A Star Shall Fall

by Marie Brennan

  Irrith listened with wide eyes. Not everyone shared that fear; someone started an argument with the maidservant, quoting some other magazine to prove they were in no danger. No one mentioned a Dragon. Still, she wondered whether the black sky was in truth a sign. Even if this wasn’t the same comet—which it didn’t appear to be, as London wasn’t on fire—it seemed a terrible omen.

  When the argument faded out, she abandoned the gin shop and wandered onward. Her intent had been to enjoy herself today, swindling shopkeepers and picking up new curiosities for her cabinet, but in the grim light she just didn’t have the heart. Irrith stopped in the middle of Cheapside, surrounded by fine shops, and made a face of equal parts frustration and worry.

  She’d left for Berkshire fifty years ago because there were things she hated about London. Mostly the faerie courtiers: vipers, all of them, saying one thing and meaning another, then biting you when your back was turned. The longer she stayed, the greater her risk of getting caught in their political coils.

  But she also loved the City. She loved it for the smart stone and brick buildings that stood where plaster and timber had once been. For the gin shops, with the poor and working folk standing around drinking poison and talking of what their mistress read in the newspaper today. For the little boxes people rode in, carried along on long poles, and the bewildering variety of their wig styles, and the Chinese wallpaper being sold in the shop in front of her.

  A few days here would not be enough to scratch that itch. Not after fifty years of absence, and not if this might all come to an end in a year and a half.

  She could always run for Berkshire at the first scent of politics.

  Irrith jumped sideways to avoid a carriage forcing a path through the crowd, and found herself against a wall plastered with advertisements. One of them caught her eye, with a word that did not belong on a sheet of paper stuck to the wall of a Cheapside shop.

  DR. RUFUS ANDREWS

  presents

  His MARVELOUS MENAGERIE

  featuring many Strange and Rare

  Half-Breeds and Homunculi

  including the

  ORONUTO SAVAGE,

  two

  RED INDIAN MAIDENS,

  born joined at the Hip,

  and most wondrous strange,

  the half-Man, half-Goat

  OLYMPIAN SATYR

  She stared at that last word, then scrubbed her eyes. It did not oblige her by vanishing.

  There was more, in smaller print, crammed in toward the bottom of the sheet; it seemed these wonders could be viewed for a fee at some place in Red Lion Square. Ladies were coyly advised that the satyr might be shocking to their delicate constitutions.

  Irrith was prepared to be more than shocked, if this Dr. Andrews had an actual faerie in his menagerie. Could he? The Greek fae were not like English ones; iron didn’t bother them. Maybe a satyr could survive in mortal captivity, without wasting away to nothingness.

  Her fingers scrabbled at the edges of the sheet. Half stayed behind when she tore it free, but the satyr stayed, as did the address.

  Irrith had no idea where Red Lion Square was, and she wouldn’t go there on her own even if she did. Should it be true this man had a captive satyr, she would need help to get the prisoner free.

  The Onyx Hall, London: October 7, 1757

  The pure ring of silver echoed off the polished stone of the walls as Irrith approached the set of chambers collectively known as the Temple of Arms. Hidden in the heart of London, where outsiders could not easily attack them, the fae of the Onyx Court rarely saw battle. Still, those among them with a martial bent yet practiced their art, no more able to abandon it than rain could stop falling downward.

  They had all the accoutrements of war at their disposal, short of seige equipment: axes, maces, swords both large and small, centuries of armor. One long gallery had been converted into an archery range; another was dedicated to pistol practice. But the room Irrith sought was the central one, a large, octagonal chamber, its sleek floor covered with a hard-packed accumulation of dirt and straw the masters of the training ground refused to let anyone clean away. Here she found what looked like the entire fighting contingent of the Onyx Hall, watching two of their number at work.

  For the second time that day, Irrith’s heart leapt into her mouth. They were fighting the Dragon.

  Her common sense caught up a moment later. When she blinked, she recognized the terrible beast as nothing more than a glamour, roaring silently in the center of the room. But there were plenty at court who remembered their foe; the illusion was uncomfortably lifelike. The serpentine creature, if it reared upward, would nearly strike the chamber’s high ceiling, and its flesh was black char over molten flame. There were salamanders in the Onyx Hall, lizardlike spirits of elemental fire, but they were to the Dragon as a brook was to the mighty sea.

  The two facing the beast, a blocky gnome and an elf-knight, were wrestling with a strange weapon. It was nearly invisible, except where the light struck a gleam off one smooth facet or another; Irrith didn’t appreciate its full length until the knight swore and lost his grip, letting the enormous spear collapse to the dirt. He tucked his hands under his arms, shivering and ignoring the gnome’s harangue, and Irrith realized what the weapon must be.

  “Elemental ice,” Segraine said, startling her. Irrith hadn’t heard the lady approach. “From Jotunheim, or so the Swedes who sent it to us claim. Whether that’s true or not, it makes a terrible weapon—terrible for us, not our enemy.”

  Now Irrith understood the gathering. “You’re preparing to fight it.”

  Her friend shrugged. “What else can we do?”

  Something new, Irrith thought. She would never say it, though. Under the command of Sir Peregrin Thorne, Captain of the Onyx Guard, Segraine and her fellows had faced the Dragon once already, battling it amidst the flames of the Great Fire. Their willingness to do so a second time showed just how brave they were—or how foolhardy. Irrith herself, though brave on occasion, had no intention of going anywhere near the creature a second time. Love for the city aside, if the appointed day came and they had no better plan than facing down the Dragon in battle, she was going back to Berkshire. London could burn just as well without her as with.

  Segraine didn’t seem much more enthusiastic. The lady knight cut an impressive figure, even in a plain silk shirt and old slops; the severity of her tightly queued hair drew attention to her strong profile, and the breadth of her shoulders. She had been Lieutenant of the Onyx Guard, before she gave her place to Sir Cerenel. Irrith wondered if it was because her friend had looked ahead just as she had, and had seen the specter of defeat.

  Then Segraine noticed her scrutiny, and the mere touch of her gaze made Irrith feel ashamed of that thought. “Mind you,” the knight added, “this all assumes there’s a Dragon to fight.”

  Irrith blinked in confusion. “What? You think the Queen’s lying, that Feidelm made the vision up?”

  Her friend’s lip curled in something not quite a laugh. “We should be so lucky. No, we have an enemy; the question is whether it will have a body we can attack. Remember, what they imprisoned was its spirit. And that’s a hard thing to stab.”

  The shard lay on the floor, steaming a little in the cool air. The practice was breaking up, and the audience with it; a small group went with Sir Peregrin out the far door, the gnome and another collected the ice, and the rest drifted away, grumbling. “That’s it for today,” Segraine said, “but I doubt you came here to watch us wave a piece of ice around anyway.”

  It recalled Irrith to her purpose. “I saw an advertisement in Cheapside,” she said, pulling the torn paper from her pocket. “Do you think this man has a real satyr?”

  Segraine took the fragment and studied it. A few of the fae who hadn’t yet left came closer, reading over the lady knight’s shoulders. “I don’t know,” she murmured, peering at the small print near the bottom. “Though it’s happened before.”

  Hempry, a short a
nd thick-limbed yarthkin, was reading not so much over Segraine’s shoulder as under her elbow. He said in his broad Yorkshire accent, “That centaur fellow, six years ago.”

  “Ktistes?” Irrith said, alarmed.

  “No, a friend of his.” That came from a second northerner, a duergar Irrith didn’t know. “Some fool come over from the continent. Got himself snatched at the docks, maybe, or off the ship he came on—never did get the story out of him.”

  “What happened to him?”

  “Nothing bad,” Segraine said, handing the sheet back to Irrith. “We rescued him before the man who meant to display him was able to make good on his advertisements. Adenant, has Il Veloce gone missing? Or any other fauns or satyrs?”

  The questions were directed to one of the knights who had gone with Peregrin, now on his way back across the chamber. He paused, eyeing them in puzzlement, and said, “Not so far as I know.”

  “Could be another visitor,” the duergar suggested.

  Segraine’s chuckle was dry. “Or just a man in goatskin breeches. That’s happened before, too.”

  “Trouble?” Adenant asked.

  Irrith shifted her feet when everyone’s attention fell on her. “How should I know? I saw this, advertising a satyr like some kind of Bartholomew Fair show, and thought at the very least that you should see it.” It seemed like a very small matter, after watching their efforts against the illusion of the Dragon—though the possible satyr, if he existed, might disagree.

  Adenant and Segraine exchanged looks, and she said, “We should at least look into it.”

  “I’ll go with you,” Irrith said, barely ahead of Hempry and the duergar.

  “It doesn’t need an entire regiment,” Adenant said dryly. “Ask Peregrin, but I expect he’ll say two is enough.”

  Hempry grumbled mutiny, only giving in when Segraine promised to include him in any rescue attempt. Once the others had dispersed, the lady knight said to Irrith, “Arrange a showing. I’ll tell the Captain, and the Queen.”

  “And the Prince?” Irrith asked. “This is a mortal thing, after all.”

  Segraine’s hesitation was barely visible, but not quite absent. “And the Prince,” she agreed.

  Why the pause? Anything having to do with the mortals of London fell under the Prince’s authority; Lune would probably tell Peregrin and Segraine so. That was how it was done with the Princes Irrith had known. But this one was new, she remembered. Perhaps Segraine didn’t fully trust him yet.

  She didn’t really want to ask. That was politics, and something she intended to stay far away from. Instead she flicked the advertisement in her hand and offered Segraine her most impudent grin. “Only one question, then.”

  “And that is?”

  Irrith’s grin got wider. “Which of us has to be the lady?”

  Crane Court, London: November 10, 1757

  Letters of introduction, unfortunately, were insufficient to bring a man into the hallowed chambers of the Royal Society. To come among that august body, Galen needed his father to bring him in person.

  He had, with extreme reluctance, begun attending what small social events offered themselves in this season, when most people who could afford to—and who, therefore, presented suitable targets—had retired from London. He did not enjoy it, and Charles St. Clair growled at the lack of results; in consequence, neither was pleased.

  But it achieved what Galen needed: together, he and his father went to Crane Court, a narrow lane off of Fleet Street, to the home of the Royal Society of London for the Improvement of Natural Knowledge.

  Whatever Galen expected of the place, he didn’t see it. The facade in front of him might have belonged to any one of a thousand townhouses in London, with a narrow front, three windows across, and a short staircase leading up to the door, all in simple Palladian style. But the fellowship that met within its walls counted among its past number some of the greatest minds in all of Britain: Robert Boyle; Robert Hooke; Sir Christopher Wren, the guiding genius that rebuilt London in the aftermath of the Great Fire. Edmond Halley, whose calculations had called the spirit of that Fire home to roost. Sir Isaac Newton himself.

  Charles St. Clair said nothing to his son, either during the journey or once they arrived. He merely went up the stairs and rapped on the door with the head of his walking stick. A footman in livery welcomed them in and directed them up to the piano nobile, where a spacious room overlooking the garden would be the stage for tonight’s meeting. It held an assortment of cabriole-legged chairs, an abundance of candles with mirrors to reflect their light, and a small number of gentlemen, all respectably dressed in gray powdered wigs and cravats.

  His father introduced him around with a brusqueness bordering on rudeness. Galen bowed, made pleasantries, and was somewhat relieved to be rescued by the beginning of the meeting. Perhaps after it was done, and he had more to converse upon, this would become less awkward.

  The meeting, alas, no more displayed the marks of intellectual brilliance than the building did. Galen could forgive it the routine business with which it began: every society that wished to survive for more than a brief time must conduct itself in an orderly fashion. He soon found himself struggling, however, against the urge to yawn, as someone read an interminable extract from what was presumably even more interminable of a lecture on the lymphatic vessels of animals. Galen lost the thread of it a few minutes in, and returned to alertness only when he realized the group was ordering thanks to the doctor who had delivered the lecture.

  He made a better effort to stay alert for the letter that followed, and was rewarded with a name he recognized: Dr. Halley. For a moment, he thought someone might mention the comet. But no; the topic was magnetism, and Halley’s work on charts of the same. Which might be of great use to navigators at sea, certainly—just not of use to Galen.

  Be patient, he told himself, and put down the hand that wanted to fidget with the cuff of the opposite sleeve. This is only one meeting. The impatience that plagued him at Mrs. Vesey’s had returned; his heart kept beating faster, his breath shallowing, as he thought of his purpose. What did he care, if some laborer had grown extraordinary tumors on his head? No doubt it was a great inconvenience to the laborer himself, and Galen mustered what sympathy he could, but that sentiment was in short supply.

  By the time one of the Fellows produced a stone dug up by the New River Company, in which Galen could see no interest or value at all, he was nearly beside himself with impatience. Fortunately—but also frustratingly—that seemed to be the end of the evening’s business. After ordering thanks to the man who presented the rock, the Society broke up, leaving Galen afraid that his inspired suggestion was, in fact, a waste of time.

  But there was more to the Society than merely its lectures. The real wealth was the members, whose interests ranged across every field of philosophical inquiry. If there was help to be found, it would be among them—and that meant Galen must not leave yet. Bowing to his father, he said, “I thank you, sir, for bringing me here tonight. I should like to stay a while longer; there are gentlemen I would like to speak with.”

  St. Clair grunted. “Hire a chair, not a carriage.” And with that miserly advice, he took his leave.

  Drawing in a deep breath, Galen squared his shoulders and surveyed the room. His best prospect was a man he had greeted before the meeting, the closest of his father’s acquaintances here. Galen approached before he could grow too nervous. “Dr. Andrews, if I might trouble you for a moment?”

  The doctor was an older gentleman, almost the inverse of Galen’s father: pale instead of ruddy, thin instead of stout, thanks to long illness. “Yes, Mr. St. Clair?”

  “That reference to Dr. Halley’s work made me think—did I not read something in the Gentleman’s Magazine a while ago, regarding some predicted return of a comet?”

  Andrews gestured to the front of the room. “There, Mr. St. Clair, is the man to ask: Lord Macclesfield is twenty times the astronomer that I am.”

  Galen felt l
ike he’d swallowed that supposedly interesting rock. Though the St. Clairs might be a good family, they were nowhere near the rank of the Society’s President, the Earl of Macclesfield. When he formed his intention to speak with men here, he hadn’t aimed that high.

  “Come,” Andrews said. “I will introduce you.” When he moved, Galen had no choice but to follow.

  The earl was in conversation with another man, but turned as Andrews approached. “My lord, may I introduce to you Mr. Galen St. Clair?”

  Galen bowed deeply as Andrews presented him to the earl and to Lord Charles Cavendish, the Vice-President of the Society. Then the doctor said, “Mr. St. Clair was inquiring about this comet business.”

  A look of mingled pity and annoyance crossed the earl’s face. “I could damn that Benjamin Martin to the depths of Hell—yes, and John Wesley, too—for filling people’s heads with such fears. No, my boy, the Earth will not pass through the cometary tail on the twelfth of May. And even if it did, there is no reason to suppose it would result in the end of the world. While Halley may have suggested that a comet was the cause of the Deluge, it does not necessarily follow that his comet will be of equal consequence.”

  Galen cursed his fair skin, which advertised his slightest embarrassment to all the world. “My lord . . . that was not the intent of my query.”

  “Oh.” Macclesfield’s expression was the stuff of comedy. “My apologies, Mr. St. Clair. What did you wish to know?”

  Whereupon Galen realized he’d failed to prepare anything like a coherent question. “I—that is—the state of affairs regarding the comet, my lord; the expectation of its return, the preparation for sighting it, anything about the nature of cometary bodies that was not known in Halley’s time . . .” Anything we might use to keep the Dragon upon its chariot, such that it cannot come down to plague us once more. Segraine had tried this, but fifty years ago. Surely astronomers had learned new things since then.

  The earl sighed. “Truth be told, Mr. St. Clair, I fear the French will steal a march on us where the comet is concerned. I’ve spoken to Bradley at the Royal Observatory, but at the moment his attention is much occupied with other matters. The most crucial issue, of course, is the timing of the comet’s perihelion—”