Her black eyes narrowed. Neel recognized that look. It was the one she usually gave before smacking the back of his head for doing something dumb.

“Anyway,” he said, “it’s done. Tom’s a quick one. I bet he’s already sliced ’em open by now.”

Damara briefly covered her face. “As it is, people don’t want you to be king. After this … Neel, you can’t afford to be seen as a boy being used by a pair of gadje.”

“I am not a boy.”

“This is about how you are seen. You—”

“It was my choice to give Tom the globes. Mine. I deserve my choices. Especially after you tried to take them all away.”

“I didn’t—”

“You kept the greatest secret of my life from me,” Neel said, yet he didn’t voice the fear that simmered below his hurt, the fear that there was something else Damara wasn’t telling him. He didn’t ask, If you kept that secret so long, why did you let it come out? Was it because you have something at stake? What do you want, Ma, now that I’m king? People will try to use me, sure as sure.

Will you?

Damara looked as if the wind had been knocked out of her.

Quietly, Neel said, “I wish Sadie were here.” He missed his older sister, who was sweet, and kind, and would so easily mend things between him and his mother.

“I do, too. But—”

“Don’t say it. Don’t say what everybody says, that it’s good she’s stuck in Prague. That spying on the Bohemian prince is the best thing she could do for her people. Don’t.”

“I was going to say something you’d like even less.”

“Oh, yeah? Out with it, then.”

“I’m sure you did want to give the globes away. I know you.” She gave him a small smile. “It’s not easy to make you do something against your will. But if you love Sadie, you have to stop thinking about what you want.”

For a moment he couldn’t speak. “If I?” he choked out. “If I love her?”

“Neel, we live in dangerous times. Thousands of our people are locked inside Prince Rodolfo’s prison. The choices you make as king will affect Sadie, and every Roma. They need you. They need you to stop thinking only about yourself and what you want.”

Neel stared. “You don’t know me at all,” he said coldly.

He walked away.

* * *

A WEEK WENT BY, then two. Neel avoided Tomik, because he couldn’t bear the thought that he had made a terrible mistake in giving his friend the globes. Tomik was gifted, but would he really be able to do what he planned with the glass spheres inside the globes?

As for Petra … Neel didn’t avoid her. But she was elusive. Sometimes he saw her shadow slip around a corner of the palace. Sometimes he’d meet her silver eyes across a distance and be surprised, as he always was, by their unusual color. He’d think that they looked like something precious, like moonlight, maybe, and by the time he’d finished that thought she’d glance away again. Then she was gone.

Petra unsettled him. He wasn’t sure why. He supposed it was because everything unsettled him these days.

One day, he caught a glimpse of her dark brown braid as she crossed the wooden bridge over the river Neel had plunged into the very first time they’d entered the palace. Her figure dwindled as she headed toward the doors that would take her down to the city.

Neel bunched the hem of his blue silk jacket into a fist, then let it go. He stopped a servant and demanded they exchange shirts.

He had to wear something a lot less flashy if he was going to follow her.

* * *

WHEN NEEL SAW HER disappear into the Metis’ cave, he ducked behind a natural pillar of rock that served to hitch several hardy beach ponies. Neel waited for hours as the horses whickered and nudged at him with their velvety noses.

Petra emerged from the cave as the sun was setting, her face distant and thoughtful. Astrophil bounced on her shoulder, trying to get her attention.

Well, Neel thought. He would get her attention.

His ghostly fingers unfurled and stretched, reaching their very limit. The tips of his flesh and blood fingers ached a little, feeling the tug of the ghosts. Just as the pain began to sear him, and it felt like the ghosts might rip away, Neel touched the tip of Petra’s nose with one invisible finger.

She whirled around, and he chuckled. “Neel!” she cried.

“Who, me?” He stepped out from behind the pillar.

She smirked as he walked toward her. “Good thing you didn’t try staying hidden. I would have found you.”

“Nah. Don’t think so.”

“Truly.” Astrophil pointed one leg at him. “She would have. Had she tried.”

The smug looks on their faces made Neel realize that there would have been something special in the way Petra might have ferreted out his hiding place. He glanced back at the mouth of the Metis’ cave. “Petali,” he said slowly, “what have you been up to?”

Her smile grew wider.

Neel slipped his hand into hers—his real hand. He felt her skin with his skin and thought about how different that felt. He could touch things with the Gift of Danior’s Fingers, of course, but this … felt different. “Come on,” he said. “Let’s talk.”

* * *

THEY CLIMBED A TREE that grew out of a cliff and sat in its branches, looking at the wide green sea.

“You go there every day, all day, don’t you, Pet?” Neel said.

She nodded. The wind pulled a dark lock of her hair from its braid and danced it on a breeze.

Neel caught it, then let it fly again. “Tell me your secret.”

“It’s not a secret. It’s just … Fiala Broshek must have the answer to my father’s cure. I need to talk with her. And I can’t stand waiting.”

“Petra, we have been over this before,” said Astrophil. “Which is better? To leave right away with a boat and make our way slowly to Bohemia, or to give Tomik some time to work on the globes? If he succeeds, we can travel home almost instantly. Be reasonable.”

“Maybe Tomik won’t succeed,” Petra said in a dark voice. “Maybe he doesn’t really want to.”

“That’s silly.” Neel was startled. “Why would he…? Oh. To keep you here.” He shook his head, trying to dislodge an instant doubt. “No. Tom wouldn’t do that.”

Petra was silent.

“Well, then we’d go,” Neel said. “You and me.”

“And me,” Astrophil squeaked indignantly. “Do not forget me.”

“Course. Astro, too. We’ll sail the choppy seas. You want a ship, Pet? I’ll give you one.”

“You’d really come with me?”

“A swashbuckling adventurer like myself? You couldn’t stop me. But … what’s all this got to do with the Metis? Why’re you lurking around them? They’re kind of creepy.”

Astrophil shuddered. He agreed.

“I used to be … afraid of what I am,” Petra said. “A chimera. Someone with two magical gifts. I’m strange. An oddity. A…”

“An anomaly,” Astrophil said helpfully. “An aberration.”

“Yes.” Petra rolled her eyes. “Thank you for the vocabulary lesson. Now I have several ways to describe my weirdness.”

“It’s not weird,” Neel said. “It’s nifty. Two gifts are better than one, right?”

She shrugged, her shoulder brushing against the bark of the tree. “Not if I don’t make the most of them. Before I came to the Vatra, I’d practiced my first gift—I mean, the one I think of as my first gift. My magic over metal. I like that one, because it’s my father’s. It makes me feel close to him. But I hadn’t done anything with my mind-magic, aside from when Dee gave me lessons in London. I didn’t pay a lot of attention to those lessons, because I didn’t want my second gift to get stronger. I don’t want to see what my mother saw…”

“The future,” said Neel.

“The future scares me. What if the people I love aren’t in it?”

Astrophil looked solemn. Neel slowly nodded.

“But I can’t help my father unless I’m the strongest person I can be,” Petra said. “So I’m practicing my gifts. Both of them. And mind-magic isn’t as bad as I thought. The Metis say mind-magic is like a cloud. You know how clouds take shape? When someone’s born with mind-magic and it’s strong, it takes shape. It becomes the ability to see the future, or read someone’s thoughts, or sense hidden things. But me … the weakness of my gift means that it’s a cloud with no form. So I can do a little bit of all kinds of mind-magic.”

Neel’s eyes widened. He instantly recognized the power of Petra’s so-called weakness. “So you really could have sussed out my hiding place.”

“Of course,” said Astophil.

“Is that why”—Neel touched Petra’s nose again with one ghostly finger—“you can feel that? Because you can sense hidden things?”

“Yes.”

Neel drew his hand away and wrapped it around a limb of the tree. The rough bark felt comforting under his suddenly nervous fingers. Why should he feel nervous? Because of what Petra had told him? Surely not because he had touched her. He had done the same exact thing only a half an hour ago and it had made him laugh.

That time, though, it had been a joke. This time it wasn’t.

Neel cleared his throat. “I’ve always wondered. You shouldn’t feel the ghosts, you know. No one else does.”

“Petra is special,” Astrophil said proudly.

“Sure,” said Neel. “Sure she is.” His voice sounded too cheery to his ears. Brassy, like he had polished it up to shine. “Me, too. And special Neel had better get his special self back to the palace, else the court’s going to get pleased at the thought that I’ve drowned in the sea or run off. Well.” Neel squared his shoulders. “Time to be kingly.”

* * *

NEEL WAS ALONE in his bedroom when Tomik barged in, his eyes blazing with fear.

“The globes?” Neel asked. “Did you—?”

“You’d better call the court. You need to tell them what I’ve done.”

* * *

THE COURTIERS SHIFTED RESENTFULLY. They’d already gotten a taste of their king’s love of theatrical announcements. They eyed his pet Bohemians, standing close to his side, and wished he were a great deal less attached to these outsiders. They also wished he were less whimsical. And dangerous. And completely disrespectful of them and his own office.

In fact, they wished he didn’t exist at all.

“Tribe leaders, step forward.” The king rapped his golden scepter against the marble floor. “Ursari, Lovari, and Maraki—oh, yes, you, too, Tarn. Don’t you ignore me. Get on up here.” He crooked his finger, and the three leaders dragged their sullen feet to the dais on which the throne stood. “I’ve got presents for you.” He waved his hand in a flourish, and Tomik stepped forward, a large wooden box in his hands. Tomik opened it, and inside were several smaller boxes. He gave one to each of the leaders, then passed the large box to Neel.

Tarn cracked open his box, and the barely contained anger on his face changed to puzzlement.

“Well,” said the king, “don’t you like your prezzies?”

“I don’t understand.” Tarn tipped the box and spilled two small glass spheres into the palm of his hand. “What are these?”

“Globes.” Neel’s grin was proud and wicked. “Happy now, aren’t you?”

“The globes are dead. He”—Tarn gestured at Tomik—“destroyed them.”

“Only in order to find out how they work,” said Tomik, “and to reproduce them. The globes had glass centers that marked the exact location of a Loophole and could guide someone through it. I melted the centers, and molded five pairs of smaller spheres from them. I’ve got a magic gift for glass.”

“He’s also smarter than a pack of foxes,” said Neel.

“The globes were big, and there was only one set,” Tomik continued. “They weren’t exactly easy to share, or easily transportable. What if you wanted to travel somewhere by horse, or on foot? Can you imagine lugging those two huge spheres everywhere? Now you don’t have to. Each box contains a map that shows—just like the Terrestrial Globe used to show—the general location of all the Loopholes in the world. Go to one of the places marked by a dot on the map, touch it, and another dot will light up. That’ll show you where the Loophole will take you. Then the spheres will float, and position themselves by the exact opening of the Loophole. You can travel from here to China, from there to the North Sea … anywhere a Loophole goes, in the blink of an eye.”

“Every tribe gets a set.” The king plucked a small box out of the larger one. “Me, too, since I’m the Kalderash leader, and your wise and canny king. And Tom, of course. That’s the price for his work.” Neel passed the last small box to Tomik, who gave it to Petra.

She curled her hands around it, and the face she turned to Tomik was so raw with feeling that many people looked away—including, oddly enough, the king.

Neel’s chief adviser leaned forward to whisper in his ear. “Couldn’t you have explained your plan earlier,” Arun said, “during your ridiculous, politically disastrous gift of the globes to Tomik at your coronation?”

“I could’ve,” Neel hissed back, “but that wouldn’t have been smart. See, now when I make a mistake—and I’m bound to, it can happen to anyone, and what do I know about being king?—people will think I’ve got something up my sleeve, just like this time. That’ll give me time to fix whatever mess I’ve got on my hands. Smart, huh?” Neel tapped his temple.