Ilsa narrowed her eyes at Cogna. She only knew two things for sure about the little Oracle: they were powerful, and they were devious. It didn’t make for a person she wanted to play this game with.
“And what possible motive you got for doing that for me?” she said.
Cogna’s expression suggested this was a stupid question. “Because I want to be on the right side of history. Your side.”
Ilsa’s nostrils flared. “Then you better get comfortable, kid, because I ain’t picked no sides. I’ll be damned if I let some strangely confident thirteen-year-old with a questionable sense of loyalty dictate my fate to me.”
“I’m dictating nothing,” said Cogna. The child’s imperviousness to insults only made Ilsa want to try harder. “Your fate lies ahead of you whether I See it or not, and whether I tell it to the world or keep it between us. Don’t you want to be destined for greatness, Ilsa Ravenswood?”
Ilsa turned and climbed back into bed, though she wouldn’t have been surprised if Cogna was impervious to social cues too. “What I want is a good night’s sleep in a comfortable bed, and a meal in the morning, and hot water for my bath, and a little good conversation.”
She hunkered down into the pillows and pulled the blanket over her head. Cogna had a hand on the doorknob when she sprang back up. “And on the subject of greatness – I’m a great magician, and I’m a great thief, and I’m a great shifter, and I play a bloody mean hand of three-card brag. And I’m a damned great detective, so believe me, I’ll find you out if you breathe a word of this city-saving nonsense to anyone!”
Ilsa settled down again, but she didn’t hear Cogna leave.
“We must follow our talents, Ilsa Ravenswood,” they said. “They will lead us down the road to greatness.”
If that was a riddle, Ilsa was too tired to puzzle it out. She let Cogna leave without another retort.
It was only after the sound of footsteps had faded that Ilsa noticed Cogna had left something on the dresser. Warily, she climbed out of bed to retrieve it.
The toy was as familiar as it was unique; the same size, the same wood, but feline rather than canine, with pinhole nicks to resemble a leopard’s spots. It was solid.
It was Ilsa. Impossibly, she would bet good money that it was carved by the same hand, and it made her throat close. Had Oren made this? She had never asked him about the wooden wolf, never thanked him for the only link she’d had to her family and her world. Hadn’t she decided the person who made it must have cared for her? She imagined a different future, in which he got to give her the leopard himself. Perhaps she would have understood the gesture, understood him, just as well as she did now. Now that he’d died for her family.
She handled the leopard slowly, turning it over in her hands, weighing it, running her fingers over every part of its sanded skin. She wondered, if Oren had asked, what kind of animal she would have liked. This didn’t match her brother’s, but it wasn’t wearing her memories of the attic either. It didn’t offer any clues or make any promises, but nor was it a vessel for someone else’s secret. It was more hers, and Ilsa liked it better, and she liked it worse.
In the end, she left the leopard on the dresser where Cogna had deposited it – positioning it carefully like she shouldn’t have disturbed it in the first place – and returned to bed, so that she might finally get some sleep.
* * *
But real sleep continued to elude her.
As her addled mind drifted about in the middle ground between consciousness and rest, she felt the pieces of the Zoo settle like a puzzle. Only, whichever way she arranged them, nothing quite fit.
She kept seeing them; Eliot, begging, the desperation etched across his face. Hester, with that look of hatred she reserved just for him.
His queen. Her loyal soldier.
You don’t hate him, then.
I don’t know.
Maybe she did. Maybe she had hated him before.
Ilsa felt herself climb from the bed, slip her feet into her slippers, and search around for her robe. All the while, a single thought pounded against her skull:
Had Hester already known?
She crept down the dark corridor, one hand against the wall. She wondered foggily what time it was. She wondered what she had failed to see because she couldn’t read her cousin’s tells.
D’you know why he cancelled the trip?
Eliot, begging. For his life. For forgiveness.
She had heard them whispering, hadn’t she? Something about… oh, she wished she’d written it down. It was what Oren would have done.
D’you know why he cancelled the trip?
She couldn’t remember. She willed her aching eyes to adjust to the dark. Her head swam with grief and fury and exhaustion, and a cloying fear.
Sometimes a person sees what they expect to see. It was how the Otherworlders remained so oblivious to the flashes of magic that cropped up in their world; the ones Ilsa had spent seventeen years chasing.
She never saw what she expected to see. She always looked for the truth. Didn’t she?
Eliot, begging. The prickle on the back of her neck.
Something had been wrong. She had been wrong. She had seen the obvious, even when her instincts had known otherwise.
That look. The desperation. He hadn’t been begging Hester for forgiveness. He had been begging her to defend him. And Ilsa should have known why, because Hester had slipped up. She was supposed to have believed the trip was happening on the thirtieth, the day after the attack. But something wasn’t right about what Hester had told her.
D’you know why he cancelled the trip?
Cancelled? That was the day of the attack.
41
“Was it you?”
The lamps were out in Hester’s chamber, but the curtains were open. Hester was silhouetted in her usual
