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“Fancy an earth Charmer, scared of bein’ underground,” muttered Scottie. “Maybe… maybe we got the wrong one?”

“Nah. I tailed her a good long while. She’s the spittin’ image of them posters. Look, she’s burned away her brand, see?”

“I dunno, Otto. Might be all for nothin’ if she can’t—”

“Shut up, Scottie.”

We walked interminably with our heads bowed and our backs hunched.

With each passing second, I grew colder.

The ceiling dripped constantly, sending rivulets past my collar.

The tunnel floor lay beneath an inch of water, and the walls cracked and groaned every so often, a monster awakening as we slunk through its veins.

Scottie and Otto spoke as though they weren’t enclosed on all sides by the earth’s mantle.

I breathed in shallow bursts. I counted.

I felt my heart squeeze and release in painful thrums as fear spiked and ebbed.

I was plagued with images of who I’d be met with on the other side of this tunnel and what they might do.

I reasoned these Craftsmen would not go to all this effort only to torture and kill me.

Better the Miners Union than the Artisan government. Just do as they say , I told myself.

I ignored the way the earth crept into my nostrils, past my lips, into my eyes.

“I just don’t like the way she was lookin’ at him,” Otto was saying. He had a Northern drawl, a boyish levity.

“Well, you ain’t a proper pair yet, are you? The girl can look as much as she pleases, at whomever she pleases.”

“She kissed me , though. Why’s she lookin’ at bloody Hank Shawley if she’s kissin’ me?”

“Perhaps she got tired of waitin’ on you to grow some hair on your bullocks and knock on her door?”

“I’m tryin’ to time it right.”

“She bloody kissed you, Otto. A month ago. A bigger window I can’t foresee.”

“I’ve got a plan in mind.”

“Yeah? That plan involve Hank between your lady’s legs?”

“Shut up.”

“Take it from me, kid. You don’t want to settle down just yet. The day I married was me last day o’ peace.”

“Ha, you’re startin’ to sound like the boss.”

My ears pricked.

“You could stand to be a little more like him.”

“Yeah? Alone and angry?”

Images of my father swirled to mind, a bloated face and bloodied eyes.

“Nah,” Scottie grunted. “Boss ain’t lonely, he just don’t want a woman. No longer than a night’s worth, anyway.”

Otto chortled. “Can’t blame a fella. He’s got plenty who’re willin’.”

“Like I said, you could stand to be a little more like him.”

Finally, mercifully, the ground seemed to slope upward. The floor became slowly emptied of water. I slipped often, and Scottie’s hands pulled me upright each time.

“Easy, princess.”

I pulled my arm from his grasp. “Get off me.”

“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’s Artisan , you idiot. They all drop 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.

I could only hesitate, lips agape, and after a moment he smirked.

I shifted my eyes away and cleared my throat, cheeks flaming.

There was little to be gained from lying. In any case, I did not seem to have a mind to do anything but nod. I was fitting pieces together, locking keys into nooks.

“Nina Clarke,” he said. Another pull on the cigarette, his stare held, and it was inescapable. I feared I would become entranced by it. “Do you know who I am?”

I did. Only it was not a title that came to mind, but a twelve-year-old boy with dirty hair and a double-looped belt. Don’t be , I thought. Please be anyone else.

“I’m Patrick Colson,” he said, and the memories collapsed and unfolded before me, recreating a man better dressed and fully grown. A man I both knew and didn’t.

He stood. Watched me carefully. “Welcome to Kenton Hill.”

I looked around as though the walls might fall away to reveal the town, but there was only him.

He was tall. Tall enough that his hair scraped the dirt ceiling.

His eyebrows were thicker, darker, his chin more pronounced.

Dark lashes framed those eyes, and I was as startled by them as I had been in a courtyard thirteen years ago.

I’d realized him handsome as a boy, but as a man, he was shocking.

There were things missing now, however. A sense of ease, that glint of mischief. In their place was an expression that remained unsettlingly dark.

It wasn’t clear if the recognition was reciprocated. He only stared. Was he lingering over the parts of my face he remembered, the way I was?

My heart stuttered.

“She don’t say much,” Scottie offered, wiping his forehead on his sleeve.

“Hmm,” Patrick mused darkly. “Perhaps you knocked the sense from her.” At that, his eyes turned on Scottie, cold and reproachful. “I told you to use a light hand.”

Scottie, far burlier than any man I’d seen, looked chided. “Aye,” he said. “Nerves got the better of me. Apologies, miss.” He slapped me gently on the back.

I raised my eyebrows at him.

“I should offer my apologies, too,” Patrick said, and I found myself disarmed once more when his gaze fell over me. “I ordered these men to bring you to me. The cautionary measures,” he gestured to the sack, the rope in Scottie’s hands, “were needed. At least until we get to know one another.”

I almost laughed. I stood with my shirt plastered to my skin and unbuttoned to near indecency. My legs shook in an effort to keep me standing. I was covered in mud. There was a lump swelling at the back of my head, and these men were offering their regrets now?

My teeth gritted with the cold. “I know enough.” Exhaustion made me brave. Careless. If Patrick Colson didn’t recognize me, then it would be more prudent to leave it that way.

He nodded, discarded his cigarette. “And what do you know?” His voice seemed to swarm in my chest. “That we’re animals and criminals who go around blowin’ everything to holy hell, I’d bet.”

That was the most common rhetoric on the Miners Union, though it wasn’t mine. To me, all of them were animals. Artisans and Crafters alike.

I lifted my chin. “I know the skinny one hasn’t any hair on his balls.

” I said it with perfect Belavere inflection.

“I know the round one doesn’t love his wife.

I know that you are lonely and angry, or so say your men here.

” I waited a beat, enough time for the beginnings of a grin to slip briefly onto Patrick Colson’s lips.

“I know that you’re not stupid enough to capture a Charmer without realizing the hazard you’ve brought to your town.

So why don’t you tell me what it is you want, Mr. Colson, and what you’ll give me in return as payment for not burying us alive? ”

Silence. Just that small smile on Patrick Colson’s lips.