"What use could a faerie have for a stele?" she asked. "You don't draw runes, and they only work for Shadowhunters."
"No use for a stele," he said. "But for the precious demon bone of the handle, quite a lot."
She shook her head. "Choose something else."
The phouka leaned in. He smelled of salt and seaweed baking in the sun. "Listen," he said. "If you enter Faerie, you will again see the face of someone you loved, who is dead."
"What?" Shock stabbed through Emma. "You're lying."
"You know I cannot lie."
Emma's mouth had gone dry.
"You must not tell the others what I told you, or it will not happen," said the phouka. "Nor can I tell you what it means. I am only a messenger-but the message is true. If you wish to look again upon one you have loved and lost, if you wish to hear their voice, you must pass through the Gate of Lir."
Emma drew the stele from her belt. A pang went through her as she handed it over. She turned away blindly from the phouka, his words ringing in her ears. She was barely aware of Mark brushing past her, the last to speak to the water faerie. Her heart was pounding too hard.
One you have loved and lost. But there were many, so many, lost in the Dark War. Her parents-but she dared not even think of them; she would lose her ability to think, to go on. The Blackthorns' father, Andrew. Her old tutor, Katerina. Maybe-
The sound of wind and waves died down. Mark stood before the phouka in silence, his face pale: All three of the others looked stricken, and Emma burned to know what the faerie had told them. What could compel Jules, or Mark, or Cristina, to cooperate?
The phouka thrust out his hand. "Lir's Gate opens," he said. "Take it now, or flee back toward the shore; the moon's road begins to dissolve already."
There was a sound like shattering ice, melting under spring sunlight. Emma looked down: The shining path below was riven with black where the water was springing up through cracks.
Julian grabbed her hand. "We have to go," he said. Behind Mark, who stood ahead of them on the path, an archway of water had formed. It gleamed bright silver, the inside of it churning with water and motion.
With a laugh, the phouka leaped from the path with an elegant dive and slipped between the waves. Emma realized she had no idea what Mark had given him. Not that it seemed to matter now. The path between them was shattering rapidly: Now it was in pieces, like ice floes in the Arctic.
Cristina was on Emma's other side. The three of them pushed forward, leaping from one solid piece of path to another. Mark was gesturing toward them, shouting, the archway behind him solidifying. Emma could see green grass through it, moonlight and trees. She pushed Cristina forward; Mark caught her, and the two of them vanished through the gate.
She moved to take a step forward, but the path gave way under her feet. For what seemed like much more than seconds she tumbled toward the black water. Then Julian had caught her. His arms around her, they fell together through the arch.
* * *
The shadows had lengthened in the attic. Arthur sat motionless, gazing out the window with its torn paper at the moonlight over the sea. He could guess where Julian and the others were now: He knew the moon's road, as he knew the other roads of Faerie. He had been driven down them by hooting packs of pixies and goblins, riding ahead of their masters, the unearthly beautiful princes and princesses of the gentry. Once in a winter forest he had fallen, and his body had shattered the ice of a pond. He recalled watching his blood spray across the pond's silvered surface.
"How pretty," a faerie lady had mused, as Arthur's blood melted into the ice.
He thought of his mind that way sometimes: a shattered surface reflecting back a broken and imperfect picture. He knew his madness was not like human madness. It came and went, sometimes leaving him barely touched so he hoped it was gone forever. Then it would return, crushing him beneath a parade of people no one else could see, a chorus of voices no one else could hear.
The medicine helped, but the medicine was gone. Julian had always brought the medicine, from the time he was a small boy. Arthur wasn't sure how old he was now. Old enough. Sometimes Arthur wondered if he loved the boy. If he loved any of his brother's children. There had been times he had awoken from dreams in which terrible things had happened to them with his face wet with tears.
But that might have been guilt. He had lacked either the ability to raise them, or the bravery to let the Clave replace him with a better guardian. Though who would have kept them together? No one, perhaps, and family should be together.