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“Don’t be,” said Dru. “I’m pretty sure that was what passes for a pep talk around here. And no”—she put up a hand—“I’m not going to explain the concept of ‘pep.’ I don’t even like the concept of pep.” She sighed, sliding down in her chair. She’d buttered her bread, but felt no desire to eat it. “You can go, Elara. I’m sure you have other tasks to see to.”

Elara said nothing, only picked up the tea tray in one hand, her wide sleeves rustling. A moment later, she’d set what looked like silvery twigs down on the table beside Dru’s teacup. “Should the Queen call you to serve again, it would be wise to use these hairpins I gave you to put up your hair,” Elara said. “Her Majesty finds it more dignified.”

She turned away as Dru blinked at her. Strange advice, she thought. But that was Elara—helpful in an odd way. She heard her door close behind Elara, the lock clicking.

There’s something Elara isn’t telling me. Faeries couldn’t lie, but they were very good at not telling the whole truth. If you didn’t know the right questions to ask, it was near impossible to get at what was real and what wasn’t.

Is it me, or was there an odd emphasis in the way Elara told me to wear my hair up? Surely she can’t just want me to please the Queen.

Dru looked more closely at the pins; she’d nearly forgotten that Elara had given them to her. They were unusually long and delicate, the metal slightly flexible in her hand when she picked one up. That feeling of being reminded of something came back, this time with a visual accompaniment: She recalled Kit, a bundle of tools in one hand, showing her and Ty how to pick locks…

Dru leaped to her feet. I’m a little rusty, she thought, hurrying to the door, but I haven’t forgotten everything Kit told me. She dropped to her knees in front of the door, hearing Kit’s voice in her ear, steady and calming, explaining the interplay of springs, tumblers, and pins.

She bent one of the hairpins nearly in half and inserted it into the lock. The second pin went in below it. Carefully, her hands barely moving, she began to maneuver the pins, one acting as the body of the key, the other as its ridges, lifting one tumbler after another until the twist of the folded pin produced a loud click.

Her heart beating hard, Dru reached up to turn the doorknob. The door swung free with only the slightest creak of unoiled hinges.

She grinned incredulously. The door was unlocked. She was almost free.

—

Dru crept through the hallways of the Seelie Court, keeping her head down. She had donned a loose hooded jacket over her training clothes. The jacket didn’t fit well, but the hood was indispensable. Every time she passed a faerie she stared at the ground, face hidden, hoping she’d be dismissed as just another servant, a brownie or the like, hurrying to some assigned task.

Faeries weren’t stupid, Dru thought, but they were at least incurious. Either they were deep in conversation with each other, or they were striding the halls with their chins in the air, eyes fixed on something far away.

Finding the runed door under the sheets of ivy, she was ready with her hairpins, but to her surprise, it was unlocked. Relief flooded through her, but it was short-lived. The moment she slipped through the door into the silence of the small hallway that led to Ash’s and Janus’s rooms, her heartbeat kicked up again. Elara said they went to inspect the wall, she reminded herself. Surely that had to take some amount of time, though she wondered what they were inspecting it for. Structural faultiness? Insubordination?

The witchlight torch by Janus’s door still burned in its holder. Dru wished more than anything that she could use the hairpins to slip into his room and visit Clary. But it made more sense to look for her stele first, so she passed by Janus’s door and made her way down the dark hall until she reached the door at the end.

Ash’s room.

The door was plain, unadorned save for a pattern of stars clustered around the keyhole. The sign of the Morgenstern family. The morning star. It made her think of the stars stamped into the metal of Phaesphoros, glinting in Sebastian’s hand. She shuddered, shoving the memories away.

Dru took her hairpins from her pocket and went to work on Ash’s door. She was nervous, but it was the kind of nervousness that was like a Clarity rune, sharpening her mind and making her hyperaware of her senses. She could hear the laughter of faeries somewhere in the far distance, and somewhere else, the trickle of water over rocks. A few tense seconds passed before the lock gave way, and Dru realized she’d been holding her breath.

She slipped inside, closing the door behind her. Ash’s room was surprisingly small. A narrow bed tucked under a canopy. A wardrobe not unlike the one in her room. A trunk at the foot of the bed, with what looked like iron handles. She thought of what Rathna had said about cold iron, how being bound with it was the only thing that could negate Ash’s power of inspiring loyalty. Yet it seemed the iron of everyday objects must not bother him. That made sense—iron didn’t bother Helen or Mark much either.

She had expected something very different. Something with lushness, decadence. Silk sheets and velvet pillows. Instead the room was plain, nearly bare. His bed was made with military precision; there wasn’t a single wrinkle in the thin blanket. The open door of the wardrobe showed a rack of clothes that hung completely straight, like soldiers at attention. There was a small cage on the windowsill, the kind that might hold a hamster or a chinchilla, but it was empty.

Nothing about the way Ash behaved at the Court would have given Dru the impression that he slept in what felt like a monk’s cell. There were no decorations, nothing that might have been there just to stir admiration or emotion. No books, no paintings, no keepsakes. It was as if he’d been reborn into this new life in Faerie the moment he had arrived, bringing nothing with him, wanting nothing that would remind him of his earlier life.

Stop thinking about Ash. On the other hand, she reminded herself, the better she knew him, surely the more easily she’d be able to find the stele. She moved methodically around the room, examining the wardrobe before moving to the trunk. It was the only part of the room that wasn’t neat—it was full of a jumble of weapons, pages with scrawled writing on them, even an ancient-looking toy with tangled strings.

But Dru saw no glimpse of adamas, nothing that could be a stele. As she leaned closer, something white flashed at the corner of her eye. It was a piece of paper…white sketchbook paper. From the mortal world. Dru snatched it up—

And then froze as the door creaked open.

Panic flooded her. She closed the trunk soundlessly, dropped to the ground, and rolled under Ash’s bed. She pressed herself against the wall, just as Ash’s voice reached her ears.

“…still don’t see why you won’t just tell me what you’re planning,” he was saying. “You keep saying there won’t be any surprises, Janus, but somehow I don’t find that comforting.”

“I’ve told you a dozen times,” Janus replied, his voice clipped and cold. “Everything is in hand. We’re nearly finished. There won’t be any surprises because I don’t allow them.”

“I surprised you in New York,” Ash pointed out.

“Maybe not as much as you think,” Janus said dryly. “Nor need you imagine that I don’t know why you followed me there.”

Two pairs of boots, both black, came into Dru’s field of vision. She couldn’t tell which belonged to Ash and which to Janus. “Just tell me why you’re moving all the Shadowhunters to Idris. What are you planning to do with them?” Ash said.