When she had it in, Lila stood before the mirror, blinking fiercely at her changed appearance, the startling difference of a shadow cast across her face, a pit of darkness so complete it registered as absence. As if a piece of her were missing—not an eye, but an entire self.

The girl from Grey London.

The one who picked pockets and cut purses and froze to death on winter nights with only pride to keep her warm.

The one without a family, without a world.

This new eye looked startlingly strange, wrong, and yet right.

“There,” said Maris. “Isn’t that better?”

And Lila smiled, because it was.

V

The slip of paper Maris had given Kell still blazed against his palm, but he kept his fist closed tight around it as he and Alucard stood, waiting, beyond the door.

He was worried that if they crossed the platform and left the ship, they wouldn’t be allowed back on, and given Lila’s tendency for trouble, Kell wanted to stay close.

But then the door swung open and Lila stepped through, the Inheritor clutched in her hand. And yet it wasn’t the scroll-like device that caught his attention. It was Lila’s smile, a dazzling, happy smile, and just above, a sphere of glossy black where shattered brown had been. Kell sucked in a breath.

“Your eye,” he said.

“Oh,” said Lila with a smirk, “you noticed.”

“Saints, Bard,” said Alucard. “Do I want to know how much that cost?”

“Worth every penny,” she said.

Kell reached out and tucked the hair behind Lila’s ear so he could see it better. The eye looked stark and strange and utterly right. His own gaze didn’t clash against it, the way it did with Holland’s, and yet, now that it was there, her eyes divided into brown and black, he couldn’t imagine ever thinking she was ordinary. “It suits you.”

“Not to interrupt …” said Alucard behind them.

Lila tossed him the Inheritor as if it were a mere coin, a simple token instead of the entire goal of their mad mission, their best—and maybe only—chance of saving London. Kell’s stomach dropped, but Alucard snatched the talisman from the air just as easy.

He crossed the plank between the market and the Ghost, Lila falling in step behind him, but Kell lingered. He looked down at the paper in his hand. It was nothing but parchment, yet it could have weighed more than stone, the way it rooted him to the wooden floor.

Your true family.

But what did that mean? Was family the ones you were born to, or the ones who took you in? Did the first years of his life weigh more than the rest?

Strange thing about forgetting spells.

Rhy was his brother.

They fade on their own.

London was his home.

Unless we don’t let go.

“Kell?” called Lila, looking over her shoulder with those two-toned eyes. “You coming?”

He nodded. “I’m right behind you.”

His fingers closed over the paper, and with a brush of heat, it caught fire. He let it burn, and when the note was nothing but ashes, he tipped them over the side, letting the wind catch them before they ever hit the sea.

* * *

The crew stood on deck, gathered around a wooden crate—the makeshift table where Kell had set the bounty for which he’d paid three years.

“Tell me again,” said Lila, “why, with a ship full of shiny things, you bought yourself a ring.”

“It’s not just a ring,” he protested with far more certainty than he felt.

“Then what is it?” asked Jasta, arms crossed, still clearly bitter from being turned away.

“I don’t exactly know,” he said, defensively. “Maris called it a binding ring.”

“No,” corrected Alucard. “Maris called it binding rings.”

“There’s more than one?” asked Holland.

Kell took up the loop of metal and pulled, the way he had before, one ring becoming two the way Lila’s knives did, only these had no hidden clasp. It wasn’t an illusion. It was magic.

He set the newly made second ring back atop the crate, wondering at the original. Perhaps two was the limit of its power, but he didn’t think it was.

Again Kell held the ring in both hands, and again he pulled, and again it came apart.

“That one never gets smaller,” noted Lila, as Kell tried to make a fourth ring. It didn’t work. There was no resistance, no rebuff. The refusal was simple and solid, as if the ring simply had no more to give.

All magic has limits.

It was something Tieren would say.

“And you’re sure it’s Antari-made?” asked Lenos.

“That’s what Alucard said,” said Kell, cutting him a look.

Alucard threw up his hands. “Maris confirmed it. She called them Antari binding rings.”

“All right,” said Lila. “But what do they do?”

“That she wouldn’t say.”

Hastra took up one of the spell-made rings and squinted through it, as if expecting to see something beside Kell’s face on the other side.

Lenos poked at the second with his index finger, startling a little when it rolled away, not a specter, but a solid band of metal.

It tumbled right off the crate, and Holland caught it as it fell, his chains rattling against the wood.

“Would you take these foolish things off?”

Kell looked to Lila, who frowned back but didn’t threaten mutiny. He slipped the original ring on his finger so he wouldn’t drop it as he undid the manacles. They fell away with a heavy thud, everyone on deck tensing at the sudden sound, the knowledge that Holland was free.