Damara said nothing as she tried to catch her son’s eye, but Neel avoided her, glancing at Petra and Tomik as if for help. Finally, he looked at the queen.

Iona’s laugh was horrible, scraping: the sound of seashells breaking under someone’s boot. Thankfully, it did not last long, and when it stopped, she threw everyone but Neel out of the room. She grabbed his ghostly fingers with her own and tugged him close.

“You cannot trust them,” she said.

“I know,” he muttered. “The Maraki’re gonna get feisty over this.”

“Of course. However, I did not mean them. The gadje boy and girl. They don’t belong here. They will use you.”

Neel arched one black brow. “Guess you’re right,” he said coolly. He nodded as the queen listed the Kalderash goals for the future, and smirked in agreement as she hissed the flaws of the Lovari, Maraki, and Ursari tribes. Anyone who knew Neel well knew he was a smooth liar. But the queen did not know her son well. So she talked until her eyes grew feverish and her voice hoarse, and when she eventually slumped in her throne with exhaustion, she was satisfied with her heir. “Hold it.” She thrust the golden scepter at him, and for the first time since he’d made his choice clear, a crack showed in his proud façade. Ever so slightly, he shrank away. Then he took the scepter with his invisible fingers. He couldn’t quite bring himself to let it touch his skin.

“It’s a curse,” Iona whispered. “Yet it is a gift, too.”

“It’s still yours.” He gave it back to her.

“Not for long.” She chuckled and waved him away.

The tension drained from Neel’s body. He felt wobbly, as if the stress of the moment had been his skeleton, and now it was gone, leaving only soft, vulnerable flesh.

He left the royal chamber and found Damara waiting for him outside its doors.

The sight of her made his spine stiffen once more, and that was what gave him the strength to keep walking, to walk away, to walk down the hall without a word, without one backward glance at the woman who had raised him.

* * *

THE CHANGES WERE RAPID, and Neel hated them. The royal adviser, Arun, was to blame.

Arun had several guards ambush Neel, hold him down, and cut his hair.

He thrust a pile of richly dyed silks at Neel, saying he wasn’t leaving his room until the boy looked the part of the heir to the throne. Neel’s heart leaped with glee when he saw the clothes—he loved finery—but he hid his pleasure with a scowl that plainly said he wouldn’t be told what to do.

Arun told him anyway. He appointed a thin, eager man named Karim to give Neel manners lessons and advise him on courtly procedure. Another adviser, Gita, was an elderly woman who would instruct him in international politics. Both advisers were Kalderash, like Arun, who lectured Neel for hours on end about the very different skills and needs of each tribe—as if Neel didn’t know that the Roma were a fractured people. Even if they shared an “it’s us against the world” attitude, they didn’t always have a lot in common. This was obvious.

The worst, the very worst thing Arun did to Neel was insist that guards be stationed outside his door at all times, and follow him everywhere. They were a shell of armor around him, and no one Neel cared about could get inside. He had never felt so alone.

One night in December, almost a month after the Pacolet had reached the Vatran shore, Neel lay in his new, unnervingly large bed. He heard a dim ruckus outside his door, and raised voices. He sat up, and had almost snatched a dagger from under the sheets, when moonlight from an open window caught a silvery twinkle by the crack below the bedroom door.

It was Astrophil, glittering his way across the floor. Neel jumped from the bed and met the spider halfway, crouching to lift the tin creature up to eye level. “What’s going on, Astro? Who’s getting rowsy out there? Petra?”

Astrophil shook his head. “She is asleep. Tomik is outside your door. He wishes to see you, because—”

Neel had heard enough. He stalked to the door and flung it open to see Tomik bucking against the guards’ grasp. “Let him in,” Neel told the guards.

“Arun said no visitors,” one of them replied.

“Well, I say let him in.”

The guards did not let Tomik go.

“Who’s in charge here?” Neel demanded.

“Queen Iona,” the guards chorused.

“Yeah, and how long is she gonna last? She seems awful sickly to me.”

Silence.

“When she snuffs it,” Neel said, “then who’s in charge?”

One of them muttered, “You.”

“That’s right. Me. And I’ve got my likes and dislikes, and right now I don’t like you. I’m going to remember this, when I’m king. So if I were in your smelly shoes, I’d be working hard to get into the heir’s good graces. That is, if I were smart. Are you smart?”

Silence.

“Now,” said Neel, “who’s in charge?”

“You,” the guards said sullenly.

“Then let. My friend. In.”

They obeyed, but one of the guards couldn’t resist giving Tomik a good shove over the threshold, and another slammed the door shut. Neel bit his lip.

He might have to pay for this.

“Thanks,” said Tomik.

“What’re you two doing creeping around at this time of night?”

“No one will let us near you,” said Astrophil. “Petra has been trying to see you for more than a week—”

“How come you’re here without her?” Neel peered at the spider on his palm. “It’s weird. Seeing you right now, away from her … it’s like seeing a part of her that’s come loose.”

Astrophil stood as tall as he could. “I am helping Tomik. He has an idea. He would like you to—”

“Talk Petra out of her loony plan. Well, Tom, I know how you feel, but it’s not going to happen. Don’t you see that her plan is all she’s got, and that the guilt of doing nothing to help her da would be worse, to her, than anything she might face in Bohemia? She won’t change her mind.”

“Yes,” Tomik said heavily, “I know. That’s why I’m going with her.”

“We will protect her,” Astrophil squeaked.

“Oh. Well, I’m going, too, of course,” said Neel. “This whole gimcracky king thing’s just a way for us to get a boat, some fleet horses, and—”

Tomik shook his head. “Listen,” he said, and explained his idea.

“Oooh,” said Neel. “That’d make the Vatra crazy. They’d hate me.”

Astrophil’s tin legs sagged with disappointment. Tomik’s face fell.

“I’ll do it,” said Neel.

* * *

QUEEN IONA DIED in her sleep several days later. Some people muttered that this was far too easy and peaceful an end for someone who had used her last breath of life to stir up as much trouble as she could. Others said she had suffered her painful disease long enough, and no one could guess what she might have suffered inside to live her life as she had. But few shed any tears for her. Certainly not Neel.

He was crowned with a fanfare that he found surprisingly boring. As he walked in a procession through the Vatran streets and finally returned to the palace to sit in his throne as courtiers played music and threw flower petals, it occurred to Neel that, not so long ago, he would have craved to be the center of attention.

Neel scanned the crowd. There were Petra and Tomik, on the fringes. Astrophil was a bright star in Petra’s hair. Damara was there, too, farther back, her cheeks shining with tears.

Neel looked away.

Arun—his adviser now—opened the gold hoop in Neel’s ear, and Neel felt a pang as he saw the small circle disappear into the man’s pocket. It was just a trinket, he told himself, something he’d nicked long ago from a Moroccan market. It was nothing. Nothing compared to the Jewel of the Kalderash.

Arun slipped the sapphire earring through the pierced hole the hoop had left behind. He fastened it with a sharp pinch that made Neel wince.

Everyone cheered.

“Hey!” Neel stood. “Pipe down! I’ve got something to say.”

The crowd quieted.

“This is … uh, an important day.” Neel felt a snaky kind of nervousness. Had he really once liked to have everyone’s eyes on him? He reached with his invisible fingers—Danior’s Fingers—to touch the jewel that had belonged to Danior. His ancestor. The sapphire was cool beneath his ghostly fingertip. “And I want to do something to com—commemorate it. I want to give a gift.”

Startled, the crowd began to whisper.

“Tomas Stakan,” Neel called. “Come here.”

Tomik pushed his way through the crowd, his tanned skin glaringly different from the darker tones of the Roma. Everyone stared.

When Tomik stood before him, Neel said, “I give you the Terrestrial and Celestial Globes.”

The gasps of the crowd rang in Neel’s ears.

“You’re mad!”

That was Treb, storming right up to the throne, shoving guards out of his way. “Neel, why would you give them to Tom? Why would you do such a stupid, gadje-loving thing?”

“So that he can destroy them,” said Neel.

9

Tomik’s Idea

PETRA BURST THROUGH Tomik’s bedroom door and caught him with the globes on a large worktable, and a small saw in his hand. “What is going on?” she demanded. “Did you know Neel would do that?” After Neel’s announcement, the crowd had roiled with shocked anger, and Petra had watched, helplessly straining against the current of people, as Neel and Tomik left the throne room under heavy guard.

Tomik dropped the saw to the table and rubbed tiredly at his brow. “No. Yes. I mean, I asked him, and he said he’d give me the globes, but I didn’t expect him to do it then, or like that.” He shook his head. “He’s such a show-off.”

“It will make him very unpopular,” said Astrophil.

“You asked him if you could destroy the globes, and … he agreed?” Petra’s hand strayed across the red fabric of her sleeveless dress to touch her shoulder, where a fencing scar stood out like a brand. She had earned that scar fighting for a globe.

“I’m not going to destroy them.” Tomik glanced at the handsaw. “Well, fine. Yes, I am. But I have an idea. I couldn’t tell you before—in fact, I wish we weren’t talking about this now—because I didn’t—I don’t want to get your hopes up. I wanted to wait until I was done, but…”

“Tomik.”

“I want to replicate the globes.”

Petra stared.

“Oh,” Tomik said in a low voice. “You don’t think I can do it.”

“Do you know—” Petra’s voice cracked. “Do you know what this looks like? It looks like you’re trying to ruin the one thing that might help me get home.”

“Petra, don’t you trust me?”

Have some faith in me, Kit had told her, sometime soon after he had kissed her, and soon before he had stabbed her deep in the shoulder.

“I’m not sure I can,” she whispered, and left.

She stood for some time outside Tomik’s closed door. Then she heard it: the rhythmic, dry whine of a saw cutting through wood and paper.

She forced herself to walk away slowly, but as the sound grew fainter it cut more deeply at her heart, tearing at a hope she would never have dared admit, would never have let see the light of day, because she would never have asked Neel for his kingdom’s greatest treasure.

Petra, Astrophil murmured in her mind. Tomik would never betray you.

She didn’t know. She just didn’t know, and there was so much she didn’t know. An overwhelming awareness of her ignorance crashed over her in a great wave. Who was Petra Kronos, to think of slipping close to the Bohemian prince and kidnapping his most valued magician?

She had gifts—she knew this. She could fence like a sword was part of her body. And she had magic. A feel for metal. Glimpses, sometimes, of the future or someone else’s thoughts.

Yet she was no master. None of her gifts was strong enough. None of them showed her whether Tomik was telling the truth. None of them promised she could save her father.

Her feet picked up pace, and Petra followed them out of the palace, down, down, down the city streets, and deep into the darkest dark she had ever seen.

In the depths of the cave, four lights sprang to life around her head.

“She has returned!” a Meti squealed.

“Why?” said another.

“Indeed, brother, why? I thought she did not like us.”

“Please—” Petra said. She tried again. “Please—”

The Meti with the softest voice said, “Little woman, young braveling, why are you here?”

“Teach me,” Petra said.

10

Gifts

NEEL WAS SLINKING DOWN a palace passageway, eager to escape the hordes of angry courtiers, when a hand reached out and touched his arm.

It was his mother.

No, he told himself, it’s Damara. He instantly regretted he had succeeded in commanding his guards not to follow him everywhere. This wasn’t a conversation he wanted to have. Not alone. He didn’t want to stand in front of this woman and realize that somehow he had grown taller than her. He didn’t want the emotions that realization unleashed inside him.

“Neel,” she said. “You can’t do this. You can’t give away the globes.”

“Can’t I?” His voice was taunting. “I’m the king!”