“I do want something.” I smiled, for I loved him and Bee so much, and all the rest of them, too. “Just don’t let Wasa get up to mischief. She has such a rascal spirit. I’ll tell you the rest tomorrow night.”

It was almost twilight as we reached the gates of troll town. The mirrors and shards of glass that surrounded the district flashed so agonizingly that I turned my back before the pain ripped through me. I kissed him and sent him on his way. The drums called him. They were already dancing, the strangest rhythm I had ever heard, for it was shot through with the whistling and clicking of trolls. It was a new song being born.

I smelled liquor, and the fresh fragrance of the traditional crossing buns filled with plum jam or yam custard. A rollicking party was already under way, as the sailors would have it.

Another sound rose out of the earth like mist and filtered down from the sky like rain: the horn calling the Wild Hunt to ride.

I ran the short distance to the harbor office of Godwik and Clutch, for I had promised Bee and Vai I would sit in a room with four mirrors until the danger had passed. Rory sulked on the stoop, seated on the stairs with a morose eye turned on me as I came up.

“I can’t believe you never told them,” he said. “Even Chartji left for troll town without knowing. How could you, Cat? And making me go along with it, too. It’s not right.”

“What good would it have done? You know them, Rory. They would have insisted on trying to hide me, or fighting the Wild Hunt, or something equally foolish and pointless. They would have spent the last two months so unhappy and grief-stricken and miserable. It’s better this way.”

“I’m not sure you have the right to choose for them.”

The horn’s cry rose a second time, gaining strength.

I sat next to him, holding his hand. “It’s done now. Rory, this is your last chance to cross back over in your own body, for once I am gone you will only cross over by means of death. Do you want to return to the spirit world?”

He pressed his face into my shoulder, then shook himself, and tugged on my braid, and pushed me as a brother teases his sister. “No. My home is here now.”

The third call licked the air like fire and breathed all the way into my bones. I heard the clip-clop of hooves and the scrape of wheels on cobblestones.

Rising, I pulled four letters from inside my jacket. “This is for Bee, this for Vai, this for Doctor Asante, and the last is for Aunt Tilly and Uncle Jonatan. You know what to say to Chartji. Now you’d better go before he sees you.”