“Well, she did this time.” She shrugged. “Or, whatever it is, I don’t remember it, because shetook the memory of it.So, there you go. I don’t remember what she took, Nos. I don’t know what to tell you.”
Neither of them looked convinced, but they didn’t press further.
Ava stood, brushing bits of grass from her clothes. “We got what we came for, right? So let’s get moving.” Picking up Nos’s coat, she plucked all the bits of grass off it and then unfurled it. “I appreciate the makeshift pillow, Nos.” She tossed it to him.
He caught it, grunted something that resembled an acknowledgement, and shrugged his peacoat back on.
Book was beside her, looking deceptively ordinary in the strange light. She tucked it under her arm, drawing comfort from its familiar weight.
“I agreed to lead you to the door.” Ibin rose gracefully to her feet. “And I will.”
“I appreciate that.” The next thing she picked up was the mirror shard. It’d changed in shape and size since the old woman had handed it to her. Now, it was about ten inches long and four inches wide at the base, and came to a jagged point. At least she had something to stab somebody with if she needed to. In its reflection, she caught glimpses of possibilities—herself with the spiral tattoo from Book’s illustration creeping further up her arm, her eyes harder, her expression haunted.
More warnings about the future. Tucking the shard into the side pocket of her backpack, she slung her bag over her shoulder.
Ibin looked off, troubled. “The door is close to the center. It stands at a nexus point in the Web. A place where realities…overlap.”
“Sounds perfectly safe. What could go wrong?” She smiled. “Maybe I can drop another train on somebody.”
Nos made a sound that might have been a laugh. “Please. No more trains.”
“You are no fun.” She stuck her tongue out at Nos, which earned her an eye roll from the older, stitched-together fae.
With that, Ibin laughed and started walking, and Ava and Nos followed.
As they headed down the path, the garden began to thin around them, the carefully tended plants giving way to wilder growth. The path beneath their feet transformed from neat flagstones to rough-hewn cobbles, then to packed earth. As the hallways of the Baroque building returned, twisted up in the trees and vines, she was almost relieved to see them.
Except something was different. There was somethingweirdabout the floor. It looked disturbingly like bone. “Please tell me we’re not walking on a skeleton.” Ava grimaced.
“Not a skeleton,” Ibin replied. “Just bone.”
“Mm, not helping, sorry.”
“It does mean we’re getting closer.” Ibin was now trying her absolute best to be cheerful.
They walked in silence for a moment. “So…can I ask you both a sensitive question?”
“Why were we both imprisoned?” Ibin smiled at her, beaming smile flawless and beautiful. “I’ve been waiting for you to ask. Why are we, charming wonderful people that we are, trapped in here with the worst of the worst?”
“I…guess? Yeah.” Ava shrugged. “Seeing as this place is filled with the world’s most dangerous fae.”
Ibin pretended to be offended. “I’m hardly dangerous in the traditional sense. I just wouldn’t shut up. You see, after I wound up crashing my aeroplane into the countryside and wound up getting cursed by some lovely milkmaid that IsworeI thought wasjusta milkmaid—I really thought she was, I promise.”
Ava was really starting to piece Ibin’s story together and it was turning out to be a really fun one. “Sure, sure. Go on.”
“Well, suddenly the milkmaid turns out to be someSeelieenchantress who is now mad at me because she thought I really loved her, and since I’d knocked her up, she thought it’d be areallaugh to make me a stork.” Suddenly, Ibin wasn’t Ibin. Well, Ava supposed that wasn’t fully accurate. Because Ibin was, in fact, still Ibin.
Ibin was now simply, suddenly,a bird.Where was once a tall, elegant, beautiful woman, transformed in a swirl of gossamer and feathers—into a stork in flight.
Ava shouldn’t have been surprised. She’d seen it once before.
It didn’t stop her from screaming and ducking as if she had been attacked by a bat.
Ibin laughed—still a bird, though the beak didn’t open or move—and landed some twenty feet away. Flapping her feathers and tucking them against her sides, she turned her head to watch them. “Youdidbring it up.”
“I know, I know.” It was Ava’s fault. And she did feel stupid for shrieking. “So what do you mean, you wouldn’t shut up?”
“I used to be human!” She flapped her wings, and in another swirl of feathers and gossamer, was once more a woman. She smoothed her hands over her hair. “And I, like you, used to believe in a world where magic didn’t exist. Where we were safe from forces outside of our own rapacious violence. I thought the world needed to hear the news.”
