“That’s a Tibetan prayer wheel!” said Enrique, snatching it from his hands. “And very old by the looks of it.”

“I was merely praying for respite from my impending boredom,” said Hypnos.

“How can you possibly be bored?” asked Enrique. “Yesterday, we almost died by fire.”

“Not true,” said Zofia.

“Not all of us are optimists—”

“Asphyxiation would have killed you first,” she said. “Not the flames.”

Hypnos snorted. “Ah, ma chère, never change.”

Zofia perched on a nearby stool, her posture like that of an aerialist.

“Don’t say that,” said Zofia, sounding rather glum. “Change is the only constant.”

“Well—” Hypnos started, and then stopped and stood abruptly. “Madame Desrosiers.”

The matriarch of House Kore stood in the doorway, wrapped in her expensive furs. She was someone whose very impression felt tall. It reminded him, oddly enough, of his mother. His father teasingly called his mother Doña because she could wear a rice sack and still look noble. Even in her letters to him, she managed to sound commanding and intimidating, always ranting about how he was running around Paris for no reason when there were beautiful girls at home waiting for him, and how this behavior was exceedingly disappointing, and also was he eating enough, and do remember evening prayers, Love, Ma.

“I don’t believe we’ve formally met,” said Enrique. “I’m—”

“The one who posed as a botanist expert and set fire to my garden last spring?”

Enrique gulped and sat.

“And the ‘Baronness Sofia Ossokina’?” asked the matriarch, raising an eyebrow at Zofia.

Zofia blew out her match, not bothering to answer to the fake name she’d used when they had stolen into the Château de la Lune last spring.

“I am surrounded by deception,” said the matriarch.

“And chairs,” pointed out Zofia.

“On that note, won’t you have a seat?” asked Hypnos.

“I think not,” said the matriarch, examining her fingernails. “I have already summoned the patriarch of House Dazbog and one of his representatives to join us in what might possibly be a fool’s errand to the supposed coordinates of the Sleeping Palace. We leave for Irkutsk in two hours. You may have solved the Tezcat spectacles, but that could’ve been sheer luck. I need to know why I should listen to an impudent girl and”—her gaze cut to Enrique—“a boy still in need of a haircut.”

One corner of Enrique’s heart yelled, Mother! The other corner seethed as he flattened down his hair.

“… I lost my comb,” he muttered, self-conscious.

“And I have lost my patience,” she said.

“Where’s Séverin and Laila?” asked Hypnos.

“Off ‘discussing,’” said the matriarch, snorting. “As if I don’t know what that means.”

Zofia frowned, obviously lost as to what else discussing could have meant.

“You have managed to earn my protection as a matriarch of the Order of Babel. But you have not earned my confidence.”

Hypnos cleared his throat. “I also have offered protection—”

“Yes, my dear, I noticed with the flaming troika the precise range of your protection.”

Hypnos’s cheeks turned a shade darker.

“What kind of intelligence have you gathered concerning the Sleeping Palace?”

The group looked to one another and said nothing. The truth was that there were no blueprints of the Sleeping Palace. The Fallen House had managed to destroy the records, which meant that for all intents and purposes, they were going into this excursion blind. Delphine must have caught that from their expressions because her gaze narrowed.

“I see,” she said. “And what—besides the ramblings of a dying, broken man—makes you so certain then that there are treasures in the Sleeping Palace?”

“It…” started Hypnos, before trailing off, “… would be a terrible waste of space without … treasure?”

Zofia said nothing.

“No historical records of confirmation?” asked Delphine, her gaze zeroing in on Enrique. “Then what do you have?”

Enrique pressed the dossier of papers tighter against him. All he could tell was the truth, so he did. “Ghost stories.”

The matriarch raised her eyebrow. “Ghost stories?”

Enrique nodded.

“What kind of history or proof is that?” she asked.

Enrique’s ears burned, but he heard her curiosity. It was genuine. At the sound of it, a quiet thrill wound through him.

“Madame Delphine, depending on who you ask, sometimes ghost stories are all that is left of history,” he said. “History is full of ghosts because it’s full of myth, all of it woven together depending on who survived to do the telling.”

She raised an eyebrow. “Go on.”

“According to the coordinates on the spectacles, we know the Sleeping Palace is somewhere on Lake Baikal.”

“There’s nothing in Siberia but ice,” said the matriarch dismissively. “And murders from the past; that’s probably where all ghost stories started.”

“Lake Baikal is a sacred place, especially to the Buryats, the indigenous people who live in southeastern Russia near the Mongolian border,” said Enrique quickly. “The name itself means ‘Sacred Sea.’”

“I’m still not hearing a ghost story,” said the matriarch.

“Well, that’s the interesting matter,” said Enrique. “When you trace the tales surrounding this area of Lake Baikal, what you find is there are a lot of rumors in that area of restless spirits. Women, especially, whose voices are known to cry out to people in the middle of the night, echoing over the ice. There were also stories in the past of … of murders in the area. The last of which was committed almost twenty years ago.”

Zofia shifted uncomfortably on her stool. Hypnos shuddered.

“And no one was ever captured,” said Hypnos, visibly disturbed.

“Supposedly, the murders were committed without motive,” said Enrique. “But I don’t think that’s true.”

Enrique walked to the matriarch, holding out one of the papers from his research. It showed an illustration of the Siberian landscape and a huge sepulcher carved from a single slab of black marble, and covered in intricate Forging metalwork of silver vines and looping script.

“In the fourteenth century, a noted traveler named Ibn Battuta observed the burial of a great Mongolian khan. He was placed with his greatest treasures, along with his favorite guards and female slaves. All of them were closed up beneath it.”

“The female slaves and guards were killed?” asked Hypnos.

“They died there, eventually,” said Enrique.

Hypnos paled.

“Some cultures thought that one could not construct an important building without tithing a human life, and so they buried people in the foundations of buildings.” Enrique drew out another paper, this one showing a brick wall. “For example, the Albanian legend of Rozafa where a young woman sacrificed herself so a castle could be built.”