When Kit went into his room next, he stayed in there for some time and was absolutely quiet. Eventually Jem and Tessa tapped on his door. At his assenting mumble, they pushed open the door and looked inside. They found Kit standing in the middle of the room. He hadn’t touched anything.

“What does all this mean?” Kit asked. “Do you think I’d take them and—do you want me to—?”

He sounded lost. His blue eyes fell on Tessa’s first editions, on Jem’s Stradivarius violin, as though they were signposts and he was trying to find his way in a terribly strange land.

Jem said, “We want you to stay, and to know that the choice is entirely yours, and we wanted to show you something. We want you to know there is nothing in this house more precious to us than you.”

Kit had stayed.

The home the Seelie Queen had given them stood on a hollow hill near bone-white sea cliffs, a hundred leagues from either Seelie or Unseelie Court, and far from any prying eye that might spy the Queen’s long-lost and long-sought-for son.

Within the house, the walls flickered with shadows. As Janus came through the doorway into the dark, the shadows trembled in the wind that crept in with him.

Ash was draped over a sofa, long legs stretched out, dressed in the faerie clothes the Queen had provided. Black silk, green velvet. Nothing but the finest for her boy. Ash hadn’t aged much since they had come from Thule. He still looked sixteen, which was the age Janus believed him to be. He was holding up a piece of paper to the light, studying it intently.

When he heard the door close, Ash turned his head, the white-gold gossamer-fine hair he had inherited from his father falling around his curved faerie ears, and hastily tucked the bloodstained piece of paper away into his pocket.

“What’s that?” Janus asked.

“Nothing important,” said Ash with a slow blink of his grass-green eyes. “You’re back.”

“Do you think I would have had eyes that color,” Sebastian had said once, late at night when he was in one of his most melancholy moods, “if our father had not … done what he did, and made me what I am?”

Janus had not been able to reply. He couldn’t imagine Sebastian or his flat shark’s eyes, dead as the sun and black as the eternal night in their world, as anything other than they were. When he looked in Ash’s eyes, green as springtime, green as new beginning, he thought of someone else entirely.

It was hard to keep secrets from Sebastian. He always took them away. But Janus had kept that one.

“It’s good to be back,” Janus told Ash slowly.

He didn’t like it much in Faerie, but Ash was here. He’d needed a secure place for Ash. Ash was going to change everything. Ash was the key. Nothing bad could happen to him.