I continued to rise in my career as a Seeker, and in only my fourth year as a journeyman I achieved a significant breakthrough. It was chance, really, that I came upon it at all, but my instincts alerted me that something was not as it seemed, and further investigation proved my hunch.

Near the house where I rented a room, little more than a stone’s throw from the Tower of London, was a bookshop I often haunted for its unusual and varied collection of volumes, especially relating to history. I often engaged in cordial conversation with the proprietor of the shop, a fine, white-bearded gentleman who went by the name of Sarsin. When he learned of my love for Virgil’s Aeneid, he clucked his tongue.

“The Roman poets were little more than thieves of the Greeks,” he said, then rummaged through his shelves and came up with many classic works of ancient Greece. After that, much of the wage the Seekers paid me went directly into Sarsin’s coffers, and I spent many hours sitting by the Thames, poring over the poetry of Homer and the tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides.

It was when I moved on to the works of Shakespeare that I began to grow suspicious. Sarsin claimed that his uncle, who had owned the shop before him, had known the Bard, for he had often come into the shop. I did not doubt that. However, more than once, when recounting these stories, Sarsin spoke as if he were the one who had met Shakespeare, rather than his uncle.

The shop owner was likely daft, I told myself. Yet I didn’t quite believe that, and my investigations soon proved I was right. Sarsin claimed that, like Shakespeare, his uncle had been something of a poet, and I convinced him to show me some of his uncle’s work, and to even lend me a yellowed piece of parchment with one particular song.

That night, I compared the handwriting of the song to that on the receipts Sarsin had written for me when I purchased books. There was no doubting it; both documents had been written by the same hand. Certain I was onto something, I began to question the oldest folk I could find on the lanes around the bookshop, and I soon found an old woman, quite blind now but still sharp of wit, who recalled the former proprietor of the shop. She described him as a handsome, elderly man with a white beard, thinning hair, and bright blue eyes.

It was Sarsin, of course. Not the fantastical uncle, but the one and only. Research into the city’s legal records confirmed what by then I already knew. Every fifty years or so, the owner of the Queen’s Shelf “died” and left the shop to his heir. However, though the names changed, the handwriting of the signatures on the deeds was always the same. There was only one answer: The man Sarsin had owned this shop for over a century and a half, and in that time he had not aged a day.

Excited, I reported my findings to Rebecca and Quincy Farris, our superior in the order, and that was when I entered into my first argument with the Seekers, for Farris foolishly decided to approach Sarsin. This was strictly against the First Desideratum, of course; the Nine Desiderata were set down in the Book by the Philosophers, and every Seeker, upon joining the order, swore a Vow to uphold them. However, Farris was an ambitious man—overly so—and no doubt he thought by winning over Sarsin he could seize this finding from me and claim it for his own, thus furthering his rise in the Seekers.

His action had the opposite effect; Farris was stripped of his rank as master and banished from the order. He hanged himself by the neck in a filthy shack in Cheapside a week later. Unfortunately, his death could not undo the damage he had caused, for now Sarsin was alerted to the Seekers, and he would have no conversations with any of us, myself included. The Sarsin case was closed, and all associated documents sealed in the vaults of the Seekers. There they were forgotten—though I did retain a copy of Sarsin’s song for my personal collection. It captured my fancy for a reason I couldn’t quite name, particularly the final verse:

We live our lives a circle,

And wander where we can.

Then after fire and wonder,

We end where we began.

Though Farris’s meddling bungled the case beyond repair, my work in discovering the Sarsin matter did not go unnoticed, and in the summer I was elevated to the rank of master—the same rank as Rebecca, and ahead of Byron, who was still a journeyman, though the good-natured fellow seemed to hold nothing but genuine satisfaction for me. We celebrated with much ale, and everything in my world was good beyond my dreams. Then, on that dull autumn day in 1679, though I had no way of knowing at the time, the seeds for my undoing were sown.

“I believe you’ll enjoy this particular assignment,” Rebecca said as she tossed me a folded square of parchment. It was the first of October, a thick layer of mist cloaked London, and we had retreated into the warm, crowded interior of a coffeehouse in Covent Garden to escape the chill.

“What is it?” I asked, catching the paper and turning it over. It was sealed with a circle of red wax. Imprinted in the wax was a picture of a hand holding three flames.

“How should I know?” she said, arching an eyebrow. “It’s from the Philosophers themselves.”

Byron leaned over the table, his blue eyes bright. “Go on, Marius. Open it.”

Although I was every bit as eager as Byron, I forced myself to break the seal slowly. I unfolded the letter, then scanned the contents. They were written in a thin, elegant hand.

“What a dreadful burden,” Rebecca crooned in a tragic voice. “You’re to follow a noble lady about town and keep an eye on her. I’ve heard she’s quite lovely. Poor Marius.”

I glared at her over the letter. “Prevaricator. You knew all along what my new assignment was to be.”

Rebecca smirked and sipped her chocolate.

“Following a lovely lady?” Byron said in a wounded voice, reaching for the letter. “Why did I not get this assignment?”

“Because I’m the master,” I said with a laugh and tucked the letter inside my velvet waistcoat before he could snatch it away. I rose. “Now, if you’ll both excuse me, it seems I have work to do.”

Despite my nonchalant air, my heart pounded as I walked from the coffeehouse and turned down a narrow lane. This was my first assignment since being elevated to the level of master in the Seekers, and my first to come directly from the Philosophers themselves. I had expected something interesting, even remarkable, but this surpassed anything I had imagined. And despite her arch manner, I doubted Rebecca knew everything that was contained in the letter.

I was to keep watch on a fairy.

Or a half-fairy, at least. I ducked into a green, quiet space protected by stone walls: the courtyard of St. Paul’s Church. This was not Christopher Wren’s grand cathedral, which was still under construction. Rather, it was a small church built by Inigo Jones, and to me looked more like a forgotten Greek temple than a Christian holy house. I sat on a bench beneath a drooping wisteria tree to read the letter again.

According to the information the Philosophers had given me, fairies were not mystical creatures that inhabited children’s stories and Shakespearean comedies; instead, they were unearthly beings, born of another world. And while the Philosophers knew of no true fairies on this Earth, they had encountered a few individuals who bore some fraction of fairy blood in their veins.

Who these otherworldly people were and where they could be found, the letter did not say. If the Philosophers knew, they had not deemed it necessary to relate this information. What the letter did say was that there was a young noble lady—one Alis Faraday—who, unbeknownst to herself or her parents, was descended from one of these half fairies. How it could be that the young lady and her parents were unaware of her fantastical heritage was also not explained. All the letter told me was to observe this lady, keeping notes on everything I saw and heard, while adhering to the Desiderata, especially the first: A Seeker shall not interfere with the actions of those of otherwordly nature.