A Star Shall Fall (23 page)

Irrith barely waited to express her gratitude before bolting for the night garden.

The place was eerily silent. Normally there were fae scattered around enjoying the fountains or the flowers or conducting an assignation under a bower, but tonight Irrith had it to herself—except for Ktistes, of course, who showed no interest in masquerades, and preferred wrestling to boxing. On her way to his pavilion on the far side, though, Irrith realized there was one other person in the garden.

Galen sat on a low bench next to a slender white obelisk. What he was doing there, Irrith didn’t know; he should have been with Lune, preparing to greet the ambassadors from the sea. Certainly he was dressed for court, in a deep blue coat heavily crusted with silver embroidery and a diamond-buttoned waistcoat. He sat unmoving, though, and his expression was a complex blend of melancholy and speculation, and it drew her like a moth to a flame.

She made enough noise that he heard her coming and rose. “Dame Irrith. Is her Grace calling for me?”

“Probably,” Irrith said. “I came to visit Ktistes. What are you doing?”

The Prince gestured toward the plaque at the base of the obelisk. “Just . . . thinking.”

Irrith drew closer and knelt in the grass, the better to read the inscriptions at the base. They turned out to be a list of names and dates.

And above them, in large letters,
PRINCES OF THE STONE.

The numbers made her feel very odd. It was such a human thing—of course, the men commemorated here
were
human. But to see the years of their reigns laid out in marble like that . . . it was as if she normally flew above the landscape of time, and this forced her briefly down to earth.

From behind her, Galen said, “You knew some of them, didn’t you?”

“Three.” Irrith reached out with an uncertain hand, brushing her fingertip along the names. “Lord Antony. Jack—he rarely used his title. And Lord Joseph.” After that, she’d been in Berkshire.

“How many were married?”

Irrith twisted around to stare at him. Galen still had that look on his face, the melancholy and the speculation. And a bit of apprehension, too. “Of the ones I knew? Lord Antony and Lord Joseph.”

Now melancholy was winning out. “And the first one, too, I think. Even if they were never wed in a church, I know he loved the Queen. And she loved him back.”

Irrith glanced past him, to the canopy of ever-blooming apple trees on the other side of the path. The greenery in between hid the second obelisk—the one that marked Sir Michael Deven’s grave. “Yes.”

Galen let out his breath as if trying, and failing, to banish his gloom with it, and sank back down upon the bench. There being nowhere else to sit but next to him or on the grass, Irrith stayed where she was. She could almost
taste
the sentiment churning in his heart, and perhaps it was that which led her to speak recklessly. “She won’t stop you from marrying, you know. Even if you
are
in love with her.”

The transformation to shock, horror, and embarrasment was instantaneous. Galen sputtered out several half-finished words before he managed a coherent sentence: “I’m not in love with her!”

“Ah.” Irrith nodded wisely. “Then I misunderstood. I thought the fact that you watch every move she makes, light up when she smiles, grovel like a kicked dog when she’s disappointed, and would do absolutely anything she asks in a heartbeat meant you were in love with her. But I’m a faerie; I know little about such things.”

She managed not to laugh at Galen, even though he was staring at her like the very spirit of the word
aghast.
It
was
funny, but she also felt a pang of sympathy for him. It could not possibly be pleasant, tying your heart to someone else’s heels like that.

Sunset still flamed in his cheeks when the strangled whisper emerged from his frozen mouth. “Please tell me she doesn’t know.”

“She doesn’t,” Irrith agreed. After all, he was the Prince; she had to do what he told her. Also, he wouldn’t be able to help Lune with the mermen if he went and buried himself under a rock to die of shame.

“You
cannot
tell her,” Galen said. For the first time since she met him, he sounded authoritative—if a little desperate. “My . . . sentiment is my own concern. Her Majesty will not be burdened with the knowledge of it.”

Irrith hardly listened to the last of that; she was distracted by something else. “No wonder you almost never use her name. Other Princes have, you know. She doesn’t require formality of them. Are you afraid she’ll guess, if she hears you say it?” It would be hard, she supposed, to sound like an ardent lover while wrestling with cumbersome forms of address.

Galen said stiffly, “Until such time as I can show her the proper respect in my heart, I must rely on the respect of speech.”

Good luck,
Irrith thought. “How did it happen, anyway?” She wrapped her arms around her knees, like a child awaiting a story. She’d once spent a few years spying on such children, trying to understand the nature of family. It still escaped her, but she’d learned some entertaining tales.

His teeth caught his lower lip, a charming bit of off-center uncertainty. “I caught a glimpse of her one night, returning from a journey outside of London. She shone like the moon . . .”

Irrith shivered. That was it, right there: the sound of adoration. It thrummed in his voice like a low string, plucked once.

Galen took sudden and intense interest in his fingernails. Seated below him, Irrith could still see a little of his face: the wings of his brows, the clean slope of his jaw. Not his eyes. “I knew nothing of the Onyx Court, and scarcely more of faeries; our nursemaid told other kinds of stories. But I searched London high and low, seeking hints of my vision, and ended up following Dame Segraine to an entrance.” He laughed quietly. “Which wasn’t my cleverest decision ever. But it worked out in the end.”

“You must have been terribly young.”

“Nineteen,” Galen said defensively.

Irrith blinked. “And you’re how old now?”

“Twenty-two.”

There was a profoundly tactless response to that, and Irrith might have made it had a puck not come running down the path just then. He ran past the two of them, slid to a halt, and came leaping back almost before he’d gotten his body turned around. “Lord Galen. The Queen needs your presence urgently—the masquerade—”

Galen was already on his feet. Despite the messenger’s obvious hurry, the Prince offered a hand to Irrith, and helped her up from the grass. “Are you attending the ball, Dame Irrith?”

It would almost be worth it, just to watch Galen try not to sigh over Lune, but even that could not drag her into so elegant an event. “No, I must talk to Ktistes. But I hope it goes well.”

He bowed, and then followed the twitching messenger out a nearby arch.

Left alone, Irrith knelt again and touched the plaque.
Dr. Hamilton Birch: 1750–1756.
It was . . . 1758 now, she thought. Galen was twenty-two. Nineteen when he came to the Onyx Hall.

She didn’t know when his birthday was, nor when in 1756 he’d succeeded Lord Hamilton, but he couldn’t have been in the Onyx Hall for more than a year or two before he became Prince of the Stone.

Quick elevations had happened before. Usually it was because something had happened to the previous Prince. And Hamilton Birch had reigned for only six years.

Then gave way to an uncertain young man whose chief qualification seemed to be adoration of the Queen.

Irrith
liked
Galen well enough. He clearly had a generous heart and an overwhelming desire to serve Lune faithfully. He was, however, also naïve enough to make Irrith feel like a jaded politician. Why had the Queen chosen him? Especially at so crucial a moment, with the Onyx Hall itself in mounting danger. Lune must have her reasons, but Irrith could not fathom what they were.

But then, Irrith didn’t know Galen all that well. She’d managed to accumulate a little bread, though—enough that she could spend some time sniffing around in the world above.

The time had come, she decided, to take a closer look at this new Prince.

Memory: September 16, 1754

Leaving behind the seventh draft of a note explaining the necessity of his decision, Galen St. Clair rode south out of London.

Darkness and the threat of tears obscured his vision as he crossed the new Westminster Bridge, descending into the open fields of Lambeth. Galen tried to force the latter down. He’d wept enough already; all of them had, from his mother down to little Irene.

All except his father.

Fury made his best guard against misery. Charles St. Clair had refused to share the details of the disaster, but Galen had gotten them from Laurence Byrd; he now knew to an excruciating degree of fineness how his father had gambled his fortune on a series of dubious investments, and lost it through the same. They were not penniless—his father kept saying so, louder every time, as if that made the situation more palatable. Not penniless, but they would have to practice a great deal of economy, and even that would not save the three St. Clair daughters. Their marriage portions would be small indeed.

Unless money was found, somehow. And so Galen wrote a letter, sealed it, and left it on his father’s desk, then took horse for Portsmouth and the Royal Navy. Britain was fighting France in the Ohio Country; there was hope of proper war, and with it, prize money.

In the madness of his desperation, this was the life Galen had chosen for himself.

He pulled his horse to a stop in the middle of a narrow lane, bracketed by hedgerows. His breath came hard in his chest, almost crossing the line into sobs. Could he do this? Abandon his mother, and his sisters, and the soil of England itself, to go to sea and court death in hopes of a brighter future?

It seemed to him that the darkness lifted a bit, as if the clouds had cleared, uncovering the moon. Galen’s breathing slowed when he realized two things: first, that the night was already clear, and second, that the moon was new.

He looked up into the sky.

High above, silver-radiant against the tapestry of the stars, rode a goddess. Her hands rested lightly on the reins of an enchanted steed, and her hair streamed free like the tail of some glorious comet. No road bore her weight, nor wings; the horse galloped upon the insubstantial air.

Behind her came a host of others, but Galen had no eyes for them. He sat rapt, his own mount forgotten beneath him, and turned in his saddle to watch the goddess go by. His memory, trained since childhood by a mother who loved the stories of the pagan Greeks and Romans, whispered names in his ear:
Artemis. Diana. Selene. Luna.

Perfection, beyond the reach of mortal kind.

And she was riding to London.

There was no mistaking it. The enchanted host changed their course, lowering to the grassy fields just before Southwark’s edge. His heart ached to see them descend to earth. They were airy things, and
her
most of all, that should not be contaminated by the heaviness of the world.

Yet they were of London. He’d seen it in the serenity of her beautiful face: she was coming home. Somehow that filthy city, choked with dung and coal smoke and the cries of the poor, that maw that ate up fortune and spat out ashes, was beloved to her. Wherever she had gone, she rejoiced at her return.

I must know who she is.

Galen tugged unthinking at his reins. Nothing happened. His horse, he saw, had bent to graze on a thick tuft of grass. Growling, he yanked harder, and dragged the reluctant beast onto a neighboring lane. But however much he spurred it onward, he wasn’t fast enough; by the time he reached Southwark, the enchanted host had vanished.

His heart pounded with passions that could not be put into words. That vision—who she was,
what
she was, and why she dwelt in London—

He could not leave.

A few moments ago, he’d been uncertain. Now there was no question. He could not turn his back upon the glory he had seen. Galen would stay, and search the city from Westminster to Wapping, tearing up the very cobbles of the streets if need be, until he found the lady again. And when he did, he would offer her his services, even unto death.

With tears once more upon his face, Galen turned his weary horse homeward.

But this time, they were tears of wonder.

The Mitre Tavern, Fleet Street: June 15, 1758

The crowds of Fleet Street were bad enough in the evening; at four o’clock in the afternoon, they were nothing short of absurd. This time, Galen’s choice to ride in a sedan chair had little to do with economy, and a great deal to do with common sense; as slowly as he was moving, a carriage would have gone even slower. Andrews had chosen the same mode of conveyance, and as they crawled through the press, the doctor’s rear chair-man was able to carry on an entire conversation with Galen’s forward man.

By the time he and the doctor stepped out at their destination, the early heat had called forth sweat from every pore of Galen’s skin. Andrews had gone so far as to take off his wig, and was fanning himself with his hat as Galen rejoined him. “God, I hate London in the summer,” the man said with feeling. “But the food will make up for it, I assure you; we’ve had a gift of turtle recently. Come, follow me.”

They escaped the clamor of the street for the quieter—though by no means quiet—interior of the Mitre Tavern. Men sat at their dinners all along the tables, and waiters scrambled to attend to them; Galen was almost run over by one plate-laden fellow as Andrews led him toward the stairs. The private room above was a relief by comparison, even if the air within was stuffy with pipe smoke, and the gentlemen there distinguished enough to put Galen to shame.