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Which meant Ty had gone fishing around in Kit’s pockets. Not that Kit minded; he was more sorry he’d missed it. “I remember bits and pieces,” Kit said. “Jinfeng was gone, but Livvy was there. She said something about the Riders of Mannan.” He stared at Ty, dread rising in him along with the recollection. The Riders were as vicious as they were powerful. One of them had killed Kit’s mother when he was a baby. “Tell me we’re not really being followed by the Riders of Mannan.”

“I can’t tell you that,” Ty said bleakly.

Kit shook his head in disbelief and horror. “They died at the Battle of the Imperishable Fields. I disappeared their flying horses and then Emma and Julian crushed them. They were very, unquestionably dead.”

“I can’t explain it any better than you can,” said Ty. “But the Riders are a relic from the earliest days of Faerie. They’re elemental. And Jinfeng seemed to think there was something different about them now. That they’d changed. She said she felt the fear of death around them.”

“So maybe they were brought back by necromancy. Who would do that? Who could do that?”

Ty sighed. “I don’t know.” He looked a little uneasy at the mention of necromancy, avoiding Kit’s gaze. “And unfortunately, the Riders probably want revenge.”

“Yeah,” said Kit. “I hate it when people I’ve killed want revenge.”

“Very funny,” said Ty, which probably meant he really thought it was.

“I mean, I was only partly responsible, but I bet the Riders aren’t splitting hairs. What happened after I passed out at the tower?”

“I managed to get you through the Portal before the Riders got in. Livvy helped,” he added, which made Kit wonder how exactly Livvy could have helped with his own dead weight. Ty must have mostly carried him. “Jinfeng left it open for us, and when we came through, she was waiting on the other side—we were in a dark field; I didn’t even know what country we’d ended up in until she told me.”

Kit raised his eyebrows. “What country are we in?”

“We’re in a little lakeside town in Germany. Apparently there’s a group of faeries in the woods near here that she knows. She was pretty injured; she said she needed their help but she wanted to tell someone about the Riders. I said she should go to Catarina in Amsterdam after she got healed.”

“I’m guessing this town isn’t the next stop on our magical mystery tour,” Kit said, looking around the little room. “How do we find out where we need to go—?”

“Here.” Ty went to his bag and returned with a folded envelope, which looked much like the one that Catarina had given them in the restaurant. Kit opened it and drew out the paper inside. It said: Go to the Shadow Market in Budapest. Look for Hyacinth.

So that was their next stop for the Order of the Briar. “Budapest,” Kit said, starting to hand the envelope to Ty, but Ty shook his head.

“It just looks like squiggles to me,” he said, so Kit read the whole rather unhelpful message out loud to him.

“I know Hyacinth,” Kit added. “She was a regular at the Shadow Market in LA…before.” Kit put a hand to his face. It came away with algae stuck to it. “Okay. Do we need to leave right away, or can I take a shower?”

Ty looked sternly at Kit, though it almost made Kit smile. Ty didn’t have the best stern expression. “We’ll get a train in the morning,” he said. “You need to rest.”

“Can we really afford the extra time?” Kit said—though he would never have admitted that the thought of getting up and dressed, and trudging off to some midnight train, half delirious from cold and exhaustion, was nightmarish.

“If we don’t want you to die halfway to Budapest, we have to take the time,” said Ty. “And the quest doesn’t exactly work without you. And there’s no train out of here in the middle of the night anyway.”

Kit conceded he was beaten and was relieved about it. It wasn’t just that he needed to rest; he could tell from the strained, pale look on Ty’s face that the other boy was exhausted, too.

“You win,” said Kit, and half rolled out of his bed, nearly landing on the floor. His legs felt rubbery from exhaustion. He was aware of Ty watching him anxiously as he crossed the room and drew aside a curtain.

Outside was a crescent of narrow beach beside a lake of deep blue water. The lake was big enough to have some real waves, which rushed up and down the pebbled shore with a sound like a lullaby. Peering directly downward, Kit could see an illuminated sign that hung on their building: Zimmer Frei. His German was bad, but even he knew what that meant. Vacant rooms. The sign was handwritten, so this must be more of a casual bed-and-breakfast guesthouse than a real hotel.

Leaving the window, he grabbed sweatpants and a T-shirt from his pack and went into the small bathroom, which was clean and neat with a stack of new towels next to the shower. Ty’s toothbrush and toothpaste were already there, lined up carefully. Kit smiled at the sight, shucked off his clothes, and stepped into the shower.

The water was blessedly hot. Steam curled around him as he leaned into the spray, letting the water pound his skin with thin needles of heat. Slowly the feeling of ice in his bones melted away, along with the smell of silt and pond water.

Kit braced a hand against the tile wall as the water coursed down his body. On top of the exhaustion, he felt nervous, jumpy. What had seemed like a straightforward task was turning out to be something much bigger. Something that would take an unknown amount of time to complete. And now they weren’t just on the hunt for the pieces of a magical artifact. They were being hunted.

Back in the room, Kit found Ty chatting with a tall mundane woman; she had an anxious air, and spectacles propped on her nose. “I am sorry I could not offer you something better,” she said, and Kit realized she had brought them food: a thermos of what was probably soup, a plate of sliced apples, a basket of bread. Ty had already started laying them out on the table with careful precision. “But all the stores are closed.”

“It’s fine, Frau Neidorf,” Ty said. “It’s very kind of you to have taken us in in the middle of the night.”

“Well, what does the Good Book tell us? Be not forgetful to welcome strangers: for thereby some have entertained angels unawares.” She beamed.

You’re closer to the truth than you could imagine, Kit thought.