THEY WATCHED THE WEALTHIEST OF the city’s remaining gentlemen strutting like peacocks, and the ladies in all of their silk and pearls stepping off carriages and washing up the steps of the brick house before them, as if carried on a wave of high spirits and laughter.

Perched two roofs over, embracing the darkness of a new moon, Nicholas leaned forward as much as he dared, counting the latest batch of officers coming up the street. He might have thought them on patrol with the other regulars he’d seen, save for the inordinate number of decorations they’d lavished on themselves. It was a time of war, but the city had been occupied for months with little trouble, and the high polish of their boots, as if hardly used, seemed to prove that point. Their ceremonial swords caught the glow emanating from the three stories of windows. As the door opened for the guests, time and time again, it gave the effect of the sun rising over the streets.

“I can’t believe the bastard is throwing a ball,” Sophia snarled.

“He has to keep up appearances in this era, if only to maintain his timeline,” Nicholas said. The hollow mouth at the center of his chest widened. It devoured the black mood in which he’d arrived in his natural era, devoured his anger, his pain, and now his heart. There was a freedom in this, too, in relinquishing decorum and manners, and giving himself over to the chill spreading through his veins.

The people on the streets below were going about their merry little evening, untethered by worry or fear. Those who weren’t entering the frivolities were making their way down the street, to one of the theaters putting on a production that evening.

I never took her to a play.

One more thought to feed the hollowness. He could not bear to think of her now, not on the cusp of doing something so vicious. Etta believed so doggedly in the good in him—that he was honorable, a man of merit and esteem. What would she see now, looking down at him? He was unrecognizable even to himself.

Li Min had been still for so long, wrapped in that impenetrably dark cloak of hers, that Nicholas might have forgotten she was there at all if she hadn’t turned to look at him. He was beginning to suspect—and accept—that she was the sort who could measure, swallow, and digest a man and his mettle with a single look. Rather than feeling frustrated or startled by her merciless insight, he was almost relieved by not having to explain himself or attempt to put a name to the storm raging inside of him.

“Do not fight it,” she told him. “It will help you. Anger is simple. Anger will move you, if you find yourself faltering. If you cannot avoid the darkness, you must force yourself through it.”

Li Min held out something in front of him—a dagger, made of what looked like ivory. He took it from her gingerly, examining the dragon’s head carved into its hilt. The curved blade smiled in his palm.

“I’m a better shot,” he told her, trying to give it back.

“You can’t use a flintlock,” she said, pushing it back toward him. “Even with the music, someone is bound to hear.”

Fair point. He accepted the dagger again, testing its weight and the feel of the hilt in his hand. The knife he’d been carrying was dull by most weapons’ standards, and while it had accomplished what he’d demanded of it, a sharpened, well-made blade would make a better tool for…

Assassination. Nicholas rolled his shoulders back.

“Know a little something about this, do you?” he asked.

“After I escaped the darkness, before I was able to secure many types of jobs,” Li Min told him, “I had just one.”

He looked at her again, but her expression was blank.

“He is not a man, Carter, but a beast,” she said. “Do not waste your time on his heart. Slit his throat before he can say a word.”

It wasn’t Nicholas’s first time killing a man—the abhorrent pride in him wanted to inform of her of that. It was, however, his first time killing a man when not in defense of his own life, and that was a difficult thing to reconcile with his soul. Each second that passed seemed to grind him down to his raw, fraught essence. Now and then, he felt bewildered by the notion that he was here again, that it had come to this. This journey had begun here, in this very city, with a choice.

With a young woman.

He tucked the dagger into his belt, reaching up to touch the pendant and Etta’s earring beneath his shirt. Let the ends justify the means.

“Thank you,” he told Li Min. She had been a stranger mere days before. Now she was attempting to comfort him, when what he needed most was a voice of reason beyond the berating one in his mind. He would never forget it.

“That’s the minuet,” Sophia whispered, crawling back over the slight slant in the roof. “Do you want to wait until they’re a few more dances in?”

Ironwood’s balls always began with a minuet, during which he danced with a lady of his choosing. The focus of all of the attendees would be on the dancers congregated on the first floor of the old house, gliding around the card tables, trays of food, and hothouse flowers. Even Ironwood’s bevy of guards might be distracted long enough for Nicholas to make his entrance on the third floor.

He shook his head. The time was now, or he’d never muster the strength.

THE HOMES ALONG QUEEN STREET—SPARED BY THE FIRE TO the west of Broad Way—were tall, proud creatures that might have been transplanted from the streets of London’s gentry. The old Ironwood house, by virtue of the man’s ego, was a rose among daisies, his own palace from which to rule an empire of centuries. Its endless series of windows, and the natural attention it drew, of course, made it damned hard to creep up on if one made one’s approach from the street.

Rope, tied to the chimney of the neighboring house, tossed with a hastily procured grappling hook onto Ironwood’s roof, made the task easier—but only just. Without the use of his right hand, Nicholas had to hook his right arm and both legs over the rope, and inch forward with an agonizing, awkward slowness. Sophia followed at a determined pace, and he found his expectations disappointed when Li Min didn’t walk across the rope like a cat, but deigned to cross it like a mere mortal.

The rope was cut free, a section falling slack against the neighboring house. The remaining length was tied to Ironwood’s chimney. Li Min used it to walk down the back of the house and then along its walls, passing between the windows with practiced ease. Suddenly, Nicholas had no problem seeing her at home on a pirate ship.

She disappeared from their sight, but he heard her negotiating a window below them.

“Rather handy, isn’t she?” Sophia said with clear appreciation, leaning over the edge of the roof to watch her at work. Nicholas gripped the back of her dark jacket to keep her from tumbling off the ledge.

A tug on the rope told him it was safe to descend, but Sophia, who was to keep watch, stopped him. She seemed to be struggling to speak; her mouth twisted as though she’d tasted something bitter.

“You’ll be all right…won’t you?” she asked after a long moment.

“I’ll be quick, at least,” he said.

“Seems unfair,” she said as he began to edge down, gripping the rough rope. “He deserves a worse end than you’ll be able to give him.”

“If something happens—”

Sophia gripped him by the collar of his shirt. “Nothing is going to happen.”

Nicholas nodded. “Understood, ma’am.”

Sophia used the rope to ease him down just enough for Nicholas to swing his legs forward through the open window. Li Min reached out, pulling him the rest of the way through the frame.

His memory of the house’s layout had served him well, after all. Li Min took a candle from the wall of the servants’ staircase, leaning around the landing to ensure no one was coming. Though they were inside the house now, the staircase was so insulated, set so far apart from the house’s grandeur, that even the lively music seemed muted.

It was remarkable, he thought, how swiftly memory could cut a man. It was the air, the way it seemed to sour in his lungs, the familiar creaks of the floor, that upset his stomach. This was a house in which all things were eventually extinguished, even hope. Whatever composure he’d summoned took a lashing as he stood there; for a moment, he was too tense to think about moving, too afraid that he might see his mother’s ghost walking up the stairs toward him.

Nicholas felt Li Min’s eyes on his face, trying to take the measure of his response. He didn’t turn toward her. The bile in the back of his throat stung and burned, but he swallowed it, ashamed that standing within this house’s walls was enough for his past to begin nipping and tearing at his resolve.

He had thought he’d known hatred, but he had not realized it lived in this place like a fine coat of dust. The familiarity of it was devastating; in all the many ways he had changed, the house hadn’t. Even now, the shadows seemed to grasp at him, pulling at his skin, as if to remind him, You belong to me. You will always belong to me.

It would always claim a piece of him he would never have back.

I need to leave this place. Finish what he had come to do, and leave.

“Signal if you need assistance,” Li Min said. “If his death causes any of us to be orphaned, find your way back to Nassau in this year. We will regroup.”

He nodded, sliding the dagger she’d given him out of his belt. He couldn’t think of the consequences of this just yet. The passage they’d come through, to the north of the city, would likely collapse—but what else might? For decades, time had revolved around Ironwood himself, and there was no way to predict what might happen once the center of that control collapsed.

He began to climb the stairs. They were shorter than he remembered, but spoke to him each time he put his weight on them, reminding him why he was there, what he needed to do. For the first time, he was glad he had a blade instead of a flintlock. Perhaps he’d give the old man a cut for every year he’d stolen from her life.

Etta.

Ironwood never liked to see his servants and slaves unless they were performing a specific task in a particular room. Each floor had a narrow servants’ hallway built into it, connecting to the hidden staircase, and each bedroom of this floor had a door disguised as part of the wall.

Nicholas was careful, achingly careful, and waited at the top of the stairs for any sign of a servant. But the entire house was occupied with seeing to the needs of the men and women below; he would need to enter the old man’s bedchambers and wait. If time had been an ally and not an enemy, he might have waited until the man was asleep and do it then, but the wasted hours would only provide more opportunity for his own body to fail him. Even now, he felt as if his head were stuffed with feathers; his vision was blurring at the corners. It had to be now. Once the task was completed, Sophia would drop a rope down from the roof for him to escape by.

It was simple, but even simple plans were prone to unexpected disasters.

Nicholas navigated forward, ignoring the squeaks and rough brushes of the mice scampering past his ankles. From the other side of the wall, he heard two men—guards—muttering to each other about the amount of food they’d eaten, and knew the next door would be the one he was looking for.

After a moment to ensure he couldn’t hear anyone inside, he put his hand on the latch. Lifted it. The door swung open, surprisingly silent, given its weight. Nicholas took a steadying breath. His eyes were drawn to the crackling fire at the far end of the room, hidden by a large red velvet chair.

This room, too, had been resurrected to its previous life, when Ironwood had first owned it. Nicholas remembered the patterned rug, smugly imported from across the world. The forbidden leather-bound volumes that lined a small bookshelf had tormented him with their unknowable words. Even the bed seemed to have been carved out of his memory, with its plain white linens and tall posts strung with toile curtains.

He shut the door softly, still gripping the dagger in his hand as he moved across the room. The rhythmic pounding of feet and clapping from the dancers below broke up the silence, their voices dulled to a low rumble as they passed up through the cracks in the floors.

It seemed to him that the best, and possibly only, place to hide was behind the screen in the corner. Even the bed was too low to the ground to slip beneath and wait. Nicholas crossed the room, softening his steps, but was caught by the sudden, sweet smell of tobacco.

He stilled.

Nicholas had initially dismissed the smoke as escaping from the fireplace; as he stepped past the chair, he saw how deeply mistaken he was.

Ironwood’s fine dress coat lay over his lap like a blanket, despite the old man’s position directly in front of the fire. Under Nicholas’s gaze, his grandfather relinquished the powdered wig he’d been toying with to the carpet, where it kicked up a small white cloud.

The man kept his attention on the small book in his lap, his hooded eyelids masking his expression. The way the firelight brightened his round face gave him unmerited warmth, and almost masked the way his cheeks seemed to hang like jowls. One of his fingers rubbed at the notched tip of his chin.

“‘—But there’s a tree, of many, one, / A single field which I have look’d upon, / Both of them speak of something that is gone,’” the old man read. “‘The pansy at my feet / Doth the same tale repeat: / Whither is fled the visionary gleam? / Where is it now, the glory and the dream?’”

Nicholas remained as still as stonework, as if he’d been run through the heart with a blade. His every last thought fled.

“Wordsworth,” he explained, setting the small volume aside. “I find I don’t have the patience for merrymaking these days, but there is comfort in reading.”

He rose to his feet and laid his coat over the chair. Nicholas took an instinctive step back, both at the suddenness of the movement and the weary tone of Ironwood’s voice. The old man brushed past Nicholas as if he weren’t holding a dagger in his hand, and moved toward the corner of the room where he kept his whiskey.

Move, Nicholas ordered himself as the man poured two glasses. Move, damn you!

Without a word, Ironwood offered one glass to Nicholas, and, when he didn’t take it, drank it down himself in one swift gulp.

“How does this house speak to you, I wonder?”

That jostled Nicholas out of his stunned silence. It was impossible for the old man to know his thoughts—he recognized this—but the other implication seemed worse; their minds followed similar tracks. Their hearts spoke the same language.

“It speaks to me of regret,” Ironwood said, pressing the rim of his glass to his temple. And this was the precise moment Nicholas began to feel the hair prickle on the back of his neck; for Cyrus Ironwood was a great many things, but none of them were maudlin or sentimental.

Drunk? Nicholas wondered, fingers tightening around the hilt of the dagger. He’d seen the man drink three bottles of wine himself and remain sober enough to take business meetings. In fact, Nicholas had always assumed it was a carefully cultivated skill, this tolerance for alcohol, meant to disarm rivals and potential business partners who hadn’t a prayer of keeping up.

Every aim, every word, every action from this man was meant to disarm his opponent. This false sentimentality was surely the weapon he’d picked to rattle Nicholas, and, all at once, he was furious with himself for falling for it.

“I wasn’t aware,” he heard himself say, “that you were acquainted with a feeling like regret.”

“Ah,” Ironwood said, saluting him with his glass. “And yet, I’ve regrets enough to paper the walls of this house.”

He finally looked at Nicholas, studying him in the room’s relative darkness. “From the moment you entered, I wondered why—I have always known there would be a when, but the why of it, that was the mystery. Because of your status when you lived in this house? Because your mother received Augustus’s unwanted attentions and was sold away? Because you felt slighted by the family? Because you broke our contract, and knew that this was the only way out of it? Or is it, Samuel, simply for the satisfaction?”

Nicholas knew by the gleam in the man’s eye, by the use of his birth name, that he’d laid out all of these strikes the way a chef would lay out his knives, debating which one was best to use to make a cut.

“Or…is it because you’ve come to take revenge for her?”

Nicholas swung the dagger around, tracking the man’s movements. Rather than go toward the chest of drawers or his bedside table, he went toward the trunk at the foot of his bed.

“No,” Nicholas said, knowing full well that he could be hiding a flintlock or rifle in it. “Take a step back.”

“Of course,” the man said, with mocking graciousness. “If you’ll retrieve the package inside. I have, after all, been keeping it for you.”

Nicholas recognized this bait for what it was, but he was disarmed by the man’s demeanor. Ironwood was never more truthful than when he was trying to inflict a mortal wound on another person’s heart.

Keeping his eye on Ironwood, keeping his dagger out, Nicholas bent to retrieve a flat parcel, wrapped in parchment and tied with string. It looked as if it had come a great distance, whether that was miles or years.

“Go on, open it,” Ironwood said, clasping his hands behind his back.

And, God help him, Nicholas did. He tore into the paper with one hand. Even before he saw the fabric—the sheer gömlek, the emerald chirka—he smelled jasmine; he smelled the soap-sweet scent of her skin.

And he smelled blood.

The feeling in his hands was gone. His pulse began to pound at his temples. So much blood, the fabric was stiff with it. It flaked off as he ran his fingers across the delicate embroidery, moving along the seams of the jacket until they snagged at the ragged hole at the shoulder, where she’d been shot.

“A guardian sent these to me weeks ago,” Ironwood said. “As proof of Etta Spencer’s death. Her father claimed her body, but I thought you might want the reminder of her personal effects.”

This is what remains….

Memory would fade from him, her footprints would be washed away—this was all he was to have of Etta Spencer now.

“You did this….” He breathed out, his gaze snapping up. “You—”

“Yes,” Ironwood said, his face drawn, as if—as if he cared. As if he felt sorry for this. Nicholas’s fury overwhelmed him, and he slashed out with the dagger, catching the man across the chest. Ironwood leaned back in time to avoid being gutted, but a gash of red extending from his shoulder to his hip began to ooze. Nicholas felt frantic, sloppy, like he was damn near to clawing his own face off to try to release the boiling anger and grief. He did not want to collapse onto his knees. He did not want to scream himself hoarse.

“All because you want one blasted thing, when you already have everything! You aren’t satisfied with the destruction you wrought; you need the tool that will make it complete,” Nicholas seethed, knowing full well that the man’s guards would be coming in, that they’d kill him where he stood. And yet, Ironwood didn’t move, didn’t taunt, didn’t defend himself.

Kill him—just finish him! his mind was bellowing, but he couldn’t move from that spot.

“What you feel now,” Ironwood said, “I have felt every day of my life, for forty years.”

“Don’t say another word,” Nicholas said. “You know nothing of me or what I feel. Nothing.”

“Don’t I?” Ironwood said carefully, glancing over at the portrait by his bedside. Minerva. His first wife. “I can see how badly you wish to stick that dagger in my heart, and I cannot blame you.”

“You don’t have a heart,” Nicholas snarled. “If you did, you never would have dragged Etta into any of this. She wouldn’t be—”

He couldn’t bring himself to finish, coward that he was.

“And if Rose Linden hadn’t betrayed us and hidden the astrolabe, if her parents hadn’t fought as hard as the rest of us to control the timeline, if our ancestors had never used the astrolabes to begin with—do you see how futile this line of reasoning is, Nicholas? We can live in the past, but we cannot dwell there,” Ironwood said. “What you cannot seem to grasp is that the astrolabe isn’t a tool of destruction, it is one of healing. It can right wrongs. Save lives.”

Save her.

He had not even considered that. How was it possible he had never once considered that by waiting out a year, he might travel back to the spot where she was to die, and save her, before the Ironwood men had a chance to reach her? That he could find a way to prevent Etta from being taken?

“You would risk,” Nicholas began, “orphaning countless travelers, shifting the timeline, for your own selfishness.”

“For love,” Ironwood corrected. “For her.”

There was nothing ironic in his tone, or even condescending. Nicholas shook his head in disbelief, his chest bursting at its seams with dark, humorless laughter. As if this man had any inkling of what that word entailed, the scale of it.

But he hated the softer part of him, the one that whispered, over and over, Forty years. Forty years. Forty years.

Forty years of this feeling. This unbearable tightness, of being caught in a cage of helpless rage and grief.

Because some part of Nicholas was listening. Some part of him heard the truth in the old man’s words, and was reaching, grasping for the solution presented to him. Nicholas had the oddest feeling that he was back on his deathbed, a fever wracking his brain. There was a haze about the man, an unreal quality.

“You seem to believe that I am blind to my own faults,” Ironwood said. “But I improved the world. I did my part to fix it, after years of fighting between the families. I brought us stability and order, and brought the worst of the travelers to heel. As long as the astrolabe is in play, we will never have peace.”

“Is that why you let your sons die?” Nicholas asked sardonically.

The man rasped a hand over his chin, his shoulders sagging. “I have been asked to sacrifice so much, and I have come so far, and still…still we die out, like an inferior species. I wonder from time to time what my life would have been like, had I not been tasked with this role. I think I might have been a merchant, a sailor. You’ve felt it, too, haven’t you? How vast the world is, when you cannot see anything but water on the horizon?”

“Stop it,” Nicholas said. “I know what it is you’re doing—”

“The moment I knew you had that inclination, that you were a natural…I recognized myself in you,” Ironwood said. “My father. His father. All forged in the same fire. And when you fought so hard to leave our family’s service, I knew for certain; for a true Ironwood cannot bear stagnation, or to be held against his will. You made your brother seem like nothing more than a yearling. He never had the grit he needed to manage the family—that grit which has kept me searching for the astrolabe all these long years. That which brought you here tonight.”

Nicholas startled at the word brother. As long as he had known the man, he had never heard him use that phrase, without qualifications.

“I am nothing like you,” Nicholas said. The old man rose to his full height, looking him in the eye.

“You have not yet lived a full life,” he said. “You have not accumulated the triumphs and the sorrows. When you are my age, you will look back and see a stranger, and then all you will have to your name will be your convictions.”

He believes he has done right by us all, Nicholas realized. There was nothing false or scheming about his words. He had spent years as a child cowering in the servants’ hall and shrinking back at the sight of the man as he strode through the house. Like a soldier, his swinging fists always seemed to enter the room first.

In his youth, when he traveled with Julian, he had seen a calculating emperor who demanded tribute from his followers and tribulation from his enemies. And now he saw…an inverse of himself. A warning of what might come from rationalizing the lapse of his own morals, compromising his deepest values with the false promises of just this once and never again.

“You are my true heir,” Ironwood said. “You alone. I was a fool for squandering your potential for so many years. We can begin again. I am not as young as I once was, and there are so many now who would betray me. I need your assistance in certain tasks, as a guard, as my eyes in places I cannot be.”

I cannot kill him. Sophia and Li Min were right, but their reasoning was flawed. To give over to the baser instincts of revenge would hand the old man a victory; it would undo Nicholas utterly, splinter him more and more with each year. He could not damn himself with this. There was nothing so important as being free from this man, his poisonous words and bloody legacy. If that meant his own death, then at least he might escape this man’s pull that way, and deny him an heir.

His grip on the dagger tightened, until he felt the dragon on its hilt imprinting its shape into his skin, lending its ferocity.

“You say these things like you know where to find the astrolabe,” Nicholas said.

“I do. It’s found its way into the Witch of Prague’s hands,” the old man said. “I received the invite to the Belladonna’s auction only yesterday. We only need to bid now and it’s ours—I have far more secrets to tempt her than anyone else who may come.”

The words swept over Nicholas’s skin like fire, blistering through the layers of muscle and bone. The Witch of Prague, indeed. What a fool he’d been. If he’d known at the beginning of their appointment that she was the original bad penny, he would have parsed her words more carefully. In the last report I received, yes, a Thorn was still in possession of the astrolabe….

So precisely phrased. If he hadn’t been blinded by his own desperation he might have been able to dissect what she didn’t say. In the last report. Not presently.

The woman was a fearsome creature, choosing and evaluating her words with the mind a jeweler would pay to buying precious stones. Loathsome, of course, but there was no denying her cunning; if it hadn’t been for the fact that she’d poisoned him, he might even respect her for it, just that small bit. No wonder she had survived Ironwood’s rule. She was that rare, dark thing that thrived by tricking the light into passing over it, that fed only on shadows and deceit.

“You need time to think on this, I know,” Ironwood said. “But we haven’t any. You—I must tell you something, and it cannot be shared outside of this room. I will not have panic in our ranks, and I know logic prevails for you as it does for me.”

Our. Our ranks. Of course, to Ironwood, Nicholas’s acceptance was a given.

“I’ve had a great rival for the astrolabe these many years—”

“The Thorns,” Nicholas said, interrupting him.

“No,” the old man said. “He who has no name, but has lived generations. I believe him to be one of the original time travelers, for there has never been record of him apart from legend. He has found the other copies of the astrolabe, drained them of their power. He cannot have this one, too.”

Nicholas, again, listened to the tale of the alchemist and his children, forcing his face to remain as stone. On his hand, the ring burned.

“Why does this…Ancient One seek it?” Nicholas asked at the end. “And why should it matter beyond your personal gain that he take it?”

Ironwood lowered himself onto his bed, staring into the fire. “There is an incantation, a spell of sorts, I’m sure of it, that bleeds the power of the astrolabes and feeds him, extending his life beyond its natural years. But it must destroy the astrolabe itself, leave it as an empty shell. And that cannot happen.”

“Why is that?” This was in line with what Remus Jacaranda had explained to them, but there was a thread of worry in the old man’s voice now that made him wonder if there was something more to this. Something worse.

“Because, if the legends passed down within our family hold true,” he said, “destroying the astrolabe will not just revert the timeline back to its original state…but it will also return every traveler to their natural time, and seal the passages forever.”

The dagger slipped from Nicholas’s hand. His mind was adrift in the storm of possibilities that tore through it.

He lies. He lies with every breath. He wants you to help him. He will do anything to have it.

But the fear—the slick, sweaty coating of it over the old man’s words—that painted a portrait of truth, because if there was one thing the old man had never been in Nicholas’s eyes, it was afraid. Or vulnerable.

Late at night, while at sea, Hall would sometimes wake Chase and Nicholas and bring them up on deck to learn to read the stars and navigate by them. Once, while he’d been stretched on his back, the sails flapping sweetly above them, the sea rolling beneath them, he’d seen a star fall from the sky, scorching the air with its speed and brilliance.

His next thought occurred to him in much the same way. He does not want the astrolabe destroyed, because it would dismantle the traveler life. It would ruin him. Break his rule.

It wasn’t enough to take this man’s life. This was the problem with these traveler families, their history. Another cruel man or woman would step up their own savagery to fill the void he left behind, and they would all be thrown into further chaos. Better to end this, once and for all—to spare the families, the world, the kind of grief he felt now.

And then I can rest. He could die knowing that he had finally broken the last chain binding him to this man. But Etta…

Love. Sacrifice. Release.

He could not save her and still destroy Ironwood. Even if he had the time to steal the astrolabe and escape—the shallow flutter of his heart, the labor it took to stay on his feet, spoke the truth: if he did not kill Ironwood, he was not long for this world.

And he would not kill Ironwood.

This was all he could do, and still live as he chose. It would be a good death, an honorable one. And, in this way, he could tolerate the surrender.

He would see them again. His mother. Friends lost at sea. Etta.

Wait for me, wait for me, wait for me. He would follow, as he had before, into the unknown; into whatever adventure awaited them there.

The man began to pace, his hands clasped behind his back. His words ebbed and flowed, disappearing into nonsensical muttering as Ironwood worked through his plan. If he had stripped out of his attire, Nicholas was not sure he would have seen the man as naked as this. The veneer of steel was gone, and it was deeply, deeply unsettling to him to see Ironwood’s desperation rise to a pitch of such barely restrained frenzy.

“Say yes, Nicholas,” Ironwood said. “She’s not lost to you. This is your inheritance. This is what you deserve.”

A sureness took his heart, lightening it enough for him to breathe for the first time in days. With each thud of his pulse, he felt the poison inch through his system. He moved toward the window, looking down into the garden where the candlelight from the ball seeped out, highlighting where Sophia was hiding in the bushes. Her face was turned up like a stargazer’s in the darkness, searching for his.

When their eyes met, he gave the slightest shake of his head and pulled the curtains shut on her confusion. I’m sorry.

“I accept your offer as given,” he said, turning back. “But I would ask for ink and paper, so that I might write a letter to Captain Hall, and assure him I am well.”

Cyrus Ironwood looked up, eyes gleaming. He moved to his own secretary desk, retrieving the necessities.

“Of course,” he said. “Of course. You’ll come to find you have a great deal of paper and ink now, as much as your heart desires. My man will search him out to deliver it. I’ll have him bring a physician to repair whatever it is you’ve done to your arm. Better yet, you’ll join me in the twentieth century. Medicine is remarkably improved by then.”

“No, it’s not necessary,” Nicholas said, his voice loud to his own ears. “I am already healing.”

“Good,” he said, “good. There’s a bed for you down the hall. Rest. We’ll discuss plans to retrieve the funds necessary to enter the auction in the morning.

“My God,” he heard the old man say as he reached the door. “My God, my boy, this is almost at its end.”

Indeed.

Nicholas wandered down the hall, past the startled guards. He walked along the carpet, not hidden in the walls like the unwelcome secret he’d been. But when he arrived at the staircase and heard the dancing, the airy melody of crystal and glass gently colliding, he turned toward the entrance to the servants’ stairwell and wound his way down it.

He was unsurprised to feel Li Min’s hands on his throat the instant the door shut behind him. Good. He could face her in the darkness.

“What is the meaning of this?” she hissed. “You’ll serve him now?”

“You heard it all?” She nodded. “Good. I haven’t much time to explain. I’ll take on the role of his heir only long enough for him to find the astrolabe, and for me to then take it from him and destroy it.”

It was an easier thing to tell Li Min, who, in her way, always seemed to see the path they undertook from several steps ahead. Sophia would have turned back and finished the old man herself.

“I did not expect you to choose artifice,” she said. “Can you maintain the deception long enough to reach your end?”

He nodded. What else did he have now but this one goal?

“Do you despise me for this? It’ll mean an end to your way of life. If you’ve accumulated wealth in other eras outside of your natural one, now is the time to collect it.”

And to prepare for the worst of it.

“If this is my last—my only—opportunity to say so, I am grateful to call you my friend. No, please hear me on this,” he said, seeing her begin to speak. “I generally consider those who save my life friends, and hope that doesn’t offend your mercenary sensibilities. I’m grateful for all that you’ve done, and that I’ve known you, even if that bond is broken by what comes next.”

“I believe that nothing breaks the bonds between people, not years or distance,” she said. “But you seem to simply take his word for it? What if his claims about its destruction prove false? I have heard—” She caught her next words, taking a moment to reconsider them. “It’s been a rumor for years that destroying it would revert the timeline back to the original. But the other points sound like fear tactics.”

He was too tired to argue this with her. As it was, he could hardly keep himself upright, and had to lean against the corridor’s wall to support his own weight. Too quickly, all of this is coming too quickly—

I need more time—please, God, more time—

“The man I saw in that room was afraid,” he said finally. “I do not know what to believe now. The world is upside down and this is the only way I can think of to right it.”

“All right, my friend,” she said. “We will follow you and assist in any way we can. If we need to meet, unknot your sling.”

Nicholas, in truth, had not expected this, and he was moved by the fact that she’d made the decision so easily.

“What if you need to speak with me?” he asked.

“We will find a way.”

“As you always do,” he said, with a ghost of a smile. “Until then.”

She raised her hand, touching his shoulder just for a moment before pulling back. His vision had adjusted to the darkness enough to make out the pale moon of her face as she stared hard at the buttonless jacket she’d stolen for him only a few hours before. “What would you have done…if she had survived? If you had found her?”

He couldn’t bear to say Etta’s name; it was a thorn on the tongue, as much as it bloomed in his heart. “I think…it does not matter much now. If the chance doesn’t present itself, tell Sophia I’m sorry it’s come to this. That I hope she’ll understand.”

“She’ll understand; she may yet even appreciate your cunning in destroying the old man,” Li Min said, drifting further from him as she found her way back to the same window she’d entered by. “But she’ll tear down the gates of hell and drag you back by the throat if you allow yourself to die.”

That, at least, was absolute in his mind. But he felt pleased in knowing that Sophia would never allow herself to be constrained by the limits of her natural time in the twentieth century. She would carve a way toward the same independence that had eluded him for so long. He had been so very wrong to assume that their uneasy alliance would rest on nothing more than a mutual hatred.

He had been wrong about so many things.

Rather than continue down the stairs, past the glittering souls dancing into the morning hours, past the cooling kitchen, he began to climb. The steps bore his weight with quiet protest, and he drifted up to the attic that had been his home for the first years of his life.

The support beam came within a hairbreadth of cracking against his temple. Nicholas sucked in a surprised breath and ducked through the entryway, bent at the waist to avoid skinning his back against the rough roof.

The old man must have completed some sort of renovation—the rafters couldn’t have been so low as this, suffocating the attic so it was little more than a crawl space. He tried to recall if his mother or any of the other five house slaves who had slept with them in this room had been forced to make themselves smaller to enter, to contract their bodies to fit inside what little space they’d been granted.

Now there was no bedding on the floor, only the bed jammed up against the wall below the window. Straw exploded out of the bare mattress through a hole some industrious rat had likely chewed in it. Dust carpeted the floor, undisturbed for many years.

The room coiled around him, nearly unrecognizable from the vantage point his height gave him; he knelt, trying to reclaim some semblance of memory, to understand why this room had once felt like a kingdom. There had been so many times he’d sat beside the room’s low window and watched the wide, pale sky above the townhomes, tantalizingly endless beyond the glass. Nicholas wondered if that was the reason Ironwood had given them this room and not the cellar—to show them that everything in their lives would remain just as far out of reach.

The lacework of spiderwebs spread from corner to corner, catching the fragile moonlight. Time began to slip around him, peeling back the years, mending the cracks in the floor and the scuffing on the wall, filling the room with soft candlelight and whispers of life. The bed linen still smelled as he remembered it, of starch and leather and polish. Even in this small sanctuary, they hadn’t been able to fully escape their work. They lived it.

He sat on the bed and, using his left hand, finally went about writing a short missive to Hall. But after the salutation he stopped, uncertain of what to say, beyond, I am well. I will find you when I am able. Both were lies, and he couldn’t abide the thought. But if Ironwood himself didn’t break the seal to read it, one of his men would, and report on its contents. So, instead, he gave Hall all that was left to him now: gratitude.

Nicholas folded the paper and stowed it inside of his coat.

How strange it was, to be near the end of one’s journey, and to find oneself back at the place one began and see it as if for the first time. To remember that small rebellion that had lived inside him at the thought of the untraveled world that lay beyond these walls.

The name Carter had come from his mother’s first master, and he had kept it, even as he’d chosen a new given name for himself at Mrs. Hall’s suggestion. It had been the sweet lady’s idea, a way to make him feel as though he had some mastery over his life. But he had kept the surname as a way to honor all that his mother had endured, and all that she had risked in hiding him. If Ironwood had sold him away down to Georgia with her and the others, he knew he likely would not have survived it.

This was the bed he’d slept on with his mother. Here she had cradled him in her arms, her scarred hands smoothing his hair, soothing his spirit. Here she had sung that song from her faraway home, thousands of miles from the cramped, dreary room. It had filled his ears like a fervent prayer, the only weapon she’d had to drive the darkness away from him. It had breathed life into his unconquerable soul.

He had lived so many lives, and yet the sum of his existence felt like so much more than any one part of his history. Even now—even now, in the face of the poison he felt inching through his veins, that same rebellion burned inside of him. That same demand for the distant horizons summoned him to fight.

Nicholas, he named himself on the deck of that ship, in the light of a sea of stars.

Bastard, the Ironwoods declared.

Partner, Etta swore.

Child of time, the stranger beckoned.

Heir, the old man vowed.

But here, in this hidden place, he had only ever been Samuel, the son of Africa, the legacy of Ruth.