“Miss Doyle, I presume?”
“You have me at a disadvantage, sir. For I do not know your name, Mr….?”
“Dwight. Edwin Dwight.”
He helps me into my seat and takes his own. The maître d’ presents me with a menu, which Mr. Dwight waves away. “The lady will have what I’m having, George.”
“The lady is accustomed to making her own decisions about tea,” I say with a genteel smile. “I’ll have the Ceylon, if you please, and the petits fours. Thank you.”
“How do you know they serve petits fours?” the blue-eyed stranger asks once we are alone.
“It is a tearoom. They all serve petits fours.”
He smirks. Drums his fingers. He wears the Rakshana’s ring. “So, a Spence girl, eh? Fine manners, raised pinkies? And magic mayhem, of course.” His bland American accent betrays no trace of place, but his air of polite condescension reeks of a certain breeding and elite schools.
“Mr. Dwight. I think it best if you tell me what this is all about,” I snap. Despite the best intentions of the Spence Academy for Young Ladies, it did not succeed in making me much of one.
Mr. Dwight takes my impatience in stride. From his pocket he retrieves a square of newspaper and slides it across the table. I unfold the newspaper, reading quickly whilst Mr. Dwight narrates the article to me—an annoying habit particular to certain arrogant men and my grandmama. Why ask me to read the bloody thing if you’re only going to tell me what it says?
“His body was found near the Metropolitan Museum of Art….”
The victim, twenty-one years old, was a clerk at a bank. Just as Mr. Dwight said, the man was found near the museum…with his heart removed. Inside the chest cavity was a feather and a scrap of pale paper inscribed with symbols and one sentence: Think upon your sins. According to the account, the murder was eerily similar to the murder of another man found three months prior.
“Did you read it, Miss Doyle?”
I manage a tight smile. “Yes. It’s astonishing the things one learns at Barnard. I’m doing all of my own reading now. Soon I shall be able to lace my own boots!”
Mr. Dwight glowers. “See here, Miss Doyle. Both of those men were Rakshana. Two of our brotherhood have been murdered.”
A flush warms my cheeks. “Forgive me, Mr. Dwight,” I say, chastened, yet also angry. I am sorry for the loss of these men, but I do not care for Mr. Dwight and the organization he represents.
Mr. Dwight leans forward, lowers his voice. “Someone is hunting us.”
“But why?”
Mr. Dwight twists the ends of his mustache. I can tell he’s considering just how much to tell me. “We have reason to believe that these men were sacrifices. Someone here in the city is using sinister arts in order to enter the realms.”
“What makes you say that?”
“Rumors. We have ears everywhere, Miss Doyle,” he says rather smugly, a little power play to remind me that I am just one stupid girl with a few friends at her side and he part of a vast, shadowy organization. What I want to say is, I do hope that you also have brains everywhere, Mr. Dwight. But if I did, I feel certain that my former headmistress, Mrs. Nightwing, would reach across the ocean and give me a deserved slap for the breach of etiquette. “These men were most likely offered to the Winterlands.”
At that, I go cold inside. “But Circe is dead. I saw her pass into the next world with the Three. She couldn’t be—”
“Not Circe.”
“Then who?”
“We’ve been hearing reports. Of a new Order trying to come into existence here in the city.”
“A…new Order?”
He smirks. “Did you imagine yourself the chosen one, Miss Doyle? All starry-eyed about your importance? There are others who have heard of the realms and the power within them. Others who would seek out the runes and try to steal that power for themselves. Others whose mothers or aunts might have told them the tales.”
“I’ve never encountered anyone of the sort. I would know.”
“Would you?” Mr. Dwight holds my gaze until I am forced to look away. “Tell me, Miss Doyle: When did you last visit the realms?”
The question slips under my skin, pricks at my nerves.
“Almost a year, Miss Doyle. You’ve not been back for eleven long months.”
My cheeks warm again. I busy myself rearranging the silver on the table, wishing I had my tea to stir. “I’ve had my studies to tend to. And it was time to allow the realms to heal themselves and let the creatures there work together. Surely as an American you can appreciate democratic ideals, Mr. Dwight.”
“Democratic ideals?” Mr. Dwight laughs. “That’s what we let the common folk believe. So they’ll vote for whomever and whatever we want them to.”
It is decided: I do not like Mr. Dwight and his shiny forehead and his oily manners. Not one bit.
“What did you imagine, Miss Doyle? That after so many years and so much fighting, democracy would spring up overnight in the realms, with a charter drawn between all the warring creatures there?” He shakes his head and chuckles, and I imagine jabbing the point of my parasol down on Mr. Dwight’s expensive shoe. If I had remembered to bring a parasol. “The Winterlands still exist, Miss Doyle. And we know little of what else is there, what foul monsters populate its icy wilderness. What has become of the Tree of All Souls.”
“You’re being deliberately cruel!”
“No, Miss Doyle. I’m being brutally honest out of necessity. Even democracies require oversight. Checks and balances. You are to be one of the checks on that delicate balance.”
The last time I visited the realms, things had been going rather well, I thought. The centaurs, the forest folk, the Hajin, and others were working together to rebuild the land, share the power, and guide souls across the river. But that world, which had brought me so many times of great happiness, had also brought me great loss. Trailing my fingers across the silver arch where I had visited with my mother’s spirit, walking through fields of achingly beautiful flowers along the river where once we girls had ruled as queens, I thought of Pip. Of Miss Moore. Of Kartik. It was so much easier to lose myself in a philosophy lecture at Barnard or in a game of badminton with Juliet or even in a visit to Samuel at the morgue. Have I shirked my responsibilities, my duties, in order to avoid the pain of my memories?
“I’m afraid I don’t understand what any of this means, Mr. Dwight.” I am angry—at him and at myself. I’m also famished. Why has no one brought my tea yet?