When their mother was distracted by other matters, they would meet in the disused study at the end of the hall, where there were bookshelves floor-to-ceiling on all sides and several large decaying armchairs. This, too, was part of their training, Jesse told her, and they would read together. Grace never knew just why Jesse was so kind to her. She thought perhaps that he understood from the start that he and Grace were each other’s only true allies, and that their survival depended on one another. Apart they might fall into the same pit that had claimed their mother; together they might even thrive.

When Grace was ten, Jesse convinced his mother to allow him, at long last, to take a rune. It was unfair, he said, to live in Idris without even so much as a Voyance rune for the Sight. It was understood that anyone who lived in Idris was Sighted, and it might even be dangerous for him not to be. Their mother scowled, but she gave in. Two Silent Brothers came. Grace barely recalled her own rune ceremony, and the sight of the scarred, drifting figures in the dark halls of Blackthorn Manor made her skin crawl. But she summoned her courage and was with Jesse when a Silent Brother inscribed the Voyance rune on the back of Jesse’s right hand. She was there to see him hold up his hand, to regard it in wonder, to thank the Brothers profusely.

And she was there that night to see him die.

3 BITTER AND SWEET

Ah well, well, well, I may be beguiled

By some coquettish deceit.

Yet, if she were not a cheat,

If Maud were all that she seem’d,

And her smile were all that I dream’d,

Then the world were not so bitter

But a smile could make it sweet.

—Alfred, Lord Tennyson, “Maud”

You don’t have to marry a man who doesn’t love you.

The faerie’s voice echoed in Cordelia’s mind as she turned to face the mirror in her bedroom. She appeared almost a ghost to herself, despite the vivid gold of her wedding dress—a floating spirit, tethered to this reality by a thin ribbon. She wasn’t the one about to marry a man who didn’t love her. This day couldn’t be the last time she’d stand in this bedroom, rise from sleeping under the same roof as her mother and brother, look out her window on the row houses of South Kensington, pale in the winter sun. Her life couldn’t be about to change that much at just seventeen.