“You do not have to, if it is too distressing,” Dee said. “By all means run away and hide.”

Petra knew that what he said was a trick, but it worked anyway. She wanted to be brave, and she began to wonder if Dee was correct about her magical gift. Maybe she was special.

She found herself stepping forward. Quickly, before she could change her mind, she laid her palm on Gabriel Thorn’s wrinkled forehead. It was cold and hard.

“Don’t think about what you’re touching,” Dee said. “Think about what it holds.”

Petra remembered the Thames, and how opaque the waters were. Somewhere below the river’s surface was a bottom—muddy, old, and far from the sun. She forgot about the curve of the skull beneath her palm.

The image of a bright, twisting liquid floated in Petra’s mind. She recognized it. “Quicksilver.”

“Good,” said Dee. “Keep your eyes closed.”

She hadn’t realized that they were.

“This will be more difficult,” Dee continued. “Can you tell me how long the quicksilver has been inside the blood? A long time? Since late this morning, or early?”

Petra’s lips automatically formed the answer: “A little after ten o’clock.”

“That’s enough.” Dee lifted her fingers from the West’s forehead. Petra snatched her hand away, and cradled it in her other palm. It was cold. She blinked at Dee, and the world felt unsteady.

“It is, of course, only her word,” Robert Cecil said.

“I’ll take it,” Dee replied. “What Petra says is consistent with certain signs on the body. Notice how pink Gabriel’s cheeks are.”

“That could be from wine.”

“True. He does smell of it. But then, where is his bottle? Where is his glass? If nobody entered the room, these items should be here.”

Cecil was silent.

“Gabriel’s mouth and gums are also a bright red,” Dee continued. “This, and the high color of his cheeks, are symptoms of poisoning by quicksilver.”

Cecil sighed. “I’ll tell the queen.”

“The key, I believe, will be discovering why Gabriel reserved the library this morning, and if he was indeed alone.”

Cecil passed a weary hand over his forehead. “How distressing. Gabriel wasn’t always well liked, but it’s difficult to imagine that anyone would wish him dead. Well, except . . .” He glanced at Dee, and then cleared his throat in embarrassment.

Except you. Petra was sure that’s what Cecil had been about to say. She remembered Walsingham’s comment to Dee: I just thought you’d care, one way or another. Was Dee glad that the West was dead?

With the face of someone eager to change the topic of conversation, Cecil said rapidly, “Now, John, while I have you here, would you be so good as to look at a draft of a law being considered by Her Majesty? I’d like to know your thoughts on it before the council meets.” He led Dee to a table near a window, and pulled a sheaf of paper in front of them.

As the two men leaned over the table, Petra stepped away from the West’s body. She didn’t want to linger near the corpse, but she thought about what Tomik would do in a situation like this. He would be thorough. He would look for something that everyone else had missed.

Petra glanced down at the thick carpet, and saw a tiny, tear-shaped seed by the leg of the chair. She bent down and picked it up. It looked like an apple seed, except it was a dusky orange, not brown.

Petra put it in her pocket and felt a sense of satisfaction. She had noticed something Dee hadn’t.

Still warm with the glow of this small triumph, Petra decided to act upon a sudden idea. After a glance at the two men, who were engrossed in conversation, she scanned the shelves until she found what she wanted: a small, compact book on English grammar. She tucked it under her arm, then carefully pulled the cloak around her shoulders.

Petra Kronos had stolen from the queen of England. Astrophil would be pleased, and Neel would be proud.

DEE WAS QUIET as the oarsman rowed him and Petra away from the dockhouse. The fog had lifted, and Petra could now see the palace and the fields of dead trees around it.

It was colder than before, and snow began to fall. Petra shivered under her cloak. The silence made her uncomfortable. She was bursting with questions, and finally she couldn’t resist. “Why did you bring me to Whitehall?”

“You might have thought Ariel’s words were nonsense,” he answered, “but I never did. When Walsingham came to Throgmorton Street with the news that a councillor was dead, I recalled Ariel’s prediction of murder. That warning came when I asked the spirit about you. Clearly, the death of the West is connected to you in some way.”

The chilly feeling that crept over Petra had nothing to do with the cold. “But I didn’t know Gabriel Thorn.”

“That may not matter.”

“Did he know the prince?”

Dee paused before replying. “I do not think so. I don’t yet understand why Gabriel died, or what you have to do with that fact. But events at Whitehall confirmed my suspicion that Ariel’s words about you were not random. In the Shield Hall—”

“The Cotton tree,” Petra supplied. “The tree dressed with robes.”

“Yes. And then there was the dirty metal river.”

Petra looked at him blankly.

“Think, Petra.”

She remembered the quicksilver, a liquid metal that flows without being heated. “But quicksilver isn’t dirty. It’s shiny.”

“It’s poisonous. That is dirty enough.”

“Oh.” She didn’t speak for a moment, then lunged into a question that had been bothering her. “Why haven’t you been giving me lessons?”

“I just did, in the Whitehall library.”

“But you didn’t before. You’ve been ignoring me.”

He didn’t give the response that Petra expected. Dee didn’t say he had been busy. Instead, he replied, “The unfortunate thing about being a teacher is that it is impossible to make a pupil learn something if she doesn’t want to do so.”

Petra heard herself saying, “But I do want to.”

His eyebrows lifted.

“I mean,” she amended, “I might want to. But nine months is too long.” It had always been too long, but Petra had made that agreement thinking she could escape well before the end of that period.

“Anything worth learning takes time,” Dee said.

“I don’t have time.”

“Then what do you propose?”

Petra considered the things that she knew about John Dee. He enjoyed bargaining. He constantly challenged Petra, whether by mocking, tricking, or entrapping her. He seemed (Petra forced herself to admit it) intrigued by her. He might care about the death of the West, and whatever Petra had to do with it.

“I propose,” Petra began, “that we stick to our original agreement. Except—”

“Except?” He was amused.

“Except that if I solve the mystery of who killed Gabriel Thorn, you will send me home to Okno right then and there. With all of my possessions,” she added, thinking of the sword.

Dee laughed.

“And,” she added, “you will break the link between our minds.”

“That part is not negotiable. A mental link like that can be broken only by the person who forged it, or by whoever owns the minds that are connected. I will not sever that link, which means that you are the only one left who can. Somehow, I don’t think I will be teaching you how to do that.”

“But do you agree to the rest?”

“Why not? You proved at Salamander Castle that you excel when properly motivated. This agreement may make you a more willing pupil. But, of course, our bargain will be binding only if you discover who killed Gabriel before I do.” He let this sink in. It wasn’t likely that Petra could beat Dee in a race where all of his connections and experience would give him more than a head start.

But Petra had what she wanted: a chance.

She nodded. The oarsman looked at her with disapproval, but Petra ignored him, and he didn’t say anything, because he was used to being ignored.

14

On the Ratlines

NEEL SPUN a little golden hoop between his fingers. He had stolen it in Sallay, along with a bolt of crimson cloth for Sadie.

On the night the Pacolet left Sallay, almost two weeks ago, Neel had eaten almonds until his stomach cramped. Today, looking at his sister’s red cloth made him feel even worse. He remembered their farewell. While the rest of the Lovari praised Neel’s theft from the Bohemian prince, Sadie had been silent and furious. When she finally spoke, it was to say that she was staying in Prague.

Neel had teased her. He sang songs about a castle stablehand who must have stolen her heart (he didn’t realize that he might have been singing the truth). She grew angrier and angrier until finally the very intensity of her emotion made her laugh.

She hugged him. In a low voice, she said, “If you had been caught, they wouldn’t have just killed you.”

Neel wished she were here, not holed up in Salamander Castle, smuggling messages through white traders the Roma trusted. He missed her. Sadie was good. A bright flame that made everyone around her glow.

Neel didn’t feel like a good person.

He opened the earring.

Then a pair of feet appeared on the ladder leading from the hatch in the ceiling.

“Neel, what are you doing down here?” demanded Nadia. “You should be working with the rest of us.”

“You should be working on catching Brishen’s eye, ’cause that’ll never happen on its own,” he sneered. He set the pointed end of the open hoop against his left earlobe.

“You’ll get an infection if you do it like that,” said Nadia.

He pushed the earring through. He heard as well as felt the tiny pop when it went through his flesh. He pinched the hoop closed, and blotted the blood between his thumb and forefinger. His earlobe throbbed, but he didn’t mind. It felt as angry as the rest of him.

“My fire’s burning just fine, so why don’t you mind yours,” Neel told Nadia, using the Lovari expression.

“The Maraki don’t have campfires. We live on ships.”

“I’m not Maraki, and you know what I meant.”

“I’m sorry.” Her voice was rough in that way that some people have when the only way they can apologize is to harden themselves first. “I’m sorry for what I said the night before we reached Sallay. I didn’t mean it. It doesn’t matter who’s in which tribe. We’re both Roma.” She sat down on the hammock next to Neel’s. “I know what your problem is.”

He kept his expression carefully blank.

“It’s him,” said Nadia.

Neel collapsed into his hammock and covered his face. “I hate him,” he groaned.

“Then why is he on this ship? You’re the one who made us keep him.”

Neel knew that, and didn’t understand why all of his reasons for doing so now seemed pale and insignificant next to his resentment. It hadn’t been right to sell Tomik as a slave, and Neel could work with the gadje if he had to, just like when the two of them had plotted out the scrying in Sallay. But now this handsome white outsider, who also happened to be Petra’s oldest friend, was here to stay—and, to Neel’s dismay, Tomik had become the darling of the Pacolet.

At least Nadia didn’t seem too keen about him. “If I go on deck,” he asked her, “will you leave me alone?”

“Yes.” She reached into Tas’s kit and pulled out a bottle.

“What’re you—”

“Hold still,” she ordered, seizing Neel’s head. “Or you really will get an infection.” She uncorked the bottle with her teeth and poured alcohol on his ear.

He shrieked.

IT MIGHT BE SURPRISING that Tomik was a favorite aboard the Pacolet. After all, its sailors had been ready to sell him into slavery, and their captain was disgusted with him. Even as Treb set the course for England, he complained to anyone who would listen that the gadje had screwed up the scrying, and that if they were chasing a phantom instead of the Celestial Globe, it was all Tomik’s fault. But from the first day that Morocco disappeared on the horizon, the Maraki adored Tomik with that easy feeling that comes from being relieved of guilt.

They also saw that Tomik was dedicated. He learned Romany more quickly than anyone would have guessed. He studied the parts of the ship, and never stopped asking questions. At first the Maraki pretended to be annoyed by this, but they soon gave in to feeling flattered.

Tomik’s sunburn darkened into a tan, his hair was streaked into an even brighter gold, his laugh was open, and he seemed to have forgotten that the sailors had once been his captors. The only person Tomik avoided was Neel, which everyone thought was strange, since Neel had raged at, badgered, and insulted the Maraki into keeping him.

The Pacolet had left the Loophole Beach families in Sallay to make their own way in life, since independence was important to the Roma and the ship had been a temporary (and cramped) solution to their problems. Neel and Tomik then became the youngest people on board, if only by a couple of years. It is perhaps natural, then, that Tomik became the pet of the Maraki, who showed him the same affection they would have toward a puppy taking its wobbly steps.

It didn’t occur to Neel that he himself was treated differently because the Maraki considered him an equal.

While Neel was below deck, slapping the bottle out of Nadia’s hand and cursing her, Tomik was making a discovery.

There was little wind that day. After the Pacolet had left Morocco, it sailed west past the Canary Islands. The ship would eventually turn to the northeast and England, but not before it had sailed far out into the Western Ocean. This route meant that the Pacolet could take advantage of good currents and the trade winds, which made the journey faster. But you can’t trust the wind. It has its lazy days just like the rest of us.