October 6: The Parlor

The invitation was waiting on the front step when Eli opened the door that morning.

It lay on the mat, square and flat and perfectly clean, as if it had been set down by someone who had a great deal of respect for mats. It was a card of black paper, heavy as slate, and when he picked it up it was faintly warm. The writing on it was in silver ink, in a tall, careful, old-fashioned hand, and the letters did not seem entirely fixed. When he looked at them for too long, they moved.

Mr. Nye requests the pleasure of Mr. Elias Calloway's company at the first assembly of the Thirteen. Seven o'clock this evening. Nye's Parlor. The door will be there when you need it.

There was no address. There was no signature. He turned the card over and found the back blank, and when he turned it again the silver words had settled, politely, into stillness.

"Mordecai," he called.

The cat was on the sofa in the living room where Vex had left him, bandaged along one flank with a strip of clean cloth and looking, in every way, like an animal that had been dropped from a considerable height. He had not slept well. He had spent the night lying with his chin on his paws, glaring at nothing, and when Eli put the card in front of him he sniffed it once and sighed.

"Ah," he said. "The host is wasting no time."

"Who is Mr. Nye?"

"He is the reason the contest exists in the form that it does." Mordecai lifted his head with a visible effort. "Every eighteen years, the thirteen clans compete for the wish. Someone must see that the rules are kept, that the Sigils are given, that the dead are counted and the living remain honest. For as long as anyone can remember, that has been the work of Mr. Nye. He keeps a shop, a tea house of sorts, that sits somewhere in the lower town. It is called Nye's Parlor. It appears where it is needed, and it is not there when it is not. A person who is not a witch cannot find it at all. They will walk past it a thousand times and never see a door."

"A shop that moves."

"A shop that arrives." The cat's tone was dry, but there was something else under it, a flat, guarded wariness that Eli had not heard before. "It is also the one place in Port Verity where no witch may harm another. That is the rule. The Parlor is sanctuary. Whatever happens inside it, however much you may hate the person across the room, no blood may be spilled under that roof. It is the only thing that keeps the contest from collapsing into a slaughter on the first night. Remember it. The moment you step through the door, you are safe. The moment you step out of it, you are not."

"And Nye himself?"

Mordecai was silent for long enough that Eli looked down at him.

"I have met him," the cat said finally. "Once or twice, in the long years. He is courteous. He is scrupulously fair. He has never to my knowledge told a lie." He lowered his head to his paws. "I do not like him, and I cannot tell you why. That is the whole of what I know. Do not take the tea, unless you must. Do not make bargains. Do not let him see you afraid."

"Are you coming?"

"Of course I am coming. I am your familiar." He tried to rise, and lay back again with a hiss. "I will walk. I have walked on worse."

Vex re-bandaged him before they left, with a soft and unexpected tenderness, her fingers moving over the matted fur while he pretended to bear it. She looked at the black card for a long time, and at Eli, and then at the cat, and when she spoke her voice was low. "I'm not invited," she said. "Only the champions and their familiars. I can't come. I hate that I can't come." She pressed a small folded packet into his palm, black salt and a nail and a sprig of rue, and closed his fingers over it. "You'll be careful. You'll listen more than you talk. And you'll come home and tell me everything."

"I will."

"Take Mina and Jonah as far as the street. They can't go in either. But you can leave them on the corner, and they'll hear you if you shout."

"I know."

He set out at half past six, with Mordecai limping beside him and the card in his pocket tugging, very gently, toward the lower town, like a compass needle that had made up its mind.

He found the door on Dock Street, between a shuttered chandler's shop and a bar that had gone out of business a decade ago.

He had walked this street a dozen times. He was certain of it. There had been a brick wall here, blind and soot-stained, with a rusting fire escape bolted to it. Now there was a narrow, deep-set shop front, painted a dull and gleaming black, with two bow windows full of curiosities. The glass was old and a little warped. Behind it, brass teapots stood in rows with ancient hourglasses and a stuffed owl wearing spectacles, a ship in a bottle, a tiny mummified hand on a velvet cushion. Above the door, a sign in faded gold lettering read NYE'S PARLOR. TEA & CURIOSITIES. A bell hung beside the door, and a light burned within, a soft amber, like a candle seen through honey.

It was warm on the step. It was a different sort of warm from the street.

Mina and Jonah stopped at the corner. Eli had asked them to, and they obeyed without comment, standing half in the shadow of a lamp post with their hands folded. He saw Mina's eyes go to the black shopfront and then slide off it, as though she could not quite make out what she was looking at. Jonah did not look at it at all.

"Shout if you need us," Mina said.

"I won't."

"Shout anyway."

He nodded, and went to the door. His palm had begun to burn. It was a faint, steady heat, and as he lifted his hand to the latch he could feel it rise, as if a hundred small coals had been lit beneath the skin. There were others near. Many of them.

He opened the door, and the bell rang once, a thin silver note, and he stepped through.

The Parlor was larger inside than out. That was the first impression, and it did not seem like a trick. The room stretched back, and back, a long, low, warm, firelit space with a ceiling hung with brass lamps and dried herbs and little glass globes that glowed like captured fireflies. The walls were lined from floor to rafters with shelves, and every shelf was crowded. Masks of all sizes and shapes and materials stared down from the upper rows, grinning, weeping, blank. Clocks in a hundred styles ticked and chimed, and no two showed the same hour. There were jars of colored sand and small bones and things that looked like sealed breaths. There were maps on the wall, and one of them, he realized, was a map of the Dreamlands, with a small neat arrow drawn beside the Vale of Skai. A faint smell of black tea and cloves and old paper lay over everything.

Round tables had been set out across the floor, each with its own mismatched chairs. At the far end, a fire burned in a deep stone hearth, and before it stood a tall, thin figure with his back to the room, pouring tea.

He turned.

Mr. Nye looked to be about forty. He was tall, taller than any of the men in the room, with a long, pleasant, unremarkable face and a neat dark mustache and a pair of tinted glasses with round lenses the color of weak amber. He wore a black suit of impeccable cut, black shoes, a black waistcoat, and a thin silver pin in his tie in the shape of something Eli could not make out. He was ageless in a way that did not look like youth. He might have been thirty. He might have been seventy. And when he smiled, a warm, courteous, welcoming smile, there was nothing in it to object to, and Eli felt every nerve in his body stand up straight.

"Mr. Calloway," said Mr. Nye. His voice was low and well-modulated and strangely full, like a voice in a large hall. "How very good of you to come. Please, come in. Sit anywhere you like. You are the first of the younger generation to arrive."

"Thank you," Eli said.

He walked to the nearest table and sat, with the cat settled stiffly on the chair beside him. He noticed, and tried not to, that when Nye turned back to the hearth, his shadow did not turn with him. It lagged. It went on facing the room, a long, thin, black shape stretched against the floorboards, for half a heartbeat after the man had moved, and then slid after him as though it had remembered. The fire threw its edges strangely. It seemed, for an instant, to be wearing something on its head.

Eli blinked, and the shadow was only a shadow.

"The tea is a Darjeeling," Nye said pleasantly, without looking round. "I would be delighted to pour you a cup, Mr. Calloway. It is entirely safe. I would never poison a guest."

"I'm fine, thank you," Eli said.

"Of course."

Next to him, Mordecai had gone perfectly still. He was looking at the fire. He was not looking at the host.

They came one by one. The bell rang, and the room changed, as each new champion entered, and Eli's palm burned a little hotter. Zara was the third, in a long dark coat with a scarf of pale blue around her hair, and she saw Eli across the room and gave him a small, warm inclination of the head that brought an unexpected and quite undeserved rush of relief. She took a seat near the hearth, and in the amber light her silver bangles chimed. Her eyes, when she turned them on the room, were calm and slightly unfocused, and for a moment they seemed to rest on Nye, and stay there, and her expression did not change.

A young man followed, in his early twenties or late twenties, with round glasses and a rumpled gray hoodie, a messenger bag, and a small ferret riding on his shoulder, pale gold and bright-eyed. He looked around the Parlor with the harried wonder of someone who had been dropped into a video game and did not like the load screen. "Okay," he muttered. "Okay. Sure. Why not." He saw Eli, and Mordecai, and pushed his glasses up his nose. "Hi. Fen. Fen Alder. This is Pixel. She doesn't bite. Much."

"Eli."

"Oh, I know who you are. The Calloway kid." He said it with sympathy, not suspicion. "I'm sorry about your dad. I never met him, but everyone said he was good."

Then, in a soft jangle of jewelry and a drift of gray silk, came a woman of about sixty with a sharp silver bob and steel-rimmed glasses, who took one look at the room, chose the chair nearest to the exit, and sat down with a spine like a ruler. A large pale spider with legs like scalpels walked along the back of the chair beside her ear and settled there, and no one near her looked at it for long. She introduced herself to no one.

A tall, wide-shouldered man in his late twenties, with sleeve tattoos running to both wrists and a mild, tired face, sat down heavily at a table and rubbed his eyes. A flash of orange moved under the skin of his forearm, beneath the ink, a fish turning in a black sea. A strikingly pretty girl with perfect hair and expensive clothes took a seat at the table farthest from the door, with a tiny white lapdog clutched in her arms and an expression of high, glittering, brittle poise. She was clearly trying to look as if she belonged here. She did not look at anyone for more than a second, and her hand, where it held the dog, was white at the knuckles.

A woman with cropped red hair and a scar across her jaw, in a battered leather jacket, walked in with a gray owl riding her shoulder and quickly, thoroughly counted every person in the room, her gaze lingering on the door, then the windows, then Nye. She sat with her back to a wall.

Then a young man in a beautifully cut charcoal suit came in, and the whole room felt the shift.

He was handsome. That was the first thing, and it was an insolent kind of handsome, as if it were a weapon he happened to have on him. Golden hair, slicked back from a high forehead. A strong jaw, a faint easy smile, gray-green eyes that went around the room like a duelist measuring a floor. He wore a pale yellow handkerchief in his breast pocket, and when he saw Eli, the smile widened by a degree.

"Well," said Cassius Wolfe. "There he is."

Eli's palm went white-hot.

He did not move. He felt Mordecai's claws sink slowly into the seat beside him. Across the room, a glass chimed against a saucer, and a clock struck half past seven, or ten past nine, or noon. Cassius took his time. He crossed the Parlor with unhurried grace and pulled out a chair opposite Eli, and sat, and crossed his ankle over his knee, and regarded him with every appearance of pleasure.

"You look well," he said. "For a boy who had a dog set on him yesterday afternoon."

Eli kept his voice level. "You sent it."

"I did." Cassius made no attempt to deny it. He leaned back, one arm draped over the back of the chair. "I will not insult you by pretending otherwise. Garm is mine. I sent him to find you, and he found you, and it was nothing personal." He glanced down at Mordecai with an expression of bright, unkind interest. "I see your cat took the worst of it. He looks like he lost an argument with a lawnmower. Do tell him I am sorry. Though not very."

"You attacked me at my father's grave," Eli said. His hands were flat on the table, and he was surprised by how steady they were. "While I was standing there. Alone."

"This is a contest to the death, Calloway, in case it has not occurred to you." Cassius shrugged, a small, elegant movement of one shoulder. "If I waited until you were ready, it would be a courtesy, and I do not have the patience for courtesy. You were a gap in the field. I thought I might close it." He smiled. "I will say this in your own interest. I have no particular quarrel with you. It is your family. The Calloways, the Hales, the lot of you, who have sat on this city for a century as though it belonged to you. The Wolfes were here before there was a harbor to sit on. I intend to see you removed, root and branch, and my family where it should have been all along, at the head of the table. You are merely first."

"That is a fine speech," said Mordecai.

Cassius's eyes dropped to the cat.

"You will excuse me if I do not rise," Mordecai said, in a voice of great and weary politeness. "I am a little tired. I notice that you have not brought your dog, Cassius. I wonder why. It cannot be that he is still in a corner somewhere, licking his wounds, unable to walk." His whiskers lifted. "I understand he is in considerably worse shape than I am."

Cassius opened his mouth. He closed it. For a moment something moved behind his eyes, quick and ugly, and then the smile came back, thinner.

"Enjoy the evening, Calloway," he said. He rose, and straightened his cuffs, and gave a small, mocking bow. "It is the last one you will be entirely safe in."

He went to a table at the far side of the room and sat with his back to a pillar. Eli let out a breath he had not known he was holding.

"He did not answer that," he whispered.

"He could not," Mordecai said, with deep and quiet satisfaction. "It was true."

The bell rang again.

Two more came through the door together, and it took Eli a moment to understand what he was looking at.

They were young, a young man and a young woman, and they were wound around each other as though they had grown that way. The young man was lean and sharp-featured, with dark curls falling over his forehead and a crooked, charming grin that did not come near his eyes. The girl was pale and wide-eyed, with a fall of long black hair and a thin floral dress, faded roses on a cream ground, that she wore over black tights in the October chill and carried with an old-fashioned prettiness that did not look like fashion. Both of them wore a single glove on the left hand, black lace on the girl, black leather on the boy. They did not seem to notice the room. She was laughing softly at something he had said, with her hand flat on his chest, and when he bent his head and kissed her, it was not a short kiss, or a polite one.

"Oh," Eli said.

"Do not stare," Mordecai murmured.

They took the table nearest the fire. The girl did not take a chair. She settled into the young man's lap as though it were her own, with her legs across his knees and her arm around his neck, and they went on murmuring into each other's mouths, and laughing, until Eli's face grew hot and he looked firmly at the tabletop. A boyfriend and a girlfriend, he thought. A couple. They looked as though they were in the middle of a private conversation that had been going on for years and did not require any other people. Once, glancing up, he saw her hand slide down the front of his jacket and settle low on his lap, and squeeze, once, slowly, and saw his grin widen. He heard her voice, a high, sweet, breathless murmur pitched for him alone, and caught five words of it before the clocks chimed over the rest. I'm going to fuck you so hard when we get home.

Eli stared determinedly at the wall.

"Do you know," Mordecai said in a very low voice, "I have seen a great many things, in a very long life. I have seen kings die and cities drown. I find that those two make my fur crawl." His nose twitched. "The girl smells of ash. I do not know why."

Before Eli could ask what he meant, a bell rang again. It was not the door bell. It was a small, silver, hand-held thing, and it was rung by Mr. Nye, who had come to the center of the room and now stood with his hands folded before him, in the light of the fire.

"Good evening," he said.

Every conversation stopped. It stopped all at once, without being asked, like a flock of birds going still. Eli felt his palm blaze up like a struck match. There were nine of them in the room, nine hot points scattered through the dark, and they pressed against his nerves like fingers.

"Thank you all for coming," said Mr. Nye. "Some of you have come a considerable distance. Some of you have come under circumstances that I am sure were unpleasant. I regret that. I am a host, and I would like you all to be comfortable, and I recognize that this is not a comfortable occasion." The amber lenses of his glasses caught the firelight. "I will state the rules plainly. I will state them only once. I would ask that you listen."

Nobody moved. Fen's ferret put its head into his collar.

"Thirteen clans have sent their champions to this city. Thirteen champions, each bearing a numbered Sigil upon the palm, which I will presently place or confirm. You will have noticed already that it warms when another champion draws near. It will do so for the rest of your lives, or for the rest of the contest, whichever ends first." A soft, dry ripple went through the room, not quite laughter. "A champion may kill another champion. A champion may trap one, or imprison one, or break one, by any means and in any place, with a single exception. Beneath this roof, no hand may be raised in violence. This is sanctuary. I would advise against testing it. The roof has opinions."

One of the lamps overhead flared, very briefly, an angry deep red, and went amber again.

"A champion may also forfeit," Nye said. "At any time, for any reason. It is simple. You come to me, you place your Sigil in my hand, and it is done. The forfeiter loses their magic, for good, and is thereafter free to go. They keep their life. They keep their memories. They are no longer a participant, and no one may be required to continue." He smiled. It was a pleasant, courteous, welcoming smile, and it was too wide. It was perhaps a quarter of an inch too wide, at both corners, and it stayed there a moment longer than it should have. "I mention this only because it is a mercy, and a few of you may find that you want one."

He said nothing more.

The silence went on. It went on for a long time, and he let it. The fire popped. A hundred clocks ticked, in a hundred different hours, and somewhere in the shelves a small brass bell began to chime, and kept chiming, and Eli counted without meaning to, and reached thirteen before it stopped. It occurred to him, quite suddenly, that no one in the room had thought to ask what happened to a forfeiter's power afterward, or where it went, and that Mr. Nye had not volunteered it.

Beside him, Mordecai did not breathe.

Nye's shadow moved.

It did not lag this time. It simply moved, on its own, a long, narrow darkness on the floor, stretching its arms wide in a gesture of welcome, though the man himself stood perfectly still. For a moment Eli saw it clearly. The proportions were wrong. The head was too tall, and crowned with something flat and broad, like a headdress, and where a face should have been, there was only a smooth black blankness that seemed to be looking at each of them in turn. Then it folded its arms and was only a shadow.

No one else had noticed. He was sure of it. They were all looking at the man.

"On the thirty-first of October, at midnight," Nye said gently, "the last champion standing will receive one wish. One. Whatever it may be, however large or small. It is the only reward. I have never known it to disappoint."

He turned, and set the bell on the mantel, and spread his hands.

"Now. Shall we begin?"

He called them by number.

It was a ceremony, and it was clearly an old one, performed with the quiet precision of a man who had performed it many times. Each champion rose when summoned, crossed the floor, and held out a left hand. Nye took it in both of his, with a formality that was almost tender. He touched the palm with two fingers. A thin line of light went through the skin and faded. And for a moment the champion stood quite still, looking stunned, as if something had been taken and something else returned.

"Sigil One," said Mr. Nye. "Mr. Harlan Vesey."

No one stood. Nye waited, politely, and looked around the room.

"Mr. Vesey sends his regrets," he said. "He is eighty-three years of age, and his health does not permit him to travel. He has assured me that he will follow the contest with the closest attention."

"I've heard of him," Fen whispered to Eli, leaning over the next table. His ferret had come out of his collar to peer at the room. "He's supposed to be the oldest clan in the country. My dad's coworker said he looks like somebody's grandfather. Little white hair, walks with a cane." He shivered. "Which I'm told is the scariest kind."

"Sigil Two," Nye went on, "will be addressed at the end of the roll." He passed on without pausing, and a few of the champions frowned. "Sigil Three. Dr. Imelda Roth."

The woman with the silver bob rose, smoothed her gray skirt, and came forward with the unhurried tread of someone who had spent decades walking into rooms where people were afraid of her. The pale spider on her shoulder, which she called Atropos in a flat voice when Nye inquired, clung to the silk of her blouse and did not move. She held out her palm and took it back at once, as if it were an instrument she had finished using.

"Retired. St. Anne's, general surgery. Thirty-one years." She turned, and her eyes, behind the steel rims, passed over the room like a lamp over a ward, and settled on Eli. "So this is the Calloway boy."

"Yes," Eli said.

"Eighteen. Fresh out of the egg." She studied him in the clinical way she might have studied a chart. "I am glad, if I am honest. Thomas Calloway was forty-seven and had been at this for decades. He would have been hard to beat. You will be easy." She said it without malice, as one remarks on the weather. "I mean no offense. I would simply prefer to survive."

Mordecai's claws flexed. Eli put a hand on his back and said nothing, and Roth went to sit down with her spine like a ruler.

"Sigil Four," said Mr. Nye. "Brother Anselm."

Again no one rose. Nye lifted his hands in a small, regretful gesture.

"He did not reply to the invitation," he said.

"The priest won't come," said Roth, from her chair. "He's arguing with God." Several people laughed shortly. "Defrocked in the nineties. He has been seen shouting at pigeons in the cathedral square."

"The man is mad as a hatter," Cassius agreed lazily, from his pillar. "I would avoid him. He would sooner hear voices than hold a conversation."

"I heard he did something to a church once," Fen said, in a small voice. "A real church. With people in it." He swallowed. "I don't want to know."

"Sigil Five. Mr. Silas Crane."

Silence.

It was not the same silence as before. Eli looked from face to face and saw nothing in any of them, no recognition, no fear, only a polite blankness. Ruth Calder frowned. Fen glanced at his phone and put it away.

"Crane," Ruth said. "I don't know the name. The Marrows hold Five. I was expecting Gideon."

"Mr. Marrow passed away in September," said Nye pleasantly. "The seat passed through his sister's line, to her son. Mr. Crane is a most private gentleman. He has not replied."

He moved on, and the room let go of a breath it had not known it was holding, and Eli thought, for no reason he could name, that it was the only name of the evening that had made the fire gutter.

"Sigil Six. Mr. Cassius Wolfe."

Cassius rose without hurry and held out his hand, and as the light of the Sigil moved through his palm he glanced at Eli across the room, and smiled. "My companion is unavoidably indisposed this evening," he said, in answer to a question no one had asked. "A minor injury. He will recover." His eyes flicked to Mordecai. "Quickly."

"Sigil Seven. Ms. Ruth Calder."

The woman with the scar stood, with the gray owl riding her shoulder, a small, calm shape whom she introduced, briefly, as Strix. "Formerly of the Port Verity Police," Nye said. "Homicide, for eleven years."

"Formerly," said Ruth. She took the hand back and rubbed her palm against her jacket as though it itched. "Let's get on with it."

"Sigil Eight. Ms. Zara Qadir."

Zara rose in a drift of pale blue and the chime of bangles. She extended a hand that did not tremble. "Dvalinn is not here," she said, when Nye glanced at the empty space beside her. "He prefers moonlight to tea."

"Of course. Dreamers so often do."

On the way back to her chair, she stopped at Eli's table. For a moment her eyes were wholly present, warm and dark and a little amused, and she laid two fingers lightly on the back of his hand. "You came," she said quietly. "Good. I thought you might not. How is your cat?"

"Angry," said Mordecai from under the table.

"That is a healthy sign." She smiled, and was gone, and Eli found that the place where her fingers had been felt oddly warm. It was the way an older sister might have touched him, if he had had one. He pushed the thought aside and watched her sit.

"Sigil Nine. Mr. Takeshi Mori."

The big tattooed man went forward with a small, apologetic bow. Under his sleeve a flash of orange rippled along the ink, and a koi, a fat gleaming spirit-fish, rose briefly to the skin of his wrist and rolled one eye at the room. "Kohaku," Tak said, with a tired fondness. "He's shy."

"Sigil Ten," Nye said. "The Vance clan."

The two at the fireside table stood up together, still twined, still murmuring. They crossed the floor hand in hand, a lean, dark-haired young man and a pale girl in a faded floral dress, in a slow, loose-limbed dance that made no sense. Nye held out his hands. The pair exchanged a look, a bright, private, delighted look, and each of them held out a gloved left hand.

"To whom," said Nye, "does the Sigil belong?"

"To us," the young man said.

"Oh, we share," said the girl. She giggled.

Mr. Nye did not blink. He took the leather glove in one hand, and the black lace in the other, and laid a finger on each, and a faint white light shone through both of them, and neither of them said which of them had flinched. "Of course," he said, with perfect gravity. "The clan has a champion, and the champion has a familiar. I am not obliged to say which is which. I will say that Mr. Drew Vance is twenty years old, and Miss Lily Vance is nineteen, and that they are brother and sister."

The room went very quiet.

"Brother and sister," Eli said, to no one.

"Oh no," Fen said, softly, from the next table. "Oh no. Oh, nope."

Drew was grinning, the crooked, empty grin, and he lifted his sister's hand and kissed the lace of her glove with great ceremony. "Our familiar is rather shy," he said. "He keeps to himself. He does not like parties."

"He hides," Lily agreed, fluttering her lashes. She leaned her head against her brother's shoulder. "You will never see him."

Eli felt the heat rise to his face and the whole of his stomach turn over. He thought of the kiss by the fire. He thought of the hand on the lap, and the whisper he had overheard, and he looked at the table very hard indeed. "Mordecai," he said under his breath. "That's..."

"Yes," said the cat. His whiskers were drawn back flat. "I know."

"Sigil Eleven. Mr. Fen Alder."

Fen stood up fast, knocking his chair back, and Pixel shot up his sleeve and out again in a flurry of gold fur. "Hi," he said. "Sorry. Hi. Everybody." He held out his palm with a hand that shook, and when Nye pressed it, he let out a shaky laugh. "Cool. That's, like, extremely cool. I'm going to throw up later."

"Sigil Twelve. Ms. Gwendolyn Pryor."

The girl with the perfect hair rose at the farthest table with her dog in her arms, and she did it with a toss of her head and a shining, practiced smile, the smile of someone who had been photographed ten thousand times. She crossed the floor in heeled boots with her chin lifted. "Gwen," she said, and held out her hand. "Obviously." She smiled around the room. "And this is Bijou."

The small white dog in her arms turned its head and looked at Nye for a long, steady moment, with eyes that were far too old for a dog. Then it yawned, and put its head down.

Gwen's fingers were trembling. She had hidden it well. Eli saw it only because he was looking, and he saw her swallow, and saw the light go out of her face for half a second before she dragged it back. She was nineteen years old, and she was terrified. She caught him watching. Her chin lifted a fraction, and her eyes flashed, and for a moment there was something almost defiant in the look, and then, curiously, almost curious, before she turned away.

"And Sigil Thirteen," said Mr. Nye.

Eli stood.

It was a long walk. He felt the weight of every eye. His palm was a coal. When he reached the fire, Nye took his hand in both of his own, and they were very cool, and very dry, and the thin amber lenses of his glasses reflected two small tiny flames. "Mr. Elias Calloway," he said. "Already awake, I see. You have been busy." The pressure of his fingers shifted. Light ran across Eli's palm and sank into the ring of thirteen points, and the topmost flared and was still. "A pleasure. I am sorry about your father. He was a man of rare discipline."

"Thank you," Eli said. His voice sounded far away.

Nye let go. His smile did not change. Behind him, on the wall, his shadow had turned to look at Eli, and it stayed that way a moment too long.

Eli went back to his seat.

"Which concludes the roll," Nye said, "with one exception." He folded his hands. "Sigil Two. Mrs. Marguerite Beaumont, who was to have been with us this evening, will not be joining us. She was found this morning on the seawall of the harbor. She was dead."

For an instant no one spoke at all.

Then the room broke open.

"What?" Gwen's voice cracked on the word. The dog in her arms stirred and whimpered. "No. She... she can't be. How?"

"Dead?" Fen had gone white. "Dead how? When?"

"Last night." Nye's voice was gentle. "I regret to say that she was killed. I do not know the details. I am told she was found sitting upright, and that there was no mark upon her."

Tak had put his hand over his mouth. Zara's eyes had closed, and her lips moved in a quiet prayer. In the corner, the Vance siblings exchanged a look, and Lily whispered something into her brother's ear, and he laughed. Eli saw Cassius smile thinly, and Roth sit absolutely still, and Ruth Calder rise slowly to her feet.

"Mr. Nye," Ruth said. Her voice was low and flat and carried well. "I have some questions."

"I will answer what I can."

"Where was she found?"

"On the seawall. On a bench."

"Time of death?"

"The small hours of the morning, I understand."

"Who found her?"

"A passerby. A man walking his dog."

"Who killed her?"

"I do not know." A fractional pause. "I would not be able to tell you if I did. I am the host. I must remain impartial. If I were to name a hand, I would be taking a side. That I may not do."

"She was a champion," Ruth said. "She died outside the Parlor. Was that within the rules?"

"Entirely," said Nye. "The rules permit a champion to kill. I do not enforce them against the living. I only keep the count."

Ruth Calder looked at him for a long moment with a policeman's flat, cold eyes, and then sat down very slowly, as though she had learned something she did not like.

"Any one of the people in this room could have done it," Roth said into the silence. She had not raised her voice. She did not need to. "Any one of us. I suggest everyone remember that when they next accept a cup of tea."

"Or it was the missing ones," said Fen faintly. "The old guy, or the priest, or the..." He did not say Crane. "Right? It could have been them."

"It could have been anyone," Cassius agreed, and sounded delighted.

Eli looked at the faces. He could not help it. He looked at Roth's cold, composed one, and at the pleased, handsome face of Cassius Wolfe. He looked at the Vance siblings, who were whispering in each other's ears, and at Ruth, and at Tak's hand over his mouth, and at Gwen, white and rigid. Somewhere among these people, or among the ones who had not come, was the person who had taken his father from him. He did not know how he would recognize them. He did not know if he would be able to bear it when he did.

"May I speak?"

It was Zara. She had risen from her chair by the hearth, with one hand resting lightly on its back, and in the amber light her eyes were clear and her voice low and steady. She did not look at Nye. She looked at the room.

"Mrs. Beaumont is dead," she said. "I did not know her. I am sorry for her. She was a witch of an old and proud family, and she was alone, and someone killed her in the dark. I would like us to consider whether that is what we want for the rest of the month." She drew a breath. "I do not pretend that the wish is nothing. It is a great deal. Everyone in this room wants it for a reason. But I believe that killing, other than in self-defense, is not becoming of a witch. We have a better option, and Mr. Nye has told us so himself. A champion may forfeit. A champion who is beaten need not be dead. Let us beat one another, if we must, and leave one another breathing. Let the loser surrender the Sigil and walk away, with their life and their memory, and no blood on any of us."

"How touching," said Cassius.

"I would go further." Zara did not look at him. "I would ask that we say what we hope to win. Not all of us, not tonight, but those who are willing. I will tell you plainly that if someone tells me an honorable wish, a wish that harms no one, I will forfeit to them gladly. And if someone tells me an evil wish, a wish that would hurt others, I will fight them to my last breath." She inclined her head. "That is my proposal. You may take it or leave it."

The silence that followed was thick with doubt. Roth was the first to speak.

"Sentiment," she said, flatly. "The wish is a prize, not a charity. I did not come here to be generous. I came to win."

"I think it's a lovely idea," Cassius said, in a voice of silk. "I would sooner trust a cobra. Or a dream-walker."

"Oh, she's the one," Drew said suddenly. He was grinning again, the bright, hungry, crooked grin. His arm was around his sister's waist, and he tilted his head toward Zara like a man about to say something clever. "Don't you see? She's the nicest person in the room. She's so kind. That's what a killer would do, isn't it? Pretend to be nice, so you won't look at her knife."

"Nice girls are the most dangerous," Lily added, in her high, sweet voice. She had curled against his shoulder and was watching Zara with wide, bright eyes, wholly guileless. "They look at things that aren't there. I think she's the scariest of all."

"You are free to think so," Zara said gently. She did not seem offended. She did not seem anything at all. "I cannot prove a negative, and I will not try."

"I think it's a good idea."

Tak had taken his hand from his mouth. He sat very still in his chair, a big, tired, kind-looking man with a flicker of orange moving in the ink at his wrist, and his voice was quiet. "I don't want to kill anyone. I don't think I could. I came because I had to, and because I want..." He stopped. He looked at his palms. "I want to take back a night. My brother died, a few years ago. It was my fault, and I would give anything to go back to the night it happened and do it differently. That's my wish."

"I'm in," Fen said, almost before he had finished. He had half-stood, his round glasses crooked, the ferret clinging to his shoulder. "I mean, I'm terrified of all of you, but I'm in. Mine's easy. My little brother is in a coma. He's been in it for two years. I just want him to wake up." His voice cracked. "That's all. That's the whole thing. I don't want to win. I want him to wake up."

There was a faint, shocked quiet. Even Roth looked away.

"That is exactly the kind of wish I mean," Zara said softly. "Thank you."

Gwen had not moved. She sat very straight with the dog in her lap, her hands buried in its fur. When Zara's eyes turned to her, she said "No," too quickly, and then, with a ghost of a toss of her head, "I mean, no thanks. I'm good."

"And you, Eli?"

Eli had not been ready for it. Every head had turned. He felt the heat of the Sigil and the weight of every eye, and his mouth was dry. He thought about the question. It had been asked of him once already, on a bridge in a dream, and he had not been able to answer.

"I want to find out who killed my father," he said slowly. It came out stronger than he had expected. "That's all I know. After that, I don't know. I haven't figured it out."

Zara looked at him, and her face softened. "That is an honest answer," she said. "I can work with an honest answer."

"Honest answers get people killed," said Cassius.

"Too many of you are children."

Ruth Calder had spoken. She sat with her arms crossed and her back to the wall, and the scar on her jaw stood out pale in the firelight. She was not looking at anyone in particular. "I've been counting," she said. "The Calloway boy is eighteen. The Pryor girl is nineteen. The Vances are twenty and nineteen. I have been a police officer, and I have been in a lot of rooms with a lot of bodies. I do not like what I am looking at. Too many young people are walking into a contest to the death." She looked at Nye. "Is there no age limit?"

"There is none," said Mr. Nye. He gave a small, pleasant shrug. "Eighteen is old enough."

"Eighteen is old enough to vote," Ruth said. "It isn't old enough for this."

"That is the opinion of the clans, however. I only keep the count." Nye smiled, and clasped his hands together, and glanced at the clocks. Most of them had stopped. "I think that is enough for one evening. The Parlor will remain open until the tea is gone, and you are welcome to stay. I would remind you, as a courtesy, that sanctuary ends at the threshold. What you do on the other side of that door is a matter for you, and for your patrons."

He bowed slightly, to the room at large, and as he did the shadow behind him bowed as well, a half-second late, and a good deal deeper.

They left in ones and twos, with a good deal of care.

Cassius went first, without looking back, with his hands in his pockets and his handkerchief like a small yellow flag at his breast. At the door he paused, turned his head, and smiled at Eli with those clear, pleasant, empty eyes. "Mind the corners on your way home," he said. "They can be treacherous." And then he was out into the night.

Roth followed, silent, the spider riding her shoulder. Ruth Calder went out like a woman leaving a crime scene, scanning every shadow. The Vances left last, together, with their arms wound round each other. Eli saw Drew's hand slide down over the curve of his sister's hip and lower, under the hem of the floral dress, and saw Lily lean up and say something wet and giggling against his ear. They went out together into the dark, laughing, tangled up like a pair of animals.

"I think I am going to be sick," said Mordecai.

"You and me both."

Tak and Fen had gone off together to a table by the window and were talking in low voices, earnestly, like two men on a lifeboat. Eli saw Fen scribble something on a napkin and slide it across the table. Zara had stopped to speak with them, and then she crossed the room to Eli's side with her coat over her arm.

"You did well," she said.

"I said I didn't know what I wanted."

"It is better than most. They have wishes they have never said aloud, even to themselves." She was close enough that he could smell cedar and rain on her coat. She regarded him a moment longer, with that grave and gentle attention that was oddly like a big sister's, and then, just for a moment, she smiled, a real smile, quick and warm. "Stay near your cat," she said. "He is better than he looks. And be careful on the way home."

"I will."

"Good." Her bangles chimed. "I will find you."

She went out. A moment later, someone stopped beside his chair.

It was Gwen. She had the little white dog under one arm and her phone clutched in the other hand, and her expensive hair had come a little loose from its clip. She was looking at him, not quite meeting his eyes, with an odd, careful expression.

"You're brave," she said abruptly. "Saying that. Out loud."

"I'm not."

"Yeah. Me neither." She laughed, a small and breathless sound, and for a second the polish slipped, and he saw how young she was. "I don't know why I came. I really don't." She clutched the dog tighter. "Be careful, okay?" And then she was gone, with the click of her boots.

Eli stood a moment, looking after her.

At the far end of the Parlor, Mr. Nye stood at the hearth with his back to the room, pouring the last of the tea. The fire made a long, gentle gold around him. Eli could not see his face. He could see the line of his shoulders, and the neat dark hair, and the black suit, and, spread out across the stones at his feet, the tall dark shape of a shadow, at ease, as though it had all the time in the world.

"Come," Mordecai said, very quietly. "Come. Now."

He went. The bell rang once above the door, a thin silver note, and the cold took him on the step, and when he looked back there was a brick wall behind him, blind and sooty, with an old fire escape bolted to it.

He walked home the long way, with Mina and Jonah a respectful distance behind and Mordecai limping at his side, and he did not say a word until they reached his father's gate. They watched him in. They did not follow him through the door.

The kitchen was warm. Vex had been waiting, and it showed. She was sitting at the table with a mug and an untouched plate of reheated spaghetti, in her oversized sweatshirt, and she stood up the moment she heard the latch.

"You're alive," she said.

"I'm alive."

"Good. Sit down. Eat. And tell me."

He told her, between mouthfuls, with the cat dozing on the chair beside him. He told her about the black card and the shop that was not there. He told her about the tea and the amber glasses and the shadow that would not hold still. He described Cassius, and the dog that was not in the room, and Mordecai's retort, and she laughed, a small, startled, relieved sound. He described Roth and her spider, and Ruth Calder's questions, and Gwen with her fox that was disguised as a dog. He told her about Zara's proposal, and about Tak and Fen and their wishes, and she stopped chewing.

"Fen's brother," she said. "God. That's awful."

"Yeah."

He told her about the Vances, and she pulled a face of such deep, honest revulsion that he nearly laughed. "Siblings? You're sure?"

"Nye said it himself."

"Okay, no. No, that's... I knew the Vance clan was weird. The whole family is weird. But that is a lot of weird." She put down her fork. "I hate that I'm not surprised."

He saved Marguerite for last. When he told her, she was quiet for a while. Then she said, in a flat voice, "I saw it on the news this afternoon. A woman on the seawall. They said it was natural causes, pending the autopsy." She looked at the table. "I thought, it's too neat. I thought, it's started." She shook her head slowly. "Who would do that? Who would sit someone down on a bench afterward?"

"Someone who wanted her found," said Mordecai, without opening his eyes.

Neither of them had an answer to that.

Later, after the dishes were done, they stood together in the hall, and Vex said, "You start school tomorrow."

Eli groaned. "I forgot."

"Port Verity High. Your grandmother arranged it. Mina will be in your class, and Jonah will be in the parking lot, probably doing something suspicious." She tried not to smile, and failed. "Say goodbye to your sanity."

"I'm a witch in a contest to the death," Eli said. "I think I can handle gym class."

"Gym class is where most witches die," said Vex solemnly. "Go to bed."

He went up the stairs, and lay in the dark on his old bed. His palm throbbed gently, with a low, steady, ember-like heat. He thought of a shop that arrived when it was needed, and of a host who did not tell lies, and of a shadow that wore a crown. He thought of a woman on a bench with her pearls beside her, and of the eleven champions still living, one of whom had left her there.

He had a long day tomorrow. He did not know how he would be able to sleep.

He slept anyway, and dreamed of nothing at all.