Matthi opened the door to her office with a lined, shadowy face which suggested she had fallen asleep at her desk.

"Ugh," she said, after half a glance at Ellini. "Every time I see you, you get glowier."

"Matthi," she said, fidgeting with impatience. "My sister-"

"Seen 'er," said Matthi. "Nice girl. She talks a bit much, but then some people like that kind of thing."

She glanced again at Ellini and sighed, pulling the door wider. "D'you wanna talk about it?"

This was all the invitation Ellini needed. "Oh Matthi! I'm so – I can't even explain. Everything's different this morning."

"I can tell. Nice hair, by the way. Looks dyed, but with depth rather than colour."

Ellini raised a hand to check that her hat was still in place. Nobody else had mentioned the difference in her hair. She had hoped that, pinned up and covered with a suitable hat, it was unnoticeable. But then she'd never been able to hide anything from Matthi.

"Jack described it as a kind of dark glow," she ventured.

"I felt the spell take effect, d'you know that? About ten o'clock last night. Anyone with a magical inclination would've felt it, I reckon. Which means Madam Myrrha's probably got a fearful 'eadache this morning."

She went to sit behind her desk – which, Ellini couldn't help but notice, had a half-empty bottle of whisky on it. "What's it do?" she added.

"I'm sorry?"

"The new 'air," said Matthi, putting her feet up on the desk. "Does it do anything?"

"I think it's just symbolic of – of a change inside me."

"Yeah," said Matthi. "The glowiness. I'm with ya."

For the first time, it occurred to Ellini that her friend might not want to hear about her happiness. In the same moment, it occurred to her that she didn't have to talk about it. She and Matthi had always been able to communicate without words. And in any case, the feeling didn't need expression. It wasn't so unsteady that it needed to be bolstered by being talked about.

"How are things with the girls?" she said carefully. "And with you?"

"It's the same thing."

"All right," said Ellini, smiling. "But that's not an answer."

Matthi's hand wandered to the neck of the whisky bottle, and then snapped back again. "Let's walk, shall we?" she said, standing up so suddenly that she jolted the desk. "I always like to visit the 'ope Gallery before breakfast. You can tell me about the fire-mines on the way."

The Hope Gallery was the long room on the first floor which housed Emma Hope's paintings. There was a brass plaque above the door which encapsulated Emma's tender-hearted sentiments:

Never forget. But, for God's sake, forgive.

And inside – immaculately framed and mounted on the walls – were her paintings and sketches. Not the lovely, pastoral scenes she was painting now at the Ruskin School of Art, but the slave-girl scenes. Canvases as dark as Caravaggio's, oil paintings that were all black and red and sickly white, sketches where the pencil had bitten deep into the paper.

They were robbed of some of their power by the daylight pouring in through the windows. But not all. Emma had a talent.

"You visit this place before breakfast?" said Ellini, as they wandered from one canvas to another. "It would take away my appetite."

"Depends what kind of breakfast you're 'aving. If it's a liquid breakfast, this place sets you up a treat."

"Matthi, do you miss the fire-mines?"

She looked up and shifted her shoulders. "What kind of question is that to ask a girl? Do I miss the fire-mines? Do I miss being whipped and beaten? Do I miss watching my friends die?"

"That's not what I asked," said Ellini, still holding her gaze.

"I'm not a masochist."

With a sigh, Ellini looked away. She had been about to protest that that wasn't what she'd asked either, but she didn't want to hound her. Matthi had something to say, perhaps. They weren't in the habit of discussing her problems, so she probably didn't know how to begin.

So Ellini started babbling on her own account – not about Jack and how amazing he was, though she was sorely tempted – but about the discoveries she had made in the fire-mines. She told Matthi about Faustus and all his revelations, about the cave of sleeping female warriors. How they had eyes, when the males didn't. How they had been entombed alive in pouring cement.

"I wondered if Elsie had known about it all along, and turned the male gargoyles to stone as a sort of – appropriate punishment."

"It'd be more appropriate if they were never gonna wake up," said Matthi. "They're free in five 'undred years, while the women are just dead."

"But they're..." Ellini grimaced and trailed off. She didn't like talking about this. "They're conscious the whole time, aren't they? Five hundred years of thinking about what you did, and watching the world go by without you. At least the women's suffering was brief."

"Thinking about what you did is only painful if you regret it," said Matthi. "I'd be all for their suffering if I thought it was going to do any good."

"Oh Matthi."

"What does that mean? Oh Matthi? Are you exasperated with me, or afraid I'm right?"

Ellini smiled grudgingly. "A bit of both, I suppose."

She turned to Matthi. Her hair was pinned back, but straggly, wet-looking curls still hung down by the side of her face, and at the nape of her neck. Ellini was used to twisting them around her finger, though she sensed it would be a bad idea to try that now.

"Why are you still dyeing your hair?" she asked.

"I've a mind to be different."

"Well, that's true in so many ways."

Matthi shrugged her shoulders and walked on. She moved up the aisle of paintings until she came to rest beside a black, shiny canvas that depicted the lake where they had stretched out on the rocks together. That had been a place where they could confide in each other – where they could say anything. Was she trying to get that feeling back?

"What now?" she asked, so suddenly that Ellini started. "You go to Edinburgh? Your Kraken's already left without you, I suppose you know?"

"Yes. But he's waiting for me."

Matthi snorted but didn't comment. Instead, she said, "'Ow you gonna get away from your fella?"

"He'll let me go."

"Will 'e?"

It was the same as Jack's 'Are you?' from half an hour before – not really a question, just two forlorn syllables. It didn't convey doubt so much as despair.

Ellini placed a hand on Matthi's arm, and was not shaken off. "I don't know-" she started, and then cleared her throat and tried again. "It will be hard for me. To leave them."

"'Course it will," said Matthi. "You've been done up good and proper. You've got an 'usband and child now, even if that child is yer sister. What else is a woman supposed to want?"

Ellini considered this. She didn't feel that she was being reproached – mocked, maybe, but at least it was gentle. "How do men do it?" she wondered. "They leave their loved ones all the time – to go off to war, or make their fortunes. How can they-?"

"Them? They do it by keeping an insulating layer of contempt 'tween themselves and their loved ones at all times."

Ellini laughed. "I don't think that's true, Matthi."

"Oh, you want a nicer answer? Let's say it's education, then. Custom. They've been told that the point of their lives is to distinguish 'emselves, serve their country, make a fortune. We've been told that the point of our lives is to love."

Ellini turned to her suddenly. "You understand why I'm going, don't you?" It came out as a fierce whisper. It was hard to step back and let go of her arm.

"It's – it's not just what she does to young lovers," she added, scuffing the floorboards with the toe of her boot. "It's not even the fact that she's planning to kill the little mother and become Queen of the demons herself." She looked up, trying to raise her head above the roaring nausea kindled by that idea. "Imagine it, Matthi! A little mother who'd raise the demons and new-breeds in exactly the same way she raised Robin – by constantly testing them to make them strong, stripping everything away from them to make them self-reliant. Nobody deserves that, not even him."

Matthi raised her eyebrows. "We'll agree to disagree on that one. But you said it wasn't just that?"

"It's not, it's..." Ellini pressed her lips together. "She was behind what Robin did to my family, did I tell you that? I should have realized he wasn't clever enough to terrify me so effectively on his own – to take them from me in ways that had such a... a storybook simplicity."

She took a deep breath and visualised her door. She was back there, but she didn't have to stay. She didn't have to let the memories trigger their snowballing story, the way they used to.

"And now I find out that she's been moulding me and educating me from afar, like a... a distanced version of what she did to Robin."

"Thank God for the distance is all I can say," Matthi muttered. "I understand why you're going, love. But that don't matter. As long as you know why you're going, that ought to be enough. What else could be, after what we've been through?"

Ellini sighed. She felt as though there had been a small window – thin as an icicle – when her life had been her own, and she'd been able to risk it without fear of hurting anybody. After the stabbing in Oxford and before she fell – re-fell? Fell deeper? – in love with Jack. Before she acknowledged what she was to him. Before Sita came back.

She had not been happy, but there had been something marvellous about it. Cold and well-dressed and marvellous. She could never go back there again.

If she went to Myrrha now – when, she told herself, when she went to Myrrha now – she would just be play-acting, impersonating her old self from those Lambeth days. Would it be enough?

But then she heard Jack, from the dragons' cave, saying, 'You're not going to beat her by being an ice-queen, mouse. She's better at it than you are.'

And she remembered throwing up after taking the curse off William Parsons. And pleading ineffectually with Mari Lloyd before getting her head smashed through a glass cabinet. She had always been queasy and conscientious. Momentous things had happened to her – injuries and realisations and magical transformations – and she had always been herself. Perhaps that was better than being an ice-queen.

***

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