Chapter Eight

"You should probably know," I told the Ambassador the following day over a light supper of poet's tears and chrysanthemums, "that you're about to have some mortals looking for you."

"You can say people, Robin," he chided me. "And I am technically mortal as well."

I wasn't about to let that stand. "We're all technically mortal. Even the great lords and ladies of our courts can die in theory."

"So I've heard, but I don't believe it."

I wasn't entirely sure I did. And certainly I have not been spreading any rumours about specific instances. My lord Oberon in particular has always held his current throne, came by it by entirely fair means, and has no blood on his hands whatsoever. And no ichor either. "Gods have died. Titans have been cast down. Even the eternal is impermanent."

The Ambassador drained his glass. "Why are you really here?"

"A friendly visit."

"Say that twice more."

I feigned a sigh—it is a habit, I think, I have picked up from too long observing humans. "The Lady has taken an interest in a girl in whom I have also taken an interest. Her brother will be looking for you. And he will have solicited the assistance of a mortal champion—"

"Do they still make those?" asked the Ambassador casually.

"Once or twice a generation. And they're each as infuriating as the last. But that aside, he will want you to undo what has been done. Or tell him how to undo it. And I wanted to make sure that you were ready to give him an answer that will … be to the advantage of our mutual lord."

In the Ambassador's lily-woven bower beyond space and time, something that was pretending very hard to be sunlight slanted down through things that were pretending very hard to be trees, dappling him with gold. Long ago (as you reckon it) he was the source of a quarrel between my master and his lady, and has since that day dwelt in the Other Court from which he has, from time to time, journeyed out to carry word between the human world and the fairy kingdom.

"You mean you want me to use this opportunity to fuck with Titania."

I shrugged. Another mortal affectation. "It is both of our duty, and the Lady is her creature."

"And how exactly will this mortal locate me?" asked the Ambassador, not quite suspicious. One is suspicious only when one is uncertain.

"I couldn't possibly imagine."

The thing that was pretending to be the wind sighed a melody. "My my," said the Ambassador. "I have guests. What a remarkable coincidence."

Knowing that he would not receive visitors in the space beyond (I had encouraged him to, but he kept raising objections about things like "being able to get out again" and "grip on reality" and "inexperience with nonlinear time" like the utter killjoy he is) I went out to see who it was. I, of course, had no forewarning as to the identity of the intruders because I had no involvement with any sequence of events that could have led to anybody being present.

"Remind me again," Mr. Caesar was saying to Miss Bickle, "how you know this will work?"

"It came to me in a dream," she told him, with ironclad surety.

"And you're certain," said Captain James, who made up the final third of their party, Miss Mitchelmore being otherwise employed with her lover, "that this is the right tree?"

The tree in question was old and gnarled, its branches spreading wide and forming, if one so fancied it, the top and side of a frame or a portal. Daffodils, just in season, strewed the ground beneath, although their exact position was never quite the same the second time one looked.

"I am positive. It was most vivid. I have never felt anything like it, and you should know I have exceedingly vivid dreams all the time."

Mr. Caesar did, in fact, know this. Indeed he had been treated to detailed narrations of several of Miss Bickle's more vivid dreams and had agreed to this little jaunt partly in the hope that he would be treated to no more.

"I'm extraordinarily sorry about this," said Mr. Caesar. "I'm aware that it's a rather odd thing to be doing."

The captain shrugged. "Still better than the opera."

"So now," Miss Bickle explained, "we just place the offerings"—she lifted the hamper that she had brought for the purpose—"on the right spot beneath the boughs."

Mr. Caesar was still looking profoundly sceptical. "And you're sure that teacakes, clotted cream, mature cheese, and a decanter of brandy are appropriate for conjuring an otherworldly intermediary?"

"They seem a fine enough present to me," said Miss Bickle, her lips turning artfully downwards into an aggrieved frown. "And I don't see you stepping forth with any better ideas."

Captain James made a thoughtful expression. "Blood of a virgin? A handful of grave dust?"

After a moment's consideration, Miss Bickle screwed up her nose. "Why would anybody want anything like that? None of those are pleasant at all. Anyway, we have placed the offering, now all that remains is to say the words."

"The words," Mr. Caesar pointed out once again, "that came to you in a dream."

"Yes." Miss Bickle nodded emphatically. "Those words." Because she was the best kind of human being, Miss Bickle paused for an appropriately dramatic time and then said, loudly and clearly: "By the compact of three veils and nine cyphers, I request audience."

For a moment nothing happened. And then for another moment.

Captain James gave Miss Bickle a regretful look. "I don't think it worked, miss."

Being, once again, possessed of a perspicacity that most of her kind lack, Miss Bickle beamed. "Oh, but it wouldn't, you see, until somebody said that it hadn't. But now you've said it didn't, so I'm sure it shall."

The captain glanced confusedly at Mr. Caesar but the only reply he received was "I'm sorry, I have no idea either."

"She means," said the Ambassador, stepping out from behind the tree trunk, "that we like to keep you waiting."

Without hesitation, Miss Bickle scooped up the hamper. "We bring offerings."

"We bring cheese," clarified Mr. Caesar.

"But she's rich," explained the captain, "so it's probably good."

"It's Cornish," explained Miss Bickle. "From a little village near my grandfather's country house. I do not believe it to be famous, but I think it very fine regardless."

The Ambassador took the hamper. "And the teacakes?"

"Homemade," Miss Bickle told him. "Well, made by our cook. But I understand she's fearfully talented."

Holding the basket over one arm, the Ambassador crumbled a corner from one of the cheeses and sampled it. "Acceptable. Now, I assume you're here about your sister?"

It was a trick that never ceased to delight one member of the party nor to infuriate another.

"And how do you know that?" asked Mr. Caesar, warily.

"He's from the otherworld, John," Miss Bickle stage-whispered. "They know things there."

"We have sources, certainly." The Ambassador cast me a sly glance over Miss Bickle's head.

"What sources?" asked Mr. Caesar, not so easily placated as his friend.

"A little bird. But if you are intending to ask what I think you are intending to ask, then you should know it will be dangerous."

"I'd have gone with ‘fraught with danger,'" I told him.

"How dangerous?" asked Captain James.

This display of caution earned my contempt and an exclamation of shock from Miss Bickle. "You're a military man, surely you should say, ‘I laugh in the face of danger.' I believe there are rules."

"In my experience, miss, them as laugh in the face of danger get a musket ball down the throat. Now, tell us what we can expect. And be detailed. Very detailed."

Being, as he so recently reminded me, technically mortal, the Ambassador was not capable of a truly withering stare, but he made the best approximation he could. "He was right, you are supremely irritating."

Mr. Caesar's inevitable response of "Who was right?" was roundly ignored by everybody present except for your humble narrator since I am both the who in question and mystically bound to record every detail I observe for later explication.

When it became clear that he was not going to derail the conversation onto any other topic—a common strategy and necessary for survival in the Other Court if you don't want one casual suggestion to see you spending a thousand years transformed into a living croquet set—the Ambassador continued. "What happened to your sister was the work of a being we call the Lady —"

"How gnomic." Mr. Caesar's tone was as arch as his eyebrow.

"Do you want this information or not? She is a servant of Titania and as such I have no influence over her whatsoever. If you wished, you could assault her court and see if you could force some kind of concession"—

"A bold strategy," I added, "and highly recommended."

—"but that would be extraordinarily likely to result in your deaths."

"Spoil-sport."

"A better approach"—the Ambassador persisted in ignoring me; if anything his millennia amongst our kind had only permitted him to hone his vexatious spirit—"would be to lure her out and ensnare her, which will prove difficult."

Always the kind to see the potential in the most restrictive of situations, Miss Bickle went at once to: "But not impossible?"

"Find her in the mortal world, however you may, and bind her at the neck and wrists with a yellow cord. This will trap her in material form, which will cause her to diminish swiftly." Would that it were swifter, reader. I have found myself diminishing by inches. "Old compacts decree that she must exchange a single service for her freedom. Reversing what she did to your sister would be well within her capabilities."

Cynical to a fault, Mr. Caesar asked: "And would she be able to seek retribution afterwards?"

I do hate it when they ask the sensible questions.

"It's considered a little gauche," the Ambassador replied. "And the Lady's power is mostly in wishing."

Mr. Caesar's eyebrow had been raised for most of this exchange and was getting few opportunities to lower itself. " Mostly? "

"Well, she could also hit you with a rock or something."

Captain James gave the Ambassador a long, hard stare.

"She might also have the capacity to inspire inanimate objects to motion," he admitted. "Which she could, for example, use to hit you with a rock."

"I don't like might, " said Mr. Caesar. "Does she or doesn't she?"

The captain gave the slightest shake of his head. "It's fine. Might means does. Always. Have to plan for the worst."

"So we plan for a situation where my own cravat might choke me to death?"

"Better than not planning for a situation where your own cravat might choke you to death," pointed out Miss Bickle.

"Also"—Captain James was smiling now, almost slyly. For all I despise heroic mortals, those with capacity for slyness do intrigue me—"the plan for that would be don't wear a cravat."

As Mr. Caesar's hand had gone instinctively to his jaw when the captain had been describing the effects of pistol shot, so now it went to his throat.

"Truly," the captain continued, "war is hell."

Being the person present least distracted by Mr. Caesar's cravat-related misgivings, Miss Bickle—continuing the group's run of asking the awkward questions—asked another awkward question. "But how do we find her?"

"I suspect," the Ambassador replied, "that she will find you."

"Please don't tell them how to see us when we don't wish to be seen," I reminded him. "That would make my job extremely difficult."

The Ambassador hefted the hamper into his arms. "All in all, I think you've had more than"—he counted swiftly—"three blocks of cheese, a decanter of brandy, and some teacakes' worth of information from me."

"They are exceedingly good teacakes," Miss Bickle tried, always one to take an unnecessary risk, which, reader, I strongly urge you to do also.

"And it is exceedingly good information."

Without waiting for reply, the Ambassador stepped behind the tree and vanished. Miss Bickle naturally followed him but found herself looping around the trunk and back to her companions.

"I should have told him the hamper was an offering also," she said to nobody in particular. "He may have answered more questions." Our kind are not quite so basely transactional, but I will always commend Miss Bickle for thinking in the right direction.

Having achieved their goal, at least the largest fraction of their goal that they could muster, Mr. Caesar, his friend since childhood, and the military gentleman he'd fucked and taken to the opera in that order gathered up their belongings and made their way out of the park.

On the way their talk turned to short-term tactics and long-term strategies.

"We'll see the lady home," suggested Captain James, "then I'll head back to the Folly and see if the lads are up for a fairy hunt."

Miss Bickle, who had drifted away from the conversation to gaze at the sunlight, the grass, the trees, passing wasps, and anything else nearby that could conceivably be gazed at, brought her attention back to the company with some effort. "Oh, you needn't escort me. I go for walks unaccompanied quite often when I am in Cornwall."

"Cornwall isn't London," insisted Mr. Caesar. "And given how many terrible things have happened to ladies of my acquaintance in the last year, I will not leave you to roam the streets alone."

Miss Bickle was not an easily rankled person, so the implication that she could not take care of herself caused her no especial concern. "Oh, John," she said with an indulgent smile, "it's sweet that you're being protective, but, well, your presence didn't prevent either of the first two terrible things happening, did it?"

It was a fine day and had followed a fine night, but the words still struck Mr. Caesar like a knife, all the sharper for having been meant entirely without malice.

"Even if it didn't," the captain replied on his behalf, "it might stop you getting a blade in your ribs. And it'll make the gentleman feel better, so how about you let us take you and then if you want to go for a stroll you slip out after we've gone and nobody's the wiser."

This, Miss Bickle agreed, was an eminently sensible compromise, and a short while later she was delivered safely to her grandfather's city residence. That left Captain James and Mr. Caesar alone on a major public thoroughfare, trying to navigate parting.

"I can see you back as well, if you want," the captain offered. "Wouldn't want you getting stabbed either."

"I think we're out of the worst parts of town now."

"Maybe." Captain James gave half a shrug. "But you might get lost."

They remained standing for a moment. Then Mr. Caesar said: "Actually, if it's all the same to you, I might accompany you to the Folly. I'm not sure I can quite face returning home while I still don't know what we're going to do about Mary." This was, in a sense, true. Although it was far from his only reason. As a shape-shifter I understand the appeal of wanting to be somebody else for a time. It is one of the few things about Mr. Caesar I can empathise with. "Besides, if there's a plan to be made about this Lady character I should probably be part of it."

Once again, I dislike Captain James on principle, but the look in his eye warmed me. "Then," he said, "I shall have Mistress Quickley make you up a room."

Rather than being a euphemism, Mistress Quickley was indeed the moniker of the proprietress of the Lord Wriothesly's Folly—although almost certainly an adopted one. Adopted, I note with some distaste, from that bastard from Stratford. But I should not hold this against the lady herself. Mistress Quickley was, by Mr. Caesar's doubtless impeccable judgement, a woman of the flash sort whose fingers were in far too many pies. That also not being a euphemism. She was welcoming enough, and when Mr. Caesar explained that he would need to be boarded while he and the Irregulars worked on what he called a personal issue, she asked no questions save about payment and offered instead to send a runner to tell his family he would not be returning.

"They might rob you," Jackson explained, leaning back against the bar and twirling an old-fashioned plug bayonet against the surface with his free hand. "But I'll have a word and let them know you've nothing worth taking."

"You wouldn't even be lying," said Barryson, who was lazily etching some symbols into a table that I worried were a runic ward to prevent me from accessing the Folly but which, on closer inspection, proved to be a generously proportioned cock and balls. "I've been to their house, there's hardly anything."

Callaghan made a great show of disappointment. "And there's us thinking the captain's bagged himself a rich one."

"Excuse me"—Mr. Caesar was finding it curiously easy to adapt to soldier's banter; it wasn't so very different from a molly-house—"nobody has bagged anybody. And I am not rich. I am … adequate."

Sal settled herself into Mr. Caesar's lap and gazed deep into his eyes. "And what does that make us, sweet thing? Inadequate? "

"Boy William is," said Jackson. He had the kind of lips that made a sneer look like a blown kiss.

"Piss off," replied Boy William.

Captain James gave him a stern look. "Not in front of the children."

" I'm the children," Boy William protested.

Sal slipped herself free of Mr. Caesar and draped her hands across Boy William's shoulders. "Then that, " she said, "makes it even worse. "

"What I don't quite understand," Callaghan wondered aloud, in a way that implied strongly to Mr. Caesar that he absolutely understood, but wanted to talk about it, "is if you're not rich—"

"How's he afford all that fancy neckwear?" asked Jackson. "There'd be money in that if you could filch it."

"How did you get the captain off at the hearing?" Callaghan finished.

That was, at least, a relatively easy thing to answer. "My grandfather's an earl," Mr. Caesar explained. "But the money goes mostly to his eldest son, not to my mother. And my father has no wealth of his own. I get the occasional invitation but fewer than, for example, my uncle. He'll be at the Earl of Semweir's ball this evening. None of my immediate family will."

Captain James clapped Mr. Caesar on the back. "Hear that, you lot, he's a man of the people. Sometimes an earl will have a ball and he won't be invited."

"I'm aware it's a … somewhat trivial concern. But it affects my sisters very strongly."

"You know what my sister does?" asked Callaghan.

There was, Mr. Caesar reflected, no good answer. And he was sure Callaghan knew that. "I assume the answer is something very different to ‘attends balls.'"

"Though it may still have something to do with balls," added Jackson.

This interjection did, at least, direct Callaghan's attention in a different direction. "Fuck off, she's a charwoman."

"Not a lot of balls then?" asked Mr. Caesar.

Callaghan shook his head. "Not a lot, no."

"At any rate," Mr. Caesar continued, "it is a matter that has affected one of my sisters so strongly that she has fallen under the sway of a fairy creature"—please, reader, do not call us fairy creatures, it is belittling—"and so while I am sure her life is still better than that of many of her age and sex—"

"Easy there," Callaghan raised his drink towards Mr. Caesar in a gesture of comradeship. "I was only joshing with you. No man ever has to explain why he wants to watch out for his sister."

Sal gave a polite cough.

"No woman neither," added Callaghan. "Point is if my sister—she's a Mary, too, by the by, that's what comes of the same name going to a queen and also the mother of God—was in that sort of trouble there's nothing I wouldn't do to bring her back."

The captain patted Callaghan warmly on the shoulder. "If it was your sister the fairies wouldn't stand a chance."

And again Mr. Caesar noticed the difference: it was a joke, yes, but not meant to wound. Which was presumably why Callaghan just nodded and said, "True enough. She's a formidable woman."

"I think we can all agree," purred Jackson, who was sitting just outside the group and nursing his drink like he was concerned it might be poisoned, "that not one of us will judge you for looking after your own."

"Thank y—" Mr. Caesar managed.

"Just as I'm sure you wouldn't judge us for looking after ours."

Even coming from Jackson, a man Mr. Caesar had been told outright was a thief, a liar, and a killer, it stung a little. Primarily because it was so plainly factual. "I would not. You've all been very kind, but I assure you I am very aware that I'm an outsider here."

"And that you've brought danger on us," added Jackson.

That, too, was an uncomfortable thought. "That danger has passed now, surely?"

Sal laid her hands on his shoulders. Mr. Caesar wasn't quite sure when she'd appeared behind him. "From what I saw you humiliated a British officer, insulted him, let him call you out, then humiliated him again by magic. No, I don't think this is over."

Letting his head flop forward like a broken doll, Mr. Caesar emitted a low but sincere "Fuck."

"Not your fault," Captain James reassured him. "Bloodworth's always hated me. You were just the excuse. And if he comes for us"—he looked pointedly at the Irregulars—"we'll be ready for him."

That was some comfort to Mr. Caesar, but only some. Ideally, he felt, they should not have needed to be ready for anything at all.

But as grim a turn as the conversation had taken, the Irregulars were practical people, and if they had ever allowed themselves to dwell too long on the bleakness of their situation they would have all died from despair and French musketry long ago. So Barryson hijacked the mood with a story about a girl he'd known in Jarrow and the little band went back to drinking and laughing and trying not to worry too much about who was going to try to kill them next.

For Mr. Caesar it was a curiously—one might almost say unfamiliarly—pleasant evening. Although from time to time he would catch Jackson watching him coldly from across the room, more often he would catch the eye of the captain, and they would smile at one another. And not in the threatening way that men of Mr. Caesar's set so often smiled. Despite the real physical danger he had been in just the day before and the only slightly less real physical danger he stood in now, surrounded by people who made their livings killing or stealing or (worst of all) doing honest labour, he found himself almost able to relax. It was a strange experience. And not an unwelcome one.

Which was, I am sure, terribly healthy for him, but it was sadly lacking in entertainment for me. That was the trouble with low taverns, so few of them bothered to maintain a proper standard of lowness. There had been a time when hardly an hour would pass in a place like this without a knife fight. I miss those days. Or at least I missed them. Now I'm stuck in a physical body I'm rather glad they're over.

Towards the end of the evening, the party's conversation turned to their plans for tracking the Lady and since I expected them to make limited progress in that area for reasons of having no idea what they were dealing with, I elected to leave. There were, after all, other threads to this tale that I needed to follow.

If the Irregulars offered scant hope of entertainment, I held out slightly more hope for the Caesars, who would soon be receiving word that their son had chosen to spend the evening with vagabonds rather than his family. Thanks to my uncanny alacrity and impeccable narrative timing, I caught up with the messenger just in time. She approached the Caesar residence with the sharp, cautious air of somebody who was accustomed to being unwelcome in the parts of the city that had streetlights and knocked at the door. Nancy greeted her, and I saw there pass between them the curious recognition of mutual hierarchy that, in that day, existed even amongst the lowest orders. A maid in a lady's house, even a lady who lived like a Quaker, outranked a girl from the slums.

A letter was passed and I, wearing the shape of a bumblebee, slipped in the door as it was closing. From the street, Nancy ran it upstairs and put it in the hand of Lady Mary, who read it, rose at once, and went to fetch her husband.

"John is not returning this evening," she told him, when he emerged from his study. "He says he has a plan that will help, but that it requires him to remain at—he says the Folly. Do you know what that is?"

There were few secrets between the Caesars, and so the elder Mr. Caesar nodded and told the truth. "It is an inn in St. Giles, frequented by soldiers and criminals."

"Then I'm sure John shall like it very well," said Miss Anne, looking up from her novel. "Such company suits him."

"Anne." Lady Mary glared at her daughter. "While I am also not … overjoyed that John has chosen to absent himself at such a difficult moment, you should not speak of your brother that way."

Standing in the centre of the room in a flawless attitude of otherworldly grace, Miss Caesar turned as slowly and inexorably as public opinion. "The difficult moment has passed, Mama. And besides, Anne is just being shrewish because she's upset that Mr. Bygrave hasn't called."

"I am not being shrewish," Miss Anne protested. "I say it suits him because it does. John has behaved very ill of late."

Mr. Caesar, who knew more of his son's recent activities than either of his daughters, was not quite willing to let that stand. "He has made difficult choices," he said, "and while they are not the choices I would have made they are still his to make."

The lesson that the lives and decisions of others are complex and best left unjudged unless one is very certain of one's awareness and standing settled onto Miss Anne like snow and then, like snow, melted away. Whereupon it was replaced by a wholly different thought. So she sighed only a little theatrically and segued into a matter closer to her heart. "I do think this absence very unkind of Mr. Bygrave. I had grown used to his visits."

"Perhaps somebody else has caught his fancy," suggested Miss Caesar, a spiral of light dancing delightedly inside her.

Miss Anne's lips trembled and a single tear glistened artfully in the corner of her eye. "Mama, make Mary stop being beastly. She has already driven John away and—"

But it was not Lady Mary who intervened. "That is enough," said Mr. Caesar with finality. "You are sisters. You will behave like it."

"She may not even be my sister anymore," replied Anne. "She may be something else entirely."

Lady Mary glared at her daughter. "Your father said that was enough. If the next words out of your mouth aren't all rainbows and butterflies then you will not attend another ball or speak with another gentleman until you are thirty."

The injustice of this clearly burned Miss Anne like wet fire, but she did at least keep her silence.

"I am still me," said Miss Caesar, a little plaintively. And were I the sentimental sort I might have wondered who she was trying to convince.

"I am sure of it," her father said. And it didn't sound like he was trying to reassure her so much as that he was stating an immutable truth of the cosmos. "Who you are is the one thing that can never be taken away. And had you not come back to us, we would have found you. Something is trying to separate this family, and I will not permit it."

Sunlight glittered off the glass roses in Miss Caesar's hair. "The Lady is not trying to hurt us, Papa, she is trying to help me."

Mr. Caesar's face was stone. "She came in the night. And she took you. That is not the action of somebody who wishes you well. It is the action of somebody who wishes to use you."

"She seems to have done very finely for it," said Miss Anne, immediately following up with: "Which is a pleasant thing to say. I was paying her a compliment."

Miss Caesar bobbed an eerily fluid curtsey. "Thank you, Anne."

"Perhaps I should find a way to be carried off by fairies too," Miss Anne mused. "It seems—"

"Anne." The tone of warning in Lady Mary's voice would have registered with even the most obtuse of debutantes, but still more notable was the fact that her husband very quietly turned and left the room.

Miss Anne's gaze followed her father as he left. "Is Papa very upset, do you think? I meant only—"

"Whatever you meant," said Lady Mary, "your father does not like talk of his children … disappearing."

For a moment a look of contrition flickered across Miss Anne's face. "I suppose," she tried, "it is not so very bad if Mr. Bygrave doesn't visit so often. I am still young, after all."

"You should not expect him today at any rate," pointed out Lady Mary. "He will be at the Earl of Semweir's ball tonight. He's of good family; it should be more than enough to secure him an invitation."

"Whereas we," Miss Anne ask-stated, "are not of good family?"

The Caesars had tried, as best they could, to shelter their children, especially Miss Anne, from the worst realities of the world they lived in (those realities they knew of, at least; if they understood what horrors lurked beneath the soap bubble of material reality they would have had quite a different order of problem). And Lady Mary took some small comfort in the fact that if their youngest daughter had grown up na?ve and a little selfish then that was, at least, a task in which they had succeeded. "Not," she said at last, "in many people's eyes."

The light inside Miss Caesar's body faded a moment and she asked: "Why did you marry Papa?"

And for an equal moment, Lady Mary was silent. It was not a topic of which she spoke often, at least not to her children "Because I was in love with him," she began. And then she hesitated again because love was not considered a very sensible basis for marriage, and while her daughters doubtless wanted the fairy tale (I heartily approve of this usage, by the way; fairy tales are indeed a fine thing and always to be relied upon) for themselves, they would very much have preferred their mother marry money. "And because I knew that if he could live the kind of life that he had lived and still be the kind of man he is, then I would have nothing to fear so long as I was beside him."

In spite of her instinctive desire to scorn everything that originated with her parents, Miss Anne pressed her hands to her bosom. "Oh, Mama, how romantic. It could almost be the subject of a novel."

"Not," Lady Mary replied, more sorrowfully than she had intended, "one that would be well received amongst the monied classes." To think, reader. How terrible it must have been to live in a world where writers of fiction have to contend with such considerations.

"Because you married beneath yourself?" asked Miss Caesar. Her tone would once have been icy, but since her transformation every inflection of her voice was accentuated and it cut like, well, like glass. "That is"—she retracted hastily—"I don't mean … Uncle Richard would say you—"

Perhaps because her daughter was now literally made of a brittle substance, Lady Mary replied with care. Or as much care as she could while indulging her distaste for compromise. "Your father is not beneath anybody. But yes, Uncle Richard would disagree, as do most of his friends, and most of polite society. The Vicomte de Loux they will accept, but things are different in France. Besides, there are other rules for men, and in his case it was his mother who came from … less acceptable stock."

Miss Anne looked down at her hands. She had long, slim fingers that she was now twining nervously. Her hands, like the rest of her, were much admired in the ton but as she progressed through her fourteenth year she was beginning to notice how often words like exotic made their way onto her admirers' lips. "Still," she said aloud, "it is hard for us sometimes. And when one's future may be limited by a thing over which one has no control."

"I know," replied Lady Mary. And she did indeed know. She would indeed have given much to stop knowing, just for a day or two. "But I cannot regret my choices. Nor that I had you, or John. And besides"—she forced herself to be cheerful—"there will be other balls."

Right on cue—a cue I had been expecting for some while thanks to my marvellous sensitivity to the ephemeral but had concealed from you, dear reader, for dramatic purpose—the street outside clattered with hoofbeats and rang with the sound of harness bells.

Without being asked, for she was in many ways a well-trained girl, Nancy went to the door to see what the matter might be and, a few minutes later, returned with a puzzled expression.

"There's a carriage," she said. "With footmen. Strange footmen. And a lady in a blue gown."

The light within Miss Caesar kindled once more. "She's here?"

The same words she's here were echoed by Miss Anne and Lady Mary with very different inflections.

"She is," said a voice from the hallway. It was by far the pleasantest voice any of the mortals there present had ever heard, being sunlight and hope spun into sounds. Though they heard the Lady, they did not at first see her, since she was preceded by her footmen, the ones that Nancy had denounced as "strange."

Whether they were strange or not depended, of course, on your perspective. I have seen plenty of white-eyed servants with digitigrade legs and an extra joint in each finger. But then I go to a far better type of party than the average human. Their livery, like most of their mistress's belongings, was the palest of blues and they announced her arrival with slender trumpets made from a type of bone that, for the sake of my audience's sensibilities, I shall not identify.

The commotion was enough to stir the elder Mr. Caesar once more from his study, and so he was treated to the full splendour of the Lady's entrance. She shimmered into the room like a fallen star, which, in many ways, she was.

"What are you doing in my house?" demanded the elder Mr. Caesar with a commendable fortitude for a mortal confronted with one of Titania's more insidious servants.

"My duty," the Lady replied. "I have a bargain with your daughter, and I would see my side of it upheld."

Miss Caesar was already gliding towards the Lady while Miss Anne watched her with profound jealousy and Lady Mary watched her with profound horror.

"Leave her be," Mr. Caesar demanded. Which was useless. We are not amenable to demands.

The Lady blithely ignored him, as she was ignoring me. I was, I will freely admit, very tempted to attempt to distract her purely for my own amusement, but I was concerned that if her composure broke she would address me, and that would compromise my mission. She extended a hand, smiled beatifically at Miss Caesar, and said—because, dear reader, some incantations are mandatory, "My dear, you shall go to the ball."

"Mary"—Lady Mary called after her daughter—"please, don't go with this … creature."

Realising that the Lady was not going to listen to reason (and why should she when so little in this cosmos is even remotely rational?), Mr. Caesar decided, with some reluctance, to resort to physical intervention. He did not get very far. Although the Lady made no word nor gesture that was perceptible to mortal kind, she bid two nearby chairs to assist her, and assist her they did, skittering across the floor to intercede themselves between her and her would-be inconveniencer. When he vaulted, with a frankly unexpected agility, over them she resorted to more drastic measures. A sewing-basket slid from beneath a settee and a single long needle aimed itself directly at Mr. Caesar's throat.

"I do not wish to be uncouth," she said, "but where I come from a deal is a deal."

Miss Caesar looked from the Lady to her father and back to the Lady, and for a moment even I did not know which she would choose.

"It's all right, Papa," she said carefully. "I—this is what I want. There's no need to …"

She didn't finish the sentence, but went with the fairy. I fell into step beside her and left with them.

"I shan't be any trouble," I promised mostly to remind the Lady that I could if I pleased. "But you surely appreciate that this branch of the story is likely to be far more interesting than the one happening back at the house."

She did not reply, of course. But she cast me an evil look out the corner of her eye and made a valiant if doomed effort to shut the carriage door before I could slip through it.

The carriage itself was a wondrous thing, at least by mortal standards (the steeds and chariots of my master are, of course, more wondrous still, but I am adjusting my assessments to the limited experience of my audience). It was silver spun from moonlight, drawn by four white horses whose eyes burned with a pale fire and whose harnesses were strung with bells that were each a star.

Miss Caesar settled down on a seat upholstered in pale blue silk and watched as her parents' house receded into the distance. Her expression was harder to read now that her face was made of glass, and her heart harder to read now that it had been replaced with a ball of borrowed light, but I sensed ambivalence from her.

"Papa will—you would not have hurt him?" she asked.

"Of course not," said the Lady. Though she said it only once. "But he was trying to keep you from your destiny. And destiny, child, is not a thing with which one toys."

I knew, as I am sure the Lady did, that it was a specious argument at best. A vapid appeal to large-sounding ideas in order to cover up an unpleasant truth.

But the lure of a life of beauty was tempting, especially to a young woman in a world where beauty was the only currency a lady really had of her own. And so Miss Caesar permitted herself to be convinced. And to be carried through the streets of London to the fashionable residence of the Earl of Semweir.