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“Ah! She speaks! You hear that, Otto?”

“Good. She’ll be doing a whole lot of talkin’ in a few minutes.”

A few minutes. Just a few minutes between me and my captor.

A hand suddenly pushed down on my head. “Duck, princess. We’re goin’ up.”

My scalp glanced against a timber frame as I lowered it, and I collided with Otto.

I heard the machinations then. The sound of iron squealing together, of metal chains clinking along their tracks. The floor beneath my boots shuddered, and I pitched forward as we moved. Upward, upward.

The groan of timber and the strain of metal wheels rebounded around us, but after a short time, they disappeared altogether.

Silence fell, and a hand prodded me from behind. “Out you get,” Otto said.

My boots met uneven ground once more. It felt drier here, compacted. The light was muted but certainly brighter. I could see the fine fiber of the burlap.

And then a voice called to us from ahead.

I jumped at its sound, shrank against the reverberations.

“Mornin’, boys,” it said. “You’re late.”

It was heavily accented. Northern, like the other men’s, and not at all familiar. It was like smoke. Smooth and deep and gut-churning.

“Yeah, well, Scottie knocked her out for a good long while, and we carried her most of the way here,” Otto blithered. I heard Scottie grumble at the accusation.

“How were I to know she’d drop like that?”

“She’sArtisan, you idiot. Theyalldrop like that.”

The other voice interrupted them then, and Otto and Scottie fell quiet. “Take off her blindfold. Untie her hands.”

Perhaps its tenor had the same effect on them as it did me, because Scottie cleared his throat, swallowing whatever rebuttal he’d readied, and I felt the rope fall free of my wrists. The burlap pulled back over my face.

I took one long, sweet breath. Still cloying. Still earth-rich and damp, but it filled my lungs.

I blinked rapidly, trying to dispel the sudden light that poured through an aperture at the end of the passage. I looked over to my captors in the light and found that Otto was short, dark-skinned, and wiry. He had close-cropped black hair and a miner’s uniform. Scottie was distractingly huge, pale, with no hair and a bulging neck.

We were still underground, still enclosed by walls made of dirt. But the passage was short. There were rough timber steps leading to our escape, and on the bottom rungs sat a large man in black boots, a black expression, and a worn brown coat.

He was younger than I’d figured, certainly more handsome. He had defined cheekbones and jaw, wavy chestnut hair, the chain of a pocket watch against his chest. From the inside of his coat, he pulled a tin lighter and lit a cigarette between his lips.

“Hello, Miss Clarke,” he said in that same drawl, as though every word dragged from his lips was one too many. He studied me openly, his eyes gliding over my feet, legs, waist, chest, neck, and then, finally, his eyes found mine.

Prismatic blue.

A shock bolted through me.

“I’ve been lookin’ for you,” he said.

Then there was nothing but a weighted silence.

I stared at him, and he at me.

Eventually, Otto interjected. “She’s definitely the one, boss. We tailed her for a good long while, didn’t we, Scottie?”

“Are you the earth Charmer?” the man asked me. Though it seemed he knew.