I found myself taking off a glove, before I even thought about it. “I need to touch it,” I told Gertie.

She didn’t ask why. Probably because half the court were touch clairvoyants, or touch telepaths as we were sometimes known, because we read the mental impressions that long dead minds had left. It wasn’t exactly a rare gift.

But she didn’t look happy, and a hand suddenly appeared on my arm, with a surprisingly strong grip.

“I’m not going back there,” I told her, because there was no freaking way. “I just need to reach through—”

“And get pulled in by a fey?”

“They’re all up at the castle. And that question means you can do it, right? You can widen that thing?” I gestured at the viewport.

“Not for long,” she said, her mouth pinched. She eyed the dead giant without favor. “What do you hope to learn?”

“I think that’s obvious—”

“Not to me.” It was flat, and I knew Gertie better than to argue.

“When I was here, Aeslinn in dragon form plucked me out of a window and flew off. My party had passed through some kind of portal when we came in—possibly to Faerie, because my power didn’t work. He could have lit me on fire or crushed me like those fey back at the castle and there would have been nothing I could do about it. So, why didn’t he? He didn’t seem to have a problem with killing me on the river.”

Gertie frowned. “He captured you?”

“And was taking me off somewhere, but Mircea and Pritkin attacked him, and he turned back toward the castle, I guess so his fey could help him. Only they didn’t seem to recognize him in that form and targeted him instead. The rest you saw.”

Gertie’s frown grew. “You lead an interesting life.”

That was one word for it.

“Do you think he planned to do to you whatever he did to that creature?”

I shrugged. “You said it yourself, Zeus wanted things from those he consumed, things he didn’t have. He absorbed Phanes for his reproductive abilities, and Metis for her wisdom—”

“And Zagreus, a son of Hades and Persephone, to acquire power in the underworld, according to some reports.”

I blinked. “You really know your mythology.”

“I looked it up last night. I couldn’t sleep.”

“Well, the reports are probably right. He told me he’d done the same to some little goddess of the byways, which is how he and Aeslinn managed to follow me into transition.”

Her brow wrinkled. “When did he tell you this?”

“When we were fighting—”

“He talked to you while he was trying to kill you?”