He hadn’t bothered to keep as quiet as Eliza; he spoke loudly enough that Maggie’s head came up suddenly, the girl staring in their direction. She hadn’t caught his words, Eliza didn’t think—but Maggie’s eyes held a hunted look, like a stray dog that thought she heard trouble coming.
Maggie Darragh? Working with the Fenians? But she’d always said—
No. She hadn’t said; Fergus had. Maggie had never voiced a word on the subject, not that Eliza heard—not since that fellow came by a summer past, dropping hints in the pubs about the Irish Republican Brotherhood. Then the dynamite incidents started happening, and Eliza was so caught up in her own troubles that she’d hardly spared a thought for Maggie.
Their gazes locked, and the hunted look grew. Eliza said, “Maggie,” and that was all she got out before the young woman grabbed her by the arm and dragged her out the sacristy door.
“Not a word, where Ma can hear,” Maggie said in a harsh whisper, when they were out in the nave once more. “Say to me what you like, but I won’t be having her troubled with this, not when she’s just got Owen back.”
Eliza had not been short of curses and anger before, but it all seemed to have temporarily drained from her. “I—I don’t even know what to say.”
Maggie pulled her bonnet off, forgetting they were in church, and scraped a hand through her tangled hair. “’Tis Fergus who sent Special Branch after you; I never asked him to do it.”
“And did you ask him to stop?”
The silence answered her well enough.
Eliza sagged into a pew. “Christ, Maggie—why?”
“Why not?” the girl said bitterly. “I look at Ma and I see what this place did to her; I see what it has done to me. Twice the English bastards have pushed me into an alley and flipped my skirts up, because being Irish is the same as being a whore, is it not? And God help me, but I’ve thought of doing it, because at least that would keep us fed. With Owen gone…” She trailed off, looking hopeless in the light of the few candles still burning.
It made Eliza sick to her stomach. “But the ones who have died—they aren’t the ones who hurt you.”
“I don’t care, and that’s the truth of it,” Maggie said flatly. “I want them to know what it is like, seeing innocents die for crimes they never did.”
Hideous, blasphemous words—spoken in front of the altar, no less, with the Son of God watching from the crucifix above. In the workhouse, when Quinn accused her of helping the Fenians, Eliza had wondered if Maggie hated her enough to spread that lie. But Maggie’s hate wasn’t for Eliza: it was for the English, and all of London. Poison like that could not be drawn by her brother’s return.
There was no sound, but the hairs on the back of Eliza’s neck rose. Turning, she saw Owen standing in the shadows, watching them both.
Maggie drew in a sob-tangled breath at the sight of him. Her elder brother, now younger than she. “Oh, Owen,” she whispered, and went to wrap her arms around him once more. He stiffened, but let her do it; and Eliza, rising to her feet, wondered if he would embrace her back. A moment later, she had no more attention to spare for such questions, because the church entrance banged open and Dead Rick came darting through.
The sight of him knocked the breath from her. Not just to see a faerie there—in church!—making no effort to pretend he was human, though that would have been enough. But his eyes…
The soft dog-brown was gone, drowned in an acid green that flooded iris and pupil alike. In those absinthine depths, time came off its hinge; past and present abandoned their God-given places and danced a mad waltz, whirling such vertigo into Eliza’s mind that she abruptly found herself on the floor, staring at the skriker’s knees. Those, at least, stayed put.
Until he dropped into a crouch and seized her shoulders. “Eliza. I need you to remember. The last time you saw me—before that bastard sent me to take Owen—what did I tell you?”
He called me Eliza.
Not Miss Baker, or Hannah, or any of the other false names she’d borne. He remembered. She saw it in his posture, heard it in his voice; everything about him, everything but those eyes, was an echo from seven years gone. Dead Rick was himself again.
The friend she’d lost had returned.
And then was torn away from her, as Owen charged at him with a howl. Dead Rick lurched under the boy’s weight as if drunk, not defending himself with the brutal skill she knew he had; terrified for him—for them both—Eliza leapt up and tried to force them apart. Tangled together, the three of them swung around, back toward the sacristy, from which her da and Mrs. Darragh had emerged.
It was chaos. Three other people had followed Dead Rick in: two mortal men, and a young woman who took one look at the altar and suddenly showed herself to be the sprite Eliza had seen before. That one blanched dead white and fled the church as if she was about to throw up, leaving the other two behind. They caught Maggie and her mother, while James O’Malley backed off, staring, and in the meanwhile words were pouring out of Eliza’s mouth. “He never meant to do it, Owen—the bastard who hurt you hurt him, too—”
He let go, and the sudden release sent Dead Rick and Eliza both staggering backward into the sacristy. Owen advanced and slammed the door behind himself. “Then why is he here?”
In the relative quiet, she realized Dead Rick was still talking, his voice managing to be hard and begging at the same time. He didn’t even seem to realize Owen was there. “Ash and Thorn, Eliza—you ’ave to remember. If you don’t remember, nobody does. Nadrett smashed it; I’ll never get it back. But it were a danger to ’im, and ’e’s the one what did this to your boy; if you tells me, maybe we can make ’im pay for that.”
She made the mistake of looking into Dead Rick’s eyes again; time swirled, and she almost lost her footing. The last time I saw him. Not the one burned into her memory by the pain of betrayal, or any of their encounters since then; the last time she saw him, the skriker she’d saved. For his sake, Eliza tried to remember. “You told me a story.”
He straightened, then caught himself with one hand against the wall; with that insanity in his eyes, no wonder he was unsteady. “A story?”
Piece by piece, it came to her. “About the Faerie-land. You said that all the tales we have of lands being drowned by the sea—Lyonesse and, oh, others I don’t remember—they’re all echoes of some place in Faerie, that did sink beneath the waves.”
Bewilderment showed on Dead Rick’s face; she was learning to watch his mouth and forehead, not his impossible eyes. “No, there—there ’as to ’ave been something else. Something about Nadrett.” A shiver rose from his toes to his head. He leaned harder against the wall.
She wanted to help him so badly, but— “You never mentioned Nadrett. Only Seithenyn.”
His sagging head came up so fast, she flinched back. What Dead Rick might have said, though, she never found out. The skriker took one step toward her and pitched over sideways as if the floor had gone vertical beneath his feet. Eliza cried out and managed to slow his fall, but not to catch his full weight; he hit the tile floor in a boneless heap.
Bewildered, she looked up at Owen. But he looked no less confused than she. “Nadrett. I—I’ve heard that name?…”
Before she could answer him, the door swung open, and on the other side was one of the men she’d seen a moment before. A dark-skinned heathen fellow—probably that genie from the Galenic Academy. He shook his head over Dead Rick’s limp body. “Were it not for the absinthe, I doubt he would have made it this far. Come, please—your friend, too, if you wish—we will take him to a safer place, and see if we have answers at last.”