“That’s not important,” she said. “You just need to look after yourself for now. I should think you’re pretty well padded already with the kind of skimming you’ve been doing—and it looks like you’ll be well set up to get a pretty good payment afterwards, too.”

  “That’s not all I want,” he said, with an earnestness that was hard to discount. “I worked very hard these last two years. It wasn’t just for money.”

  “What was it for, then?” she challenged him.

  Marazul looked away.

  YeoWoo sniffed a small laugh but didn’t push. Marazul, like Athelas—and like YeoWoo herself—was looking after himself and didn’t like to be reminded of it too much. Besides, she thought she might already know the answer.

  “You’re still trying to prove yourself, I suppose,” she said. “To the human girl. That’s all the old man thinks about doing, too.”

  “I don’t see how he could,” Marazul said. “He killed her parents—I don’t think I could forgive that. Even if I could—”

  “I couldn’t bring down the World Behind, but the two of them did it together,” YeoWoo said. “And the old man is very good at getting what he wants.”

  Marazul nodded. He seemed to be waiting for her to put down the tablet, but YeoWoo, her face emotionless, instead threw it against the wall by his head, smashing it. Marazul, his face shocked and his entire torso hunched over as he stared at her, eyes wide, was still in that very useful position when the door swept open to disclose the sharp-eyed den mother and a mildly blinking Athelas—both of whom YeoWoo had scented, very nearly too late.

  The den mother’s eyes roamed over the mess on the far side of the room, then over the shaken merman, who straightened himself in his chair.

  “I do apologise on behalf of my contract,” she said to YeoWoo, with a shallow, polite bow. “He is often not as amenable as he ought to be—but he does respond well to punishment…which I see that you’ve already provided.”

  YeoWoo threw a look of scorn at the broken tablet and the merman. “I’ll pay for it if it’s bothersome to you. He’ll learn not to be distracted when I’m giving him commands.”

  “There’s no need for that,” the den mother said smoothly. “I will fetch someone to clean the mess. Don’t think about it again; I wouldn’t dream of bothering you over such a small thing, my lady.”

  Under YeoWoo’s sharp eye, the den mother bowed once more, and turned to proceed unhurriedly down the hallway. Left along with Athelas, YeoWoo had the instinctive sense that he was out of breath, though she could see no physical sign of it.

  “My dear,” he said. “There appears to have been a death in the contract quarters, and I do believe that the den mother would appreciate us leaving so that it might be cleaned up in peace.”

  It didn’t take his hard look settling on her to know exactly who it was that had died.

  YeoWoo only said rather absently, “What a shame,” because her thoughts were full of blood and delayed vengeance, and even if the nymph was not able to be rescued, the rest of the contracts in the café could be.

  “Indeed,” he said curiously. “I see that you’ve had an enlightening day; perhaps we could imbibe some of our housekeeper’s delightful tea while we discuss the matter.”

  “There isn’t anything to discuss,” YeoWoo said. “Not yet. There’s a lot more I need to do first, and tomorrow is going to be busy.”

  Athelas said suggestively, “Then perhaps we could go?”

  YeoWoo heard the faint swish of thin-tubed wheels as she narrowed her eyes at Athelas. “You’ve been up to something,” she said, starting toward the door. “You better not have been the one doing the killing.”

  She was pulled up short by the tug of fingers on the cuff of her jeogori. Marazul had caught a pinch of the fabric of her sleeve in one hand, and he looked up at her with eyes that were entirely serious.

  “Don’t forget,” he said. “Don’t forget me.”

  BLOOD ON THE HANDS

  Athelas had a leisurely breakfast the next morning, helped along by the fact that YeoWoo had not been in the house when he awoke, and had remained absent for most of the morning. She had been full of purpose when they left the café yesterday, which no doubt meant that her investigation was going well. She was probably still about her business this morning—a pleasant and peaceful state of affairs for Athelas. He took tea in the sunroom, where a teapot was waiting in readiness for him with fresh steam coiling from its spout and his favourite teacup set out primly beside it on the coffee table.

  He had seen only the briefest flash of Camellia’s foot and a flicker of her tangerine skirt at the end of the hallway as he approached the sunroom, but Athelas had his own thoughts to think, and he wasn’t unamenable to being left to them. He would very much prefer this particularly unpleasant job to be over as quickly as possible, and Athelas didn’t yet see how he was going to bring the thing to a satisfactory close unless YeoWoo’s particular work first came to a satisfactory close. His ends being at the mercy of someone else’s ends was not a new circumstance—Athelas excelled at working through a sprawling and interconnected web of means and ends—but while he was aware that Camellia was watching him closely, he preferred to do the right, rather than the expedient thing. It was far harder to get caught doing something wrong if he was, in fact, not doing anything wrong.

  The difficulty, of course, lay in the fact that Athelas was so used to thinking of means and ends that he retained very little more than a hazy idea of right and wrong, which made dealing with a moral person so much harder. Had Camellia been as stiffly, angrily upright as YeoWoo, who fairly battered him with her wounded righteousness, it might have been amusing to play with her. Since she was not—since she was, moreover, an important part in his reinstatement in the Pet’s eyes—Athelas preferred to be seen doing things in the right way, and appeal to Camellia as a changed fae. It had the added benefit of making their interactions distinctly more enjoyable.

  That preference, however, while useful in general terms, wasn’t particularly useful when it came to the details. He could, of course, simply charge through the contract café, slaughtering all behind and ahead, and hope to make it to Harrow before the boy was snatched away, or Athelas himself was killed. That particular method had a significant number of good points, and only one or two bad points.

  But was it considered right, he wondered, to demolish any chances that Peregrine and YeoWoo had in their efforts to bring down the contract café, simply to save one human boy another night, or week, of imprisonment? On the other hand, anything could happen in a week, and it was as possible that the boy could be sold, or die, during that week.

  Call it a life, then, Athelas decided.

  Should one human boy’s life be bartered for by throwing away a planned raid that purposed to stop in its tracks at least one small, sordid corner of the contract trade? And then there was the case of the human contracts—and Peregrine’s particular human contract. He would be bartering with her life also, not to mention YeoWoo’s concerns. Was it, Athelas wondered, the number of human and behindkind lives that mattered, or was it a matter of who found those humans precious that mattered?

  Was it simply a matter of who was most at risk?

  He wondered suddenly, with amused curiosity curling in a sparkling wave through his stomach, what would happen if he asked Camellia which was the right, not merely expedient, decision to make. Would she know the answer herself? Knowing it, would she be willing to answer him honestly? Or would she insist that he answer it for himself? Would she merely be angry at him for not telling her that he had already learned where Harrow was being held but hadn’t yet rescued him?

  The strength of that desire to ask nearly took away his breath; and perhaps it was a good thing that these curiosities, which had no answer that he could find, were interrupted by the opening and slamming shut of the front door.

  “Dear me,” Athelas said into the last of his tea as it rippled his reflection up at him. “No doubt she has come to drag me out of the house once again.”

  The thought annoyed him: he did not feel ready to enter the nightmare-laced halls of the contract café again just yet. He had also hoped, if he waited long enough over his tea in the sunroom, that Camellia would eventually return—or at least show herself for long enough to have her attention caught. It was entirely ineligible to ask her the questions he wished to ask, but he thought it churlish of her not to be there to tempt him to do so. It was also insupportable of YeoWoo to turn up instead.

  It was nearly half an hour later when YeoWoo swept into the sunroom, however; Athelas finished the last drops of his tea in cold defiance and set down the cup and saucer precisely in the middle of the coffee table.

  “I have not yet,” he said, “finished the pot.”

  “Get up, old man,” she said, fixing fluttering charms to the band of her chima and ignoring his statement. “We need to go to the café.”

  “Do we indeed?”

  “If you want to get Harrow today, yes,” she said bluntly, surprising a tickle of interest and amusement in his chest. “The contract that Peregrine is looking for is going to be there at two o’clock today; that gives us more than two hours to get there, get ourselves and Marazul into a room nice and close to the action, and wait for her to arrive.”

  “I very much wonder how you know that,” Athelas said, gazing at her.

  YeoWoo gave the toothy, unamused little grin that he was beginning to find familiar. “I know it because I went to Lee BoRa and asked her if she wanted to get revenge on a few different people at once. Then I told her that it was a good idea to be at the café at two this afternoon if she did want to.”

  A gentle laugh reverberated softly through his chest. “I did wonder why you were not more taken aback at knowing your lead was dead. How long have you known where the human was?”

  “Since yesterday,” YeoWoo said shortly. She didn’t engage with the first part of his speech, and that amused Athelas as well. “That’s how long I’ve known that she was the one we want, at any rate.”

  “You fancy that Peregrine would have given up on the raid if you’d directly told him where she is?”

  “No,” YeoWoo said, after a pause. “But he would have been less interested in taking down the café straight away, and it would have been harder to collect evidence. We wouldn’t have had cover to go in for Harrow, either. We only need the girl to be there for Peregrine to have just cause to go in—and with her there and marked as one of theirs, we’ll have all the evidence we need to justify taking everything out of the café and putting it before a behindkind judge. Paperwork and all.”

  “A swift coup, in fact,” murmured Athelas.

  As YeoWoo had said, it would be easier to make off with Harrow under cover of a raid than it would be at any other time, provided that he could get to the child’s location in the contract quarters before anyone came for him. Harrow’s family had been paid a hefty enough price, and the child himself had shown such unmistakable signs of a concerning affinity for Between that Athelas was rather sure Harrow was a Special Interest Case. He would be one of the first snatched away if the den mother and the den sister had enough time to do so.

  He said to YeoWoo, “I trust you will make good on your agreement to help when it comes to finding the boy?”

  She stared at him. “Didn’t you locate him yet?”

  “Like yourself, I found the contract area—I went further and found the rooms they keep for new contracts. If, however, we wish to secure the boy before he is carried off by panicking staff, I will need to be sure exactly which door to break down.”

  “There isn’t going to be much time to run around, freeing people,” YeoWoo said, with a touch of impatience.

  “Then perhaps Camellia could be persuaded to—”

  YeoWoo glared at him. “Of course I’ll help find the kid. But you’d better come along afterward and make sure we get what we need from the records before those all go up in smoke, or slime, or whatever it is they’re using these days. And while we’re being philanthropic, don’t forget that we’ll be looking after the merman as well.”

  Athelas raised his brows as he looked at her, but YeoWoo, apparently busy checking the charms along her sleeves, didn’t meet his eyes. “Will we indeed?” he said. “Then I trust you’re aware of the location of his quarters, should we fail to take him along with us while ostensibly hashing out our contract?”

  “He’s going to be in our usual room,” she said. “And if anything goes wrong, I’ll sniff him out.”

  “Then it would seem that we are adequately prepared—if you are quite finished with your charms.”

  “Don’t sniff at my charms,” YeoWoo told him shortly. “They’ve saved my life a few times when I needed to stay in my human form for whatever reason.”

  “No mockery was intended,” said Athelas, lightly touching his upper arm and forearm through his shirt sleeves on each side to content himself that his knives were, as ever, ready to use and in the correct places. “I myself have used charms upon occasion. Used in the correct manner, they have often proved invaluable.”

  YeoWoo came very close to rolling her eyes but appeared to stop herself in time. She said, “I’m glad you approve, because there’s one for you, too.”

  Athelas’ brows rose. “Indeed?”

  YeoWoo retrieved yet another charm from her capacious sleeves and threw it down on the table in front of him. “Take this with you.”

  The bauble she had dropped there glowed with a wet sort of light. Athelas took it. It was a familiar shade of blue, but that aside, he couldn’t quite make out what it was. It could have been a flower, all golden wire edges and infilled enamel blue, but if so, the flower had been wrenched so far out of shape as to leave it an interpretation of a flower rather than a reproduction of one. Behind, it had been beautifully fitted with a bar-brooch clasp—below that a clip.

  “What is it?”

  “A brooch—or a tie pin,” YeoWoo said.

  “Could it be possible that you are concerned enough for my safety that you are, in fact, giving me a protective spell?” he asked, aware of the faintest touch of old, strong magic with which he was not familiar. Rather than ancient fae magic, which would have had the same kind of dense coolness as the surface of ancient rock, this magic had the feel of fire, or the warmth of spice.

  “It’s not a spell,” she said. “Not anymore, at any rate. It used to be part of one, but these days it’s just useful.”

  “I must be more than usually tired today,” sighed Athelas. “In that case, what use do you expect me to make of this no doubt very charming froufrou?”

  “Camellia said that Harrow could be in such a state that he might not recognise you,” YeoWoo said. “He’ll recognise this.”

  Athelas’ brows went up. “Will he so? I wonder why?”

  “Because he’s seen it before,” she said. “And he knows where it comes from.”

  “It does not seem as though it is entirely free of magic,” Athelas pointed out, leaving one ticklingly interesting thread for another. “You said it was useful—I assume it is not merely for the recognition of preteen boys?”

  “Harrow is thirteen,” YeoWoo said. “And it has two uses, but you only need it for the one.”

  “And the other use?”

  “You don’t need to worry about that,” she said shortly. “It’s not something you’ll need to use—it’s not something you could use, even if you wanted to.”

  Athelas raised his brows at her once again. “But it is something you can and do use when needed?”

  “I didn’t say that,” YeoWoo said, stiffly enough that Athelas took it as an affirmative. “But you’d better give it back when you’re done with it. Camellia will be after you if you don’t, because I made it from something that she gave me.”

  “I should not dream of troubling our housekeeper so much,” Athelas said, clipping the pin to his tie and testing the tightness of it. If time permitted, he would certainly take the opportunity of exploring the usefulness of the pin himself; although he didn’t recognise the magic, he was rather certain that an hour or two alone with it would be sufficient to begin working out the mystery.

  YeoWoo gave a rude snort of laughter and said, “So long as you remember it. Are you ready to go?”

  Athelas moved forward reluctantly to rise. He said, “I did think to see Camellia before we left.”

  Camellia ought to see him off on the business she had set him—ought, in fact, to have been the one to be providing him with charms, if needed. The fact that she hadn’t done so stung slightly, and made Athelas ruefully aware of the amount of work he had ahead of him to win her favour. It was not that he was a knight to await receipt of a favour, but she had commissioned him, after all; she might have pinned the froufrou on him herself.

  “Camellia has other things she needs to do—she knows we’ll be bringing Harrow back with us.”

  “It’s more than I know,” Athelas remarked. So YeoWoo and Camellia had talked before YeoWoo came to find him, had they? What were they keeping from him? “However, if that is the case, let us be on our way. I would much rather have the merman safely in a room of our choice than in his own to be found before the raid—or the den mother—passes through.”

  They took the quickest way to the DDP, passing through Between that was heavy with misaemonji and tinted yellow around the edges. YeoWoo, her eyes feral and her stride a prowl, didn’t even try to protest. When they approached the crossing that would see them across the road in a moment, she didn’t wait for the lights, either, despite their surfeit of time.

  To Athelas’ amusement, the lights appeared to be on YeoWoo’s side: the little green man flashed up, bright and bold, and one unlucky driver who tried to edge his car through at the last moment, received a glare so molten that he stomped on the brakes and all but disappeared behind the dashboard.

  They were only halfway across the road when YeoWoo stopped abruptly. “No!” she said sharply. “Oh no, no, no!”