“Oh, I believe you, kid.” Iris reached out and covered her hand with her own: older, thinner, infinitely familiar. “I—” She paused. “I haven’t been entirely honest with you,” she admitted. “I had an idea this was going to get weird before I gave you the box, but not like this. It seemed like a good time to pass it on when you began sniffing around their turf. Large-scale money laundering is exactly the sort of thing the, this Clan, would be mixed up in, and I suspected—well. I expected you to come back and ask me about it sooner, rather than simply jumping in. Maybe I should have warned you.” She looked at Miriam, searchingly.

“It’s okay, Ma.” Miriam covered Iris’s hand with her other.

“No, it’s not okay,” Iris insisted. “What I did was wrong! I should have—”

“Ma, shut up.”

“If you insist.” Iris watched her with a curious half-smile. “This second knotwork design—I want to see that. Can you show me sometime?”

“Sure.” Miriam nodded. “Didn’t bring it with me, though.”

Her mother nodded. “What are you going to do next?”

“I’m—” Miriam sighed. “I warned Angbard that if anybody touched a hair on your head, he was dead meat. But now there’s a second bunch after me, and I don’t have a hotline to their boss. I don’t even know who their boss is.”

“Neither did Patricia,” murmured Iris.

“What did you say?”

“I’d have thought it was obvious,” Iris pointed out quickly. “If she’d known, they wouldn’t have gotten near her.” She shook her head. “A really bad business, that.” For a moment she looked angry, and determined—the same expression Miriam had glimpsed in a mirror recently. “And it hasn’t gone away.” She snorted. “Give me your secret phone number, girl.”

“My secret—what?”

Iris grinned at her. “Okay, your dead-letter drop. So we can keep in touch when you go on your wanderings. You do want to keep your old mom informed of what the enemies of freedom and civilization are up to, don’t you?”

“Ma!” Miriam smiled right back. “Okay, here it is,” she said, scribbling her new, sanitized mobile number down on a piece of paper and sliding it over to Iris.

“Good.” Iris tucked it away quickly. “This locket you found—you think it goes somewhere else, don’t you?”

“Yes. That’s the only explanation I can come up with.”

“To another world, where everything will of course be completely different.” Iris shook her head. “As if two worlds wasn’t already one too many.”

“And mystery assassins. Don’t forget the mystery assassins.”