Sin had to resist the urge to smile back. Then Merris spoke, and Sin no longer felt any temptation to smile whatsoever.
“Of course,” she said, her voice sleek with satisfaction, like a great animal curling up after a good hunt and a feast of flesh, “you did both have help.”
Sin flashed Mae a look of inquiry and was irritated to see Mae directing the same glance her way. She didn’t have to answer to tourists.
She did have to answer to Merris.
“Alan Ryves happened to be there and shot at it. I didn’t ask for his help, and I didn’t need it.”
“Nick worked out what was going on and came to help me,” Mae said, and Sin remembered Nick’s sudden request to go to the nurse’s office. “I didn’t need it either. And it doesn’t matter. The point stands. We have to devote all our energy to stopping the magicians. Can’t we put off this contest?”
“This contest will give you both an edge,” Merris told her. “I want you to push each other to be the best you can. I want you to be motivated.”
“The magicians killed my mother!” Mae snarled. “I am motivated. I don’t need to be distracted.”
Merris glanced at Sin, as if questioning whether she was going to continue with this challenge to Merris’s authority. Sin had a terrible moment of wondering whether this might be the final test, if she should prove her loyalty by agreeing to submit to Merris’s will. She’d always tried to do what Merris wanted; she’d always struggled to please her.
Look how much good that had done her.
She didn’t speak.
Merris looked into the space between Sin and Mae. For an instant Sin thought she was regretting the distance between them, but then she realized that Merris was looking through the open door of her wagon.
Those tar-black eyes reflected nothing, but Sin knew as surely as if she’d seen the setting sun in them that night was coming, and Liannan with it.
“I believe you have both seen Celeste Drake,” Merris said, her voice unhurried, as if the sun and her own body were not slipping away from her.
Celeste Drake was the leader of the Aventurine Circle, the big London Circle that had joined with the Obsidian Circle, which the Goblin Market had just fought. Sin did not think she could ever forget Celeste, and how she had appeared in the midst of the battle when Sin had just started to truly believe they could win. Celeste was small and very fair, wrapped in white, and she had swallowed their victory so casually, as if it was a plum she happened to fancy.
“Yeah,” Mae said warily. Sin just nodded.
“Did you happen to notice the black pearl she wears?”
“Yes,” said Mae, as of course she would. Sin didn’t want to lie to Merris, so she said nothing. Maybe Celeste had worn a necklace, dark against the pallor of her clothes and skin; Sin hadn’t taken much notice.
“It’s supposed to be enchanted to wholly protect its wearer from demons,” Merris said. “No demon charisma can touch you, none of their words sway you: They have no power over you at all. No matter what.”
Sin touched the talisman at her own throat: It warned you of magic coming, protected you from possession unless a demon managed to get it off, shielded you from some spells. The pearl sounded a lot more efficient.
“No matter what,” Mae repeated, and Sin looked sharply over at her. There was a new note in her voice that Sin couldn’t quite understand: Her hands were clasping the arms of her chair too tightly, her whole body straining forward a little.
“Call this the final test,” Merris said. “Whichever of you takes Celeste Drake’s pearl wins.”
“She’s the leader of the Circle trying to kill us!” Sin exploded. “It’s impossible.”
“It’s not meant to be easy,” said Merris. “Nor is taking over the Goblin Market.”
Sin was sure taking over the Goblin Market was not actually impossible, not like infiltrating a stronghold of magicians, any of whom would kill her on sight, and taking a priceless treasure off the most powerful of them all. This was just throwing away their lives.
“Of course,” Merris said, eyes on Sin’s, “there is an alternative. Give up.”
“What?” Sin demanded.
“Either one of you could surrender your claim,” Merris continued as calmly as if Sin hadn’t spoken. “Either one of you is free to give up, and swear to follow the other as their leader.”
Sin glanced at Mae, whose face was set in determined lines.
Mae wasn’t the type to give up on anything. Sin had liked that about her once, the way Mae could go around with that candy pink hair, being as short as she was, and shove her way into being taken seriously anyhow.
She would still like it, if Mae hadn’t been trying to shove her way into Sin’s place in the world.
“No,” Sin said. “I don’t think either of us will be doing that.”
Merris nodded as if they were all in agreement, and Mae uncurled herself from the chair, murmuring something about helping Ivy and Iris with their back catalogue. The silent sisters, who had traded their tongues for the ability to read any language ever written, had taken a real shine to Mae.
Sin had once accidentally landed on top of a lot of papyri when another dancer had thrown her too hard during a rehearsal. The sisters still acted as if she’d landed on a baby.
Sin did not take the chair Mae had vacated, even once she had left the room. She remained standing by the desk, and Merris pushed her chair back and stood as well. They were exactly the same height. That still startled Sin sometimes.
Merris went over to the window of the wagon. There was a crescent moon carved in one of the shutters she opened, and the setting sun filled her hair with red.
It wasn’t just the sun. It was the demon closing its claws around her, her black and silver hair starting to twist in the air like reaching hands, changing as it moved until it was the color of blood.
Sin could not see her face clearly any longer. She was glad.
“I did not understand the bargain I was making, you know,” Merris said quietly.
It was so unexpected that Sin had no idea what to say. Merris had refused to discuss the demon’s bargain she’d made with anyone. Sin had begun to think she’d been a fool when she’d believed Merris felt anything like affection for her at all.
Merris had agreed to be possessed, but it was meant to be different with her. Other people were made into shells animated by demons, but she had her body half the time.
It had been clear from the first that it was not that simple.
“Demons always take more than you can afford to pay,” Merris continued, the alien note in her voice growing stronger. “I knew that. But I thought, if what I received in return was my life…I thought it would be worth it. Only it’s not my life now. It’s hers.”
“Liannan,” Sin breathed, as if she was a magician, as if she could name the demon and control its power.
Merris nodded, hair tangling in on itself like a nest of snakes.
“She’s in here with me, always,” Merris said. “Coloring everything. Wrapped up in everything. Whispering to me, as if she was my own heart. Soon I will only want what she wants. Do you know, when I was a girl, I never wanted anything but to dance? I wouldn’t have wanted to be a leader, at your age. I didn’t even want to be part of a Market. But when I couldn’t dance anymore I made this Market my whole life, and she wants to leave. Every morning I wake up in a place farther from it, farther from you all, and every morning I think to myself that I could stay gone.”
Sin swallowed. She had been able to accept Merris’s bargain because she had thought it was the only way to keep her, because the Market needed her so badly.
That was a demon’s bargain, though. They took more than you could afford, and they gave you back nothing.
Merris had not been saved for the Market, not really.
“But if I had that pearl,” Merris whispered, “I think I could silence her. I think I could stay here, and be myself again.”
Hope was harder to swallow than horror. Sin felt like she was choking, at how the stakes had been raised, how the impossible had now become something that absolutely must be done.
Merris continued talking.
“You know, in all the tests I devised for you Mae has achieved much better results, has shown herself able to be a stronger leader than you could be. You’re too close to the Market, I think sometimes. You have to be able to step back and see it as a business. And something to die for: that too. Maybe you have to be a stranger. I was a stranger here once myself.”
“No,” Sin said.
“I wish it wasn’t true,” Merris told her. “You walked into Mezentius House and back out again unbowed. You know how I feel about you.”
Sin had thought she’d known.
“What good would it be, giving you the Market?” Merris murmured, and Sin drew closer, came to stand at the window by her, and Merris reached up and touched her hair as she’d used to. “If I gave it to you and the Market was destroyed, or you were destroyed by it, what use would this demon’s bargain be? I have to choose right, and I have to choose fast. I wish I could choose you. But I don’t know if you’re the right one: I don’t know if you can bear more responsibility than you already have, if you can turn life and death into a business. If you bring me this pearl, we would have time. I would have time to teach you. I want to believe you can be the leader this Market needs.”
Sin bowed her head under Merris’s lightly stroking hand. She wanted to cry, but she knew Merris wouldn’t appreciate that.
“I am the leader this Market needs,” she insisted past the knot in her throat that wanted to become tears. “This is my place.”
When she looked up, deadly pallor was rushing over her leader’s face, terrible beauty claiming it the same way shadows were claiming the city below as the sun retreated.
From lips twisting into a shape not their own, Merris whispered, “Prove it.”
3
Throwing the Fever Blossom
THERE HAD BEEN A GREAT FOREST BY HORSENDEN HILL ONCE.
The houses of Wembley lay spread at the foot of the hill like a glittering carpet now, but the trees enclosing their Marketplace were tall and strong, the survivors of the ancient forest. Every arching branch bore a lantern swaying in the wind, throwing bright beams of magic against the long grass.
Merris might be lost to a demon, Mae might be impressing the silent sisters, but the night of the Goblin Market had always belonged to Sin.
Tonight was her chance to remind everyone that this was her rightful place.
“Welcome to the Market,” Sin murmured to the first rush of tourists, who were milling about the stalls, watching her.
There was a full moon, a bright circle like a pale, open flower against the dark sky, and Sin had dressed for it. She was wearing black with silver lines shot all through it like spider-webs, silver that caught the moonlight and turned her from shadow to gleaming ghost and then back again, mocking, elusive, the only point of color about her a crown of crimson flowers.
Mae might be smart and she might be cute enough, but she did not know about performing. She didn’t know that if you made a performance good enough you made it true: that by playing a queen Sin could transform herself.
“It takes you awhile to learn the ropes here,” said a tourist walking with his girl, who judging by her wide eyes was here for the first time. “Helps if you’ve got magic blood in you, of course. My mum’s Scottish, so that helps. Very mystical people, the Scots.”
“Good to see you again,” Sin murmured to him as she went past, and he stood and stared after her in pleased bewilderment, thinking she remembered him.
That was part of the performance, making other people feel special, until dozens of people were thinking of you as special. Sin was good-looking, but it took belief to make you the most desirable woman in a crowd. It took an audience to be beautiful.