“And make Hypatia suspicious? Don’t be ridiculous.” Anna rolled her blue eyes. “Off you go, conspirators. I’ve done my part, and the rest of my evening will not require you.”

“Anna?” Hypatia’s voice sounded from somewhere inside the bronze-lit room. “Anna, darling, where are you?”

“Take my carriage,” Anna whispered. Then she smiled. “And you did very well, Cordelia. They’ll be talking about that dance for ages.”

She winked and shut the door in their faces.

Sleep eluded Cordelia that night. Long after the boys had dropped her at the house in Kensington, long after she had wearily climbed the steps to her bedroom, long after her new dress had been discarded in a pile of bronze silk on the floor, she lay awake, staring up at the white plaster ceiling of her room. She could still feel James’s lips on hers, the touch of his hands and fingers on her body.

He had kissed her with violent desperation, as if he were dying for her. He had said her name: Daisy, my Daisy. Hadn’t he? Yet when they had reached Kensington, he had helped her down from the carriage and bid her good night casually, as if they were simply the friends they had always been. She tried to hold the memory of what it felt like to kiss him in her mind, but it slipped away and vanished with only the memory of sweetness, like the smoke in the Whispering Room.

16 LEGION

The sea gave up its dead, and death and the grave gave up their dead.

—Revelations 20:13

When Cordelia arrived at the Institute in the late afternoon, she found Lucie and the Merry Thieves in the ballroom, clearly taking advantage of the fact that Will and Tessa had gone on a day patrol. White sheets had been thrown over the furniture and the piano, and the only light came from the arched windows, whose heavy velvet curtains had been pulled back. Even in the short time that had passed since the ball, the floor had grown lightly grained with dust.

Lucie, Christopher, James, Matthew, and Thomas were standing in a circle around an object that had been placed in the middle of the room. As Cordelia drew near them, she recognized it as the Pyxis Anna had handed to James the night before.

In the watery daylight, Cordelia could see it more clearly. It was made of a dark golden wood, with the pattern of the ouroboros, the snake swallowing its own tail, burned into four of its sides. A handle protruded from the top.

“Cordelia!” Lucie exclaimed. “We were just exchanging information. We learned a great deal that was important at the Enclave meeting last night, and it sounds as if you did something or other at the Hell Ruelle. Nothing that compelling, no doubt, but we cannot all be spies.”