“I still need you.”
At the time it had felt true, like he needed me. But now I knew better. This was what he needed—my information to help him trace unCavendish’s plot back to its source.
This was what I got for letting my feelings run away with me.
The worst thing was, I couldn’t blame him for wanting to uncover the truth. It endangered his court, his queen, his country, and mine.
So I swallowed down my foolish feelings and asked, “Who do you think he was working for?”
Bastian exhaled, brow furrowing more deeply. “That’s not for you to concern yourself with. You’ve dealt with that world enough.”
“Have I?” I gritted my teeth. “I feel like I barely scraped the surface while so much more was going on underneath, and that’s how I ended up here.”
After a pause, Bastian closed the notebook and placed it on the desk, hand spread over it. He watched me for a moment as if weighing me. “It’s my job to work all that out. I just need you to stay safe. All you need to know is that someone didn’t want us forming an alliance with Albion.”
Even though this person was responsible for unCavendish upending my life, he wasn’t going to tell me. State secrets. Or just that he didn’t trust me. It amounted to the same outcome.
He grunted, mouth twisting in a sardonic smile. “And they got their wish.”
When I’d told Bastian about the wedding, he’d explained how Queen Elizabeth had called off her marriage to Asher. Thanks to the return of Excalibur, she had magic of her own now and didn’t require a husband—human or fae—to shore up her rule.
Must be nice to have a choice in such things.
His fingers tapped on the notebook’s leather cover as his gaze turned distant, thoughtful.
“You don’t know, do you?” The realisation burst out of me. “All that time in Albion and the week back here, and you still haven’t uncovered them.”
His gaze shuttered. “I’m still gathering information.”
“But we could have more information, by now, couldn’t we? If you’d told me you were trying to lure out the person spying on you, I could’ve helped. If you’d told me you’d taken the antidote—”
“You mean, like you told me about your spying? And about the poison?”
His words were a punch in the gut.
And for a moment—the blink of an eye, really—I caught a glimpse of something wounded and bloody behind the Business Bastian exterior.
The hurt cut both ways, didn’t it?
On a different day, I might’ve found that funny in a bleak kind of way.
Instead, today, I cleared my throat and looked away. “I’m sorry, Bastian. I wanted to stop, but then he threatened Ella, and I couldn’t find a way out. I never wanted—”
“Tenebris is not like Lunden, Katherine.”
I jerked, back straight like I’d been rapped across the knuckles. I’d overstepped the lines of formality he’d drawn between us.
“Different rules apply here. Rules you’d do well to learn.”
He wasn’t wrong. Didn’t rules keep you safe, after all?
His jaw turned solid. “Especially with Dawn so close.”
“Close?” I glanced at the door. “I didn’t see anyone from Dawn on the way here.” None of the corridors had been decorated in a way that marked them as Dawn rather than Dusk—at least not as far as I could tell.
“You wouldn’t. You remained in our territory.”
I squinted at him. “So… they have one side of the palace. The east or—？”
“Not like that. Not so mundane.”
Of course not. This was faerie.
“Two versions of the palace overlay each other.” He gestured as if that explained everything.
I cocked my head.
He blasted a sigh. “You need to understand this, Katherine. As a guest of Dusk, you have some protection, but if you inadvertently walked into Dawn…” Head shaking, he scanned the desk. “Take this piece of paper.” A wisp of shadow pulled one from a pile with a soft rustle. “It has two sides, both identical, divided only by the thinnest barrier, right?” The shadow passed the paper to him and he showed me its edge.
“Thin enough to cut.” I scoffed.
“Many things in Elfhame cut.” His smile was humourless. “Two palaces almost identical in layout.” In pencil, he drew a square on one side of the paper, then turned it over and drew another. He held it up to the light and I could see through the paper—the squares overlaid each other. “But they’re on different planes of existence, separated by the thinnest membrane. You could be in the library in our version of the palace”—he drew an X inside the square—“at the same time someone else is in Dawn’s library”—he turned the sheet and added a small circle in the same location—“and you’d never know the other person was there. You’re in the same space but on different planes.” He held up the paper again.
I frowned at the circle and cross, which were together and not. “They’re close… but also separated.”
He nodded. “Like the veil that lies between us and the Underworld.”
“Can people hear across this veil?” My stomach turned at the idea of someone from Dawn sitting in an office like this one and being able to hear all the details of what unCavendish had done to me.
“No. The only way for anything to cross is at one of the fixed points between the two. We call those lodestones.” He pushed the pencil through the paper. “You experienced one yesterday when we arrived. There’s a tipping sensation as you enter, but you get used to it. There are several throughout the palace. Guarded, of course. The royal suite, the library, the ballroom—there are two of each, one on either side. But the throne room, the grand hall, the royal balcony, for example—these are lodestones. There is only one throne room, accessible by Dusk and Dawn.” He removed the pencil and showed me the hole.
I rubbed my head at the impossibility of it. But was it really more impossible than a city that shifted from one state to another as the sun rose and sank?
Looking at that sheet of paper, I could picture an ant walking along one side, reaching the hole, and passing through that to the other side. And weren’t we just ants to the gods?
“If the lodestones are guarded, there’s no danger of me accidentally crossing over, is there?”
His mouth flattened, the scar standing out pale in the light. “You might not mean to pass across, but someone from Dawn might try to lure or trick you through the wrong door back into their side.”
“But… why?”
The muscle in his jaw flickered again. “Because I’d be powerless to follow.”
I fought the urge to rub my hands over my arms as goosebumps chased across my skin. The word “powerless” on Bastian’s tongue seemed as impossible as a tree growing underwater.
“You see why you need to understand my city and its rules?” The low line of his eyebrows didn’t invite me to answer.
“It’s imperative.” He swept to his feet and circled the desk, going to one of the high windows that looked out over the city. “Never ask someone their name—it’s considered taboo. Offer yours, then they should offer theirs in return.”