body going slack.

Eliza’s breath was coming fast, but she met Father Tooley’s questioning gaze and nodded. It seemed to have done some good; Owen was silent through the exorcism, through the repeated signs of the cross and the second imposition of hands, Father Tooley praying in a voice that went no farther than their little group, admitting him into the church building. When the paternoster was done, Eliza beckoned Owen from the door, and he obediently followed Maggie and the rest into the nave.

He shivered as he crossed the threshold, but made no other sound. The solemn exorcism, Father Tooley’s spittle upon his ears and nostrils, the renunciation of Satan, the anointing with oil; the interior of the church was lit only by a few candles, and the entire moment had a dreamlike quality that made Eliza hold her breath. Her entire spirit was bent in wordless prayer, as if she could compel Owen into wholeness just by the force of her hope.

This had to heal him. It had to.

Father Tooley changed his violet stole for a white one, shimmering in the darkness, and led their little group to the font. A hand slipped into Eliza’s, startling a little sound out of her, but it was only Mrs. Darragh. The old woman shivered, and Eliza gripped her fingers, taking comfort in the strength that answered hers. “Owen Darragh,” Father Tooley asked, “credis in Deum Patrem omnipotentem, creatorem cæli et terram?”

James O’Malley might not be a religious man, but he never doubted the existence of God the Father Almighty. “Credo,” he answered for Owen, and Maggie with him.

Eliza’s breath came faster and faster as they finished the profession of faith, as Father Tooley asked whether Owen wished to be baptized, and his godmother and godfather answered on his behalf that he did. And then the moment had come, and she stopped breathing entirely.

Taking water from the font, Father Tooley lifted it above Owen’s head. “Si non es baptizatus,” he said, “ego te baptizo in nomine Patris—”

Every hair on Eliza’s arms and neck stood straight up as the priest poured the holy water.

“—et Filii—”

A second dipper of water. Every candle in the church seemed to grow brighter.

“—et Spiritus Sancti.”

Owen drew in a deep, shuddering gasp, the third cup of holy water running over his closed eyes, streaming through his hair and down his cheeks. He straightened beneath Maggie’s and James’s hands, shoulders going back, and Eliza’s skin tried to shake itself right off her body as she felt something go by, banished from the church—and from Owen—by the ancient ritual, repeated in this precise form for hundreds of years.

Holy Mary, Mother of God—please—

Hand shaking, Father Tooley anointed Owen with chrism, reciting the prayer in a near whisper. When he finished, Maggie and James opened their mouths to answer, but another voice spoke before they could.

“Amen,” Owen said.

The Galenic Academy, Onyx Hall: August 22, 1884

When Dead Rick saw what Yvoir had set up, he almost turned around and left.

The French elf had mostly talked about how they were going to shine moonlight through the translucent plates of his memories, running them one by one past his eyes as if they were pattern cards in a Jacquard loom. He’d spent a great deal of time explaining the principles behind the creation of that moonlight—something about a particular balance of the four elements in what he called a selenic configuration; Dead Rick didn’t understand a word of it—and made one brief mention that the absinthe might have some lingering effects that would take a while to disperse.

He hadn’t said a word about the chair.

It was a thick, blocky thing—heavy, not like the modern, fashionable furniture that sometimes made its way into the Goblin Market, but rather like the oldest pieces, the ones that predated the Onyx Hall itself. No padding softened its seat or back, and along the edges…

“Ash and Thorn,” Irrith said from behind him. “Yvoir, what in Mab’s name are you planning to do to him?”

Yvoir blinked owlishly at them through the lenses over his eyes, which allowed the Academy engineers to better study the alchemical balance of the machines they built. “What?”

Tension gripping his throat too tightly for him to speak, Dead Rick gestured at the chair—at the bands on its arms, its legs, even where his head would rest.

“Oh.” Yvoir turned the lenses up, so that his eyes were no longer refracted into weird layers. “I mentioned there may be muscle spasms, yes? It is necessary to make certain you do not move from the path of the light; if we do not send the image directly into your eyes, you may lose a part of what we seek to return. Is it a problem?”

Dead Rick’s jaw ached from being clenched so hard. The sight of the chair called up a nameless dread in him—no, not entirely nameless; he could identify a portion of it very well indeed. Once he was locked into position, he would be at the mercy of those around him, unable to move so much as a single hand to defend himself. Every Market-honed instinct he had screamed at him not to be an idiot, not to trust these people, no matter what they promised…

Irrith had learned something of him in these last few days. She stepped around in front of him, lifted her hand, and when he did not flinch away, rested it on his arm. “I’ll be right here,” she promised. “The instant you say the word, I’ll let you out. Even if Yvoir isn’t done. If you want it to end, all you have to do is say so.”

She was still asking him to trust her, and he was still petrified to do it. But you’ve done worse, ’aven’t you? Trusted Valentin Aspell, without even knowing who ’e was. ’Cause you was too desperate to pass up the chance.

He’d been under Nadrett’s thumb at the time. Now he was free of his master. He could hold on to the memories, and wait until—

Until what? Until he found someone else he did trust? Dead Rick looked around the room, at the alchemical diagrams on the walls and strange equipment littering the shelves. All the foreigners were here for a reason: because there was no other place like this in the world, where fae had found a means of describing the half-rational, half-symbolic rules that governed the realms existing in the cracks of the mortal world, and then translating those rules into mechanical devices. Once this place was gone, he could wander a century without finding anyone else with the necessary skills to help him.

And then there was the possibility Hodge had raised. Maybe he’d known something that threatened Nadrett, and that was why the bastard had stolen his memories. If there was any fragment left that might hurt his former master…

With stiff legs, Dead Rick strode over to the chair and dropped into the seat. “I ain’t going to back out. Do what you ’as to.”

Irrith bit her lip, and gave him a startlingly grave nod. “Here,” Yvoir said, handing her a crystal vial. “Prepare this, and have him drink it.”

The Green Faerie: absinthe from beyond this world. The moment Irrith withdrew the emerald that capped the vial’s slender neck, a powerful scent filled the air, like bitter anise carried on ephemeral wings. Irrith emptied it into a small cup; then she laid a slotted silver spoon across the top, with some kind of glittering crystal balanced in the center. Over this she poured a liquid that shone like moonlight. When it dripped into the absinthe below, the concoction swirled into a thousand different shades, dizzying to watch.

Dead Rick meant to toss it off in one gulp, the better to get this over with, but it turned out not to be that simple. The first taste of the bitter liquid, blooming warm on his tongue, seemed to lift him partially from his body, so that he wasn’t sure if it was going down his throat or not. He was suddenly very aware of the motions involved in drinking: the angle of the arm, the tilting of the head, tongue and throat working in a specific fashion. Only his intellectual understanding of these things allowed him to continue; he had to trust that his body was responding as it should.

Distantly, he heard Yvoir speaking. “—partial separation of the aetheric component from the rest of the elements; it will aid the reintegration of the memories into the spirit. And, of course, the lunar sympathy of the absinthe will play a role as well. Ah, my lord, you’re just in time. Irrith, if you would be so kind…”

A peculiar sort of clarity settled over Dead Rick’s mind. Without looking, he knew that Hodge had entered the room, followed by Abd ar-Rashid and Wrain. He knew that Irrith was apprehensive as she reached for the manacles on the chair, and that he was mad beyond question to let these people chain him down.

He also knew he had no other hope of regaining his memories. So he swallowed the keening whine that wanted to escape his throat, dug his nails into the worn ends of the chair’s arms, and let Irrith bind him into place.

Two leather cuffs around his ankles. A band across his knees. Another across his chest, and his wrists bound to the chair; then, her face tight with reluctance, Irrith strapped his head to the back of the chair, and moved into position the side braces that would prevent him from twisting in place.

Dead Rick’s heart beat an accelerating tattoo against his ribs. It was more than just his appalling vulnerability, but he couldn’t tell what the rest was—

“Pardonnez-moi,” Yvoir murmured, and his delicate fingers slid thin wires under Dead Rick’s eyelids, to brace them open.

Was it his fear or the absinthe that made everything so sharp, both close and yet impossibly far away? This must be what faerie wine tasted like to mortals, bitter and compelling, lifting him partway out of the world he knew, into sight of something more, whose existence he had never before suspected…

Yvoir’s machine rolled into position in front of him, something like opera glasses lowering before his pinned eyes, the precious chain of his memories set to begin scrolling in front of the box that would create the necessary moonlight. Dead Rick felt Irrith’s hand slip into his and grip his fingers tight; without thinking, he gripped hers back, hard enough that he could feel the delicate bones grind together. The sprite didn’t make a sound.

“Are you ready?” Yvoir asked, and Dead Rick answered with a wordless grunt. It was supposed to be a yes, and it seemed the French faerie interpreted it as such, for he began to turn a crank on the side of the box, and pure silver light filled Dead Rick’s vision.

As if from the other side of the moon, he heard scattered words. “Un moment—” “Should I—” “Commençons—”

And then the memories clacked into motion, the first plate of glass falling into the path of the light, and the shapes hidden therein shining straight into Dead Rick’s eyes.

Memory: September 14, 1877

He fought against the straps even before he knew what Nadrett and Chrennois had planned, because it didn’t take a bloody genius to guess it wouldn’t be anything good. But they’d drugged him before they chained him to the chair, and then they forced his eyes open with wires and pushed some kind of two-lensed camera right up into his face, and he didn’t even have time to snarl before white light flashed and a piece of himself was torn straight out of his head.

Dead Rick’s scream echoed off the stone walls. The straps dug into his body, hard enough to bruise, and when the spasm faded he heard Nadrett say, “Did you get it?”

Clattering wooden sounds, the gentle splash of liquid, and then an apologetic sound from the French faerie. “No. It is not precise; I can only take what is foremost in his mind. You must persuade him to think of what you want removed.”

“Iron rot you,” Dead Rick snarled, through teeth that would not unclench. All he could see was the camera in front of his eyes, but he knew Nadrett was out there somewhere, and directed his curses at the bastard. “I ain’t going to give you nothing—”

“That,” Nadrett said coldly, “is where you’re wrong.”

Another flash, another scream, his muscles knotting into hard points of agony.

“Your arrival in London, I think, sir,” Chrennois said. “Closer, but not quite.”

He had to hold on to it. Whatever the cost, he couldn’t let Nadrett take what he knew—

Dead Rick twisted his mind frantically away from that thought. ’Ave to think of something, anything other than what ’e wants—

Drinking in the Crow’s Head. With a rending flash, that was gone. The first Prince of the Stone—gone. The Great Fire, which had burned London to the ground—gone. Desperate, Dead Rick threw everything he could think of between him and the camera, and piece by piece it dwindled, as his body thrashed and his throat went raw with screaming. The moors of Yorkshire, where he’d roamed for ages before coming to London. Centuries of All Hallows’ Eve rides, sweeping ghosts from the city’s streets. Irrith. Other Princes. Mortals he’d known—Owen and Eliza—he’d told her about—

“Ah,” Chrennois said in satisfaction. “We have it at last.”

“Let me see.”

Dead Rick’s breath sobbed in his chest. Despairing, he reached into the bloody, shredded depths of his mind, knowing there had once been something there, something important, something that explained why he was here…

Nothing but a gaping hole remained.

“Excellent,” Nadrett hissed, and the sound of shattering glass filled Dead Rick’s ears.

The skriker’s hands had cramped into fisted masses, useless so long as he was tied down. But as soon as they let him out, drugged or not, he would get his revenge. It didn’t fucking matter what he’d known about Nadrett and lost, if the bastard was dead.

The sprite asked, “Do you want him killed?”

The question chilled Dead Rick’s blood; Nadrett’s thoughtful laugh turned it to ice. “No. We know it works, now; let’s try something more. Let’s see what ’appens when ’e don’t ’ave any memories left.”

A mindless, panicked howl burst out of Dead Rick then, long before the camera clicked once more into action. He fought like a rabid dog, until the straps cut into his skin and he thought he might tear his own arms off; he would have done it if he could, and counted it a worthy trade.

But mere flesh and blood could not buy him escape. Nothing could. And soon the pain in his body faded into insignificance next to the agony in his mind. The light flashed again and again, each burst tearing him apart piece by piece until even the memory of the tearing was gone, leaving behind nothing but a gaping wound where someone used to be.

The howling went from memory to reality, a primal sound driving up from his gut to split the air. “C’est terminé, c’est tout!” Yvoir was shouting, and Irrith’s nimble hands were tearing at the buckles that held Dead Rick in place; he tried to fling himself from the chair before he was entirely free, wrenched his legs, snapped the last ankle cuff without waiting for anyone to undo it. Dead Rick fell to the floor, gasping, crawling away from the all-too-similar chair, staggering to his feet and forward until a wall stopped him, where he clung to the black stone, relying on it to hold him up.

Too many thoughts flooded through his mind at once, a swirling, incoherent mass of memory that even the clarity granted by faerie absinthe couldn’t settle immediately. Faces stared at him—familiar faces; Blood and Bone, Irrith, I ’elped ’er rob the British Museum—everything piled atop everything else, arranged more by connection than time, so that he looked at the Prince and remembered every man who had preceded him, Joseph Winslow, Geoffrey Franklin, Michael Deven, who was buried in the ruins of the night garden. Galen St. Clair, who haunted the Onyx Hall every year after his death, lending what help he could to his successors, until the breaking of the palace stranded him in the sewers.

Nadrett. The bastard who ripped apart Dead Rick’s mind until he got what he wanted, then tore the rest out just to see if he could make a puppet from what remained.

“I did know something,” Dead Rick ground out, fingers pressed against the wall, not sure whether he was about to fall down or launch himself off it. “Fucking bastard. You was right, milord. I’d found out something about Nadrett; that’s why ’e took my memories.”

Hodge’s eyes went wide. “What was it?”

Dead Rick shook his head, ignoring the way the room and everything in it danced at the motion. “I don’t know. Burn my body—burn my mind; that’s damn near what ’e did—’e broke it as soon as ’e ’ad it, to make sure nobody could get it back.”

Groaning, Irrith squeezed her eyes shut. They popped back open, though, when Dead Rick laughed—a laugh as ominous as the one Nadrett had uttered before.

“I don’t remember no more,” the skriker said, baring his teeth in a fierce snarl. “But I knows somebody who does.”

St. Anne’s Church, Whitechapel: August 22, 1884

It might have been better to leave the church and go somewhere with fewer eyes that could recognize Eliza and James O’Malley. But they had nowhere suitable to go, and Father Tooley was not eager to throw the recipient of tonight’s miracle out onto the streets; instead he hurried the five of them into the sacristy, where they might be cramped, but at least there was a bit of privacy, and the priest himself went to make sure no one else was stirring.

Tears kept ambushing Eliza when she least expected them. Crying after Owen began to speak again, that was understandable; but every time she thought she was done, a fresh spate would begin. It was all she could do to stand back and let the Darraghs at their son, Owen’s mother hugging him as if the meager strength of her arms could undo all the separation of before.

It couldn’t. He was still fourteen but not; he still seemed to remember almost nothing. But he spoke again, and looked at the world around him like he saw it, which was more than they had before. Eliza sniffed back the latest round of tears and told herself that was enough.

For distraction, she had her father. The success of the baptism did wonders of its own for Eliza’s feelings toward the man; he’d been a part of that miracle, and for that she was grateful to him. But not so grateful that she didn’t think to say, “It’s later, Da. And long past time to talk.”

His face settled into a grimmer shape. Keeping her voice low, so as not to distract the Darraghs a few feet away, she growled, “Isn’t it enough, all the trouble you were for us before? Drinking and gambling and falling in with the wrong sort—and now the sort you’ve fallen in with are the bloody Fenians. I’ve had Special Branch after me, because of you.”

Because of her own actions, too; but the boiling resentment in Eliza’s gut left no room for that kind of nuance. James O’Malley grabbed his daughter and pulled her farther from the Darraghs, as if another two feet would make any real difference. “Because of me? It’s Fergus Boyle who’s had the loose tongue—”

“Aye, I know that—”

“And telling lies to boot,” he finished. “Christ, Eliza, I’ve been in prison; I don’t have a bloody thing to do with those boys. Don’t you see what Boyle’s doing? He’s trying to protect her.”

And he jerked his thumb at Maggie Darragh.

He hadn’t bothered to keep as quiet as Eliza; he spoke loudly enough that Maggie’s head came up suddenly, the girl staring in their direction. She hadn’t caught his words, Eliza didn’t think—but Maggie’s eyes held a hunted look, like a stray dog that thought she heard trouble coming.

Maggie Darragh? Working with the Fenians? But she’d always said—

No. She hadn’t said; Fergus had. Maggie had never voiced a word on the subject, not that Eliza heard—not since that fellow came by a summer past, dropping hints in the pubs about the Irish Republican Brotherhood. Then the dynamite incidents started happening, and Eliza was so caught up in her own troubles that she’d hardly spared a thought for Maggie.

Their gazes locked, and the hunted look grew. Eliza said, “Maggie,” and that was all she got out before the young woman grabbed her by the arm and dragged her out the sacristy door.

“Not a word, where Ma can hear,” Maggie said in a harsh whisper, when they were out in the nave once more. “Say to me what you like, but I won’t be having her troubled with this, not when she’s just got Owen back.”

Eliza had not been short of curses and anger before, but it all seemed to have temporarily drained from her. “I—I don’t even know what to say.”

Maggie pulled her bonnet off, forgetting they were in church, and scraped a hand through her tangled hair. “’Tis Fergus who sent Special Branch after you; I never asked him to do it.”

“And did you ask him to stop?”

The silence answered her well enough.

Eliza sagged into a pew. “Christ, Maggie—why?”

“Why not?” the girl said bitterly. “I look at Ma and I see what this place did to her; I see what it has done to me. Twice the English bastards have pushed me into an alley and flipped my skirts up, because being Irish is the same as being a whore, is it not? And God help me, but I’ve thought of doing it, because at least that would keep us fed. With Owen gone…” She trailed off, looking hopeless in the light of the few candles still burning.

It made Eliza sick to her stomach. “But the ones who have died—they aren’t the ones who hurt you.”

“I don’t care, and that’s the truth of it,” Maggie said flatly. “I want them to know what it is like, seeing innocents die for crimes they never did.”

Hideous, blasphemous words—spoken in front of the altar, no less, with the Son of God watching from the crucifix above. In the workhouse, when Quinn accused her of helping the Fenians, Eliza had wondered if Maggie hated her enough to spread that lie. But Maggie’s hate wasn’t for Eliza: it was for the English, and all of London. Poison like that could not be drawn by her brother’s return.

There was no sound, but the hairs on the back of Eliza’s neck rose. Turning, she saw Owen standing in the shadows, watching them both.

Maggie drew in a sob-tangled breath at the sight of him. Her elder brother, now younger than she. “Oh, Owen,” she whispered, and went to wrap her arms around him once more. He stiffened, but let her do it; and Eliza, rising to her feet, wondered if he would embrace her back. A moment later, she had no more attention to spare for such questions, because the church entrance banged open and Dead Rick came darting through.

The sight of him knocked the breath from her. Not just to see a faerie there—in church!—making no effort to pretend he was human, though that would have been enough. But his eyes…

The soft dog-brown was gone, drowned in an acid green that flooded iris and pupil alike. In those absinthine depths, time came off its hinge; past and present abandoned their God-given places and danced a mad waltz, whirling such vertigo into Eliza’s mind that she abruptly found herself on the floor, staring at the skriker’s knees. Those, at least, stayed put.

Until he dropped into a crouch and seized her shoulders. “Eliza. I need you to remember. The last time you saw me—before that bastard sent me to take Owen—what did I tell you?”

He called me Eliza.

Not Miss Baker, or Hannah, or any of the other false names she’d borne. He remembered. She saw it in his posture, heard it in his voice; everything about him, everything but those eyes, was an echo from seven years gone. Dead Rick was himself again.

The friend she’d lost had returned.

And then was torn away from her, as Owen charged at him with a howl. Dead Rick lurched under the boy’s weight as if drunk, not defending himself with the brutal skill she knew he had; terrified for him—for them both—Eliza leapt up and tried to force them apart. Tangled together, the three of them swung around, back toward the sacristy, from which her da and Mrs. Darragh had emerged.

It was chaos. Three other people had followed Dead Rick in: two mortal men, and a young woman who took one look at the altar and suddenly showed herself to be the sprite Eliza had seen before. That one blanched dead white and fled the church as if she was about to throw up, leaving the other two behind. They caught Maggie and her mother, while James O’Malley backed off, staring, and in the meanwhile words were pouring out of Eliza’s mouth. “He never meant to do it, Owen—the bastard who hurt you hurt him, too—”

He let go, and the sudden release sent Dead Rick and Eliza both staggering backward into the sacristy. Owen advanced and slammed the door behind himself. “Then why is he here?”

In the relative quiet, she realized Dead Rick was still talking, his voice managing to be hard and begging at the same time. He didn’t even seem to realize Owen was there. “Ash and Thorn, Eliza—you ’ave to remember. If you don’t remember, nobody does. Nadrett smashed it; I’ll never get it back. But it were a danger to ’im, and ’e’s the one what did this to your boy; if you tells me, maybe we can make ’im pay for that.”

She made the mistake of looking into Dead Rick’s eyes again; time swirled, and she almost lost her footing. The last time I saw him. Not the one burned into her memory by the pain of betrayal, or any of their encounters since then; the last time she saw him, the skriker she’d saved. For his sake, Eliza tried to remember. “You told me a story.”

He straightened, then caught himself with one hand against the wall; with that insanity in his eyes, no wonder he was unsteady. “A story?”

Piece by piece, it came to her. “About the Faerie-land. You said that all the tales we have of lands being drowned by the sea—Lyonesse and, oh, others I don’t remember—they’re all echoes of some place in Faerie, that did sink beneath the waves.”

Bewilderment showed on Dead Rick’s face; she was learning to watch his mouth and forehead, not his impossible eyes. “No, there—there ’as to ’ave been something else. Something about Nadrett.” A shiver rose from his toes to his head. He leaned harder against the wall.

She wanted to help him so badly, but— “You never mentioned Nadrett. Only Seithenyn.”

His sagging head came up so fast, she flinched back. What Dead Rick might have said, though, she never found out. The skriker took one step toward her and pitched over sideways as if the floor had gone vertical beneath his feet. Eliza cried out and managed to slow his fall, but not to catch his full weight; he hit the tile floor in a boneless heap.

Bewildered, she looked up at Owen. But he looked no less confused than she. “Nadrett. I—I’ve heard that name?…”

Before she could answer him, the door swung open, and on the other side was one of the men she’d seen a moment before. A dark-skinned heathen fellow—probably that genie from the Galenic Academy. He shook his head over Dead Rick’s limp body. “Were it not for the absinthe, I doubt he would have made it this far. Come, please—your friend, too, if you wish—we will take him to a safer place, and see if we have answers at last.”

Hare Street, Bethnal Green: August 22, 1884

How they made good their escape from the church with Dead Rick’s twitching carcass in tow, Eliza couldn’t say, except that it undoubtedly involved faerie magic. What they’d planned to be a surreptitious baptism under cover of night had become a good deal louder than that, and attracted attention to suit. But somehow Eliza found herself being led north by the other man who’d followed Dead Rick, a fellow who might have been anywhere between thirty and eighty years old. The heathen came with them, carrying the skriker, and Owen and that faerie woman followed, but the rest had been lost along the way.

She expected to go to the Onyx Hall, but instead they crossed under the railway arches to the north—half their party gasping in pain as they went—and halted outside a tobacconist’s not far from St. Anne’s, where the man unlocked a door leading to the flat above. Through her shivering, the faerie woman said, “We can’t take him below.” She indicated Owen with her pointed chin. Irrith, that was her name. “It wouldn’t be safe. And we can’t risk somebody selling word of this to the Goblin Market, anyway.”

This morning, it hadn’t been safe to keep Owen out of the Hall for long. Now… can he ever go back?

Better for him if he couldn’t. Eliza had no intention of it herself, except as much as was necessary to get revenge on this bastard Nadrett. And that, she supposed, was why Owen had come.

The rooms on the first floor reeked of dust and stale air, as if almost no one ever came here. “Hodge’s flat,” Irrith said, as the man went around striking matches for the lamps, illuminating a mismatched assortment of shabby furniture. The other fellow laid Dead Rick on the couch, where he shuddered as if caught in a winter storm.

Hodge said, “Not that I’m ’ere too often. Miss—would you?”

Eliza found him holding out a stale biscuit. After one staring moment—she had gone stupid with exhaustion—she realized what he wanted.

The tithe.

“We’ve got to get something inside him,” Irrith said. “And me, if you don’t mind.”

Saying the words would cost Eliza nothing; even the bread was being handed to her. Even so… “Can’t you do it?” she asked Hodge.

He shook his head. “Drank faerie wine, as part of becoming Prince. Once you do that, you’re no good for the tithe; I doubt your friend ’ere could do it, either.”

So this was the Prince who was supposed to pass judgment on Dead Rick for what he’d done. She hadn’t seen much judging happen—but she was no longer certain she wanted it to. Not against the skriker, anyway. But Nadrett, yes. And Dead Rick had come to ask about Nadrett.

Stiffly, she reached out and took the bread. “A gift for the Daoine Sidhe,” Eliza said, laying the stale biscuit at Dead Rick’s side. “Take it and plague us no more.”

Irrith snatched up the food and tore a piece off, shoving it into her mouth like a starving woman. Chewing frantically, she broke off a second bite and slipped it between the skriker’s thin lips. “Go on, swallow it,” she murmured, shaking his shoulder as if that would do any good. Eliza edged her out of the way and lifted his head. Hodge gave her a hip flask, and she poured a dribble of its sweet-smelling contents into Dead Rick’s mouth, stroking his throat the way she’d done for her brothers and sisters when they were ill, until finally she thought the morsel had gone down.

He continued to twitch in her grasp. “Shouldn’t that help?” she asked, worried despite herself.

“Against all of this, yes,” Irrith said, gesturing around. Her own color had already improved visibly. “But it won’t do much against the absinthe he drank.”

Her worry grew. “I’ve never seen absinthe do this to a man. Not unless it was mixed with something bad.”

Irrith’s breath huffed out in a quiet laugh. “Our version is… special.”

Hodge’s own breath followed hard on her words, but his was a sudden hiss of pain. The man dropped into the nearest chair, his Arab companion moving swiftly to his side. Irrith said, “Are they—”

The panic in her voice was clear. Hodge waved it, and the Arab, away. “No new rails; I’ve done what I can to make sure those get put off as long as possible. But a bit of the woven stuff just went, near the Academy. We should do our business ’ere and get back; Lune can’t ’old without me for long.”

“This business ye have,” Eliza echoed. “It would be what, exactly?”

Hodge said, “Nadrett. You know who that is?” He waited for her nod before going on. “Then you know ’e’s a nasty piece of work. We’re trying to find out what ’e’s doing right now. Seemed a good bet that Dead Rick might ’ave learned something about ’im, seven years ago, and that’s why Nadrett took ’is memories. Looks like that was true, but if so, it’s gone. We gave ’im back everything in that box. ’E thought you might ’ave what ’e’d lost.”

Eliza hugged her arms around her body, feeling cold inside, despite the oppressive summer heat. “He said… Nadrett ‘smashed’ it?”

“The memories were on glass plates,” Irrith said quietly. “Photographs. Nadrett broke one whenever Dead Rick made him angry.”

The cold deepened to a sick fury. But Eliza couldn’t see how what she knew would help them. “He never told me anything about Nadrett. The last time I saw him, the only thing he said—the only thing that seemed important—was a story about a fellow named Seithenyn.”

By the looks on the others’ faces, it didn’t mean anything to Hodge or the Arab; the former was mortal, of course, and perhaps young Arab faeries learned different stories at their grannies’ knees. Irrith showed more confusion than anything else. “Seithenyn and Mererid… he told you about the Drowned Land? What has that got to do with anything?”

“It means Nadrett’s a fucking dead man.” It was a bone-dry whisper from the couch. Dead Rick’s eyes were still closed; Eliza was grateful to be spared another glimpse of that swirling, otherworldly green. He spoke like a medium in a trance, channeling information from some source outside himself. “Irrith—what ’appened to Seithenyn, after ’e killed Mererid and flooded the land?”

The sprite said, “He was cursed. By the waters of Faerie, because he killed Mererid, who was their daughter. If he hadn’t fled—” Her eyes, a shifting green almost as unnerving as the absinthe in Dead Rick’s, widened. “They would have drowned him. Ash and Thorn—you think Nadrett is Seithenyn?”

“Came ’ere,” Dead Rick said. “And made ’imself somebody else. No idea ’ow I found out… but there’s one way to know if I’m right.”

“Throw water on him?” Eliza asked.

She meant it to sound scornful; the idea was ridiculous. But the fierce, predatory smile on Dead Rick’s face told her it was no joke. “Show the waters where ’e went,” the skriker said. “Then let the curse do its work. Even if ’e runs, ’e won’t live; they’ll find ’im.”

Hodge let out a soft whistle. “Bloody well easier than trying to get at ’im by force. But first we ’ave to find ’im, and from what Bonecruncher tells me, ’e’s pushed off to Faerie already.”

A brief silence—and then Dead Rick sat bolt upright, mad eyes flying open once more. “Off to Faerie? Not bleeding likely. ’E’d die the second ’e set foot over there. Aspell was wrong!”

It seemed to mean something to everyone else there, save Eliza. Even Owen was frowning, as if trying to stitch his shredded mind back together. With the tone of a man making an argument he did not believe, but felt should be given due consideration, the Arab said, “He could still sell the right to use it, and then take his profits elsewhere. There are other lands than this, and not all are threatened by iron. Not yet, at least. Nor can he be bothered by things of your Heaven where men are not Christian.”

While Eliza frowned at his choice of words—your Heaven, as if there were others—Dead Rick spoke again, with cold certainty. The whirling in his eyes had slowed, but still lent his words a skin-crawling cast. “And start scratch, in a foreign land? Not a chance. ’E likes being master too much for that. I don’t think ’e’s making no passage to Faerie. I think ’e’s trying to make a kingdom for ’imself, right ’ere.”

Eliza’s oath would not have bothered anyone in the Onyx Hall; it had nothing of God in it. She might not give a twopenny damn for the fae, but the thought of the bastard who did such terrible things to Owen and Dead Rick setting himself up as some kind of lord made her go white hot with rage.

The expressions around her, though, showed varying shades of hope. Irrith said, “If he can repair the Onyx Hall—”

“Not repair,” Hodge said, with certainty. “’E ain’t in the palace—we’re sure of that. But ’e might be trying to make a new palace. Maybe ’e already ’as.”

“How?” The Arab’s deep voice had the abstracted quality of a fellow whose thoughts are buried deep in a puzzle. “This must involve the photographs; if we can determine how, we may have some notion of what to search for.”

Eliza knew precious little about this sort of thing; her instinct was to stay silent, and let more knowledgeable people talk. But a useless silence had fallen, while everyone scowled or bit their lips and tried to find the answer, and perhaps the notion that had come into her head would help one of them. Even though it had nothing to do with the question of how. “What he’s photographing—’tis people, is it not?”

“It seems to be so,” the genie answered. “What are you thinking?”

Now everyone’s eyes were on her. She shrugged uncomfortably. “Only that I’ve heard tell of a number of people going missing in the East End. Not just missing: the story is, they were taken by the faeries.”

As she expected, Hodge shook his head, frowning. “That could be anybody in the Goblin Market. They steals people all the time, now.”

But Dead Rick said, “Where was it?”

“I think… I might know.”

The answer didn’t come from Eliza. The others all stared past her, and then she turned, and saw Owen standing, face paper white, hands tangled in a hard knot near his mouth.

“Did you see something? What—”

Irrith’s burst of questions cut off when she ran into Eliza’s outflung arm. She hadn’t stopped the sprite in time to prevent Owen from flinching back, but Eliza turned and put herself between them, hands on her hips, returning glare for green-eyed glare. “He’s about had enough of ye,” she said, addressing all the fae. Even Dead Rick. “What ye did to send his family away just now, I don’t want to know—but ye won’t be coming near him again. Do ye understand?”

“If you’re right about these missing people,” Hodge said quietly, not moving from his seat, “then more than just ’is safety depends on us knowing.”

“I know. But I will do the asking.” She turned her back on him, and looked to Owen.

He’d retreated into the corner, and stood with his hands flat against the walls. He shook his head, confusion scratching a faint line between his brows. “They say they’re my family, but I don’t—I remember you from the library. You took me to the church. And I think I remember you from before, too, but ’tis all in pieces. I thought I had a sister, but she was younger.”

Eliza’s heart ached. Healed—but not fully. He may never be completely well again. Wetting her lips, she said, “You’ve been gone seven years. Perhaps—perhaps it will come back to you. Were you in West Ham?” The name only deepened the crease between his brows. “In the East End,” she added. “Did Nadrett take you there?”

Haltingly, fumbling it out word by word, Owen said, “There was… a building. A warehouse. Or something. He kept people there. Like me. In cages. And one by one, they went away, until it was my turn.”

“How many people?” Eliza whispered. Whelan knew of three; she’d heard rumors of two more.

Owen shook his head again. “A dozen. Or more. I did not count.”

From behind Eliza, Irrith said, “When he took you away—”

Eliza cut her off again with a furious glare. Any idiot could see that was when Owen had been broken; his hunched shoulders proclaimed it. She had to swallow down tears before she could ask, “This building. Would you know if it you saw it?”

As gently as she posed the question, it still sent him rigid with fear. “No, no, I can’t—”

In a low voice, Hodge asked Dead Rick, “Could you sniff it out?”

“Maybe,” the skriker said, but he didn’t sound confident. “Depends on ’ow ’ard Nadrett’s trying to ’ide.”

If Eliza correctly understood what the fae had said, he would be trying very hard indeed. She risked going closer to Owen, and following him when he slid down the wall to crouch on the floor, arms around his knees. “You’re afraid of him, aren’t you,” she murmured. He nodded convulsively. “You don’t have to face him. We’ll do that part, Dead Rick and I will. But we need your help to find him first. I swear—” She hesitated, wondering if it was safe to say this to him; then she remembered the holy splendor of the baptism washing over him. “As God is my witness, I will keep you safe.”

The words produced no shiver of antipathy. That much, we’ve done; he’s ours once more. But Owen still looked afraid. Impulsively, Eliza reached out and took his hand in her own, gripping his fingers tight. “We don’t want anyone more to end up as you did. Help us, Owen, and we’ll stop him. You’ll not have to be afraid again.”

He might have been as mute as before, cowering on the floor like that. But after a moment, his fingers tightened hard enough to make her own ache, and he nodded.

“That’s my lad,” Eliza whispered. “We’ll bring the bastard down together.”

White Lion Street, Islington: August 24, 1884

How the Goodemeades had ever persuaded Mrs. Chase’s cat to play messenger for the woman, Hodge would never know. The tortoiseshell creature had shown up in his chambers, reeking of affronted dignity, with a note tied around its neck, and vanished as soon as he took the paper, with enough speed that he wondered if they’d put a faerie charm on the cat as well.

Dear Mr. Hodge, Your Highness, the note began—Mrs. Chase had never quite grasped the proper address for the Prince of the Stone.

He left for Islington three minutes later, with the Goodemeades, short as they were, almost outrunning him in their haste. It was a risk, leaving the Onyx Hall, when he’d been out just the previous night; now it was afternoon, with trains running to threaten the palace’s stability. But he could not leave the matter of Aspell for others to handle. They took a cab, Hodge paying the driver handsomely while the Goodemeades whispered to the horses, and the resulting trip to Islington would not have shamed some competitors at Ascot. They burst through Mrs. Chase’s front door, and found they were in time—if only barely.

“In a poor state” fell far short of describing Aspell’s condition. The former lord had always been pale as the underbelly of a fish; now that pallor had a grayish-green cast. If faerie bodies persisted long enough past death to need graves, Hodge would have said the bastard had just crawled out of his own.

Mrs. Chase stood by, twisting her hands, staring at the unconscious faerie on her canvas-draped sofa. “He all but fainted onto Mary when she opened the door. But I didn’t dare fetch an ordinary doctor—”

“It wouldn’t have done any good,” Rosamund said, as Gertrude knelt to peel aside Aspell’s blood-soaked shirt and coat. “Dead Rick said he was shot with iron.”

Gertrude’s breath hissed between her teeth when she uncovered the wound. Ugly black lines radiated from the torn flesh of his shoulder, spiking across his arm and chest. Enemy though he was, even Hodge flinched at the sight. He’d seen blood poisoning before, though never on a faerie.

“It looks as if he dug the bullet out himself,” Gertrude said, her fingers gently probing. Even the most delicate touch made Aspell jerk, moaning indistinctly. “But nobody drew out the poison the iron left behind. This… may kill him.”

Hodge clenched his jaw. “Don’t let ’im die yet. We need ’im to say where ’e ’id the Prince’s ghost.”

“I have no intention of letting him die under any circumstances,” Gertrude snapped. A glare from Rosamund echoed her sister’s sharp words. Hodge flushed in shame. He hadn’t meant it that way—not really—though it had crossed his mind that it wouldn’t be any great shame if Aspell were to croak. Now he felt like a terrible person, and Mrs. Chase was staring at him as though he were a grandson of hers not yet too old for a good thrashing.

“Let’s shift him downstairs,” Gertrude said, with all the brisk, no-nonsense confidence of a nurse. Mrs. Chase hastened to apologize, explaining that she had not been sure whether the sisters would want Aspell in their home; Rosamund waved it away, and bid the parlor wall open.

To make up for his earlier mistake, Hodge stepped forward without prompting and lifted Aspell from the couch. The disgraced lord weighed very little, even for his slender build, and hung limply from the Prince’s arms. The only difficulty was making sure not to crack his head against the wall as Hodge navigated the narrow staircase.

Once within the tiny faerie realm of Rose House, Aspell breathed more easily. While Hodge settled him onto another couch there, the sisters hurried off to gather supplies, and Mrs. Chase closed the entrance behind them. Hodge stood aside, letting the women do their work—and grim, unpleasant work it was, leeching what poison they could from the faerie’s body, while Aspell sweated and whimpered under their touch. Good job they can’t see inside my ’ead, Hodge thought. Neither the brownies nor their mortal friend would approve of the satisfaction he got from seeing his father’s murderer in pain.

But he didn’t want the treacherous sod to kick the bucket. Not now, and not like this. Hodge waited, crossing his fingers, and was rewarded at last with a stirring that looked more like life. Aspell’s eyes opened a slit, their usually green irises darkened almost to black.

“Where’d you put the photo?”

The faerie’s mouth moved soundlessly, not quite forming words.

Another glare from Rosamund stopped Hodge before he took more than one stride forward. Gritting his teeth, the Prince said, “Galen St. Clair. You ’ad ’is ghost; Dead Rick told us so. Where’d you put ’im?”

Gertrude helped Aspell sit up a few inches, and poured a dribble of water between his pale lips. It seemed to give him energy: when he had swallowed it, the faerie sank back, glared black venom at Hodge, and said, “I put him nowhere. He was taken from me. By Nadrett.” He coughed, and a spasm of pain twisted his face. Once that had passed, he added, “Who has been my captor, as well. Until I escaped.”

Bloody convenient. There was just one flaw in the notion that Aspell was lying: the iron poison pervading his body. The snake might have had a good reason for abandoning all his people in the disintegrating Goblin Market—though Hodge could not imagine what that might be—but not for letting himself come so close to the edge of death. Being Nadrett’s prisoner, however, explained it neatly.

Hodge thought about asking how Aspell had gotten away, but realized he didn’t care. Other things mattered far more. “Where?”

The shaking of Aspell’s head was almost imperceptible. “Don’t know.”

“You say you bloody well escaped from there; ’ow can you not know?”

“I leapt aboard a train,” the faerie growled. Both brownies hissed in sympathy. Even Hodge flinched; with no bread to protect him, and that poison in his veins, it must have been agony. “Somewhere east,” he added, in a whisper, as if that growl had taken most of his remaining vigor.

Thinking of Eliza and Dead Rick, even now searching the area for sign of Nadrett and a new faerie realm, Hodge asked, “Could it ’ave been West Ham?”

Aspell nodded, exhausted.

Well, it lent weight to Eliza’s notions, at least. If Owen failed to identify his former prison, might Aspell succeed? Before the Prince could even think about asking, Gertrude told him quietly, “You should let him rest.”

But Aspell’s eyes flew open again, life flooding once more into his face, and he stretched out one gray-tinged hand. “Wait. What I said before. I must speak to Lune.”

“You aren’t going anywhere,” Rosamund said firmly. “Not for a good long while.”

“And you ain’t getting anywhere near Lune,” Hodge added.

“Then carry a message for me!”

Panic tinged the words. He must be desperate, if he was willing to trust Hodge with a secret that not that long ago had been too valuable for anyone else’s ears. And—“What’s your price for it?”

Aspell spat out a curse entirely at odds with his usual elegance. “For you to pay me, or me to pay you? This is for the Onyx Court, you cretin. I bargained because it was the only way to gain access to Lune, and she is the only one who might listen to me.”

“She’s the one you betrayed!”

“And she knows why. To save the Onyx Court: not to destroy it.” Aspell sagged deeper into the embrace of the couch, his burst of vitality flagging. “You must promise to carry the message.”

All three women were looking at him, now, not Aspell. If Hodge refused—or agreed, and then didn’t follow through—he suspected there would be a second round of those looks from before, that made him want to crawl in shame. Through his teeth, Hodge said, “I promise.”

Gertrude had to give her patient more water before he could muster the strength to speak. When he did, his words were enigmatic. “Francis and Suspiria.”

Enigmatic to Hodge; the brownies sat bolt upright at the names. “Who are they?” Hodge asked.

Rosamund answered, to spare Aspell the need. “They made the Onyx Hall.”

“With help,” Gertrude reminded her.

Hodge knew the story, in its broad outlines; he’d been told it when he asked why repairing the palace was so hard. Mostly it was the abundance of iron, but also what had been lost in the interim: of the various powers that helped create the Hall, nearly all were now dead.

Including the mortal man and faerie woman who shaped it in the first place.

When Hodge said as much, Aspell whispered, “Dead, yes—but not gone. It took me far too long to understand what it was I felt. We are not used to dreaming, we fae; I could not make sense of it, not for many years. But I am certain of it now. The spirits of Suspiria and Francis Merriman dwell within the London Stone.”

The Prince stared. Then reached out, blindly, for a chair; finding one, he lowered himself carefully into it. “I would ’ave felt them there.”

Would he? He hadn’t known about Chrennois in Aldersgate; as Prince, he could send his mind throughout the Onyx Hall, but it hurt so much he almost never did. The London Stone, though… it was the very point of his connection. Surely he would have known if there was another spirit there. Something besides himself and Lune—

And the Onyx Hall itself.

He clamped one hand over his mouth, fingers digging into his cheeks, to keep the words from bursting out. Bloody fucking ’ell. The palace—which answered to the commands of Queen and Prince; sometimes, he’d heard, as if it had a mind of its own. Which protected the bones of the Princes laid to rest within its ground against all attempts to desecrate them. Which acknowledged Lune as Queen, and refused others, when they tried to usurp her crown; that was the foundation of faerie sovereignty, that one ruled by right of that bond, the realm accepting someone as master or mistress over it all.

Suspiria and Francis Merriman stood with their hands upon the London Stone, beneath the eclipsed light of the sun, and dreamed the Hall into being.

Three hundred years and more later, they were still there—because they were the Onyx Hall.

Hodge unclamped his fingers, knuckles aching as he moved them. He licked his lips, swallowed, and said, “You… might be right. And I don’t think Lune knows it, neither. But—what good does that do us?”

Aspell’s eyes glittered through the fringe of his lashes. “It means Lune isn’t the only one holding the palace together. Without her, it would not last long—but it would not collapse instantly, either. She would have a moment’s grace, in which to escape: from the Hall, from London entirely, and into Faerie.”

He’d once tried to murder Lune. But not out of malice, Hodge was forced to admit; like the Fenians with their dynamite, he’d thought it would serve a greater purpose, which was the preservation of the Onyx Hall. With that cause now lost beyond recall, it seemed Aspell was not without a degree of mercy.

The bastard had it backward. He was giving up right when victory for that cause could be within their reach. It all depended on what they found in West Ham.

Smiling ruefully, Hodge said, “You’ve known ’er for ’ow many centuries, and you don’t see the mistake there? Lune will never run.” He stood and grinned down at the pale, exhausted Aspell. “But maybe she don’t ’ave to. Not if we can make ’er a new ’ome.”

Paddington Station, Paddington: August 25, 1884

For once, it was not the abundant menace of iron that made Louisa Kittering’s breath come fast.

She’d flinched when she and Frederic first came beneath the vaulting girders that covered the vast interior of Paddington Station, with its rails and trains and gas lamps, but it was nothing more than instinctive sympathy for those she left behind: the fae of the Onyx Hall, who even now were entering the final days of their home. Then she’d been taken aback by the chaotic activity of the crowds within: men of the suburbs going to or from work, mothers shepherding noisy and disobedient children, porters pushing trolleys full of baggage, voices crying food or newspapers from stalls along the sides. But Frederic had found a porter to take their trunk, and he’d known how to find the right platform, so now all she had to do was wait.

Wait, and think of what she had done.

Leaving the Kitterings hardly mattered. But what would Frederic think, in the days and months and years to come, about leaving his wife? He did love the woman, Louisa knew; and while it was possible to make him forget that love, it wouldn’t be easy. Not when he hadn’t chosen this path freely. She even felt a twinge of guilt, because she actually cared what he thought of her… and in the privacy of her own mind, where she could be honest with herself, Louisa knew he would not approve of what she had done.

But the alternative was to leave him vulnerable to Nadrett. Or to send him away on his own, without her—

She could not do that, either.

No. They would go away together: to Dover, to Calais, and once they had booked passage, to America, where they would make a new life among the emigrants, faerie and mortal alike, and they would have nothing to fear at all.

She should have known better than to believe it.

Trouble came without any warning at all: one moment Louisa was awaiting her train, dreaming of the life it would carry her off to, and the next there was a gun barrel pressing intimately against her spine, just above her bustle.

The gun remained there when Nadrett stepped into view, flanked by two of his men. He looked enough like himself to be recognized, though of course it was a human version of himself. But Louisa thought, despairing, that she would have recognized that cruel smile no matter what face shaped it. “There you are, my love,” Nadrett said, with false cheer. “Going somewhere?”

At her side, Frederic was gazing patiently into the distance, taking no notice of the fae a few feet away. The ticket was in his hand; he didn’t even blink as Nadrett twitched it from between his fingers. “Dover, is it? Now, why would you be going to Dover… and ’ello, who’s this? Blimey, if it ain’t Mr. Myers!”

His theatrical surprise might as well have been a knife between her ribs. The words were very nearly the worst thing she could have said, but Louisa could not stop them from bursting out: “Don’t hurt him!”

Nadrett’s sharp eyebrows rose. “Don’t ’urt ’im?” he repeated, mocking her. “Mab’s tits—don’t tell me you’ve bloody fallen in love with ’im.”

She tried to salvage what she could. “Not love, no, of course not—what an idea!” Her laugh sounded brittle and too bright, even to her own ears. “Just a passing entertainment, sir; you know how such things are. I thought you were done with him.”

The Goblin Market boss looked speculatively at Frederic, who sighed and referred to his pocket-watch. “’E were a useful sort, I’ll grant ’im that. Kept ’im around in case I ’ad more questions. But you know, it’s all going splendidly. I think I don’t need ’im anymore.” Nadrett drew his gun.

“No!” Louisa threw herself forward, seizing his arm. There was no risk she would make him fire; she knew Nadrett, knew he wanted her to beg. “Please. I’ll do anything—”

“I knows you will.” Nadrett’s free hand wrapped around her slender throat. Hissing into her face, he said, “You still belong to me, slut. So does ’e. So does everybody I touch.”

The train had pulled up to the platform, in a cloud of coal-scented steam. All around them, the crowds of Paddington Station passed by, oblivious. Had she vanished completely from their eyes? Or did they just see some man disciplining his wayward wife?

“That little shell ain’t enough to protect you,” Nadrett said. “It breaks too easy, you see. All I got to do is make you admit what you are.” His grip tightened. “’Ow ’ard do you think it would be for me to do that?”

She wasn’t sure she could speak, and he probably didn’t want her to. She just shook her head, a tiny, trembling motion.

Nadrett smiled and released her. “Right you are. But I’m not without mercy, am I, boys?” The other fae grinned and made noises of agreement. “I’ll let your cove ’ere live. For a price.”

Passengers were flooding off the train, parting around their little group as if it were nothing more than a rock in the stream, of no interest to the water flowing by. Porters farther down were unloading the trunks and smaller valises, making room for the new baggage. Her trunk would make it onto the train, and so might Frederic Myers—but she would not.

It had been foolish to think that she might escape.

Awkwardly, hampered by the fashionably narrow skirt of her dress, Louisa knelt on the filthy platform. Another eternity of servitude… but it was worth it, to see Frederic safe. “I will serve you faithfully. Master.”

“Good—but not good enough,” Nadrett said, and snapped his fingers, gesturing for the other fae to move along. Grabbing her by the arm and hauling her to her feet, he said, “You’ll ’ave company before we’re done today.”

West Ham, London: August 26, 1884

Dead Rick could scarcely bring himself to look at either of his companions. He felt like he was seeing two of each, and not because of the absinthe; those effects had only lasted for a day or so. No, he saw Eliza and Owen with two sets of memories: his own, and those of Nadrett’s dog.

It wasn’t honest to divide himself like that, and he knew it. However much he wished to deny it, the last seven years were as much a part of him as the ages that went before—ages his mind was still sorting into order, below the level of his awareness. And losing his memories hadn’t completely changed who he was; some things went beyond simple recollection, into his nature as a faerie. But he had no better way to describe the strange disconnection he felt when he looked around, seeing two meanings to a single thing. Owen was both the mute, broken shell he’d found cowering in the Academy library, and the good-natured boy who’d had such hopes for bettering his family’s condition. Eliza was both the furious young woman who tried to beat him senseless, and the fierce girl who’d protected him against those tormenting lads.

Two of most things; three of them. Because what those two had become, in the aftermath of Owen’s healing, were different yet again.

He wanted so badly to have back the warmth they’d shared—a warmth that, thanks to the absinthe, he remembered as if it were just a few days ago. Owen had forgotten it, though, and as far as Eliza was concerned, it had long since died and been left to rot. At this point they operated in a state of uneasy truce; Dead Rick didn’t dare hope for more.

Fed on Eliza’s bread, he took the surface path to West Ham, following the road as its name changed from Aldgate to Whitechapel to Mile End to Bow. “The place makes sense,” he said to break the silence, as the buildings around them began to thin. “The big sewer runs right from the Goblin Market to the pumping station out ’ere, don’t it? Easy road for Nadrett’s men.” He didn’t like to think who he might have met, if he’d had to go by the road below.

“Yes,” Eliza said, but the conversation died there.

The strange mixing of his memories disoriented him, with its insistence on remembering Londons that were centuries gone. Tower Hamlets, they called this area; once it had been an area of hamlets, little villages scattered like seeds among fields that fed the City. Now all the villages had run together like stains, and the weeds of industry had taken root, choking the green grass with brick and soot.

As if she, too, could not bear the silence between them, Eliza said abruptly, “When this is done, perhaps I’ll get myself a factory job. It can be good work, it can—better than being in service.”

Dead Rick blinked. With his mind so filled by the past, it was hard to see the present, much less the future; but to Eliza, this must look very different. She saw not destruction, but opportunity. Which of them was right? Were either of them? Mortals had been arguing this very point amongst themselves for years. But it made him remember something Irrith said once, about why Lune ruled with a Prince at her side. Because they helped her see what she otherwise could not.

None of it was important, not right now—and yet, he needed the distraction, because if he let himself think about Nadrett he wouldn’t be here, walking calmly down the street with Eliza and Owen; he would have long since taken to his heels, intent on nothing more than finding his former master and tearing out the bastard’s throat. Which would have gotten him killed, and he knew it—assuming he could even find Nadrett—but the feral rage pumping through his veins with every beat of his heart didn’t care. It had waited too long already for its satisfaction.

The road sharpened its gentle bend northward. In the distance to the right, Dead Rick could see the ornate exterior of the pumping station, which brought all the filth up to a level where it could be vented into the river, safely downstream of the city. “Recognize anything?” he asked Owen.

The boy shook his head. He still communicated more in gestures than in words when he could, but sometimes Dead Rick thought that born of a similar confusion to the one in his own mind: whatever had been taken from him by Chrennois’s cameras, and given back by the baptism, Owen was still sorting it into order. And pieces of it were clearly missing.

Dead Rick frowned at the pumping station. “If they been coming up out of the sewers, I can try to find a scent. But it ain’t going to be Nadrett crawling up out of the muck, and I don’t know who it will be.”

“Might there be guards?” Eliza asked. Dead Rick nodded. “Then we’ll try the town first.”

She guided her companions past the depot for the Great Eastern Railway and into West Ham itself, working her way along Stephens Road toward Plaistow, with Dead Rick in dog form sniffing everything they passed, and Owen shaking his head. As sites for faerie palaces went, this one was frankly terrible: a grim industrial suburb, with nothing much to recommend it. Would Nadrett really come here? Eliza held an aetheric versorium like the one Dead Rick had used to find the Aldersgate entrance, but its needle only pointed at the skriker, with never a twitch in another direction.

Owen said the area smelled right, though—coal and marsh air and the stench of a leatherworks—and so they went on, up and down each near-lifeless street, watching in all directions for danger. At the corner of Liddington Road, the boy stopped with a whimper.

The building his eyes had fixed upon was unremarkable, a squat, hulking mass of mud-yellow London brick. Its walls were as uninviting as the Bank of England’s; only a thin line of windows ran along the upper reaches, leaving the rest of the surface featureless and blind. A warehouse, perhaps, or a factory, with nothing obviously faerie about it.

They pulled back swiftly, of course, out of sight of the building. Dead Rick held out a hand, and Eliza gave him the versorium; angle it how he might, the needle did not point at the building. Owen insisted this was the place, though.

“What in Mab’s name is ’e doing in there?” Dead Rick muttered. Surely if it were a new faerie realm, the versorium would sense it.

Eliza risked another glance around the corner, though Owen twitched as if to pull her back. “I don’t see anyone,” she said. This was not a busy part of town; at the moment, they were the only ones on the street. “But there could be any number of people inside.”

“In cages,” Owen said, in a voice made tight with fear.

She stroked his shoulder, calming him. “We’ll get them out. We just have to figure out how.”

Not easily, that much was certain. Eliza was the safest of them for scouting; with her bonnet pulled forward, she made a circuit of the building’s perimeter, up Liddington Road and down the nameless alley on the other side. What she reported back cemented Dead Rick’s unease. There were only three entrances into the building, two of them narrow, the third a set of double doors that looked to be securely barred from within. If Hodge could bribe Charcoal Eddie or somebody else capable of flying to look through the windows beneath the roof’s edge, they might be able to get some sense of what was inside, but Dead Rick wouldn’t care to bet on it. Which meant whatever forces Hodge sent would be going in blind.

“Who the ’ell is ’e going to send, anyway?” Dead Rick muttered, after they’d retreated to a safe distance. The Onyx Guard, the closest thing Lune had ever had to an army, was down to three knights: Peregrin, Cerenel, and Segraine. Irrith could shoot, and so could Bonecruncher; Niklas von das Ticken could, too, if dragged out of the Academy. Dead Rick himself would fight. Perhaps a few others, especially if Hodge offered something valuable in return. But Nadrett had a great deal more than half a dozen bullies working for him, and the means to hire more, too.

“You have magic—” Eliza said.

Dead Rick snorted. “And so does ’e. It’s Nadrett’s territory, too, so ’e’ll ’ave prepared it. If we ’ad enough bodies to throw at it, I’d say damn the charms, we can just storm the place. But we’ve got ’alf a dozen people and a Prince who would fall over if you blew on ’im too ’ard.”

In her eyes, he saw the same frustrated desperation that burned in his own heart. They were this close; it simply wasn’t conceivable that they could admit defeat now. “There has to be a way,” Eliza said.

The skriker closed his eyes in thought. He’d never been a general, not even before his memories were taken—but he did know a thing or two about fighting dirty. The weak point was the windows: too high to be used for invasion, too small to let people through at speed. Which do you want more? Answers, or revenge? He knew which one Eliza would say. “Give up on finding out what ’e’s doing in there, and chuck dynamite in through the top. Blow Nadrett straight to ’ell.”

The resulting silence gave him time to regret his words. The salvation of the Onyx Hall might lie inside that building; could he really sacrifice it, just to make amends? You don’t know ’e really ’as anything, Dead Rick thought, and knew it was a justification. And a thin one at that.

Eliza whispered, “Dynamite.”

Owen yelped, and Dead Rick’s eyes flew open. “There might be people in there—” the boy protested, far too loudly.

She threw her hands up, stopping his appalled protest. “No, not blowing it up! Jesus, Mary, and Joseph; I would never hurt innocents. And there might be something in it the fae need. But Dead Rick—you said that if you had enough people, you could storm it. Was that true?”

“Where the bleeding ’ell do you think you’re going to get an army?” he asked in disbelief.

Eliza drew in a careful breath, looking as if she was questioning her own sanity. “From the Special Irish Branch.”

Scotland Yard, Westminster: August 27, 1884

No one clapped Eliza in chains when she walked into the offices of Scotland Yard. She felt foolish for expecting it; she was, after all, just a poor woman from Whitechapel, not some famous murderer or highwayman. The number of constables who knew her name, let alone what she looked like, was probably rather small. But she was walking into the lion’s den, and she could not help but be afraid.

The man at the front barely even looked up at her. “State your business.”

Eliza licked her dry lips, and had to make a conscious effort not to hide behind an English accent. “I’d like to speak to Sergeant Quinn.”

“Which one?”

They had more than one man of that name and rank? She tried to remember his Christian name. “Patrick Quinn, of the Special Irish Branch.”

The man jerked his thumb at the door she had come through, back out into the road of Great Scotland Yard. “Small building across from the Rising Sun. First floor, off to your left; look for the name. He might not be in, though.”

Eliza hadn’t considered that possibility. What if they tried to make her talk to Chief Inspector Williamson, the man in charge of the branch? She could hardly ask him for help. And if she walked in, she might not walk out again, except in chains.

Dead Rick’s sharp ears must have caught what the man said, or maybe he just smelled her fear, for he rose from his slouch by the door and came to her side. “You can do this,” he murmured in her ear. “Come on.”

He’d promised he would see her safely out, whatever happened. Taking a deep breath, Eliza went in search of Special Branch.

They weren’t hard to find. Repairs still marked the northeastern corner of the building, where the bomb had exploded in May; inside, the words SPECIAL IRISH BRANCH were painted black and gold on the door. It hung slightly ajar. Eliza listened at the gap, but heard nothing, and at last forced herself to knock and put her head in. “Hello?”

The man inside didn’t wear a uniform, any more than Quinn had; Special Branch constables rarely did. Their job wasn’t to patrol the streets and frighten off criminals by their presence; they operated like spies, more effective when not noticed. Eliza wasn’t surprised to hear the Irish tinge to his answer. “Can I help you?”

Edging into the room, with Dead Rick close behind, Eliza said, “We need to speak to Sergeant Quinn. He—he told me to come to him if I had information.”

“And you would be?”

She’d gone back and forth on the question of what name to use. But it was likely all these men knew the aliases she’d gone by before; even calling herself some form of Elizabeth might get their attention. And a totally new name would mean nothing to Quinn. Still, her heart pounded louder as she said, “Eliza O’Malley.”

The man straightened immediately. She spooked, one hand going to the door as if pulling it shut behind her when she fled would do any good, but his manner wasn’t hostile; more like a dog that just heard an interesting sound. He beckoned her farther in. “No, it’s all right—the sergeant will be glad to hear you’ve come. I’m P.C. Maguire. No need to be scared, Miss O’Malley. Quinn’s just down this way; you and your friend just follow me.”

Deeper into the lion’s den. Maguire led them through a large room with several men at work in it, to a smaller office holding four desks. Two were in use, and Quinn almost knocked a stack of papers off his when he sprang to his feet. “Miss O’Malley!”

The head of the other man came up sharply. Was her name so notorious? “Sergeant Quinn. I—I have some information you might want to be hearing.” She glanced at Maguire and the other man. “Can we speak to you alone?”

Quinn frowned slightly, at her and Dead Rick both. She’d gotten the skriker to put on shoes, at least, but he still wore no shirt beneath his stained waistcoat, and generally looked like a ruffian. “If ’tis police business, ye should know, I’ll be sharing it with the others. We can’t do our work, otherwise.”

“’Tis what I told you of before,” Eliza said. Habits of reticence made it hard to say the rest, even though these men certainly knew. “In the workhouse.”

He hadn’t forgotten. Quinn’s eyes widened fractionally, but his tone was perfectly level as he said, “All right. Maguire, Sweeney—let us have the room. And no listening at keyholes, ye mind!”

Dead Rick clearly did not trust it; he listened at the door, then nodded that the men were walking away. Quinn, in the meanwhile, dragged two chairs from the neighboring desks over to his own, and sat facing Eliza, bracing his elbows on his knees. “You gave me a fair surprise, you did, vanishing from the workhouse like that. How did you get Miss Kittering to arrange your release?”

“She took pity on me,” Eliza said briefly, not wanting to have to invent an explanation for whatever the changeling had done. “Sergeant, have you found any proof of what I told you?” He shook his head, and opened his mouth to answer, but she stopped him with a raised hand. “I brought some for you.”

She would have expected Dead Rick to hesitate. His hatred of Nadrett ran deep, though; if stopping that monster meant showing his faerie face to half of Scotland Yard, he might have done it. Quinn’s chair scraped backward across the floor, and she knew the skriker had dropped his glamour.

“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” Quinn whispered.

“Wrong on all counts,” the skriker said with aplomb. “Though it’s an ’onest mistake to make. You believe ’er yet? I don’t want some cove walking in ’ere while I’m ’alf naked.”

Eliza hadn’t heard such lightheartedness from him since before Nadrett stole his memories. The warmth it produced gave her the confidence to say to Quinn, “I showed you because I need your help. Yours, and as many more as you can get.”

Quinn was still staring at Dead Rick, but he answered her. “To find your boy?”

“No, that bit I’ve done. ’Tis the one responsible I’m going after now.”

He sat quietly as she explained it to him, though once or twice his hand drifted for a notebook, out of habit, before being called back. Nothing of the Onyx Hall, Hodge had insisted when they asked him; if what they found in West Ham saved the palace, they didn’t want to lose it promptly after to a throng of hostile neighbors or curious explorers. But that Nadrett was possibly trying to make a shelter for himself, yes, and that he was apparently using ordinary humans to build it.

That he would defend the place. And that there were things men could do—especially mortal men—to fight back.

By the time she was done, Quinn’s eyes had taken on a glazed cast. None of it, she suspected, was much like the fairy tales he’d grown up with. But he shook it off, alert once more, after she’d been silent for a few seconds. Then he grimaced. “I’ll help ye myself, just to see the truth of it with my own eyes. But it’s a devil of a hard thing to arrange more. Even if ye knew for sure he’s the one kidnapping these folk, that isn’t Special Branch business.”

“But dynamite is,” Dead Rick said, drawing Quinn’s attention once more. “Nadrett supplied the Fenians. For Charing Cross, and Praed Street, and the four in May. I doubt ’e’s the only one they gets it from, but cut ’im off, and you’ve at least done them a blow.”

“How do you know?” Quinn asked. Not suspiciously, but dutifully; he would have asked Queen Victoria herself where she got her information, if she offered some to him.

Dead Rick’s answering grin was fit for a death omen, even on his human-looking face. “I carried it to ’em myself.”

Eliza hastened to assure Quinn that Dead Rick had not cooperated by choice, but the sergeant waved it away. “’Tisn’t the first time I’ve taken help from somebody inside,” he said absently. “Christ, though—I can’t just go up to Williamson and say, give me a dozen fellows to hunt the faeries.”

What came next was properly Dead Rick’s to offer, but they’d agreed it would be better coming from Eliza. “There are ways to… persuade them,” she said. Nervousness made her fumble the words she’d chosen in advance. “And to make it so they aren’t too clear afterwards on what they saw—”

“Stop,” Quinn said. Not loudly, not angrily, but it cut her off like a knife. “I do not know what you might be thinking, but I won’t have your faeries fiddling with the heads of my boys. They know what they’re doing, or they don’t come at all. Do you understand me?”

She did—but she also knew what the other side feared. “Sergeant, they’re afraid, too. They might not be hiding much longer, the good ones won’t; but they don’t want the first news of them to be a fellow like Nadrett. They’d be hunted for sure, then. So unless you can persuade your boys to be keeping quiet…”

Quinn seemed to be chewing on the insides of his cheeks. He rose from his chair and paced the room, casting the occasional glance at the door, as if thinking about the men outside. Eliza and Dead Rick let him keep his peace. Finally he said, “How many would ye be needing? Not how many ye’d like, but what would be enough to try with.”

Eliza turned to Dead Rick. He knew far better than she did what kind of defenses Nadrett might have, and what men could do against them. He said, “If they’re brave, ’alf a dozen. Two for each door. Religious, if you can.”

The sergeant breathed out a quiet laugh. “That will be the easy bit. Half a dozen, then? So five, aside from me.” He shook his head, like a man about to take a wager he knew he should refuse. “They won’t all be Special Branch, but this won’t be an official operation, either. All right, Miss O’Malley—ye’ll have yer men.”

West Ham, London: September 2, 1884

Dead Rick watched Eliza pace up and down the edge of Stephens Road, hands knotted behind her back, a general waiting for her troops to arrive. The upcoming assault was as much hers as anybody else’s: she didn’t know as much about tactics or charms as Sergeant Quinn or Sir Peregrin, but she had the connection to both worlds, so everybody on both sides looked for answers to come through her. And it had been her idea to begin with.

An audacious idea, that might yet blow up in all their faces. But they had run out of time for caution, and every faerie with a sense of self-preservation had already left the Onyx Hall. What they had left were the desperate and the mad. A few more of those than expected, at that: in addition to the three knights of the Onyx Guard, Irrith, and Bonecruncher, they’d managed to rouse out Niklas von das Ticken, the puck Cuddy, and even Kutuhal, the monkey fellow that had come with them to Aldersgate. Dead Rick didn’t know if he was coming out of curiosity, loyalty to his Academy fellows, or vengeance for the dead naga, but ultimately the reason didn’t matter. The Indian cove had a strong arm, which was all they really needed.

So there were three fae for each door, and the rest of their forces should be here soon enough.

“Can you tell?” Eliza asked abruptly.

It made him jump a bit; he was as tense as she. When he cocked his head at her quizzically, she made a brief, abortive gesture at the rest of the fae, waiting in a clump some distance away. “Whether they’re going to die.”

Dead Rick’s hackles rose at the question. He shook his head. “No. It don’t work on fae.” Their deaths were always too far off to sense, until the moment they happened.

“But you’ll know about the mortals.”

“Only if I look.”

Eliza shivered, and looked down. “Don’t look.”

He wished, with sudden intensity, that he were in dog form; he would have gone and slipped his head under her hand. It was the sort of thing he would have done before, and he thought she might not refuse it now—but he wasn’t sure.

Hoofbeats and the rattle of iron-rimmed wheels gave him no time in any case. A boxlike carriage with iron-barred windows approached along Stephens Road, and drew to a halt nearby. Sergeant Quinn jumped down from the front seat. With an effort at humor, Dead Rick said, “Planning on arresting ’em, are you?”

“There might be fellows that need arresting,” Quinn said. “The iron bars could be useful around the others.”

The carriage’s back door opened, and men began climbing out. None were in uniform, but they all had the sturdy, hard-bitten look of police constables. Also the ill-disguised nerves of men who knew they had not signed up for an ordinary fight. How Quinn had recruited them, Dead Rick didn’t know, and didn’t care to ask. After what Eliza had said, he couldn’t not look—and as he expected, the possibility of death hovered not far from each man. Not a certainty, and that was something; but this might yet go very badly indeed.

He wasn’t about to tell them, though. Without preamble, Eliza said, “It’s this way,” and their pitiful army moved up toward Liddington Road.

Three doors to assault; three groups to assault them. Dead Rick and Niklas were under Sir Peregrin’s command. Quinn had mustered six additional constables instead of five, so the sergeant himself came with their group; they would be taking the large double doors on the southern end of the building. Eliza joined them as well. One hand gripped a knife; the other, a vial of water, ready to be thrown. Whether it would have any effect coming from a mortal’s hand, nobody knew, but it might at least scare Nadrett—or rather, Seithenyn.

Dead Rick was looking forward to seeing the bastard drown.

Around the corner from the building, they paused to make their final preparations. The fae tied green bands around their left arms, to distinguish them from the others inside. Every mortal had come wearing a cross or crucifix, in addition to the weapons of revolver and water. Niklas daubed their eyes with some kind of ointment, mixed by someone in the Academy; it should help them see through charms of confusion. As a final touch, each constable turned his coat inside out—whereupon Dead Rick’s gaze slid right past them, refusing to notice Quinn and the other two men standing just feet away.

It settled on Eliza instead. “You should ’ide yourself,” he said.

She shook her head, surprising him not at all. “I want that bastard to see me. I want to look him in the eye.”

No time to argue; the other groups would be moving into position already. Peregrin beckoned them forward, and together they ran to the double doors.

Which burst open, the bar holding them shut splintering into two broken ends. Dead Rick tried to watch the constables do it, but he only saw Eliza and the fae run through the gap. Inside lay a shallow room, filled with empty crates and some odd bits of machinery, with another set of doors and a staircase leading up. Peregrin ordered Niklas and P.C. Butler to check above, but the door at the top was locked, and they retreated rather than make noise by bashing through.

The one at the bottom was barred from their side; no need to break this one down. Someone Dead Rick couldn’t see lifted the bar, and it swung open enough for a man to slip through.

But no one moved forward, and Dead Rick froze, every hair on his body standing on end. Something hung on the other side, fluttering in the shifting air: a length of cloth, shimmering all colors and none.

No. Not cloth. Looking at it, Dead Rick shivered down to the bone. The stuff twanged discordantly against his skriker instincts: something not quite of death, but not far distant, either.

At his side, Eliza let out a stifled moan. Her eyes were wide, when he turned to her, and she looked rather like he felt. Memory swam up from the absinthe-riddled depths of his mind: teaching her to call ghosts, because she was a born medium.

Mouthing the words more than speaking them, he whispered, “What in Mab’s name is that?” The only thing he could think was, it felt like ghosts, like the stuff the physical ones were made of—but not even quite like that.

Eliza shook her head, as baffled and unnerved as he. The fabric covered the entire doorway, in overlapping sheets; they would either have to go through, or try another door. And he wouldn’t be surprised if the others were similarly draped.

A skriker couldn’t see faerie deaths, and he certainly couldn’t see his own. Gritting his teeth, Dead Rick muttered an oath, and flung himself through.

The caress of the fabric over his shoulders made his skin try to shudder right off his body, but what he found on the other side was a complete anticlimax:

An empty room.

It was a huge, echoing space, going up to the clerestory windows above, with a walkway overlooking from the second floor. Another set of stairs up to it lay by the wall at the far end. There were doors along the walkway, but everything he could see was silent and still.

“Blood and Bone,” Dead Rick whispered to himself. “What is going on?”

Movement along the wall made him jump, but it was just Bonecruncher, coming through the near entrance, and Irrith through the far. A familiar scent told him Eliza had followed behind him, and one by one the others came through as well, to stare about in confusion.

The answers had to lie in the fabric. Dead Rick turned to examine it. Not death, and not ghosts, though something like each. That it was Nadrett’s work, he had no doubt—but what was it, and why was it draping the entire inside surface of this building?

“Wait,” Eliza said. Not to Dead Rick; she was staring toward someone his eye refused to see. Of course; the inside-out coats wouldn’t confuse her mortal eyes at all. “They think they see something,” she told the fae, “and I do, too—up ahead—wait!” she cried, and leapt forward as if to catch someone; whereupon she vanished.

Dead Rick flung himself after her.

Three steps in, the entire room changed. Rattling, clanking sound filled his ears; the smell of oil and grease and unwashed humans filled his nose; and in the center of the floor stood an enormous machine.

It transfixed his gaze, a hulking monstrosity unlike any he’d ever seen before. No, not true: it reminded him of the thing he’d seen in the Academy, that strange loom, except only part of this seemed to be weaving anything. People stood all around it: boys and girls, men and women, at least a dozen of them at a glance, all working away in the dim light as if they hadn’t noticed anyone rushing in.

Dead Rick’s skriker instinct crawled along his bones, confused and afraid. Death—but not.

Every last one of them was more empty than Owen had been.

And while one end of the machine was producing more of that strange, shimmering fabric, a man at the other end was setting into place something Dead Rick recognized all too well: a photographic plate.

“Mab’s bleeding ’eart,” Dead Rick whispered, almost voiceless with horror. “It’s their bloody souls.”

A bullet cracked into the floor not a foot away. Dead Rick spun, gun coming up instinctively, and he fired; he caught a brief glimpse of Gresh on the walkway above, before the goblin pulled back through a doorway. The skriker yelled, even as common sense told him Peregrin and the others wouldn’t hear; the illusion concealing this place wouldn’t let his voice past. Better ’ope they follow, he thought grimly, grabbing Eliza and dragging her toward cover beneath the walkway. Else I am about to die.

They did—or at least the fae did; Dead Rick’s eye still refused to track the constables, though he could see their effects. One of the mortals around the machine staggered, blood bursting from his shoulder; he regained his footing and went about his work as if nothing had happened. “Don’t shoot ’em!” Dead Rick bellowed, wondering who had done it. “Get the bastards up above!”

But by then it was chaos. Nadrett’s men came out of concealment at various places around the floor, their protection broken by crucifixes and the devout faith of the mortals holding them. They wrestled with fellows they couldn’t see, and then someone tore Quinn’s coat off, exposing the sergeant to hostile eyes. Bullets rained down from above. “We’ve got to get up there,” Dead Rick snarled.

“In the first room,” Eliza said breathlessly, knife and water in white-knuckled grips. “The staircase—”

Had to lead up to the walkway. Dead Rick gauged the distance to that door, wondering what their chances were. Then his nose caught the acrid smoke of a fuse. He tackled Eliza to the ground an instant before the dynamite exploded.

Metal screamed in protest. It wasn’t any bomb, thrown from above; someone had jammed a stick into the machine itself. Bonecruncher, Dead Rick thought, through the ringing in his ears. He couldn’t hear the gears and rods grinding against one another, but through the haze he saw an entire section shudder to a halt.

It was as good a distraction as any. Dead Rick ran for the door, setting his teeth against the ghastly feel of the soul-fabric against his skin. Up the stairs—Blood and Bone; Eliza had followed him—where he shot the lock off the door at the top, and then he was back in the main room, this time at one end of the walkway.

Old Gadling stood nearest. Dead Rick transformed midleap, and the ease of it shocked him so much he bowled the thrumpin over and went sprawling himself. He’d eaten bread, of course—but even with that protection, he usually felt the iron, the mortal world frowning at his change.

Not here. Aside from the iron the constables had brought in, the prayers wielded as shields, he might have been on the most deserted moor in all of Yorkshire. As if nothing outside this building existed.

Nothing outside the fabric.

He rose to his paws in time to see Eliza wrestle Gadling over the walkway rail. The thrumpin fell with a surprised yell, and then Dead Rick moved on, past Gresh, past a faerie he didn’t recognize, toward the far wall, where Cerenel had lost his gun and was using a knife to drive Nithen up the other staircase. None of them mattered, except that they’d helped defend this atrocity; the only one who mattered was Nadrett. Dead Rick couldn’t carry water in this form, but his teeth would do well enough, if only he could find a target for them. Where did that bastard go?

Eliza went through one of the doorways; he followed close on her heels. The rooms on the far side were smaller, and they had Nadrett’s scent on them, but the master was nowhere to be found. Just tools, and cameras, and bits of machine, and a scrawny faerie cowering under a table, pleading for mercy.

And a room full of cages, twins to the ones Nadrett kept in the Goblin Market. These, too, were filled with people, and Dead Rick recognized two of them.

They wore the same face, and the same expressions of terror. But only one of them might be able to tell Dead Rick what he wanted to know. He shifted to man form and snapped, “Cyma! Where the bleeding ’ell is Nadrett?”

“He went back to the—”

Her words dissolved in a wail of horrified dismay. Unthinking, he had called her by her faerie name, and unthinking, she had answered. Louisa—the real Louisa—clutched her double’s shoulder, but it was too late; the symmetry of their appearances shattered, leaving behind one mortal girl and one former changeling.

Cyma gasped for air, clinging to Louisa and the side of the cage. Eliza pressed her hands to her mouth, staring at them both, and the expression on her face made Dead Rick feel a brief stab of guilt. I didn’t mean to do it. But it was too late now.

“Find a key,” he said to Eliza, and she began searching while he crouched down to grip the bars of the cage. “Cyma—Blood and Bone, I’m sorry, but you’ve got to tell me. I ain’t letting Nadrett get away. Where is ’e?”

She swallowed back tears and turned her pale face up far enough for him to see. “He went back to the Onyx Hall. Dead Rick, he’s going after Lune.”

The skriker’s heart stopped. He couldn’t even think of a curse vile enough to suffice. Lune—if Nadrett did anything to her—

Eliza threw a key to someone he could not see and dragged Dead Rick to his feet, breaking his paralysis. “I know where we can hire a cab. Come on.”

The Prince’s Court, Onyx Hall: September 2, 1884

I can’t die. Not now. Sweet mother of—oh Christ it ’urts—don’t let me die—

The earthquake went on and on, inside and out. Hodge wasn’t even trying to stand; he’d flung himself flat when the first tremor hit, pressing his body against the black stone of the floor, throwing every atom of his strength into the Onyx Hall. He could hear Lune’s scream in his head, a constant shriek of agony, never needing to pause for breath; his own throat was mute, paralyzed by pain.

He had just enough presence of mind to choke back the prayer that tried to form. Hodge wasn’t a praying man, never had been, save in the most extreme desperation—which most certainly described this moment. But he’d felt the extra strain when Christ’s name went through his mind, and he knew, with the part of him that was still capable of analysis, that his own battlefield piety might be the thing that broke them both, and destroyed the Onyx Hall for good.

Cracking splintering shattering collapse. The Academy, Hodge thought, and knew Lune was thinking of it, too; they must not lose the Academy, which held all the knowledge they might use to craft their salvation. They could surrender any part of the Hall but that one—the Academy, and the rooms that held Hodge and Lune. Like a man caught in a trap, Hodge amputated his own leg, knowing that if he didn’t he would die where he lay. And the blood, the life, poured out of him so fast he feared he would die anyway.

Not him. The Hall. The two spirits within the London Stone, Francis and Suspiria. He could neither hear nor feel them, but if Aspell was right, they were still there. And if they died—if their spirits were torn completely apart—

This is the one fucking thing I can do for this place. I can ’old it together. And I will. No matter ’ow much it ’urts.

And so he held.

The pain ended at last—the worst of it—and tears streamed without shame down his face. Still alive. I’m still alive, and so is the Hall—for now.

It was the smallest, most pathetic shred of victory. The iron chain had been linked together at last, the final pieces of rail laid down below Cannon Street. The Inner Circle Railway was complete.

It hadn’t destroyed them—not yet. But when the trains began to make their circuit, Hodge was a dead man. Him, and Lune, and the palace: they had not enough strength among them to survive it.

Those sons of bitches were early, too. The navvies weren’t supposed to lay the last bits of track until tomorrow; he’d thought Dead Rick and the others had just enough time to see what Nadrett was doing in West Ham. If that bastard actually had some way to make his own shelter, then this suffering could end at last.

Now he wasn’t even sure he would live to see tomorrow.

The stone beneath him had spiderwebbed into a thousand pieces. His hand trembled with palsy as he pressed it against the shattered fragments, trying to push himself up—not to his feet, that was out of the question, but at least as far as his knees. There was no strength in his arm. When he heard the door open, running footsteps approach him, Hodge almost wept with relief; then Dead Rick hauled him upright, and the panic in the skriker’s eyes killed that relief entirely.

“’E’s after Lune,” Dead Rick said, fingers gripping hard enough to bruise. “But I don’t know where she is. You ’as to tell us.”

Lune. And Nadrett. How the hell had that bastard learned where she was? It didn’t matter. Alone and vulnerable, maybe shaking with weakness like Hodge, she would be easy prey. I ’ave to warn ’er. He pressed his hand against the floor, tried to reach out, but all he got was silence.

“I’ll bloody carry you if I ’ave to,” Dead Rick said, desperate.

Hodge’s voice came out a near-inaudible rasp. “You’ll ’ave to. Swore an oath; I can’t tell you where the Stone is. But lift me up, and I’ll show you where to go.”

The London Stone, Onyx Hall: September 2, 1884

Eliza followed Dead Rick’s lurching run, one hand pressed to her side as if she could push away the stitch of pain there. When they came into the Onyx Hall, there had been a terrifying moment of dislocation, as if something were trying to rip her insides clear out of her body; she and Dead Rick had fallen hard when they finally made it through, and the skriker had begun crawling before the floor settled, even though it seemed the ceiling could fall in on him at any moment.

The Goodemeades had spoken of destruction; so had Dead Rick. None of it had meant much to Eliza, until now. Until she felt their world tearing apart around her.

And now they were braving it in search of the Queen, the faerie woman who ruled over this dying place. No—in search of Nadrett, and revenge.

Hodge gestured Dead Rick to the left, then through an arch. In the distance, Eliza could hear cries of fear, the sounds of other people running. She cast a nervous glance at the walls around them, which seemed on the verge of collapse. We only need a few minutes more.

A sudden tremor sent Dead Rick sprawling. Hodge grunted in pain as he hit the floor. Eliza caught herself against the wall, then went to help the Prince. His pointing hand stopped her. “Not far. She walled ’erself in. But if Nadrett’s there—”

Eliza didn’t wait for anything more. Gripping the knife and the water so tight her knuckles ached, she ran in the direction Hodge pointed.

The first room was hung with faded tapestries and cluttered with rubbish, echoes of a forgotten past. Eliza had no eyes for them: her gaze went straight to the right-hand wall, where broken black stone formed a jagged mouth. Weapons raised, Eliza hurled herself through to the room beyond.

The woman within sat in serene perfection, eyes closed, heedless of her surroundings. Her cloth-of-silver gown was old-fashioned, with the full crinoline and sloping shoulders of decades past; it shone in the dim light of the room. She shone, pale skinned and silver haired, like some poet’s vision of the moon, and a sword was thrust into the black stone at her feet.

So arresting a sight was she, it took Eliza a full second to notice the other faerie in the room—the creature that had been the source of all her pain.

She’d expected something more. Some grand demon, maybe not horned and clawed and dripping venom, but showing outward sign of his evil. Instead she saw a faerie much like any other: dressed like a man, in the tattered elegance she associated with the leaders of gangs in the slums of London.

Holding a gun to the woman’s head.

“Stop!” Dead Rick wrenched the vial from Eliza’s grip, when she would have hurled her water at the other faerie. “Stop,” he repeated in a whisper, and she felt the skriker tremble against her back.

Nadrett’s laugh held all the malice she’d imagined in her nightmares. “That’s right, dog. You know what this means, even if that mortal bitch don’t. I pulls the trigger, and this all comes tumbling down.”

Fear roughened Dead Rick’s voice, alongside the anger. “You’ll die with us.”

“Maybe so,” Nadrett said, seemingly unconcerned. “But you ready to kill everybody else, too? No, I don’t think so. You’ve got your memories back, don’t you? Which means you remember fighting for this place. Being a good little dog for the Queen. She wouldn’t want you to throw that away, now would she?” He gestured at Eliza. “Are you ready to kill ’er, your little mortal pet?”

Dead Rick slid in front of Eliza, pushing her back with gentle, shaking hands. She retreated, thinking of that terrible dislocation as they came into the Onyx Hall. It would be like that again, if the Queen died. Only worse.

The skriker said, “What do you want?”

Nadrett’s lip curled. “Your guts on an iron platter would be a pleasant start. Or no, I’ve got a better idea—I want all of your memories gone again, all except this moment. So the only thing you remember is ’ow you failed, and fell back into being my crawling, whining cur.”

Eliza dug her fingers into the black stone of the wall at her back, gripping it as if that were the one thing keeping her from leaping at Nadrett. The malevolence of him turned her stomach. This was what had broken Owen; this was what Dead Rick had lived under for years, until the kindness and trust in him had been beaten almost to death.

Dead Rick snarled low in his throat, but said, “I mean right now. You came for Lune. You planning to walk out with ’er? Take ’er away from that? Might as well shoot ’er, and you know it.”

He’d jerked his chin upward on the word “that.” Following his motion, Eliza saw a stone in the ceiling above Lune that did not belong with the rest of the palace. It was a simple, rounded block of limestone, pitted and chipped, scored with grooves along its tip, as if carriage wheels had ground across it for years—but it hung ten feet above their heads. Surely nothing could touch it up there, least of all carriages.

Then she realized she’d seen it before, during her costerwoman days. Or rather, a stone just like it, set into the outside wall of St. Swithin’s Church. An old relic that they called the London Stone.

“I ain’t got no interest in seeing everybody die,” Nadrett said, in answer to Dead Rick. “You ought to know that, dog; if there ain’t no fae in London, I ain’t got nobody to make a profit from. So ’ere’s what we’re going to do.

“You’re going to go out and tell everybody there’s a new place for them to live. Out in West Ham. Anybody as wants to stay in London can, so long as they pays my price. You clear them out of this place; that Prince of theirs ’as enough bread piled up to give everybody a bite. Once that’s done… You see that camera over there?”

Eliza couldn’t risk taking her attention off Nadrett, but out of the corner of her eye she could just glimpse a box on a tripod stand. “I use that camera,” Nadrett said. “I take the Queen’s soul. I carry it off to West Ham, and use ’er and that dead Prince to pour what’s left of this place into what I’ve got waiting there. New faerie realm, new ’ome for everybody. Ain’t it grand?”

Eliza’s heart lurched against her ribs. So that was how he would do it: with human souls and the captured spirit of the Queen. That was the secret they had risked themselves to capture.

Or rather, destroy.

“Sounds very grand—except for one thing.” Her voice shook: with rage, with fear, with the fruitless need to do something. She couldn’t possibly kill him before he shot the Queen. But if she made him angry enough… “We blew your machine to pieces.”

It almost worked. Nadrett snarled in fury, and Dead Rick tensed, about to throw himself forward in that moment of distraction. But Nadrett saw it, and spat a curse. “One inch, dog, and I blows the Queen’s brains out.”

Let him.

It was a stupid, reckless, suicidal thought—so Eliza believed, at first. But the tone wasn’t reckless in the least; it was perfectly calm.

And it wasn’t her thought.

The whisper ghosted into her head, and no one else seemed to hear it. Let him fire. If you can hear me… make Nadrett do it.

Madness. They would all die; Dead Rick had said so. But Eliza would have put her hand on the Holy Bible and sworn her oath to God that the whisper came from the silver-haired woman in the chair: the Queen of the Onyx Court.

Whose mind she was somehow feeling, as if the woman were a ghost she had raised.

Trust me.

The tenuous sense of connection faded as Eliza shifted forward, releasing her grip on the wall. Nadrett redirected his snarl to her. “That goes for you, too, bitch.”

In the end, Eliza was sure of one thing: that it would be better to kill every faerie in this place, even Dead Rick, and herself with them, than to let Nadrett tear people’s souls out and feed them into his terrible machine.

“Devil take you,” she said, and threw herself at Nadrett.

The sound of gunfire was deafening in the small space. Eliza never made it near her target; Dead Rick caught her, in a desperate, failed attempt to prevent disaster. But as her ears rang with the aftermath of the shot, as smoke wisped through the cool, dry air, the expected earthquake did not begin.

And Lune sat, untouched, in her chair.

Nadrett stared, disbelieving, at the Queen. So did Dead Rick; so did Eliza. The pistol was an inch from her head; he could not possibly have missed. The wall showed a fresh pockmark where the round had struck, and the line between the two went straight through her skull.

Trembling, Nadrett reached out with his free hand to touch Lune’s hair.

His fingers went right through.

“What in Mab’s name…?” he whispered.

Clinging to Dead Rick, Eliza felt the growl in the skriker’s chest, before it ever became audible. Then understanding caught up, and she released him, freeing his arm to throw.

A tiny arc of water leapt from the vial, cloudy and stinking of the Thames from which it had been drawn. In a fierce, triumphant growl, Dead Rick snarled, “Seithenyn, I name you, and mark you for death. Let the waters of Faerie carry out their curse!”

Only a few droplets of water caught Nadrett. Nowhere near enough to hurt anyone. The entire vial couldn’t have hurt a man, even if poured into his lungs. Nadrett raised his gun again, and Eliza thought they were dead; Lune might survive that, but she and Dead Rick never would. Before Nadrett’s arm made it all the way up, though, the water began to move.

Move, and grow. It twisted up from the floor, from his sleeve and collar where the droplets had landed, twining into ropes and waves. Nadrett screamed, trying to claw it away, but the water only clung to his hands, like animate tar; then, understanding, he tried to run.

He didn’t get more than three steps. The waters raged higher around him, a whirlpool binding his body tight, and in their surface Eliza thought she saw faces: beautiful nymphs, twisted hags, and through them all, the solemn, bearded face of an old man. A voice spoke, resonant but clotted with mud and filth, the voice of the Thames itself. “For the destruction you wrought, and the death of Mererid our daughter, we bring this justice upon you.”

Nadrett’s scream died in a choking cough. Then there was only rushing water; then silence, as it drained away, leaving only a damp slick on the floor.

Dead Rick spat at it. “Wanted to tear your throat out, you bastard. But they ’ad first claim.”

Sick to her stomach, Eliza turned away. To the broken edge of the wall that had closed Lune into this chamber—Lune, who was some kind of ghost. Beyond its edge she found Hodge, limp on the floor, having dragged himself almost to the Queen before his strength gave out. Eliza knelt and rolled him onto his back, fearing the worst, but Hodge opened his eyes. “Is she…”

Eliza didn’t know how to answer. Instead she slipped her arm around his chest and helped him upright, and together they staggered back into the chamber of the London Stone.

Dead Rick gestured helplessly toward the Queen. “Lune—”

Hodge stretched one hand out to the wall. Not for support; his fingers touched the stone, and he closed his eyes. After a moment, Eliza did the same.

She felt that presence again, tenuous and weak, but undeniably there. A sense of gratitude breathed over her, so painfully weary that it brought a gasp of tears into Eliza’s own throat. I began to suspect some time ago. I have poured so much of myself into the Hall, I am no longer in my body; the Hall is my body. The scholars would say my spirit has released its grip upon the aether that made it solid. I could not hold both that and the palace at once.

It was more than just words. The Queen’s whisper carried with it overtones of sensation and memory that gave Eliza vertigo: in that moment, she came untethered from human notions of time and existence, growing into something vaster and more elemental than her poor mortal mind could conceive. But then, as from a distance, she felt Hodge’s arm tighten around her shoulders, and she knew she wasn’t alone; he was mortal, too, if not entirely so, and he helped anchor her to the reality she understood, against the tide of the Queen’s ancient soul.

Whether she heard Dead Rick’s voice with her ears or her mind, Eliza didn’t know. “Your Grace. I should ’ave stopped ’im sooner—”

No need for apology. Another wash of weariness, so intense Eliza wondered how anyone, human or faerie, could bear it. I know of your purpose in West Ham. Did he have an answer? Can his… machines be used?

It must have been mental communication, for Eliza felt the surge of Dead Rick’s repugnance alongside her own. “No,” she said, and then words failed her; they did not suffice to describe the horror of what Nadrett had built.

But it seemed the Queen took the sense of it from her mind, for she felt Lune’s grim resignation. Then we do not have long. At most, until the first train passes by the London Stone above. Perhaps not even that long. Hodge… the time has come. The Onyx Court must flit; the Hall can shelter us no more.

“No!” That was out loud, and it came from Dead Rick. Hand still on the wall, Eliza opened her eyes, and saw the skriker fall to his knees at the feet of his phantom Queen. “We can’t just bloody well give up. There ’as to be a way to save the palace.”

Hodge slipped from Eliza’s arm to lean against the stone, exhausted. His answer was flat and unyielding. “There ain’t. We’ve tried. I wish it weren’t true—but your time ’ere is done.”

The naked despair on Dead Rick’s face echoed through the stone, into Eliza’s own heart. “But this is our home.”

His words tore her in half. One piece growled that it would be good riddance; after all the evil the fae had done, London would be better off without them. No more Nadretts, stealing people and memories and souls, profiting from the misery and suffering of others. These were not godly creatures; they were alien, and unwanted. The occasional exception—Dead Rick, the Goodemeades—did not redeem the rest of their kind.

The other piece of Eliza had heard such words before—coming from men like Louisa Kittering’s father.

Maggie Darragh, starving in Whitechapel, until her anger could only express itself in dynamite. James O’Malley, who’d stolen more than a few things in his time, and other crimes besides. All the drunkards and thieves and murderers, the unwashed pestilential masses of Irish hidden away in their rookeries, where the respectable folk of London didn’t have to see them; some were bad at heart, and others were led into sin by those around them, and still others had it forced upon them by circumstance. And then there were the men like Patrick Quinn, that those respectable folk liked to forget: decent, hardworking Irish, not living in poverty, not committing crimes, but they couldn’t redeem their race in the eyes of those who judged.

Eliza had told Quinn that London was her home. It was Dead Rick’s home, too—and Lune’s, and the Goodemeades’, and all the other fae who sheltered in the dying ruins of the Onyx Hall, criminal and citizen alike. How could she look him in the eye and say he had to leave, that his kind were not wanted here?

This moment wasn’t hers; she was all but a stranger here, ignorant of so much that she hardly dared open her mouth. But she had to do something to lift the blackness from Dead Rick’s heart, and so she said, “How did this place get made? Can’t you make another one?”

The fierce blaze in the skriker’s eye repaid her courage tenfold. “You said it two ’undred years ago, your Grace—that if the palace burned down, we’d build another one! If we can’t save the Hall, then let it go, and start over!”

But Hodge shook his head. “The giants of London are dead; Father Thames ’asn’t spoken in more than a ’undred years; the city’s shot through with iron. We know what they did the first time, but the world’s changed too much for that to work.”

“Then find a new way,” Eliza said, with all the bold confidence of a woman who had no idea what such a way might be, but wasn’t letting that stop her. “Pull Nadrett’s machines to bits and figure out how to make them work with something other than souls.”

For a moment, she thought Hodge would say no. The weariness was in him, too, going beyond what she thought any man could endure; it would have been easier for him to give up, to send the faeries away, and then to die alongside Lune, with the last of the Onyx Hall.

But he wasn’t some overbred twig off the royal tree of Europe. This Prince was made of sterner stuff, and had the will to go down fighting. “It can’t ’urt to try,” Hodge said, and managed a smile. “Any more than not trying will. I can only die once.”

Dead Rick stood, bowing to both the Queen and the Prince, and said, “I think I might know somebody who can ’elp you put that off a bit.”

The Galenic Academy, Onyx Hall: September 7, 1884

The closing of the Inner Circle had, in one brutal move, severed the Onyx Hall into two pieces, along the line of Cannon Street. For days afterward, the southern half shuddered through its death throes, the last of the Goblin Market fracturing smaller and smaller, taking with it anyone, faerie or mortal, not smart enough to run for the door while they could.

For the northern half, survival took precedence over security: Dead Rick and Eliza helped the Academy’s engineers dismantle the great loom and move it to the chamber outside where Lune sat in desperate trance, supported by the ghost of Galen St. Clair. The young man had not hesitated, once Yvoir freed his spirit from the plate found in the West Ham factory; he had only to hear that Lune needed his aid, and went immediately to her side. In the meanwhile, Bonecruncher and others had braved the dying southern half to gather as much material as they could, salvaging it to feed the loom, so they could weave protection for what had become the two most vital pieces of the Hall.

The London Stone and the Galenic Academy.

The former would hold their present for as long as it could. The latter, perhaps, held their future.

It was the irrational hope born in those moments after Nadrett’s death: that they could, in these final days, discover some acceptable use for the horror he had invented. Some way to make a new home for themselves, on some foundation other than the destruction of mortal souls.

“I’m sorry to say that was, in part, my doing,” said the bearded man who presented himself to the Academy, five days after the raid. The Goodemeades had brought him, introducing the fellow as Frederic Myers, of the London Fairy Society. “I do not remember the details—it seems that memory has somehow been taken from me—but according to what Fjothar and I have reconstructed, some years ago, Nadrett sought out my expertise on ghosts.

“His original interest was in the notion of the ‘astral plane’—a place where spirits dwell. I believe he was interested in establishing some dominion there, if he could. A different portion of my research, however, proved more fruitful to him: the physical manifestation of spirits. I theorized that ectoplasm, as I called it—the ghost-substance—was an emanation created by the human soul itself.”

Here Fjothar took up the thread. He was a svartálfar, with patches of wiry hair sticking out in all directions; he had a habit of pulling on these as he spoke. “We all know that mortal souls can shelter fae against iron and faith; it is that property which allows tithed bread to do its work, and also protects changelings who take a mortal’s place. With Mr. Myers’s help—and, I suspect, the assistance of Red Rotch, a former Academy scholar who was killed some time ago in the Goblin Market—Nadrett discovered that ectoplasm is in fact solid aether. And it retains its protective capability.”

With her usual bluntness, Irrith said, “But if we have to grind people’s souls down into thread to make use of it, then we might as well put our coats on now, because that isn’t going to happen.”

They had gathered in the Presentation Hall, all those who remained, to pool their knowledge and answer the final question: could they, with the Academy’s wisdom and Nadrett’s machines, with their memories of the past and their visions of the future, find a way to build a new palace? They made a strange assortment, ranged across the benches and chairs and boxes scavenged for seating; not just scholars, but courtiers and mortal allies and Goblin Market refugees. Everyone who cared enough to risk staying. Damned if I know what I can add, Dead Rick thought wryly, but I ain’t about to run now. Not after what I said to Lune.

They’d salvaged what they could from West Ham. Whether anything could be done for the empty human shells that had operated the machines was doubtful; Mrs. Chase was attempting to find caretakers for them all. Those faeries not killed had fled, and nobody had the energy to chase them, nor to do more than beg the constables not to speak of what they’d seen. All their remaining will went into the scientific problem instead. Parts of the equipment were intact or repairable, and some fellow with a strong stomach had examined the fabric for its secrets—but could they turn any of it to good?

Bonecruncher helped Rosamund up onto a barrel so she could stand high enough to be seen by the others. “A human seer helped before,” the brownie said, once she had everyone’s attention. “Back when the Hall was created. He and a faerie woman worked together to do it, and his spirit is part of what has protected this place. One possibility—and it’s only a possibility, mind you—is that somebody else could do the same.”

Creaks and scuffing sounded around the room, as every mortal in the place shifted and tried to avoid meeting anyone’s eye, lest they be asked to volunteer. Not just the men; Dead Rick saw Eliza bite her lip. If she tried to do it, he would stop her.

But her thoughts, it seemed, went in another direction. Hesitantly, as if not sure she had the right to speak up in this place, Eliza said, “Would ghosts do? Could ye… harvest this stuff from them somehow, without harming them?”

“I know a genuine medium,” Cyma offered, from where she sat on the far side of the room, a wide-eyed Louisa Kittering at her side.

So do I, Dead Rick thought. Did Eliza mean to offer her services? Before she could, though, others in the room took the idea and began to elaborate upon it. Ch’ien Mu, the Chinese faerie in charge of the great loom, seemed very excited by the prospect; he began muttering, “Weft thread! I say before, if we have aether for weft, it is stable.” Fjothar tried to explain something about the configuration created by Nadrett’s machine, but it was lost in the hubbub, scholars and nonscholars alike flinging suggestions atop one another, making a confused jumble of it all.

Dead Rick couldn’t understand more than one word in ten. Instead he watched Abd ar-Rashid. The Scholarch listened quietly for a time, hands folded behind his back, before bringing out something like a golden pen. Without speaking, the genie began to move the pen through the air, and lines of glowing gold appeared in its wake, as if he were writing on an invisible slate.

Most of what he wrote consisted of the alchemical and arcane symbols the scholars used in their science, and those, Dead Rick could not read. Two things, however, Abd ar-Rashid wrote in plain English, letters big enough to be seen from across the Presentation Hall: CONFORMATION? and FOUNDATION?

He tucked the pen away and clapped his hands sharply, halting a discussion that had begun to veer off in a dozen directions, each less comprehensible than the last. “If we are to make a new faerie realm,” Abd ar-Rashid said, “then we must address these two questions, before we go any further. Supposing we overcome the obstacles to making the substance itself—which may be within our grasp—what will be its conformation, and to what will it be anchored?”

At Dead Rick’s side, Eliza looked completely lost. Pretending for a moment he knew the first thing about these matters, he leaned toward her ear and muttered, “Like this place. It reflects the City of London—the way it was when the palace were first made—and it’s anchored to certain bits up above.”

She nodded, frowning. “The Goodemeades told me. The old wall, the Tower, and so on.”

“Right. Too much of that’s broke, though, so we needs to pick something new.”

What the “something new” should be rapidly became the primary point of discussion. Someone rolled out a huge map of the city and stuck it to the wall; this had lines marked on it for both the Underground and overground railways, and everyone was arguing over which landmarks to choose for the new foundation. Geographical arrangement, symbolism, and distance from the tracks seemed the primary points of contention, as Wilhas von das Ticken and a Spanish-accented mortal began a vigorous debate over the relative merits of a pentagram versus a hexagram.

That Myers fellow leapt into it with a will, but others sat back, looking as useless as Dead Rick felt. Louisa Kittering, he saw, was murmuring to Cyma; Bonecruncher was spinning a gun around one finger; Sir Cerenel’s violet eyes had fixed on the far wall as if determined not to show how lost he was. Eliza, to his surprise, was listening closely, though unless she’d spent the last seven years studying the Pythagoras fellow that the Spaniard was going on about, she couldn’t possibly understand it any better than Dead Rick did.

As if feeling the weight of his gaze, she glanced sideways at him, and her brow furrowed. “Are they stupid, or am I?”

“I’m pretty sure I am,” he muttered. “You actually follow them?”

“No—but I think I see a problem, all the same.” She shifted her stool closer, an intent look in her eyes. “Tell me if I’m wrong. Isn’t yer problem right now that yer foundation is cracked, because the things ye used for it got moved or destroyed?”

Dead Rick frowned. “Yes, but they’re choosing new things—”

“Which might be destroyed in a hundred years, or ten,” Eliza said. “Oh, I suppose no one will be in a hurry to knock down Nelson’s Column, but still—that doesn’t mean the problem goes away. Does it?”

He cocked his head, listening as best as he could to the conversation. They were talking now about the significance of the original anchor points, their symbolic meaning and the effect that had on the Onyx Hall. Trying to find new anchors that would carry similar meaning, or better. But it all still sounded like physical things, and to his way of thinking, Eliza was right. The Great Fire had destroyed much of the City of London, and came terrifyingly close to destroying the Onyx Hall, too. Anything man-made could be unmade, too.

Natural features, then—but no, those didn’t work either, did they? All those bridges spanning the Thames, some of them with iron, and the various embankments narrowing and shaping its course. The Walbrook, buried underground, and the Fleet, too; year by year, London buried more of its rivers. Hills were flattened, valleys filled in. Mortals might not see it, with their short and blinkered lives, and the timeless memories of fae might overlook it; but with his memories half in a tangle still, Dead Rick knew very well how much London had changed.

The more firmly they planted their feet on the ground, the more vulnerable they were to an earthquake.

What could they choose, that couldn’t be destroyed?

Eliza didn’t think Dead Rick’s words were meant for her; he spoke them under his breath, his teeth clenched hard together. “Fucking Nadrett. Useful after all, you bastard.”

Before she could ask what he meant by that, the skriker shot to his feet. He wasn’t tall, nor large of build, but the sudden conviction in his posture made him seem twice his usual size. In a growl that cut straight through the clamor, he said, “You’re wasting your bleeding time.”

Few of the expressions he received were friendly. Dead Rick still looked and sounded exactly like what he was: a black dog, a goblin creature from the Goblin Market, uneducated and barely literate. Neither the scholars nor the swells here much liked being told they were wasting their time by someone who had, until recently, been Nadrett’s dog. But even the glaring ones had given him their attention, and that was enough. Shaking his head, Dead Rick said, “Eliza ’ere already figured it out. You can’t just pick new places; you’ll end up ’aving to do this again in a few ’undred years. Or less.”

Ch’ien Mu snapped, “Must have anchor! Describe in symbol, tell machine, so machine go—”

He waved his hands, clearly frustrated with the way his mind had outpaced his English. Wrain said, “We realize the problem, Dead Rick, but—” Ch’ien Mu spat something out in rapid Chinese, and Wrain translated. “With samples from the locations we choose, we can create instructions for the loom; without that, we don’t have conformation or foundation. We must work with what we have, flawed though it may be.”

“And ‘a few ’undred years’ is more time than we have now,” someone else said in a nasty tone.

Dead Rick took no offense at the mockery. “Ain’t it better to pick something that ain’t flawed? Something that can’t be destroyed, that’ll go on forever—or as close to forever as any of us needs.”

Several people seemed ready to shout him down, but Abd ar-Rashid spoke before they could. “What do you have in mind?”

Dead Rick grinned, in a way that made Eliza’s stomach tense in both apprehension and excitement. “London.”

A full three seconds of silence followed, before a skinny mortal said, “What the blazes do you think we’ve been discussing?”

“Not the stuff in the city,” Dead Rick said, still grinning. “The city itself. The idea of the place. So long as there’s Londoners, there’ll be a London, right? Ash and Thorn—I’m the last bleeding sod to tell you we should thank Nadrett for anything, but ’e got Chrennois to figure out a way for photographing things that can’t be touched. So photograph the city, the idea of it. Use that for your foundation. It’ll fall apart when the city gets abandoned, maybe—but by then, we won’t need it no more. Because there won’t be no London to live in.”

More silence. Then Irrith said, “But how in Mab’s name do we photograph that?”

“We don’t have to,” Wrain said, leaping up in excitement. He flung one arm out toward the large machine that sat at the other end of the room, across from where the loom had been. “We can calculate it instead. Once we know how to represent the nature of London in symbolic notation, we can use that to instruct the loom. A conceptual conformation and foundation, instead of a physical one!”

The genie was writing this in the air as he spoke, in glowing letters of gold. Like a teacher waiting to see what his pupils knew, he said, “What, then, is the nature of London?”

Not far from Eliza, the Goodemeades had been whispering to each other. Now Rosamund cleared her throat and scrambled back up onto the barrel. “Gertie and I have been here longer than just about anyone. Longer than the Onyx Hall, even. London is, and always has been, the heart of England.”

“They say that one in ten Englishmen lives here,” Gertrude added. “Maybe more. Nowadays it isn’t the only city—there’s Liverpool, Manchester, Birmingham, and so on—but they’re not a tenth the size of London.”

Sounds of startlement, from a few of the fae; none of the mortals looked surprised. These creatures may know history, Eliza thought, but they don’t know the world around them very well. Even she knew about those cities—many of them swelled by the emigration of her own people.

“Size is not the only thing that makes London the heart of England,” Sir Cerenel added. “The government is here, too. Or rather, in Westminster—but I suppose that is part of London now, isn’t it? Queen Victoria and Parliament are also England’s heart, and they are here.”

Not as much since Her Nibs went into mourning and never came out. Eliza couldn’t help but notice, too, the way they kept speaking of England. Not Britain, or the United Kingdom. Three hundred years and more, they’d been here. It showed.

Louisa Kittering spoke up boldly. “You mustn’t forget money, either. All the trade that comes into London, and the banks, and the investors; I don’t know what fraction of the nation’s wealth is here, but it must be vast. Anyone who wishes to count for anything must come to London eventually, if only for the Season.”

One of the mortal men gave a dry laugh. “You and Sir Cerenel are talking about the same thing, really: power. That’s what London is about. It is the heart of power. And the trappings of power follow with it, all the fashion and art and commerce and such.”

Voices rose up in agreement, murmuring about the elegant terraces of houses, the museums, the grand monuments, all embroidering upon the theme of London’s glorious power. Eliza sagged in her chair, excitement draining away. She’d felt, for a few moments, as if she belonged—but not in this conversation. This was for the Louisa Kitterings of the world, the educated folk and the wealthy, the privileged swells, whether they were faerie or mortal. At her side, Dead Rick was equally silent; their eyes met, and his lip curled upward cynically. She knew what he was thinking, as clearly as if he’d said it. That ain’t my London.

Eliza sucked in a sudden breath. The half sneer on Dead Rick’s face turned into wide-eyed thought, and then to a remarkably evil grin. As well it should; he’d stood up a moment ago and told everyone they were a pack of idiots. Of course it would please him to watch her do the same.

Months of hiding, of doing her best to make sure nobody took notice of her. Months of lying about who and what she was, the better to blend in. Hard habits to break, after all that time. But if she didn’t do it now, she would regret it forever.

Nobody heard her clear her throat. Should she wave her hand, or wait for a lull? The devil with being polite. Planting her shoes—her battered, secondhand shoes—firmly on the floor, Eliza stood and declared in a clear, carrying voice, “That’s the London ye see, is it? Well, ’tisn’t mine.”

The conversation staggered and trailed off. The genie turned an inquiring face upon her and said, “Please, Miss O’Malley, do share your thoughts.”

He might be a heathen, but Eliza couldn’t help but like him at that moment; she suspected he knew what she was about to say. There were enough of his kind—heathens, not genies—in the East End, especially around the docks. Where the city pushed much of its unwanted refuse.

“What is London?” she asked, and licked her lips, clenching her hands for strength. “’Tis thousands of servants scrubbing the floors of yer rich and mighty, so the missus’s skirt won’t get dusty. ’Tis boys sweeping mud out of the street for pennies, and scooping up dog turds to sell to the tanners. ’Tis cholera and measles and scarlet fever, poverty, starvation, drinking yourself half dead with gin, and being thrown in prison for debt. ’Tis paying fourpence to sleep on a bench with a rope holding you up, then going out to sell buns from a barrow while your fingers freeze with the cold.” She paused for breath, and found she was shaking so hard it came in a ragged gasp. “All yer power, all yer wealth, all those things that make this place important—they don’t come from nowhere. They’re just the top layer, the crust on the pie, and underneath is another city entirely. The Irish, and the Italians, and the lascars—even the Jews—all those people who are not English, and are not a part of the world ye see, but they are bloody well part of London, too.”

Quietly, Gertrude Goodemeade said, “Just as we are part of London, the hidden faerie folk. We, too, have been a part of making this city what it is today.”

Sir Cerenel offered Eliza what he probably thought was a sympathetic smile. With the anger trembling in her veins, she found it hard to accept as anything other than condescending. “Your point is well taken, Miss O’Malley. But we must ask ourselves: Are those layers what we want to choose? The new palace will reflect its foundation; surely we want to make that the best London has to offer.”

Of course a knight would say that. She spat at his feet in fury. “And power makes things best, does it? Money and fine clothes? Never mind the hard work, the folk who come here because they hope for a better life; ye would never want to reflect that, now would ye—devil knows what it might do.”

Behind Eliza’s shoulder, Dead Rick rose to his feet. “You want a strong foundation? I ain’t no architect, but I knows that a broad bottom works better than a narrow one. It don’t tip over so easy. And there’s a lot more poor than there is rich.”

“Who says we cannot include both?” Abd ar-Rashid asked. “Include all the visions of the city, high and low alike?”

In a tone that suggested his head was on the verge of exploding, the man who’d spoken of power said, “But we can’t include everything. It would be chaos!”

“Only if it is rendered in fragments,” the genie said, and looked significantly at Wrain.

Who turned to look at the machine he’d mentioned before, the calculating engine.

Lady Feidelm murmured, “Is this not the purpose for which it was built? To take certain values and bring them to bear upon one another, conducting the operations which will tell you the difference between them, or the average, or any such relationship?”

Multiple ideas of London, calculated into a whole. Eliza knew nothing of mathematics beyond bare addition and subtraction, and what the sidhe spoke of sounded only half like mathematics to begin with—but if they had some way to do it…

But Wrain sank with sudden exhaustion back onto his chair. “We can’t possibly calculate it all in time. Even rendering a single concept into symbolic notation would be a huge undertaking. A dozen or more? The Hall will be long gone before we can do it. If the Calendar Room had survived, then it would give us the time we need, but that last earthquake broke the chamber’s clock, and we cannot restore it.”

The only reason Eliza knew the French voice that answered was because she’d thanked him for returning Dead Rick’s memories. Yvoir said, “Then work from photographs, as Dead Rick said! As Nadrett did. But not souls, only thoughts, and a single lens only—we do not wish to remove the thoughts from anyone’s head, merely to copy them. Use the glass as a filter; what passes through, and what does not, can be translated for the calculating engine—”

“Which will carry out the necessary operations—”

“And print the result onto another photographic plate? Use that as the instruction, instead of the crystal cards, for the elemental threads—”

“Aetheric weft—”

“—the configuration Nadrett used—”

“There is one problem.”

The grim declaration came from Yvoir, as dead as his previous words had been animated. Eliza had been caught up in the excitement, herself; seeing the French faerie’s expression fall, she blurted out, “What?”

He directed his answer to Dead Rick instead of her, and shaped it as a question. “Did Nadrett send anyone far away, earlier this year? To Australia, perhaps, or the American frontier, or the far reaches of the Orient?”

The skriker stared at him. “’Ow’d you know that? Sent a fellow to Japan, ’e did. Rewdan, the same one as brought ’im those compounds.”

Yvoir nodded. “He must have done more than just acquire compounds. In studying the photographs from West Ham, I realized what Chrennois did to sensitize the plates. He exposed them during a lunar eclipse.”

An impressive curse from Irrith told Eliza what the problem was, before the sprite put it into words. “And we broke most of his unused plates when we stormed the factory.”

“When is the next eclipse?” Eliza asked.

In a place like this, no one had to reach for an almanac. Abd ar-Rashid said, “October fourth. And its totality will be over London.”

Nearly a month away. No one asked the final question. Will this place survive that long?

Eliza startled again, as Dead Rick spun to face her, hands gripping her shoulders. “Eliza. You can give the Queen more time. Maybe enough.”

“What? How?”

“Ghosts,” he said, holding her gaze steadily. “Lord Galen ain’t enough. But there’s others, other Princes I mean, that don’t ’aunt the palace, but they used to be bound to it. Call ’em back. As many as you can get. With their strength, Lune can ’old, I know she can. Long enough for the others to do their bit, to get the photos and set it all in motion. Then we can take what we’ve got and shape it into something new, something that don’t care if there’s iron in the ground, because it ain’t in the ground no more. A new reflection of London. But we need time, and the ghosts can give us that.”

Ghosts. Seven years ago, he’d discovered her untutored gift, and trained her to use it. Started to train her; Nadrett had put a stop to that before she mastered it, enough to make her living.

The changeling who had taken and then lost Louisa’s place had said she knew a medium, a real one. Surely it would be better to seek that woman out—

And how long would it take to find her? To explain what this place was, and persuade her to help?

Eliza remembered the voice whispering through her head, from the black walls around the London Stone, and the phantom Queen who sat beneath it. Pouring every last drop of her strength into holding the palace together. How much longer could she endure?

“I don’t know if I can do it,” she whispered, for Dead Rick’s ears only.

He gave her a fierce smile. “I know you can.”

She heard what he really meant. I know you have to.

Memory: May 29, 1870

While men in top hats applauded and congratulated one another on a job well done, Alexander Messina died.

Lune had known the shock would come, and she had known it would be bad. They’d discussed it, long before the navvies broke ground for the extension of the Metropolitan Railway to Blackfriars Station. Iron pipes were dangerous enough; iron rails carrying iron trains, stabbing in and out of the Onyx Court’s domain dozens of times a day would be a threat the likes of which they had not yet faced.

But they had survived the test train, run late at night to make certain the signals worked, and in the aftermath she allowed herself to believe they would have at least a brief period of grace. Time during which she and her Prince could find some way to adapt, as they had before.

When the inaugural train crossed the line of the wall, Alex’s heart stopped.

For a few horrifying moments, she thought her own would, too. The double shock of the train and the Prince’s death crushed her to the floor, driving all the breath from her; she could barely hear the frantic cries from Amadea and Nemette, begging their Queen to answer them. By the time her vision returned, she knew what she needed to say; the instant she regained her voice, she said it. “Get Hodge. Now.”

After centuries of joint rule, the death of Princes no longer caught her unprepared. She knew who would succeed each man when he passed on, and the men themselves knew it, too. Later they would mourn Alex as he deserved; later they would consider how long any mortal could survive the cataclysm that was the world’s first underground railway.

In this instant, all that mattered was replacing the Prince. She could not bear the weight of the palace alone. Not anymore.

He came at a run. Little more than a boy; she couldn’t remember how old he was, except to be shocked at the youth of his face. But Lune could not afford that reaction, and so she crushed it ruthlessly. Youth was necessary. Youth, and the strength it brought, and birth at the heart of London, which was why this cockney lad would be her next—perhaps final—Prince.

Benjamin Hodge knew perfectly well that the title carried a sentence of death. And still he came running, to lift her to her feet and help her stumble toward the London Stone, where she would bind him to what remained of the Onyx Hall, a marriage until death did them part. His death, or the Hall’s.

Not hers. She refused it. Lune would die when her realm did, but not before.

No ceremony, beyond the few steps that were absolutely necessary; the days of her court’s glory were gone. It was only the two of them: she with the London Sword, chiefest of her crown jewels, Hodge swearing the oaths and drinking the faerie wine and laying his hand upon the London Stone, the heart of her—their—realm. Lune wept when she kissed him, and she could not have said the cause. The pain still reverberating through her body, perhaps. Or grief for Alex. Or for Hodge, and what she was doing to him, in the name of preserving her people’s refuge for as long as she could.

He gripped her good hand hard enough to bruise, when they were done. “I’ll find a way,” he promised. He didn’t need to say more. I’ll find a way to save the Hall. They’d all promised it, and they’d all meant it.

“Go,” Lune whispered softly, knowing her smile of thanks looked more like a rictus. “I… need a moment alone.”

He did not question it. Later, he might—after he’d assimilated his new dignity as Prince—but for now, he obeyed her as any mortal in the Hall would. When he was gone, Lune drew in a long, shuddering breath, and looked at the London Stone.

It hung like a dagger from the ceiling of the chamber: the key to her entire realm. Though the Stone had moved from room to room, as the original was moved above, it remained at the center; wherever it lay was the center. Through the Stone, she had become Queen of the Onyx Court, and at times it felt like that block of battered limestone was her oldest and closest friend. It was eternal, after all, as her Princes were not.

She could not save Hodge—not without saving the Hall. If there was to be any chance of doing either, the Prince and those who supported him would need time.

Lune went into the outer room. After the Stone moved here, they had filled this chamber with rubbish, broken ends too useless for anyone to bother stealing. That, and the cathedral overhead, were the best defense they could muster for the Stone, short of a constant guard that would draw the very attention they sought to avoid. She rummaged through the debris, coating her cloth-of-silver skirts with dust, until she found a chair whose missing leg could be jammed back into place. This she carried into the inner room, and placed it beneath the Stone. When she settled herself carefully upon it, the chair held her weight.

With one swift move, she thrust the London Sword into the floor, to serve as her conduit and anchor point. Beneath her skirts, she kicked off her shoes, settling her bare feet against the black stone. Measuring out her breathing like the ticking of a slow clock, Lune closed her eyes, and sank her mind into the wounded body of the Hall.

Her realm. A part of her flesh, a part of her spirit, for nearly three hundred years. She had done all she could outside—in the chambers of the palace; in the world above—but there remained one final thing she could do for Hodge.

She could hold.

Soundlessly, the black stone of the wall grew shut, sealing the way to the outer room. Darkness closed in about the London Stone, and the Queen of the Onyx Court.

The London Stone, Onyx Hall: September 16, 1884

When Dead Rick took Eliza’s hands in his own, he found her fingers ice cold. The smile she attempted showed equal parts embarrassment and tension. Quietly enough that only he could hear, she whispered, “What if I can’t do it?”

An echo of her words in the Academy; she kept saying it, though fortunately never where anyone else could hear. Dead Rick squeezed her fingers. “You can. You ain’t one of them fake ones; you’ve got the knack for it. And you’re in the right place. They’ll come, never fear.”

If they could. Just because Galen St. Clair haunted the Hall after his death didn’t mean the ghosts of the other Princes could be drawn back. But Eliza needed confidence as much as anything else, so he gave it to her, and was repaid in the strength of her grip. “You ready?” he asked, and biting her lip, she nodded.

They’d set a chair facing Lune’s, a little distance from the London Stone. With the Queen insubstantial from the effort of holding her realm together, she had no hand for Eliza to take; Hodge had offered, but in the end the mortal woman had refused. “I’d feel a fraud,” she’d said, and Dead Rick understood why. His restored memories included a few recollections of spiritualist meetings; the theatrical ritual some mediums engaged in bordered on the ludicrous. Instead it was this: Lune in her trance, with Hodge at her left hand, and Eliza facing them in her chair.

She’d spent days preparing for this, listening to stories about the past Princes, those men who had ruled the Onyx Court alongside their immortal Queen. As many days as they dared: according to the railway newspapers, a test train would be traveling around the entirety of the Inner Circle tomorrow. The proper opening of the new stations was not planned until the beginning of October; Cyma was doing her best to persuade certain gentlemen the date should be after the eclipse. But if the Hall were to last until then, the Queen would need more strength.

The Irishwoman shifted on her seat, brushing sweat-lank strands of hair from her face. She took a breath, and then another, each one slower and deeper than the one before. Silence settled over the room like a blanket, her breathing the only sound.

Dead Rick clamped his arms across his ribs, and waited.

The moments passed, one by one. Hodge swayed, then steadied. We should ’ave given ’im a chair, whether ’e wanted it or not. Eliza’s breathing had gone all but inaudible, though the scent of her sweat grew. The woman held her breath—then let it out explosively. “I can’t do it.”

He crossed to her before anyone else could move, kneeling and gripping her cold, shaking hands. “Yes, you can.”

“I can’t—”

“I’ll ’elp you.” Dead Rick tightened his grip. “Skriker, ain’t I? I knows death. Look into my eyes, and I’ll show you.”

Just like they had done seven years before. They’d both traveled a long road to come back to where they started, and been changed by the journey. Not weakened—no, Dead Rick thought, she’s stronger than she ever was. The Eliza of seven years ago could not have done this. But the one in front of him, he believed, could.

She sniffed back the wetness of tears and clutched his fingers painfully tight. Dead Rick stared up at her, not moving, not blinking, casting his thoughts upon death. Age, the rot of the body, impending calamity that cut the thread of life short. The final breath, rattling free of the chest. Eyes clouding over. Blood growing cold. And the soul, slipping free… had this been All Hallows’ Eve, it would have been as easy as breathing, but they could not wait for that night to come. Instead he filled his mind with ages of such nights, reaching for the connection he felt then, the sense that one could pass across that boundary with only a blink.

Eliza’s hands grew colder and colder, and her breathing stilled almost to nothing.

Barely moving his lips, Dead Rick whispered, “Call ’em.”

In a voice so distant it might have arisen from some source less material than lungs and throat, Eliza began to recite the names of the Princes of the Stone.

“Michael Deven. Antony Ware. Jack Ellin. Joseph Winslow.”

Through the stone beneath his knees, Dead Rick felt Lune reach out, echoing Eliza’s call.

“Alan Fitzwarren. Hamilton Birch. Galen St. Clair. Matthew Abingdon.”

Behind Eliza’s left shoulder, a glimmer, taking familiar shape. Galen’s ghost was certainly here.

“Robert Shaw. Geoffrey Franklin. Henry Brandon. Alexander Messina.”

Names Dead Rick remembered. He’d been here almost since the beginning—not the earliest days of the Hall, but not long after Lune became Queen. Memories swirled through his head: faces, voices, the individual habits of each man who stood at Lune’s side, for thirty years or three.

“Benjamin Hodge,” Eliza whispered, and began the litany again.

A chill that had nothing to do with cold swept through the room. Dead Rick’s vision blackened at the edges, as if he were holding his breath—but this was different; the blackness closing in was not any kind of blindness. He could still see through it, could see more clearly, the ghostly figure of Galen St. Clair whispering along with Eliza and Lune.

Hodge joined them; so did Dead Rick. The names echoed off the stone, again and again, a mesmerizing litany. The room grew colder still, and then the air began to thicken into shapes.

Alexander Messina came first, the most recently dead: a dark man, showing his Italian ancestry, and dressed like a prosperous tradesman. Then the others, in irregular order: Colonel Robert Shaw, color bleeding slowly into his red-coated uniform. Dr. Jack Ellin, mouth ready for its usual wry smile. Dr. Hamilton Birch, a man in his middle years, showing no sign of the unnatural age that had killed him. Sir Antony Ware, a solid and dependable presence. Matthew Abingdon and Joseph Winslow; Alan Fitzwarren and Henry Brandon and Geoffrey Franklin, bearded and clean-shaven, dressed in all the styles of centuries past.

Michael Deven came last of all, into the gap at Lune’s right hand. A dark-haired Elizabethan gentleman, in doublet and hose, and Dead Rick felt the swell of unspeakable joy in Lune’s heart, as the man she had loved three hundred years ago returned at last to her side.

Joy, and also the lifting of his hackles. Not at the ghosts, but at the tension shivering through the air. It was as if cords stretched from each dead man and the single living one to the London Stone, and those cords were drawn to their tightest. At the same time, the stone beneath his feet suddenly felt more stonelike, in a way he had forgotten—not the photographic loss of his memories, but simply the forgetfulness brought on by more recent experience. Not until now, when the solidity returned, did he realize how insubstantial the Onyx Hall had grown over the last century and more of decay.

The Princes had come to serve their realm one final time. With this strength behind her, Lune—and the palace—would survive what was to come.

Dead Rick hoped.

“Eliza,” he whispered, rising to a crouch. “It’s done. Time to go.”

She did not respond.

Alarmed, he repeated her name, more loudly, then reached out for her shoulder. But he paused before he could shake it, because fear gripped his heart: What if disturbing her caused the ghosts to vanish?

She spoke without warning, in a flat, distant voice, like a badly recorded phonograph cylinder. “I am the channel through which they pass. While I remain, so do they.”

Meaning that if he woke her from this trance, they would vanish. Blood and Bone. He hadn’t thought of that.

September sixteenth. Eighteen days until the eclipse. Could they risk letting the ghosts go after the test train was done? Dead Rick knew without asking anyone what the answer would be. Even if they knew for certain there would be only one test, and no other trains until the formal opening, the risk of collapse was too great.

In the world outside, such a duration would kill her. But this was a faerie realm, where time and the body did not behave as they otherwise might. With care, she might survive.

Might. Or might not.

Guilty horror ate away at Dead Rick’s heart, like acid. I should’ve warned ’er. He should have guessed.

Then he wondered if Eliza had—and had chosen not to say anything.

She ought to bloody well hate us, he thought. She certainly had, when they came face-to-face in the library. She had hated him. But once she learned the truth—once she saw him restored—

Stupid whelp. You got what you wanted. Your friendship back, and now she might die ’elping you.

No. He wouldn’t let that happen.

Gently, so as not to disturb her, the skriker bent his head until his brow touched hers, his hand upon the back of her neck. “I’ll see you through this,” he whispered.

Releasing her was one of the hardest things he’d ever done, but one thought made it possible. If she were to survive until the eclipse—her and Hodge both—they would need the Goodemeades’ help.

The London Stone, Onyx Hall: October 4, 1884

By they time the engineers were done, machinery filled the outer chamber almost to the ceiling. If they could have fit it into the room with Lune and the ghosts, they would have done; Niklas said it should be as close to the center point as possible. But the sprawling mass was far too large, and there was a risk of disrupting the ghosts besides.

Instead it trailed through the available space: calculating engine and loom, elemental generators filled with raw material and aetheric filters to process it, photographic machinery and all the secondary pieces that joined the whole together. A portion even extended into the chamber of the Stone, to draw on the link between Lune, the Princes, and the realm, and to capture the ideas of London in their heads. “After all,” Lady Feidelm had said, “between themselves, they have three hundred years of the city’s past; and that, too, is worth including.”

It was the brainchild of Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace, Joseph Marie Jacquard and the Galenic Academy of Faerie Sciences: the Ephemeral Engine. Nobody seemed to know who had coined the name, but they were all using it.

The last pieces were coming in now: photographic plates sensitized outside, where the Earth had cast the moon into shadow. Yvoir had babbled something about a morphetic configuration of the vitreous humor and lunar caustic coating the plates, and what followed that had been even less comprehensible, but Dead Rick understood the effect: they would not have to bear the plates around the city, or shove cameras into anyone’s faces while asking them to reflect upon London. They had gathered tokens from select individuals, so that tonight the plates would receive impressions from their dreams, even at a distance; and once imprinted, would be added in to the calculations.

Wrain, standing by the calculating apparatus, said, “I am ready.”

“As am I,” said Ch’ien Mu, by the loom.

More confirmations, all around the chamber. Dead Rick took a deep breath, and went into the chamber of the Stone.

The ghosts still stood in a ring around the center chair, where Eliza sat unmoving. Despite being fed Rosamund and Gertrude’s best fortifying mead, she was nearly as pale as a ghost herself; Dead Rick half feared his hand would go through her arm, that she, like Lune, had gone insubstantial. But she was a human, composed of matter as well as spirit, and her arm was solid—if ice cold.

Leaning to whisper in her ear, he said, “It’s time.”

There were mirrors around the room, to assist the Princes in focusing what they held upon Lune; from her it would transfer to the machinery, and so the process would begin. Wilhas von das Ticken waited by the first lever, ready to set everything in motion as soon as Dead Rick gave the signal.

He felt the pressure of it, the strain: twelve ghosts, one living man, and a faerie Queen struggling to shift the weight of the entire Onyx Hall. It wasn’t a matter of the few chambers that remained; there was more to it than that, he sensed, though he did not understand how. Perhaps this was what the others meant, when they said it was impossible to make a new palace as the first one had been made; the burden was too great for ordinary souls to bear, be they mortal or fae, and the greater powers that had once helped were now gone.

What would they do, if the Queen and her Princes could not complete their task?

Dead Rick looked up to ask Wilhas that very question, and choked on it as he saw movement in the outer room. With a few swift strides, he moved to block the hole broken in the wall, so that no one could pass.

Only those needed to operate the machine were supposed to be present: Wrain, Ch’ien Mu, and the von das Tickens, and Dead Rick for Eliza’s sake. But in came the Goodemeades—somewhat battered by their passage through the only remaining entrance—and between them, looking faintly ridiculous leaning on the two tiny brownies, Valentin Aspell.

With Irrith behind him, gun in hand as if she planned to shoot him should he so much as breathe wrong. “He insisted,” the sprite said, in response to the stares.

Aspell’s smile was twisted. He looked like death: gaunt and weak, and lucky to be alive. But alert enough to answer Dead Rick’s question before the skriker could ask it. “After a hundred years of dreams in this place, I cannot let go of it easily. And when the Goodemeades told me what you intended, I knew you had overlooked something. I forgive the sisters forgetting, as they scarcely understand this contraption you have built; and Hodge, of course, has been dying for years. It does much to explain his intellectual deficiency. But tell your medium, she must call two more ghosts.”

Dead Rick managed to tear his gaze away from Aspell long enough to glance at Hodge. The Prince showed no sign of hearing; the trance into which this communion had put him was too deep to be disturbed. The man who had barely risen from his bed to come here stood as steady as a rock—had stood thus for days. He might as well not have been flesh anymore. So it was the Goodemeades Dead Rick addressed when he asked, “What does ’e mean?”

“Suspiria and Francis Merriman,” Rosamund said.

The names meant nothing to Dead Rick. Gertrude said, “They’re the ones who made the palace. They had help, but they were the heart of it—Suspiria was the Hall’s first Queen. Aspell said, and Hodge agreed, that they’re still here. In the London Stone. Now Aspell insists you need them.”

By the way she said it, she agreed with him, however reluctantly. But Eliza had already maintained the connection for days, holding twelve ghosts at once; it was a feat of endurance that made Dead Rick shudder to think of it, and now Aspell wanted her to call two more. If she tried, she might lose the lot.

If she didn’t try, then the Ephemeral Engine was useless.

But at least that wouldn’t put ’er in danger.

He wished now they had brought in the medium Cyma spoke of, or one of the ones Mr. Myers suggested. It might have been possible for them to share the burden, though he’d never seen it tried. But all they had was Eliza, and no second chance: if this failed, he doubted they would be able to try again.

“Iron burn your soul, Aspell,” Dead Rick growled, and went to kneel once more in front of his friend.

In a voice meant only for her ears, he said, “Eliza. I’ve got one more thing to ask of you—but it’s your choice, you ’ear me? If you don’t think you can do it—if you think it’s too dangerous—then don’t try. We’ll find another way. I don’t want you getting killed for this.”

No answer. Of course not; he hadn’t yet told her what they needed. He just hoped that was it, and not Eliza being unable to answer.

The words dragged out of him. “We needs two more spirits. They ain’t far; they’re in the Stone. Can—can you sense ’em? Do you think you could call ’em? Would that be something you could do?”

He waited, not breathing, for Eliza’s response. Some kind of nod or shudder; something to say yes or no, that she could try it or could not. He couldn’t bring himself to look, to see if her death hovered near. If it did… he could not guess what he would do.

Then Eliza spoke. Two names she could not have overheard, two names she could only have gotten through her gift: either from the ghosts around her, or from those she now called. “Suspiria. Francis Merriman.”

The London Stone rang like a bell.

Two last figures flared into view, behind Eliza’s chair. A slender man, black hair falling loose around his sapphire-blue eyes, and a faerie woman, tall and regal, Lune’s dark shadow.

Two spirits, bound within the Stone for more than three hundred years.

A perfect ring, surrounding Dead Rick and Eliza. Fourteen men, and the two Queens they’d served. Among them, they held everything the Onyx Hall had ever been, from the moment when Suspiria and Francis Merriman called London’s shadow forth from the sun’s eclipse until these final, fragmented days.

Held it ready for the machine.

Dead Rick could scarcely breathe for the power choking the air. It poured out of them all: the ghosts, and the fae, and himself; and Eliza most of all, holding them by force of will, here in the living world where they did not belong, and Blood and Bone she’s going to fucking kill ’erself—

He couldn’t draw enough air to shout the cue. But through the pulse thundering in his ears, Dead Rick heard someone say, “Do it.”

A flash of light, a rattle and a metallic clank—and the Ephemeral Engine shuddered into motion.

The world blinked. Not darkness, but a fleeting eclipse of reality: a shutter snapping open and closed. The first stage of the machine captured the Onyx Hall itself, held in the Princes’ heads, in the memories of its Queens, and translated it into the language necessary for the calculating apparatus.

In another part of the Engine, other images of London took shape. Photographic plates, sensitive to the evanescent touch of dreams, caught images out of the minds of Londoners: high and low, young and old, English and immigrant alike. Light streamed through, here stopped by the shape of the image within, there permitted through, rendered from one kind of abstraction to another.

Then the calculation began, metal wheels and crystal gears and rods and levers clicking smoothly into action. Poor subtracted from rich, East End multiplied against West, all the interactions and operations that made up the intricate and ever-changing reality of London. New plates slotted into position, received the imprint of intermediate concepts, slid aside until they were needed once more. Again and again the machine elaborated upon its calculations, first-order answers becoming variables for the second round, second for the third, third for the fourth, until it seemed there would never be an end—

But in time the machine ground out a plate, larger than those used within its confines, and this slid along a chain until it clanked into place alongside the elemental generators.

There was not enough material within them to create an entire palace large enough to shelter the fae who called London home. But if the Engine worked—if it created a structure that could withstand the strains of the world in which it stood—in time, that could be the starting point for more.

Earth and air, fire and water. The arms of the loom began to move, first a rattle, then a thunder, heddles rising and falling to change the warp, a shuttle of ectoplasmic aether flying back and forth, and on the far side of the mechanism, an image began to grow.

Dead Rick felt it, like the touch of Faerie itself. A power beyond any he’d known in this world—but no, it wasn’t that distant realm; it was something else, born of the union between mortal ingenuity and faerie enchantment. What they sent through the Engine was not a series of cold numbers, abstracted from their meaning, but rather thoughts, dreams, beliefs, everything that London meant to those who dwelt within its reach. And the Engine, animated by such power, became more than mere metal and glass.

Dreams flooded in, faster and faster. Like wildfire, the thought of London spread from those early dreamers to inflame the minds around them. First the sleepers where they lay in their beds; then those who kept wakeful watch in these late hours of the night. A maid in Camden Town, sitting red-eyed over her mistress’s pelisse, mending it for the morrow. A Lambeth solicitor, reading through the documents of a case, in search of anything that might spare his client from prison. An omnibus conductor, trudging on aching feet home to his flat in Battersea, beneath the light of the eclipsed moon. One by one, then by the hundreds, they found their thoughts turning to the city in which they dwelt, and those thoughts, high and low alike, took shape on glass in what remained of the Onyx Hall.

Which began to unravel.

The generators had run dry, but the Engine did not stop; it drew in the substance of the palace around it. Rumbling filled the air, ominous and low beneath the noise of the machine. Dead Rick clutched at Eliza’s chair, terrified of disturbing her—but all at once fear overwhelmed that consideration and he seized her hands. His vision blurred, swam, reality falling apart around him. The palace was going; they had to get out!

But there was no escaping this final collapse. What door would they pass through, what floor would they walk upon? They hung in a shuddering maelstrom, everything breaking apart, the only solid thing their hands joined together in a desperate clasp. Something was growing, in the distance, right next to them, a radiant weave too bright to look upon, and they teetered upon its brink, an instant from falling.

The weave exploded.

Images, sounds, scents, textures; all burst outward in an unstoppable flood as time opened up. Five different cathedrals to St. Paul, spired and domed, in wood and in stone. Three Royal Exchanges. Whitehall Palace, vanishing in fire; docks growing like man-made lakes in the Isle of Dogs. A wall along the river’s north bank, open wharves, a walkway of stone. Buildings rose and fell and rose again, some too tall to believe, while sewers threaded through the ground below. The clop of horses’ hooves, the rattle of carriage wheels, the thunder of trains—and even stranger sounds, that had not been heard in London yet: music from no visible source, and a low growling in the air, as shapes like coaches without horses flooded the streets.

Men in doublets, top hats, Roman armor; women in crinolines and farthingales and glittering dresses that scarcely covered anything at all. Indians. Germans. Chinese. Iceni. People who dwelt there thousands of years before the Onyx Hall ever was; people who would dwell there in centuries to come. The flood kept going, into the past, into the future, everything the city had been, everything it could be—for Francis Merriman had been a seer, and through him, they saw it all.

London.

The weave flung itself outward, sweeping through the City of London, Westminster, Southwark, Whitechapel, and beyond. Every hair on Dead Rick’s body stood on end. He had a body; gravity had returned, and so had air, and the proper spaces between things. He wasn’t in every London at once, all the centuries interlaced; he was in a room, clutching Eliza, and the simultaneous pressure and tension that had threatened to destroy him were gone.

Nearby, the Ephemeral Engine clattered away, tireless and steady.

Movement in his arms. Warmth, too, and when he drew back enough to see, Eliza’s eyes were open and alert. She had survived.

And so, he realized, had he.

Dead Rick sagged to the floor, exhausted beyond the telling of it. The tiles were cool against his cheek, and he might have stayed there forever; but Eliza, damn her, had actual energy, though Mab knew where she’d gotten it. She tugged at his arm. “Dead Rick—come and see.”

With great effort, he braced his other hand against the stone—Stone? Weren’t it tiles, a moment ago?—and pushed himself to his feet.

The room kept shifting. It wasn’t just his imagination; every time his attention drifted, something changed, and if he tried to follow it his brain might melt. Dead Rick kept his eyes on Eliza, on her hand in his, and followed her through the gap in the wall to where the bulk of the Ephemeral Engine stood.

The gears still turned, the rods still rose and fell; on the far side of the weaving apparatus, something still shimmered. People circled the Engine, whispering quietly; the Goodemeades were hugging one another and sniffling. Irrith stood a few steps away, staring unblinking at the machine. “Shouldn’t—shouldn’t it be stopping now?”

Wilhas laughed, a sound of mixed astonishment and glee. Wrain licked his lips and said, “It—may never stop.”

“But if it keeps weaving—” Eliza said.

The palace was growing still. Dead Rick could feel it, if he concentrated. He imagined it expanding, farther and farther, until it covered not only London but England, Europe, the world…

Wrain said, “It has to keep going. I think. This place… doesn’t resist the world outside. Not like the old one did. It will break down; rooms will fade and go away. But the Engine will gather their substance back in and weave them anew. It hasn’t made a palace—well, it has—what I mean is, it is making a palace, and will go on doing so. For as long as it needs to. That’s how it will last.”

So it wouldn’t cover the world. Dead Rick suspected its boundaries would be those of London: the farther one got from areas that could truly be considered part of the city, the weaker the Engine’s power would be, and the faster it would fray. If the city grew more, though—

It would grow more. He’d seen it, through Francis Merriman’s eyes.

The thought brought Dead Rick around in a sudden whirl, to stare into the room he and Eliza had left behind.

Benjamin Hodge lay on the floor, curled fetal on his side. Eliza cried out and ran toward him; Dead Rick opened his mouth, but she saw the truth for herself soon enough. Hodge stirred as she touched his shoulder, and opened weary eyes.

“She’s gone,” Hodge said.

The room around him was empty. The ghosts had dissipated, Galen St. Clair and all the rest, Francis, Suspiria.

Lune.

Her chair remained, a battered thing beneath the London Stone, and a crack piercing the floor where Sword had been, with a pair of embroidered silver shoes between. These alone marked the Queen’s fourteen-year battle to preserve her realm, and the three hundred years of her reign.

Dead Rick knew a few things about death. The scholars of the Academy said faerie souls and faerie bodies were not separate things, that the latter was the former made solid. When most fae died, their souls were destroyed; there was no afterlife for them, whether Heaven or Hell, and their bodies soon crumbled to nothing.

Soon, but not immediately. Sometimes, though, when a faerie died, she vanished on the spot. And then, they said, it meant her spirit had moved on, going to somewhere beyond anyone’s ken.

Suspiria had gone into the London Stone, following the bond placed there when the Onyx Hall was created. Where Lune had gone, now that she was free of both body and Hall, Dead Rick could only guess—Faerie, perhaps—but wherever it was, he suspected Michael Deven was there with her. Lune’s love, and the first Prince of the Stone. They, and their predecessors, had moved on at last.

Dead Rick joined Eliza, and between them they got Hodge on his feet. The man was still old before his time, still exhausted; his years holding the palace together had taken things from him that could never be restored. But he was alive, and while the Onyx Hall was gone, something new had taken its place. Lune’s last Prince had served her, and her realm, very well.

The von das Tickens stayed to watch over the Engine, already conducting an argument in German that sounded more excited than angry. The rest of them, those dedicated few who had witnessed the rebirth, went out through a portal that shifted from wooden beams to brass arch to cleanly carved stone, to explore the new faerie realm of London.

The Angel, Islington: October 6, 1884

Benjamin Hodge did not look like a man who should be out of his sickbed. “I would have been happy to come to you below,” Frederic Myers said, as one of the coaching inn’s young maidservants set hot meat pies on the table before them.

Hodge waited until she was gone, then shook his head with a weary grin. “I spent fourteen years ’ardly daring to come up ’ere, for fear the place would fall apart as soon as I turned my back. And believe me, it ain’t good for one of us to stay down there so long. It’s a breath of fresh air, being outside.”

The way he attacked the meat pie said the journey had taken a good deal out of him, whatever he claimed. Myers said, “I will endeavor not to tax you too much. Indeed, I would not have written to you at all, except that I have a rather pressing matter which I believe must be laid before you, as Prince of the Stone.”

“’Old on,” Hodge said through a mouthful of crust and gravy. Myers paused while he washed it down with a swallow of stout. “I ain’t Prince no more.”

Given the man’s exhaustion and ill health, it wasn’t surprising. “Who is?”

Hodge sucked a bit of meat out of his teeth and said, “There ain’t one.” Another swig of beer, and a rueful smile. “What we did with the palace… I don’t know if it’s the machine, or all the people’s ideas we poured into that thing, but it don’t ’ave a Prince no more, nor a Queen neither. So ask what you want, and I’ll tell you what I think—but it’ll be just one man’s notion.”

The revelation unsettled Myers, less for the change in faerie society than for the loss of an authoritative voice to tell him yea or nay. This was the sort of question that ought to be answered by someone official—but it was also a question that could not be left until later, after the fae had decided how they would proceed.

He might as well ask Hodge. “Very well. I believe you are aware of the London Fairy Society, and the Goodemeades’ plan for it?” Hodge nodded. “They had, of course, assumed the city would be mostly deserted of fae, with the remaining few largely scattered, and that announcing their presence to the general populace would therefore create trouble only for themselves and their associates. Given your recent miracle, however…”

“It ain’t so simple,” Hodge finished. “More than you know, guv. You got any notion what’s ’appened, with the new palace?” Myers shook his head. Apprehension meant he was making but slow progress on his own pie, though Hodge managed to gulp down healthy bites during pauses. “Anchored it to the idea of London, didn’t they? Now it’s everywhere. Next to London. All around it. Inside it. Step to the left, and you’re there. So says Abd ar-Rashid, anyway, and ’e’s the sort of cove to trust on this.”

Myers’s appetite vanished entirely, though whether it was from fear or excitement, he couldn’t have said. “And with the dreams so many had that night…”

“Won’t be long before they starts puzzling it out,” Hodge said. “Ain’t ’ad nobody wander in yet, but it’s only a matter of time. Not to mention there’s ’alf a dozen constables as saw some bloody peculiar things in West Ham not long ago, and no telling ’ow long they’ll stay quiet.”

“In that case,” Myers said, “I hope it is not too presumptuous of me to suggest that the Goodemeades and the London Fairy Society should proceed with their plan? Suitably modified, of course, for the circumstances—but I had thought to present some introductory information to the Society for Psychical Research, who would take a very great interest in this matter. I—I cannot promise the results will be entirely positive—”

Hodge waved it away with gravy-stained fingers. “Ain’t going to be, and we knows it. More like bleeding chaos. But it was that or leave, so…” He shrugged. “Them as doesn’t like it can live quiet somewhere else, or push off to Faerie. Same as they would ’ave done anyway.”

It wasn’t quite that simple, of course; as soon as it became public knowledge there were faeries in London, curiosity seekers would be poking under every hedgerow and hill in England. Likely elsewhere, too. Myers imagined there would be no little resentment of London’s fae for that. But for better or for worse, that was the consequence of their decision, and refusing to face it would not improve anything.

“I will consult with the rest of the Society, then—the London Fairy Society,” he clarified. “And, of course, take suggestions as to how you, or rather they, wish to make their debut. But it should be done swiftly.”

Hodge nodded and drank down the last of his beer. “I’ll ’elp as much as I can.”

Myers dropped a shilling onto the table and rose, intending to begin work immediately—he had taken a room in a hotel nearby—but hesitated. “If I may ask one other question?”

The former Prince gestured for him to go on.

“During the meeting where the notion for the Ephemeral Engine was drafted, I believe I saw a young lady of my… acquaintance.” The word stuck in his throat. Myers had not gone home to Cambridge since that inexplicable day in Paddington Station, when Louisa Kittering vanished from not two feet away. Confused and shattered, he had clung to what sent him on that disastrous journey to London in the first place: the notebook, with its record of ideas he did not remember. That led him back to the Goodemeades, and to the meeting down below, and somewhere in between the two, his feelings for the young woman had vanished as completely as the young woman herself. And with as little explanation.

Into the pause, Hodge suggested, “Eliza O’Malley?”

“What?” Myers said, startled. Ah, yes—the Irishwoman. Though I thought her English, when I saw her in Mrs. Chase’s house. “No, Miss Louisa Kittering. She was sitting with a faerie woman—”

“I know the one you mean. And I’d wager it’s the faerie woman you actually need. I’m done ’ere,” Hodge said, rising from his seat like a old gaffer with aching joints. “I’ll show you where she is.”

Oakley Street, Chelsea: October 6, 1884

Had Cyma felt a whit less pity for Hodge, broken and scarred as he was by his long ordeal as Prince, she would have thrown her shoe at him for bringing Frederic Myers to see her.

She had successfully avoided him in the Academy, hurrying Louisa Kittering away before the man could escape his fellow scholars and come after the girl. But while Hodge had lost his authority, he hadn’t lost the habit of paying attention to what went on around him; he knew about her brief tenure as a changeling, and would not let her escape its consequences so easily. He ran her to ground in Chelsea, where she and Louisa had taken refuge with Lady Wilde, and then he left her and Myers alone.

She felt awkward in ways she never would have believed possible. Though her changeling face had gone, the memories stayed, of caring so intensely what he thought of her. Of loving him.

Only the memory of that love, though. Not the passion itself. Cyma’s heart was her own—and so was the choice to withhold it.

“I don’t understand,” Frederic Myers said, his sad eyes clouded with pain and confusion; and because she remembered caring for him, but did not crave his love anymore, Cyma told him the truth.

All of it, from Nadrett onward. Haunting him as Annie Marshall, keeping his grief alive. Surrendering him to the Goblin Market master, to be used, broken, and discarded. Encountering him once more at the London Fairy Society, where she had gone to seek out someone who might be persuadable to a changeling trade; taking the place of Louisa Kittering, and only then finding that what had been mere faerie infatuation, a fascination with his imagination and his grief, bloomed without warning into an obsession.

Through it all, she could not help but absorb every detail of his reactions: the incredulity, surprise, anger, and hurt. It was a relief, to be able to enjoy that rise and fall, without having her own emotions shackled to his.

“You are a monster,” Frederic Myers whispered, when she brought the story to its close.

Cyma shrugged gracefully. “Undoubtedly I seem so to you. I am a faerie, sir; I am not human.” For all the sympathy she once thought she had for them—perhaps it would be better to say interest in them—in the wake of her changeling experiences, she was glad to be herself again.

“To the best of my knowledge,” he said with biting precision, “a faerie nature does not require one to be heartless. You have my forgiveness for those actions you took while under the fist of your former master—but what, pray tell, justifies your deeds since then? Charming me into an affection I did not naturally feel, and estranging me from my wife? The most infamous trull, ma’am, would shame to use your methods.”

She would not have them to use. But Cyma did not want to deal with the fury that might result if she said it, so instead she told him, “I did not know how else to respond. The panic I felt at the thought of not having you made any method seem reasonable, so long as it produced results.”

Myers stared at her, then released his held breath in a sound that was half sob, half laugh. “You are not a monster. You are a child, stubbing her toe for the first time, and weeping that she cannot walk for the pain. Heaven preserve us against your innocence; it runs a bare second to your malice for cruelty.”

Something in his tone made uneasiness stir in the depths of Cyma’s mind. Myers turned to go, and she would have been happy to let him; but concern made her say, “One moment. My understanding is that you were to help the Goodemeades with their plans. Will you now refuse? Because of what I did to you?”

He halted, and his stooped shoulders had a beaten angle to them she remembered from their earliest encounters, when the grief over Annie Marshall was fresh upon him. But then Frederic Myers straightened. Without turning to face her, he said, “No. Though your people are fortunate indeed that I made the acquaintance of those sisters, before I learned of your perfidy. They alone persuade me that it is possible for faeries to be kind.”

Satisfied with that answer, Cyma let him go, and went back to the task of reestablishing her life.

The Underground, City of London: October 6, 1884

Eliza insisted on riding the train. Never mind that the new stretch of track opened with hardly any fanfare, compared to years past; it was commonplace now, the extension of the Underground, though most of its growth was to the west. To most Londoners, this addition meant little, except that gentlemen in their top hats were saved a minute’s walk from the slightly more distant Mansion House Station. Now they could alight at Cannon Street, or Eastcheap, or Mark Lane.

Dead Rick resisted coming with her—more, Eliza thought, out of superstitious dread than any real danger. Iron still had power to harm him, though the bread she tithed kept it at bay; he would never be happy in the cold body of a train carriage. In some ways, she couldn’t blame him: the noise and clammy foulness of the air meant the journey would never be pleasant, not until the railway companies made good on their promises of smokeless, steam-free engines.

They would, someday. She had seen glimpses of it, in that moment when the enchantment burst outward. Gleaming trains capable of terrifying speed, clean as the promises made twenty years ago, when the Underground first opened.

Faerie gold bought them a place in a first-class compartment at Blackfriars, and Dead Rick glared away anyone who tried to join them. Alone on the padded seats, with the gaslight flickering overhead, they passed from Blackfriars through the underbelly of London.

Hands cupped against the window, Eliza peered into the darkness. “So we aren’t going through the palace anymore?”

“You never was,” Dead Rick said. He didn’t look out, but closed his eyes and drew in a slow breath, as if tasting the air for something. “I mean, you sort of was. Two things in the same space, mostly not touching.”

“And now?”

He grimaced in a way she recognized; his mouth took on that twist every time he had to deal with the scholars’ theories. His thin lips had softened, though, from their hard set of before. “Sort of yes, sort of no, but in a different way. The palace is all over London now, not just in the ground. But ’ere, too. Blood and Bone, don’t ask me to explain it. You just ‘step sideways,’ is all.”

It was as good a phrase as any for what had proved to be their first challenge: getting out of the palace. The old entrances were gone, lost alongside every other physical landmark except the London Stone, and after some amount of fruitless effort Dead Rick had finally turned to her and said, “You’re the mortal; you puzzle it out.” She’d almost called on God, just to see what would happen. But she was nervous of disrupting the Ephemeral Engine’s work, and so in the end she took his hand and concentrated, thinking about the world she knew. They walked forward—but yes, sort of sideways, too—and then they were on Whitechapel Road, a stone’s throw from where the Darraghs lived. There was a possibility that going from faerie to mortal London would always require the assistance of a mortal, and a faerie for the reverse, but no one yet knew for sure.

Mansion House rattled off behind them; soon they were slowing into Cannon Street. Somewhere just above their heads, the London Stone sat in the wall of St. Swithin’s. Its reflection was the one thing that persisted below—that, and the Engine itself—but it wasn’t the heart of the palace anymore, not like it had been before. Dead Rick glared away another gentleman who otherwise could have joined them, and when he was gone, Eliza asked, “Who is staying?”

The skriker shrugged, putting his bare feet up on one of the leather-padded seats. “Not sure. A lot of them foreigners is still around, from the Academy and the Market; they ain’t bothered by the same things as us, iron and such, so they just cleared out while everything was crashing around our ears, and will come back now it’s safe.” He snorted. “It’ll be a cross between the East End and the Royal Society down there.”

Eliza pressed her lips together. “Just so long there’s order. Ye may not have a Queen anymore, but somebody needs to make sure ye don’t get another like Nadrett.” She gave Dead Rick a sidelong grin. “Or I’ll sick the constables on ye again.”

Eastcheap Station, close by the Monument to the Great Fire of London; once the fae had captured lost time and placed it in a room beneath that column, to help them combat the threats against their home. Such grand deeds they had done, and so few of them known to the people above. She still marveled at it.

“Want to ’ear something mad?” Dead Rick asked.

Eliza laughed. “Always.”

“Niklas thinks ’e can figure out a way to make this”—the skriker rapped the side of the carriage with his knuckles—“drive the Engine.”

She stared at him, thinking she must have heard wrong. “The train? But—what about the iron?”

“You asking me to explain it? ’E said it ’ad something to do with magnets. All this iron circling around generates power, or some such. Damned if I understand it. But then we wouldn’t ’ave to worry about keeping the thing going.”

They certainly needed some source of power. As Wrain had predicted, the Engine was still clanking away, weaving more and more of the faerie palace. The growth had slowed, and aside from the immediate vicinity of the Engine—where things still changed every time one blinked—the result appeared stable, but if it was to go on functioning, it would need fuel. And no one had any intention of letting it stop.

The train drew into Mark Lane. Eliza and Dead Rick alighted there, for the nearby Tower of London Station had been closed when the new track opened. “You going back to Whitechapel?” Dead Rick asked.

Habit made Eliza draw her shawl around herself, as if to hide again. “I… don’t know.” She hadn’t yet. Whitechapel was complicated; Quinn might not be hunting her anymore, but there was still Maggie Darragh to consider, and Fergus Boyle, and Owen. None of those were matters that could be dealt with in the space of a few days.

Including her own self. The work of seven years had ended; now what would she do? Find factory work, as Tom Granger had suggested all those months ago? Go into service with some other rich family, and hope they were better than the Kitterings? Perhaps Mrs. Chase needed another maid. The expansion of the palace had swept the Goodemeades’ home into itself without faltering, so Eliza would be able to step through into Rose House any time she liked.

A gust of wind gave her a better reason to wrap her shawl close. The day was a chill one, and gloomy enough that gaslights still burned in many places, although it was early afternoon. A reminder that, whatever she did, it had better pay well enough to buy a warmer shawl. Winter was coming on.

Dead Rick, bare-armed in the cold air, noticed her discomfort. “If you’d like—” he said, then stopped.

They’d never truly had the conversation, the one where they settled all the pain and questions between them. Looking at him, Eliza realized she no longer needed it. Somehow, in the course of healing Owen and hunting Nadrett, calling ghosts and creating the new palace, they’d found a new balance of friendship. And she was comfortable with that.

He caught her smile, grinned, and kicked a broken cobblestone with one dirty foot. “You is a real medium, after all. And there’s that Myers fellow, as studies ghosts. You probably don’t need my ’elp no more, but…”

“I’d be glad to have it, I would,” Eliza said quietly. As they had planned, seven years ago. She might not make a fortune, might never tour Scotland and France and the United States—but she could make enough to live on, and even to help the Darraghs. For now, that would more than do.

“Right then,” Dead Rick said, a bit too loudly; that last crossing of the breach had made him awkward. “And any time you want to come on below—inside, I mean—Ash and Thorn, ’owever I’m supposed to say it—you just let me know. We’ll always ’ave a place for you.”

The New Palace, London: October 31, 1884

They could not call it the Onyx Hall anymore. The name had suited the old palace, with its halls and chambers of gleaming black stone, but the new one showed too much variety to be captured with so simple a description. Some rooms were like rustic cottages, black-tarred timbers between whitewashed walls; others were bare stone, or papered with William Morris designs. As before, some of it echoed what lay above—or outside, or whatever the term should be—while some was pure faerie invention.

They gathered in a place clearly born from the memory of the Great Exhibition, thirty years before: a green, tree-studded space not unlike Hyde Park, dominated by an edifice of silver and glass, a recollection of the Crystal Palace even more wondrous than the original. Sunlight shone down through the panes, warming and brightening the grass-carpeted area inside. The Galenic Academy was already making noises about claiming the place as their own, a Presentation Hall grander than the one they had lost.

Outside, it was nearly night. In a few hours London’s remaining goblins would go outside, to see what ghosts needed sweeping away this All Hallows’ Eve. Ch’ien Mu, after examining the Ephemeral Engine, had concluded that it was gathering stray wisps of aether from the mortals of London, probably through their dreams; what effect that would have on the population of ghosts, no one knew. It didn’t really matter. Right now, all Dead Rick wanted was the tradition, the sense that he was upholding his duties as a skriker, after being misused by Nadrett for so long.

Before then, a gathering of faerie London. The Goodemeades had been emphatic that it wasn’t a formal, organized event; there had been talk of organizing some sort of Parliament, or at least a council, to govern the fae now that no royal authority held sway, but no decision had been reached as yet. This was simply a gathering, and a chance for everyone to hear of the changes taking place outside.

As Dead Rick had predicted, many foreigners were there: Abd ar-Rashid, and Ch’ien Mu, and that monkey fellow Kutuhal; Feidelm and Yvoir and the von das Tickens; Po from the Goblin Market, with Lacca at his side, and a faun Dead Rick now remembered as Il Veloce. Others from his memories, and strangers he did not know. Mortals, too; not just Eliza and Hodge and various Academy fellows, but that girl Louisa Kittering, dressed in a japonnais gown that suggested she had used her faerie-granted freedom to run off and join the aesthetic set. She had come in with Cyma and an elderly woman Mrs. Chase had introduced as Lady Jane Wilde, but now was deep in conversation with a fellow who looked like the lady’s son.

Irrith appeared at his elbow. As Dead Rick lagged a sleeve for her to tug on, she pinched a bit of the hair on his forearm instead. “Ow!” he said, and glared at her. “I’m right ’ere, you know. You could just say ’ello.”

“Actually, what I came to say is, Gertrude’s gone mad.”

He looked across the gleaming expanse of the room to where Gertrude stood, in animated argument with her own sister. “I think they was always a bit cracked.”

“Extra mad, then,” Irrith said. “Come on; you have to help me convince her—”

What precisely he was supposed to convince Gertrude of, Dead Rick didn’t know, but he followed before Irrith could decide to drag him by some sensitive bit of anatomy. As he drew near, Gertrude caught sight of him and brightened. “You can tell her! Didn’t you take Miss Eliza to a meeting of the Society for Psychical Research? And wasn’t it perfectly unobjectionable?”

“He didn’t ‘take’ me, and it wasn’t a meeting.” Eliza rejoined him, having freed herself from a pair of revolutionary-minded fae, Eidhnin and Scéinach, who wanted only to talk of Irish nationalism. “I sat down with Mr. Myers and the Sidgwicks and a few others, with Dead Rick there, and we talked about ghosts. It went well enough, I suppose.”

“And did they know you were a faerie?” Rosamund asked Dead Rick, hands braced on her hips.

Suspecting where this was going, he said, “They did, but—”

“You see?” Gertrude demanded, before he could say anything more. “So it’s perfectly safe for us to attend a meeting.”

She was a damned sight braver than Dead Rick, if she was willing to stake herself—and apparently her sister—out as targets for those insatiably curious bastards. If anyone could talk the Goodemeades to death, it would be the Society for Psychical Research. Myers’s presentation to them had ignited even more curiosity than the man predicted; their reports and editorials in various newspapers were currently doing battle with sensational stories from a few constables and a pub keeper in Billingsgate who swore his cellar had once been invaded by faeries. Before Dead Rick could think of what to tell Gertrude, though, his nose caught a new scent on the air.

A little girl, no more than ten years of age, with the lollipop in her hand hovering forgotten, tangled in the ribbons of her bonnet. A pretty little thing, her hair in careful ringlets; she was obviously born to a pampered life, and wandered the grass with her eyes so wide, it seemed only the upward tilt of her head kept them from falling out.

The reactions were comical. Everywhere people fell silent, fae and mortal alike, drawing back warily if the girl wandered so much as a single step in their direction.

Irrith whispered, “Ash and Thorn. Where did she come from?”

It was clear that nobody there knew her. Which meant nobody there had brought her in. Dead Rick licked his lips and said in a whisper, “My guess would be Hyde Park, or else Sydenham.” Where they’d moved the original Crystal Palace, after the Great Exhibition ended. Or it could be somewhere else entirely; they were still sorting out what rules governed entry into this place.

But now they had evidence that people—at least one small, beribboned, female person—could enter unannounced.

The girl’s gaze swung toward where Dead Rick stood, with Irrith and Eliza and the Goodemeades. Before it reached them, instinct made him shift shape; however disreputable a dog he might make, it was better than his appearance as a man. Unfortunately, this proved to be a miscalculation.

“Doggie!”

He rolled his eyes upward, hoping for rescue, but found the Goodemeades urging him toward the girl, Eliza failing to smother a smile, and Irrith grinning ear to ear. Then the girl was upon him. Dead Rick bolted, for all the good it did him; that, of course, made this a chase, and chasing was even more exciting.

It was ridiculous, undignified… and fun. He could have escaped by fleeing into the rest of the palace—leaving behind the unrepentant laughter of his so-called friends—but Dead Rick found he did not want to. So long as he stayed clear of sticky hands that would undoubtedly try to pull his tail, it was pleasant to run across the soft grass. Not to hunt—not out of fear—just to run, and to trip up his friends, Eliza cursing him cheerfully in Irish, and Dead Rick grinning a canine grin, his tongue lolling out as he went.

Let others plan for the future. At this moment, beneath the bright, glittering expanse of enchantment and glass, Dead Rick was content.