And he jerked his thumb at Maggie Darragh.
He hadn’t bothered to keep as quiet as Eliza; he spoke loudly enough that Maggie’s head came up suddenly, the girl staring in their direction. She hadn’t caught his words, Eliza didn’t think—but Maggie’s eyes held a hunted look, like a stray dog that thought she heard trouble coming.
Maggie Darragh? Working with the Fenians? But she’d always said—
No. She hadn’t said; Fergus had. Maggie had never voiced a word on the subject, not that Eliza heard—not since that fellow came by a summer past, dropping hints in the pubs about the Irish Republican Brotherhood. Then the dynamite incidents started happening, and Eliza was so caught up in her own troubles that she’d hardly spared a thought for Maggie.
Their gazes locked, and the hunted look grew. Eliza said, “Maggie,” and that was all she got out before the young woman grabbed her by the arm and dragged her out the sacristy door.
“Not a word, where Ma can hear,” Maggie said in a harsh whisper, when they were out in the nave once more. “Say to me what you like, but I won’t be having her troubled with this, not when she’s just got Owen back.”
Eliza had not been short of curses and anger before, but it all seemed to have temporarily drained from her. “I—I don’t even know what to say.”
Maggie pulled her bonnet off, forgetting they were in church, and scraped a hand through her tangled hair. “’Tis Fergus who sent Special Branch after you; I never asked him to do it.”
“And did you ask him to stop?”
The silence answered her well enough.
Eliza sagged into a pew. “Christ, Maggie—why?”
“Why not?” the girl said bitterly. “I look at Ma and I see what this place did to her; I see what it has done to me. Twice the English bastards have pushed me into an alley and flipped my skirts up, because being Irish is the same as being a whore, is it not? And God help me, but I’ve thought of doing it, because at least that would keep us fed. With Owen gone…” She trailed off, looking hopeless in the light of the few candles still burning.
It made Eliza sick to her stomach. “But the ones who have died—they aren’t the ones who hurt you.”
“I don’t care, and that’s the truth of it,” Maggie said flatly. “I want them to know what it is like, seeing innocents die for crimes they never did.”
Hideous, blasphemous words—spoken in front of the altar, no less, with the Son of God watching from the crucifix above. In the workhouse, when Quinn accused her of helping the Fenians, Eliza had wondered if Maggie hated her enough to spread that lie. But Maggie’s hate wasn’t for Eliza: it was for the English, and all of London. Poison like that could not be drawn by her brother’s return.
There was no sound, but the hairs on the back of Eliza’s neck rose. Turning, she saw Owen standing in the shadows, watching them both.
Maggie drew in a sob-tangled breath at the sight of him. Her elder brother, now younger than she. “Oh, Owen,” she whispered, and went to wrap her arms around him once more. He stiffened, but let her do it; and Eliza, rising to her feet, wondered if he would embrace her back. A moment later, she had no more attention to spare for such questions, because the church entrance banged open and Dead Rick came darting through.
The sight of him knocked the breath from her. Not just to see a faerie there—in church!—making no effort to pretend he was human, though that would have been enough. But his eyes …
The soft dog-brown was gone, drowned in an acid green that flooded iris and pupil alike. In those absinthine depths, time came off its hinge; past and present abandoned their God-given places and danced a mad waltz, whirling such vertigo into Eliza’s mind that she abruptly found herself on the floor, staring at the skriker’s knees. Those, at least, stayed put.
Until he dropped into a crouch and seized her shoulders. “Eliza. I need you to remember. The last time you saw me—before that bastard sent me to take Owen—what did I tell you?”
He called me Eliza.
Not Miss Baker, or Hannah, or any of the other false names she’d borne. He remembered. She saw it in his posture, heard it in his voice; everything about him, everything but those eyes, was an echo from seven years gone. Dead Rick was himself again.
The friend she’d lost had returned.
And then was torn away from her, as Owen charged at him with a howl. Dead Rick lurched under the boy’s weight as if drunk, not defending himself with the brutal skill she knew he had; terrified for him—for them both—Eliza leapt up and tried to force them apart. Tangled together, the three of them swung around, back toward the sacristy, from which her da and Mrs. Darragh had emerged.
It was chaos. Three other people had followed Dead Rick in: two mortal men, and a young woman who took one look at the altar and suddenly showed herself to be the sprite Eliza had seen before. That one blanched dead white and fled the church as if she was about to throw up, leaving the other two behind. They caught Maggie and her mother, while James O’Malley backed off, staring, and in the meanwhile words were pouring out of Eliza’s mouth. “He never meant to do it, Owen—the bastard who hurt you hurt him, too—”
He let go, and the sudden release sent Dead Rick and Eliza both staggering backward into the sacristy. Owen advanced and slammed the door behind himself. “Then why is he here?”
In the relative quiet, she realized Dead Rick was still talking, his voice managing to be hard and begging at the same time. He didn’t even seem to realize Owen was there. “Ash and Thorn, Eliza—you ’ave to remember. If you don’t remember, nobody does. Nadrett smashed it; I’ll never get it back. But it were a danger to ’im, and ’e’s the one what did this to your boy; if you tells me, maybe we can make ’im pay for that.”
She made the mistake of looking into Dead Rick’s eyes again; time swirled, and she almost lost her footing. The last time I saw him. Not the one burned into her memory by the pain of betrayal, or any of their encounters since then; the last time she saw him, the skriker she’d saved. For his sake, Eliza tried to remember. “You told me a story.”
He straightened, then caught himself with one hand against the wall; with that insanity in his eyes, no wonder he was unsteady. “A story?”
Piece by piece, it came to her. “About the Faerie-land. You said that all the tales we have of lands being drowned by the sea—Lyonesse and, oh, others I don’t remember—they’re all echoes of some place in Faerie, that did sink beneath the waves.”
Bewilderment showed on Dead Rick’s face; she was learning to watch his mouth and forehead, not his impossible eyes. “No, there—there ’as to ’ave been something else. Something about Nadrett.” A shiver rose from his toes to his head. He leaned harder against the wall.
She wanted to help him so badly, but— “You never mentioned Nadrett. Only Seithenyn.”
His sagging head came up so fast, she flinched back. What Dead Rick might have said, though, she never found out. The skriker took one step toward her and pitched over sideways as if the floor had gone vertical beneath his feet. Eliza cried out and managed to slow his fall, but not to catch his full weight; he hit the tile floor in a boneless heap.
Bewildered, she looked up at Owen. But he looked no less confused than she. “Nadrett. I—I’ve heard that name?…”
Before she could answer him, the door swung open, and on the other side was one of the men she’d seen a moment before. A dark-skinned heathen fellow—probably that genie from the Galenic Academy. He shook his head over Dead Rick’s limp body. “Were it not for the absinthe, I doubt he would have made it this far. Come, please—your friend, too, if you wish—we will take him to a safer place, and see if we have answers at last.”
Hare Street, Bethnal Green: August 22, 1884
How they made good their escape from the church with Dead Rick’s twitching carcass in tow, Eliza couldn’t say, except that it undoubtedly involved faerie magic. What they’d planned to be a surreptitious baptism under cover of night had become a good deal louder than tha
t, and attracted attention to suit. But somehow Eliza found herself being led north by the other man who’d followed Dead Rick, a fellow who might have been anywhere between thirty and eighty years old. The heathen came with them, carrying the skriker, and Owen and that faerie woman followed, but the rest had been lost along the way.
She expected to go to the Onyx Hall, but instead they crossed under the railway arches to the north—half their party gasping in pain as they went—and halted outside a tobacconist’s not far from St. Anne’s, where the man unlocked a door leading to the flat above. Through her shivering, the faerie woman said, “We can’t take him below.” She indicated Owen with her pointed chin. Irrith, that was her name. “It wouldn’t be safe. And we can’t risk somebody selling word of this to the Goblin Market, anyway.”
This morning, it hadn’t been safe to keep Owen out of the Hall for long. Now … can he ever go back?
Better for him if he couldn’t. Eliza had no intention of it herself, except as much as was necessary to get revenge on this bastard Nadrett. And that, she supposed, was why Owen had come.
The rooms on the first floor reeked of dust and stale air, as if almost no one ever came here. “Hodge’s flat,” Irrith said, as the man went around striking matches for the lamps, illuminating a mismatched assortment of shabby furniture. The other fellow laid Dead Rick on the couch, where he shuddered as if caught in a winter storm.
Hodge said, “Not that I’m ’ere too often. Miss—would you?”
Eliza found him holding out a stale biscuit. After one staring moment—she had gone stupid with exhaustion—she realized what he wanted.
The tithe.
“We’ve got to get something inside him,” Irrith said. “And me, if you don’t mind.”
Saying the words would cost Eliza nothing; even the bread was being handed to her. Even so … “Can’t you do it?” she asked Hodge.
He shook his head. “Drank faerie wine, as part of becoming Prince. Once you do that, you’re no good for the tithe; I doubt your friend ’ere could do it, either.”
So this was the Prince who was supposed to pass judgment on Dead Rick for what he’d done. She hadn’t seen much judging happen—but she was no longer certain she wanted it to. Not against the skriker, anyway. But Nadrett, yes. And Dead Rick had come to ask about Nadrett.
Stiffly, she reached out and took the bread. “A gift for the Daoine Sidhe,” Eliza said, laying the stale biscuit at Dead Rick’s side. “Take it and plague us no more.”
Irrith snatched up the food and tore a piece off, shoving it into her mouth like a starving woman. Chewing frantically, she broke off a second bite and slipped it between the skriker’s thin lips. “Go on, swallow it,” she murmured, shaking his shoulder as if that would do any good. Eliza edged her out of the way and lifted his head. Hodge gave her a hip flask, and she poured a dribble of its sweet-smelling contents into Dead Rick’s mouth, stroking his throat the way she’d done for her brothers and sisters when they were ill, until finally she thought the morsel had gone down.
He continued to twitch in her grasp. “Shouldn’t that help?” she asked, worried despite herself.
“Against all of this, yes,” Irrith said, gesturing around. Her own color had already improved visibly. “But it won’t do much against the absinthe he drank.”
Her worry grew. “I’ve never seen absinthe do this to a man. Not unless it was mixed with something bad.”
Irrith’s breath huffed out in a quiet laugh. “Our version is … special.”
Hodge’s own breath followed hard on her words, but his was a sudden hiss of pain. The man dropped into the nearest chair, his Arab companion moving swiftly to his side. Irrith said, “Are they—”
The panic in her voice was clear. Hodge waved it, and the Arab, away. “No new rails; I’ve done what I can to make sure those get put off as long as possible. But a bit of the woven stuff just went, near the Academy. We should do our business ’ere and get back; Lune can’t ’old without me for long.”
“This business ye have,” Eliza echoed. “It would be what, exactly?”
Hodge said, “Nadrett. You know who that is?” He waited for her nod before going on. “Then you know ’e’s a nasty piece of work. We’re trying to find out what ’e’s doing right now. Seemed a good bet that Dead Rick might ’ave learned something about ’im, seven years ago, and that’s why Nadrett took ’is memories. Looks like that was true, but if so, it’s gone. We gave ’im back everything in that box. ’E thought you might ’ave what ’e’d lost.”
Eliza hugged her arms around her body, feeling cold inside, despite the oppressive summer heat. “He said … Nadrett ‘smashed’ it?”
“The memories were on glass plates,” Irrith said quietly. “Photographs. Nadrett broke one whenever Dead Rick made him angry.”
The cold deepened to a sick fury. But Eliza couldn’t see how what she knew would help them. “He never told me anything about Nadrett. The last time I saw him, the only thing he said—the only thing that seemed important—was a story about a fellow named Seithenyn.”
By the looks on the others’ faces, it didn’t mean anything to Hodge or the Arab; the former was mortal, of course, and perhaps young Arab faeries learned different stories at their grannies’ knees. Irrith showed more confusion than anything else. “Seithenyn and Mererid … he told you about the Drowned Land? What has that got to do with anything?”
“It means Nadrett’s a fucking dead man.” It was a bone-dry whisper from the couch. Dead Rick’s eyes were still closed; Eliza was grateful to be spared another glimpse of that swirling, otherworldly green. He spoke like a medium in a trance, channeling information from some source outside himself. “Irrith—what ’appened to Seithenyn, after ’e killed Mererid and flooded the land?”
The sprite said, “He was cursed. By the waters of Faerie, because he killed Mererid, who was their daughter. If he hadn’t fled—” Her eyes, a shifting green almost as unnerving as the absinthe in Dead Rick’s, widened. “They would have drowned him. Ash and Thorn—you think Nadrett is Seithenyn?”
“Came ’ere,” Dead Rick said. “And made ’imself somebody else. No idea ’ow I found out … but there’s one way to know if I’m right.”
“Throw water on him?” Eliza asked.
She meant it to sound scornful; the idea was ridiculous. But the fierce, predatory smile on Dead Rick’s face told her it was no joke. “Show the waters where ’e went,” the skriker said. “Then let the curse do its work. Even if ’e runs, ’e won’t live; they’ll find ’im.”
Hodge let out a soft whistle. “Bloody well easier than trying to get at ’im by force. But first we ’ave to find ’im, and from what Bonecruncher tells me, ’e’s pushed off to Faerie already.”
A brief silence—and then Dead Rick sat bolt upright, mad eyes flying open once more. “Off to Faerie? Not bleeding likely. ’E’d die the second ’e set foot over there. Aspell was wrong!”
It seemed to mean something to everyone else there, save Eliza. Even Owen was frowning, as if trying to stitch his shredded mind back together. With the tone of a man making an argument he did not believe, but felt should be given due consideration, the Arab said, “He could still sell the right to use it, and then take his profits elsewhere. There are other lands than this, and not all are threatened by iron. Not yet, at least. Nor can he be bothered by things of your Heaven where men are not Christian.”
While Eliza frowned at his choice of words—your Heaven, as if there were others—Dead Rick spoke again, with cold certainty. The whirling in his eyes had slowed, but still lent his words a skin-crawling cast. “And start scratch, in a foreign land? Not a chance. ’E likes being master too much for that. I don’t think ’e’s making no passage to Faerie. I think ’e’s trying to make a kingdom for ’imself, right ’ere.”
Eliza’s oath would not have bothered anyone in the Onyx Hall; it had nothing of God in it. She might not give a twopenny damn for the fae, but the thought of the bastard who did such ter
rible things to Owen and Dead Rick setting himself up as some kind of lord made her go white hot with rage.
The expressions around her, though, showed varying shades of hope. Irrith said, “If he can repair the Onyx Hall—”
“Not repair,” Hodge said, with certainty. “’E ain’t in the palace—we’re sure of that. But ’e might be trying to make a new palace. Maybe ’e already ’as.”
“How?” The Arab’s deep voice had the abstracted quality of a fellow whose thoughts are buried deep in a puzzle. “This must involve the photographs; if we can determine how, we may have some notion of what to search for.”
Eliza knew precious little about this sort of thing; her instinct was to stay silent, and let more knowledgeable people talk. But a useless silence had fallen, while everyone scowled or bit their lips and tried to find the answer, and perhaps the notion that had come into her head would help one of them. Even though it had nothing to do with the question of how. “What he’s photographing—’tis people, is it not?”
“It seems to be so,” the genie answered. “What are you thinking?”
Now everyone’s eyes were on her. She shrugged uncomfortably. “Only that I’ve heard tell of a number of people going missing in the East End. Not just missing: the story is, they were taken by the faeries.”
As she expected, Hodge shook his head, frowning. “That could be anybody in the Goblin Market. They steals people all the time, now.”
But Dead Rick said, “Where was it?”
“I think … I might know.”
The answer didn’t come from Eliza. The others all stared past her, and then she turned, and saw Owen standing, face paper white, hands tangled in a hard knot near his mouth.
“Did you see something? What—”
Irrith’s burst of questions cut off when she ran into Eliza’s outflung arm. She hadn’t stopped the sprite in time to prevent Owen from flinching back, but Eliza turned and put herself between them, hands on her hips, returning glare for green-eyed glare. “He’s about had enough of ye,” she said, addressing all the fae. Even Dead Rick. “What ye did to send his family away just now, I don’t want to know—but ye won’t be coming near him again. Do ye understand?”