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rendered him crippled, how his family s secret had been discovered, the exact circumstances surrounding
his fall from nobility to homeless street-musician.
She watched him while he read, his gray-streaked brown hair like an unraveling scarf over the shoulders
of his faded coat. Gaslight limned the profile of his thin, aquiline nose and generous lips, and shadows
smoothed away the fine network of wrinkles that framed his eyes and mouth.
It occurred to her suddenly that she wanted very much to trust him.
He glanced up, as if feeling the weight of her gaze on him, and Mina hurriedly looked back down at her
own book, embarrassed.
"Did you have a question?" he asked mildly.
She looked up, shocked. "What?"
His brows quirked together, but he only gestured at the ancient text she held in her hands. "Did you have
a question about the manuscript?"
"Oh. Uh, no."
Duncan continued to watch her for a moment, until the silence that stretched between them felt
uncomfortably heavy. Then he shook his head, as if dismissing a thought. "I have asked the other unseelie
faelings to come here tomorrow night, so that you can meet them."
She blinked. "Meet them? There are more?"
He gave her an impatient look. "Of course there are more. I have taught faeling students for thirty years in
this city. A few have even survived."
Mina winced at the bitterness in his voice. "Oh. I m sorry."
"No matter." Duncan sighed, removed his spectacles, and rubbed tiredly at his eyes. "I think that it would
be good for you to meet them, and they you. I have done more than teach, Wilhelmina. I have tried to
build a community of sorts. We must all rely on one another if we are to survive. My students help each
other in any way that they can. They take care of one another. Do you understand?"
"Yes."
"Good." He gestured vaguely towards her book. "Perhaps you should finish that before you go home
tonight."
She nodded and bent her head back over the faded pages. And she suddenly wondered whether or not
Duncan trusted her at all.
~*~
The next night, Mina walked briskly past the market, on her way to Mummers Street. The dim stars of
summer were just emerging from the blue-black sky, and a faint red glow lingered in the west. The heavy
blanket of heat that held the city in its grip had lifted only slightly, and Mina wondered nervously whether
or not this would be a fever year.
She remembered the last one far too well: the smell of the corpses in the streets, the reek of smoke from
the fires that burned to chase away the miasma of sickness, the deathly silence that hung over the city.
The factory had closed, along with every other place where people congregated in large numbers, leaving
workers without the means to either get food or pay off their indentures. She had been terrified that the
constables would come to take them all to prison long before the mill opened again. But it seemed that, in
the season of sickness, even the police were reluctant to be out and about, and the danger had passed
her by.
She shivered a little despite the heat of the evening. Perhaps Duncan knew a spell to keep away the
fever. That would be useful.
A faint step on the pavement of the deserted market square caught her attention. Startled, she pivoted on
her heel. To her right eye, nothing was there. But to her left, a man stood behind her. For a moment, she
thought it was another fae, come to torment her like the first. But some gut-deep instinct told her
otherwise, and the hair on her neck stood straight up.
The man was pale as a corpse drained of blood. His hair might have been blond, but it bordered close
enough on white that she couldn t tell in the darkness. A white tunic embroidered with silver hung over his
spare frame, completed by white pants and boots. Blue eyes stared at her, but the look in them was as
dead as the expression on his slack features.
Mina took a step back, and then whirled as she heard a second sound behind her. Another man, almost
identical to the first, appeared from behind the stalls. A third emerged and a fourth followed; from his
hands dangled silver leads, attached to collars around the throats of two enormous Hounds.
I can t let them circle me, Mina thought with an odd clarity. She dove for the open space where the
two halves of the trap had yet to close. For an instant, she thought she would make it through. Then one
of the men whipped up the blunt end of a bronze-tipped halberd, catching her hard on the chin.
Explosions of light flowered briefly in her vision, and she felt the ground swing up to slam into her body.
Then hands were grabbing her. She screamed, trying to twist away, but they held her tight. Cold iron
kissed her wrists, and she heard the dry click of manacles snapping into place.
CHAPTER SIX
"Would you care for more tea, Fox?" Duncan asked. "It would be no trouble for Bryan to make."
Fox looked up from where she was repetitively knotting and unknotting a tangle of string between her
fingers. He thought that she might have been attempting cat s cradles, but it was difficult to tell. Fox s
mind was labyrinthine on her best days.
She had appeared shortly before noon, an expensive shawl of plum velvet wrapped around her waif-thin
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