Tes hesitated. She didn’t want to touch it, in case it was the source of the man’s sickness. She had seen cursed objects before, threads dripping with the oily sheen of tainted magic, the air around them bruised, the strings crumbling with rot. But the threads above the broken thing were splintered, not rotten.
Unlike the customer, who seemed to be getting worse by the moment. Sweat ran down the bridge of his nose, and there were bruised hollows beneath his eyes.
“What is it?” she asked, but he wouldn’t say, only muttered the words on her shop door.
“Once broken, soon repaired.”
Tes folded her arms. “You want me to fix a thing, without knowing what it is or what it was meant to do?”
“It’s broken,” he wheezed. “That’s what it is. It’s meant to be whole. Can you fix it or not?”
That was a good question. She’d yet to find something she couldn’t fix, but then, she usually knew how it was meant to work. And yet, in theory at least, the threads would tell her. If she could read the pattern. If she could reconstruct it.
It would be a challenge. But Tes loved a challenge.
She gestured at the mound of parts. “Is this everything?” she asked, and the stranger hesitated.
“Everything you need,” he said, which wasn’t the same thing, but he clearly wasn’t well, and she didn’t need him fainting in her shop.
“I’ll do it,” Tes said. “Eight lin. Half up front.”
The man didn’t argue. He fumbled in his pockets, pulled out a handful of loose coins. They were all lin, red metal printed with a small gold star, and yet he plucked them out of his palm one at a time, holding each coin to the light as if to check its value before setting it on the counter.
Tes produced a black ticket, a gold H on one side and a number on the other, and slid it across the table so she didn’t have to touch him. In case it was the kind of curse that spread.
Her eyes were already drifting back to the parcel, the pieces, her mind racing ahead when he asked, “When will it be ready?”
“When it’s ready,” she said, and then, seeing the fear and panic that swept across his sickly face, she added, “Come back in three days.”
She would know by then if she could fix it, or not.
His head jerked like a puppet’s. “Three—days.” He seemed loath to leave the bundle, broken as it was. He backed away from her, as Nero had done, but there was no ease, no charm, only a cord drawn taut. And then it snapped, and he was gone.
Tes got up and followed in his wake, turning the sign to CLOSED and locking the door, despite the early hour. She scarfed down the remaining dumplings, and brewed a pot of strong black tea, and sat down before the stack of broken parts. She cracked her knuckles, and rolled her neck, and bundled the curls on top of her head.
“Well,” she said to the dead owl at her elbow. “Let’s see what we’ve got.”
Part Four
THE OPEN DOOR
I
Lila’s luggage hit the floor with a heavy thud.
“You know what I love?” she said, looking around. “You can change the name on the sign and the number of stairs. You can change the color of the walls and the view beyond the window. But no matter how many worlds you cross, a tavern inn is still a tavern inn.” She took a deep breath. “Sawdust and stale ale. Always makes me feel at home.”
Kell turned in a slow circle, taking in their room at the Setting Sun.
“Ir cas il casor,” he said. To each their own.
But in truth, he understood the point.
He had kept a room of his own here once, years before. It had been a respite—from palace life, and the weight of the king’s attention—but also a place to keep the things he’d picked up on his travels.
And no wonder it felt familiar to Lila as well. After all, nearly a decade ago, Lila had lived in a room on this very spot, albeit in another world. The Setting Sun stood in the same place as the Stone’s Throw in Grey London, the Scorched Bone in White.
Fixed points. That’s how Kell had always thought of them, those rare places where the worlds perfectly lined up, so that what existed physically in one also existed in another, as if called into being by the echo. A bridge at the same bend in the river. A well on the same hill. A tavern on the same corner.
In those places, the walls between the worlds were thin—at least they had always felt that way to him—and as Kell stood in the center of the floor, he imagined that if he looked up, he would see the pale ribs of the Scorched Bone; that if he took a step, the boards would groan over Ned Tuttle’s head; imagined he could feel those other places, the rain beyond the windows, the chill beneath the door, the shadow of something at the edge of his senses. Kell shivered, sure that he could feel—