Sure, it made things interesting, but she’d been raised in a world without spells, without shortcuts. And despite her eye, or perhaps because of it, she’d learned the importance of close study. Of observation, exploration, boots on pavement.

  Lila had no doubt the palace was doing everything it could to find the Hand. And yet. The fact was, Alucard may have played at pirate, but he’d never stopped being noble, Rhy was the literal king as well as the target, and Kell could practice being a swashbuckling sailor all he liked, could shed his coat and call himself Kay, but he had been the best magician in the world for the first twenty-two years of his life, and he was still, and would always be, a prince. All three men had been born and raised in power. That was how they saw the world. That was how they saw their city—from the stronghold of the soner rast.

  But a city was so much more than that.

  It didn’t have one face, one mood. It could call itself one name, but in truth, it was made up of a hundred smaller worlds, private and communal, domestic and wild. A handful were dazzling bright spots and a few were lightless corners, but the vast majority fell somewhere between.

  There was the night market, for instance, the shimmering, magic-filled tents that bloomed in the shadow of the palace, and thrived in the Isle’s light. And there was the Narrow Way, an alley south of the shal that catered to darker tastes. But there were dozens of other markets on dozens of other streets, less flashy, perhaps, but just as full.

  Every city street had its own rhythm, its own color, its own pulse. And the best way to learn them—the only way, really—was by walking.

  So that’s what Lila did.

  She walked. Not the way Kell did, with the purposeful strides of a man always on a mission. No, she walked like a body with nowhere else to be. She strolled, her head tipped back, and her hands in her pockets, fingers grazing the tokens. The same ones Kell still insisted on wearing around his neck.

  A shilling, for Grey London.

  A lin, for Red.

  And a tol, for White.

  As she felt the tol’s shape—an eight-edged coin, struck in silver—she thought of her first visit to the city after Holland’s death, how relieved she’d been to hear they’d crowned a child queen. That was, until she saw a painting of that child’s face. Lila had looked into those two-toned eyes—one hazel and the other black—and muttered, “Fuck.”

  She had returned to Red London, and a waiting Kell, had told him about the healing city and the child queen and, at some point, had decided to leave out the fact she was Antari. Kell had enough problems, so Lila had resolved to handle it herself.

  She’d gone back, again and again, and every time she thought about killing the young queen, and every time she decided to wait another month, another year. It wasn’t mercy that stayed her hand, not really, only the knowledge that White London was a power-hungry place, and whoever came next might well be worse.

  So Lila had waited, and watched as, over the years, the city took on color like a pale body in the sun, watched as it raised monuments to Holland Vosijk, watched as the Antari grew from a child into a lanky teen, watched, and waited for those two-color eyes to turn and look to other worlds. So far, at least, they hadn’t.

  And one day, if they did—well, she would handle it.

  Lila turned her attention back to the city around her, the street unspooling beneath her boots. She remembered the first day she’d come to Red London, hitching a ride on the back of Kell’s magic. They’d been dragged apart by the force of the spell, and the first thing she’d come across was a parade. A vast spectacle of magic, strange and wondrous. The sight of it had made her hungry, and she felt that hunger now—not in the pit of her own stomach, but the city itself. In the gaps left between wealth and want, and how they’d spread.

  As she moved away from the shelter of the palace, she felt the city change. It was a subtle thing, like the slow rise of a tide, or the air in the hours before a storm, but there all the same.

  It only took her an hour to find the first sigil.

  She stopped before the wall and ran her fingers over the stone. The paint was long dry, beginning to flake, but she could tell that it had been a hand.

  “Where are you?” she murmured, laying her own palm flat in the center of the mark.

  It was then she noticed that the hand was tipped off-center, turned faintly on the axis of an invisible wrist, as if mid-wave. She tipped her head the same direction, to the left, looked down the road. Into the shal.

  Lila frowned. It felt too obvious. The roughest corner of the city was surely the first the royal soldiers would have searched. But the night was dragging on, and she had no other leads, so she took a deep breath, and plunged into the warren of streets as if the darkness were a curtain, one that parted to let her through, and swung shut again in her wake.

  She found the second handprint one street down.

  And then a third.

  But the tilt of the hand always went to the left, which was as good as leading nowhere. Or, she realized, in a circle. Lila closed her eyes and called up a map inside her head, and laid the marks like pins, until the picture formed.

  The hands made a loose ring around the block, a circle of three shuttered storefronts, a stable, a brothel called the Merry Way, and—

  Lila froze. She turned her thoughts a different way, calling Verose back to her, along with the tavern, and Tanis.

  If you find yourself in London, she had said, I hear the gardens are lovely.

  Lila swore under her breath. The city had plenty of greenery, but Tanis hadn’t been talking about flowers. Red Londoners had a special term for brothels. They called them pleasure gardens.

  She doubled back down the road until she found the canopied entrance of the Merry Way, and went in.

  * * *

  In retrospect, calling the Merry Way a pleasure garden was … generous.

  It was more a rowdy tavern offering a collection of dark corners and rooms overhead, and you didn’t have to listen hard to hear the sound of bedposts scraping on the floor. Lila leaned against the wall beside a belching fire, nursing a pint and watching as hosts drifted through with painted red lips, and let their hands graze the shoulders of any patrons whose affections they’d accept.

  More than once, Lila sensed a host coming toward her, and sent them on their way with a pointed look, flattered though she was. She took a sip of her ale, and winced. It was black, and bitter, thick enough to leave a trail on the inside of the glass. And like all brothel drinks, it was brutally strong.

  That’s what she was counting on. It was common knowledge that liquor made tongues loose. It also made them loud. Whispers quickly became shouts, and secrets had a way of spilling out as patrons leaned further into their cups.

  And yet, so far, she’d learned nothing.

  Oh, she’d heard the usual mutterings of discontent, but not a single mention of the Hand. No one even had the decency to look as though they were conspiring. One man did spit the king’s name, but it had all the force of a mumbled oath. Other than that, it was raucous laughter and slurred stories and a sailor passed out by the fire. Either the patrons were good at holding their tongues. Or, she suspected, they weren’t involved.

  This wasn’t the right garden.

  And now, her own head was beginning to fuzz in that warning way, and she knew that when she stood, she’d feel the swell and sway of the floorboards underfoot. But she had sea legs, and knew how far she could go before they failed her.

  So Lila stayed long enough to finish her drink.

  When it was gone, she went to leave the glass on the bar, and for the first time noticed it was cracked.

  She traced the line, her thoughts skating like a pebble off the shore. What was it Maris had said, about the persalis? That it had been damaged in the fight. Maybe it still worked, and maybe it didn’t. Say it was broken. Needed to be fixed. An object that dangerous, maybe they’d try to repair it themselves. But if they hadn’t—if they couldn’t—

  Lila flagged the brothel’s barkeep, a stocky woman with a hard jaw, but when she went to fill the glass, Lila put her hand over the rim.

  “Let me ask you something,” she said, softening her words to sound a little drunker than she was. She made sure to pair the words with a lin on the counter. “Let’s say you got lucky, had a fine piece of magic fall into your lap.” The barkeep raised a brow, waiting for the question. “But it got a little banged up on the way there. Where would you take it?”

  “Me?” said the barkeep, putting her hand over the coin. “I’d save the cost and the trouble, and fix it myself.” She slid the coin into her pocket. “But if I weren’t so clever, I’d go to Haskin.”

  Lila’s gaze flicked up. She turned the name over on her tongue. “Haskin?”

  The barkeep nodded. “He can fix anything. Or so I’ve heard.”

  Lila smiled and sat back. “Good to know.”

  A shout went up across the room, and the barkeep drifted away. Lila looked down into the dregs of ale as if it were a scrying glass. Haskin, she thought. In the morning, she’d start there.

  She nudged the glass away and shoved a hand in her coat, only to find she’d given the barkeep her last lin. She switched pockets and found the handful of coins Maris had given her, the ones lifted from the Hand who’d died on the ship.

  Lila weighed the three lins, letting them spill from one palm into the other. She had come all this way because of them, she reasoned. The least they could do was pay for her drink.

  She put two back in her pocket, set the third on the table, and rose. A little too fast, it turned out, thanks to the last pint. She paused, steadying herself a moment. And frowned. Perhaps it was the angle of the light on the edge of the coin, the way it hit the ridges in the crimson metal. Or perhaps it was something else, something harder to define, some gut sense that made her take the lin back up. Lila ran her thumb along the edge and saw that she was right—it wasn’t entirely even.

  “Son of a bitch,” she muttered as she turned it, trying to make out the pattern, but it was too small, the metal of the coin too dark.

  Lila sank back down into her chair.

  She drew the other two coins from her pocket, and studied their edges, but they were even all the way around. This one alone was different. Embossed with a code. Or a message. Lila only needed a way to read it. Of course, she had no paper on her. No ink. She rapped her fingers on the table, mind racing.

  Her gaze dropped to the wood beneath her hand, pocked and scarred.

  Lila smiled.

  She drew a kerchief from her coat with one hand, and placed the other flat on the wood. The surface was a tapestry of stains, and she doubted anyone would notice one more flaw. Still, she kept her eye on the barkeep as she called on the fire. Heat bloomed beneath her palm, a tendril of smoke curling up between her fingers, and when she took her hand away, the wood beneath had been singed black. She tipped the last drops of ale onto the scorched wood, and mixed it with the tip of her finger.

  She kept the gestures slow, almost bored—a tipsy patron simply humoring herself—even though her heart was beginning to quicken the way it did right before she drew her knife, fast with the promise of action. When her fingertip came away black, she rolled the coin through the makeshift ink and then, carefully, across the kerchief.

  “Son of a bitch,” she said again as the words revealed themselves in tiny strokes.

  SON HELARIN RAS • NONIS ORA

  It wasn’t just a message. It was an address. And a time.

  Six Helarin Way. Eleventh Hour.

  Lila was already on her feet and out the door before she realized she’d forgotten to pay for her drink.

  II

  The dead owl perched, his pebble eyes watching, as Tes tore the spell apart.

  Days and nights of hard work ruined, and she’d be lying if she said it didn’t hurt. But she knew she’d put her power to the worst kind of use, gone and done something impossible. Something forbidden. The worlds had been cleaved apart for a reason, and then she’d gone and made a bridge, crossed a boundary that had been put up centuries ago, one that was meant to keep her whole world safe.

  Tes thought of the ruined magic around the old woman’s head, the dead threads hanging on the air, thought of the man who’d brought this cursed thing into her shop, the way his own magic seemed to rot, and her hands moved faster, ripping at the knots she’d so carefully made, dismantling the magic she’d worked so hard to mend.

  The shop door rattled.

  Tes ignored it—Haskin’s had been closed since she took the job of fixing the doormaker, and in that time, a dozen customers had tried the handle, found it locked, and gone away. She expected this one to do the same.

  Only they didn’t. They rattled the handle a second time, and Tes stopped working. She looked up. The rattling stopped. She held her breath, and waited, but it didn’t start again. Instead, the lock in the door began to groan, like metal bending out of shape, and Tes had just enough sense and just enough time to sweep the remains of the cursed doormaker into a sack, and shove it beneath the counter, before the shop door swung open and a man and a woman strolled in as if they’d been invited.

  “We’re closed,” said Tes, but the words had no effect. The two continued forward.

  They were a mismatched pair.

  She was short and sinewy, her black hair braided up into a crest. Her skin was the color of wet sand, her eyes a cold, flat grey. A metal cuff ran the length of her forearm, and her magic twisted around her, the glowing orange of molten steel. That explained the lock.

  He was pale—pale hair, pale skin—and built like a butcher’s block. He had a face like one, too, the surface deeply scarred. It looked like someone had tried to hack off his nose at some point, but the blade had gotten stuck on the bridge. His magic was a dark green, by far the brightest thing about him. An earth mover, Tes thought, right before he flicked his fingers, and the door slammed shut behind them.

  Working in a shop like this, she’d learned to read her customers. It wasn’t just written in their threads, but in their eyes, their gait. Tes knew bad people when she saw them.

  These were bad people.

  “We’re looking for Haskin,” said the woman, ambling toward the counter.

  “He isn’t here.”

  “But you are,” said the man, running his hand over a table.

  “I’m just his apprentice,” she said.

  He stopped, pausing right beside the place she’d made the door, the scar hanging in the air barely a foot from his face, though he didn’t seem to notice. She forced her gaze back to the woman, who was now standing right across the counter.

  Tes watched as she produced a black ticket, the gold H stamped onto the front. She flipped it around, so the number was showing. It was, of course, the same ticket Tes had given to the sick man. The one who’d brought her the doormaker.

  Tes reached for the ticket, but as soon as the slip of paper grazed her fingers, the woman caught her wrist, and slammed it down against the counter. She yelped, tried to pull free, but the woman flexed, and a sliver of metal unraveled from the cuff on her forearm and drove into the wood around each of Tes’s fingers, her hand, her wrist, pinning her there.

  It happened so fast, Tes didn’t feel the pain until it welled, thin lines of blood where the bands of steel cut into her skin. Panic rolled through her, her free hand already reaching out, intending to undo the threads inside the steel.

  “I wouldn’t,” said the woman, who clearly assumed that Tes intended to pry herself free the usual way. “There is a lot of metal in this shop.”

  Tes’s free hand stopped, hovered, withdrew. It was true—she could get herself loose, and expose her power in the process, but in a test of speed, she would still lose.

  “What do you want?” she asked.

  “We’ll get to that,” said the woman, leaning an elbow on the counter. “But first…”

  Suddenly she had a knife in one hand and a lock of Tes’s hair in the other. With a flick of her wrist, the curls came free, dropping like a dark ribbon into the woman’s palm. As Tes watched, the knife vanished, and the woman tied the lock of hair into a knot, and slid it in her pocket. Panic wormed through her; not at the loss of the curls—she had a mountain of them—but at how they could be used. Just as names had value, so did anything that came from a person’s body. That was meant to belong only to them.

  The woman rapped her fingers on the counter, drawing Tes’s attention back to the metal pinning her hand.

  “Now,” said the woman, “before I begin, you should know, for every lie you tell, you’ll lose a finger.” She looked around. “I imagine those are important, in this line of work.”

  Tes fought to steady her heart. She had never been a good liar, which was why she’d always opted for omission. Better to say nothing and avoid the traps, the tells. But she had a feeling silence wouldn’t buy her much.

  “Where is Haskin?” asked the woman.

  “There is no Haskin,” she said. “It’s just me.”

  “Could have told you that,” said the man, hefting a sword from a shelf. He held it up to check his teeth. The woman let out a low sigh, halfway to a hiss, but kept her attention on Tes.

  “What’s a girl your age doing with a shop all her own?”

  Tes swallowed. “I’m good at what I do.”

  “So am I,” said the woman, and Tes sucked in a breath as the metal pinning her hand tightened a fraction, cutting into her skin. “Our friend brought in something to be fixed. Where is it?”

  “You’ll have to be more specific,” said Tes. “After all, this is a repair shop.”

  The man chuckled, the sound like a blade on a whetstone. The woman didn’t smile. She nudged the ticket forward. Tes made a show of staring at the number.

  “I remember him,” she said after a moment. “He was sick.”

  “Not anymore,” said the man, in a way that made it clear he hadn’t gotten better.

  The woman clenched her teeth. She didn’t like this man, thought Tes. That was good. That was something.