“Your education has been limited, to say the least. So I imagine you’ve never heard of a Shadowdrake, a particular breed of dragon that breathes darkness, not fire. Fiala Broshek paid a warrior to kill a Shadowdrake and collect its blood. She then cut the wrist of Karel, drained him of every drop of human blood, and gave him a transfusion of Shadowdrake blood. This brought the dead man back to life, if life is the word you wish to apply to such a creature. The operation had intriguing effects on the human body, as you witnessed firsthand. The surgeon repeated this operation with several other subjects.”

“How did you get this information? From spies?”

“Just so. Are you interested to learn how I saved you from the Gray Men?”

She nodded.

“I decapitated them,” he said.

Her jaw dropped.

“That means that I cut their heads off,” he added.

“I know what it means!” Remembering the speed of the Gray Men and their burning touch, she said hesitantly, “All four of them?”

He smiled.

His message sank in. However terrifying the Gray Men were, John Dee was more dangerous. At least four times more dangerous.

She almost dreaded the answer to her next question. “If I’m really in London, how did you bring me here?”

“With the aid of my daughters. Judging by your shocked expression, you don’t think of me as quite human, do you? Yet I am, Petra, and I have a family. My daughters, who are about your age, possess remarkable magic. They can manipulate passageways through space. In less than the time it takes for you to cross a street, I can step from London to Bohemia. Anyone can, anyone who knows precisely where to enter a passageway created by Madinia. She is able to tear Rifts in space. Margaret can close them.”

“So Margaret and Madinia will help me go home.” Petra’s chest felt tight, just like her throbbing arm. “Won’t they?”

“No.”

A numbness crept over her. She couldn’t tell if it was because of the Gray Men’s poison or Dee’s reply. But then Petra remembered something. She was so relieved, she laughed. “Wait. Wait a minute. The night I left Salamander Castle you told me you would grant me one favor. Remember? Well, I want it now. I want you to let me out of here. Send me home!”

“I didn’t save your life for you to toss it away. If you return, you will be hunted down.”

“You promised me! You—”

“Petra.” He sighed. “I already granted you a favor. You called upon me for help.”

“No,” she whispered. “I didn’t call you.”

“Our minds are connected, and I heard when you called. I brought you here, and now you are safe. I promised you one favor. One.”

“But you can’t keep me here!”

“I can and will.”

Petra struggled to rise out of her chair, but could not. She saw her fingers twitch, but did not feel them move.

“Hmm.” Dee tapped a finger against his lips. “Paralysis. Finally. The poison has worked a little more slowly than I would have expected. But then, perhaps the Gristleki prefer to keep their victims mobile for a time. Paralysis does make their sport a little too easy.” He rose to his feet. “Or perhaps you are stronger than I believed.”

“Please!” she choked out. “I just want to go home.”

“You have no home.” He turned away.

Petra’s eyelids slipped shut and the image of the brocade flowers bloomed beneath them, red like the flames that had consumed the house she was born in.

Dee closed the door behind him.

Part of Petra wanted to relive her dream, to pound against that locked door. But now the poison seemed like a cure. When the room went black around her she was grateful that she could not move and could not feel anything at all.

5

The Pacolet

AT FIRST, Tomik thought Petra would come back to the Sign of Fire. He watched the door, hoping it might suddenly swing open again and reveal his friend. But it didn’t.

Atalanta lay down. She rested her chin on her front paws and gazed up at Tomik with round, green eyes. “Why Astro go?” she asked mournfully.

“I don’t know.” Tomik shook his head. “I don’t get it.”

Lately, there were a lot of things that Tomik didn’t get about Petra, like what she was thinking when she bit her lip, or shrugged, or made some other kind of gesture that meant she didn’t want to talk about whatever he had asked.

Where Petra was concerned, one thing puzzled Tomik above all others: Prague. Why hadn’t he gone to Prague with Petra? Why had he let her—helped her—travel alone to a city where the first thing she did was put her trust in a Gypsy?

Tomik looked at the shut door again. Something was wrong with Petra, that much was clear, but if Tomik left the shop unattended, his father would be furious.

Tomik’s gaze fell on Atalanta. He made up his mind.

“Attie, I’m going to leave for just a little while. I’ll lock up. Can you guard the Sign of Fire?”

She barked, leaping to her feet.

“Good girl. And . . . if somebody comes by who tries to get inside, who seems like he doesn’t belong, try looking mean.”

Atalanta leaned forward on her huge front paws and growled. A snarl ripped in her throat as her lips pulled back to show rows of pointy teeth.

Tomik patted her head. Atalanta immediately stopped snarling and licked his hand.

“Mean, Attie. Remember.”

“Sorry.” She bared her teeth again.

After Tomik locked the shop behind him, he took something out of his pocket. It was another Glowstone.

When the Kronos family began packing their things to move far away, Tomik saw the danger Petra was in and decided he would try to protect her, whether she liked it or not. He hadn’t lied to Petra, exactly, when he gave her a Glowstone. His invention was better than any candle for seeing in the dark. But it was more than that. It was also designed to track Petra, and she definitely wouldn’t like being tracked or tricked.

Tomik weighed the Glowstone in his hand. He turned to the left, in the direction of the Sign of the Compass. The crystal in his hand flickered with a faint blue light. So Petra had gone home, then. Tomik put the Glowstone back in his pocket and walked down the shop-lined street. It was oddly empty for what was usually the busiest time of day.

Tomik smelled smoke.

“Move out of the way!” someone shouted.

Tomik turned around. Two men rushed past him, buckets swinging from each hand.

He ran after them. “What’s going on?” he called.

“Fire!” one of them replied. “The Sign of the Compass!”

Tomik raced alongside the men. He tried to bottle up his fear, but then he saw the skinny house. It was a tower of flame. Men and women circled it, passing pails of snow and flinging them into the roaring fire.

That’s never going to work, Tomik thought with a moan. The people looked like sticks, their buckets like acorns. Flames flashed along the thatched roof.

Tomik pulled the Glowstone from his pocket. There was no mistaking it: the crystal’s blue light was stronger. Petra had come here.

Tomik ran up to the men and women trying desperately to put out the fire. He spotted Tomas Stakan, blackened with soot, pitching snow as quickly as he could. “Father!”

“Tomik, what are you doing here? Who’s in the shop?”

“No one,” Tomik said hesitantly. “But Attie’s guarding it.”

“What? What were you thinking? Go home, now!”

“No.” Tomik grabbed a bucket.

“I don’t have time to argue with you. Look at that.” His father stabbed a finger at the Sign of the Compass. “Our friends could be inside that house. We have to put out the fire!”

“Then let me help!” Tomik scooped up a bucket of wet snow and stepped toward the crackling wall of flame.

This time, his father didn’t stop him.

The men and women of Okno heaved snow and wet earth into the fire, but they knew they were fighting a losing battle. The fire had already consumed the ground floor by the time the first help had arrived, making it impossible for anyone to enter the building. Now even the roof was ablaze.

Tomik couldn’t allow himself to think. He moved mechanically, passing buckets, filling some, emptying others. He knew his father was next to him, but they didn’t speak.

Then there was a sickening crack, like the sound of a spine breaking, as the beams of the house split.

“It’s caving! Back! Get back!”

Somebody shoved Tomik, pushing him yards away from the fire.

There was a crunching sound of falling timber as the Sign of the Compass began to collapse, the fire rushing down to hollow out the inside of the house.

Tomik felt an arm around him, but couldn’t look away from the flames, even though they hurt his eyes.

“Tomik,” his father said.

Tomik turned. A tear traced over Tomas Stakan’s sooty cheek. “I’m sorry,” his father said, and tried to hug him.

“Stop it!” Tomik struggled.

“Son, no one could have survived that. If they were inside the house—”

“They weren’t! Petra was not inside that house!” But Tomik knew that wasn’t true. His Glowstone had shown that Petra had come here, and his inventions always worked.

Tomik broke away from his father and began to run. He didn’t pay attention to where he was going. He stopped only when he realized that he could no longer hear the crackling fire. Now a different sound filled his ears. A bird was singing.

Tomik had reached the edge of the forest. He blinked up at the trees and saw a sparrow in the bare branches. Suddenly angry—angry at the bird for thinking it had the right to sing, angry at himself, and at Petra, too—Tomik snatched the Glowstone from his pocket and drew it back to knock the sparrow right off its branch.

Something stayed his hand.

The crystal was an even brighter blue than before. Tomik stared disbelievingly.

He had designed the smooth crystal to shine a deeper blue as it got closer to its target, which was the twin Glowstone in Petra’s pocket. The crystal could pick up traces of where Petra had been, which is why it had flickered as soon as Tomik left his shop in search of her. But it would react most strongly to wherever Petra had been recently.

Which meant that Petra was not in the Sign of the Compass when it collapsed.

Tomik laughed with relief. “Petra!” he called, and plunged into the woods. He followed the Glowstone with a light heart, as if he and Petra were small again, and playing a really complicated game of hide-and-seek. A serious voice spoke up inside, reminding him that he would still have to tell Petra that her home was in ashes. But he ignored that voice, growing happier with each darker shade of blue.

The smile on his lips faded when he smelled something rotten.

He inched forward. The stone burned more brightly. The stench grew worse.

At first he thought he was looking at animal carcasses. Yet the four headless corpses on the ground seemed eerily human, though their skin was scaly, and black blood poured from their necks.

With dread, Tomik realized that the Glowstone was leading him into the center of the ring of bodies.

Then a metallic glint on the ground caught his eye. Tomik crouched down and brushed at the snow, uncovering a tiny iron horseshoe. He recognized this—it was the necklace Petra had worn every day since she had returned from Prague.

Tomik picked up the rough trinket and inspected it. Master Kronos didn’t forge this, he decided. It’s misshapen. He turned the horseshoe over, and immediately eliminated the possibility that Petra had made it. A strange language was scratched into the iron. Tomik knew one word—Kronos—but the rest was gibberish.

Trailing from the horseshoe was a broken leather cord that looked as if it had been seared by something. Tomik sniffed a blackened end of the cord. Not fire, he thought. Acid, maybe? Or—his gaze jumped to a headless corpse—something else?

Tomik knotted the cord where it had broken, slipped the necklace over his head, and tucked the horseshoe inside his shirt.

He checked the Glowstone again. As if it were a compass, he turned north, south, east, and west. The blue deepened most when he faced south, so Tomik stepped that way over a body, careful not to let any part of him touch it. Headless or not, dead or not, those things smelled evil.

Tomik walked a few yards away from the bodies. Whatever happened, Petra escaped, he encouraged himself.

He was striding forward, his hand holding the Glowstone outstretched, when his forearm vanished.

With a surprised cry, he jerked back. His arm reappeared. There was his hand, the stone firmly in his fingers. There was his wrist, properly attached to the rest of his body.

“A burned-down house. Four headless monsters. Disappearing body parts,” he muttered to himself, shaking his head. “Petra, you’ve got a lot of explaining to do. And I don’t mean the shrugging-and-ignoring kind of explaining. I mean the sit-down-and-go-over-every-blazing-detail-so-I-can-be-sure-I’m-not-going-mad kind of explaining.”

Tomik dropped the Glowstone into his pocket. Tentatively, he reached out his right hand.

It disappeared again.

This time, Tomik didn’t leap back. He flexed his invisible hand. It seemed to function all right. It just wasn’t there.

And, oddly enough, it was warm.

Tomik exhaled, his breath fogging the air. There was still slushy snow under his feet. He was definitely cold, but his invisible hand wasn’t. Summertime, he thought. It feels like summertime, wherever my hand is.

Tomik took a deep breath, shut his eyes, and walked several paces.

He felt the sun beating down on his skin, and heard a roaring, hissing sound.