“You can tell me now, or you can tell my parents. And believe me, their questions are less kind than mine,” the boy said. He stopped in front of Eleanor. His eyes met hers, and a shiver went through her. There was something about the boy that seemed familiar.

“Who are you?” the boy asked again, leaning closer. Eleanor clamped her teeth shut and glared at him.

“Let us go, and maybe we’ll tell you,” Pip suggested.

The boy straightened up. “Take them to the throne room.”

They were herded toward the front doors of the castle. Eleanor looked over her shoulder, managing to catch Otto’s gaze. He looked as panicked as she felt.

They were marched through a long hall, up a set of steps, and then through a massive pair of iron doors. Eleanor, pushed out in the front, found herself in a huge, vaulted room, the ceiling covered in intricate patterns of twisting lines. Columns lined each side of the vast hall, and a single red length of carpet split its center—the only color in the whole place.

Two spikes of onyx stone stood at the front, carved into thrones. And on those thrones sat two figures Eleanor had seen once before, in a painting on the wall of a hidden room in Mrs. Prosper’s office. Fresh fear flooded Eleanor’s body, followed by a slow wave of dread.

They were the Pallid King and the Pallid Queen. The mother and father of the People Who Look Away. Which could mean only one thing.

Somehow, impossibly, they were in the Pallid Kingdom.

“No, no, no,” someone moaned, and Eleanor realized it was her. She stopped walking, but still the soldier dragged her forward, toward the grim thrones.

The king and queen were like people, but stretched. Their bodies and limbs long and horribly thin, even their faces distorted—not that they really had faces. They had no mouths, no noses, only black, lidless eyes. Their fingers, resting on the arms of their thrones, were like spiders’ legs. They wore robes of many shades of gray, and above their heads floated a few jagged spurs of metal and stone, like shattered crowns.

Eleanor twisted to look back helplessly at the others. The hedgewitch’s face was drained of blood, stark fear in her eyes. Pip and Otto looked terrified.

“Why have you brought these vermin to our hall?” someone whispered in Eleanor’s ear. She gave a startled cry—but there was no one behind her. The Pallid Queen was leaning forward, and even though she was at least fifty feet away, Eleanor was somehow sure she had been the one to speak.

That fly-buzzing sound came from one of the soldiers again, and the queen clicked her stretched-out fingers against the arm of her throne. “Then our child can explain himself.”