“Do you have any names?” challenged Gedeon.
Eliot’s expression was as rigid as stone. “I was working on it when the raid happened.”
Another rumble of derision from the group. Gedeon sneered. “You could have come to me. I could have helped you. I could have stopped the attack that cost Hester her magic!” He gestured at his cousin, who was still glaring coolly at Eliot.
“Hester—” Eliot whispered desperately. He took an unconscious step towards her, but Gedeon blocked his path.
“I should kill you,” he said.
It didn’t sound like much of a threat – maybe, like Ilsa, he was still expecting some miracle of vindication – but there were a few murmurs of assent from the wolves. Eliot ended them with that venomous look.
“Gedeon,” he said firmly, “I’m sorry. For everything.” Stirred by the realisation that Eliot was begging for his life, Ilsa found herself pressing forward. “But you couldn’t have helped me. Believe me, I have played every decision of the last three years over and over in my mind. Everything I have done… I had no choice.”
“Why?” Ilsa said. All eyes turned to her. “Why din’t you have a choice?”
She hadn’t meant to ask the question, but the longer she pondered the truth, the more wrong it felt. She couldn’t imagine an answer Eliot could give that she would believe.
Eliot looked at her for the first time, that rare tenderness melting away the ice, and heaved his shoulders in a lacklustre shrug. “It doesn’t matter any more.”
“It does to me,” said Ilsa, but her small voice was drowned out by Hester’s large one. It was the first time she had spoken since they had returned with Eliot in chains and told her the truth.
“He’s right,” she said. Everyone parted to let her into the centre of the room. “Whatever excuse he has to give, I don’t want to hear it.” She turned to Gedeon. “Just deal with him.”
There were jeers of concurrence from the wolves as Hester wheeled from the room. Eliot’s desolate gaze tracked her out. His mouth soundlessly formed her name.
“What does that mean?” said Ilsa, over the dozens of voices.
“It means hang him!” someone yelled before Gedeon could respond.
“We haven’t hanged someone since before Lyander’s day,” said Cassia, but her voice was lost among the growing shouts.
“He’s a traitor!”
“He’s with the enemy!”
“He should hang!”
Gedeon swept a level gaze over his soldiers. He was hearing their piece, Ilsa realised, and it wouldn’t do. She stepped close to her brother and spoke at a volume that demanded the rest of them be quiet.
“If you start killing us off,” she said, “soon enough there’ll be no Changelings left. We lost five wolves today already.” She paused, the room having fallen quiet, and looked each man and woman baying for Eliot’s blood in the eye, one by one, daring them to argue. “Won’t our enemies love it if we start killing each other and save them a job? Ain’t there enough death in this starsforsaken city already?”
When she looked back at Gedeon, she was the only one with his attention. He nodded, just once, and put his back to Eliot. Everything in the motion said that he had looked at his old friend for the last time.
“Escort him to the portal,” he said. “See that he passes through. Tell the abbey guard he is never to re-emerge. Ever.”
“Gedeon—” Eliot began.
“This is mercy,” Gedeon growled. “You can thank my sister, and then you can bid her farewell.”
He couldn’t have known the true impact of those words, but Ilsa felt them like a punch to the stomach. She knew from Eliot’s face that he did too. But how did she say goodbye? Wanting him mingled with wanting to hurt him and she couldn’t stand it.
In the end she looked away, and Eliot said nothing.
40
The Zoo was running out of medicines.
Aelius would live, and was growing stronger by the hour, but he was still taking a steady cocktail of pain and healing tonics. Most of those who had been at the orphanage were also in need, including Fyfe, who had shattered his radius, and Cassia, who had never let on, but had taken a cutting curse to her abdomen and lost a frightening amount of blood. Gedeon was frantic when she almost passed out – even more so when she refused to see him.
This was how Ilsa was left to heal from a tear in her shoulder, several broken ribs and a freshly bleeding bullet wound all on her own, with only the Otherworld tools of stitches, iodine, and gauze to aid her. Fliss dictated that there was no medicine either side of the portal more essential than sleep, but between the pain and her troubled mind, Ilsa couldn’t manage it.
She was back in her own bedchamber; her belongings had been quietly moved there while Fliss was stitching her shoulder. Sometime in the night, after the Zoo had quietened, she stretched, opened her eyes – and was jolted out of bed by the presence of a short, pale child sitting atop her dresser.
“What the bleeding hell is wrong with you?” she hissed. “Not everyone can See there’s a midnight visit from a shady little scoundrel in their future.”
“I’m sorry,” said Cogna, not sounding it in the least, “but you wanted to talk to me.” A little frown of concentration appeared between Cogna’s eyes, then was smoothed away again. “No. My mistake. You will want to talk to me when you hear what I have to say.”
Ilsa gritted her teeth. “Out with it, then.”
Cogna hopped down from the dresser. “It hasn’t escaped my notice that the only two witnesses of our conversation at the orphanage are dead,” the Oracle said matter-of-factly. “I’m sure it hasn’t escaped yours either.”
They were right, it hadn’t, though Ilsa had not decided what to do with this information yet. “So?”
“So,” said Cogna, rocking back and forth on the spot, “I have spent the last six months studiously not telling people that Ilsa Ravenswood will save the
