The Demon's Surrender

“Coming! Excuse me, I’ll be right back,” she said. “You,” she added, addressing Nick in a cold voice, as if to prove to both herself and him that she truly had not forgiven him. “You’re a demon, right? I seem to recall something of that sort. If you have to be here, go make yourself useful.”

Mae stared stonily at Nick. Nick stared back, his face a blank wall, but after a moment he walked toward one of the wagons under construction. Mae glared after him and then went running off to Isabella.

Sin was left standing alone at her own Market, with nothing to do.

“Sin,” said Carl the weapons master, breaking away from one of the murmuring knots of people. “Thank God you’re here.” He hesitated. “Where’s the—”

“Lydie’s with my father.”

Carl’s face cleared. Sin’s father was a tourist, after all, not one of them. “That was the right decision. And now you can be here for us. That tourist’s got completely above herself, and she’s running wild. Some of those necromancers arrived with stinking bodies in their cars.”

Confusion to the enemy seemed to be leading to confusion about who the enemy was.

“Nobody’s happy,” Carl murmured conspiratorially. “Look around.”

She looked at Jonas trudging by with his tools and fresh wood in hand, wearing a scowl caught between uncertainty and anger, and she realized that most of the core Market people, the real Market people, were feeling that uncertainty and anger. They were feeling abandoned enough that they would put their trust in what was familiar. Merris was possessed and abandoning them. Mae was a tourist dragging chaos in her wake.

Sin had arrived without a magician in tow. They knew her.

She wouldn’t even have to try and win them back. If she started giving orders, they would obey.

It was a stunning realization. Even more stunning was the second one.

She didn’t know what orders to give. “Everything stay the same!” was probably not a good idea, given that the magicians could attack at any moment.

Given that the magicians could attack at any moment, having more people in place to fight started to seem like a better idea.

Sin caught sight of Matthias, piping beside one of the wagons shining with new paint. There were tiny objects floating in the air all around him: hinges, nails, and several small screwdrivers.

She excused herself to Carl and headed over to him.

“Hey,” she said. “Got a minute?”

Matthias lowered his pipes. A dozen nails dropped lightly to the ground and lay sprinkled and gleaming in the grass. “Not really.”

Sin inclined her head to the wagon. “You moving in as well?”

“Oh yes,” said Matthias. “Nothing in the world I want more than to live with you miscreants in all this racket.”

“Why are you helping, then?”

Matthias, raising his pipes back to his lips, paused. “If people are so massively misguided as to want to live with you,” he said eventually, “they should be allowed.” He paused again. “Besides,” he added, “with the new regime, I thought I might bring my parents to the next Market.”

“Your—what?”

“My parents,” Matthias repeated irritably.

Sin had never thought of Matthias as having parents. She supposed it was logical, most people had them, but Matthias liked music so much more than people, she would hardly have been surprised to learn his father was a flute and his mother a music stand.

With the new vision that came from being jolted into a new way of thinking, Sin watched him push back his hair and noticed that despite how gaunt and worn he was, he was probably still in his early twenties.

She wondered if there were young necromancers, too.

“Your parents would have been welcome anytime,” she said.

“Oh yes,” said Matthias. “Anyone with money’s welcome. And if they happened to hear a joke about pipers stealing children, well, where’s the harm?”

Sin didn’t make piper jokes herself, because it would be insane for a dancer to annoy her musicians. But she’d heard them. “That bothers you?”

“Only the fact that they’re stupid,” Matthias snapped. “What the hell would I do with a pack of children anyway? My landlord doesn’t allow pets. But my parents don’t need to know about it. They gave up a lot for their piper son. I accidentally stole their voices when I was a kid, and they think the Market is this place of—of celebration. They don’t need to come here and see me sneered at.”

Sin chose her words with care, because she was not sure how to respond to what Matthias was saying, but she had asked to hear it. He deserved a thoughtful response.

“You think all this will make that better?”

“I don’t know,” Matthias said. “But the Market spoke, and my people came at their word. And I’ll play for them. Or I would, if you would stop asking me ridiculous questions.”

“Just one more,” Sin promised. “I guess you’ve changed your mind about who should lead the Market?”

“Is the leadership still in question?” Matthias asked. “If it is, I think you should let us know. A lot of people might be very interested.”

He raised his pipes to his mouth with an air of decision and resumed playing. Sin opened her mouth, and he raised one eyebrow in a manner that suggested he would not be impressed if she spoke, and the nails rose from the grass, hanging in the sky like tiny stars.

Sin turned away and saw Nick and Mae standing side by side. They looked a bit funny together, Sin thought, Nick tall and grim and Mae so short, with her bright, silly hair.

They didn’t look like they were having a funny conversation. Sin started over to them.

“I won’t do it again,” she heard Nick say abruptly as she came into earshot.

“You’re damn right you won’t,” Mae told him. “If you do, I swear, I’ll find some way to kill you.”

“Hi, guys,” Sin greeted them, with the carefully assumed air of someone too preoccupied to pay much attention to other people’s conversations. “Were you talking about Gerald’s little message?”

Immediately Sin could see Mae’s brain turning possibilities into a checklist and ticking them off. “No, but I was thinking that Seb has the pearl, and wondering why he hasn’t handed it over. He has to have it, because none of us do. If I had it, I’d be wearing it and using it to rule the Goblin Market.”

“You seem to have appointed yourself leader anyway,” Sin remarked.

“Well, I don’t have it,” said Nick into the ensuing silence. “And I don’t feel the Market has done anything terrible enough to deserve me as its leader, though my face would look amazing on the money. But if Seb has it, I’ll kill him for it. And then I’ll give the pearl to Mae.”

Mae met his gaze coolly. “I’ve told you I want to get it for myself.”

Nick turned away, and Mae watched him go for a moment, then fixed her eyes on the construction of one of the wagons.

“All of our fuss over that pearl,” she said in a brittle voice. “And it looks like neither of us is going to get it.”

“Looks like,” Sin murmured. “I didn’t want it for me, anyway. I wanted it for Merris. I thought it could help her fight back the demon.” She paused. “Not that I didn’t also want to win.”

“I wanted to win too.” Mae’s hand went up to touch her talisman, and then the place where her mark lay beside it. “And I wanted the pearl for me, as well. So I could fight back the demon.”

Sin took a deep breath and shoved envy aside.

“I’m sorry Nick did that to you. If I was you, I’d be sick about it. When I saw him do it, I wanted to kill him. But he said he wouldn’t do it again.”

Mae sighed. “Yeah.”

“You don’t believe him?”

“I believe him; he can’t lie,” Mae said. “It just doesn’t matter. I don’t want him to be holding back from controlling me. I want him not to be able to do it. When he can just make me turn around, make me do what he wants, make me think or feel whatever he wants, even if he never does again, how the hell am I meant to be around him? Let alone…”

“Let alone what?” Sin asked gently.

Mae set her jaw. “There’s something I want to tell him,” she said, not looking at Sin but at the wagons she had ordered built. “Something he probably won’t understand. But I want to tell him anyway. I can’t, not when we’re like this, but I thought if I could get that pearl… I thought maybe I could.” Mae tried to smile. The expression folded in on itself. “Pretty stupid, right?”

Sin, who could smile on command a hell of a lot better than Mae could, did so. Her smile made Mae smile back, just for a minute, but for real.

“Oh, I’m not all that surprised. You never met a ridiculous challenge you didn’t like. Which is not to say it’s not stupid, mind you.”

“Thanks,” Mae told her, and made a face. “Your support means a lot to me.” She shoved her hands in her jeans pockets. “You don’t—uh, you don’t seem altogether thrilled by the plans I have for the Market.”

“That would be because I’m not.”

“Merris came to see me today,” Mae said. “She said you sent her. Thank you.”

Sin felt the practiced smile slip off her face. “It doesn’t seem to have done much good.”

“None of this would be happening if Merris hadn’t given me the nod and let me put it all into motion,” Mae said. “I’m— I’m sort of in charge, because nobody else wants to do it, but they wouldn’t have let me do any of this if Merris hadn’t spoken to them. That’s down to you.”

“I’m thrilled.”

“Merris didn’t seem to think my ideas were too bad,” Mae offered, almost tentatively.

“I’m not Merris, am I?” Sin returned, and softened slightly at the look of dismay on Mae’s face. “I wouldn’t leave.”

“So,” Mae said, still looking wary. “If you don’t approve of what I’m doing, are you going to do something about it?”

Was she going to stage some sort of coup? Maybe, if she had had a plan of her own, if she had not promised a demon she would deliver herself into his hands and promised her father she would come home safe.

“Sure I’m going to do something,” Sin answered. “I’m going to go with both of you tonight. And I’m going to ask if you’ll send some Market people along ahead of us. We could use the backup.”

Mae’s eyes shone. “I was already planning on it.”

“Good,” Sin said. “Because the asking was going to be pretty much a formality.”

They both laughed a little, and then stood silently together for a little while more, watching the new Market rise around them.

The Monument to the Great Fire of London was a looming shape against the evening sky, looking like a tower for the villain of a story. The lights of London touched on the golden urn high at the top of the column, making it shimmer and then dim.

They had to walk a few steps down the incline to get there from the Monument Tube station.

“You know, we could’ve driven here,” Sin remarked. “If you hadn’t insisted on driving into London Bridge.”

“It’s true what you see on the news,” Nick said. “Teenage guys are a menace on the roads. Reckless drivers. Speed demons.”

Sin noted the glints on top of a gray office building, on the roof of another building with a glass front. The archers were in place.

She looked back to Nick, who was walking in the middle, between her and Mae. The line of his shoulders made her think of a high stone wall, a scribble of wire mesh at the top, surrounding a prison nobody could ever escape. He looked like he wanted to kill someone.