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“If you want to give me lessons, you can.” Dru followed Elara down a familiar-looking curved tunnel, the packed earth around her threaded with thin roots and starred with glowing moss. It felt familiar, which was eerie when she knew she’d forgotten several trips to Faerie. On the other hand, all the corridors in Seelie looked alike.

“I wish to know if you had a good time at the revel.” Elara walked ahead of Dru, her expression placid.

“I danced with Lord Byrne, who was weird and smelled bad,” said Dru. Elara clucked sympathetically. “I kissed someone who hates me. I destroyed my shoes and this perfectly nice dress, and I have a headache. So no.”

“That certainly sounds like a revel,” said Elara. “I am glad to hear they haven’t changed since I was young.”

Was that a joke? Dru wondered. If so, it might be the first joke she recalled Elara making. As she turned to ask, she spotted a familiar door, slightly ajar. Through the gap a circular room with smooth stone walls and a tiled floor was visible. Light sparked off something inside: something curved and golden.

The Queen’s scrying bowl.

Dru spun around and hurried toward the half-open door. Elara made a squeaking sound and darted after her, her feet slapping against the hard dirt floor as she hurried to catch up to her charge.

“Drusilla,” she hissed, her voice low. “What are you doing? If the Queen finds you in her scrying room, she will kill you.”

Suppressing a shiver, Dru paused with her hand on the door. She will kill you. Elara didn’t meant it figuratively; she was being literal. “Then she’d better not find me.”

Elara shook her head wildly, her black hair flying. “It is dangerous for a mortal to even try to use the scrying bowl. Some have died.”

But I used it and I’m fine. Not that Dru could say that.

“I’m sorry, Elara,” she said instead. “I have to look. I know what I’m risking, but if I don’t, I—I might as well give up on everything right now. You should go,” she added, and meant it. It wasn’t Elara’s fault that she’d seen Kit and Ty in an enchanted mirror. It wasn’t Elara’s fault that she’d seen the danger that hung over them. It wasn’t Elara’s fault that her heart felt like it would stop beating if she didn’t find out what that danger was.

Elara said nothing, but when Dru slipped through the gap in the door, she followed, grim-faced. Once inside, she closed the door firmly behind them both.

The chamber was much as Dru remembered it, though the crystal at the apex of the domed roof had changed—now it appeared to be a circular window through which she could see the multicolored stars. The scrying bowl glowed atop its pedestal, filled with still water that seemed to absorb the starlight and darken it to black.

“Drusilla,” Elara whispered, as if they might be overheard. “This is reckless. You have not seen the full rage of the Queen. She will not sully her own hands with your murder. She will order the Huntsman or one of her guards to do it, and it will be a torture you cannot imagine.”

Dru had caught the skirt of her dress in her hands, lifting it to keep from tripping over the fabric as she ascended the few stairs that led up to the pedestal. She turned to look at Elara, biting her lip. “There were enchanted mirrors at the revel,” she said, “and in one of them I saw my brother and my friend. And all around them I sensed something terrible, an awful danger. It’s my family, Elara. I need to know if I can help them.”

Elara had gone a pale teal color, but she didn’t move.

“Please go,” Dru said. “There’s no reason for you to stay here and risk being punished too.”

But the look on the handmaiden’s face told Dru there would be no convincing her. Elara clamped her mouth shut, almost as if she was afraid what she might say. Then she turned around, her back to Dru, and faced the door as if she could fend off whatever wanted to come inside.

“Do what you must,” she said.

With a sigh, Dru placed her hands on the rim of the bowl. The water within stirred before giving back her own reflection. Her pale face, her smeared lipstick, the leaves in her tangled hair.

“Show me my family,” Dru whispered. “Show me what has become of them.”

The water shifted, darkening further. Its surface rippled in waves, like a miniature sea. Then the sea parted, and a vision leaped to life, glowing like a living painting in the churning waters of the bowl.

Dru saw fire and ash. A battlefield among the ruins of an ancient city. A wind that smelled of sage and sand lifted her hair.

In the city, a single figure stood atop a crumbling tower, bearing a sword that blazed with white flame. Not a seraph blade, not any weapon of the Clave. Its hilt was marked with strange runes, old and deep, and the flame that curled around it was silvery cold as starlight.

The vision changed, and Dru saw the sky of the mortal world with its ice-white stars, and from it hurtled a shadow like a burning planet tumbling to earth, a shadow that resembled a white-winged man screaming as he fell.

Dru struck the side of the bowl with her hand. It rang like a bell, the water inside surging, breaking the image of the falling angel—because what else could he be?—into a thousand colorful puzzle pieces.

“No,” Dru said, her voice trembling. “Not some story. And not the past. I need to see the people I love. Ty Blackthorn. Julian Blackthorn. Emma Carstairs. Kit and Jace Herondale. Thais Rosabranca Pedroso. Helen and Aline—”

The colored puzzle bits vanished, the fractured image melting away as if drowned. When the water stilled again, Dru’s heart stopped.

There they were. Julian. Emma. Aline. Helen, holding Tavvy’s hand. Alec, Simon, Jace. Isabelle. Each one of them still, pale, their faces set and their eyes closed. Dead? Dru’s mind screamed, but no—silvery trails of bubbles rose from their mouths.