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Peace restored to the library, Elfreda dipped her pen and began to write—about the leathern cup that stood six and three-quarter inches high in front of her writing pad.

It was Saxon, taken from the second of three barrows she’d opened with Papa the previous summer on a rocky hill near Thornton. The leather was decorated with…

Elfreda’s pen made a distressed noise and released a large blotch of ink.

She had to will her fingers to loosen, to set it down.

There was no peace with Georgina in the house. And Georgina was most definitely still in the house.

Elfreda’s nape hadn’t stopped prickling, even after the library door clicked. Her body registered Georgina’s continued presence, like a barometer registered atmospheric pressure. Georgina did something to the air. Charged it.

“The Barrow King.” Papa was chuckling softly beside her.

“I’m not at all surprised. Oh, it must turn Clutterbuck green!

When did you first hear it spoken? On that trip to the Chilterns?

Mortimer himself could scarcely believe the number of Celtic ornaments I carried away.

But even before that, the skulls I collected near Parsley Hay made quite a stir. It could have begun then.”

Elfreda smiled faintly, all the answer Papa required.

He turned happily to his book. His mood had been foul the other day, when she’d limped into the library after the ram attack.

He’d just received the letter from William Aubin-Aubrey changing the starting date of their tour, and the meeting place—no small inconvenience.

Papa didn’t keep a carriage, and what with Aubin-Aubrey driving straight to the Peak, he’d no choice but to ask Sir Graham Tabor to take them in his.

Sir Graham was an older friend even than Mr. Clutterbuck—in fact, he was Elfreda’s godfather—and Papa had nothing good to say about him.

Elfreda listened to all of it, holding her notebook, too few of her grandmother’s crumpled papers shut inside.

For her, meeting William Aubin-Aubrey in the Peak had been the final blow.

She needed him here, in Twynham, where she could show him the note about the winter camp in The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle , walk him to the wolf pit, and then to the bluff, to convince him with firsthand demonstrations that her surmise was sound, based in research and an understanding of the landscape.

Fifty miles to the north, she’d have to persuade him with her words alone.

She was good with books, with ancient languages, with measurements, with a shovel, but she was bad with people.

Not the long-dead ones. The living ones, who were charmed by vivacity, pleasing manners, an agreeable air and address, none of which came to her naturally.

Artificial attempts always exacerbated her awkwardness.

And God forbid there were witnesses. One too many and she could as soon speak as fly.

The situation was hopeless. Papa wouldn’t come to her aid—he wasn’t persuaded himself.

Once he’d finished maligning Sir Graham, she’d launched on a halting, not entirely coherent account of recent events on the Redmayne estate, and he’d interrupted, dismissing the wolf pit with a twitch of his brows.

A pock in the earth, he’d said. From my wishing a pox on the Major. Let this be the last I hear of your setting foot on his side of Holywell Rock. You’ll embolden him to set foot on ours.

As it turned out—as Georgina had predicted—he didn’t mind Georgina’s feet going wherever they liked. All Georgina had to do was smile. Apparently, flattery was an effective substitute for character, if you happened to combine big blue eyes with shamelessness.

Where was Georgina now? Agnes wouldn’t have shown them out. Agnes craved company so badly, she waltzed with broomsticks. She wasn’t going to let Georgina go without a fight. Had she mentioned something about a banquet?

Papa turned a page of his book, smiling.

“Excuse me a moment,” she whispered, and tiptoed from the room. She was nearing the Great Hall when she heard voices.

A banquet was indeed underway.

Agnes and Georgina sat side by side near the head of the long plank table. Twelve places were laid, and every chair was filled, either with a suit of armor or a picture from the gallery. Grandpapa’s portrait of King Alfred presided.

“Miss Redmayne.” Agnes was speaking in her royal voice, loud and nasal. “His Majesty the King wants to know if you play the lute.”

“I wish I did, Your Majesty.” Georgina had removed their bonnet, and they inclined their bright head, addressing the portrait of King Alfred with deference. “The lute is my favorite instrument. Listening to its music is my chief pleasure in life.”

“Really?” Agnes spoke in her normal voice.

“Oh, not at all.” Georgina swirled an empty wineglass. “I was just saying the sort of thing you say in society.”

“Untrue things?”

“Courteous things that may or may not be true.” Georgina set down the wineglass.

“It’s best to avoid outright falsehoods if they can be readily exposed as such.

Note I didn’t claim to play the lute, only that I shared the king’s admiration.

If I’d said I could play, he might next have asked me for a song. ”

“This is exceedingly helpful. Now may we practice complimenting soup?” Agnes’s expression was so blatantly adoring that Elfreda cringed. Couldn’t she see that Georgina was dangerous?

Georgina deposited their reticule in Agnes’s empty bowl.

“Soup,” they said. “Turtle soup. Sing its praises.”

Agnes lifted her spoon. “I have long adored the tortoise!” She announced this to the table at large.

“I kept a pet tortoise as a child. His name was Wamba, and I miss him every day.” She lowered her spoon, blushing with sudden uncertainty.

“I did that wrong, didn’t I? I made it too melancholy.

I could clarify that Wamba escaped, and that I believe he lives in a log somewhere, with a family of his own?

Unless someone has caught him and put him in a soup. ” Her lower lip started trembling.

“Less is more when it comes to complimenting soup.” Georgina sounded gently encouraging. “What you said was very heartfelt, but you could condense it to simply I adore the soup .”

“I adore the soup,” repeated Agnes, perking up.

“Very good.” Georgina nodded. “Now let’s try artichoke soup.”

“Let’s not.” Elfreda had witnessed enough. Georgina was toying with her sister, and she wouldn’t stand for it. She stomped over the stone flags. “Dinner is over.”

Agnes saw her and blanched. “We’re on the first course.”

Elfreda came to a halt at the head of the table, shoulder to shoulder with King Alfred. “I don’t care. It’s time for Georgina to go.”

“You go!” Agnes sank down in her chair. “You’re not invited.”

“We could speed things up,” suggested Georgina, glancing between them. “Skip the soup. The king is missing his spoon.”

“Because of the twins.” Agnes sank lower. “There’s a spoon shortage. I can hear them whinnying now. They’re about to interrupt us too.”

Indeed, faint whinnies had become audible.

“I’ll never learn the proper etiquette,” wailed Agnes. “I will disgrace Beatrice in front of her new friends and lose her forever!”

“Oh please, enough.” Elfreda’s patience snapped. “If Beatrice is so inconstant, you haven’t lost much.”

“How would you know?” Agnes banged the table. “You don’t have any friends!”

The silence that settled was profound. Even the whinnies had faded away.

Elfreda’s nose burned, and pressure built behind her eyes.

She didn’t have friends, but she did have sisters, sisters she loved, whose happiness and comfort she put before her own.

She played with them, protected and provided for them as best she could.

The only reason Agnes could correspond with Beatrice at all was because Elfreda paid for the postage, out of the money she skimmed from the household budget through such laborious means as refilling Papa’s opodeldoc bottle with a liniment she made herself, and repairing certain books he tasked her with sending to the conservator.

The sting of injustice mixed with the deeper pain of rejection. She turned away so Georgina couldn’t see her expression.

“Forgive me.” Agnes was suddenly beside her, tears trembling on her lashes. “But sometimes it seems that you want to keep me from everything wonderful.”

Elfreda sucked in a breath. If that’s how it seemed, what use denying it? Besides, her chest was hurting in a way that made speech difficult.

“Do you hear that?” Agnes’s face lit up. “It must be the post boy!”

She lifted her skirt and ran, hair streaming behind her.

Elfreda watched her cross the Great Hall, the largest room in the house, and the most austere. Benches against the gray walls. Blackened hearth holding dead fire. Fathoms of dim air between floor and timbered ceiling.

The whinnies resumed, became louder, then faded again as the twins galloped on.

She swallowed, and her throat made a tiny, hurting click.

“They’re spoonicorns today,” she said, without turning to look at Georgina, so it was almost like speaking to herself.

“Hilda and Matilda. They made themselves manes out of Grandpapa’s mangy old wigs, and I suspect their heads are crawling with mites.

I’m going to have to force them to bathe, and they’ll be angrier with me even than Agnes.

Usually, they get cake as a reward for a washup, but there’s not any cake.

I could bake a cake. We’re low on butter, though.

I could go out for butter. But Papa will want me in the library, to get down more books from the shelves.

When his leg is stiff, he can’t climb the ladder.

” She closed her eyes. Last night, she’d dreamed that Marsden Hall was filling with soot-blackened, ice-cold water.

It rose from below, and poured down from above, and she’d plugged the holes in a frenzy, but there were too many.

The dream came back to her now, that clawing panic, and the desire—just as terrifying—to stop. To let the waters rise, and slip under.

She turned. Georgina was watching her, and she couldn’t read the slant of their brows, the set of their mouth.

Often, her tongue locked in place. Now, her tongue felt loose, and words poured from her like the dream waters, as though if she kept talking, she could finally breathe.

“Aunt Susan, Papa’s sister, who stayed with us after Mother died—she recently remarried.

In March, her husband wrote to Papa with an offer to bring out Agnes alongside his own daughter the year after next, and to take in the twins as well.

He promised to give them every advantage.

Aunt Susan’s doing, obviously. While she was here, I resented her for her officiousness—all the sermons, all the ringlets —but she has a warm and generous heart, and real regard for the girls.

The offer was meant as a kindness, not an affront.

But it certainly affronted Papa. He tore up the letter, which is the only reason I know of its existence.

I found the pieces in the waste bin. He must have written something dreadfully disrespectful in response.

No letters have arrived from Aunt Susan or her husband since.

I haven’t told Agnes. I haven’t told anyone. ”

At this she paused, a bitter half smile on her lips. Of course she hadn’t told anyone. She had no friends, no one to whom she could unburden herself. And that was why she was unburdening herself now to Georgina Redmayne.

It was madness.

A crease had formed between their brows.

“Please don’t repeat a word of this to Agnes.

” She met their eyes. “She won’t be able to change Papa’s mind, and it will only make her miserable.

She expects that Aunt Susan will invite her at some point to London.

I don’t want to mislead her, but I don’t want to crush her hope.

She makes hope into…everything wonderful. ”

She gestured at the table, at the dinner guests.

King Alfred, a German knight, an English knight, Merlin .

The pain she’d felt when Agnes lashed out had abated, and in its place, she felt the usual mix of affectionate exasperation and admiring trepidation.

She could appreciate Agnes’s resourcefulness, even when she had to tidy up afterward, even when tidying up involved dragging full suits of Greenwich and Gothic armor up the great stair.

But what would become of her tempestuous, whimsical sister? How would the world see her ?

Her gaze had fixed on the painting of Merlin. He was standing with his staff in the mouth of a cave.

She heard the loud scrape of oaken chair legs on stone. And then another.

“Elf.” Georgina was standing behind a chair they’d pulled back from the table. “Will you sit?”

She shook her head. “I have things to do.” Hadn’t they been listening? No, of course not. If they ever listened to her, they wouldn’t have come here at all. She’d called them a curse . She’d vowed to destroy them.

“You look as though you need to sit down first.”

She flushed. They had been listening—listening, and studying her too, making determinations about her needs.

She wanted to look away from them, but she could read the expression on their face now, and it transfixed her.

Sympathy, but not the amused, condescending kind she anticipated, as though she were a pitiably ridiculous curiosity.

No, their face held something far simpler, much more frank. Concern. Kindness.

If resistance was beyond her, destruction was too.

She felt too defeated to sweep proudly from the room, and so she most definitely wasn’t about to charge them like a ram, in a display of vengeful fury.

There was no point. In truth, she didn’t feel vengeful or furious. That was all gone. She felt tired.

She went to the chair and sat.