Chapter One
London, February 1848
Lydia has been missing for eight days, and I’m beginning to fear that our parents are going to wake up in the morning and find my bed empty too.
A noise in the dark alley to my left makes me jump, but it’s just a rat tearing through a pile of rubbish.
I’ve shivered my way through the city for miles, ignoring hecklers and stepping over half-dead beggars. Usually, my parents say to pay them no mind, that they’ve had the same opportunity to bargain with the queen as the rest of us, but they’re harder to ignore tonight.
My freedom is usually limited to turns around the park arm in arm with Mama or safely ensconced within the velvet walls of our family’s carriage. What I lack in experience I make up for in confidence. That confidence feels a lot flimsier now, lost, and cold down to my bones.
I thought it would be safer to stick to the main roads rather than risk traipsing through the ink dark of Hyde Park alone, but one wrong turn down a serpentine side street has me hopelessly turned around. Even the flicker of the gas lamps is weak. The biting February air is thick with coal dust, blotting out what little light theflames throw off. I pull back the hood of my cloak and tip my head to the sky in an attempt to get my bearings. Cassiopeia should be north, but the twinkle of the stars is too dim to be sure. An errant tear flows out of the corner of my eye and into the hollow of my ear.
I’ve been searching Lydia’s room for days, praying fruitlessly for a clue about her sudden disappearance. It’s as if she vanished into nothing, but I refuse to accept that.
Tonight, after Mama, Papa, and our skeleton crew of staff had gone to bed, I pulled on my cloak, wrapped myself in Papa’s thickest scarf, and took off into the night.
Maybe I was being brave, like the knights in the stories Lydia and I read as little girls, noble and driven by love, or maybe I just wanted to feel something other than the maddening terror I’ve felt since my sister disappeared.
The police say she’s either eloped or dead, but I don’t believe them. She’d have told me if she planned to elope, and I’d be able to feel it if she were dead. There’s no possible universe in which my sister’s heart stops beating and I keep on living, unaltered.
My breath comes out in puffs of vapor as I cut down another alley. I sigh in relief as I finally recognize where I am.
The gates of Kensington Palace loom like a mouth in the near distance, the dark shadows of the Queen’s Guard beside them.
I thumb over the cool surface of the necklace sitting deep in the pocket of my cloak like a talisman. I’ll have to be clever, circle around Hyde Park again maybe, and sneak in the back way. I don’t need to get too near the palace, only to the trees surrounding it. My feet are numb in my boots, but I must keep walking lest I look suspicious to the guards, now in sight.
When Lydia and I were small and our family still owned thecountry house in Oakham, we spent our summers in the woods, catching frogs or making little houses out of leaves for the ducklings. Our legs scraped to ribbons, twigs in our wild hair, we’d only come inside once the moon rose and the bats emerged. We’d enter through the kitchen to avoid getting scolded by Mama, and there we’d be attended to by a particularly indulgent old cook named Mrs. Osbourne. Mrs. Osbourne was the oldest person I’d ever known, and as she bandaged our legs and snuck us lemon ices, she’d tell us stories. We loved the ones about the Others best of all.
She read to us from an old book that was wrapped in fraying sage-green fabric and dented at the corners. I was particularly taken by the concept of a faerie door. As the stories went, the Others could be compelled to open the door between our worlds, usually hidden in gnarled old trees, for clever humans who left objects of great significance at their thresholds.
I begged Lydia to try it with me. We found a squat ironwood tree, and in the divot of its roots we left our matching baby necklaces, one strung with a small pearlLcharm and the other with a matchingI. They were too short to fit around our big-girl necks, but they still hung on the posts of our beds. I was giddy with anticipation for the rest of the day, peeking through windows, desperate for a glimpse of one of Them.
The next morning, Lydia and I ran across the dew-damp lawn and dug our chubby little hands into the dirt at the base of the tree. The necklaces had vanished. I jumped and hollered with joy, so loud that my mother stomped out into the garden and demanded to know why I was giving her a headache. I told her everything. Without another word, she marched to the kitchens and made Mrs. Osbourne burn her faerie book. I was only six then, and I didn’tunderstand that owning something like this was illegal. I wailed for days.
A year later, I found Lydia’s necklace shoved in the back of her wardrobe. Two years older than me, she placed her hands on her hips and told me I had to leave babyish things like magic behind. It was the first of her three great betrayals.
She sauntered out of the room before I could ask her why we never did find the second of the matching necklaces—or if she also saw the silhouette of the man by the trees that night.
An icy wind whips down the street, sending a swirl of dead leaves scattering. My blond curls whip around my face, and I pull the cloak tighter around my neck.
The stories from Mrs. Osbourne’s books were of an England where Others ran wild. Queen Mor would have us believe that she and her son are the only ones of their kind who live here now, but they came from somewhere, and even locked doors can be opened again. I can’t get up north to our old home in Oakham, nor to the memorial battlefield from the Battle of Barnet, but if a door exists in London, wouldn’t it be in the trees surrounding the queen’s residence? I can’t not try.
I double back toward the public entrance of the park, to where the bargain lines form on Sundays. The trees stand like specters in the dark, indistinguishable from one another. There’s nothing remarkable about any of them, I’m just going to have to choose at random. I clutch the necklace in my pocket.
A shadow moves in the dark. “Who’s there?” shouts one of the Queen’s Guard.
I curse under my breath, drop my sister’s necklace at the base of the nearest tree, and run.
I sprint down the path and across the wide lawns, then make a sharp left, turning back onto the street and off palace grounds.
From out of the silence comes the sudden clatter of wheels pitching over cobblestones.
I jump back, hoping to hide in the shadows, but I don’t see the loose stone until it is too late.
My boot catches on the edge of it, and I trip and fall, my temple colliding with the curb. My body splays out like a rag doll in the dirt.
At first there is the blinding, sharp sting of pain, and then there is nothing but darkness.
