I stared, willing the burns to disappear, willing the pain to stop.
“We’ll have to pick the lock,” I whispered. I’d never had to break one of my own locks before, but I knew that if it wasn’t done in just the right delicate way, it would shatter and stab the lockpick’s hands—and, worse, some of the shards would fly into the briefcase and might damage the sleeping buzzers in ways I couldn’t repair outside of my workshop. “We’ll have to be very careful, though, and very clever.” I looked down at my useless hands in dismay.
“I’ll do it,” Caro said. “All those years of making music boxes had to come in handy.” Fin moved over, and Caro knelt beside him on the ground. She waited patiently for each of my instructions and followed them with remarkable dexterity.
Finally I heard five quick snaps, and the briefcase creaked open.
The first tray contained the copperwork butterfly and five sleeping dragonflies. “Maybe they’d be safer in there,” I said, reconsidering. “We’ll find the cap-o’-rushes eventually, and I can . . . manage the burns till then.”
Jules, who had been watching quietly, shook his head.
“Maybe they’ll be safest if they can think for themselves,” Fin said.
I hated to risk them in any way at all, but I knew he was right. Caro and Fin woke the buzzers, since even that would have hurt my hands. They crowded affectionately around me for a moment, buzzing anxiously over my burns.
Jules nickered and they flocked to him. He rumbled something quiet, and they took off in small fleets, soaring without hesitation into the shadows.
If Jules knew this place, I supposed the buzzers did too.
I kept thinking about all those people back on the sea, the ones we might have rescued if we’d tried just a little harder, if Jules still had his other wing . . . if I’d built it better and stronger.
I was grateful that Fin had made it to Faerie alive, because I understood that he had important work to do here. And I was grateful for Caro’s survival because I couldn’t think about a world without her. More than my own life, I needed both of them to live.
But why should I have survived instead of, say, Wheelock? I remembered the stark, stubborn determination on his face when he told me that he would go down with his ship. I had liked Wheelock, really liked him, even more than I’d realized back on the Imperator. I thought of his stiff old-man formality and the surprising flashes underneath it and compared him to the young men I’d met at court in the past year, who tended to be variations on the theme of Fitzwilliam Covington: grasping, manipulative, slick.
Wheelock had endeared himself to me in a way that none of them had, and I mourned the lost possibility that he might have become part of the intimacy that I shared with Caro and Fin. Perhaps we could have had something like Bex and Caro had . . .
But Wheelock was dead, and Walsh and Gunning and Sneha and probably the whole rest of the crew were dead, and they were all lost behind us on that brilliant green sea, and all I could do now was plunge into the darkness of the jungle with the friends I still had with me.
I had to leave Wheelock behind, I had to leave them all, to move forward. So I forced myself to do it.
After less than an hour of picking our way over the huge tree roots and torso-thick vines at our feet, we had to stop for a rest. My mouth was so dry that my blistered lips stuck to each other as I opened them. We had no supplies with us, of course, but I saw some cupped leaves the size of buckets sprouting from a thick stalk ahead.
In the recesses of each leaf’s curve was a perfectly clear bowl of rainwater.
I walked up to the closest one, my hands shaking as I raised them to its sides. I wanted to pour the cool water over the burns on my arms almost more than I wanted to drink it . . . My skin felt tightly stretched and uncomfortably hot, a condition that the close, humid air of the jungle only exacerbated.
“Wait!” Fin said as I started to tip the water toward my parched, waiting mouth. “Nick, do you know that plant?”
In that second I almost hated him.
Finally I released my hold on the leaf. “No.” I could feel a waxy residue on my hands, and I wiped them against my singed trousers. “You’re right, it’s too risky.”
We rested for a few more precious minutes and walked on.
The buzzers had been gone for nearly an hour now, and I was starting to worry. Every bright flicker in the shadowy jungle around us I hoped was a metallic wing—and not a pair of predatory eyes. Mother hadn’t told me as much about the Fey fauna as she had the flora . . . I started to wonder if she’d avoided describing it in order to spare me nightmares.
That wouldn’t have been like her, though. She would never spare me or shelter me when she could teach me something instead. I remembered her sharp, demanding intellect and tried to take comfort in it.
Something rustled in the darkness behind us. Without a word we crowded closer together, Caro and I flanking Fin and walking sideways while Jules took the lead, so that we could keep watch in all directions. At least the fear of lurking, hungry monsters meant I paid a little less attention to my still-swelling burns, my screaming muscles, my parched throat.
A series of glassy flickers at the corner of my eye made me flinch, but then I recognized the buzzers as they fluttered out of the shadows. They flew slowly, because they were heavily laden.
The copper butterfly flew directly to Jules’s mouth and he began tearing the cap-o’-rushes into narrow strips.
Then Jules ground the fungus in his strong metal jaws. A wonderful astringent smell, clean and earthy at the same time, filled the humid air. The butterfly smeared its wings in the paste and flew to my right arm, where it gently stroked itself along my raw skin.
A sweet, icy tingling spread everywhere the butterfly touched me. The relief was so immediate that tears came to my eyes.
Fin and Caro took the rest of the cap-o’-rushes from Jules’s mouth and joined the butterfly’s ministrations, carefully spreading the gray-brown paste over my arms, shoulders, neck, and face.
I had never felt anything so wonderful. I had to tighten my jaw to keep myself from crying out with the joy of it, with the gratitude for being suddenly free of such terrible pain.
The dragonflies laid their burden at the ground before us, and it was nearly as welcome as the butterfly’s: rhodopis berries, a whole branch of them, larger and plumper and shinier than any I’d seen in Esting. It took all five dragonflies to carry the heavy branch, and they stayed on the ground once they’d laid it at our feet, seemingly too tired to move.
“Thank you so much,” I said. I picked the dragonflies up, carried them gently to Jules, and placed them on his back for safety and company. Then I returned to Fin and Caro, and we began to pluck the berries one by one.
I forced myself to eat slowly. I didn’t even notice the flavor, just the fresh liquid in my dry mouth. Beside me, Caro and Fin were equally careful, equally shaky. I knew we were all thinking the same thing: If it weren’t for the buzzers, we might have collapsed before we found sustenance we could trust, might have resorted to eating plants we didn’t know. Might have died before nightfall.
The darkness was coming on impossibly quickly. Many small, layered shadows seemed to tumble down through the thick canopy above us, darkening the spongy, leaf-laden ground with each step we took.
“Wasn’t it morning when—” Fin began.
“Yes,” Caro and I chorused.
And then it began to rain.
We flinched and huddled closer together. I listened for the hail that was sure to follow, for the malevolent, searching thunder that had seemed to chase us from the beach.
Birds stopped their song, and the movements of unseen animals vanished inside the encompassing noise of soft rainfall. The whole jungle grew quiet except for that gentle sound. The rain fell soft and sweet, washing my hair of its sticky residue of sea spray.
This was no storm; this was ordinary rain. I turned the palms of my hands toward it, and raindrops touched them l
ike blessings.
Fin’s hair had been crusted over with sea salt, making it look as if he had gone gray from the trials of the morning, but now the water sluiced over him and turned his curls black again, draping them down his neck like hanks of dark silk. Beside him, Caro opened her mouth to the sky, and tears fell from her eyes and mixed with the rain. It was the first time I’d seen her cry.
I drank too, my shaking muscles and cramped stomach thanking me for every meager swallow.
I started to feel a strange tightening on my face. I ignored it at first, but soon I couldn’t pretend not to notice it; my burns were swelling again. The cap-o’-rushes were washing away.
I watched the feather-shaped blisters on my arms rise again as the paste slipped off them. I hobbled toward the shelter of a huge, heart-shaped leaf, and when Fin and Caro saw what was happening to me, they quickly followed.
I tried to brush the thinned-out paste that remained back over my skin, but it was no use.
“We can go get more,” Fin said over the din of the rain, which was slowly growing to a torrent. “Now that we know what it looks like.”
“No,” I said. “We can’t risk getting separated in the storm.”
“Maybe the buzzers can . . .” But as he spoke, we watched one dragonfly try to lift off from Jules’s back, only to have the raindrops knock it straight to the ground. The rain was coming down hard now. It still didn’t feel like magic, and I knew it rained several times a day in Faerie’s jungles—but how could I really tell?
Caro started breaking the woody stems of the gigantic leaves around us and weaving them through some low-hanging vines that looped downward from one of the impossibly tall trees. Jules saw what she was doing, bit off another stem, and dragged it over. Fin quickly got the idea and began to help. With my burns shooting pain all over my body, I could only huddle under their makeshift tent, miserable for being unable to help them.
We had a relatively watertight shelter within half an hour. I urged Jules to get behind me, worrying about rust before I remembered that I’d already tested all his materials for both hot- and cold-water resistance, for every environmental variable I could think of. One must always account for the vagaries of truth, Mother used to say.
That phrase echoed unsettlingly in my mind now, as I looked around at a gloomy Fey landscape that seemed at once more and less true than the magical world, ripe for exploring, that I’d imagined as a child.
This wasn’t a world for exploring . . . it wasn’t for anything. It just was.
I suddenly wanted to weep with anger for all the wrongs Esting had done to this place, for how even I had thought of it as a place-for-purpose, not a place-that-is. It wasn’t a place to explore or conquer or convert, or even to free. It wasn’t a place for us at all.
We shouldn’t be here, I wanted to tell Fin and Caro, but I hurt too much, and I was too tired, to form words. And what good would it do any of us, grieving and exhausted as we were, to dwell on the mistakes that led us here?
I huddled close to them in our shelter, and I wrapped my aching arms around Jules where he rested against the deep, springy moss of the tree trunk behind us. I was happy to endure the pain of his engine’s warmth on my burns for the comfort of having him close.
But Jules, I realized, wasn’t nearly as warm as he should be. The whirring ticks and deep rumbles of his mechanisms were slowing down, and when I looked into his furnace I saw the cause: his fuel was running out. Only a few small embers of coal glowed in his belly.
He raised his head slowly and looked at me, his eyes unfocused. I thought frantically of gathering wood to burn, but I knew anything in this jungle would be too fresh and wet to light.
“It’s all right, Jules,” I murmured, using the last of my strength to speak a few words to soothe him. “I’ll find you something soon. I’ll keep you safe till then. I promise, I promise.”
He nodded, and his head came to rest on my lap as the last sparks in his furnace went out.
I took a deep, shuddering breath that made my arms and shoulders ache. The buzzers tucked themselves into my ragged pockets, sheltering from the rain.
I was overwhelmed with pain and exhaustion. Next to me, Fin and Caro looked haggard and worn.
“We have a shelter,” Fin said, looking around at the gloomy jungle. “We need to rest before we do anything else. This is probably the best place to do it. Here.” He stood and walked a few steps away, gathered ferns as tall as he was, and then laid them carefully across Jules, Caro, and me to hide us. Finally he sat down again and pulled a last fern over himself.
It was as if the camouflage gave my overtaxed survival instincts permission to relax, and within moments I was asleep.
The pain from my burns and aching muscles bled into my dreams, and I shook with fever and half-imagined fears. I dreamed of my mother’s workshop. The damp, organic jungle around me seemed to contract into clockwork and steel; the rain turned to molten glass, the mist to smoke. I heard what I thought were the rhythmic taps of tiny hammers, and I felt my mother’s hand on my neck.
Then the hand tightened and wrenched my head upward. I blinked away my visions and stared into an impassive, blue-freckled face.
I CHOKED and struggled to look for Fin and Caro, but the Fey’s grip was too strong to let me turn my head.
“Who are you?” fe asked in perfect, harsh Estinger. I looked down and saw a blue kerchief, an emblem of the Fey rebellion, tucked into the collar of fer shirt.
I hesitated. Even if Mr. Candery’s letter had been honest, and I held desperately to the belief that it was, I didn’t know if this soldier could be trusted.
When fer grip tightened even more, I gasped, then pressed my cracking lips together. I steeled myself for further pain, knowing only that I needed to keep my friends safe.
“I am Prince Christopher Dougray Fadhiri Anton Abdul-Rafi’ Finnian, Heir of Esting,” I heard Fin say fiercely.
My heart sank. Could he really be foolish enough to believe his name and title would save the day?
“Fin!” Caro whispered, and I knew she thought the same.
I felt my hands yanked behind my back and tied. The Fey who held me released my neck and looked over my shoulder, in the direction of Fin’s voice. “It could be him,” fe said. “He matches the stories, anyway.” Fe looked me up and down, assessing. “So does this one. The princess-to-be.”
“The inventor,” I said. “Not the princess.” I didn’t know why I should care about such things at a time like this, but since I thought I might be about to die, I at least wanted to die as the person I really was.
The Fey blinked, and I thought I saw a flicker of surprise, or recognition, in fer blue eyes as fe looked me up and down. But fer face soon grew cold and impassive again.
“Inventor or princess,” fe said, “you and your friends are coming with us.”
I turned my head and saw several more Fey soldiers holding Fin and Caro. Others inspected Jules, who lay as still under our shelter as if he’d never moved at all. They were frowning in distaste, even disgust. Their expressions tightened further at the sight of the briefcase on Jules’s back, which thankfully was closed tight again; I knew well they’d confiscate it, but I felt confident that the locks I’d adapted from Mother’s designs would keep them from opening it.
One of the soldiers looked at me, and again I saw that flicker of recognition and wondered if Mr. Candery had been honest after all.
They opened the furnace hatch in Jules’s belly.
“Don’t hurt him!” I cried.
The Fey who had grabbed my neck frowned at me. “Send a carrier for the machine when we get to the barracks.” Fe nodded toward the others. “Now turn out.” Fe pivoted and began to walk back through the jungle. I felt a shove from behind and had no choice but to follow.
It was fully night now, and the only light came from the glowing orbs that dangled from the soldiers’ belts. I stumbled over the uneven ground as we walked. They’d placed me in front, so I couldn’
t see Fin or Caro, but after a few moments I heard Caro’s reassuringly gentle voice near me. “All right, both of you?”
“Yes,” I said, and I heard Fin say the same from closer behind.
I still felt as if I could kill Fin for giving away his identity so easily—and I still couldn’t believe he’d been so foolish. And why hadn’t the rebels been expecting us?
I felt the buzzers flit one by one out of my pockets and steal away into the night, and I was glad. They were small enough to run on clockwork instead of coal, and they knew how to wind one another. Even if I never saw them again, at least they’d survive.
I don’t know how long we marched. My muscles were already aching so much that every step took monumental effort and seemed to take monumental time.
At the edge of the light cast by the Fey’s orbs, I watched vines slither over tree trunks like snakes, moving hopefully toward the lamps. The Fey who led us kicked away tendrils that crept around fer legs and boots. I was suddenly grateful that I didn’t have a light of my own, in spite of my tendency to trip.
Far above in the trees, more lights flickered greenly among the leaves.
At last we stopped before a huge rock with a fissure down its center. I thought perhaps we’d squeeze through the crack, but instead the Fey leader walked right through the rock’s apparently solid face.
I was pushed forward so harshly that I had no choice but to walk into the rockface too. I had barely enough time to remember the secret door to the underground Night Market in Esting and how I’d learned the hard way the first time I went there to hold my breath whenever I passed through it. I took in a deep breath just before the rock sucked open and closed around me.
The breath was a mistake. My torso was squeezed until every particle of air was forced past my lips. I felt my fingernails begin to crack under the pressure, and I tasted blood on my tongue.
Then I started to feel my mind being compressed too, somehow flattened and pulled apart. Every emotion inside me, every intention, was laid bare one at a time.
Some kind of entity sorted through them, rummaging past each surface thought in its search for something deeper. I was here to protect Fin, yes, and to see Mr. Candery again, yes, and also to try to help Faerie if I somehow could—I felt that last desire scoffed at and tossed aside by whatever power examined me.
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