They arrived at noon on a Tuesday, which struck Ro as deeply rude.
Two of them. Both wearing what she could only describe as aggressive neutrality — grey coats, grey expressions, the kind of carefully assembled blankness that said I am not here to threaten you while radiating threat from every pore. One was tall with cheekbones like architectural features. The other was shorter and had the specific energy of someone who had not been told no in several centuries.
Ro had three tables of actual human customers. A builders' lunch. A woman with a laptop who'd been nursing the same Americano for ninety minutes.
She didn't look at the two fae when they came in. She picked up the coffee pot, refilled the laptop woman's cup without being asked, and walked to their table at her own pace.
"What can I get you?" she said.
"We are here on behalf of the Summer Court," said the taller one. It had a voice like late afternoon light. "To present formal acknowledgment of the new anchor's—"
"Eggs, toast, or something off the menu?" Ro said.
Silence.
"This is a diner," she said. "If you want to do politics, order something first. I can't have people sitting at tables without ordering. Health inspector thing." Complete lie. She did not care about the health inspector.
The shorter one looked at the taller one. Some fae communication passed between them, invisible and rapid.
"Tea," said the taller one.
"Lovely." She wrote it down. "Two teas. Be right back."
---
Caelan appeared from the back hallway approximately four minutes later. He was not supposed to be here — he was supposed to be doing whatever three-hundred-year-old Unseelie fae did on Tuesday mornings. He'd explained his schedule once, briefly; she had gathered it involved a great deal of things she didn't have the vocabulary for yet.
He slid onto a stool at the counter. Not looking at the two Summer Court emissaries. But she could feel the altered quality of the air — the way the diner's hum shifted slightly, recognising him, recognising them, recalibrating distances.
"Summer Court," she said, quietly, setting his coffee in front of him.
"I see them."
"Are they dangerous?"
"No more than most things with very old grudges and formal diplomatic immunity." He wrapped both hands around the coffee mug. His knuckles were freshly bruised, she noticed. Not her business right now. "They want to establish standing with you. To have it on record that Summer acknowledged the new anchor."
"And if I don't acknowledge them back?"
"Then Summer has cause to call the anchor hostile to their interests. Which creates—" He paused. "Complications."
"Great." She straightened up, picked up the two teas on their little saucers. "Translate for me if it goes sideways."
She walked back to their table and set the teas down with the practiced competence of someone who'd been doing this for four years and had no interest in spilling things.
The taller one said, very formally: "The Summer Court recognises Rowan Blackwood as the current holder of the Hollow Crown anchor and wishes to register its respectful acknowledgment of the transition."
"Thank you," Ro said. She'd been practising this part, in the three days since the negotiation with Caelan. "The anchor receives your acknowledgment. Is there anything else I can help you with today?"
The shorter one's eyes narrowed. Not unfriendly. Assessing. "You know the forms," it said. "Who taught you?"
"I read a lot." True, actually. Caelan had left three books on her counter two nights ago without explanation. She'd read them cover to cover by dawn. One had been an etiquette manual for dealing with Court emissaries. Another had been a densely written history of neutral anchors in post-medieval London. The third had appeared to be a cookbook but contained, in its margins, handwritten notes in Miriam's writing, which Ro hadn't been able to bring herself to read yet.
"The anchor acknowledges Summer's standing," she added. Caelan had underlined that sentence twice.
The formal tension in the emissaries' posture dropped by a perceptible fraction. Not much. But enough.
"There is a second matter," the taller one said. "A message, from our Court Lord, regarding the stability of the eastern boundary markers—"
The window broke.
Not dramatically — not an explosion, not a thrown rock. It cracked, slowly, from one corner to the other, in the specific pattern of something very cold touching something warm. A thin fracture line. And along that line, pressed into the glass like a stamp, was a symbol Ro didn't know.
Three seconds. Then it faded.
The laptop woman swore and looked up. The builders didn't notice. Ro didn't move.
She looked at the symbol's afterimage — already fading from the glass — and made herself memorise it. Three interlocking circles, the inner one broken. Like a chain with one link half-open.
She looked at Caelan. He was very still.
"I think," Ro said, to the Summer emissaries, in a perfectly level voice, "that you should probably finish your tea and go. I'll tell the anchor that Summer's message regarding the eastern boundary is received, and that we'll be in contact."
They left without argument. She wasn't sure if that was the correct forms or just the fact that the broken-circle symbol had rattled them too.
---
After they'd gone, after the builders paid and left, after the laptop woman had, miraculously, missed the entire thing by having her headphones in — Caelan moved to the cracked window.
He looked at it for a long time without touching it.
"That symbol," Ro said.
"Yes."
"The cult."
"Yes." He turned. His expression was the careful controlled version but something underneath it had gone quiet and watchful in a way that wasn't controlled at all. "It is a marking. Not a threat, precisely. More an announcement."
"An announcement of what?"
"That they were here. That they saw you speak the forms. That they know you are learning." He looked back at the crack. "They want you to know they are watching."
Ro looked at the window. At the thin line running through the glass. At the place where the symbol had been.
"Okay," she said.
Then she went and got the roll of packing tape from under the counter and stuck three strips across the crack, because the window wasn't going to fix itself and the cold came through, and she was not going to stand here and be unsettled by the aesthetic choices of people who marked glass like dogs marking territory.
Caelan watched her do it.
"The eastern boundary message," she said, smoothing down the last strip of tape. "What is it actually about?"
He was quiet a moment. Then: "Something is weakening the markers on the eastern side of the city. Shoreditch, primarily. The Summer Court wants assistance investigating."
"And they came to me because...?"
"Because the anchor feels it. Or it should. You should." He met her eyes. "Have you felt anything unusual in the past week? A pull, eastward?"
Ro thought about the three mornings she'd woken up at five AM for no reason, with a vague feeling like she'd forgotten something important, and a specific awareness of direction that she'd put down to not enough sleep and too much coffee.
"Maybe," she said.
His expression shifted. Not alarmed. But noting it, filing it away.
"You should have told me."
"I'm telling you now." She set the tape back under the counter. "That's what the deal is for."
Outside, against the taped window, London pressed on in its grey and relentless way. The diner hummed. And somewhere east of them, something was pulling at the fabric of things, quiet and patient and waiting.