Waiting for him, judging by how quickly she’d appeared. Galen reached the obvious conclusion. “Are you leaving?”
Startlement pulled her straight. “What? No! Is that how you think of me, as someone who runs away?”
He remembered her charging across the ice, pistol in hand, to free Lune. The marks of her exposure in the world above had largely faded now, but there was still a hollowness to her, shadows in her cheeks and along the line of her collarbone. No, she was not the sort to run away.
“I’m sorry,” Galen said, turning back toward the hearth. It was easy enough to do his servants’ work, here in this faerie palace; all it took was a whispered request, and fire bloomed in the empty grate. “I’ve been with the von das Tickens. The news isn’t good. Niklas says gold would only hold the Dragon a little while, before it melted.”
Irrith closed the door behind her. “Abd ar-Rashid said the same thing. But he suggested—well, I did, but he agreed—that we might be able to weaken the Dragon by doing the alchemical thing badly. On purpose. Combining it with something impure, to make it imperfect. And therefore vulnerable.”
Silence followed, in which Galen fancied he could hear the beating of both their hearts. The pieces hovered in his mind, not quite coming together. A vessel of sun-gold. Filled with something lacking in phlogiston, that would draw the Dragon in, as air was drawn into a vessel from which it had been pumped. Something impure, so they could enact the “chemical wedding” of the philosophers, with opposite intent.
But what thing?
“Water and earth,” Irrith said, like a schoolboy recalling his—her—lessons. “Cold and wet. It has to have no fire in it, but it also has to be flawed. Not Lune. Something that’s vulnerable.”
“Something,” Galen whispered, “that is mortal.”
Her mouth fell open by degrees, as if all the world had slowed. Irrith stood perfectly still at the edge of the carpet, not breathing. Any more than Galen was.
“Mortal,” he repeated, more strongly. “Bind the Dragon’s spirit into a vessel that can be destroyed—that can be killed. You might not even have to do anything; the mere presence of such power might annihilate the vessel, and by doing so, take the Dragon with it.” How could the words be so steady, so calm, as if he were speaking of philosophy only, with no application to life?
Irrith’s voice was not so steady. “There are plenty of stray dogs in Lo . . .”
She couldn’t even finish it. Galen was shaking his head. “No. It needs more than a dog.”
“Then a beggar. Plenty of those, too. Snatch one off any street corner—”
“An innocent?” he demanded. His own calm slipped. “Someone ignorant of this world, this war, tied down for the slaughter without even knowing why? I’ll be damned first! It must be someone willing, Irrith.”
His declaration hung in the air. She could make the tally as well as he could. Edward Thorne was half-faerie. Mrs. Vesey? Delphia? There were others in the Hall or associated with it, various lovers and pets of faerie courtiers, many of them with no awareness of the larger faerie world, its politics and dangers. It would be his duty as Prince to go among them, to question one after another, asking who would lay down his life for the good of London.
And perhaps one might agree. Perhaps.
But he could never bring himself to ask.
She shook her head, a tiny movement at first, then a more vehement one. “No, Galen.”
“I am willing,” he said, and if it was ragged, it was also true.
“No, no, no—” Irrith spun and crossed the room, hands in the air as if to ward off his statement, and then without warning she seized the nearest thing that came to hand and hurled it across the room. Porcelain shattered against the far wall. “No! You aren’t going to do it!”
“Yes. I am.” Peculiar joy was filling the hole inside him, driving back the fear. “Who better, Irrith? If the Prince will not sacrifice himself for the good of his people, who will? I’ll renounce my connection to the Hall—”
The firelight caught Irrith’s face, revealing fury. “Do you think this will make her love you?”
The chain of her question dragged him back to earth. “What?”
“Lune. That’s why you’re doing this, isn’t it? Because you love her, and you want some grand gesture to show it, saving the Onyx Court single-handed. You think she’ll finally love you, then. You’re an idiot, Galen. Her heart was given centuries ago, and not to you.”
He flinched. It struck too near the mark. He had dreamt like that, too many times, but such dreams could not survive the light of day. “No. I—I know she will never love me.”
“Then what?” Her contempt lashed out like a whip. “That when you’re gone, she’ll understand? These years you’ve been in the Hall, worshipping at her feet, laughed at by all the courtiers who have seen it a thousand times before, a poor little mortal pining for his faerie lover. But once you’re dead, oh, yes, then we’ll understand. We’ll see what your devotion was worth.
“You won’t be here to see it, though. Because you’ll be gone. Do you imagine yourself looking down from Heaven, seeing us all mourn you as you deserve?” Irrith’s eyes blazed green, burning with inhuman light. “What makes you think you’re going to Heaven at all?”
Galen’s heart pounded once, hard enough to shake his entire body, and then it stopped.
The sprite’s slender frame was rigid with emotion. The only thing moving was her breast, heaving with her shallow gasps. Then it slowed, and Irrith said, more quietly but with no less force, “I don’t know your divine Master. But I know this much: he does not love suicides. And what would you call it, when a man embraces death for love of a faerie queen?”
He had no answers. His heart was beating again, but he could not draw breath. Her questions rang in his head, the echoes multiplying instead of fading out, and all he could see was Irrith’s green eyes, shifting as no human eyes could.
And Lune’s face, the perfect portrait that had resided in his memory since he first saw her above Southwark, shining in the night sky. His goddess.
Irrith opened her mouth, as if to say something more. But no sound came out, and then she spun away and was gone, slamming the door shut behind her, leaving him alone with the silent fire.
The Onyx Hall, London: April 15, 1759
It was not the Queen’s mourning night, but the great garden of the Onyx Hall was empty. At Lune’s request, even Ktistes had departed, leaving her alone with the trees and grass, fountains and stream, and the faerie lights blazing the image of a comet across the ceiling above.
She walked without purpose, without seeing, up one path and down another, lost in the maze of her own thoughts. In nearly one hundred and seventy years of rule, Lune had faced many challenges to the Onyx Hall and her rule over it. More than once she had thought herself at the end of that road, doomed to lose her realm, her sovereignty, or even her life. And always she had found a way to continue.
Always—until now.
The weight of the Dragon already lay upon her. She remembered that searing touch, the annihilating force of its attention. Soon she would feel it anew. The last clouds were shredding; they would not endure until the end of the month. The reports from Paris were that Messier was having difficulty sighting the comet, obscured as it was in the morning twilight, and soon he might lose it entirely; but after that it would reappear in the evening sky. They would face the Dragon whether they were ready or not.
She was not alone after all. Someone was waiting on the path ahead.
Galen.
The meticulous elegance of his apparel set off a warning bell in her mind. She’d seen such a thing before—had done it herself. He dressed with care because it was a form of armor, a way of preparing for battle.
They had not spoken to one another directly since he fled Rose House. She knew what battle he expected, and was prepared for it.
But Galen surprised her by bowing, with the same flawless care that marked his appearance. “
Your Grace, I bring you good tidings. I know how to kill the Dragon.”
Kill. Not trap, or banish, or appease. End. And ensure their safety forever.
So why did the Prince not look happier?
Formality rose, unbidden, to her lips; she dismissed it. That was the game he wanted to play, and she didn’t trust it. Instead she asked directly, “How?”
“It requires a little preparation,” he said. “With your permission, Abd ar-Rashid and I will enter the Calendar Room for that purpose—though I know we can ill afford to lose eleven days. But the principle, madam, is sound.
“Much of it will be the prior plan. We will use the Monument to summon the Dragon down into the chamber in its base. This will be armored in gold, to prevent it from fleeing while an alchemical conjunction is performed. But not with sophic mercury: instead we will bind it into mortal form. If this does not immediately result in the death of that host, and therefore the death of the Dragon, then it will at least be vulnerable, as it was not before.” He bowed again. “Your Grace, I will undertake this duty myself.”
Duty. Binding. Elegant words, to blunt the raw edge of his meaning.
He still intended to die.
Galen didn’t flinch away from her gaze. He’d gotten better at lying, but not perfected the art. There was fear beneath the surface, whose existence he was doing his best not to show.
Fear held in check by certainty. The principle was sound. Every detail of their predicament was too firmly graven into Lune’s mind for her to delude herself on that front; offering herself up to the Dragon as appeasement was a weak possibility at best. Even Aspell had known that. Binding the Dragon to mortality stood a far better chance of success.
He hadn’t come here expecting argument, she realized. The armor was not for her. It was for himself, to hold the fear at bay.
She wondered if he had chosen his moment deliberately, tracking her movement through the garden until she came to this point, or whether it was pure chance that put them near the twin obelisks. Michael Deven’s grave, and the memorial to her past Princes.
All of them died eventually. Some from illness, others from misfortune; one had given his life to prepare them for the Dragon’s return. None of them could live forever.
But she hadn’t expected to lose Galen so soon.
She had not answered him. He was stiff as a pike, still where he had been when she stopped, awaiting the answer they both knew she had to give.
Before she could give it, though—“What of your family?”
It was cruel, but necessary. His calm cracked a little. “My sisters,” he said, with a hint of unsteadiness, “have been taken care of. Delphia’s jointure is provided for by our marriage settlement.”
A lawyer’s reply, which told her the answer to her real question. “You have not told her yet.”
His jaw trembled, then firmed. “No. But I will.”
Lune could not guess how the woman would take it. Delphia was too unfamiliar to her still. But the considerations of one mortal woman would not change their circumstances—nor, she suspected, Galen’s determination. He would do this come Hell itself.
And she had no reason strong enough to refuse him.
“Then make your preparations, Lord Galen,” she said formally, acknowledging him with a curtsy, Queen to Prince. “The resources of this court are at your disposal.”
Memory: April 15, 1756
“I think the one thing worse than locking myself in that room for months on end,” Cuddy said, “would be locking myself in that room for months on end to do mathematics.”
The puck’s voice echoed down the corridor as Lune approached. She hid a smile before she came through the pillars into the dwarves’ workshop. Some fae, like the von das Tickens, might have a great deal of love for craftsmanship, but none of them enjoyed mathematics. Even those mad brothers did their work by instinct, not calculation. For that, they needed a mortal.
Eleven days ago, Cuddy and the dwarves had carried stacks of books into the great clock’s chamber: instructions in algebra, elementary works on the calculus, and Newton’s great Principia Mathematica; Flamsteed’s observations from 1682; Halley’s Astronomiae cometicae synopsis, which had started their troubles to begin with. There were rumors that a French mathematician would be attempting to calculate the comet’s orbit and perihelion, but Lune and her court could not afford to wait. The Calendar Room was the only solution, and so Lord Hamilton had offered himself for this herculean task. He knew little of that branch of learning, but that was nothing sufficient study outside of time could not mend.
She’d given him her most heartfelt thanks before he went in, and would do so again when he came out. To be locked inside, alone, with only the great clock for company . . . Cuddy’s jest aside, even the work could not be enough to distract a man from that dread presence. She hoped Hamilton would not come stumbling out in a few moments to say he could not do it, that he’d only lasted three days and accomplished nothing at all.
The time had come to find out. Wilhas took hold of the sundial on the door and dragged the portal open.
At first she thought Hamilton’s slow, shuffling steps a sign of mere exhaustion. He could not have slept well, inside the Calendar Room. But then he came forward, into the illumination of the workshop’s faerie lights, and she saw his head. Not a wig; he’d taken none into the room. Those long, ragged locks were his own hair—and snow-white.
The Prince of the Stone lifted his head, revealing his time-worn face to the world.
Lune’s breath withered in her throat. Mortal. He is mortal. Time outside of time—we knew he wouldn’t need food, but we did not think of aging.
How long was he in there?
Hamilton extended one wrinkled hand. The papers in it trembled, until Lune took them. “Perihelion on March thirteenth, 1759,” he said, in a reed-thin voice that had spoken only to the walls for years. “The French will need more than one mathematician if they want their answer before the comet has come and gone; the work is enormous. I fear I took too long learning the calculus—it was hard to concentrate in there—”
He staggered. Everyone had been standing like stone, but now Wilhas leapt into the chamber and came back with a chair. Its cushion was worn beyond threadbare, its padding flattened until it was almost as hard as the wood. Hamilton collapsed into it with a motion that spoke of endless, horrifying habit.
Lune sank into a crouch before him, papers forgotten in her hand. A single glance had shown her the unsteady scrawl, replacing his old, meticulous writing. “Hamilton—did you not realize?”
His gaze fixed on her. With a chill she had not felt since she took the throne, Lune saw a familiar madness in his eyes. He had aged as if in the mortal world, but his mind suffered the effects of too long in a faerie realm. Or perhaps it was only the isolation, and the inevitable ticking of the clock.
“I did,” he said gently, as if speaking to a child. “But by the time I did . . . it was already too late to go back to my old life. Years had passed. People would wonder. So I decided to finish the work. But it was hard, and sometimes I forgot what I was doing . . .”
Cuddy’s feet scuffed against the floor as he shifted his weight. Hamilton glared at him. “The numbers are right, though,” the Prince insisted, with something like his old strength. “I made sure of that. Only when I had the same result three times in a row did I come out.”
Lune tasted ashes. Hamilton had not been the youngest Prince she ever chose, but even accounting for the effect of his broken health, he must have been inside for at least twenty years. Probably more. Six years her Prince, and he would not live to see a seventh. She’d feared losing a consort to the Dragon, but she’d never imagined it would happen like this.
He laid his shaking hand atop hers, where it rested on one skirt-shrouded knee. “I’ll help you look,” he promised, with sincerity that brought tears to her eyes. “There were some likely lads in the court. They’re still here, yes? They haven’t gone away?”
/> “No, Hamilton,” she whispered. “They haven’t gone away.”
The old Prince nodded, white hair falling in a curtain around his face. “One of them will do well, I’m sure. One of them will do very well indeed.”
The Onyx Hall, London: April 30, 1759
The workshop was silent, the tools cleared away. Even the clocks had been allowed to run down, their hands stopped at odd hours. Most of the Onyx Court waited in the great presence chamber, filling the space before the Queen’s silver throne and the Prince’s chair of estate, gathered to hear their rulers speak. And soon enough that time would come.
Once the door to the Calendar Room opened.
The escort waited in silence: dwarves, scholars, an honor guard of knights, and three women. Irrith and Delphia St. Clair flanked Lune on either side, and none of the three met the others’ eyes. Once we divided him among us, Irrith thought, bones aching with tension. Now he belongs to none of us.
Lune was, or at least seemed, her usual self: serene as the moon, and as cool. Delphia presented a stony mask to the world. Surely she hadn’t expected to be widowed scarcely a month after marriage. It won’t end, Irrith had said to her, the night they went to rescue the Queen. He’ll always be running off, and leaving you behind. Where he ran to now, no man returned.
A hard knot lodged in her own throat, hurting every time she swallowed. Often as she reminded herself that Galen was mortal, and mortals died, the knot refused to go away. It was fury, and betrayal, and fear; and it was grief, too, which made her angriest of all. She shouldn’t have to suffer that when she hadn’t chosen to love him. He should mean nothing to her, one more broken doll, gone a bit too soon.
She knew it was a lie, though. Lune mourned all her Princes, not just the one she loved. Not as deeply, and as time passed they would fade from her mind; but any faerie who lived closely with mortals, mimicked their ways, ate their bread, felt at least a touch of loss when the close ones passed on. Next year Irrith’s grief would be forgotten.
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