Unlike the rest of us, Serendipity had continued exploring the vault and discovered that it was not solely a warren of bookshelves and clusters of gracious furniture. It was in fact a semicircular room—a large one, perhaps, but it pivoted around the wall with the fireplace. The chair Radburn was still occupying was halfway around the semicircle.

“I was walking,” the genet explained as we followed her. “With my hand on the wall...” She touched it to demonstrate. “When I got this far and went around the turn, I took my hand back, because there are all these things in the way.” The things in question were shelves and chairs. “So I kept walking without it, and found this.”

We stopped. On the other side of the wall, the shared fireplace... was cold.

The shared fireplace.

Which was burning quite merrily on the opposite side.

“That’s not possible,” Chester said flatly.

“So it must not be happening.” Guy folded his arms.

“I was confused,” Serendipity said. “But then I remembered what Master did with his blood, so...” She pointed to her palm. Her black palm, because even the skin under her fur was dark. If there was a cut there, I couldn’t spy it. “I scratched myself and smeared it on the wall, and the room looked different.”

Guy bent down and plucked his knife from his boot.

“At the rate we’re going you might as well leave the thing with me,” I said.

“At the rate we’re going, you’d better get your own.”

I snorted and cut myself, then smacked my palm against the stone above the mantel.

A fire sprang into view in the fireplace, and color and warmth flooded the room. Nothing else looked different—

“There,” Serendipity said. “Behind you, Master.”

I turned and gasped despite myself. Serendipity’s hole was literal: an enormous balcony shrouded in deep shadows. The firelight limned the edges of the wall, the jambs painted and gilt, carmine, gold, sienna orange. But beyond it was a bare suggestion of the balcony’s floor, and a hint of a filigree railing... and then nothing. A darkness so stygian it suggested a hall even larger than the one through which we’d descended to reach this place.

“Well,” Guy said. “Let’s have a lamp, and a look, eh?”

“A hidden room!” Ivy exclaimed.

“Why is there a hidden room?” Radburn asked from behind us.

“Now there is a question,” Eyre murmured. “Two layers of obfuscation, one at the vault, and one here. What’s so important down there?”

“Or dangerous?” Chester muttered.

“More dangerous than an army of revivified corpses and their demon captains?” Ivy said.

“Point,” Chester said. “Nevertheless. We should proceed with caution.”

“Sounds good,” Guy said. “We’ll push Morgan out first. He can’t be killed.”

“Guy!”

I couldn’t tell who that last had come from, because it seemed to burst from every throat at once. And I... I laughed. If it was a pained laugh, there was real humor in it as well. “Well, get me a lamp. If I’m going to have to heal myself of lethal wounds, I’d rather them not be from falling.”

“A most ignominious way to go,” Radburn agreed. “I’ll fetch the lamp.”

While we waited, Eyre and Chester studied the smear I’d left on the wall. Ivy drifted over to join them. “Expressed blood magic,” she said. “That’s supposedly the only way that men can attain to the powers of women.” When they glanced at her, she said, “It’s in the book I chose, which is about female spellcraft. Apparently all magic is carried through mediums, and in flesh it’s most strong in the blood. Women manipulate it directly with their power. Men do something else. But when they expose the blood, by expressing it from their bodies, they can approximate some of the same effects. Apparently this is how people of little magical ability can borrow power they do not have, as well.”

“So this,” Chester said, spreading his fingers beneath the glistening mark. “Is doing what, do you suppose? Why does it make the illusions fail?”

“Perhaps they’re not illusions,” Eyre said. “Perhaps they’re locks. They evaluate the composition of the blood for certain qualities before they are disarmed.”

“We could test that,” Guy said. “See if any of our blood will turn the trick.”

“It worked with Serendipity,” Ivy said.

“Serendipity was crafted from royal blood,” Chester said. “She is in effect a king’s daughter.”

I ran my finger across the color, dragging it across the stone. “Perhaps we are trying to be too scientifically minded about this.”

“Are you suggesting we should be irrational?” Chester frowned at me. “Magic is of this world—”

“But it suggests that our understanding of the world is deeply flawed,” Ivy said. “Or at least, incomplete. What if magic follows some other natural law, one we don’t understand?”

“Or one we already do, in our hearts,” Eyre said. “Is that it, my folklorist?”

I nodded. “Perhaps it is not the blood that matters. It is that it’s a symbol for sacrifice.”

“Oh!” Ivy exclaimed, paling. “Oh! Maybe that’s why the elves can no longer fight the demons. They are no longer capable of the ultimate sacrifice, and that... that new truth is in their blood. Their blood is meaningless. There is no symbol anymore.”

I tried to suppress my shudder.

“It makes an ugly sort of sense,” Chester muttered.

“But Guy will tell us why we’re wrong,” Ivy said.

We all looked at Guy, who slid his hands in his pockets, pretending not to notice until our silence made it impossible for him to persist.

He said, “Keep the knife.”

I thanked God for Radburn’s timely return.

“A lantern, provided by our hosts, who I might add are somewhat disgruntled that we’ve been ignoring—I say, what’s with the faces?”

“Just shine the lamp that way,” Guy said.

“Hand it to me,” I said. “Guy was right... if peril there is, it will have a harder time disposing of me.”

“Callous,” Radburn said. “But practical. All that I expect of Guy.”

“Sensible,” Kelu said from his elbow.

Radburn shook his head. “Well, I’ll not hold with it. For once, I want to be the first to see the amazing sights.” And so saying, he strode to the balcony. We all moved to intercept him, but he evaded us and stepped onto the balcony, and gasped. We froze.

“Oh, but you must come see!” he exclaimed. “It is astonishing!” A tap, as of his boot heel against stone. “And no fear of this thing dropping from under us... I’m betting there is a solid stone plinth under it.”

“That sounds unlikely,” Chester said, but he joined Radburn. “Oh, there is room for us all. Do come.”

I allowed the others to precede me, human and genet both, because Radburn was right: they deserved the opportunity to be the first to see some of the wonders. I could give them so few gifts; this one was easy. I ambled after Eyre once they’d had the chance to scatter onto the dim length of the balcony, anticipating... a palace, perhaps? A view of the distant plains? But no, there was no breeze, no freshness in the air to suggest they were looking on an external vista. I stepped up beside Ivy and beheld what Radburn’s wan light illumined, and though it penetrated little it was still enough to glimpse the cut-glass edges of a glorious mosaic, and the gilt trim bordering the closest wall, and to suggest the faraway columns that held up the walls, stretching up toward a ceiling that was not, as I thought, an extension of the mosaics we could not see clearly, but rather thousands upon thousands of tiny window panes. The architecture made no sense to me at all: skylights in a subterranean hall? So I looked down instead.

The Prince returns—

The Prince lives—

The Prince has come home, come back, come again, to free us, you will free us, you are come again at last and it will be as it was—

The distant floor yawed toward me. Even in the dark I could taste the blood on it, and the cachinnations of the voices that crowded my ears mingled with it, taking the world from me. I reached for it, desperate, and then the pain erupted, which I had forgotten, which I had assumed had been forever banished with the chains that had held on my human guise.

I felt hands on me, and they hurt, and I jerked away.

Come, Prince, the voices hissed, laughing, plucking at me. Come, come. Come to us, come again, feed us, feed us—

In desperation I yanked away. My last lucid perception was of the banister against the small of my back.

The Prince comes, and is the Red Prince in truth.

I screamed.

Waking hurt. Oh God, but it hurt in every extremity. Breathing made tears well from my eyes, and my whole body was shaking, as if shocked by the agony. I was cognizant of voices, frantic: one of them was high and dear and close, but it was not the only one. No, most of them were dear, but there were others, too many. My ears bled with their fear, with the memory of demons. With the burning shadows of their wings close over my body, with the lap of their tongues on my bleeding flesh.

I was hallucinating again? I had to be. And yet I didn’t wake. Instead I smelled something warm and furry, and then a tongue licked at the corner of my brow, where I realized the frames of my glasses had twisted with my—

—fall. Oh God, the humiliation. Had I really?

“Morgan, oh, God, Morgan, say something, please!” Ivy.

“Give him some room—”

Chester. Chester would tell me. I tried to make my mouth move, but it seemed forever before it would consent, during which I was subjected to the terrified babble of not just my companions but some number of strangers. “...I fall?”

“What’s that?”

“Chester,” I said, more sure of my mouth. It was full of blood and slivers of something I hoped wasn’t bone. “Tell me... I... didn’t fall.”

“You fell,” Guy said from above and behind me. He sounded angry—that was rare. “For God’s sake, Morgan. I was making a joke about you getting hurt, not issuing an invitation.”

“Wasn’t...” It was bone. From my shattered jaw, which had reformed in my mouth... God Almighty. “Wasn’t my intent. How.... far?”

Radburn this time, sounding shaken but determined to ignore it. “Oh, that must be... seven or eight stories?”

“Stories!”

“Maybe ten,” Radburn said, meekly apologetic. “It’s rather a long way.”

And I’d survived, though every part of me protested that it would rather have not. I tried to move, succeeded only in groaning despite my desire not to. Almond touched me gently. “Sssh, Master. Don’t move. Give your body a chance to finish knitting.”

These ominous words, accompanied by the sight of Ivy, Chester, and Eyre hovering with such expressions... I could only imagine what my limbs must have looked like when they’d rushed upon me. To save myself from considering it further, I sought the balcony that had delivered me to my adventure: no trouble seeing it now, for it was lit with dozens of lanterns from its railing down the ramp—yet another ignominy, for had I been insistent on seeing the damned floor I could have walked down to it without resorting to my dramatic flight. Though I could not yet move my head, I spotted a few clusters of strangers, making notes in journals, talking in hushed murmurs, hanging lights: members of Vigil’s academic community, no doubt, though not so many as I expected for the find. So much for maintaining any secrecy... and I dearly wish we had. Remembering the inspiration for my fugue made me want, almost desperately, to drag my bleeding body from where I had fallen. I could feel the secrets beneath me, pulsing.

“What is it?” Ivy asked, frowning.

“This is where it was done,” I whispered. “The bloodletting that bound the elves.”

“Here?” Chester said, surprised.

“Is there... there’s a design on the floor? In the center?”

“A large one,” Ivy agreed. “Like a flower, in gold.”

“Above us,” I said. “Somewhere. A tower.”

They all looked for me. I couldn’t raise my head, leading me to wonder if I’d broken my neck. The very idea filmed my skin with horrified sweat and I swallowed... which was the last mistake I made before retching from the blood and the scrape of bone. Several people dove for me, helped me up; one of them yelped—Radburn, I thought—when my head flopped. Guy growled at him and supported it, and as they held my body into a kneeling pose my spine finished snapping back together. The pain of it snuffed my consciousness effortlessly.

The second time I woke my head was in Ivy’s arms and my body sprawled over her lap.

“Please tell me I no longer look the broken doll,” I murmured.

“You’re a terrible sight still.” She brushed a kiss over my brow. “But you are no longer shattered.”

“The others...?”

Her sigh lifted her breast beneath me. “Eyre’s gone with Chester to attempt to speak with the scholars. I admit our screams when you went over the edge brought them into the library, and after that the sight of you... well, they assumed they would have to bury you. As you can imagine they are somewhat... nonplussed... at what has transpired since. Some few have come down to assess the new discovery, but for the most part they’ve withdrawn. One would hardly believe intellectuals of such long training would be subject to superstition, but I’m afraid you’ve stretched their minds past what they can comfortably tolerate.”

What a disaster. I would have copied her sigh, but my body still ached and I couldn’t draw that much breath.

“Guy and Radburn have been cleaning. Not just your mess, mind... but I think Professor Eyre and Guy were the only ones who didn’t... react... to the sight of you.” Her cheeks pinked and she cleared her throat. “Anyway, they thought it best that any blood you spilled be handled by us, rather than someone who might accidentally discover its virtues. Where it has been unadulterated, they have been giving it to the genets... anything tainted by... other... fluids... they have further diluted and disposed of in the water closets.”

“Clever,” I said, surprised. “That was well done of them.”

“I thought so as well. They are off taking care of that, then, and I was given the duty of guarding you, with Almond.”

“Almond? Please tell me....” I lifted my head, grateful that I could and then frightened, for I could see no sign of the genet.

“She’s fine,” Ivy said. “Sleeping up in the library by the fire. Her worry over you exhausted her. Kelu is trotting along after Radburn, no doubt tanning his hide with her tongue. The twins have gone with the professor.”

“The twins—Ah, Emily and Serendipity?”

“Yes. They look like twins, so....”

“The term serves,” I said. I did sigh then, pain or no pain. “I’ve made a mess of things.”

“You had a seizure?” she asked, carefully.

“No,” I said. “A hallucination. Though I suppose I cannot call them so, if they are echoes of the past revisited... or God forfend, actual visitations from demons.”

“Surely not, or they would have tarried to make more mischief.”

“Let us hope,” I murmured, feeling her hand on my hair. “You may do that forever, if you wish.”

“I do,” she said, a smile in her voice. “Though perhaps later, when there’s not so much matted blood on us both.”

“Oh, Ivy. This is not how I thought to pay court to you.”

“As I recall, you hadn’t been planning to pay court to me at all.” She rested her nose in my hair—my blood-stiffened hair—and tightened her arms around me. “Given that, I much prefer how you are proceeding now. Though I grant you that perhaps a few more bouquets of flowers and a few fewer calamities would make for an easier time of it.”

“Ivy—”

“You can particularly skip the epic leaps from balconies,” she continued. “You needn’t work so hard to impress me....”

“Ivy!”

“Though I must say it did impress. Once I pushed past my mortal terror on your behalf.”

“You are teasing me,” I said, relieved.

“Yes.” She smiled against my hair, and I heard it in her beloved voice. “I wouldn’t be anywhere else in the world right now, Morgan.”

“You are a queen among women.”

She laughed. “I know it! And now you do too.” Her fingers stroked the edge of my wrist. “You seem hale. Can you stand?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “But I’d best try.”

Trying involved sitting up first, which I managed without dizziness. I reached for my face to right my glasses and found them missing. I inhaled sharply.

Ivy took one of my hands and closed it around my spectacles. “A bit battered, but they survived the fall.”

“Thank God,” I said. I examined them—the legs were crooked, and the extant lens now had a spiderweb crack—but they were still serviceable and, thankfully, clean. When I set them on my nose and looked toward Ivy, I saw again the warm glow through the open side. I blew out a breath, relieved. “Thank God.”

“For more things than one,” she agreed, and cupped my elbow. “Up you go.”

I could stand, and did, and had the opportunity to survey the extent of the hall now that it was well lit. What I saw matched all I’d come to expect from the elves: the ambition of their designs, the opulence of their tastes, and the richness of their ornamentation. There was a king’s ransom in gold inlaid in the walls of this hall, edging the mosaics on the enormous columns, and filling the grooves in the vast blossom carved into the floor. I had fallen on one of the petals near the center, where someone had once spilled blood to curse elvenkind. Above us, at the end of the hall, was the tower, and I could not see but somehow remembered the spiral stairs that led to its pinnacle, where once elves and humans had kept the watch, and stargazed in search of some hint at their fortunes. The farthest wall of the hall was a solid rockslide. I hoped a dragon had caused it, because otherwise I would be forced to contemplate the possibility that demons could swell as large as this place was tall.

“Well,” I said finally. “I suppose there is no denying the existence of magic anymore.”

“No,” Ivy agreed, getting up and dusting off her pants. “But at least they are no longer pressing to enter the hidden library.” She nodded toward the west and east ends. “There are apparently corridors leading to other rooms there, all perfectly preserved. It seems a pity that they aren’t willing to investigate.”

“I imagine they will be eventually, when they have forgotten the sight of me broken on the stone.” I sighed. “Let us go up. I need a bath. I may take one, I hope?”

“I don’t see why not,” Ivy said. “The rest of the scholars have called an early halt to their day and have presumably retired to their dormitories. We are here only because your... healing... seemed to require vigilance.”

I hesitated. “How long?”

She was carefully not looking at my face, concentrating on steadying me. “We have passed the dinner hour by some time, I would think.”

I winced at the thought of all those lonely hours, spent in distressed contemplation of my broken body. And yet I was grateful as well; the attempt I’d made at my own life, in the mud outside Far Horizon, had taken me days to heal back from. Apparently losing my human mask had shortened the time I needed to spring back from lethal injury and spared my friends the necessity of several days of horror.

“A bath,” Ivy said firmly.

“And then more books,” I said. “If any of us can stay awake for it.”

“Oh,” she said, rueful, “I think we might find it a welcome diversion.”

The trip to the surface felt much longer than it was with the echoes of history dragging at me like cerements. I leaned heavily on Ivy on the way up the ramp and was grateful to be spared the necessity of stairs, while wondering vaguely at the architectural choice. The lamps stressed the absolute silence of the hall: light suggested recent habitation, so the eerie emptiness was distressing.

I glanced only once past the edge of the rail and saw the vague marks where I’d been lying. Would someone be along shortly to eradicate the final streaks of evidence of my unnatural enchantment? I thought of Eyre and Chester and did not envy them the task of quelling the dismay of the academics. As Ivy and I made our way out of the lost athenaeum and through the now deserted antechambers, with their abandoned work tables, I suppressed more than one shiver.

It was a very long trip.

When we arrived aboveground, the only people I could see were the knights of the Church. The sight of me inspired Samuel to send for the Vessel immediately. I followed Ivy toward one of the barracks and, I hoped, a bath, and made it most of the way there before Rose joined us.

“My lord,” she said, her eyes concerned.

“A mishap,” I said.

“A mishap.” She sounded unconvinced.

“Involving a very long fall.” I managed a smile. “I need to clean off, but you should accompany me to the bath, and I will tell you the challenges we now face.”

As Ivy went ahead to arrange for the water, I walked alongside Rose and informed her as to what we’d discovered, and she ruminated in silence, hands folded into her sleeves.

“Not good,” was what she said finally.

“No. But one hopes salvageable.”

“One hopes.” But she did not sound convinced.

“Any sign of Last?” I asked.

“No. No... and my lord, the vultures are missing.”

I glanced at her. “That implies they were supposed to be present.”

“They were a gift to Saint Winifred to warn her of the impending rise of demons,” the priestess said. “The remains were drawn from the earth here, at Threnody-Calling-Forward. It was presumed that they would head toward the locus of the worst evil, and we assumed that would be here, where the dead once threshed elves and humans both. Barring the actual presence of demons, all the scholars of the Church posited that they would return to where they died. But they are not here, my lord. So where have they gone?”

“It is too much to hope that you saw them continuing on to some other locale.”

She huffed softly, shook her head. “You should know better, my lord.”

“I should, yes.” My gaze was drawn to the north, where I still felt, beneath the constant hammering pulse of Amhric’s danger, something else. Some sickness. “I have some guesses. But before we can pursue them, we must undo the enchantment and collect my brother.”

“Yes. We will keep the watch.”

“Please,” I said. “I suspect my own will be in the athenaeum vault all night. We cannot afford to leave it unguarded now, and it will look poorly if we draw your men to that duty given how little love these people have for the Church. If we make it too obvious that we don’t trust them, they will want reasons.”

“You don’t trust them, though,” she said. “Why?”

It was a good question, because even removed from my first impressions of them by most of a day I didn’t know the answer. Why had I not looked on them as a way to multiply our labors? Dozens of researchers at work on our problem would surely solve it more quickly than my handful of companions. Their being Eyre’s rivals did not make them evil. And yet.... “A king once betrayed his allies to demons, Rose. Why did he do it?”

“The histories say it was fear,” she said, subdued. “Or jealousy. Or avarice.”

I glanced at her. “They don’t agree?”

“You are surprised?”

“No,” I said, because I knew how unreliable accounts of the past could be. And, “Yes,” because this was no minor matter. “I would have expected the Church to have the best answer, given how much they seem to have preserved.”

“What they preserved,” she said, “was the fact that demons will use the tool best suited to the person they are seducing. If that tool is fear, then they will frighten. If it is jealousy or avarice, they will speak poisoned words. If it is righteousness, then they will clothe their offerings in reason. They are kin to angels, my lord, dark siblings to the brightness of God’s messengers. They know our secret hearts. But we rarely know our own, much less the hearts of others.” She drew in a breath, let it out, shoulders dropping. “Our annals record that the king was seduced. They don’t know what tool the demons used to effect that seduction.”

I thought of the book awaiting me in the library. “Perhaps we will learn more soon.”

“If you do, my lord, I hope you will share forthwith.”

“I would be remiss otherwise,” I said. “But for now, I am an offense to nose and eye—”

“By all means.” Her mouth quirked. “Don’t let me keep you.”

The building into which I went, following Ivy, was not the dormitory I’d been expecting... but the stables. I walked past rows of drowsing horses, wondering if I’d come to the wrong place after all... and then heard humming from the end of the building, which drew me to the final stall; not a stall at all, but a loose box meant for bathing horses, from the sloped floor and the drainage ports. Some poor soul had been asked to drag an iron-clawed tub and several pails of fresh water suitable for humans into a place appropriate for washing animals, and for a fleeting moment I was back in the Archipelago, where human were kine and it would have been reasonable to drench them clean in a stable.

That was all the unease I had time for before the sight of Ivy’s naked shoulders made every other consideration dwindle in significance. She was in the bath, scrubbing her hair. Seeing me, she beamed. “Well, come in, then. It’s no good one of us being clean if the other isn’t.”

“Ivy…” I hesitated. “There’s not even a door!”

“Of course there’s not,” she said. “It’s a stable. People don’t take baths in stables.” She held out her hands. “Come, my love. Believe me when I say this is the most reliable method of securing our privacy I could devise.”

What could I say to that? Nothing. So I didn’t. After that, few words, but much laughter, laughter, and sighs, and, I confess, gasps. By the end of it we were somewhat cleaner, and Ivy relented in her other attentions to wash my back. “So much tension,” she said, fingers digging beneath my shoulderblade. I rolled my lip between my teeth to keep from groaning. “Did you learn to carry tension in your shoulders from your time as an invalid? Or is this new?”

“I fear I have always kept pain in my body,” I said. “I suppose it is too much to ask that I dispense with the habit now that the pain is harder to come by.”

Silence then, made all the more noticeable by the caress of her fingers on my skin, gone soft and slow. “Does it hurt? Healing from so much… damage.”

Did I want to tell her? And yet I had held back so much of myself from her for so long. I found I wished not to hide things from her. “Excruciating. But it passes, and then I live.”

“And this will end when we unmake the enchantment.”

I captured her hand in mine, kissed her soapy fingers. “I will remain difficult to hurt, my love. Do not fear on that account.”

“I don’t,” she murmured, resting her cheek on my nape. “But it is a situation I did not think to face in my life… being able to decide whether my husband will die or not.”

My skin prickled. “Oh, Ivy. Please.” I shuddered. “Please, do not go down that road. I have no desire to die untimely, but I have seen what immortality does to the spirit, the heart, the mind. If you love me, you will let me go to my rest when the time comes.”

“And you will have the same equanimity when I am dying?”

What a hateful thought. I rested my mouth against her fingers, closed my eyes. Inhaled the smell of soap, her skin. Tasted, very distantly, the sea in my mouth, and the wine of Amhric’s calling. My skin prickled up my sides. At last, I said, “I will be deeply aggrieved. But I hope I will have grace about it, and comfort you as you go home.”

Perhaps that was the right answer, for her voice became contemplative. “Do you think it is? Home, I mean. When we die.”

I glanced over my shoulder at her. “I would have thought this to be a topic more properly answered by you. You are more devout than I am.”

She smiled, cheeks dimpling. “That’s why I’m asking you. I know what I believe to be the truth already. But I didn’t think that you would believe.” She canted her head. “Do you?”

“I now know there to be angels,” I said, quiet. “If not angels, how not Heaven?” Kissing her knuckles, I said, “But God willing we are many years distant from that fate.”

“God willing,” she agreed.

The scritch-scratch that caught our attention sounded very much like footsteps. We froze, waiting... and then relaxed as a hand crept around the edge of the box, and then a nose.

“Almond,” I said, relieved. “We thought you were someone else.”

“No, Master,” she said. “May I come in?”

I glanced past my shoulder at Ivy, who nodded. “Go on, please.”

The genet slipped around the wall of the box. “I didn’t see you when I woke,” she said to me, eyes wide. “And I worried.”

“I’m fine,” I said. “And you are in need of a bath as well—”

Ivy was already stepping out of the tub, wrapping a towel around herself. “I’ll help, once I dry off.”

“Oh, Master, you needn’t! I can wash myself—”

“I needn’t, but I wish to,” I said firmly. “Come in, please.”

Did Ivy find it strange that I stayed in the water to scrub Almond? She did not seem to. I was grateful. I could not have named the position the genets held in my heart, and Almond in particular, but they were innocents, and I gave no more thought to being nude before one than I would have before a beast. The little whines of pleasure that escaped Almond were more than enough compensation for any inconvenience.

“Oh, we should have taken this off,” Ivy said, tugging at the collar’s buckle.

Almond yelped and touched her hand. “No, please!”

“Almond?” I said. “You don’t need it—”

“It belongs on me,” she said. “And I like it. Please, leave it.”

Ivy and I exchanged glances. She said, “All right, Almond. As you please. We will wash under it.”

“There is food out now, Master,” Almond said as we toweled her off. “Lord Guy has brought it into the study, though he complains that it is too quiet now without the other humans to agitate.”

“Lord Guy,” I repeated, bemused. “Have you called him thus yet?”

“No, Master?” The insides of her ears flushed. “I have not needed to talk to him. Will you come?”

“In a moment,” I said. “I’d like to speak with Ivy.”

She brightened. “Of course. I will make things ready for you.”

With her gone, Ivy said, wry, “Lord Guy.”

“And Lord Radburn, I assume. The collars...”

“I never thought to remove Emily’s or Serendipity’s.” She worried at her lower lip with her teeth. “It seemed too personal a topic to broach. I wanted to respect their privacy, as I would a normal person’s, in the hopes of acquainting them with the fact that they should expect such courtesies.”

“I will ask. For now, though....”

“For now, we return to our research.” She kissed me, and the skin she’d been abrading was warm and soft and reminded me too much of wounds. I quivered, hid it by resting my brow against hers.

“Research,” I agreed, and we dressed.

The scene in the athenaeum was much as I’d left it in the early afternoon, with my companions back at their studies, save for Eyre who was occupied aboveground with Doctor Carrington, from Chester’s explanation.

“How did they take it?” Ivy asked.

Chester rubbed an eye with the side of his hand. “About as one would expect. But they allowed themselves to be convinced and have gone to their beds, along with everyone else.” He looked up at me from under his brows. “It has been a bad evening’s work, I’m afraid.”

“I know,” I said. “Thank you for doing what you could to mitigate the damage.”

Radburn interjected, “Oh, fine. Thank him for the hard work of talking to Eyre’s friends. But do the people who deployed the mops get any kind words? No... of course not.”

“And now you know how most women feel about housework,” Ivy said as she slid back into the chair she’d vacated.

“Yes,” Guy said. “Continue in that vein. A good argument will get my blood flowing, keep me focused.”

“Just so long as your blood flow stays in your body,” Radburn muttered. “I’m done cleaning for the night.”

Ivy said, prim, “Some of us are trying to concentrate.”

Chester shook his head, but the group fell silent; a good sign. I glanced at my friends, then beckoned Kelu aside.

“Walk with me?”

“Do I have a choice?” she asked.

I considered her, found her ears sagging rather than pinned back to her skull. Not anger, then, but exhaustion, perhaps? Did she always feel compelled to fight so hard, and did it weary her? “Of course you have a choice. But I would be grateful if you were to agree.”

Her eyes flicked up, met mine through her white lashes. Then she sighed and padded out of the room into the now empty antechamber, with its dust-clogged air and neglected projects. I passed many books abandoned in mid-examination, wondered if any of them would entice their scholars back in the morning, or if they would find the uncanny events of the night too disturbing to want to resume their perlustrations.

“I hope this isn’t about me having to do something else,” she said, stopping to peer at one of the manuscripts spread on a table.

“You’re enjoying the work, then?”

“I like reading.” From her flattened ears, she expected mockery. She should have known better. “If it’s not about that, what do you need?”

“The collars,” I said. “I have never tried to remove one.”

“A good thing,” she said, picking up a set of tongs and tapping its ends together experimentally. “Since that would have used us up.”

My heart stumbled. “I beg your pardon?”

“The collars?” She set the tongs down and sniffed at one of the pages, wrinkled her nose. “Ugh, this thing is ancient. Makes me want to sneeze.” Rubbing her nose, she turned to me. “You do remember what we were made for, right?”

I grimaced. “Yes. I did not assume there to be an ornamental component to your use. If the immortality enchantment came with the demonic ability to comb energy out of living creatures, why make the genets with a... a....”

“Wrapper?” she suggested. “A convenient cover to keep the goods untainted until you’re ready to use them?”

“This is related somehow to your inability to use your own magical wells, isn’t it,” I said. “Somehow you’ve been designed in a knot, and the collar is the lock. Can your magic be forced out, the way it can out of elves and humans?”

Kelu shrugged. “You can try. But unless you take off the collar, the energy is bound up in us, and if you try to steal it, you fail. It dissipates. Or so they say when they sell us.”

It made a twisted sort of sense, if one’s aim was to prevent the use of the genets by anyone but those purchasing them. What a complex piece of enchantment that must have been... would that we could meet the sorcerer responsible for it! Undoing immortality would be child’s play for her, for a woman it must surely be if the blood magics were the province of female powers.

“What I don’t understand,” I said,“is why they would make it so that all your energy must be used at once. You cannot half-remove the collar, I imagine?”

Kelu eyed me.

“No, I thought not. But why? What if an elf wanted only a small sip of magic?” I said.

“Because elves don’t tend to be the prudent ‘small sips’ sorts,” she said. “Or have you forgotten? They want a draught, they want it all at once.”

And all this time, I had been sleeping, walking, talking, brushing the genets, and they were one flipped buckle away from dissolution? “There must be a way to remove the collars without destroying you.”

“If there is a way we don’t know about it,” Kelu said with another shrug. “Maybe someone in Suleris did, but I wouldn’t depend on it. Why would they engineer us any differently? We’re supposed to be disposable. If someone accidentally uses up their genet, Suleris just sells them a new one.” She studied me, and her ears dipped. “You really don’t understand, even now, do you. None of this is real to you.” She tapped the tag hanging from the collar, her claw eliciting a dull clink from it. “You want to know why I haven’t taken a ‘real name’ yet? It’s because my name’s still true. I’m a slave, ‘Master,’ and I will be until I fall apart... because some elf planned me to do that before I could grow old enough for them to get tired of looking at me. When you can take this collar off me, then you can give me a real name. Until then, I’m not going to fool myself… and neither should you.”

She did not wait for me to answer, but stalked back to the library. I wondered if she took such liberties with me because she knew I would not punish her, as the Pearls had suggested… or if she courted her own death. Was her life so heinous that she longed for an ending?

I remembered being in that much pain. My heart contracted with pity. For her. For myself. For all of us, that we must stumble through life with so little guidance.

Eyre was right. There was no living without others, and no joy without those relationships being right. I didn’t know how I could make it right for the genets, but I was once again resolved to try.

I had no sooner re-entered the library when Chester was pressing a book into my hands. “Here, Locke, you need to see this.”

I had a fleeting impression of bright colors, elven glyphs, and words I could read before I allowed him to guide me into a chair. His hands pressed my shoulders down until I sat and then he leaned over me, turning the pages. “Look! This… this is a history of the origin of species!”

He stopped on a page faced with an illustration, painted with a deft hand: a road drenched in lavender shadows proceeding down a moss-green hill. At its pinnacle, on either side, stood two slim winged creatures, one white and the other scarlet. They oversaw a procession of silhouettes heading down.

Behind the hill, the entire page had been gilt. Shifting it made it shimmer in the firelight.

“Here,” Chester said, tracing the glyphs with a finger. “This is the story of how God made the elves to be stewards of the land, which had known too many visits from demons prior to their creation. And this… this is the interesting part.” He tapped a sentence I couldn’t read. “It says that they were intended to ensure the proper balance of magic and earth, sky and well, so that angels and demons might be at peace in Heaven, and feel no need to come to earth.”

Radburn looked up from his own book. “That makes it sound as if demons are supposed to exist.”

“What if they are?” Guy said. He tapped his pen. “What if one must have them, the way day and night are both necessary?”

“Night is not evil,” Ivy said. “So you would suggest that demons aren’t either.”

“Maybe they’re not,” Guy said. “Maybe they merely predate upon us because we are too weak to oppose them.”

“Predation becomes evil when it is inflicted on thinking beings,” Ivy said. “We eat pheasant because the pheasant can’t feel existential grief over its plight. But we execute those who kill other human beings.”

“Pheasants can feel pain,” Radburn said. “Isn’t that enough? Maybe we’re tricking ourselves into thinking a moral justification exists for a behavior we enjoy.”

“Pheasants don’t have souls,” Guy said dismissively.

“The elves don’t think humans have souls,” Kelu said. “So is them using up humans all right in your book?”

“Of course not,” Guy said. “There is a measurable difference between a pheasant and a human.”

“Yes,” Kelu said. “One of them succeeds at killing the other, and the other succeeds at dying.”

Ignoring them, Chester turned the page. “There is an account here in Lit as well, if you wish to read it. Each page has translation, which begs the question of its intended audience… but before we come to that question, here, look at this.” A few more pages, and then he stopped on one of a creature rendered wholly in white paint and gilding, its arms held out to either side as if in welcome. Before it, on their knees, were two elves: one male, one female, bent as if to receive a benediction from the hands extended alongside their heads.

“Here is the account of how the elves received the Angel’s Gift,” Chester continued, his excitement palpable. “That is the gift of magic.”

“An account,” Radburn said, skeptical. “A historical one?”

“Folklore,” Guy murmured.

“There are demons in the world,” I said. “There must then be angels.”

“Have you seen one of these demons?” Guy asked.

“No,” I said. “But I have felt them.”

A pause. I could sense their gazes. Then Guy said, “Very well, then. But the existence of demons does not require the existence of angels, no matter what it might imply. Ultimate evil can exist without ultimate good.”

“Then where is the day to the night of demonkind?” I asked.

“Maybe we’re it,” Radburn said. “Maybe ultimate evil has to be countered with crippled and well-intentioned good.”

“I hope not,” Kelu said. “Or you’re all going to die.”

Into that pause, Almond said, “Angels do exist. I have dreamed them.”

If any of my friends had dared to tell her that her dreams were fictions, I would have had strong words for them. But it was Kelu who said, “Dreams are just dreams, Almond. They’re not true. They’re just things that come into your mind when you’re asleep.”

Said Almond, quiet, “But I am a pheasant who dreams of angels. Where would a soulless creature, born to die, come up with such dreams?”

Kelu stared at her, jaw agape, and this Almond weathered in silence, as she weathered all our shocked stares.

“Oh Almond,” Ivy said softly. She held out her arms, and the genet padded to her, obedient. When she rested her head on Ivy’s lap I saw the glint of firelight off the collar’s metal fixtures and suppressed a tremor that Chester felt but did not comment on. He cleared his throat instead and turned the page to the Lit translation.

“Here,” he said, low. “It gives the account. One could use the book to learn both languages. The words are relatively simple. There are other tales here… about the first king and prince. You might find those of interest.”

“I imagine I will,” I said.

He left me to it, and we retreated into our islands of silence, broken only by the shifting of pages or chairs and the scratch of pens on paper. I could have mistaken it for one of the lectures at Leigh, had I closed my eyes… save that I was not in discomfort. Pain had defined my life for so long that it stunned me that I could no longer recall what it had been like to live thus. The memory had receded, become someone else’s. I hoped to God and all the angels that I would remember how to persist through its ravages when it came again, because I could not help but believe that it would.

I applied myself to Chester’s book. Eventually, Almond came to me and rested her head against my thigh, and I stroked her and tried not to grieve for her plight.

Eyre returned some time later, looking so haggard that I half-stood at the sight of him. He waved me down. “It’s nothing,” he said. “Not what you assume. They accept that an elf out of legend must have magic.”

“Did they?” Ivy asked, surprised.

“Once they pushed through their initial revulsion—no offense, my student, it was... a gruesome sight. But no, all that was left, as expected, was politics. What are we to do about the hall. Who should explore it. Whether you would consider it yours, and therefore off limits to study.” He smiled crookedly. “I had hoped a discovery this large would mollify Emery and Hugh—there is surely enough credit to pass around now—but they are anxious and belligerent. As usual, success makes them more aggressive, not less.” He sat next to the fire. “Have you learned anything of note?”

“I have,” Ivy said. “This book is fascinating.”

“The one that told you about blood magics and men?” Chester asked from his desk.

“Just so.” She consulted her notes, then sat back, resting a hand on one knee. “It is a book of theory, and intended for humans if I am reading right. An explanatory text about the magic of their elders. The explanation your captain gave us, Morgan, was correct in an observational sense, but not in a theoretical sense. Women and men do use magic differently, but the context for those differences is broader than suggested. In basic, the former affect creatures… the latter, things.”

“Oh God,” Radburn said, putting his head in his hands. “We are back to pheasants.”

“Hush,” she said and continued. “There are two spheres: the self, and others. And two levels: to change or affect, and to create. All magic works in one sphere and on one level when cast spontaneously, but to manage more than one usually requires planning—”

“Enchantments,” Chester said.

“Precisely.”

“So the enchantment that bound the elves,” I said. “How is that an enchantment, if it affects others? That is one sphere, one level?”

“That part I don’t understand yet,” she admitted. “It may be because the effect on others persists past their death, and past them into the entirety of the species. I must read further.”

“How does that work?” Radburn frowned. “If men can affect only things, how can they have a sphere devoted to the self?”

“The example they used,” Ivy said, flipping through the book, “is that of a foreign object embedded in the body.” She showed him the page, and he paled. When she pointed it at us, we found a very detailed rendering of a spear in someone’s gut. “The spear, when it pierces the body, becomes part of the self, and can be affected. A man would remove it by impelling the spearhead to move back out of the body. A woman, by healing the flesh beneath it until it is pushed out.”

“Bizarre,” Guy said.

“Now here’s the interesting thing.” She paged backwards and stopped near the end. “As this is a text intended to educate humanity on the wherefores of elven magic, there is a section explaining the elven kingship.” She lifted her eyes to meet mine across the room, then again she looked down. “It says here that there is a third sphere, that of magic, and this is reserved solely to the royal blood. And that a woman may never be either king or prince, because the ability to affect flesh and soul when combined with the ability to manipulate magic would be a tyranny past which there would be no returning.”

Had not Amhric told me the same? He would not kill, could not with his power. This then was an extension of a divine natural philosophy: proof, perhaps, that there was a plan.

“It continues to say that the kingship is passed from one king to the next, either by consent or by death,” Ivy said. “And that the prince’s power flows from the king’s, as the people’s does. So perhaps that is why you find yourself deprived of ability, Morgan. Your king is bound, and so you are also.”

“Damnable thing,” Radburn said. “They fettered you all but good.”

“And yet,” I murmured, thinking of the battle on the strand of Kesína, “I can compel. And Amhric can receive.”

“Perhaps this is a ramification of the loss of the kingship,” Chester offered. “Since no king has granted that power to your brother, nor died recently....”

“But a king did die,” Ivy said. “If the text is correct, that should have transferred the power.”

“Did a king die?” Eyre asked suddenly.

“Good point. You’re all immortal now,” Guy said. “Who was the last elven king? Where did he go?”

“The last elven king fell defending humanity here, on the battlefield just outside our door,” I said. “And I cannot imagine that he would not have returned to address the many ills elven society has suffered in the wake of the curse, if he yet lived.”

“Besides,” Kelu said. “He was followed by an army of revenants. They did fine killing other elves by ripping them apart. I’m sure a king’s limbs come off his body just as easily as a normal elf’s.”

“Kelu!” Almond whispered, ears flipping back.

Kelu shrugged and returned to her book.

“Maybe it’s the enchantment that is binding your power,” Ivy said to me. “That is the only other explanation I can think of, if you are meant to be more powerful than the average elf.”

“So I have been told,” I said. “But as you see.” I held up my hands.

“Anyone else, then?” Chester asked. “I’m still knee-deep in history, trying to locate any other word of major enchantments.”

“Me too,” Radburn said, holding up his book. “A history of Vigil itself. What it was like, how it was built. And about the three dragons who lived here.”

“Dragons,” Ivy said with a shudder.

“Just think of Morgan’s drake, but bigger,” Radburn said with a grin.

“Morgan’s drake is small and biddable,” Ivy said, repressively, picking up her pen. “I cannot imagine either of those qualities attaining to a dragon.”

“They certainly didn’t,” Radburn said. “Fortunately there were few of them. Never more than twenty or so the book claims.”

“This one does also,” Chester said. “The dragons were never meant to be numerous, and it was rare for more than one or two of them to maintain alliances with smaller folk at all. To have three in residence here would have been a coup for whomever wooed them here.”

“My book,” I said, petting its cover, “says that dragons were the glories of solitude made manifest, and made poor companions to elvenkind, and for this humanity was created.”

They stared at me until Radburn said, “You jest.”

“I do not,” I said. “The legend says—if you will not believe it to be history—that elves were stewards, who lived to maintain the land that demons and angels overflew.”

Chester held up a hand. “You mean to tell me that elves were serfs.”

I shook my head. “I don’t know what I mean to tell you. The words are spare, Chester. I can only tell you how it sounds to me from the reading, which is that the elves were gardeners of a world God made, to which angels and demons both might visit when given cause. The angels gave the Gift to the elves when it became clear that demonkind did not intend to share the world with angels or elves. But the ability to work magic also conferred the ability to love—” I spread my hands to stay their protestations, “—I only report what I have read—and so the elves felt grief for there were few of them and a great deal of land, and the dragons did not rebuff them but were not fast friends to them. They asked for companions of an angel....”

“And an angel made us?” Chester asked, incredulous.

“The annals do not say,” I said. “They report that one morning elves woke and found humanity established among them, and they were glad.”

Ivy eyed my book. “I find all of that difficult to believe.”

“Remember,” Eyre said. “All accounts are written by a person, and that person has biases through which the account is filtered.”

“Like Morgan with his glasses,” Radburn said.

“This account of humankind as gift to elves to save them from loneliness reflects something,” Eyre said. “The beliefs of the time, the beliefs of the writer. It may even be fictional, or a political statement.”

“And no way to tell,” I said, paging through the volume. “There’s not even a byline for the author. One presumes it to be an elf because of the content, but....”

“Without a human book to give another perspective to the tale, we might never know the truth of it,” Chester said.

“Perhaps,” Eyre said, “that is the human book.”

I traced the spine with the pad of my thumb. “Why then is it in this library? Why the sealed vault? Books meant for humans?”

“Maybe that’s why they sealed it,” Ivy said. “They didn’t want us to have it again. We cut you off. You cut us off.”

“It has to be more than jealousy and bitterness,” Chester said.

“Must it?” Radburn asked. “Jealousy and bitterness are powerful forces.”

“People do act irrationally,” Guy agreed. “Even elves.”

“Especially elves,” I muttered. But I thought of Chester’s comment on the ride here, about how we yearned toward the knowledge of a lost amity. Did the elves also long for the lack of humanity? Did some elf write this volume out of love for his companion race? Dare I hope for such a thing: evidence that we were meant to live in peace, rather than as predator and prey, or estranged family?

“I take it that no one has found anything about the curse itself,” Eyre said, and we all looked at one another, waiting. When no one volunteered, Eyre nodded. “Then we must resume our work.”

“We must,” I said. “But we must also eat, or we will have no strength to press on.”

It was something of a triumph that we were able to continue our work long past the normal hour, for it proved we remained of a single mind when it came to the pursuit of knowledge... and I was glad of the camaraderie and shared purpose. We did break to eat, but we didn’t leave the room, even to sleep; Almond and Serendipity found blankets to drape over whomever had fallen to slumbering in a chair or at a desk. I read quickly rather than deeply, hoping to find an account of the actual historic act, but of that I encountered not even a mention: had the elves excised the event from their books in the hopes of preventing its reoccurrence? Or had the athenaeum been sealed before anyone could write of it? I could imagine being less frustrated at how much knowledge we now had access to, and yet how little of it relevant... but only just.

And always, in the back of my mouth, I could taste wine, and blood. When my head dropped into my folded arms and I dozed, I heard the clash of swords, smelled sweat, panted through the urgency of a battle I feared was coming closer. One of these dreams seemed particularly urgent, and when I woke it was because I’d been lanced with guilt and relief and the falling wave of a victory won against terrible odds, but not completely. I felt a ghost of heat on the insides of my thighs, as if I clasped them to muscled sides and felt the great barrel of the drake rising and falling.

Only Ivy and Eyre were awake when I lifted my head. My mentor cocked a brow.

“He’s coming,” I said softly. “But the danger follows.”

“Do you know what it is yet?” Ivy asked.

I shook my head.

“God be with us, then,” Eyre said, and returned to his study.

But I found I could not remain in the chair afterwards, and no one seemed surprised when I excused myself to go up the stairs and to the surface, where it was somehow still the same night. One of the Church’s knights espied me and vanished, no doubt to give report of me. I waited, contemplating the stars scattered across the cobalt sward of the sky, and not long afterward Rose joined me. She looked out with me, the chill autumn wind caressing us both.

“You are facing north,” she observed.

“Yes.”

“Because you intend to go there next.”

“Yes,” I said, though I didn’t recollect making the decision.

She nodded. “We will accompany you wherever you go, my lord.”

“Thank you,” I murmured. Recalling what I’d come for, I said, “The King is on his way.”

“And Last?”

“I presume they are together, but...” I summoned the impressions, sorted through them as they glided over my skin with phantom emotions, like layers of scarves. “...they may not be.”

“Either way,” she said, and left it thus: a promise I felt not at all worthy of. Who was I, other than a man who could heal back from his own death? If I had been fated to undo the enchantment of the elves—if in fact Kelu had been correct and the fate of all I held dear rested on my ability to read books—then why was it taking so long to put the pieces together? I could sense the magnitude of the puzzle as well as my failure to grasp even the size of it. I feared that state would continue to obtain, and we would be laboring here when the demons came for us with laughter on their lips and anguish cupped beneath their wings.

I had been putting off the book that mattered.

I sighed. “I return.”

She nodded. “When your people tire, send them up. They will find their work impeded if they subsist solely on naps caught in chairs.”

“No doubt,” I said, and inclined my head to her before returning downstairs. The antechamber now echoed with the silence that no doubt had characterized it for centuries before Vigil’s scholars had pierced it... I felt a melancholy for those abandoned books, and little saved me from it but that I heard, now and then, a murmur from the vault where I was bound.

I rejoined my fellows, picked up The Countenance of Demons, and resumed the task.

The study of demons was as grim a thing as I’d anticipated. What I hadn’t expected, however, was how very like the studies of folktales it would prove. The book I’d chosen was a slender volume, and it involved the identification of demons, their powers, their methods of work. It contained illustrations that seemed to consist of ink poured over pages, or spattered. It made frequent references to fear and guilt and doubt. It was more a piece of poetry than a guide. And yet, it was strewn throughout with dire warnings and adjurations on how one must behave in order to prevent the incursion or depredations of demons.

Perhaps it was the earnest presentation of the text that caused me to find the one fact in it that could stun me into speaking aloud completely believable.

“Demons cannot die.”

My faithful paused in their own studies. “I beg your pardon?” Chester asked.

“Demons,” I repeated. “It says here they cannot be killed by violence. They have no form that can be pierced with sword or lance. They bleed, but they cannot die.”

“Like you,” Ivy said, stunned.

The words rang in me, twice, thrice, like an echo from a very great distance. The enchantment had not only given us claws like demons… it had turned us into creatures like demons.

“So how does one prevail against them?” Radburn asked, frowning. “The Church has spent centuries training its knights. One presumes that effort was predicated on the notion that demons could be destroyed.”

“They’ve trained to kill the dead,” Chester said. “And the dead do need swords to be destroyed.”

“Swords charged with magic,” I murmured.

“Which the Church knows about,” Chester said.

“Sooth.” I drew in a breath. “It says that demons can be banished, and that once banished they must be invited back into the mortal realm in order to take form there. Otherwise they exist as... accentuations of our own doubts and negative thoughts. This is also the tool they use to manipulate us into doing their will.”

“So how does this banishment work?” Radburn asked.

“Let me guess,” Guy drawled. “A kind word, a good deed, an act of great sacrifice, love.”

I cleared my throat and said nothing.

“Oh no,” Ivy said, laughing. “Don’t tell us that’s what it says.”

“It does, yes.” I eyed Guy. “If with rather less mockery.”

“I tell you I am so surprised,” Guy said, but he was smiling, and resigned, I smiled back. “Be candid, Morgan. You’d be lost without someone to inject a little skepticism into your life.”

“I’m afraid I find skepticism difficult to maintain in the face of immortal enchantments, fairy tale royalty, and apparently demons that can grow to any size and devour whole armies.”

“That part must be fantasy,” Ivy said, frowning. “If they can’t be killed by mortal sword, why can they kill us? Does it say?”

“They don’t have to,” I said. “When they arrive, apparently all fall before them in abject terror. Some even die of it, or so it says here.”

“Less an attack,” Eyre murmured, surprising us, “than a betrayal. Of ourselves.”

“Yes,” I said. “Yes, just so.”

“So what protection against that can be fielded?” Chester asked, irritated. “A force that can cause your own heart to burst from fear?”

“A pure spirit, obviously,” Guy said.

“God save us,” Radburn exclaimed. “We shall all die. Even Ivy now that you’ve debauched her, Morgan.”

“As I recall,” Ivy said tartly, “It was I who did the debauching. And some convincing it took as well.”

“Ivy!” I exclaimed.

“You see?” she said, unperturbed. “He still blushes to speak of it.”

“Then he’s the only pure heart among us,” Radburn said with a laugh. “Ivy, you are horrid.”

“I am exactly as horrid as any of you, or very probably less, as my embraces were inspired by love and not wasted on strangers found in some whorehouse.”

“I don’t think purity of heart is measured entirely in sexual abstinence,” Eyre said dryly. “Or the absence of purity would be a requirement for life to continue and somehow I doubt God intended us to pass through the gates of sin in order to perpetuate His creation.” He glanced at me. “Folklore would suggest the pure heart is one that passes through trial into compassion for others, and generosity in the response to their suffering. What does your book say?”

“That to banish them again requires sacrifice,” I said, quiet. “Or demonstration of a great love.”

“Ah, then, we’ll be safe,” Guy said. “No shortage of that in this group, eh?”

Radburn snorted. “You mean to say that Ivy and Morgan will survive and the rest of us are doomed.”

“Love is not solely romantic,” Ivy said. “But I wouldn’t expect any of you to admit to it.”

“It also says,” I continued, scanning the text, “That magic is of great aid, as it assists with resisting the attacks of demons. Those attacks being the betrayals of which Professor Eyre spoke.”

“We have been remiss with the lessons since arriving here.” Radburn closed his book, frowning. “Perhaps we should resume?”

“Doing so would alert our hosts as to the existence of magic,” Chester said. “Granted, Locke’s dramatic return from the dead has no doubt put the notion in their heads, but I thought the idea was to remain discreet about our ability.”

“And yet, as you said, they can hardly be unaware that the world is now rather more mysterious than they assumed,” Ivy said.

“More importantly,” Kelu interrupted, “It’s ridiculously late at night and they’re supposedly all sleeping. How are they going to find out?”

“It’s true,” I said. “The Vessel and her knights are maintaining their vigil, but I doubt anyone else is.”

“Here’s a thought, though,” Ivy said. “Why not invite them?” She lifted her hands. “I know what you are about to say. But how better to bind them to us than to offer them something they want dearly but can receive no other way than at our hands? We could win them forever with that gift, I am sure.”

“There is something to that,” Radburn murmured.

“Assuming the professor’s colleagues don’t take it into their heads to resent our knowing something they don’t, again,” Chester said. He glanced at Eyre. “Do you suppose they will want it more than they would hate us for giving it to them?”

“How quickly you learn their habits,” Eyre said with a sad smile. “But no. I think this is one prize that they will care little as to how it is acquired, so long as they might have it. The idea has merit, and not just because it would ensure their loyalties... but because it might also protect them from demons, and is that not our duty?”

“We might prevent the descent yet,” I said. “It is my duty and all my aim to do so.”

“And yet,” Eyre murmured.

“We are not living someone else’s folktale yet,” I said to him firmly. I turned to Ivy. “However, much as I like your plan... it would be in vain, as it will fail to affect the two people most hostile to our cause. Neither of the professor’s male colleagues have any magical potential at all.”

“What?” Chester said, startled. “How is that possible? They were born in Troth, weren’t they?”

“They were, yes,” Eyre said.

“Were they aristocracy, then, to eschew the rituals of the common man?” Ivy asked, frowning.

Eyre tapped his fingers on his folio. “They were, yes. Though I was sure they’d attended at least in their youth. When we were young it was not quite as politic to avoid the Church.” He glanced at me. “You are certain of their disability?”

I tapped my glasses. “Not only are they not glowing with the inner fire I associate with it, they have something in opposition: a darkness.”

“Darkness?” Ivy asked, wary.

“Not just an absence,” I agreed. “Though most of the others have that absence. What I see in Roland and Powlett is something active.”

“Demons,” Almond whispered, and I caressed her to still her shivering.

“That can’t be,” Eyre said, “or Morgan would know. But still... both Emery and Hugh? And the rest of the team here... not a single one of them?”

“Maybe scholarship extinguishes the irrationality necessary to accept magic,” Guy said. “And the only reason we’ve been exempt is through contamination with a prime source.”

Radburn snorted. Ignoring them, I said to Eyre, “Not a one, save Carrington.”

“Mary,” he said, and sighed. “Such an opportunity lost.”

“We could train her, though?” Ivy said. “I know the Vessel would be delighted to have another female student....”

“Her and only her among all her peers?” Chester said. “Be reasonable, Ivy. The jealousy would be incandescent. If our purpose is to unite them in allegiance to our cause, awarding only one of them the teaching they will all desperately desire will completely contravene our purpose.”

“He’s right,” Eyre said, sighing. “We can’t just teach one of them. No matter how hard she tries to remain discreet, she’ll reveal herself, and then... then we really will have trouble.”

In silence we contemplated the future that could have been had fate been kinder. But we had what we had to work with. I said, “You should all go up and have your training from the Vessel. If you are the only ones who can learn, then your duty to do so is all the more paramount.”

“I could use a stretch,” Guy said.

“Go see the stars,” I said. “The evening is beautiful. I’ll tarry, and see if I can finish this book. Her methods don’t work for me, anyway, with the enchantment’s trammeling.”

This suggestion met with general agreement, and my companions rose then, stretched stiff limbs, and one by one passed out of the room. Ivy paused to have a kiss of me, which I gave her gladly. She no longer smelled of her violet soap, but her hair had its own perfume, one that belonged to her and her alone, a greenscent like something growing and bright. Perhaps it was part of woman’s magic, expressing itself through her skin with the regular practices. Whatever it was, I loved it.

“You’ll be fine by your lonesome here with the echoes of history?” she asked after we parted.

“You won’t be gone that long,” I said, amused and fond.

“So long as you’re sure.” She sighed. Then looked over her shoulder at the door. “Don’t think we don’t see you, Chester St. Clary. You are loitering why? Do you believe me to need a chaperone?”

Chester had indeed stayed behind. He gave up being unobtrusive and joined us. “I trust Morgan with your honor, Ivy.”

“Do you?” she asked, surprised. “I had thought you would disapprove of our actions.”

“Me—but not Douglas or Du Roi?” He lifted his brows.

“Guy and Radburn gad about town, getting drunk and pawing women of questionable virtue,” Ivy said dismissively. “They are hardly paragons of virtue. You, though, are your parents’ model son. Your every move with Minda has been overseen by anxious aunts and dowager cousins to ensure not the first hint of impropriety. Moreover, I believe that to be so because you honestly wish to protect women from the predations of men, who would tumble them and then leave them penniless and with child.” She tilted her head. “So yes, I expected you to have an opinion on the matter, one not necessarily shared by two confirmed bachelors with no need to wed.”

Chester looked from her to me, then back to her. Quietly, he said, “Morgan is no predator.”

“No, but he is no innocent either.”

“No one is who lives long enough.” Chester shook his head. “I’m not here because I believe you to require escort to the surface.”

“Then why—”

He met my eyes. “Last gave me a charge.”

Of course. What could I say to such a thing, if he believed it his duty to guard me? And yet to think of Chester falling to a demon because he failed in his lessons.... “You must go up,” I said. “You serve me better if you learn to use magic to defend yourself against my enemies.”

“You have more enemies than those that must be defeated with a virtuous heart and a familiarity with cantrips.”

“And all of them can be overcome by the sword you already know how to ply,” I agreed. “But against demons and the walking dead you have no recourse save sorcery. Chester—I will keep the genets with me, and you will be gone all of an hour. That hour may save your life—and mine—in the future. Go, please.”

Ivy touched his arm. “Come.” Her smile flickered, quick and bright, over her mouth, though her eyes remained grave. “We love him, we two. We should not fail him. And I sense we have little time.”

Chester glanced at her, startled, but her touch pacified him. “You,” he said to me. “Don’t go over the balcony again.”

“Trust me, once was enough,” I said, pained. That won me a chuckle, and their reluctant removal from my presence.

The darkling shadow that came to me before the echo of their quiet conversation had a chance to fade did not surprise me. “Go with them,” I said to Emily before she could ask. “I know you’re fond of Ivy.”

The genet flipped her ears back in as close to an expression of chagrin as her training permitted. “She has been kind to me.”

“Kelu and Almond will keep me company. And Serendipity, if I can find her.” I tilted my head. “Where is she, do you know?”

“Looking at things,” Emily said. “She likes looking at things, now that she can.”

Who could blame her? A life in a cage did not grant one much opportunity to experience anything new. Only the weather, and what joy was there in that when one was also subject to it? How far the two Pearls had come from that resignation, that Serendipity could feel comfortable indulging her curiosity, and Emily could stand here with her slim straight shoulders, daring to want something I had not told her to want. Her little pine frond had been reduced to a brittle curl of branch, but she was still wearing it. I smiled, and set a hand on her shoulder. “Follow, and learn, if you wish.”

“Thank you, Master,” she said, with a quick rub of her cheek against my jaw, and then she was gone.

From her position, half-hidden in the inglenook, Kelu muttered, “Well, now you’ve done it. Left yourself completely alone here? With us for company?”

“You and Almond have served me for company well in the past,” I said. “I’m not sorry to be with the two of you now.”

“She’s asleep.”

“She’s still good company to me asleep, and you speak enough for both of you,” I said, amused.

Kelu snorted. “So now what?”

“Now,” I said, and drew in a breath. “I study.”