“I am,” he said, interrupting me as he reached for a covered basket beside the hearth. It was tied with a checkered bow, and I imagined it was from Newt—hopefully on one of her good days. “I’ve not eaten in weeks, it feels like,” he said as he undid the ribbon and looked inside.

“Al, I need your help.”

“Oh.” His expression fell. “I am not eating that. Rachel, this is foul. Come smell this.”

“Al!”

Al stopped fussing with the basket, his head down. “I know you want to use my rings. You aren’t strong enough to overpower Ku’Sox alone. No one is, not even two demons together. Not three. Five, it took last time, and since only four walked away from the encounter, no one is willing to try again. Especially when there are bribes of mended demon babies with which to escape to the sun in.”

“You know?” I said, my surprise quickly vanishing.

He eyed me as if embarrassed. “Of course. I was burned, not lobotomized. My wedding rings are not enough.” Pulling them from a pocket, he pushed them around in his palm with a bare finger. “Even if you and I wore them and stood before Ku’Sox, they would not be enough.”

I was starting to get mad. Why did I have to do this all by myself? “You’ve given up!”

A weary slump came over him. “Rachel . . . We made him to be better than us, able to crush an elf warlord on his own. My rings are not enough.”

“But I know how to fix the line!” I protested, and he reached up to set his rings on the slate table beside him. “It’s not broken, just overloaded. Ku’Sox shoved all the tiny imbalances in your collective lines into mine, making them more than the sum of their energies. Bis and I separated Newt’s signature imbalance from that purple sludge and got it back into the line she made.”

His eyes widened, and I stifled a shudder at the new blackness of them. “Interesting,” he said, tossing another chunk of earth on the flames. “The loss is keyed to individual lines . . . and you separated one?” Settling himself deeper into the flagstones, he seemed to find strength with the fire behind him. “Is this why Newt’s room are not shrinking anymore?”

“Probably,” I said, wondering if there was a direct connection between the imbalance, the leak, and the missing mass. If so, she wasn’t going to like my dumping the imbalance into her line. “That’s why Ku’Sox took Bis. But I don’t need Bis to move the entire ball of sludge to Newt’s line and expose Ku’Sox’s curse.”

Al’s expression twisted. “Whereupon he will descend upon you and—”