Chapter Twenty-two

Once more I took the shape of a songbird, for in my native land I am not invisible, even to mortals. Fortuitously, Titania's kingdom (which is also Alfheimr, which is also several other worlds known by several other names; reality is a jewel of which you mortals see only facets) is densely wooded and the path on which the company now walked was lined by black-and-silver trees, bare-branched and beckoning. So I perched myself amongst the thorns and watched.

Sensibly, the Irregulars and their aristocratic associate proceeded through the woods as though the trees themselves were self-aware beings of limitless malice. And while they were, in this instance, incorrect (the malice of the trees was, in the strictest sense, limited), it was a very reasonable precaution.

The colour scheme of this particular end of Titania's realm being distinctly monochrome, anything that fell out of its distinct silver-grey spectrum stood out some way, and so it was for the flash—caught through the trees—of golden hair just off the path.

"Look lively"—this was Callaghan—"that might be the Bickle girl."

"Or it might be a trap," warned Jackson, though he fell into position regardless.

"Do we actually have any weapons with us?" asked Mr. Caesar. "I for one did not go armed to a costume party."

Around him, the Irregulars demonstrated all the various ways they had violated this basic precept of masquerade etiquette, from the simple expedient of incorporating a sword into their outfit to more complex arrangements of knives in boots and pistols in concealed pockets.

"Clearly a foolish question," Mr. Caesar conceded.

At a silent command from Captain James the unit, with Mr. Caesar bringing up a decidedly ununitary rear, crept through the otherworldly woodland towards the entity that might have been Miss Bickle.

"Careful," whispered Barryson. "Some of the things in this place are shape-changers."

That, of course, was slander.

As the Irregulars crept forwards they saw that the shape in the distance was indeed Miss Bickle, or looked like her (and therefore definitely was; if you are ever lost in fairyland the first and most important piece of advice I can give you is to trust absolutely everything you see). And she was in what to any other mortal would be distress, slender creatures of split bark and dead sap inching ever closer to her, grasping hands extended.

"Are you dryads?" she was asking. "I have always yearned to meet a dryad."

They were not, strictly speaking, dryads. Dryads are a species of nymph and so tend to adopt more pleasing aspects in order to better tempt mortals to leave them offerings. These beings were something slightly other, fairy-folk making a game of being trees.

And our games seldom end well for humans.

I flitted to a nearer branch in the hope of seeing better and, as I encroached, I noticed something else moving amidst the treetops. Not a bird but a winged woman, a sly and nimble figure with steel at her fingertips.

The not-dryads, to nobody's surprise but Miss Bickle's, made no response to her enquiry. Instead they drew closer, until their spindled twig-hands clutched at her bodice and their jaws lolled open to reveal thick, vine-like tongues.

"Could still be a trap," said Jackson.

To which Sal nodded and pointed into the canopy, where the steel-fingered woman was waiting. "Seems like."

"But if it is Lizzie," Mr. Caesar replied, whispering less naturally than the others owing to a marked lack of relative practice, "we can't just leave her."

Kumar looked apprehensive. "We can, " he said. "But I agree it would be a trifle unsporting."

While this debate was, if not raging, then at least gathering impetus, the steel-fingered woman swooped, and Miss Bickle looked up at once startled and delighted.

"Leave this one," the steel-fingered woman said. "She interests me."

The wood-things turned hollow eyes to her and made sounds like dry brush cracking underfoot.

"That is no concern of yours," the steel-fingered woman replied.

The creatures crackled back, but withdrew despite their objection. I should say, readers, that I am of course fully able to comprehend the speech of the wood-things, but I endeavour to give you the experience of witnessing these events through limited mortal perspectives, not my own.

Miss Bickle gazed at the steel-fingered woman with a sort of general gratitude that I was certain had no basis in any sense of her own mortality. "Thank you," she said, "but I am sure they did not mean me harm."

"They did."

Never one to let go of her good opinion of terrible things, Miss Bickle brushed the comment off. "I find that very hard to believe."

"Duly noted."

"For all I know," Miss Bickle continued, " you mean me harm."

"Perhaps I do." The steel-fingered woman reached out a hand and traced a single knife-edged talon along Miss Bickle's cheek. "You would do well to treat me as if I do."

Miss Bickle shuddered. "If you intend to seduce me, you should know that I have firmly established that dallying with ladies is not to my tastes."

Of all the responses the steel-fingered woman had been expecting, that was none. "You are a peculiar creature."

"People keep telling me that. I think they just lack imagination."

The character of the exchange was not absolute proof that Miss Bickle really was herself rather than a shape-shifting imposter, but to Mr. Caesar at least she sounded so familiar that it seemed worth the risk.

And the captain concurred. The Irregulars fanned out into flanking positions and then, once there were at least one or two pistols trained on the newcomer, he approached. "And what do you want with the lady?"

The steel-fingered woman turned her head towards the captain, leaving the rest of her body eerily still. "What do you want in this place?"

"Rescue mission."

"Noble, but foolish. As for what I want, I have questions."

While Captain James had the attention of the steel-fingered woman, Mr. Caesar took the opportunity to sidle around towards Miss Bickle. "Lizzie," he stage-whispered, "walk towards me, slowly."

It had been a valiant effort, but a doomed one. "And what will that achieve?" asked the steel-fingered woman, her gaze lighthousing around to fall on Mr. Caesar. "Were I any danger to the child, I assure you distance would not ameliorate it."

"Perhaps not," agreed Captain James. "But I've armed men with me, and a sorcerer amongst them. I fancy we've a fairer chance than you think."

The steel-fingered woman twitched her beaten-copper wings. "Do you now?"

"Perhaps," ventured Miss Bickle, "I could simply answer her questions?"

"That would be simplest all round," the steel-fingered woman agreed.

Mr. Caesar did not appear convinced. "She's a fairy. You can't trust them."

"Actually," the steel-fingered woman replied, "I'm as human as you. Or perhaps more pertinently as human as your sister."

The response silenced Mr. Caesar momentarily, but Captain James stepped, as he was so often wont to do, into the breach. "What do you know about Miss Mary?"

"What say you answer my questions first, and then I consider yours?"

"What say," replied the captain, "we answer your questions first and then you answer ours?"

The steel-fingered woman drummed her claws together with a faint rattling sound. "That seems a bad deal. I know much more than you do."

"Then we'll take our friend and go."

Whether by instinct or experience, Captain James had played his hand well. My people—and those mortals who live long amongst us—are insatiably curious beings, and we will agree to all manner of inadvisable things if the alternative is to let something go unknown. "Why was I being followed?" the steel-fingered woman asked.

"No idea," replied the captain. "Is that all you wanted to ask?"

Miss Bickle, who was less cautious about such things and so less inclined to keep to the letter of a bargain, tried to be helpful. "Perhaps we might be able to tell you more if you explain who was following you. And perhaps also when they were following you and maybe what exactly you're talking about."

"A girl," the steel-fingered woman explained. "Slender, pretty, dressed as Arachne. She was … hovering the whole ball but never actually approached me."

"That was Maelys," Mr. Caesar explained. "My cousin. Whatever she was doing I assure you she meant no harm."

The steel-fingered woman glared. "You will learn that such assurances mean little here. Tell me who she is. "

Although not wholly without empathy, Mr. Caesar was finding himself at something of a loss to think his way into the mindset of a metallically augmented woman who had lived for an unknowable duration in the midst of an inhuman court. "She is the lady who achieved a little notoriety last year as a consequence of a curse levied by Sulis Minerva?" he offered. "And presently she is a close friend and associate of the Duke of Annadale."

"The Duke of Annadale," the steel-fingered woman replied, "is dead. That much I know well."

Mr. Caesar internally reprimanded himself. He had tried to stop using the nickname for Miss Mitchelmore's sake. "Of Lady Georgiana Landrake," he clarified.

The steel-fingered woman blinked once. Her eyes, like her fingernails, were brushed steel, bright but cold. "Neither name means anything to me." This, like so much else in the world, was a lie. "But you have answered, and so I shall return the favour."

Captain James gave a sharp, no-nonsense nod. "Good, where's the girl?"

"With the queen, in the Dancing Hall."

"Which is where?" asked the captain.

They had answered one question and had a single answer in response. Nobody in Titania's court would have counted it at all amiss if the steel-fingered woman had considered the debt paid and taken off on her wings.

But she did not.

"Follow me."

To my surprise, they did. To my still greater surprise, I did also. And to my greatest surprise of all, it did not turn out to be a trap.

Despite her wings, the steel-fingered woman kept to a pace that the Irregulars, Miss Bickle, and Mr. Caesar could easily match, and led them through the hazards of Titania's land with remarkable good faith. Frankly it was enough to make any native of the fairy realm suspicious, because we as a rule never treat so straightforwardly. Of course, the steel-fingered woman was human by birth and so she perhaps had human frailties still holding her back.

The Dancing Hall was located in the beautiful, impossible palace at the heart of the realm. From the angle at which the Irregulars approached—for the palace, like most everything in the Other Court, varies dramatically depending on how you reach it—the building was a cascade of delicate spires, as though a rainstorm had been frozen in time and built by some artful magic into a dwelling-place. And for all I know that was exactly what had happened. Titania would certainly have been capable of such things.

Although she had been more helpful than was strictly necessary, the steel-fingered woman had not wholly abandoned the instincts that had let her survive the past decade or so in the Other Court. So she did not enter the palace, but she led the party as close to it as she could manage. "There"—she pointed at a silver-white archway leading into the halls themselves—"take only right turns, follow the sound of music, and when somebody tells you to leave, do what they say."

"Are you sure about that?" asked Mr. Caesar. "It doesn't sound entirely … intuitive."

Captain James seemed inclined to agree. "You've been helpful, but if you're trying to fuck us at the last minute—"

"Oh no. " Miss Bickle rallied at once to the steel-fingered woman's defence on the basis of no evidence. "These are exactly the kinds of instructions that one must follow in this sort of place. I expect, for example, that some way into the castle we will encounter a passage with only a left turn, and we will be required to walk down it backwards. Or else there will be a junction and there will be the sound of music coming from the left passage and we will be required to turn right through"—she made a brief, not entirely silent calculation on her fingers—"four hundred and twenty degrees in order to find ourselves facing in the right direction."

"Are you sure, lass?" asked Callaghan. "Because if you ask me that sounds a whole hell of a lot like bollocks."

Begrudgingly, Mr. Caesar gave his friend his support. "Actually, from personal experience, it really does seem to work like that."

"One can't help wishing," Kumar mused aloud, "that it felt a little more magical, and a little less asinine."

Barryson shrugged. "That's the thing about magic, it doesn't give a shit what you think of it."

Suspecting that the shape of a songbird would be too conspicuous once the merry band of mortals was wandering lost through the halls of Titania's palace, I became a spider and lowered myself into Miss Bickle's hair, reasoning that of all those present she was the least likely to object to my presence. She was shorter than most of the company, which meant my view was a little limited. But she moved about with such fleetness that I was afforded a range of angles from which to watch a band of grown men failing to follow basic instructions.

"She said only right turns," Sal was explaining the first time the path branched—a sheer marble corridor to the right, a hall lined with strange geometries ahead, "not every right turn. We can still go straight on."

"The music's coming from the right," replied Callaghan.

"It's not, you've just let off one too many muskets near your ears."

Captain James, speaking as mellowly as he could given the situation, moved to intervene. "Everybody just be quiet. Give us a moment and we'll listen carefully."

"Does that sound even qualify as music?" asked Kumar. "It's more of a hum."

"Which part of quiet didn't I make clear?"

After a few moments' listening they decided that yes, the slight hum did count as music but that no, it wasn't coming from the right and that therefore yes, Sal had been correct that only right turns did not mean every right turn and so they should go straight ahead.

Miss Bickle spun 360 degrees to her right anyway, which I found a little disorienting, but when she was done we kept good pace with the group.

Ahead, as Miss Bickle had predicted, they were indeed faced with a pure left turn, which they did indeed navigate by walking backwards, although Jackson did make a point of reminding them that it might just have meant they'd gone the wrong way.

"So what would happen," wondered Callaghan aloud, "if we walked this corridor forwards?"

"Maybe nothing," Barryson replied. "Or maybe we get our skins ripped off by things with knives for faces. Want to give it a try?"

To my disappointment, nobody did.

At the end of the corridor in question they found themselves at a T-junction, and the question of whether they needed to turn right as they were facing or right as they were walking came to occupy them for several minutes.

"It seems terribly unjust," said Kumar to nobody in particular, "that something this undignified should have such a high chance of killing us."

Mr. Caesar nodded grim approval. "Ever since I have become familiar with magic I've come to dread the thought of dying a farcical death. And Orestes"—the captain had looked as though he was about to say something—"don't you dare tell us that all war is farce because while I admit I have never served my country, I doubt you have ever done anything as undignified as walking backwards through an enemy stronghold in fancy dress."

"Yeah, fair point," the captain conceded.

"Though we've come close a few times," added Sal. "We've done some fucking ludicrous things down the years."

The Irregulars all agreed to this, just as they all eventually agreed that they needed to turn right as they were facing in this instance.

As they crept further into the palace, down passages made of rough stone or living wood and through doorways curtained with a thousand moths, the thought occurred to several of the company that they had thus far seen nobody in their travels. Although whether this meant that things were going very well or very ill they could not say.

Two turnings and a bridge across a river of wine later, the party came at last upon the first living thing they had encountered. Well, the first living thing save for your humble narrator, who was still perched unnoticed atop Miss Bickle's head.

The thing in question was wearing human shape, or humanlike shape, although its fingers had an extra joint, and when it spoke an astute observer would note that it had a second row of needle-sharp teeth set just behind the first. For reasons best known to Titania and her servants, it was wearing the uniform of the Coldstream Regiment and bearing a musket tipped with a green glass bayonet.

"Halt," he demanded, "who goes there."

For so many reasons, dealing with this new eventuality fell to the captain. "Orestes James," he said with military formality, "Captain, Third Foot Guards."

"Leave," said the creature, its voice oddly thin and its eyes oddly gleaming, "or be run through."

Captain James cast a look over his shoulder at his men, and at Mr. Caesar. "Then I guess I'll be run through."

The creature struck. The bayonet, sharp in that deceptive fragmenting way that only glass can be, bit into Captain James's breast. And then the blade shattered, and the creature shattered, and the world shattered.

As I said. She's showy.

It said something—not necessarily something good or something bad, but something distinctly notable—about Mr. Caesar's priorities that as reality tumbled in fragments around him he ran first and fastest to the side of Captain James, who staggered into his arms from shock.

The uniformed creature was gone, as was the corridor, and in their place was the Dancing Hall. Contrary to the sometimes whimsical naming conventions of my species it was not a hall that itself danced (we have those also, but they go by different names). It was a wide, gilded space and it was filled with dancers, each alone, each glass, each a mortal who had bargained for the Beauty Incomparable.

And they were beautiful by any objective standard, exquisitely crafted and delicately detailed. The light shone through and in and off of their bodies, and even in their imperfections—the places in which they had cracked or splintered, or where they were missing fingers or in some cases whole limbs—they possessed a kind of chaotic wonder.

They were each and every one of them masked, and they danced a perpetual spiral for the pleasure of the Queen of Elsewhere.

The queen, I should add, was very much present, enthroned on a dais at one end of the hall. Her seat was wrought of silver mined by spirits of the deep earth, her gown was sewn from moonbeams by pixies with deft needles, her crown had been spun from gold and gossamer by the finest goblin-smiths. And she watched now with detached beneficence.

Still bleeding from a wound above his heart, but active and alert for all of that, Captain James steadied himself, although Mr. Caesar continued to stand close in case he should stumble again.

Keeping his eyes on the queen, he spoke to his men. "Fan out. Find the girl."

The Irregulars needed no further instruction, although the process proved more taxing than they had expected. The dancers did not deign to stop for identification, many of them were sharp at the edges, and, en masse, they were nigh impossible to distinguish from one another.

While the gentlemen in the group were searching the crowd for one flawless masked dancer amongst a hundred, Miss Bickle walked slowly but purposefully towards the throne, carrying me with her.

Since I was technically a spy from a rival court, I was not wholly comfortable at being drawn so close to the Queen of Sun and Storms. In theory, chroniclers such as myself enjoy certain privileges much as mortal diplomats might, but in practice our rulers, like yours, can be a little testy. Reasoning that my best hope lay in openness, I took the shape of a fly, left Miss Bickle's hair, then became a bird once more and alighted on the queen's hand.

She glanced down at me. "Ill met by moonlight, emissary."

I trilled my own greeting and let her return her attention to Miss Bickle.

"Approach, child." Titania's voice was fire in winter and rain in summer.

With more caution than she normally displayed, but still less than the situation warranted, Miss Bickle approached. "If it please your majesty," she said with a pretty curtsey, "I am looking for my friend."

"Your friend is where she wishes to be." Titania's voice was promises and secrets and two truths and a lie.

"I don't think she is," Miss Bickle hazarded. "She seemed quite adamant at the ball."

Titania smiled. "Girls are fickle."

A contemplative expression crossed Miss Bickle's face and her brow furrowed sceptically. "I'm not sure that's true. My friend Miss Mitchelmore, for example, has always been quite devoted to her family and to her lover, and I account myself extremely constant in my affections. My affection for the anonymous lady author of Sense and Sensibility, for example, is abiding and—"

"Nonetheless," Titania interrupted. As Queen of the Other Court she was not accustomed to people, especially mortals, speaking at such length to her. "She may leave whenever she wishes."

"And she is definitely here, " Miss Bickle persisted—and this was a good question, one that many mortals would have forgotten to ask. "In this room?"

The smile had never left Titania's lips, but now it broadened just a fraction. "Oh yes."

"And she isn't the room itself? Or otherwise transformed in any way? She still appears as she did when we last saw her?"

We do not, as a rule, like it when mortals are exhaustive in their questioning. But the Queen of Both Evers gave a slow, grudging nod. "She does."

Miss Bickle turned to look out over the dance floor, where Mr. Caesar and the Irregulars were searching every dancer and getting precisely nowhere. There was, she felt certain, a solution. The queen herself, after all, had told her that Miss Caesar was in the room, and this was not the kind of thing she would lie about.

She looked up.

Suspended from the ceiling, impossibly high above the ground, was a silver hoop twined with white flowers, and reclining, impossibly balanced, within that hoop was a figure. From this distance and at this angle it was impossible to know who that figure was, but Miss Bickle had a strong sense of narrative fitness, and in this place narrative fitness was a surer law than gravity.

"John," she called across the hall, "I think it very likely that she's up there. "

Mr. Caesar, Captain James, and the rest of the Irregulars stopped and stared upwards. And as they did, the dancers—responding to some imperceptible signal—moved into a wide circle with the suspended figure at the exact centre. From everywhere and nowhere, violins played a sweeping crescendo, and the silver hoop, along with its occupant, descended to the floor.

Even up close, Mr. Caesar could not quite tell if it was his sister. She was still masked, still dressed in the same incongruously flowing glass as everybody else. The only real clue as to her identity was the pattern of fissures that spread across her legs and arms, which seemed familiar but not conclusive.

"Mary?" he tried.

And the girl in the hoop turned to look at him.

"Mary, are you well? Are you yourself?"

Slowly, she slid herself out of the hoop, stood, but said nothing.

"Mary?"

"John?" The answer came soft and uncertain.

"We need to get out of here."

From the dais, Titania gazed down with emotionless grace. "You do not need to do anything. The child came here for a reason."

"You came here," Mr. Caesar reminded her, "because you did not want this. You've gone your whole life ignoring me for—now I look back—very good reasons. Please, Mary, ignore her as well."

Somewhere in the recesses of her mind—and a mind she still had, that being an immaterial thing not transmutable by our magics—Miss Caesar tried to remember. "I came for redress."

"And do you still feel you need it?" asked the Queen of All Seasons, innocent as summer.

Only silence answered.

"This might be out of turn," said Captain James, moving to Mr. Caesar's side. His hand, I could not help but notice, was resting lightly on the hilt of the cuirassier's sword. "But it don't seem to me like the lady's in much of a place to make decisions."

"Because the decisions she makes may not please you?" asked Titania. Her voice was a cool spring in a desert, virgin snow in a garden.

"Because she can't say two fucking words together."

"Perhaps she chooses not to." The queen's eyes were all compassion, or some beast pretending to be compassion. "I assure you I have placed her under no enchantment."

From just within the ring of dancers, Barryson spoke up. "Say that twice more."

"A little knowledge," the queen replied, "is a dangerous thing. But since you insist. I assure you I have placed her under no enchantment. I assure you I have placed her under no enchantment."

And that, reader, was entirely true. She was indeed giving them such assurances.

Mr. Caesar, taking care not to cut himself on the increasingly jagged and splintered roses, placed his hand on his sister's shoulder. "Mary, please."

As if in a dream, which in many ways she was, Miss Caesar looked at her surroundings. And like a dreamer she found herself hard-pressed to think of anything outside of the unreal present.

"You can stop this," Mr. Caesar told his sister, with a conviction born from desperation. "Whatever has happened to you, you can overcome." He took her hand. "I'm here, but I need you to be here too."

Behind her mask, Miss Caesar shut her eyes and tried.

"I am beginning to feel," the Queen of Promises said, "that you are wasting my time."

There was an irony to this, of course. If there was one thing that the Other Court did not have to worry about, it was time.

The music died away and Miss Caesar stood transfixed under the gaze of the Queen of Never and Always. And at last she said, voice near broken, "I have come for redress."

Titania nodded. "Then speak your case."

"I bargained for beauty."

"And you were given it."

Miss Caesar raised her fragmenting hand, almost as though seeing it for the first time. "This is not beauty."

Enthroned on silver and enrobed in starlight, the Queen of Light and Wonder leaned forwards. "The world disagrees."

"The world—" And at this she stumbled. The world, at least the world she had been wont to move in for most of her sixteen years, had always called her unworthy. Always overlooked her. Always dangled riches in front of her and then told her not for you. "The world …" she said again, "does not matter."

An edge of amusement was creeping into the queen's voice like a fox creeping into a nursery. "And who are you to speak so boldly?"

If my people have one weakness, it is that we cannot resist a challenge. And I might almost have believed that the queen was baiting the child to defy her. We so seldom taste defeat that it becomes a dish that some of us perversely savour.

For a long moment or a short age, Miss Caesar considered the question, and in the end gave the only response she could. "I am Mary Caesar."

Titania, however, was not impressed. "That is no answer at all."

"It is the only answer I can give. It is the only one I care for. I bargained for beauty, but you do not get to tell me whether I received it."

"Inconstant creature." The Queen of Twelve Winters spoke with a new contempt. As though she had hoped for more. "You were rewarded amply, and you took that reward freely."

"I no longer want it."

"Then," said the queen with a glimmer in her eye like a dying star, "you may give it back."

I thought, at first, that Miss Caesar's failure to respond at this juncture came because she was, in the depths of the heart she no longer had, still tempted by the power of the Beauty Incomparable. It was, after all, an objectively wondrous thing whose power she had barely begun to draw upon.

I thought incorrectly.

The mask that Miss Caesar now wore protruded just fractionally from the edges of her head, although since it was contiguous with the structure of her body this delineation was purely cosmetic. Still, it was enough for her to dig in her fingertips. And to pull.

It began with a sound like a finger on a wineglass, a high, keening noise that set teeth on edge and sent sympathetic vibrations resonating through the other dancers. Then came the cracking, the sound of glass in pain. A sharp, jagged fissure spread from Miss Caesar's forehead to her chin and at last she screamed. Her voice began sharp and otherworldly, but as she pulled her tone softened and grew more natural, more human.

With a decisive snap, a long, wide shard of glass came away and beneath it was skin, fresh, deep brown, and living. On her hands as well, flakes and fragments were falling away, revealing mortal flesh, as weak as glass in its own way, but held together with sinew and hope and will.

Half-mortal now, Miss Caesar found that the glass cut as she pulled it away, blood running from her forehead and slicking her palms as she ripped herself free of that vitreous cocoon.

Looking back, in possession now of a physical body, I have more sympathy with the way that so many of the mortals present looked away. Even Miss Bickle, who ordinarily had a strong stomach for disquieting magic, averted her eyes as Miss Caesar's bloody work progressed from her face and throat and head to the rest of her body. Only her brother and the captain watched the entire transformation. I could not say why they did. Duty perhaps. Or love.

As she had torn and fought and bled, Miss Caesar had been walking slowly forwards until at last she stood at the foot of the dais, staring up at Titania with fury. Her gown was ragged where the glass had pierced it. Her skin was cut in a hundred places. Her hair curled free about her head, and her eyes blazed.

I could not help, in that moment, finding her just a little majestic. For a human.

"You gave me nothing," she said, "and I have returned it. You have no more hold over me."

The Queen of Here and Nowhere held Miss Caesar's gaze. "Pretty words. But suppose I were to keep you here. What would you do?"

"I am not alone."

Behind her, the Irregulars formed up into a slightly shabby rank.

"A half dozen human soldiers?" Titania's smile shifted once again, wry and unforgiving. "Do you truly think I fear swords or bullets?"

"I think," Miss Caesar said, "that I am not alone."

Captain James began drawing his sword, but Mr. Caesar checked him. At the four o'clock position of the circle, one of the dancers had raised her hands to her mask and was beginning to tear.

Titania froze. "These are mine. "

"They are their own. As am I."

Once more the singing-glass sound filled the air.

"Stop this," demanded the Queen of Oaths and Figments.

Miss Caesar shook her head. "I cannot."

"Then begone."

And the world fell down.

Titania was a showy creature, but when pressed she could act quite decisively. No sooner had she told the mortals to leave than they had left, the court and the Dancing Hall and the glass women collapsing and Hampstead Heath reappearing between eyeblinks. Back in the mortal world at last, I perched inconspicuously on a tree branch and watched.

It came as some surprise to most of the assembly, although not to me or to Barryson, that the sacrifices were still bleeding and the victimarii still present. Jaunts to the Other Court took place on an unpredictable timeline, and those who encroached on the lands of my people could return to find that no time had passed at all, or that a century had gone by.

"Go all right?" asked Cooper, apparently as used to otherworldly comings and goings as I was myself.

Mr. Caesar looked at his bloody, bedraggled sister who, despite everything, still stood rather prouder than she had in recent weeks, and at his lover who, although he remained on his feet, was still bleeding from a deep cut to the chest. "All right," he confirmed.

"Don't suppose you want to give us a hand with the carcasses?"

Under other circumstances, the Irregulars at least might have agreed. Theirs was a culture of mucking in and helping out and their instinct was to be involved with anything that needed doing. But it had been a long evening, and they had an injured young woman with them. So they made their apologies and left, save Barryson, who could less afford to offend providers of sacrificial offerings.

As I watched them go, I saw a single star streak across the heavens and heard the chime of silver bells.

"I suppose," the Lady said beside me, "that you are rather pleased with how this has ended."

"If your queen chooses to collect the wrong mortals," I told her, "it is no concern of mine. My lord, on the other hand, will I am sure find this endlessly amusing."

The Lady gave me a cold look. "Your lord has had his own share of embarrassments."

Aghast, I pressed my fingertips to my breast and adopted an attitude of scandal. "Never once. As his chronicler, I would be sure to know of any."

"There will come a time," she warned me, "when you have to stop dining out on a chance acquaintance with an influential playwright."

"Perhaps." I shot her my most endearing smile. "But until then, you know what they say. History is won by the writers."

But sadly the witticism was lost on the Lady, who turned and vanished back into her mistress's realm. And our paths did not cross again for some while. Or for no while. Or they had already crossed.

Time does not mean for my people what it does for yours.