My heart stops.

‘They’re already here,’ she repeats.

Her voice sounds dreamy, distant, as if it’s coming from far away.

‘They’re beautiful,’ she breathes. ‘Pearl, they’re so beautiful.’

‘They’re not beautiful,’ I tell her fiercely. ‘They want to kill you, Phil. And I need you to fight.’

‘They want me to go with them.’

‘Don’t you dare.’

‘You don’t get to tell me what to do, Pearl,’ she says, her voice calm, measured.

There’s not a hint of anger in it. Not the barest hint.

Oh God. Have they – have they already –

I remember what it felt like to be stabbed. I remember what it felt like to stab the scalpel into Julian’s skin.

I’m going to be sick. I’m definitely going to be sick.

‘Phil, listen to me,’ I say desperately. ‘Do you still have your heart?’

‘What do you mean, do I still have my heart? Of course I do.’

She sounds annoyed. Annoyed is like angry, right? And if she still has her own rage, they haven’t eaten it yet. They haven’t killed her yet.

‘I’m going to go with them.’

‘Wait!’ I say. ‘There – are there six of them?’

‘Yes.’

‘Do you –’ I swallow, my throat suddenly dry, because if this doesn’t work, I am out of options and out of plans and out of time. ‘Do you know one of them?’

‘Yes,’ she says, the dreamy quality starting to seep back into her voice. ‘I know him.’

‘Give him the phone.’

‘He doesn’t want to talk to you. He says he doesn’t care about you any more.’

‘He will care, when he knows what I have. Give him the phone.’

When he comes on the line, I want to slap myself in the forehead. I might have done, if I wasn’t worried that the force of the slap might shatter me into a million pieces.

Of course it was him. Of course it was. How on earth did I not realise it was him?

‘Pearl,’ Mr Hunter purrs. ‘I don’t have time for you right now.’

There are so many things I want to say. There are so many things I want to shout. There is so much rage in me, so much feeling that it’s going to burst like one of the berries on the vine in fairyland, and my vision is swimming, and I’m shaking so hard I’m worried I might actually, literally, not-even-a-little-bit-metaphorically fall apart.

But I don’t.

I keep my voice steady.

‘I have your heart,’ I say.

He is silent, and I know I have him then, because Mr Hunter would never, ever be silent if I spoke like that to him. You don’t question Mr Hunter. You don’t talk back to Mr Hunter. You sit there and let him shout at you. You don’t fight back.

‘Without your heart, you’ll be a Rider forever,’ I go on. ‘You’ll never die, but you won’t be alive. You’ll be at their mercy, doing whatever they want you to do.’

‘Pearl,’ he growls, a warning note in his voice.

‘I’ll destroy it if I have to,’ I say. ‘If that’s what it takes to keep Phil safe. If I destroy it, you’ll need to find a whole new Rider before you can come near her.’

‘The Unseelie have bound us and they would provide,’ he replies. ‘They would come to us and it is likely they would choose Philippa to ride. We can always find another ironheart.’

There are, like, thirty-seven threats in that statement that I don’t have time to be terrified by. ‘But I can give you your heart back,’ I say.

Silence.

Yes. Yes. I’ve got this.

‘I can heal you. I can bring you back to life.’

He laughs, dark, humourless. ‘None can do that.’

‘Finn can,’ I say. ‘He has healing hands.’

Silence again.

‘Bring Phil to me here, at the Summer Door,’ I say. ‘And I’ll put your heart back in your chest and make it beat again.’

More silence.

‘And if I’m wrong,’ I press on, ‘or if I’m lying, then you’ll be right here. Six Riders, an ironheart, and a Seelie prince. You do the maths. You can’t lose.’

He hangs up.

I manage to stumble three steps before I throw up.

‘Pearl –’ Finn says.

‘New plan,’ I say, wiping the back of my hand over my mouth. Spine straight, Linford. Head high. You can win. You can win. ‘So it turns out Mr Hunter is the Rider, but we can still do this. We can still pull this off. Julian’s still unconscious, right?’

‘Yes,’ Cardy replies.

‘Good. You and Holly get him out of here. Tam and Emily too. Get as far away as you can. If this goes wrong, you don’t want to be anywhere nearby.’

‘We can’t carry all three of them,’ Holly says.

‘Then leave Emily.’

‘No!’ Tam exclaims from his position on the ground. He tries to push himself to his feet, but it’s like a giant hand is holding him down. ‘Don’t. Please. She is not Seelie royalty but she is Gentry and she is the bride of a prince, and they will kill her as soon as look at her.’

‘Fine. Whatever. Take Emily. Leave Tam. I don’t really care. But get out of here.’

‘Whatever you’re planning, Pearl, you don’t have to do it alone,’ Cardy says. ‘We’re with you.’

‘Speak for yourself,’ Holly says, grabbing the end of Emily’s chain and starting to drag the ashy lump of her body across the ground. ‘I’m going. Are you coming?’

‘Go, Cardy,’ I say. ‘If this goes wrong, I want to know you lived, because someone will have to keep fighting.’

He nods. Finn and I help him drape Julian’s unconscious body over his shoulders, and then he and Holly disappear into the trees.

My hands come away sticky with Julian’s blood. I wipe them reflexively on my shirt, but it’s already covered in blood, so it doesn’t help.

God, Linford, how weak is your stomach? Why do you want to throw up every time something scares you even a little bit? Pull yourself together.

‘You want to fill me in on the plan?’ Finn says.

‘Same as before,’ I say, swallowing and swallowing and swallowing, trying to get the taste of bile out of the back of my throat. ‘Just sub in Hunter for Julian. I cut him open and put his heart back in his chest. You heal him. If we just killed Hunter, they’d find a new Rider, but if we bring him back to life, he’s still one of them but with a moral compass and his own mind and they won’t be able to come after you or me or Phil – or –’

‘Hey,’ he says, as I gulp back sobs. ‘It’s all right.’

‘It’s not,’ I say. ‘It’s really not.’

He nods. He knows. I know he knows. But I let him hug me and kiss the top of my head and we both pretend that we can comfort each other for a moment.

But then I pull away. ‘Grab the heart,’ I tell him. ‘I need to find the scalpel.’

It’s dirty when I find it, of course, nothing like the pristine sterile instrument I had Cardy swipe from his mum’s work. There are bits of grass stuck to it, and it’s still slippery with blood.

I can’t clean it on my clothes. They’re filthy. And Finn’s got blood all over him too, Julian’s as well as his own.

I use Tam’s shirt instead. ‘Sorry,’ I say.

His laugh is so devoid of humour that I think it crosses the line into some kind of negative space of anti-humour. ‘This is the thing that you’re sorry for?’

‘Tam,’ Finn says, ‘get up and walk away.’

It’s horrible, honestly. And maybe, on a less dramatic night, I’d have some feelings about seeing Tam jerked upright like a marionette on strings and walking jerkily away. But I am too full of feelings right now to have room for Tam.

‘If he didn’t hate me before, he sure does now,’ Finn murmurs.

‘We can worry about that tomorrow,’ I say. ‘For now, we need to worry about how the hell we’re going to distract the other five Riders while I put Hunter’s heart back in his chest.’

‘I’ll do it.’

‘How?’

‘I’ll work it out.’

‘That’s not a plan.’

‘So, what, you’re going to distract them? At the same time as you’re performing a sneaky bit of open-heart surgery?’

‘Well, what are you going to do?’

‘Figure something out once I know what we’re dealing with! Because I don’t know about you, but I don’t have any clue what Riders are like!’

‘Hint: they want to kill you. And if you try and distract them by –’

‘– letting them kill me? How big an idiot do you think I am, Linford?’

‘I don’t think you’re an idiot, but –’

‘– oh, so you just don’t trust me.’

‘Of course I trust you! But – God, Finn, can we not have this fight right now?’

He subsides, but I know he’s still fuming. He’s shaking. Or maybe it’s me shaking. Or we’re both shaking. Or the world’s shaking.

The world is definitely shaking. Something’s coming.

We’re out of time.

‘Okay, Finn,’ I say. ‘I trust you. And I need you to distract these five Riders. I don’t care how you do it, but I need you to do it.’

‘I’ll do it,’ he says. ‘I promise.’

Closer. They’re coming closer. All the trees around us are vibrating. The only still thing is the Summer Door, an oasis at our backs.

Three steps and we could be back in that quiet forest, blue and green and gold and brown. I could pluck one of those berries off the vine. It would explode in my mouth, and the juice would run down my throat and fill me up, fill me up with summer.

I could take his hand and lead him there, my fairy prince, and we would never have to leave again. The Summer Door would close behind us. Safe. Forever.

But they would cut Phil’s heart out and eat it and they would ride and ride and never die but never live and they would do it forever, and maybe they would kill the whole world in search of Seelie royalty, and they would still ride.

‘And I promise I won’t do it by sacrificing myself,’ Finn adds.

‘I love you,’ I say.

Even now, in the darkest night, his smile is like the sun itself.

Then they’re here.

Phil was right.

They’re beautiful.

Of course they’re beautiful. Everything the fairies are entangled with is beautiful. I don’t know why I’m even surprised.

They’re not beautiful like Finn and Emily are beautiful. Fairy beauty is frightening, but there’s something clean about it, radiant, natural. They’re beautiful like moonlight is beautiful, or the night sky speckled with stars, or tall trees in a bluebell wood.

The beauty of the Riders is not like that. It’s uncanny. It’s eerie. It makes all the hairs on the back of your neck stand up.

You know how sometimes you smell something sweet and you’re like, ‘oh, that smells nice’ and then you realise it’s rotting fruit? That’s what the Riders’ beauty is like. It’s exquisite and terrifying and wrong, wrong, wrong.

The horse of the one nearest to me snorts and paws the ground. It’s glossy black, so shiny and sleek that the urge to reach out and touch it is almost irresistible.

‘Get down,’ Finn says.

‘We do not answer to you,’ one of them says. It’s a woman with dark skin and long dark hair flowing down her back, so long it trails behind her horse. Her fingernails on the reins are long too, twisted and vicious.

All the better for cutting hearts out with.

‘If you don’t get down,’ Finn says, ‘I’ll step through the Summer Door. Good luck finding me then.’

‘You’ll never be able to rest then,’ I add. ‘You’ll ride and you’ll ride and you’ll never find him. Or your own hearts.’

The woman – the leader? – studies us both. ‘Dismount,’ she orders.

They obey.

‘Where’s Phil?’ I say, trying hard to stop my knees from shaking. ‘Your ironheart?’

‘I’m here!’ I hear her yell, her voice muffled. ‘Pearl, I’m here!’

My eyes are swimming, but I find Mr Hunter’s face among the awful rotten beauty of the Riders. ‘Bring her to me,’ I say.

‘We do not answer to you either, Pearl,’ he says.

‘Do it or I’ll crush your heart.’

That gets a reaction – not just from Hunter, but from the rest of them. It’s a small reaction – the barest flinch, the barest wince – but it’s a reaction.

Yes. Yes. I’ve judged this right. I’ve got this.

Hunter unhooks a wriggling, squirming bundle from his saddle and flings it in my general direction.

I almost fall over in my haste to help her. ‘Phil!’ I say, ripping the bag off her and helping her scramble to her feet. ‘Phil, are you –’

‘Enough of this,’ another of the Riders growls. ‘We have a duty.’

Then he’s striding towards us, somehow incredibly fast and in slow motion all at once, and the knife in his hand is the length of my forearm and there are two of them, three of them, three of them with knives and wicked, twisted fingernails, and I have to save Phil I can’t let them have her I won’t let them win.

So I do the only thing I can think of. I shove Phil through the Summer Door.

I don’t have time to reflect on the weirdness of the night swallowing her whole, of her being here one moment and then gone the next, because then they’re on me, and I’m falling, falling under them, screaming as one of them skewers me through the right shoulder with a dagger. ‘You get your wish,’ one snarls. ‘Ironheart.’

I see the knife begin to fall.

I see the end of my life.

I see the end of everything.

And then Finn dives across me.

It’s a flying leap, and he takes out two of them, knocking to the ground. But there’s a third, a third still, and another knife descending.

I roll desperately out of the way, but I’m pinned to the ground by the dagger in my shoulder. It makes a terrible crunching sound, but I don’t feel anything, and the Rider is roaring, and I try to catch the knife in my hands as it descends again, but it’s gone.

‘You made me a promise,’ Mr Hunter snarls, ripping the dagger out of my shoulder and hauling me to my feet. The Rider he’s flung off me slams against the Summer Door and ricochets off it as if it were a wall instead of a gateway. ‘You will keep it.’

Blood is spurting and trickling down my arm. ‘Hurry!’ Finn yells.

I scream as one of them stabs him through the stomach. He can’t die, I tell myself. He can’t die he can’t die not yet they can’t kill him without the ironheart and they don’t have her I saved her and it won’t be me I won’t let it be me.

I fumble for the scalpel. It’s dirty again, but I don’t have time to worry about that. My right arm dangles limp and useless at my side. I’m going to have to do this left-handed.

And I’m going to have to do this fast. ‘Your shirt,’ I tell him.

Hunter rips his shirt open. I grab the heart, use every bit of strength I have left in my right hand to fold my fingers around it. No time to think. No time to second guess. I press the scalpel into his chest and cut.

I’ve made the incision already – fast, a slash, a gash, nothing surgical about it – when I realise I’ve sliced through a tattoo. A word.

I’ve cut my mother’s name in two.

‘Pearl,’ Hunter growls.

There’s hardly any blood. I don’t know if that’s more or less creepy than the fact he has my mother’s name tattooed on his skin. My incision is a single dark line in his skin, black in the moonlight.

Two Riders are coming up behind him. I have no time.

I take the heart from my right hand with my left and then shove it into his chest.

I thought it would be warm, but it’s cold, like sticking your hand into a bunch of slippery, slimy refrigerated meat. I have to force my way through, past the hardness of bone, and I worry for a moment that the horrible pressure of his body trying to stay together is going to crush his heart before I get it back in the right place. And how will I even know when it’s in the right place? It’s not like I know what I’m –

He gasps. His eyes bulge. The small withered thing that was his heart swells under my hand, grows, fills.

And blood starts pouring out around my wrist, directly into my face.

I rip my hand out, out of a body that is suddenly not cold any more, but hot. Hunter falls to the ground and I fall with him, desperately trying to put pressure on the gash over my mother’s name. ‘Finn!’ I scream.

Two Riders are nearly on top of me. He’s fighting off the other three. He’s bleeding from a thousand places, and as he runs towards me, one throws a knife that hits him directly in the shoulderblade.

He keeps running. He flings himself over us. I grab his hand with mine, guide it to the incision, and –

Everything stops.

They stop. We stop. The blood stops. Time stops, maybe. Everything stops.

Everything stops, except the ragged breathing of Mr Hunter underneath us.

Breathing, because he’s alive.

He’s not conscious, though, so I grope for the pulse in his neck. His heart is beating.

We did it. Holy shit. We just brought someone back to life.

‘What happens now?’ Finn asks.

This is it. The biggest gamble. If they just shrug their shoulders and go ‘whatever Trevor, let’s just go find another Rider and come back and kill you all later’ we are so unbelievably screwed.

‘I do not know,’ the leader says.

She looks – well, it sounds strange to say that a six-foot-tall woman with hair past her feet and fingernails that double as weapons and an enormous sword hanging at her side looks lost. But there it is.

‘He lives,’ she says. ‘He is one of us, and he is not dust, but he lives.’

He might not live, if Finn and I keep crushing him with our weight, so I get shakily to my feet. I’m starting to get the feeling back in my right arm, and I kind of wish I wasn’t, because every movement is agony.

But I stand. ‘Can I make a suggestion?’ I say.

‘You do not answer to us,’ the leader says.

‘And you don’t answer to me,’ I say. ‘Or . . . anyone, at this stage, I think. So maybe you can use this time to – to find your own hearts.’

‘I’ll heal you,’ Finn says hoarsely beside me. He hasn’t managed to stand – I’m not surprised, given how much he’s bleeding – but he forces himself up to his knees. ‘If you can find your hearts and bring them back to me, I’ll do my best to heal you.’

‘Or, if you don’t want to live, if you just want to stop, you can destroy them,’ I go on. ‘Turn to dust. But it’s your choice.’

She doesn’t speak. None of them do.

But living with Tam has taught me about silence.

‘You should go now, before the Unseelie realise what’s happened and try and bind you again,’ I say.

When fairies leave, it’s like they disappear, like you blink and they’re gone.

It’s not that way with the Riders. They turn their backs, swing themselves up on their horses, and ride away. They look . . . slow. And old. In pain.

They look like humans would, because that’s what they are.

Humans. Humans that the fairies utterly screwed over in their ridiculous wars.

Humans that we can save.

It’s not until they’ve finally vanished into the trees that I let myself sink back down to the ground. Finn collapses in a heap beside me, a long, wordless groan of pain escaping him

For a long time, we’re quiet, the only sound the metronomic, even noise of Hunter’s breathing. ‘I’ll heal you in a minute,’ Finn says at last, his voice muffled. ‘Sorry – I know it must – but –’

‘Focus on healing yourself first,’ I tell him, although the entire right side of my body feels alternately numb, like someone’s covered it in ice cubes, or on fire with pain. ‘How many times did you get stabbed? Seventy-six million?’

‘Feels like it. Can you pull the knife out of my back?’

My hands are slippery with gore so it takes me a few tries, but I manage it. The wound starts bleeding profusely when I get the knife out but you’d think I’d just given Finn the best back massage ever judging by the noise he makes. ‘That feels so much better,’ he moans.

‘No wonder,’ I say, looking at the hilt of the knife and then scrubbing a little of the blood on his back away as best as I could. ‘This has an iron inlay, I think. There are burns. Bad ones.’

‘Makes sense,’ he says, levering himself into a sitting position. ‘If they wanted to kill me, they’d have to use iron.’

‘But they didn’t kill you.’

His face is a mask of blood and bruises – although I can practically see them fading in front of my eyes – but his smile is the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen. ‘They didn’t kill you either.’

And then, even though we’re filthy and bloody and covered with gore and both horribly injured and my music teacher who we just resurrected is passed out a foot away from us, we’re kissing.

‘I’ve never found you hotter than I do right now,’ I gasp between frantic, desperate kisses. ‘Our couples counsellor is going to have a field day with us.’

‘We’re alive,’ is all he says in reply. ‘We’re alive.’

When he tries to heal my shoulder a few minutes later, not a lot happens. The open wound closes only the tiniest bit. If anything, it hurts worse, because the numbness recedes. ‘Sorry,’ he apologises.

His own wounds are visibly healing, but they aren’t that much further along than mine. He screwed up his face with the effort he made to heal me and it’s reopened the cut above his eyebrow he got when Tam hit him, so blood is trickling down his cheek.

If people who believe those murder conspiracies about us could see us now. My goodness.

‘Don’t apologise. You just literally started someone’s heart beating again. I’m not surprised you need some time to recover.’

‘I’ll heal you when we get home, I promise. Let’s just get out of here.’

‘Wait,’ I say. ‘We have to get Phil.’

He swears. ‘I forgot all about her.’

We both look at the Summer Door.

I want to go towards it. But I also want to flee from it, get the memory of it wiped out of my brain like in that one serious movie Jim Carrey did. Those trees. The light. Those berries, rich and ripe on the vine.

I try to stand. One of my knees buckles.

‘Stay here,’ Finn tells me. ‘You’ve lost so much blood I’m amazed you’re still conscious. I’ll go.’

‘But –’

‘Linford,’ he says. ‘It’s my land. I’ll go.’

‘I –’ How can I put into words what I’m really worried about, that he’ll see that bluebell wood again with those berries on the vine and forget all about me? ‘Be careful. Be quick.’

‘In and out. Easy.’

He kisses me, and then he’s gone.

The bush is very empty, very dark without him there beside me. The breeze whistles gently through the trees and even though it’s summer – midsummer, literally midsummer – I shiver, suddenly cold.

No wonder I’m cold. Blood loss will do that, right?

He’s not back yet. I was hoping it would be a few seconds, that he’d go, grab her, and be back, and we’d all go home, but he’s not back yet.

I’m alone.

Well, apart from Mr Hunter.

He’s still not conscious, but his breathing is even and regular. I check his pulse and it’s even and regular too – a little fast, maybe, but whose wouldn’t be, under the circumstances?

I trace the letters of his tattoo with my finger, but I can’t even begin to wonder about it. That’s a problem for another day, another Pearl, one with all her blood inside her body instead of smeared all over her skin.

A Pearl who has a Finn to talk to about it. A Pearl who has a Phil to talk to about it.

They’re not back yet.

I hope Cardy and Holly got away all right and that there was nothing lurking in the trees waiting for them.

I hope Tam doesn’t find them. Who knows what he might do?

They’re not back yet.

Time passes weirdly there, I remember Helena saying.

I let myself cling to that for a few minutes, even though, while I didn’t exactly take a stopwatch and time how long Finn and Emily and I were in the bluebell wood, it wasn’t long.

They’re not back yet.

One deep breath. Two deep breaths.

I lie to myself. It’s fine. They’re fine. We’re all fine. Fairies have a messed up sense of humour. I’ve been at school with Finn my whole life. He likes pranks. This is all a joke.

Three deep breaths.

My fingers close around the hilt of the knife I pulled from his back. I have to hold it in my left hand, because the fingers of my right are swollen huge like sausages about to burst. It’s always my fingers they come for first, these arsehole fairies.

I stand up. I hold the knife in front of me. I straighten my spine. Head up. Chin up. Eyes up. No weakness.

I step through the Summer Door for the second time.

I had an inkling I wouldn’t be walking into anything good, but there’s nothing that can prepare you for walking into that many fairies all at once. I can’t tell how many there are. It could be as few as ten or as many as a thousand. I have only the barest impression before I snap my eyes shut. It’s either that or fall grovelling to the ground in front of them, and I won’t do that. I won’t.

They laugh, and it’s like standing in a sea of church bells, all ringing at the same time. It feels like the sound is pushing me down, a giant hand pushing me to the ground like Finn’s words pushed Tam, and my knees are going to go, they’re going to go any second –

I clutch the knife tighter and concentrate on the throbbing agony in my right shoulder.

‘Come, perhaps we should be polite,’ a voice says, a voice as lush and rich as the evening sky. ‘Mask yourselves.’

‘She must bow,’ another voice says, green leaves in springtime.

‘Am I not your prince?’ the first voice says. ‘You will obey.’

‘Pearl,’ Finn croaks, ‘run.’

I open my eyes.

He’s pinned to a tree, a diamond knife shaped like a star through the collar of his shirt, his feet dangling a metre off the ground. Phil’s pinned the same way to the tree next to him, head lolling to the side, her face a horrible purplish colour.

‘You’re strangling her!’ I say.

‘I know,’ Finn’s brother says.

He’s wearing a crown, a delicate circlet of some silvery metal sitting around his temples, but I wouldn’t need it to know he was the Crown Prince of the Seelie.

He doesn’t look like Finn. He doesn’t look like Finn at all, actually, apart from a vague resemblance in body shape. His hair is a rich chestnut brown, tumbling down his shoulders. His eyes are the colour of honey. His cheekbones are sharp, pronounced, exaggerated, giving him purplish hollows in his cheeks.

I suppose it makes sense he doesn’t look like Finn. If they were identical, it would have been a dead giveaway that Finn was the Valentine he was looking for.

If he looks like any of the four of us, he looks like Marie.

But he doesn’t need to look like anyone or anything for me to know he’s the prince of these people. I tell by the way they all look at him, the way their gazes are fixed in his direction, with love and fear combined.

I wrap my fingers even tighter around the knife, so hard it hurts.

‘Let her down,’ I say.

‘Perhaps,’ the prince says.

Some of the fairies are still laughing, a small sound, a delicate sound, a sound that threatens to crash over me like a wave.

‘Run,’ Finn groans again. ‘Pearl, run.’

I don’t. I stand. ‘Let them both down.’

‘I will allow you this, disappointment,’ the prince says. ‘You are determined. What a sister you would have made.’

‘This is a Rider’s knife. Designed to kill fairies. Let them go, or I will jam it in your eye.’

‘You would die the next instant.’

‘Maybe, but you still wouldn’t have an eye.’

‘Ah, but I would have my brother,’ the prince says. ‘My baby brother, with his healing hands. Such a precocious youth.’

‘Fuck you,’ Finn snarls.

More laughter, which feels like it enters my body from the ground up and fills me with an uncontrollable trembling.

‘Besides, you would lose your hand long before you came near me,’ the prince says carelessly. ‘But I do admire your spirit, kitten.’

Awww, don’t be mad, kitten, I hear Julian say, running his fingers up and down my arm.

Ugggggghhhhhhhhhhhh. It wasn’t the Unseelie that were driving him around at all. It was the Seelie. It was this spectacular example of douchebaggery.

‘I think I preferred disappointment,’ I say coolly.

‘How lucky for me that you have no choice in the matter.’

My knees are going to go. If I don’t make a move soon, my knees are going to crumble beneath me. I am going to fall to the ground, and I’m going to smash into shards, millions of jagged little pieces, and all I can hope is that those shards are sharp and it hurts when they step on me.

‘But I am in a mood to be generous,’ the prince says. ‘After all, you thoughtfully disposed of the Riders for me. I thought I was going to have to fetch my brother myself, but generously, you sent him straight through my door.’

Maybe if I throw the knife at him. How much do I trust my aim? Could I get him in the eye with my left hand?

Or would I miss humiliatingly and lose my only weapon, and they’d laugh and laugh before they killed me?

‘He knows he is bound to us for a year and a day, this foolish Valentine,’ he goes on. ‘This is a time that is just a formality, for once he lives among his own, he will never wish to leave again. And I have need of him for our war against the Unseelie. But perhaps I could spare him for few decades, now the Riders are dispensed with. For a single human lifetime. Perhaps.’

‘Then let him go,’ I say. ‘Please.’

‘And we have lost one of our human servants,’ he says, turning to Phil, running a finger down her arm, hanging slack at her side. ‘We are always in need of servants.’

‘Don’t you touch her!’

I’m going to throw the knife. I might not ever have thrown a knife in my life and I might be doing it with my left hand, but it’s going to go straight into his eye. No. Not his eye. His throat. And I’ll leap at him and they might all leap for me but my fury will protect me, and I will drag that knife up and up and up and I will cut his tongue right out of his head.

‘Like I said, I am in a mood to be generous,’ he says mildly. ‘You have rid me of the Riders, after all, and now I may ride through mortal lands all I please. And so you may take one of them with you.’

It takes me a few moments to register what he’s said.

The next moments are the shortest and the longest in my whole life.

‘One of them?’ I croak.

‘This one belongs to my land and this one entered without my permission,’ the prince says, indicating Finn and Phil in turn. ‘I am generous, but not endlessly so.’

‘And those are the only options you’re giving me.’ My voice sounds distant to me, as if it’s coming out of some other Pearl’s mouth, and I’m floating somewhere, far away. ‘To abandon him or abandon her.’

‘Oh no,’ he says brightly. ‘There are other options.’

I should have known better than to let hope flare in my heart, but it does anyway.

‘You could stay,’ he says. ‘After all, we are always in need of servants.’

The edges of my vision are turning alternately black and red.

‘Or you could leave both behind.’

‘Never.’

‘Or there is a third person you could choose,’ he says. ‘Come here, girl.’

A figure detaches itself from the crowd of fairies, wrapped in what looks like acres of cloth.

‘Take off your cloak,’ he commands her.

She does.

‘Perhaps you would prefer to take her back to your little town with you,’ he says.

The girl looks back at me politely with big brown eyes, blinking prettily, like some baby deer on a nature documentary. She’s skinnier than me, lean, as if she spends all her spare time at the gym. Her skin is paler, smooth, unmarked, unscarred. Her hair is long and honey blonde, falling down her back in ripples and waves, way, way longer than mine was even before I had my head shaved.

She’s nothing like me.

But she is me.

I stare into my own face. A stranger stares back.

Then the pieces fall into place.

‘Tam,’ I say. ‘She’s like Tam.’

Of course Finn’s dead fairy-king dad didn’t just take one baby. How could I have been so stupid? Such an obvious thing, and I totally overlooked it. If it was only Tam the Seelie took, they would have known all along who the Valentine was. All they would have had to do was look at him.

But they didn’t know, because Finn’s dead fairy-king dad didn’t take one baby. He took four.

No. He can’t have. That’s ridiculous. Only, like, twelve people live in Haylesford. No way were there four kids born on Valentine’s Day and a bunch of lookalike spares, just lying around waiting to be taken.

Plus, if a whole lot of kids had gone missing, would they really have been lining me and Finn and Cardy and Marie up for those twee Valentine kid photo shoots every year? Wouldn’t it be less ‘four kids all born on the same day, which also happens to be one of those days that they make sappy cards for’ and more ‘anniversary of the day several babies were mysteriously stolen, the unsolved crime that haunts this miniscule town’?

But . . . do I really believe that a fairy king couldn’t find a whole bunch of babies if he needed to? That he couldn’t leg it around the earth like Santa Claus and steal some kids no one wanted if it was the only thing would save his son?

‘He is not quite like the Silver Lady’s pet,’ the prince says lightly. ‘He was not your cousin. But she is your sister.’

‘. . . excuse me?’ I say faintly.

Tam’s the only other non-Twinford, I remember Shad joking at the dinner table.

The Rider’s knife falls from my nerveless fingers.

There is no way I have a twin sister. No way at all. Shad and Disey would know. They would have told me. If there was a second Pearl out there, they would have torn the world apart to find her like they’d tear the world apart for me.

But . . .

I see Tam, striding jerkily into the woods after Finn commanded him to walk away. I see the look in his eyes when Finn forbade him to try and wake Emily.

I see Tam, living in my house. I see the mud kid, living in my memories, because they made us all think he was a Linford.

What they gave, they can take away. They can mess with our minds so, so easily.

‘I call her Oyster, but you might like to give her another name,’ the prince says politely.

It could have been me, I realise suddenly. She could have been the one standing here making this impossible choice and I could have been the one standing there, docile and obedient.

‘You do understand the joke, don’t you?’

‘It’s not funny,’ I say.

He smiles, very wide, a smile that shows all his teeth. ‘Time to choose, kitten.’

Finn. Phil. Oyster.

Boyfriend. Best friend. Long-lost twin.

In movies, this is the moment where they pick the person they can’t live without. The music swells and it’s all emotional and everyone cries because they’re all feeling so many emotions.

I’m only feeling one emotion right now.

Maybe I’m not. Maybe there are more emotions in there. Fear and love and regret, all mixed up together in the subterranean spaces in my mind.

But I can’t hear them, can’t see them, can’t feel them, over the rage.

So I don’t pick the person I can’t live without, because I am not going to crumble. I am not going to shatter. I am a girl whose heart is made from iron, and they are going to rue the day they ever made me make this choice.

I make the only choice I can. The only choice I would ever be able to forgive myself for.

‘Phil,’ I say. ‘I choose Phil.’

A small smile quirks the prince’s lips. ‘Interesting,’ he says.

Another one of the fairies unpins her. She collapses to the ground in a heap, and for a moment I think I’m too late, and a spear of worry pierces the perfect scarlet of my rage, but then she starts coughing.

The fairy kicks Phil in my direction. ‘Begone,’ she sneers.

‘Now, now, there is no need for that,’ the prince says. ‘We have conducted our business here peaceably and civilly, have we not, kitten?’

I don’t answer. I don’t have words for an answer. I bare my teeth instead.

That only makes him smile further, and my rage banks, higher and higher and higher.

I help Phil up, loop her arm around my shoulders. She’s wheezing and choking still but the purple is receding from her face, and even though I’m carrying some of her weight she finds her feet.

‘And so we are concluded,’ the prince says. ‘I am sorry you did not choose to come with us. I believe I would have found you amusing, Pearl.’

‘Don’t you dare say her name,’ Finn spits viciously.

The prince laughs, a silvery summer breeze laugh. ‘Do not waste your words on me, little brother,’ he says. ‘Bid her farewell. Because this is the last time you will ever see her.’

A delicate ripple of laughter goes through the fairies around us. Of course they would think this is funny.

I draw myself up. I straighten my spine. I hold Phil up and I hold myself together and I look the Crown Prince of the Seelie dead in his golden eyes.

I’m not scared. I’m sure. I have never been more sure in my life that what I am saying is the truth.

‘Liar,’ I say.