Jack watched the scene unfolding at the gates with a combination of anger and amusement. True, there was more anger than amusement, but he couldn't deny that it was funny, the way Danvers tried to handle a crowd – the way he blushed and bristled and said things like "How dare you?", "What are you insinuating?" and "If you would only allow me to explain-"

His girls had more presence of mind. They closed the gates before the stunned pedestrians started to coalesce into an angry mob, and dragged Elsie indoors. 

The precautions they were taking over her safety seemed to thoroughly annoy Elsie, but had allowed herself to be dragged away. Jack couldn't imagine – after what he'd seen this morning – that anyone could drag her anywhere against her will.

Danvers, though, stayed to remonstrate with the crowd forming outside the gates, and their questions were already getting nasty. "How did she come back to life?" and "Why did you hide her away all this time?" were quite reasonable, but "What have you done to her eyes?" was dangerous, not least because Danvers responded to it so angrily.

"How dare you? Are you insinuating that I'd lay violent hands on a lady?"

This was going to go bad pretty quickly. Jack didn't trust a ring of gargoyles to protect his girls, especially not petrified versions of the same gargoyles who'd imprisoned them, so he either had to diffuse the situation gently, or turn his Academy into a fortress and prepare for a siege. 

He knew a few tricks for controlling crowds, but what he really needed was Joel, with his fiery enthusiasm, or Alice, with her rock-hard certainty that she was the only sensible person in the world.

Still, it was better to be without Alice when you needed her than with Alice when you didn't, so he got out his revolver and tried things his way. 

He fired a shot into the air, waited for the startled shouts and reverberations to die down, then spoke into the silence. 

"Ladies and gentlemen, please remain calm. Eve is here of her own free will."

"Why can't we hear that from her?" said a man with a bowler hat at the front of the crowd. He was clasping the bars of the wrought-iron gates with both hands like a convict.

"She was trying to tell you," said Jack, "before you all started shouting and swarming and banging on the gates. When you did that, my girls thought it would be expedient to bring her indoors. I'm sure everyone here is a well-wisher, but you will be aware that there are many who aren't: people who say she brought evil into the world once and could do so again – even people who would want to have her shot and stuffed and put back in that glass case so everything could go back the way it was. Would you feel safe, letting her speak in front of a mob?"

He slipped his gun back into his pocket, and spread his arms reassuringly. "Now, she is the mother-goddess of the demons, but she's also a lady, and her wishes should be respected. Would you go to church like this? Would you bang your fists on the altar and demand the almighty show himself? She was vulnerable and confused when she first awoke, and asked Mr Danvers to keep her hidden. Now that she seems to be ready to declare herself, I'm sure she'll be happy to speak to you, but not out in the open where anyone could hurt her. From tomorrow, I will start letting people in individually – thoroughly searched and thoroughly supervised. And she'll be able to assure you herself that she's safe and well, and has only waited this long to make her presence known because she has been in danger."

He turned his back before they had a chance to argue. He could feel their stares and their half-formed protests prickling in the back of his neck as he walked away, but nobody shouted or threw anything.

Very wisely, in Jack's opinion, Danvers didn't linger, but hurried after him as he made his way back up the gravel drive. "Thank you, Jack."

"Thank you," Jack repeated, with a contemptuous shake of his head. "These are my girls. Don't thank me for protecting my girls, as though it's a whim rather than a vocation."

"You think of Elsie as one of your girls?"

"Would you rather I didn't?"

"I'm very glad of it at the moment," said Danvers diplomatically. "Do you – do you really suppose her to be in as much danger as you made out?"

Jack shrugged. "Anyone who hates new-breeds – which, outside this city, is almost everyone – will know that you can hurt them by getting rid of Elsie. Of course, they might assume she has an army of winged monsters to protect her, especially now, but that won't deter everyone. There are more than enough idiots in the world to keep us on our toes."

He stopped, painfully aware that he sounded just like Sam. That was what happened when you ran people like Sam out of town. You ended up having to carry all the world's anger on your own shoulders.

Danvers took off his hat and twisted it between his fingers. "Do you think the ring of gargoyles will keep out intruders?"

"We'll find out," said Jack, trying to make his tone more cheerful. "There'll be at least one attempted break-in today. If we're not interrupted in the middle of Ginniver's wedding, we'll know the gargoyles work."

"And if we are?"

"I'll handle it."

Danvers gave him a rueful smile. "Once upon a time, that sentence would have filled me with dread."

"It should still," said Jack. "Now ride down to Osney and speak to the editor of the Oxford Times. It's vitally important that our version of events is the one that appears in the paper tomorrow. And make sure you're back by two o'clock. I want us to be all together for the wedding."

Of course, they were not all together, and he was keenly aware of it. He still hadn't found the three slave-girls who'd been recaptured by the master, and this fact was a constant, biting irritation, like a mosquito he couldn't catch. 

He'd been putting off Ginniver's wedding as long as he could, partly because the groom was an oaf who wasn't worthy of her, partly because he was sure she wasn't ready, and partly because he'd wanted to serve up the master's head to his girls at the wedding-feast. But she couldn't be put off any longer. She was determined to have this banal fruit and vegetable peddler, because he was ordinary, and the ordinary must have looked pretty good to someone who'd suffered in such an extraordinary way.

And so the wedding went on as if there had been no demonic interruption. The combined enthusiasm of three hundred girls was piled up behind it. Ginniver had been waiting for a long time, and wouldn't let anything interfere with her plans to be a normal woman again. She was already furious that Elsie had upstaged her by parading demons around the grounds on her special day.

And it was an important event for everyone. The Academy had been decorated as though the wedding was a ritual designed to bring on the spring – not just in the year, but in the slave-girls' lives. Garlands of tender pink rosebuds hung in the frosty fields, symbolizing new life from desolation. The trees were leafed with hundreds of birds. And, when a gust of wind caught the branches, little ice crystals were shaken off them in a spray like spring blossom. He suspected Elsie had something to do with the last two. The breeze and the birds seemed to obey her. Perhaps they had a little bit of demon in them.

In fact, in lots of ways, Elsie animated the proceedings. The maypole dancing wouldn't have been half so light-footed without her. It was as though she had so much innocence and wonder to spare that she could afford to loan some out to the slave-girls for a day.

At any rate, Jack decided he owed her on behalf of his girls, so he made an effort to talk to her as she was stacking plates in the lushly-decorated marquee after the wedding feast. She still had a few lumps of confetti lodged in her hair.

"Did I hurt your feelings?" he asked. "When I told Danvers to get you out of my sight?"

She wobbled a little on being addressed by him, but managed not to drop the plates. "Do you mean in July?"

Jack blinked. "July?"

"We first met in July," she explained. "It's February."

He stared at her. "It's February?"

He had known it was winter, but February? Seven months since Ellini died? How was that possible? "When – when was Christmas?" he stammered.

Elsie considered this with her customary earnestness. "I think you spent it raiding that jewellers in Soho for the remaining members of the Order. Mr Danvers was very impressed. He said nobody died and a lot of information was gathered."

Jack stared into space for a moment. "I wondered why they were wearing paper crowns..."

"Mr Danvers says you can't stop working," she ventured.

"I'm familiar with everything Danvers says, or will ever say," said Jack briskly. "You don't have to tell me."

"He says you're dying of grief."

She said this quite mildly, as though she was sorry to countermand his wishes, but Mr Danvers's views really couldn't be dismissed.

Jack found this extremely irritating, but decided that the best way forward was to be bitingly, achingly cheerful. "Alas, no," he said, catching hold of her hand, and pressing her fingertips to the cold silver shackle at his wrist. It was always cold, however hot his skin got. It was a constant reminder of that icy moment of realization when he'd woken up in Radcliffe Square with Ellini's blood on his hands.

"Even if I wanted to die of grief, I couldn't, because I have one of these." He licked his lips, and went on, without much hope, "You don't know how to take it off, I suppose?"

Elsie ran her fingers over the bracelet eagerly, tracing out its letters and adding them together under her breath. "This is magic, isn't it? The one thing Mr Danvers can't tell me about."

Jack smiled. "Oh, I think there are lots of things Danvers can't tell you about. Do you know how to take it off?"

"Oh yes," she said suddenly, and then stopped, perhaps sensing his sudden, stupid moment of hope. "That is, yes I can see what it is, and I can see the woman with the power to take it off, but I can't remove it."

"You can see the French girl?" said Jack, intrigued despite himself. He'd had no news of Matthilde Marron for – well, for seven months, he realized now. He had even been desperate enough to send Alice and Val into the fire-mines in search of her. Both women were probably only helping him because they wanted to see him killed, but it had been funny, all the same, watching them eye each other with pathological distaste. Each thought the other was the reason why women weren't taken seriously in this world. 

Miserable as he was, Jack felt a warm glow whenever he pictured them together, bickering about the best way to get things done. 

"Is the woman French?" Elsie queried. "I can't see that. I know she's very clever, and – fleshy..." She left the word dangling, as though she was uncertain what it meant.

"Fleshy?"

"Um..." Elsie tilted her head. "I mean both that she has a lot of flesh, and that flesh is all she believes in. Sorry. I wasn't sure how much work you could make one word do. Dr Petrescu was telling us about a man called Shakespeare who could load up a word with five or six different meanings, but that was a long time ago--"

She stopped again, and swept an agitated hand through her hair, dislodging some of the confetti. "But I forgot, I'm not supposed to tell you we visit Dr Petrescu."

"I know where you go," said Jack, his head swimming with the idea that the mother-goddess of the demons was nervous around him. "And, even if I didn't, I know Danvers." He didn't add, 'I know him as only a man who'll never be him can.'

But she seemed to hear it anyway, because she smiled. Perhaps she thought his idiotic wish to be Danvers was because he admired Danvers. Nothing could have been further from the truth.

"The fleshy girl..." she said, with another nervous motion of her hands. "I can see her coming for you."

"You can see the future?"

"No. And not much of the present. I think I can only see what the demons see, and go where the demons go, so I suppose some sort of demon must be looking at her now. This--" She touched the bracelet again "--was made by a demon but enchanted by a new-breed, so I can understand its workings, but not manipulate them. I have no power over humanity, and new-breeds are part-human. The tiniest grain of humanity makes magic volatile and unpredictable, which is probably part of the reason why new-breeds as a race have had such terrible luck."

"You have no idea," said Jack.

"I can see the past too," she said, with nervous pride. "I can go walking around in people's memories as if I was really there."

"Well, stay out of mine."

Elsie raised her eyebrows above the blindfold, perhaps to imply that she really didn't need telling. But she was too diplomatic to say so. Instead, she repeated her irritatingly Danvers-like 'Um'. 

"Um... The French girl might kill you if she catches you..."

"That's the plan," said Jack, with more of his biting cheerfulness.

"Whose plan?"

"Everyone's – mine, Ellini's, Sam's, and – needless to say – the French girl's. It's nice when so many people's intentions coincide."

Elsie sniffed, her manner becoming suddenly chilly. "My mother wouldn't have wanted you dead, even if you did deserve it."

"No, you're right. She wanted me to live and suffer. But I've had seven months of that, as you were kind enough to point out, and it's beginning to wear a little thin."

Elsie gave him one of her solemn looks. She didn't have any eyes with which to look, but the effect was no less solemn. "I don't think she's really gone."

"Yeah, I don't know what that means," said Jack, biting back the anger. He was sick – oh, how he was sick – of all those platitudes. Most people didn't dare to utter them to him now, but he could sense them, hovering unsaid in the air, in sympathy cards and sermons – even on gravestones. "Our loved ones never really leave us," or "she's gone to a better place," or "she's beyond pain now." She might have been beyond pain now, but there had been so much pain in her final moments that he could imagine it following her into death, clinging to her skirts as she sank beyond his reach forever. They had never felt pain if they thought it had any limits.

And again – as always – there was that faint whisper on the edge of hearing, a counterpoint to his furious thoughts:

She came back to you. It was her.

Well, so what if it was? So what if she was alive enough to drive him mad with longing every night? Where did that get him? What did it give him, except more pain?

"Do you mean she'll always be alive in our hearts as long as we remember her?" he demanded. "That's bollocks. Do you think there's some mystical, magical world where we'll all be reunited after death? That's even bigger bollocks. Death is final. When you're dead, you take on the same status as fiction. You only exist in people's heads. In fact, it's even worse than fiction, because we sentimentalize the dead. We give them sweeter tempers or smaller noses. And all the surprises, all the things that made her a living, separate being, disappear. She's just you and me now, Elsie – just a picture in our heads. She could not be more gone."

Elsie was jutting out her jaw, half-frightened and half-defiant. "Then explain this," she said, unbuttoning the collar of her gown, and pointing to a spot just above her breastbone. She waved her other hand impatiently, and a gust of wind flapped through the entrance of the tent, extinguishing the candles.

He could now see the lights on her skin, like a dusting of stars. The one she was pointing to was the only one that was still. The others whirled around it as though in some wild, erratic orbit, getting stronger and fainter as the fancy took them, while the central glow remained steady.

Jack took a step backwards, realizing for the first time that he was as nervous of her as she was of him. He didn't like magic. Magic had taken away his mind and his memories. It had made him a stranger to himself – or horribly familiar to himself in a strange way, which was even worse.

He tried to think of something practical to say, but he could only manage: "So this is why Danvers insists you're in bed before nightfall."

She wasn't listening anyway – she was too angry at the suggestion that her mother was gone. Or maybe at his despair. He had seen her shrinking back whenever the slave-girls sank into despondency, the way a prisoner kept in the dark squirms away from bright lights. Despair was so contrary to her nature that she couldn't stand to be in the same room as it.

"These lights represent every living demon or new-breed," she said. "Everyone whose life is tied to mine. Obviously, there isn't enough room for them all to be on my skin at one time, so they come and go like migrating herds, sometimes going out if the creature dies, or winking on if a new creature's born. But this one always stays in the same place, and it's my mother, I'm sure of it. She stays right over my heart – the one fixed point in all this chaos – like the North Star. Because the memory of her guides me through everything."

She stopped, teetering on the edge of words she was obviously afraid to say. Jack wouldn't have thought it possible, given her uncanny, cosmic powers, but she was crying – or, anyway, two damp patches were spreading over her blindfold.

He stepped forwards again, his practical nature finally reasserting itself. He couldn't understand magic or hope, so the only things he could take issue with were her anatomical details.

"That's not your heart," he said, frowning. "Your heart's lower down. This--" he went on, hovering his hand above the strange, stationary spot of light. "This is..." He suddenly laughed as realization slammed into his stomach like a boot. "This is the place where I stabbed her – close enough to the heart to ensure eventual death, but sufficiently far away to make it slow and painful."

Elsie flinched, and then raised a hand to her mouth. "Oh – that makes sense, actually. I know we're linked together anatomically, because Mr Danvers said the night he found me was the night she died, and I was coughing up smoke while she was trapped in a burning building, and losing blood while she was bleeding to death. Both he and Dr Petrescu gave me a transfusion, hoping to save her by proxy, but--"

"I didn't know that," said Jack, mesmerized with horror. "Why didn't anyone tell me that?"

Elsie frowned. "Uh – because you punch anyone who even mentions her name?"

"I would have--" Jack started, and then paused. Would he have been less angry with Sergei and Danvers if he'd known they'd tried to save her? It was still too late. They had all contributed to her death in some way. It had been like the death of Julius Caesar – everyone had had a stab.

"Anyway," said Elsie, as though they were straying from the material point. "This light tells me that she's not gone. It wouldn't be here if she was completely dead, I'm sure of it."

"How do you know it represents her?" said Jack, resisting the urge to shout at her naivety. It was Danvers's fault. He had breathed all this hopefulness into her.

"I just know," she said, jutting out her chin again. "Like you'd know where your cannons are on a battlefield. I can't see where she is, or what form her continued existence has taken – whether she's a ghost, or--"

"So you know it's her, but you don't know where or what she is?"

"No. But I know when."

Jack sighed wearily. "I'm sorry?"

But again, Elsie wasn't listening. She was raking a hand through her hair, with a dreamy expression on her face. "I bet that's it," she said at last. "I bet that's why she's not gone. You couldn't break her heart because it was already broken. You couldn't kill her in that church because she wasn't all there to be killed."

Jack wanted to storm out. Trying to console him with platitudes was one thing, but trying to console him with nonsense was far worse. He was halfway to the door of the tent when he began to understand what she was talking about. It didn't make him any less angry, but it was intriguing enough to stop his feet.

"She's always lived in that moment when her family was killed," Elsie went on. "She was only ever haunting the present. You couldn't kill her, because how can you kill a ghost? I can't see where she is, or what she looks like, but I can tell she'll always be alive in that moment, because the moment caught her and pinned her down like a lepidopterist with a butterfly."

She paused here, evidently pleased to have got the word 'lepidopterist' into a conversation. Clearly, she had got up to 'L' in the Encyclopaedia Britannica.

And Jack would always hate lepidopterists from that moment on, because the triumph of crow-baring that word into a sentence carried her away. "I can even show you," she said, her little, pointed mouth curling up at the corners. "I can take you to where her life is. I can give you half an hour at the heart of the matter."

"What are you-?" said Jack, horribly aware that it was already too late. She was magic, and magic could do whatever it wanted to him. It could toss him around like a piece of driftwood after a shipwreck. He couldn't fight it.

"Close your eyes," she instructed.

He didn't, but as it turned out, this didn't matter. She waved a hand and they closed for him. A moment later, he fell to the floor.