In Ashes Lie

by Marie Brennan

  Any doubt he might have had as to the nature of this place and its inhabitants fell into dust when he walked into a great, vaulted chamber and saw the woman on the throne.

  She sat beneath a glittering canopy of estate that would have beggared Charles to buy, framed by the sweeping arch of silver that formed the throne’s back. Her own hair gleamed as brightly beneath the fanlike coronet that capped it, while the midnight silk of her gown provided a splash of jeweled color. The high bones of her face never belonged to anything human.

  The elfin woman was speaking to a serpentine man, her tone quite sharp, but she cut off when the sisters hurtled past a startled and sticklike usher, their shoes tapping a rapid beat against the marble floor. “Gertrude? Rosamund?” she said, in clear, resonant tones. “Is something amiss?”

  They dropped perfunctory curtsies, as if begrudging even that instant of delay. “Your Majesty,” Rosamund said, “this man bears you a message from Lord Antony.”

  Immediately, every eye in the chamber was on Jack. He had followed at the sisters’ heels, but forgotten in his stupor to bow; he did so now, as clumsily as he had ever done, and felt the amusement of some of the watching courtiers. The resulting spark of anger steadied him, and when he straightened, he met the faerie Queen’s gaze without flinching. “Are you Lune?”

  “I am,” she said, ignoring the gasps at his insolent address.

  “Then Sir Antony bids me ask you this: if you will not save London, will you at least save him?”

  Dead silence. No one so much as breathed, let alone laughed. Seeing Lune’s stricken face, Jack wondered for the first time at the content of Antony’s message. He’d taken it without thinking, assuming it all to be part of the man’s feverish rantings—but no. Clearly it had meaning.

  A meaning that hurt this elfin Queen, struck deeply at her heart. He had not realized, coming here, that his first words to her would be so terribly cruel.

  “Madam,” Gertrude whispered into that terrible hush, “’tis the plague.”

  The Queen came to her feet in a movement so swift his eye missed it. “Take me to him.”

  LOMBARD STREET, LONDON: September 15, 1665

  The stench of putrefaction and death filled the house, a foul miasma that choked Lune’s breath. The doctor hung back, strangely reluctant, and nodded at the staircase. Covering her mouth, she hurried up the stairs, terrified of what she might find.

  His skin was corpse-pale and beaded with sweat, and he did not so much as twitch when she threw the door open. Lune hesitated on the threshold, trembling in every limb. Mortality, in its most dreadful form: the slow rotting of the flesh, with agony as its excruciating handmaiden. Gangrenous black spots marked his throat, striped with red where he had torn at them with his nails. Plague had come to London before, many a time; she knew enough to recognize what she saw.

  And to hope, for one awful moment, that he was dead already, and free of this suffering.

  The physician was behind her. Lune forced herself forward, one unwilling step at a time. “Is he—”

  The man knelt at Antony’s side. John Ellin; that was his name. Jack. The memory swam up through her horror. Ellin covered his hand with a kerchief and pressed his fingers into Antony’s neck. “His pulse is weak, but he lives.”

  Her breath rushed out in a gasp. Ellin examined Antony with gentle care, then paused. Not looking at her, he said, “He told me you would save him.”

  The gasp became almost a sob. It is the war, all over again. Had I acted more decisively, and sooner—

  She could not have stopped the spread of this plague. The mortals believed it was God’s punishment, for the licentious behavior of the City and its King; whether that was true or not, she had no power to halt it. But I could have kept him below.

  He would never have stayed there, not when London needed him. If he sheltered in the Onyx Hall, though, where the air was unfouled, where there was no filth to breed disease...or if she had done as he asked, aiding in the mortals’ plight, so he did not exhaust himself in a battle he could not win.

  Ellin pivoted on his knee, his pale face desperate. “If you have some charm that can save him, use it. I don’t know how long he has.”

  Lune forced away her anguished thoughts; there would be time enough for those, later. The reply hurt her throat. “I—disease is not something we know. I cannot make him well.”

  She watched the light in his eyes die. “But he believed—”

  “He hoped.” Lune came forward, standing over Ellin’s shoulder, unable to look away from her dying Prince. “Had we any charm to dismiss the plague from a man’s body, I would have used it ere now. But we do not. The best I can give him...”

  She trailed off, lost. Ellin shot upright and seized her by the shoulders. “What?”

  The sheer affront of his conduct tore her attention away from Antony at last. “We might strengthen him,” she said. “A draught—something to aid him in the fight.” Whether it would do any good, she did not know.

  “Then fetch it,” Ellin said. “At this point, nothing can hurt.”

  LOMBARD STREET, LONDON: September 16, 1665

  Cramps bent Antony’s legs up to his chest, setting off an agonizing fire through his hips and thighs. He cried out, driven from hazy, tormented unconsciousness into a waking state he had not thought he would see again.

  Delicate hands touched his face, bathing his brow with blessedly cool water. He wept at the pain, and a voice soothed him, whispering reassurance it did not believe. I am dreaming, he thought. The fever has sent me mad.

  If so, his madness was cruel. It should have brought him both Kate and Lune—though it was not safe for Kate to be here. He did not want her shut in with him.

  Lune could not be here, not as he saw her, wearing her own face. But then a bell tolled, black herald of yet another death, and she shuddered; and that convinced him. This was no fancy of his fevered brain. She truly was here, without glamour, without protection, comforting him in his extremity.

  “You are awake,” she said: an inanity to fill a void that could not be filled.

  Somehow, a smile found its way to his face, though he suspected it looked more like a rictus. “Jack found you.”

  She nodded. “And he is here now, brewing some strange concoction for you. I have never seen the like.”

  Antony began to laugh, as if the notion were surpassingly funny. God above—had he at last driven Jack into the arms of the chymical physicians, with their inexplicable remedies for bolstering the body’s vital spirit? Salts and mercury and Heaven knew what else. Lune smiled at first, but it faded to concern as he continued to laugh, long after he should have stopped. Once he subsided to wheezing, she said, “You must be feeling better, to show such humor.”

  His breath caught in his throat, and he coughed, rackingly, on his own spit. When he could speak at last, he answered her bluntly. “I am dying.”

  So he had told Jack, and the doctor denied it. Lune was not so practiced at a physician’s politic lies. Her eyes told the truth.

  “Forgive me,” she whispered. Her hands sought out his own and clutched them tight. “I would save you, if only I could.”

  Antony hissed, almost crushing her fingers. The swellings were excruciating, enough to drive a man mad; he wanted to run, scream, do anything to distract himself from the pain. Fling himself into a plague pit, perhaps, and wait for the dirt to blot out the sun. “You cannot. I understand that. And I—I forgive you.”

  The words cost him. So many years he had stood at her side, always knowing that he would die, and she would go on. But it was bitter indeed when it came. I will be forgotten, soon enough. A single name, in a litany that will stretch far beyond my time.

  But he did not want his name remembered, if the cause to which he had dedicated his life fell into ruin. “Lune,” he whispered, half-strangled, but determined to get it out. “I am lost. Do not let London be lost with me.” What remained of it, after death’s scythe had swept across it these long mo
nths.

  “I will not,” Lune promised. Anything, no doubt, to give him peace.

  His hands were slick with sweat, although thirst parched his body dry. “The people are what matters. Yours and mine both. They need you. They need all who love this City, to preserve it against its fall.”

  Her silver eyes wavered with shame. He did not hate her for her weakness, the terror that paralyzed her—but she hated it in herself. And abruptly, in a voice made strong by wild determination, Lune spoke. “In Mab’s name, I swear to you that I will do everything I can to preserve London and its people from disaster—and let fear hinder me no more.”

  He inhaled sharply. Not the empty assurances she gave before: an oath. Still binding to fae, though mortals broke their sworn word with impunity.

  This, then, would be his legacy to the Onyx Court: that he had shamed their Queen into making fast her commitment to the mortal world. Not just the one mortal at her side, but all the ones above.

  His time among the fae was one of success and failure so closely interwoven that few strands could be picked out, but this, the last thread, shone gold among them all.

  It did nothing to abate the agony of his swollen body, the delirious heat of his fever. It did not make Jack’s treatments hurt any less, as the physician lanced the pustules and fed him medicines that burned his throat. Nothing, in the end, could make the remaining span of his life any less of a torture—not even God. He almost asked Lune to end it for him; there would be no stain upon her inhuman soul, and one more could not blacken his by much.

  But he had always fought before, and so he fought now, until the last of his strength gave out, and blackness took the pain away forever.

  LOMBARD STREET, LONDON: September 18, 1665

  The silence had lasted for over an hour, and it told Jack everything. He waited in the deserted kitchen, mortar and pestle forgotten in his hands, and stared unseeing at the floor, while periodically his vision blurred with tears.

  Guilt gnawed at his insides, inescapable and cruel. Not only had he failed here; how many others had he neglected, in trying to save Antony? What would be the death toll this week? Could he have preserved any of them, if he left this place and went to their aid?

  A question not worth asking, for no force in the world could have pried him from this house.

  But the footsteps on the stair confirmed what he already knew: that his use here had ended. He put down the mortar and pestle, scrubbed his face dry with one sleeve, and stood to face the door.

  The faerie woman looked as haggard as he, as if every vital drop had been drained from her. She met his gaze without flinching and nodded once.

  He clenched his teeth and looked down. Not so ready for it, after all. And how would he tell Kate?

  Lune, it seemed, was thinking of matters even more immediate. “His parish was St. Nicholas, was it not?”

  The reminder stung Jack. Antony had refused a priest at the end, with bitter words that horrified the physician and put Lune whimpering on the floor. But whatever the man’s anger at God, he must be buried. “The churchyard at St. Nicholas is full. As they are everywhere.”

  Her eyes might have been steel instead of silver. “I will not see him flung into a plague pit outside the walls. Antony will rest in sanctified ground.”

  Her concern for such matters surprised him. Jack sighed wearily. The wealthy could afford to buy such concessions, and despite his charity these past months, Antony no doubt still had enough. “I’ll see to it.”

  “Thank you, Dr. Ellin.” Raggedly spoken, but gracious. Lune sounded far too serene. Was she even capable of grief? Something had torn at her during those long hours at the dying man’s side, but he did not think she wept.

  He began cleaning away the scattered remnants of his ineffective medicines. “I did little enough.”

  “You stayed with him,” Lune said. “Which is all anyone can do.”

  It made his hands pause in their task. Another bedside, with Antony lying insensate. Another woman who aided him then. Jack had given his name to the sisters, but not to this woman, and yet she spoke as if she knew him—as if they’d met before.

  “You were Mistress Montrose,” he said.

  A slight intake of breath, audible in the perfect silence of the house. “You have a good eye.”

  A host of other questions followed on the heels of that one, but he had not the heart to ask them. Antony had spoken of secrets; it seemed Jack had found them. He emptied the mortar into a bucket, wondering what he would do now.

  Lune shifted her weight. “Dr. Ellin. You’ve seen a great deal that few others have. I know you have little enough reason to hear me—but I would propose an exchange between us.”

  His fingers tightened on the stone bowl. Facing her was hard; her inhuman presence unsettled him too much, at a time when he had not much stability to spare. But her words put all his nerves on edge, and he could not stand with her at his back. “What could I give you, that you would desire?”

  The sculpted lips tightened in a painful, ironic smile. “Not your soul, Dr. Ellin. Tell me: how large is a penny loaf of bread these days?”

  “Nine and a half ounces.” What did that have to do with anything?

  “Could you afford an extra one each day?”

  On the money the City was paying him for his services, no. A bloody apothecary was paid more, because of the medicines they mixed; he should give up his place in the College of Physicians and hire himself out as a vendor of drugs instead. But Jack was already bankrupting himself fruitlessly in combating the plague; if this could gain him anything in return, he would do it without hesitation. “To what end?”

  “Our greatest obstacle,” Lune said, “is a l—” A nearby bell rang, and she staggered. Jack was there before he could think the better of it, taking her arm and lowering her onto a stool. For all her height, she weighed less than a bird. She had fainted, he thought, but recovered an instant later, and let out a breathy laugh. “My point precisely. We lack protection, as you can see. If you are willing to tithe a loaf of bread to the fae each night, then we will help you.”

  It sounded simple—which made Jack suspicious. “Did Antony do this?”

  “He could not. He was...too close to us.”

  A phrase with disturbing implications. “What help do you offer?”

  Lune lifted her chin. “What do you need?”

  The silver eyes chilled him, but Jack forced himself to think past their inhuman touch. “Assistants—ones who need not fear catching the plague. Money for medicines. A place to shelter the sick, away from the healthy, instead of shutting them up together so that all will die. Clean places to bury the dead. An end to the arguments between the Galenic physicians and the chymical physicians and the surgeons and the apothecaries, and all the quacks who prey upon the desperate driven out of town with a whip. Rain, to cleanse the air and end this heat that breeds distemper.” How much lay within her power, he had no idea—but she had asked.

  The elfin woman nodded slowly, thinking. “I cannot give you all of that. But if you give us the bread we need... I dislike begging the tithe so baldly, but we have reached a pass where it is necessary. With bread, I can order my people into service.”

  Jack thought of the disdainful looks he had received from her courtiers. His mouth quirked. “So long as you give me the least resentful ones as my nurses, Lady, we have an accord.”

  THE ONYX HALL, LONDON: December 9, 1665

  Dame Segraine stepped ahead to open the bronze-bound door, which meant she did not see the involuntary shudder that rippled across Lune’s shoulders. Most of her subjects didn’t notice the tremors—not unless they came near this place, and few enough did that without explicit orders. She felt them, no matter where she was.

  Despite being alone.

  The gravedigger had laid Antony to rest in his parish churchyard. Late at night, in accordance with the plague orders, with no one there to mourn; but Lune and John Ellin watched from the shadows, concealed by a
charm, and protected by some of the bread he gave to the court. The ground was clogged with bones and fragments of coffins, past burials broken open by the need to make space for more. It was hardly the dignified end Antony Ware deserved. But he had deserved far better than the death he had, too.

  His absence left a hole in her life. Strange as it sounded, she missed their arguments; she missed having someone to confront her when she needed it, even in front of her own courtiers. His solidity had been a foundation she depended on.

  And without him, there was likewise a hole in her power. Lune hoped no one guessed just how vulnerable she was, ruling on her own. At least she was still able to command obedience—however much her courtiers resented it.

  The door creaked open, and moans ghosted through the gap. Lune went through quickly, and Segraine shut the portal behind them, closing them in with the scent of death.

  She’d chosen this area carefully. The twists and turns of the Onyx Hall had no logic to them; some parts were open and airy, while others were confined warrens. This part was accessible from only three points, one of those leading above to Billingsgate. The other two could be closed off, creating a space Dr. Ellin could use as his pest-house.

  The idea had seemed absurd at first. Bring mortals into the Onyx Hall? Well enough when they were trusted friends, or passing diversions brought in for brief glimpses, and few in number. Over a hundred lay on pallets throughout these chambers, and they stayed until they recovered or died. They were the poor, the forgotten, those whose families could not care for them. Ellin brought them below, sequestering them so they would not spread their infection to the healthy. With the chambers stripped of all furnishings save those needed for their care, and the doors guarded against their wanderings, there was little enough to tell the patients where they were. And if the otherworldly atmosphere of the place struck them as strange...well, high fevers could explain much.