She looked back at the clerk and saw herself through his pitying gaze. She had been sleeping on the streets for the past few days. Her hair was tangled, her clothes dirty. Worst of all, her urgent attempts to contact the Great Library of Summershall were beginning to resemble the actions of a madwoman. An unfamiliar feeling of shame burned inside her stomach.

“Please,” she said, the words rasping through her sore throat. “Can you give me directions to Hemlock Park? I know someone who lives there.”

The clerk wetted his lips, glancing between her and the waiting couple. She could tell he didn’t believe her. “Could I post a letter for you instead, miss?”

Elisabeth had used all of Mercy’s money sending the first letter. She couldn’t pay for a second. Suddenly, the shame overwhelmed her. She mumbled an apology and ducked past the staring couple, pressing a hand to her mouth as she fled from the post office. As soon as she reached the street, she doubled over in a coughing fit. Pedestrians gave her a wide berth, shooting her troubled looks. With a trembling hand, she folded the letter and slipped it into her pocket.

Her fever was getting worse. Yesterday morning, after sleeping huddled up and shivering in a doorway, she had woken with a cough. Today she felt so disoriented that she’d barely found her way back to the post office.

Her heel slipped on something slimy as she started down the sidewalk. A wet newspaper, pasted to the gutter. She peeled it free and held its translucent headline to the light, even though she had already read the article a dozen times since her escape from Leadgate. THIRD ATTACK ON A GREAT LIBRARY—FETTERING IN FLAMES, the front page proclaimed. Beneath that there was an illustration of a spiny, deformed monstrosity—the paper’s interpretation of a Malefict—howling in front of an inferno. The article went on to say that there had been at least two dozen casualties in the village, some lives claimed by the Class Nine Malefict, others by the blaze. The number made her head spin. Traders from Fettering occasionally stopped by Summershall’s market. She might have met some of the people who had died.

Near the end, there was a quote from Chancellor Ashcroft: “At this time we believe the saboteur is a foreign agent working to undermine the strength of Austermeerish magic. The Magisterium will stop at nothing to apprehend the culprit and restore order to our great kingdom.”

The paper crumpled in her hand. The attack had happened while she was trapped in his manor. He had lied to reporters while she lay in bed.

She was running out of time to stop him.

Yet the letter’s response had left her unmoored. Weeks ago she wouldn’t have bothered with the letter; she would have charged straight to the Collegium and pounded on the front doors until someone answered. Now she knew that if she did that, she would be turned away, or worse. She had counted on arming herself with Master Hargrove’s good word to prove that she was someone worth listening to. The anticipation of holding his response—of being vindicated at last—was what had kept her going through the long, cold nights and the gnawing ache of hunger. Now she had nothing.

No . . . not nothing. She still had Nathaniel. But days of searching hadn’t led her any closer to Hemlock Park. The city was huge; she felt as though she could remain lost within it forever, growing ever more invisible to the people passing by, until she faded away to a shadow. No one had proven willing to help her. Few were even willing to look at her.

She didn’t know if Nathaniel would be any different. But of everyone in Brassbridge, he was the only person she could trust.

A glimpse of a short, slim boy passing through the crowd yanked Elisabeth to a halt. She stood frozen on the sidewalk as people flowed around her. It didn’t seem possible. Either her fever was causing her to hallucinate, or Silas had appeared as though she had summoned him out of thin air by thinking his master’s name. Could she be mistaken?

She whirled around, searching for another sign of him across the street. Her gaze latched onto a slight figure stepping neatly through the afternoon bustle. The young man wasn’t wearing Silas’s green livery, but instead a finely tailored suit, a cravat tied impeccably around his pale neck. But his hair—pure white, held back with a ribbon—could belong to no one else. He was not a hallucination. He was real.

She hesitated, wavering, and then rushed across the street, the dismayed shout of a carriage driver chasing in her wake. She scanned the crowd once she reached the sidewalk, but Silas was no longer in sight. She hurried along in the direction he had been heading, peering into the windows of shops as she passed. Her own dirty reflection stared back at her, pinched and desperate, her blue eyes bright with fever. She broke into a jog, trying to ignore the fire that roared in her lungs as she urged her body to move faster.

There. A flash of white hair ahead, turning onto a side street. She hastened after him, barely noticing that the buildings around her had grown dilapidated, the traffic thinner, its carriages replaced by carts filled with junk and wilted produce. Crooked eaves hung over the narrow avenue, strung with unused laundry lines. The damp, dark corners stank of urine. Silas stuck out like a sore thumb in his expensive suit, but no one spared him a second glance. The same wasn’t true for Elisabeth.

“Where are you going in such a hurry, little miss?”

Her heart tripped. She kept her gaze fixed straight ahead, as though she hadn’t noticed the man’s leering face in the periphery of her vision. But he didn’t give up, as she’d hoped. A boot crunched broken glass behind her, and multiple shapes detached from the shade of a nearby building.

“I said, where are you going? Maybe we can help.”

“Give us a smile for our trouble, eh?” another man suggested.

Silas was too far ahead, a shape glimpsed behind a passing cart. Elisabeth tried to call out. Though she only made a hoarse, pathetic sound, he paused and began to turn, a yellow eye flashing in the light.

She couldn’t tell whether he had truly heard her, or whether the reaction was a coincidence. She didn’t have time to find out. “Silas,” she whispered. And then she ran.

Pavement scuffed beneath her heels. When the men moved to cut her off, she dodged from the main street and into an alley, stumbling over crates and sodden drifts of newspapers. Rats fled squealing toward a branching alleyway, and she followed them, hoping they knew the best place to hide. As the deep shadows enveloped her, her boots skidded on something slippery. A putrid stench hung in the air, and puddles of fluid shone on the cobblestones, covered in floating scum. She had wandered into the rear of a butcher’s shop. Her breath came in labored, agonizing rasps.

“This way!” a voice called. The men were close on her heels.

Elisabeth staggered to the end of the alley and around the corner, only to draw up short at a dead end. The building that backed up against this alley looked abandoned. Its windows had been bricked over, and the door, once painted black, was badly peeling and secured with a padlock. She jerked at the doorknob, but the padlock held.

Footsteps splashed through the puddles. There was no use trying to be quiet; her pursuers would notice the adjoining alley any moment now. Fueled by terror, she dug her fingers into one of the wooden boards that crisscrossed the door and yanked with all her might, staggering backward when it wrenched free with a metallic squeal of protest. The board had come loose in her hands. Bent, rusty nails protruded from the ends.