KNELL.

The note let go at last, and the Dance Hall found out it had been holding its breath.

The applause started at the edges and came in all at once, the way a summer storm comes onto a tin roof: a few drops, and then all of it. Andy didn’t let go of Laura straight away, and she didn’t let go of him. The three of her stood inside the circle of his arms while a hundred and ten people clapped for them, and when he went down the bond one more time it still came back with nothing in it where the fear had been.

He would have stayed there. The room had other ideas. Mildreds were already moving between the tables with the sweet course, setting down small plates with a soft, practiced clink. Laura stepped back first, all three of her in the same half-step, and the nearest of her squeezed his hand before she let it go.

At the family tables his mother had the camera in her lap and was laughing at something Kathleen Allen had said, and his father had a slice of cake in front of him that nobody had asked him about. Over by the garden doors, Arabella had come to rest with Anna at her elbow—Anna in blue, lapis at her throat, a long sheer scarf trailing off her shoulders as if it had meant to be wings. The two of them had their heads bent together the way they always did.

It was Scarlet he noticed first, and only because the quill stopped. She was at the end of the long bar with Matt Hawkins, flipping that oversized orange quill over the backs of her fingers the way she had all afternoon. The quill stopped mid-turn. Her fingers closed around the shaft hard enough to whiten the knuckles. By a window, Nimue froze for a moment, her eyes darting to the door. Across the floor, by the pillar nearest the cake table, Amabilis stood in her half-black, half-white robes as she had all day, so still that Andy had stopped noticing it. Now the stillness sharpened into something else—the kind of stillness a deer has in the half-second before it decides which way to run. All three of them had gone tight as wire, and nothing in the room had happened yet.

Then the bell.

It came from a long way off, past the windows and past the island, from nowhere he could have pointed to: one slow stroke, low enough that he felt it in his teeth before he heard it. It was nothing like the music the Hall made on its own. The Hall’s music answered the room. This answered nothing. It was the kind of bell a village rings when it wants the whole valley to know somebody has died.

Nobody else heard it. The Mildred with the tray kept setting down plates, and at the family tables his mother went on laughing.

But all over the Hall, heads had come up. Sumiku had turned from the long windows. Dawn’s ears had gone flat against her hair. Norah had set her glass down without looking where she put it, and Eden had stopped dead beside Katherine, her gaze gone almost to the ceiling. Laura had turned toward the windows, all three of her in the same instant. Every woman in the room who belonged with him had heard it, and nobody else had.

Arabella had heard it too. Her eyes came to rest on him across the floor, and there was sorrow in them, and something warmer underneath, both plain for exactly as long as it took him to see them. Then her face was her own again. Beside her, Anna went on with whatever she had been saying and did not turn her head. Andy couldn’t tell which of the two things he had been meant to see.

He went down the bond before he had decided to. Laura was still near the windows, and the fear had come back into the reading. It hadn’t crept back. It was simply there, all the way up, as if the last song had never happened.

Past the long windows, the sky began to thunder, a low roll well out over the water. Nobody at the tables looked up.

Andy started across the room. He didn’t hurry. He told himself it wasn’t goodbye he was saying, but only another check—the same one he had been running down the bond all afternoon, in the one version he could do with his hands.

Sam caught him first, near the tables, and didn’t let him get two words out. “Dude.” She looked him over slowly, sash to circlet. “You look like somebody who robbed a museum and got caught wearing it.”

Andy looked down at the sash. “They were gifts.”

Sam’s mouth twitched. “From a museum.”

“From my wives.”

“Same energy,” Sam said, and reached out to straighten the mantle at his shoulder, which did not need straightening. She left her hand there a second longer than the job took.

“Says the woman,” Andy shot back, “whose toast needed a rescue party.”

Sam didn’t even blink. “The dessert was dying. It’s documented.”

“Is true,” Liesa put in, folding herself into the conversation uninvited. “I have witnesses.” Her hands were already moving, and her hips with them, whether she wanted them to or not. Then, a little too fast, she added, “Andy. I am happy. Really, stupidly happy. I keep catching myself at it.”

“I can see it,” Andy said, and he could.

Chloe found him a few steps on and lifted her glass at him, eyebrows up, waiting.

Andy lifted an empty hand to her. “To Chloe. Who never once let me off easy, and was right every time.”

The praise went through her before she could get her face ready for it. He watched it land—the small, helpless lift of her shoulders, and then the neckline of her dress rising further to the occasion than it had been a moment earlier. Chloe looked down at herself and laughed outright. “You did that on purpose.”

Andy held up both hands. “I really didn’t.”

“You did. Okay. It’s fine.” Chloe clinked her glass against his empty hand. “There. Toasted.”

Norah cornered him next, heels planted, arms folded. “Seven dances,” she said, “and you led every one of them like you were carrying a filing cabinet up a staircase. Come here. I’ll show you what bad actually looks like.”

She hauled him a yard onto the floor for one enormous, deliberately terrible spin, all elbows, her free arm flung out like a woman hailing a cab in the rain, and let him go again, delighted with herself.

Riley’s hair reached him before she did, a long cool brush of it across his shoulder. She came around after it and stood close, almost touching, her dark mouth parted the way it always was.

“Wherever we all end up tonight,” Riley said, and the honey of her voice had gone low enough that it was only for him, “I’ll know exactly where to find you.”

“I’m counting on it,” Andy said.

Marissa’s arms came around him from the side, and when he raised an eyebrow at her she only held on tighter. “It’s for me,” Marissa said at his ear, in that near-whisper that always made the room seem to lean in. “Let me have it.”

So he let her have it. His shoulders came down half an inch, and then another half—her arms had found the knot by feel and started working it loose. She let go when she was ready, and not before.

Katherine reached him without a sound, the way she reached everybody. She stood in front of him and pressed both hands flat over his heart, and kept them there, looking up at him. He covered her hands with his own. “I felt that.”

Katherine held on a moment more. Then she stepped back and inclined her head to him, once, slow and deliberate.

Eden had come up at her sister’s shoulder, moving the only way her body would let her move, a long lazy roll of hip and shoulder that made crossing a dance floor look like an invitation. She had no hands to put on him. She leaned instead, set her bare shoulder against his, and didn’t blink.

“Stay close to your sister tonight,” Andy murmured, and Eden nodded once, and didn’t move away from either of them.

Sumiku was last of them. She came from the windows, and before he could get her name out she had dropped into as deep a bow as the crowded floor allowed, wings folded tight.

“This one is glad,” Sumiku said, “to have seen the Master crowned with her own eyes.”

She meant every formal word of it. He brought her up by two of her hands, and she let him. When she straightened, her eyes went back to the windows at once.

The brides took longer, and he let them. Myra reached him first, unerring, as if the crowded floor were a path cleared for her alone. She put her forehead against his chest, just below the clasp, and stayed there a long moment. “Stay where I can find you,” Myra said.

Andy rested his chin on her hair for a second. “I’ll do my best.”

Emily caught his hand next and turned it over once, palm up and back again, as if she were making sure it was still attached to him. Then she came up on her toes and murmured, so nobody else in the room could catch it, “If that was the dessert bell, I am filing a complaint.”

He laughed outright, once, before he could stop himself, and drew her against his side.

Dawn pressed a plate into his free hand before he could tell her he wasn’t hungry. On it sat a tart barely the size of a coin, lemon, still faintly warm from wherever she had been keeping it. She nodded at it. “Eat.”

Andy started to hand the plate back. “Dawn, I’m not—”

“Eat it, Andy Cooper.” She stood over him with her ears straight up until he did. He knew that look. The kettle in the other room had clicked on again, and she had come to see about it.

Claire had come up without a sound. She touched two fingers to her own chest and then to his, the small shorthand they had built between them in the first weeks, and down the bond came her answer to everything he was carrying—settled, unbothered, entirely certain of him. He covered her hand with his. “I know.”

Emi looped one of her six arms through his before he could move on, and the air around the two of them turned warm and sweet, a greenhouse opened on a winter day. She leaned into his side and said nothing at all. She didn’t need to.

Erin he pulled aside on purpose, two steps out of the current of the room. Whatever changed in his face going into it, she saw it, and went still, and waited.

“The week,” Andy said. “What I gave you on the floor.”

“As of now,” Erin said. “I remember.”

“You and Sam split a crown. That was supposed to be about points. If I get cut off from you, from all of you, either of you may be the one who has to hold the whole thing together.”

She didn’t ask him what he’d heard, or why. She had heard it too.

“Then I hold all of it,” Erin said. “I’m not going to make you a speech.”

He put his hand on her arm. He felt the hard little knot of it come up in her and go out again under his palm, and she let out a long, slow breath.

“Thank you,” Andy said. “I love you.”

Erin nodded at the windows. “I love you too. Now go.”

Somewhere past the glass the wind had picked up. It was barely anything yet, only a new pitch against the long windows that hadn’t been there a minute before.

Laura was last. The nearest of her stood a little apart from the other two, close to the windows. Here the wind was easier to hear than the room. The other two of her waited a few yards back along the wall, facing the same way. When he came up beside her she didn’t turn her head, and he didn’t need her to. He was the one who brought it up.

“On the mound,” Andy said. “You asked me something. Whether he was coming soon.”

“I remember,” Laura said, all three of her in the one voice.

Andy kept his eyes on the glass. “I didn’t answer you.”

“No.”

She had asked him for the truth once already today, and he had given her a promise instead. He still meant the promise—it just wasn’t what she had asked for.

“Yes,” Andy said. “It’s Nergal. He’s close. Closer than either of us has said out loud since the bell.”

Laura took it steady-eyed, and didn’t look away. All three of her went quiet at once. It was the particular, total quiet that meant every part of her had heard it together. Down the bond the fear stayed pinned at the top. It did not climb. There was nowhere left for it to climb to.

“Okay,” Laura said. Out past the glass the thunder rolled again, nearer. “What happens now?”

He had been asking himself that since the bell, and nothing had come. “I don’t know,” Andy said. “I don’t have that part.” He looked into her eyes. “But I know I’m not going to let you go again. Whatever happens, I will be there with you.”

He reached for her hand, or she reached for his—they were close enough by then that it was hard to say which. Her fingers closed hard around his. Behind him, without looking, he knew the other two of her had closed their hands on nothing.

Outside, the wind kept climbing. It went past a moan, and past the thin high note it had been, into something much closer to a howl. The long windows hummed with it in their frames.

If either of them said anything after that, the wind had it first.

The howl did not break. It thickened, the way a river thickens when the flood is still upstream, until it was less a sound in the room than the room’s own weather. Before either of them could find enough quiet inside it to try again, the guests nearest the walls began to go.

One, by the far windows. Then three at once at the Delgado table. Then a dozen along the east wall, all together, as if a hand had passed across them. A raised glass hung in the air for half a second before it followed its owner into nothing. A sentence stopped in the middle of a word, and there was no one left to hear the rest of it.

It didn’t happen all at once. It spread. The gap opened first at the edges of the Hall and worked inward toward the tables, faster than anyone still standing could make sense of it. People turned to say something to the person beside them and found a chair.

Andy looked for the family tables, and they were already empty. His mother’s camera lay on the tablecloth beside a plate with one bite gone from the cake. His father’s chair had been pushed back, as if he had only stood up to fetch something. There was nobody at the Allen table, or the Morenos’, or anywhere along that whole row.

Arabella had promised—the instant she felt the collector coming, every family pulled clear, and nothing of it kept but the wedding. He held on to that with both hands. He didn’t know if it was true. He found Arabella by the garden doors, straight-backed, one hand closed at her side so hard he could see the cords stand out in her wrist. Whether she was doing this or only watching it done, he couldn’t tell from where he stood.

The women of his household were all still there. So was Anna, at Arabella’s shoulder, her scarf streaming sideways in the wind. At the end of the long bar Scarlet hadn’t moved, and her grip on the quill had tightened until the shaft bowed. Across the floor, by her pillar, Amabilis had gone rigid from crown to hem—a breath held long past where a breath could be held.

High above them all, Eilistraee had stopped keeping time. She had risen to her feet on the gilded moulding where the dome sprang from the wall, all nine feet of her—lilac against the gilt, her pale hair hanging past her knees—and she was looking not at the floor but at the far doors. She looked down once at the room, unhurried, fixing it in her memory. Then she stepped off the ledge, not down but away, in a direction the room did not have. She was gone a full breath before anything else in the Hall changed.

Nobody had sent her. Nothing had taken her. She had chosen her moment, and kept it. Harper’s wives and children, Mona and her harem, all vanished with her.

The dome went next. The false dusk it had worn all afternoon tore open from the inside. Glass and gilt blew straight upward and outward in a single report that swallowed even the wind. For an instant the whole painted evening hung above them in pieces. Through the hole it left was the real sky—black and heaving, lit from inside by lightning that beat the thunder to every strike.

Then the glass came down. Andy had the closest women, Claire and the nearest of Laura, under his arm and his back to it before he knew he had moved. It came down in a bright hard rain across the blackwood and the tables and the cake. It rang off the mantle across his shoulders like thrown gravel. He felt the other two of her, a few yards off, duck in the same instant she did.

At the far end of the Hall, the doors slammed open hard enough to crack the frame.

Nergal walked in.

Behind him, down the garden path the whole wedding had followed that afternoon, the lanterns were going out one after another. They went from the far end toward the Hall, as though someone were walking the path ahead of him and pinching each one out between finger and thumb.

He was not in any hurry. He came down the length of the Hall at the pace of a man walking behind a bier. What was left of the Hall made way for him. He was bald and massively made, gray-skinned like a corpse, with a thick black beard and hands like spades. He wore the long, dark, fringed robes of a funeral older than any city Andy could have named. His face might have been cut from granite and never finished—all planes and no give. The nose was hooked like a hawk’s. The mouth was a thin line. The eyes were as flat and still as stone at the bottom of a well. The lightning showed him to them white, and gave him back to the dark, and showed him again, a little nearer each time.

Around him, circling as he came, went the women. There were fourteen of them. Their hair hung to their waists and past, matted and wild. What they wore had once been skirts of tufted fleece and was now rags, trailing off them in long torn strands that the wind could not quite reach. Their feet did not quite touch the floor. They howled as they flew, and Andy understood, all at once and far too late, that the howl had never been only the wind.

The air that came in with them was cold. It was not winter cold. It was river cold—the cold of deep water in November. Andy knew it the way he knew his own name, because he had gone into it once after Laura and had never entirely come back out.

It took him another moment to see what else was wrong with them. They went in pairs. Every one of them had her match, stride for stride, the same tilt of the head, the same reach of the arm, turning together at the same point in the circle. Someone had decided long ago that they would be twinned. They had been twins ever since.

Nergal stopped beneath the torn dome and looked around the ruin of the Hall like a man admiring his own finished work. A long blade of the fallen glass had driven itself upright into the wreck of the cake table. He drew his fingers down its edge as he passed, slowly, almost fondly, and it did not cut him.

When he spoke, his voice carried through the wind and the wreckage both. It was the only sound in the Hall that did not have to fight to be heard. He did not search for her. He turned his head and found Arabella by the garden doors without looking anywhere else first.

“Geshtinanna,” he said. He said it as a man might say the name of a house he had burned once before, and remembered burning. “You still build in glass.”

For one unguarded instant everything in Arabella went still, even the hem of her dress against the wind. Then her face came back to her, piece by piece. It was the Host’s face. It gave him nothing at all.

Beside her, Anna was not looking at Nergal. She was looking at the women.

Andy saw it land in her like a wave taking a pier: all at once, and then the long shudder after. The color went out of her face. One of the pairs was coming round the circle toward the garden doors, and Anna took a step out to meet it. Her scarf tore sideways off her shoulders and was gone.

“Ninbanda.”

It was barely a word. It was the kind of sound a person makes when a face she has mourned walks past her in a crowd.

The woman nearer to her did not turn. She went on howling, and her twin went on howling beside her, matched to her step for step, and the circle carried them both past.

“Ninbanda!” Anna cried, and now it was a cry. “Ninbanda, it’s Anna. It’s me—”

Nothing. They were already gone round the curve of the circle, behind Nergal, and the next pair had taken their place.

Anna turned to Arabella. Her voice had gone raw. “They were with us. In Dilmun. All of them.” She could hardly get the last of it out. “He kept them.” Arabella’s hand closed on her wrist and held on.

Andy knew the shape of that season. He had heard Arabella tell it on the beach, and Claire had dug up the rest: a Master called Abi-Eshu, two sisters called Alla and Anna, a Wish that made them gods, and a death that sent him down to serve the one of them he had owned. Nobody had ever said a word about the rest of his harem. He had never once thought to ask what became of the rest of a harem when its Master went down into the dark.

If Nergal had heard Anna at all, nothing in him showed it. “I am come under the seal of the Queen of the Great Below,” he said, “by her Edict, which was spent to bring one back across the river. What was spent is owed, and the tablet stands open. I have come to close it.”

It sounded recited. It sounded like something said at a great many doors, in a great many tongues, until every edge on it had been worn smooth.

Then his eyes found Laura, and for the first time something in his face moved. He looked at the nearest of her, under Andy’s arm. He looked at the other two, a few yards off along the wall. He looked back at the first. It was not fear, and it was not hesitation, but interest, plain and unguarded—the interest of an old craftsman shown a joint he has never seen cut.

“Three,” Nergal said. “Three, where the tablet names one.” He considered her a moment longer. “I have carried the dead of every city under heaven, and not one of them came to me in three. There is no line on my tablet for this.” His eyes burned with interest. “Lu diš. Pagru eš. I have never seen such a thing.”

Under Andy’s arm the nearest of her had gone rigid at the word river, and had stayed that way. Now she lifted her head. Laura held Nergal’s gaze and did not look away, all three of her equally still. Down the bond the fear was a single held note at the top of the reading. It did not waver.

Arabella let go of Anna’s wrist and turned hard away from him. She did not move toward him. She moved toward them—toward Liesa and Chloe and Dawn and Emily and the rest still scattered between the tables. She went at them with both hands, driving them toward the garden doors with a sharp, wordless urgency Andy had never once seen in her. Claire had Emi by two of her wrists and was pulling. Katherine had Eden against her side. But the Hall was too full of glass and wind and howling, and the moment was too short, and none of them was clear.

Sam was already moving the other way. Thrustworthy was in her hand, drawn out of nothing, held low, and she walked toward the center of the Hall like a woman who had been waiting all week to be asked. Cobalt blue plate armor, emblazoned with a grinning corgi, materialized around her.

“Cooper!” Sam shouted back over her shoulder. “Stay on her!” The wind tore the end off it, but he heard enough.

Norah fell in at her shoulder, heels planted in the broken glass, sleeves shoved back, both fists already closing on glittering metallic escrima sticks. Erin reached into empty air and came back with the double-barreled handgun, and settled beside them in a two-handed stance, dead level. Sumiku dropped low on Sam’s other side, wings half-spread, her naginata raised crosswise and steady across four braced arms.

Riley’s hair lifted off her shoulders and began to coil at her sides, lock over lock, as she and Myra closed in on Laura from either side.

Andy stepped out in front of all three of them.

The Hall held there. Nergal stood at its center, under the broken dome, with the dark sky churning above him. His women circled him, howling, pair after matched pair. Andy’s household had drawn up against him in a ragged line of blades and bare hands and one small gun, and the whole room had gone taut around the space between them.

For the length of one breath, nobody moved at all.

It was Andy who broke it.

He hadn’t planned to. He had been standing there with the three of Laura at his back and the glass under his shoes, listening to the fear in the bond hold its one high note, and thinking about the mound. He had told her she was not dying today. He had meant it. Standing in the wreck of the Hall with the sky open over his head, he had no idea what it had ever been worth, and he found he didn’t care. Somebody had to say the first thing. He was not going to let it be the man in the funeral robes.

“She isn’t yours,” Andy said. “You don’t get to take her.”

It came out flatter than he had meant it to, and quieter, and it didn’t matter. Nergal heard it. For the first time since the doors, the stone-flat eyes left Laura and settled on him. Andy felt the weight of that look like a hand laid on the back of his neck.

“She is not mine,” Nergal agreed. “Nothing that comes down to me is mine.”

He said it without heat, in the same worn, procedural voice he had used for Arabella’s old name—as though he were reading from something only he could see.

“The right is the Queen’s. It was the Queen’s Edict that was taken from its place and spent to bring this one back across the river, and what the Queen has spent, the Queen is owed. A death was undone. The lending has not been paid.” He turned one great hand palm upward, slowly, the only movement he made. “Unless another life is laid down in hers, freely, by one who has standing and knows what is given, her life is already mine to carry down.”

It was an old accounting, delivered flat and unhurried and worn down to nothing by however many times he had given it before. It told Andy nothing he didn’t already know.

“No,” he said. He didn’t raise his voice.

There was nothing left to say after that. Nobody said it.

The household answered with movement. Sam broke first. Thrustworthy was already swinging as she went, a long flat arc of it catching the lightning, and she shouted back over her shoulder as she ran—one word. “Now!” Norah and Erin went with her, one on either side, Norah with her sticks up and her heels biting the broken glass, Erin with the handgun level in both hands. Sumiku came in low and fast on her wings. All four arms brought the naginata around in one motion, as if she had been waiting a long time for somebody to let her.

Nergal did not look at any of them. He gave the women circling him a single order, and he did not raise his voice to give it.

“Lay them down,” he said. “Bind them, and hold them. Let none of them be ended.”

The circle broke. The women came off him all at once, howling, pair after matched pair. Without them he looked no smaller. He looked like what he was—a man who had come to collect, standing still while the collecting was done for him.

They crashed into the fighters, and the Hall came apart into close quarters on every side of him.

Under the howl there was another sound, and it found each of them alone. Sam heard hers first, a voice with no single shape to it, naming the exact blade and the exact month she would stop counting; it said it once and then whispered how one of the ragged women would tear out her heart, and then whispered of how Sam would die alone. Sumiku heard her own a beat later and set her jaw against it, because there was no room today to listen. Norah heard hers over the ring of her own sticks. Erin heard hers under the crack of her second shot. None of them could tell the others what they were hearing, only that it was theirs and it knew exactly where to cut.

Erin's first barrel went off like a door slamming and her second like its echo, and both shots went through the woman in front of her exactly the way they would have gone through smoke — no mark, no flinch, nothing but the whisper naming, low and certain, the year Erin wouldn't see. A pair hit Sam from both sides in the same instant. Thrustworthy went through the nearer of them as though through smoke, and the woman came apart into rags and wind, and came back together a yard off, still howling, and came again. Norah's grip closed on a wrist that wasn't there to close on, the woman gone to cold mist between her fingers and back again a stride later, and the whisper told her, patiently, which of the fourteen would be the one to finish it. Above them Sumiku’s wings beat the fallen glass up into glittering eddies, and the naginata swept a pair off Norah’s back and kept on sweeping.

Nobody in the Hall was left out of it. Between the tables a pair bore Emily down onto the blackwood and held her there by the arms, her gold-and-pink hair spread across the glass. Emi came at them with all six hands and was taken round the waist from behind before she reached them. Chloe had Marissa by the wrist and was pulling her toward the doors. Dawn went up off the floor in one of her impossible leaps and came down feet first on the shoulders of the woman reaching for Chloe. The woman folded into rags and wind under her, and came back together behind her. Claire stood over Liesa where she had fallen, ears flat, tail lashing, with nothing in her hands but her notebook.

Over by the garden doors Arabella had put herself in front of Katherine and Eden, and the women went round her the way a stream goes round a stone, and kept coming. Anna had not moved from where Arabella had left her. None of the women had come near her.

For the first few seconds Andy stayed where he was. Sam had told him to, and he couldn’t make his feet do anything else with the three of Laura at his back. Then a pair came for her.

Riley’s hair went out from her like a net cast into the wind, a dozen dark ropes of it, and caught the first of them by the wrists and throat and held on. Myra put herself between the second and the nearest of Laura without a sound. Andy took the one that came past them both. Its hands closed on his arm, and the cold of them went straight to the bone—November cold, river cold, the kind of cold that finds the one place in you that never quite warms up again. For one long, stupid second he was thirteen, in Willow Run in the dark, and his lungs were full of it.

He tore his arm free. The woman came apart and came back together and came again.

He understood it then. This fight could go on until every one of them was down and held, the way Nergal had ordered, and it would change nothing. The fight that mattered was not with the women, but with the one man in the room who was letting them do his work for him.

He caught Riley’s eye across the tangle. “Hold her.”

“Go,” Riley said.

He went. He broke from the line toward Nergal, straight through the circle. The mantle Myra had given him that morning snapped out behind him in the wind. The circlet was still on his brow. The open sky was cold on the back of his neck. The women came at him from both sides. He did not stop for them. He shouldered one pair aside, took the cold of them along his whole left side, and kept going. He had punched handholds into a climbing wall. He had taken a boulder full in the chest and not moved. He had never once used all of it on anything that could be hurt.

He closed the last of the distance in two strides. He set his feet on the blackwood among the glass. Then he drove the full force of his own strength—everything he had, and everything he had never let himself use—into a single blow at the man standing at the center of it all.

It landed with enough strength to pulverize a cliff.

Nergal took it standing exactly where he was. He did not step back. He did not lift a hand to meet it. For a heartbeat the two of them stood as close as two men can stand. Andy’s fist was against him. The funeral robes smelled of cold stone and turned earth. Those flat eyes looked down at Andy with something in them that was not anger and was not surprise. It might have been the same interest he had shown Laura.

It was like hitting the island. Nergal’s flesh didn’t move. Andy had time for exactly one thought. Laura.

Then the god's answer came. It did not need him to hurry. It was not a blow. It was one unhurried motion of his right hand, low and to the side—the small, economical gesture of a man brushing crumbs from a table.

Andy was gone.

There was no sound. There was no light. The space where he had stood was simply empty, a little broken glass on the blackwood where his feet had been, and the wind went on through it as if nothing had ever stood there at all.

Nobody in the Hall saw Arabella. Not the women still fighting between the tables. Not Anna by the doors. Not Nergal, who had already turned back to his circle as if one piece of business were finished and the next begun.

She stood by the garden doors in front of Katherine and Eden, with her face the Host’s face and her hands at her sides. She did not move. She did not look toward the place where Andy had been.

Somewhere beneath that face, in a part of her that had been there since before she had a face at all, she reached out and caught the thing Nergal had thrown.

She caught it in the same instant it left his hand. Down at her side, where nobody was looking, the old scar across her palm opened again along its whole length, and bled, and she let it. She could not send it back at him; it would have been useless, and she did not try. She did something else. She turned it, as easily as a hand on a shoulder turns a sleeper over in bed, away from wherever he had meant it to go, and down.

Down past the floor, and the stone under the floor, and the roots of the island under the stone, into the one place in all the world that was hers and no one else’s. She put him there.

Then she closed her bleeding hand, and kept it closed, and turned her face back toward the women still fighting in her ruined Hall. She gave no sign to anyone, by so much as a breath, that anything had happened at all.

Nobody saw her do it. Nergal did not feel it happen. Andy Cooper, falling, did not know whose hand had caught him.

One heartbeat the Dance Hall was still coming apart around her, glass underfoot and the wind screaming through the open dome and a dead woman’s hands reaching past Riley’s hair for her face. The next, the wind and the shouting were simply gone.

---

Laura stood in grass.

It gave under all three of her at once, soft and cool, where the blackwood should have been. The nearest of her was still half turned into a shelter that was no longer there, one shoulder up, braced for glass, and the place across her back where his arm had been was already going cold. The other two of her had landed a few yards off, one on either side, facing the same way she was, as if the Hall had simply been lifted out from under them and put down again somewhere else.

The air was warm and still and lantern-colored. It smelled of open pasture and of something green being grazed on somewhere nearby, and under that, faintly, of smoke still caught in everyone’s hair.

She knew where she was before she had finished looking. She had come down here every day for two weeks, to sit with her mother, and her feet knew the lantern paths before her head caught up. The Hollow Garden—the quietest place on the island. The lanterns hung along the paths at their usual height, glowing their usual soft amber. Past them the long grass of the pasture ran away into a dimness that was not quite dark, as she had never seen in the Garden before, and somewhere out in it something large shifted its weight and went on grazing, unhurried. Nothing down here had heard a thing.

It was too quiet—the kind of quiet a body braced for a fight has nowhere to put. Every one of them was still braced for the Hall.

Sam was still holding Thrustworthy, her knuckles white around the hilt, the blade lowered but not put away. Norah’s fists were still closed on the sticks at her sides. Erin still had the handgun up in both hands, dead level, aimed at a field with nothing in it. Sumiku came up slowly out of her fighting crouch, wings folding down against her back, the naginata held loose across all four arms and looking, in the lantern light, like something that had wandered in from a different story. Riley’s hair was letting go of its readiness one lock at a time, uncoiling down her back and over her shoulders. Myra had turned her face outward, slow and careful, taking in the shape of the place in whatever colors it came to her in.

Behind them the rest of the household were picking themselves up off the grass. Chloe was on her hands and knees, breathing hard. Emily was sitting up where she had been pinned, pulling her hair back over her shoulders with both hands. Dawn had come down from a leap that had started in another room entirely and was standing with her ears straight up, staring at her own feet. Claire was on her knees beside Liesa. Katherine had Eden pressed against her side, and Eden, who lived down here, was staring at the lanterns she walked past every day. Marissa had Emi in her arms, all six of Emi’s hands knotted in the back of her dress, and Laura didn’t think Marissa knew she was doing it.

Laura hadn’t looked for him. She hadn’t needed to. She had never once in her life needed to look for him; she had always simply known, the way you know which way is down without having to check. So in those first few seconds, with the grass and the lanterns and everyone’s bodies still set for a fight, she did not look.

Norah’s head came up first. She was scanning the group too fast, and Laura watched her count. She counted all the way to the end, and then she started again from the beginning, and at the end the second time there was only the quiet, where an answer should have been. Nobody said his name.

Sam’s shoulders went back and settled, slightly, the way they did when she picked up something heavy and had already decided she wasn’t going to put it down. Her eyes found Erin’s across the grass, once. Erin didn’t look away from her.

Claire hadn’t got up. She was still kneeling beside Liesa, but her ears had gone flat to her skull and one hand was pressed hard against her own breastbone, just below the collar of her dress, as if something had struck her there. Laura knew what was reaching Claire. It reached her the way it always had, without words and without asking.

Laura went still, all three of her at once. She reached for him, not with her hands but inward, down the thing that had run between her and Andy since before either of them had words for it—since two back gardens and a gap in a fence and a girl who needed somewhere to be that wasn’t her father’s house.

The bond had grown thin over the last two days. She knew that. She had felt it go thin and thinner and had told herself it was only the wedding, only the fear, only everything.

It came back. She had never been so glad of anything in her life.

“He’s alive,” Laura said. All three of her said it together, one voice, and the others turned to her as one.

Sam shut her eyes for exactly as long as it took to breathe once. Dawn’s hand had gone over her mouth. Across the grass Emi turned her face into Marissa’s shoulder and stayed there.

Then the rest of it reached her, and she had to lock her knees to stay standing.

She had felt Andy afraid before. She had felt him afraid of her, at thirteen, of what his face was doing when she caught him looking. She had felt him afraid in the last days, all the way up and holding, and she had held it with him.

This was fear pitched past anything she had a name for, all the way up and past the top and still going—and there was nothing riding with it. No anger. No hope. Nothing else at all. She didn’t know if that was the whole of it, or if the bond simply wasn’t passing those through.

Her voice came out steadier than she was. “He’s scared. That’s all that’s coming through, just that, all the way up, and I’ve never had it like this from him, not once, not ever. There’s nothing else in it.”

Myra’s ears went flat. Laura didn’t need to be told why. Myra had always been able to perceive the line between her and Andy, whenever she turned toward either of them, a thread only she could make out, and she was turned toward Laura now.

“The silver’s still there,” Myra said. Her voice had gone careful, the voice she must once have used on the worst news in a hospital corridor. “It’s thin, but it’s there.”

Nobody said anything to that. Then Sam did. “Where is he, Laura?” It wasn’t unkind. It was Sam refusing to let half an answer sit there and go bad.

For one second Laura didn’t want to know. Alive was something. Alive was a thing she could stand on. If she reached again and the next thing she found was worse, she would have to stand on that instead, in front of all of them, with her own face.

The location had always been the easy part. It was the part she had never once had to think about. Since they were children she had known where Andy was the way she knew where her own left hand was—a direction and a distance, true as a plumb line. Even in the last three days, with everything else stripped away, that one piece had never failed her.

What came back now made no sense. He was right here. He was so close that if she turned around too fast she thought she would walk straight into him. He was close enough to touch. And he was farther away than anything she had a word for, farther than the river, farther than the sixteen years she had spent dead, so far that the distance itself stopped meaning anything.

Both, at the same time.

She reached again, and harder, and neither one would give way to the other. She turned around. All three of her turned in the grass, quick, as if she could catch him standing just behind her if she only moved fast enough. There was nobody behind her but Sumiku, folding her wings, and the lanterns, and the long dim pasture going on and on.

All three of her turned back to Sam. “He’s here. He’s right here, and he’s—” She stopped. She tried again. “He’s so far away I can’t… Both. He’s both, Sam. I keep reaching and it won’t pick one, and I can’t make it be one thing.”

Erin’s grip on the handgun finally slackened. She let it come down, slowly, both hands at once. The fight she had braced for was not the one happening here.

---

It was supposed to be her.

The thought came to Laura clearly, in the middle of all of it, and she couldn’t make it go away. Nergal had walked into the Hall for her. He had named her debt and counted her bodies and looked at her like a puzzle he meant to take home and solve. And it was Andy who was gone.

She had spent three days getting ready to be the one who went. She had said goodbye to Andy in her head a dozen different ways and hated every one of them. She had not spent one minute getting ready for this.

She didn’t know yet what that meant. She didn’t know whether it was something she could live through.

Riley didn’t wait to be asked. Laura saw her go inward. She had seen it before: Riley’s eyes going soft and distant, her head tilting as if she were listening for a sound nobody else could hear, while the one sense she trusted more than her own eyes went out looking for someone she loved.

It came back now, and Laura watched it land on Riley’s face. It was the same. Laura could see that it was the same. She had wanted, badly, for Riley’s to be the one that worked. Riley’s mouth opened a little and stayed open. Her hair, which had almost finished settling, lifted off her shoulders again, just slightly, the way it did when she didn’t know what to do with her hands. She reached a second time. Laura watched her do it. It didn’t help.

“He’s right here,” Riley said, and Riley could not say a thing that wasn’t true. “Laura, he’s right here, and I can’t—”

Footsteps.

Quick ones, coming fast along the lantern path from somewhere deeper in the Garden, and every head turned toward them at once. The lanterns swung on their hooks as someone went past them without slowing.

Dinah Hornblower came around the bend at a dead run, ears laid back, tail low behind her, and she was already reading the wreck on every one of their faces before she was close enough to say a single word.