He opened the test chamber, and she set the soul pearl in the bottom. Then Broomstick opened the other cases he’d brought and spent some time inspecting the bombs, making little cooing noises as he came to his favorite ones. Fairy didn’t laugh at him, because she was just as weird. Her potions and poisons were like babies to her, and she’d been known to talk or even sing to them.

Maybe this was why she and Broomstick were such a good gemina pair.

Finally, he chose a bomb. They lit the fuse and locked it inside the test chamber with the pearl.

Five, four, three, two, one . . .

A muffled explosion shook the test chamber.

Broomstick unlocked it. Black smoke poured out. Fairy coughed and waved an old horse blanket at it, trying to usher the smoke out of the stables.

“Did we do it?” she asked, once the smoke had cleared a bit. She peered inside the test chamber.

The walls were dark with soot, but the soul pearl sat, gold and unscathed, in the center.

“Stars,” she cursed.

They tried half a dozen approaches, beating the smoke out of the stables each time before looking into the test chamber. After the sixth failure, Broomstick shook his head.

“I don’t think we can do anything with this pearl. It’s not just a gem from the ocean. It’s like what Liga’s arrow said—if there’s god magic involved, it’ll take god magic to undo.”

Fairy sagged. “I suppose we should report back to Spirit and Wolf.”

They walked out of the stable—wow, the air was so much fresher out here—and looked in the shack. There was no one in there, so they headed back outside.

Fairy spotted Wolf and Spirit among the crab apple trees. But when Broomstick lifted his hands to his mouth to holler at them, she put out her arm to stop him. “Wait.”

Wolf and Spirit were standing next to each other, their backs to Fairy and Broomstick. They were probably just looking at something near the base of the tree in front of them, but Fairy suddenly remembered the sound of Wolf’s voice after he’d been injured, when he was losing consciousness and called Spirit’s name. There was something of longing now in the way they stood together, so familiar that they naturally leaned their heads toward each other, that where Spirit’s hip jutted to the left, Wolf’s body arced to allow a matching space, as if they were puzzle pieces that needed only a small nudge to nest into one another perfectly.

Fairy sighed.

“You know he’s yours as long as you want him,” Broomstick said. He understood Fairy well enough to know what worried her, even if she hadn’t said a thing. “And Spirit would never interfere.”

“I know . . . but you see it between them, don’t you?”

“See what?” Broomstick asked.

“The inevitability.”