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wings that had not been seen by the Court in over twenty years.
    He looked up at her, not bothering to conceal his anger or hurt. “Get out, Ayla. I am tired.”
    She could have reminded him that she was Queene…. But she had never been his Queene. She could have ignored him and stayed…. But she had done so before, and had accomplished nothing. No subtle shift of power between them, no grudging reconciliation. He would forgive her when he chose and no sooner.
    Three
    I t was simple enough to find the search party Malachi had ordered—what had he hoped to accomplish by sending them into the Darkworld?—and convince them to give up their search. He insisted on staying behind, in case there were stragglers, even after the soldiers insisted there would not be.
    And there would not be. That was not Cedric’s purpose in staying. When he’d put enough distance between himself and the guards, he changed direction, and pulled from his shirtsleeve the rolled paper diagram that would lead him to the Gypsy camp. The tunnels were not named on the drawing. Many of them went unnamed in the Darkworld, so it would not have helped. And only a few symbols, known only to those who were intended to find the place, indicated that it was a map at all. Dika had gone over it with him many times, though he’d protested ever needing to use it. He did not like to be in close proximity to mortals—at least, not large groups of them—and did not know how they would react to his presence. She’d been correct in her assumption that someday, his need to find her would be stronger than his desire to stay away.
    He followed the map, doubting every turn, fearful of what might lurk in the shadows. It had been a long time since he’d had to use his battle training, and despite what most outside of the Guild believed, he’d rarely gone on missions as an Assassin, content to orchestrate the assignments and send others to do the fighting. He knew of the horrors that could lurk in these tunnels, knew in theory how to protect himself, but he’d not had the practice for a long time.
    It was a relief when the tunnels became less dark, less damp. He knew it was a trick of his mind to equate light with safety, for untold horrors already stalked through both dark and light. But there seemed to be a life energy pulsing along the walls that Cedric could see in bright handprints and hurried smears where shoulders and limbs had brushed the cement in passing. These mortal imprints did not flare with terrified or angry energy, but happy excitement—the feeling of being home.
    It was a feeling that Cedric could easily recognize but not truly understand. Faeries did not have homes. A dwelling to return to every night was a prison. The true joy of their existence had always been in the roaming, the never knowing where you would wake that morning or sleep that night. Trooping, that was what they had been made for. It made their lives in the Underground a particularly cruel hell.
    Here, the feeling of home was pleasant, not stifling, and he continued on, alert for the rising of sound, which always accompanied the living spaces of mortals. The tunnel bent, and there were no more electric lightbulbs, but grates that let in the starlight. The scent of wood smoke, a smell he hadn’t experienced in decades, drifted up the tunnel, and, sooner than he expected, the buzz of mixed music and conversation. He rounded another bend and staggered on his feet at the sight of his destination.
    It was as if the Underground had disappeared. The ground was Earth. Hard packed, dotted with bits of crumbled cement at intervals, but real Earth. The walls were not the carefully constructed tunnels the Humans had burrowed through the ground for pipes and trains and sewage, but rough rock walls that arched high, surrounding a hole with irregular edges and no grates, no barriers between the Upworld and the Underground. Through it, the view of the starry sky was blocked only by the black shapes