The first thing Constance sees is her father. He sits in his old leather chair, foot crooked onto his knee, a newspaper in his hands. Beside him sits a chess board on a turntable so he can play both sides of it. It is so devastatingly normal that her breath catches in her throat.

He pushes up his wire spectacles with a long finger, eyes still on what he's reading. "Here, Constance darling, have you heard this?" He taps the paper.

Heart hammering, she draws closer, crossing the carpet of their old home—sold a year since. She knows it's an illusion, but still she finds herself sitting at his feet, her back against his chair, her head against his knee. "Heard what, papa?"

He starts off excitedly about some geo-political conflict, and Constance lets the words wash over her. Oh, how she's missed this. His voice warm, his frame solid, his analysis sharper and brighter than any knife she's ever seen. At some point, he pats her hair twice, fondly, to let her know his leg is getting tired of bearing her weight. She raises her head obediently.

And scrambles away. His clean-shaven face has been replaced with rotting flesh. Worms crawl from his eye sockets and hook onto his spectacles. He looks as he must in truth: dead, buried, and gone a year.

His head tilts, stringy hair flopping. "Constance?"

A scream builds in her throat, but she swallows it. Fear is death before the blow, he would say, and somehow she can't bear to disappoint even his facsimile. The grain of the carpet digs into her hands as she stares, chest heaving.

"Marthe," her father calls to another room. "Can you come in here a moment?"

From the kitchen bustles in another corpse: that of Constance's step-mother. Flour dusts her apron, as it so often did before the wasting disease took her, and she wipes her bony hands on it, smearing dirt and gore. "Sweet, what's the matter?"

Constance is flying from the room before she's even registered taking to her feet. The hallways and rooms she passes are intimately familiar, and they scream at her to slow, to drink it all in, these things she will never get back. Her parents call out behind her, concerned, and somehow, her heart twists with it. What concern have the dead for the living? But they sound close, too awfully close, and her legs are rubber. Breaths heaving, she throws herself into a linen closet.

She loved to hide here as a child, but now it smells of mildew and the shelves press into her ribs.

Someone moans softly, and Constance flattens herself to the wall, hand pressed against her mouth to keep her from screaming. Someone is in here with her.

No. Two someones, she realizes as silhouettes shift against each other and her eyes adjust to the darkness. Two someones with their lips locked, hands in each other's hair, hiding away from the rest of the world. Her stomach turns and turns again. Her brother Clarence, who used to hide in here with Constance and play glorious games of pretend, now wraps his arms tighter around his bride.

They ignore Constance entirely (though how could they when she threw open the closet door and now stands less than two feet away?). It is as if she matters nothing; she, who held her brother when he cried as their mother left, who fixed his hair before their father remarried Marthe, who whispered stories and secrets and dreams to him—she might as well be one of the worms twining their father's glasses.

It sends knives through her gut. Her hands itch to tear the minx from Clarence's face, but her fingers only curl helplessly. She only ever could smile when they announced their wedding, wish them congratulations, plan every detail for them because Marthe was too sick to. She never could beg him to stay. She never could cry.

Lips still pressed to his bride's, Clarence opens his eyes. He sees me, she thinks. He sees me. But all he does is wink.

With a cry, Constance bursts from the closet. Her parents' voices echo from every direction, calling for her like the past is still something she can grasp, so she runs and runs and runs—

Smack into someone's chest. She screams and jerks away, but hands reach out at her, pulling her close, fighting her flailing arms—

"Konnichiwa, shhh, it's me," Marek says, and she realizes dully that it's not the first time he's said it.

The fight goes out of her, and he supports her as she sags. She can't explain anything, least of all why she's letting him hold her, so instead she compulsively apologizes. If she says she's sorry enough, perhaps everything will go back to normal, back to the way it should—

Be. Should be. She pushes back and smacks him across the shoulder. Tears blur her vision as she scowls at him. "You aren't supposed to be here."

He sighs, searching her (embarrassingly) tear-stained face. "For a smart woman, you're pretty dumb if you think I'm going to let the fairies have their way with you."

His eyes are warm—as warm as Clarence's when he gazes at his bride, as warm as her father's smiling at Marthe, even as she withered away and left him as a husk too. Constance has no use for that kind of warmth.

She pushes past him without a word. Her parents' voices have turned into distant wails now, and she hardens her heart against them. The courtly fairy said she could navigate between realities using books. The family library should have plenty. She heads that way.

Somehow, she finds herself instead in her childhood bedroom.

All her books have been removed, but the many trinkets she collected remain: crystals and leaves from foreign forests; porcelain dolls that she and Clarence would set as damsels and perform daring rescues on; music boxes and jewelry and miniature paintings her father brought back whenever she couldn't travel with him.

And on her pink bedspread, surrounded by the hundreds of letters the woman sent Constance, lounges her mother.

Gesine Wylf, the woman who gave birth to her. Not the woman who raised her, because Marthe, in her endless cheerfulness and sincerity, raised Constance. Gesine is an actress, and she knows nothing of sincerity.

Gesine's gauzy skirt shifts as she uncrosses her legs. She opens her arms, and her costume jewels jangle. "Aren't you going to give me a hug?"

"I'm not going to give you anything," Constance snips, and it feels good. It feels good to not be polite, to not make nice when the woman who abandoned her stifling family life drops by for a conscience-soothing visit. It feels good to sneer rather than smile, to march past Gesine and pluck up a piece of jewelry that means more to Constance than the woman ever could.

Tucked into her ballerina jewelry box is a tiny compass on a chain. She lost it somehow in the days following her father's death, even though she almost never used to take it off. Now she slips it on again so that it rests against her heart. A true compass always points north, her father used to say, and she steels her heart against the guilt creeping in.

She owes something to Gesine; she knows that. She just can't decide what it is.

"The silent treatment, huh?" Gesine says. "Aren't you above that, Constance?"

"You would hardly know what I'm above or below. I could be underwater for all you know"—Constance snaps the box's lid closed—"and it wouldn't matter a whit to you."

Gesine puts a hand to her heart, cheeks flushed. "Of course it would."

"I haven't heard from you in a year. You didn't come to the funeral. The only thing you cared about once dad was dead is maybe I would come live with you."

"I do like to see you," Gesine protests.

"And yet you moved three countries away and send gift baskets for the holidays."

"You don't understa—"

"I don't care to."

Gesine's face crumples, and something in Constance twists, but it feels good just as much as it hurts.

"I always try to send things you like," Gesine mutters, downcast.

Constance should leave now, find the library and get out of this crooked house, but instead she steps closer to the bed, looming over the defeated woman. "What I would have liked was for you to show up. To be a mother. To not chase your flights of fancy across the continent."

The woman cringes as if Constance's words are whips. Tears in her eyes, she pleads, "I can show up now. I can be there for you now."

"I didn't need you then, it turns out." Her voice is level, but even so, it drips with bitter vinegar. She's surprised to enjoy the taste, and she layers it in more thickly. "What makes you think I would need you now?"

"Constance," Marek warns. She snaps something to him—she's not even sure what—eyes burning and heart hammering, angry at being interrupted, but he insists. "Look at your hand," he says, coming further into the room.

She turns to push him out, but as her hand swings up, she sees it and bites back a gasp. Her fingers, just like the fae's outside this tome, are turning to bone. Her foot stutters. She trips on a rug, and Marek catches her.

"Let's get out of here," he says.

She pushes out of his arms, but she nods.

"Don't leave me!" Gesine calls after them.

Why not? Constance wants to sneer. You left twenty years ago. Her hand tingles with cold, and the bones creep up to her palm. She swallows her uncharitable, very un-her thoughts, and shoves her hand in her pocket.

They hurry up the stairs to the tower library. The room is tiny but crammed and cozy. She plucks a book from a shelf at random.

"Are you going to explain to me what's going on?" Marek asks.

"I wouldn't have to if you hadn't come," she mutters, and her hand tingles again.

"Well, I did come."

She lays the book on the central reading table and presses her hands to either side of it. The bony one stares back at her accusingly, so she looks at Marek instead. She huffs and rattles it all off like it's nothing. "The fae are trying to 'free' me. Primarily by setting me mad. But if I can free myself, they'll let me go. The courtly fairy swore it."

"Free yourself how?"

She shrugs like it's an academic problem instead of a life and death one. "There's a thing with fairies and threes. If I can make it through three of these with my mind intact, they should let me go."

"Should, or will?"

"Nothing's exactly gone to plan lately, has it? Should, Marek. Should."

"Alright," he says, hands coming up. "Alright. And the hand is..."

"Them toying with me." Constance hates the way the words snap out of her mouth, they way they're not quite fully true, not quite pointing straight north. But the idea that her hand is the fae's way of measuring how unstable she is (and taunting her with that fact) isn't something she can find in herself to quite put to words.

Marek seems to put it together himself, though, because he nods slowly, looking between her and the skeletal hand. "We'll get you out of here," he promises.

"I'll get myself out. And now you too."

He flinches, but Constance doesn't stay to watch the pain on his face. If that's what it is. She can't afford to care. She needs her head screwed on straight. If fairy tales have taught her anything, these next two rooms are going to be even worse than the first. Briskly, she explains what they're going to do and jumps into the next book without looking back, without apologizing, without straining to hear her family's voices on the floors below.

If the fae want to use her emotions against her, then she just won't have any.