MUNA REMEMBERED THIS. It had happened just this way, once before. She had been caught like a fish in the net, while her sister looked on, unmoved . . .
She could not scream, for she could not breathe, but whether it was terror or magic that had taken her breath, she could not tell. Perhaps she was dying. But the thought did not bring relief, for if that was so, she had died before, and that meant one could die again and again; suffering did not need to have an end.
A hand clutched at hers, cold and dry, the skin soft. Muna recollected that there was another with her, no less frightened than herself. Henrietta—that was her name.
“Do not be afraid,” Muna tried to say. She wound her fingers through Henrietta’s.
The magic spat them out, and they tumbled onto a damp yielding turf.
Muna opened her eyes. There was a pale blue sky above, embroidered with leaves in brilliant shades of yellow, red, orange and burnt umber. She glimpsed Henrietta’s pale blond hair out of the corner of her eye.
Trees with brilliant white trunks loomed over them. Thin gold sunshine poured into the glade, but the crystalline light did nothing to counteract the cold.
Muna sat up, rubbing her arms. She felt feeble, but her mind was clear.
“We were captured,” she said aloud. The last thing she remembered was being seized and borne off by the Queen’s attendants. Then she had been overcome by unconsciousness. They must still be in the Unseen Realm, but . . . “Where have they brought us?”
Henrietta started up with a glad cry. “But I know this place! These are my father’s lands in Shropshire.”
Muna could not have said why, but she was quite certain they were not in England, nor anywhere in the mortal realm. Perhaps it was the effect of having swallowed Rollo’s scale; it had lent her a sense she had not possessed before, a feeling for magic.
Or perhaps it was something else. She thought of the serpent she had seen in her vision in Henrietta’s classroom, slumbering beneath the sea.
“But the Queen will not have freed us,” said Muna. “It must be an illusion.”
Henrietta had arrived at the same conclusion as she looked around. Her face fell.
“Yes. It is only a glamour put on to deceive us. I wonder what they mean by it!” Still she looked about hungrily, as if she could not have enough of seeing, though she knew all she saw to be false. “This grove was my particular refuge when I was a girl. It was here I fled to evade punishment for mischief.”
Muna rose to her feet, brushing twigs off her dress. She was still somewhat dazed, but Henrietta’s voice was reassuring, an anchor to ordinary things. To keep her talking, Muna said, “Were you a mischievous child? You surprise me!”
Henrietta smiled. “I believe I was as obedient a girl as anyone could hope for—certainly my sisters were less biddable! But my minders were persuaded I could conquer my magical nature if I wished. They thought if I were spanked I should in time learn not to fly in my sleep.”
“And did you learn?”
“No,” sighed Henrietta. “I tried my best, for my family found my habits distressing, but it was no good. I did not stop floating in my sleep till I joined Mrs. Wythe’s Academy. Mr. Wythe said it was because I had been obliged to suppress my magic during the day—it burst out at night when I slept and could not restrain it. But since at the Academy I began to make full use of my powers, there was no longer a surplus to be drained off. It vexed Prunella that I stopped; she had wished to study how I did it.”
The reference to the Sorceress Royal seemed to give her thoughts a melancholy turn, for she fell silent. Muna was opening her mouth to ask why she looked so grave when a chill wind blew, making them both shiver.
“Does your father have a house here?” Muna said.
They saw it when they emerged from the grove—an imposing structure of pale gold stone, standing upon a rise in the distance. It was larger than any building Muna had ever seen, surpassing even the English king’s house in Malacca. She would not credit it was the Stapleton family’s residence until Henrietta had repeated herself.
“But it is even grander than the raja’s house in Malacca!” said Muna in awe. She gazed at Henrietta with new respect. Nothing in her comportment suggested she was accustomed to such grandeur, but this explained Mr. and Mrs. Stapleton’s high-handed manners.
The thought of her family’s good fortune seemed to give Henrietta little pleasure, however. There was a shadow on her face as she gazed at the house. She said abruptly:
“I wish I had not said what I did of Prunella! We don’t know what may happen. I hate to think of”—she swallowed—“of dying, with matters as they stand now—with no chance of telling her all.”
“But you were only play-acting,” said Muna, puzzled. “Mrs. Wythe agreed you should say what you must to persuade Fairy you were subverted by the French. It is not as though you said anything very shocking. Mrs. Wythe ought not to borrow her friends’ clothes only to spoil them.”
“She could have all my finery and be welcome to it, if only I could see her again!” declared Henrietta, with a sob in her voice. “She is my dearest friend in all the world, and she has no conception of what has troubled me for the past several months—does not know why I mean to marry a man for whom she does not have the least regard! I wish I could have told her. We had no secrets from one another at school.”
“I am sure you refine too much upon it,” said Muna. She was still distracted by the scale of the Stapletons’ mansion. “Is this where you live, then, with your family?”
“In the summers,” said Henrietta absently. “Shropshire is a considerable distance from town. We have a town house in London.”
Muna gazed at her, round-eyed. “You have two such houses? Your father must be vastly wealthy.”
“My father is ruined,” said Henrietta flatly. “If he does not find a means of discharging his debts, he will be obliged to sell both houses.”
Muna stared. Henrietta did not meet Muna’s eyes, but the tightness in her shoulders had eased. She seemed relieved to have unburdened herself.
“I have not apologised for my mother’s conduct at the Sorceress Royal’s ball,” she said after a pause. “You will have thought it odd—even offensive.”
So much had happened since Muna’s encounter with Henrietta’s mother that it seemed remote and unimportant. Muna said politely that she recollected nothing in Mrs. Stapleton’s behaviour to cause offence. “She seemed most hospitable.”
Henrietta shook her head.
“My mother’s manners do not always do her credit,” she said awkwardly. “She has the best of intentions; it is only that my father’s secret weighs upon her. My father has sought to hide the true state of his affairs, but it is impossible to conceal such a matter indefinitely. My mother fears we shall be debarred from the society to which we have always belonged. That is what makes her worry so about setting the fashion and—and all that sort of thing. It is not that she is eaten up with ambition, whatever Prunella says!
“And her fears are not groundless,” Henrietta added. “Already there is a wounding decline in the attentions she and my father are accustomed to receive. If his creditors should find out, we are finished. Unless . . . unless something is done.”
Understanding dawned on Muna. “This is why you intend to marry the thaumaturge of whom Mrs. Wythe disapproves.”
Henrietta nodded. “Mr. Hobday is a friend of my father’s. He has promised to settle my father’s debts after our marriage—and to do it discreetly, so no one need ever know.”
Indignation flickered to life in Muna at Henrietta’s resigned expression. “But it is very wrong of your father to require you to marry for such a reason.”
“Oh, I have not been forced into it. My father is not so gothic!” said Henrietta, trying to smile. “He would not have encouraged the union if he did not esteem Mr. Hobday and think he would make a good husband. If I had opposed the match, or”—Henrietta blushed, lowering her eyes—“or if my affections had been engaged elsewhere, then I am sure my father would not have asked it of me. But I am very willing to be married.”
Muna did not know why she should feel so troubled by this pronouncement. Whom Henrietta chose to marry was none of her business—and yet it seemed to Muna there was something seriously amiss in the whole affair.
“You like the gentleman, then?” said Muna.
“I don’t dislike him,” said Henrietta unpromisingly.
Muna thought of Mak Genggang. The witch had always made it her business to intervene in any matches on the island that she suspected to have been forced upon one of the parties. She was wont to remark that she had liberated far more brides than she had educated witches.
“I don’t dislike cabbage,” Muna found herself saying, “but I should not consider marrying it. Not disliking seems a poor foundation for future happiness.”
Henrietta would have been quite within her rights to tell Muna off for presuming to advise her, but the Englishwoman did not seem offended.
“For my happiness, perhaps,” she said. “But there are my sisters to think of. It is Amelia that gives me the greatest anxiety, for she is to make her debut in society soon, and she is the prettiest of us all, everyone says so. I am afraid for her—she is so headstrong, she is bound to do something reckless if she is obliged to marry a gentleman she does not like. But if I marry Mr. Hobday, there will be no call for that. The girls could wed according to their inclination.”
With each word from Henrietta, Muna’s vexation increased. She said snappishly, “So you will sacrifice yourself! That is very noble, to be sure.”
For all Henrietta’s sweetness of temper, even she could be provoked.
“You are speaking as Prunella would!” she said. “I know she will enact theatricals over it—that is why I have not told her. But why should not I decide to marry Mr. Hobday if it serves my purpose? Dozens of girls do the same every day. And it is not as though . . .” She cut herself off, flushing.
Muna raised an eyebrow. “Not as though?”
Henrietta gave her a defiant look. “Well, it is not as though there is anyone I should prefer to marry.”
“It is only that you have not met the man to whom it is your fate to be bound,” said Muna sagely.
But Henrietta only looked thoughtful and a little removed. “No. Even when, in the past, I have conceived an admiration for a gentleman, I could never imagine being married to him, nor desiring it. Perhaps I was made wrong. As God gave me magic, He decreed that I should desire other things. Mr. Wythe says there are records of spinsters who devoted their lives to the secret study of thaumaturgy. Their connections believed them to be mere old maids, of no account, when in truth they were pioneers—Britain’s first magiciennes! I believe I should have liked that—to have been married to magic.”
Somehow Henrietta’s declaration rang hollow; there was some part of the truth that she withheld. As Muna watched the colour deepen in Henrietta’s cheek, a thought surfaced in her mind, like a crocodile emerging from a brown river.
Henrietta admires Mr. Wythe! Muna thought, thunderstruck.
It was a new idea, but immediately convincing. It was only natural for Henrietta to harbour a secret passion for Zacharias Wythe. He was not only handsome but a brilliant thaumaturgical scholar, with a command of magic that must be as much of an attraction to Henrietta as his person and manners. Was not Henrietta always quoting his sayings with a respect that bordered on reverence? Certainly she blushed a great deal—the smallest thing set her off—but did not she colour with particular rapidity when she spoke to, or of, Mr. Wythe?
No wonder Henrietta could name no one whom she would prefer to marry. Her affections were indeed engaged—but their object was one she could not disclose to her father, since Mr. Wythe was so closely associated with the Academy, which Mr. Stapleton abhorred.
Muna was conscious of a sinking at her heart, but there was no reason she should feel either disappointed or surprised. When she was reunited with Sakti, Muna would never see any of these people again. And after all, she ought to be happy for Henrietta. For Muna had seen, in a flash, the solution to Henrietta’s difficulties.
It was a delicate matter to interfere in affairs of the heart. Muna was not at all confident of her powers in this area, and yet the idea was so obvious and sensible that it could cause no offence to raise it. The first thing to do was to confirm her suspicion.
“But what if the gentleman you married were a practitioner of magic, who could teach you?” Muna suggested. “You could devote your lives to the study of thaumaturgy together.”
Henrietta blinked. “I suppose . . . but few gentlemen would countenance their wives or daughters having anything to do with thaumaturgy. I shall have to give up magic upon my marriage, for I doubt whether I shall be able to conceal my activities from Mr. Hobday.”
“There can be no question of your marrying him, then,” said Muna, dismissing Mr. Hobday. She was now quite certain of her ground. “There is only one gentleman you can marry—Mr. Wythe!”
Henrietta gaped. “What?”
She looked so scandalised that Muna added:
“I don’t suggest that you go behind Mrs. Wythe’s back, of course. That would not do at all! But I don’t see why she should object, once all is explained to her. Most men of substance take several wives, and I am sure she would rather her husband marry the friend of her youth than a stranger. You would not be obliged to wed Mr. Hobday, which you say she would not like, and since Mr. Wythe is wealthy, you would still be put in the way to help your family.”
Muna thought her proposal a neat one, likely to be productive of happiness for all concerned.
But Henrietta did not receive it with the joy she had expected. The Englishwoman opened her mouth and shut it again, like a fish, then did this two more times. It was a matter of some doubt whether she would ever speak again when they were interrupted by the sky splitting open.
It did this with an enormous crash like thunder at the height of a storm. Henrietta jumped, clutching at Muna’s arm. Muna returned her grasp, looking up in alarm.
There was a crack right across the sky, through which only darkness could be seen. But as they gazed upwards, the darkness receded, till it was surrounded by white. They were looking into a gigantic dark eye, peering through the fissure in the sky. Its owner drew back, so that they could see the bridge of a nose, and then a second dark eye.
“There you are,” said a great rumbling voice, setting the leaves on the trees a-shiver. “Just a moment!”
A massive foot appeared through the crack in the sky, followed by another, and a giantess lowered herself through the gap. At first she was large enough that even as her feet touched the ground, her head was still among the clouds, but she was shrinking all the time as Muna and Henrietta watched her. By the time she turned to them, she was almost exactly of a size with Muna, save that she was a little taller.
Muna had forgotten that Sakti was taller than her.
“Muna, are you quite well?” said Henrietta.
“Yes,” said Muna. She dried her eyes, but even so her vision was blurred with tears.
She went towards her sister, unsure of whether she wished to embrace Sakti or slap her. But none of the questions or reproaches that rose to her lips found expression, for Sakti spoke first.
“How came you to be so late, kak?” said Sakti. She was in the same outlandish dress in which Muna had seen her earlier, with black teeth and her face painted, but her impatient expression was wholly familiar. “I have been waiting for an age!”
SAKTI was not quite so cross as her greeting suggested. While Muna was still sputtering in outrage, Sakti flung her arms around her, exclaiming:
“I had quite given up on ever seeing you again! I thought you must have been eaten by spirits, or perhaps the English had turned on you and thrown you in gaol. I nearly died when I saw you in the Queen’s presence chamber.”
“Why did not you speak to me then?” said Muna. Any vexation was rapidly melting away in the face of Sakti’s delight in seeing her. “I thought—oh, I don’t know what I thought! I feared you didn’t wish to see me.”
“I like that! When I put a spell on you just so you would come to me,” said Sakti, indignant. “How could I have spoken to you with the Queen of the Djinns watching, pray? I have been doing all I can to avoid her notice! But why did not you stay there? I gave you a look so you would know you should stay where you were and I would come and find you when the Queen was gone.”
Muna was almost as diverted as she was annoyed by this faith in her mind-reading abilities. “How was I to know that that was what your look signified?”
“It would have saved a great deal of time if you had paid attention,” said Sakti severely. “I must have looked in dozens of trees to find you!”
“Trees?” said Muna, thinking she must have misheard.
“Did not you see them as you came in?” said Sakti. “All this”—she gestured around them at the grove—“is an illusion. We are inside a tree that the Queen cursed and turned to stone. There is a whole jungle of them, entombed in the caves beneath her Palace. They say the spirits of the trees offended her by their loyalty to a great spirit, her deadly rival.”
Muna went still. In her mind she heard again the angry voices of Georgiana of Threlfall and the Queen of the Djinns, quarrelling about the ancient history of the Unseen Realm . . . but was it so ancient?
“The rival spirit you speak of,” she said. “Was that the True Queen?”
“Why, I should not have thought you would have had time to learn the Court’s gossip,” said Sakti, impressed. “You had better not let anyone hear you call her the True Queen, however; it is sedition. It is safer to say ‘the Great Serpent.’”
But Sakti did not linger on the subject of the True Queen; she was more interested in recounting her efforts to find Muna. “I should think there are hundreds of trees here. Most of the ones I looked in were occupied by languishing mortals, or spirits with the heart cut out of them, capable of little more than spitting and swearing. But there were a few demons that still had magic enough to make trouble, and I barely escaped from them with my hide! The prisoner in the tree next to you nearly bit off my head—it was a sort of monitor lizard that could breathe fire.
“But you know, kak, you ought not to have come directly to the Queen’s presence chamber. The Queen does not even know I exist. There are such a number of spirits here, and all so different, that it is easy to avoid drawing attention to oneself. No one has even suspected me of being a mortal. Why did not you come by a quieter way?”
Muna had forgotten quite how exasperating her sister was. “It is not so easy to open a door from England to Fairy. And it is not as though I had a map!”
“Could not the polong help you?”
Muna began to answer, when she remembered they were not alone. When she glanced back she saw that Henrietta remained at a courteous distance, pretending she could not hear their conversation.
Muna and Sakti spoke in Malay, but who knew what powers of understanding the English magicienne possessed? It was not out of the question that she might have cast a translation spell . . .
But even as the thought passed through her mind, an image of Henrietta’s countenance as she gazed on her father’s house rose before Muna.
No, Muna thought with a certainty that surprised her, Henrietta would not deceive me.
Henrietta trusted Muna. Perhaps it was time that trust was returned.
Sakti had followed Muna’s gaze. She frowned. “Who is that?”
“Henrietta,” said Muna, beckoning. As the Englishwoman came shyly towards them, she said to Sakti, in English, “This is Miss Henrietta Stapleton, an instructress at the Sorceress Royal’s school for witches.”
“I do not need to be told who this is,” said Henrietta, smiling. “It is your sister, of course. The resemblance is remarkable!”
To Sakti she said, “I am afraid we had given you up for lost—we thought it so unlikely that a mortal swallowed up by the wilderness of Fairy should ever return. But it seems we underrated your resource, Miss . . . ?”
Sakti did not supply her name. It was Muna who said, “My sister is called Sakti.”
“Kak!” protested Sakti.
“She is my friend,” said Muna in Malay.
Sakti’s look of misgiving did not change. “She is English.”
“Even Mak Genggang has English friends!” protested Muna. “I tell you this lady may be relied upon.” She turned to Henrietta. “My sister is about to explain what happened when she vanished in the jungle. Aren’t you, adik?”
Sakti gave Henrietta a discontented look, but then a cheering thought occurred to her. She said in Malay, “After all, we can always abandon her here if she is not to be trusted.”
“Adik!” said Muna reproachfully, but Sakti continued, in English:
“There is not much to tell. I found the enchanter that cursed us, that is all.”
Muna’s eyes widened. “You found the author of the curse?”
“The curse?” echoed Henrietta, no less astonished. “Are you under a curse, Muna?”
“Yes, we believe so. I will explain all in time!” said Muna hurriedly. She turned back to Sakti. “Adik, do you mean the curseworker Midsomer was here, in the Unseen Realm?”
“Midsomer?” said Henrietta.
“No, not Midsomer,” said Sakti, frowning. “What has Midsomer to do with anything?”
But then her expression cleared. “Oh, the spell in Malacca! That was a mistake. The magic must have gone awry. There is a Midsomer here—Geoffrey Midsomer, an English magician who married a spirit and heartily regrets it—but he is not our enemy. The author of the curse is a spirit, one of the Queen’s attendant djinns. I don’t know his true name, of course—he is far too canny to have let it slip—but he goes by some absurd title. The Earl of the Waters of the Nose, or some such . . .”
Muna stared. “You don’t mean the Duke of the Navel of the Seas?”
“That is it! He is the one that cursed us.”
“But that can’t be,” said Muna, baffled. “What makes you think so?”
“Why, he was the one who summoned me here,” said Sakti. “That is how I came to the Palace. I arrived and he declared himself my master.”
She paused, looking around, before performing a complicated gesture with her hands. A wall of white light sprang up around them, from which issued a faint buzzing, like that of bees.
“In case anyone is listening,” explained Sakti. “You see, the—Duke, did you call him? I think of him as the thief, for he stole your magic and our memories, and that is not all. He has stolen a treasure belonging to the Queen—they call it the Virtu.”
“That can’t be!” Muna repeated. But then she thought of the turquoise pendant resting in the pale hollow of Clarissa Midsomer’s throat, on the night of the Sorceress Royal’s ball—the Duke’s eyes, intent and full of wonder, fixed on Clarissa—and the eerily familiar ornament the Fairy Queen had worn, which had looked so much like Clarissa’s necklace.
Muna’s protests died in her throat. She pressed a hand to her temple, for impossible ideas swarmed in her mind.
All she was beginning to surmise could not be true, she told herself. She was going mad, perhaps. It was something in the air of the Unseen that was giving her such strange fancies. She must be sensible. And yet the suspicion growing within her would not be conquered by staid sense.
“The Queen thinks it is a secret that the Virtu has been stolen, but there are no real secrets in the Palace of the Unseen,” said Sakti. “You never met such a parcel of old gossips as the spirits here! They all know the Queen is desperately anxious about the loss of her talisman, but since she means them to be deceived, they are obliged to collude in the pretence. She sees conspirators everywhere, and anyone who dares ruin the illusion would suffer.”
“But the Duke was sent to Britain to recover the Virtu,” Henrietta began. “He cannot have stolen it . . .” But her voice trailed off.
“Yes, it was clever of him, wasn’t it?” said Sakti. “He went to the Queen when the news came that the guardians of the Virtu had lost it, and insisted he go to Britain on her behalf. He thought it best to be out of her way. I expect the Queen half-suspects him, but currently she suspects everyone of meaning her ill. There are rumours that her sister—the Great Serpent—will soon return. It seems she was the true heir to the throne and rightful sovereign of the Unseen Realms, and the Queen is only a pretender. It has made the Queen exceedingly cross; the Court is in a terrific ferment.”
Glancing at Henrietta, Muna saw that the Englishwoman was near being convinced. Muna’s own incredulity was dying away, for Sakti spoke with such confidence that it was impossible to doubt her. If she was right, it would certainly have been an astute move on the Duke’s part to have accused another and volunteered to investigate the theft.
Muna shook her head in an attempt to clear it. The Duke who had summoned Sakti to his side had stolen the Virtu. The Virtu contained the best part of the banished True Queen’s magic—the True Queen who was expected to make a return.
It all pointed to an answer that Muna feared must be true, incredible as it seemed. But there was still a missing piece. Groping towards understanding, Muna said aloud:
“What makes you think the Duke stole the Virtu, adik?”
“Oh, he told me,” said Sakti offhandedly.
Muna was mystified. “Surely it was very trusting of him to confide in you!”
“Well, he had lost half of it,” explained Sakti. “That was why he summoned me. He desired me to steal the half he had lost.
“The creature is addicted to gambling, you see,” she continued. “He owes parts of his soul to all sorts of persons. Everyone in the Palace knows that his affairs are hopelessly involved. I expect that is why he stole the Virtu—so he could extricate himself from his embarrassments. But it did not occur to him to stop gambling once he had the Virtu. He accrued further debts of honour and had nothing else with which to settle them.”
“Do you mean to tell me that the Duke gambled away the Queen’s Virtu?” demanded Muna.
“Yes, wasn’t it stupid of him?” said Sakti, with some relish. “I was vastly encouraged when I discovered that! But the creature is not altogether witless. He did not surrender the whole of the Virtu to the winner—he broke it in two and kept half. But of course that meant he only had half the magic he had hoped for.”
“So that is what happened,” said Muna slowly. “It begins to fit together.”
“What does?”
“Why did the Duke desire you to recover the lost half of the Virtu?” said Muna, ignoring Sakti’s question. “I mean to say, he is a powerful spirit. It seems odd that he should have summoned a mortal female to help him.”
Sakti frowned.
“That is something I have not quite made out,” she admitted. “I think his summoning spell must have gone awry. He used the Virtu to call me up. I believe he was hoping for a great spirit—a mambang or naga of renown. He seemed quite disappointed to find me so insignificant. He had nearly made up his mind to steal the lost half back from Midsomer himself, but then he was obliged to leave for England . . .”
“Midsomer!” Henrietta exclaimed. “You do not mean Geoffrey Midsomer acquired the other half of the Virtu?”
“Oh, do you know him?” said Sakti, looking at Henrietta with new interest. “He is not much of a magician, but it seems he has extraordinary luck at dice. The Duke is not the first spirit to have suffered at his hands at the gaming table. But no one can touch Midsomer, for his wife is a favourite of the Queen, and very short-tempered.” Sakti sighed. “One can only search Midsomer’s residence when she is away. I have not been able to find the missing half of the Virtu, though I have hunted high and low.”
But she squared her shoulders, turning to Muna with an air of resolve. “But I shall find it, kak—never fear! And when I do, I mean to demand our freedom from the Duke. He is so desperate he will not be able to deny us. That is why I summoned you here.”
“I am glad you did,” said Muna.
She saw all now. It had been no accident that she had been granted that vision of the serpent floating in the waters. She had been led here for a reason.
“But you will not find the Virtu if you look for a hundred years, adik,” she said. “You see, I know where the other half of the Virtu is.”
Henrietta’s head whipped around. “You do?”
“You know where it is too,” said Muna. “Do you remember the necklace Miss Midsomer wore at the Sorceress Royal’s ball?”
Henrietta’s brow furrowed. She shook her head.
“There was such a great deal to think of that day,” she said apologetically. “I scarcely saw Clarissa before the ball, and I missed most of it after the Duke appeared, for I was seeing to our guests.”
“If you had been less preoccupied, you would not have failed to notice it,” said Muna; though she addressed Henrietta, her eyes were on Sakti. “Miss Midsomer wore a gold chain. And hanging from it, a very fine pendant, in the shape of a snake . . .”
Sakti’s eyes were round. “A blue snake, with red eyes and a short tail? The Duke’s half of the Virtu was the same!”
“The replica the Queen wore in her hair reminded me of Miss Midsomer’s ornament,” said Muna to Henrietta. “And Miss Midsomer is sister to Geoffrey Midsomer, is she not?”
Henrietta saw what she meant.
“You think Geoffrey Midsomer gave Clarissa the half of the Virtu he won?” she said. “I suppose it would have been sensible. He must have known the Duke would seek to reclaim the article if it remained in Fairy. But if Clarissa wore it to the ball, the Duke must have seen it. He met her then, did he not? Prunella told me of it. She said he was fascinated with Clarissa.”
“He was entranced!” said Muna, recalling the fixity with which the Duke had gazed at Miss Midsomer. “But what if it was because he had recognised the missing half of the Virtu in Miss Midsomer’s pendant? It is no wonder he decided to stay in England. It was his best chance of retrieving what he had lost to her brother.”
Henrietta looked troubled. “I cannot believe Clarissa knew what she had. If she did, surely she would have told Prunella and surrendered the Virtu. Even now the Fairy Queen suspects Britain of having robbed her!”
“This sister of Midsomer’s is in England?” said Sakti. When Muna nodded, Sakti said, “Then we shall have to go to England to steal it back, I suppose.”
“Yes,” said Muna. “We must go to England.” She took a deep breath, but it scarcely alleviated her nervousness at what she had to tell Sakti. She knew it would sound mad, for Sakti seemed to have no suspicion of the truth herself.
“For the Duke is there too,” Muna continued. “And we must recover the whole of the Virtu, adik—the half he holds as well.”
Sakti looked startled. “You wish to steal his half? So we may use its magic to break the curse, you mean?”
Muna shook her head.
For a moment she felt sick with dread. A part of her had known the truth since she had seen the replica of the Virtu perched upon the Queen’s head. Perhaps she had known it even before—when she had asked the fine ones to grant her a vision of her sister, and they had shown her the serpent, half-asleep under the waves surrounding Janda Baik. But till now Muna had not dared to look directly at the truth.
“Because . . .” she said, but the words stuck in her throat. To say what she knew was to lose what was most precious to her in life—to accept that the connection she valued most was an invention of her fancy, founded on a mistake—to admit, finally, that she did not have a sister.
She looked into Sakti’s wondering eyes. Muna could see that Sakti was impressed by her daring in declaring that they should steal the Duke’s half of the Virtu as well as Clarissa’s.
It heartened her absurdly.
It was not a lie, she thought. I was her sister.
For months Muna had defended and advised and borne with and worried for Sakti; that had been no sham. It did not matter if it was happenstance that had bound them together, rather than blood. Sakti had been hers since Muna found her on the shore.
“Because the Virtu is yours,” she said. “You are Saktimuna, adik. You are the spirit they call the True Queen—the Great Serpent, sister to the Queen of the Djinns.”