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“I’m here to bring you to the revel,” she said brightly.

Dru eyed her more closely. Rathna was wearing a dress of silvery fabric ingeniously woven to look like shark skin. Her shoulders were bare and dusted with sparkling powder. Her hair had shimmering bits of sea glass woven through it, which reminded Dru painfully of Julian.

“What revel?” Dru said, suspiciously. “And is it actually a revel or a surprise public execution?”

Rathna seemed baffled. “It’s a party, silly. For the twins. It’s their birthday. Most faeries don’t celebrate birthdays but they just have to be different.”

The twins? Dru’s mind blanked for a moment—to her, “the twins” would always be Livvy and Ty—before she remembered. “Callen and Cuan?” she asked. When Rathna nodded, Dru held up a hand. “That’s very kind, but I don’t think I want to go.”

“Ash sent me to bring you,” said Rathna, looking worried. “He will be terribly upset if you don’t come.”

Oh, will he? If he’s upset, it’ll be because someone said no to him—not because he genuinely wants me there.

But Rathna looked nervous. “He’ll blame me,” she wailed. “And besides—don’t you want to go outside?”

Dru stopped pacing. “It’s outside?”

Rathna nodded. “Most revels are held under the moon and stars, on the earth of Faerie.”

Outside. The last time Dru had seen the sky was when Ash was carrying her through it, above the Hudson River. She had never thought you could be desperately hungry for something so simple as fresh air, or the sound of wind. The smell of grass and trees. The light of the moon. She knew the stars in Faerie were different, but they were still stars, glimmering down from a vast, unknowable space.

“All right,” Dru said. “I’ll go.” She cast a dark look at Rathna, who was looking a little smug. Dru had to hand it to her, it had been clever to appeal to Dru’s longing for the outdoors. Maybe Rathna wasn’t as silly as she seemed.

“Well, you can’t go like that,” Rathna said. “One must dress for a revel.” She padded over to the vines where Dru’s clothing hung, and began to rifle through the material. “Ah—hah,” she crowed, pulling out the dress that looked as if it were sewn out of rose petals. “This is perfect.”

She held it out to Dru, who shooed Rathna out of the room so she could wriggle into her dress.

Dru had become more accustomed to faerie garments: the way they adapted to fit the body of the wearer, the butter-soft feeling of the fabric against her skin. At home, she would have felt awkward in a floor-length rose-petal gown that left her shoulders bare; in fact she usually avoided strapless styles since they were impossible to wear with a bra. But this dress had corset-like boning built into the fabric. When she glanced at her reflection in the mirror, she felt as if she were seeing a stranger, a girl whose body curved like a cello, a girl whose bare shoulders made her look as if she were rising, naked and elegant, out of a bed of flowers.

Thais would have loved it, she thought. She was always trying to get Dru to wear a color other than black. It needs something else, Dru thought, and picked up the delicate brooch she had been wearing when she’d arrived in Faerie. She was just pinning it onto the dress when Rathna burst back into the room.

“I can’t wait,” she said. When Dru turned toward her, her mouth fell open. “Oh, you look enchanting,” she exclaimed, clapping her hands together. “Truly, I’ve never seen a figure like yours before in Faerie. We just don’t have them.”

Dru wasn’t sure what to say. The dress was pushing everything up and out and she was a bit frightened to examine her own cleavage too closely. Her hips, too, were straining against even the adaptable fabric of Faerie. She tried not to imagine the dress simply exploding off her when she arrived at the revel.

“Is there going to be dancing?” she asked, sliding her feet into silver-soled slippers.

“Of course,” Rathna said, actually bouncing with excitement. “That’s what a revel is for. Well, that and drinking odd fizzy drinks. One turned me into a fish once.”

“Really?” Dru snatched up her lipstick and applied it quickly, then tucked the lipstick tube into her bodice. She glanced in the mirror to make sure the lipstick wasn’t all over her face. It wasn’t, but it looked startling nonetheless, perhaps because faeries wore little in the way of cosmetics. Her lips were blood-red, as dark as the roses on her dress, a color like violence. Scary, Dru thought appreciatively, before following Rathna out of the room. “What happened then?”

“Oh, it went away after a while,” said Rathna cheerfully. She was leading the way: They were already in a part of the corridors unfamiliar to Dru. There was the smell of wet stone here, and the torchlights glimmered in blue and green.

Rathna ducked through a narrow stone arch that led into a damp tunnel. The scent of moss and river water filled the air. The passage opened into a cavern, where an underground river ran swift and clear beneath crystalline stalactites.

Elegant boats bobbed along the riverbank—slender skiffs carved to look like swans, their sides painted with silver stars. Will-o’-the-wisps danced in the air and when Dru looked up, she saw that many of the stalactites had been carved into glimmering shapes: chains of stars or apples, musical instruments, outstretched hands.

Dru couldn’t help but wonder if any Shadowhunter had ever before stood where she was standing, or seen what she was seeing.

The cavern was empty. It was clear everyone else had already gone to the revel. Rathna helped Dru into a skiff, then stepped in herself. As the boat left the shore, it played a mournful, echoing note, like the fading reverberation of a plucked violin string.

Dru settled herself on a wooden bench inside the boat, opposite Rathna, who was leaning over the side, trailing her long green fingers in the water. When she drew her hand back, the water clung to her skin like silver sparkles.

The boat moved on, cutting a silent path through the water. The underground tunnel slipped by on either side of the banks, the walls crusted with brilliant semiprecious stones: crushed tourmaline, green aventurine, and amethyst.

Remembering something, Dru eyed Rathna with slight suspicion. “Wait. Don’t you drown people for fun?”

Rathna snorted, though she had turned a more delicately aquatic shade of green. “I’m not going to drown anyone today. And certainly not in a river. I like still, shady pools.”