A Star Shall Fall (45 page)

Against his will, his gaze went upward. The clouds were as thick as ever, and he thanked God and Mab alike for that, depressing as they were. “Myself? Four years or so. For them, however, it’s been more than fifty years.”

Delphia shivered. He doubted it was from the chill. “That long. I can’t imagine living that way—not for decades on end.”

“They don’t see time as we do,” Galen said. While true, it wasn’t the whole of the truth. The long wait
had
worn on the fae, he thought. They were accustomed to passing eternity with little attention to the years, counting few things in any increment smaller than “an age.” For half a century now, however, they’d lived with one eye on the calendar. The strain showed. Podder, who had been servant to seven Princes of the Stone, had vanished last week. He wasn’t the only one to go.

“I confess,” Delphia said, “I did not expect them to have philosophers and scholars. When I thought of such creatures at all, I associated them with—oh, I don’t know. Flowers and butter churns, I suppose.”

“Those things have their place; I should introduce you to the Goodemeades. But the fae copy anything they like, and ignore whatever they don’t. They’re very curious creatures, Delphia,” Galen said. The name had grown more comfortable over the months, though he took care never to use it around anyone who might find the familiarity inappropriate. “You would like Lady Feidelm, I think; she, too, is very interested in learning.”

Delphia smiled, tugging her cloak more firmly around herself. “Never mind the faerie
court
beneath London’s feet; you have a university down there.”

His laugh was too loud; a guilty glance over his shoulder told him Mrs. Northwood had overheard. But what, he asked himself, would she do? Call off the wedding? The marriage settlement was signed, and the ceremony planned for a month hence; she would not undo it all just because her daughter and future son-in-law seemed to be sharing a private joke. “With tedious lectures and the granting of empty degrees? I think not.”

“An academy, then, such as Plato had in Athens. After all, you said yourself that there are unanswered questions yet. Surely you won’t abandon them just because a star is no longer about to fall on your head.”

Now it was his turn to shiver, and she placed a hand on his arm. “I’m sorry. I should not jest about something that worries you so much.”

He laid his own hand over hers in reply, before they moved apart once more, Delphia tucking her arm back into the shelter of her cloak. For all that Galen appreciated the semisolitude that being outside gave them, he was beginning to grow chilled; they could not stay out here much longer.

Delphia might have been thinking the same thing, for she said, “I will be glad when we are wed, and can spend time in company with one another—or even go missing for a few hours—without raising suspicion.” Then she blushed and said, “I—that is not to suggest that my
only
reason is—”

Galen drew her arm out again, bringing them both to a halt in the grass and turning Delphia to face him. Before Mrs. Northwood could catch up to them, he placed a kiss on the hand of his soon-to-be bride, and said, “I understand. And I feel the same. Be patient but a little while longer, Miss Northwood, and you shall have what you desire.”

The Onyx Hall, London: March 12, 1759

The laboratory was empty when Irrith came in. Abd ar-Rashid was in Wapping, talking to the Dutch Jew who had made their bowl, arranging for lenses and mirrors. Wrain and Lady Feidelm were also above, examining the Monument to the Great Fire, seeing if they could somehow shield the chamber in its base from aethereal contamination.

Galen was at home with his family, for tomorrow he would be married.

Irrith had expected to find Savennis or Dr. Andrews, though. Without them, the abandoned laboratory seemed forlorn. Paper lay scattered everywhere, with notes scribbled in half a dozen different languages and hands. Shelves meant for books were all but bare, their former occupants tottering in piles on the tables and floor. Cold ashes filled the hearth, with no Podder to see to them.

Irrith trailed her fingers over a microscope, a pendulum, some chemical apparatus whose purpose she’d never learned. She picked up a sheet whose top read
Extraction of Sophic Mercury
in large letters; the rest of it was blank. It flutttered from her hand to the floor.

This wasn’t what she’d imagined. In the long ages of her life, she’d seen every kind of struggle from a knife in the back to armies at war, but never one fought so much in the mind. It might yet come down to armies, of course; that was what Peregrin’s spear-knights were for. But Galen and his scholars were trying to defeat the Dragon with nothing more than ideas: a kind of war she’d never seen before.

In a moment of rare carelessness, she’d left the door open behind her. How long Irrith hadn’t been alone, she couldn’t say, but she turned to find Lune standing in the opening.

Irrith jumped, of course, and her hand went into her pocket, gripping the pistol she always carried these days. There was a hawthorn box in her other pocket, its friendly wood shielding her against the three iron balls within. If the clouds failed suddenly and the Dragon came roaring down, she would be prepared.

But it was Lune, not the Dragon. Once her nerves had calmed, Irrith remembered to curtsy. “Your Majesty.” Then she peered out the door, into the empty corridor beyond. “You’re . . . alone?”

Lune smiled, with rueful amusement, and closed the door behind her. “I am. After so many years, even I forget there was a time I walked this realm alone, without ladies and footmen and all the other pomp that attends a Queen. I wanted to speak to Dr. Andrews privately—but it seems he’s not here.”

“I think he went home.”

“Good.” Lune picked up a mortar and pestle, studied its contents, set it down again. “Galen said he was having difficulty persuading him to do so.”

“He’s dying,” Irrith said bluntly. “And he thinks being here can save him, at least for a while. But I think it’s sending him a little mad.”

The silver eyes darkened. “Gertrude is very apprehensive of that danger. But Galen argued, and I agreed, that Dr. Andrews’s condition made it worth the risk; we needed his mind, and he would not have long to run mad.”

Needed.
Lune spoke as if the matter were done. “Are we ready, then? I know about the Monument plan, but have they found their mercury?”

“They found it long ago,” Lune murmured, and her lips tightened. On most fae, it would have been nothing, but on her it was a like a banner, advertising her distress. “But there is . . . a problem.”

They had a source for the sophic mercury? This was the first Irrith had heard of it—though admittedly, she hardly understood the scholars’ debates. She knew they wanted to draw it out of some water-dwelling faeries, but there was, as Lune said, some problem. Irrith furrowed her brow, trying to remember.

Then she succeeded, and wished she hadn’t. “They’re afraid it would kill the river fae.”

Lune’s lips tightened again. For a moment she was like a statue, frozen and mute; then she inhaled and answered with a simple truth. “Not the river fae. Me.”

Irrith gaped. No one had breathed a word of this, not in all the time she’d spent in the laboratory—well, of course they hadn’t. Who would say such a thing, any more than they had to? But a thousand things made more sense now, that she hadn’t understood when Wrain muttered them, or Feidelm lapsed into language so abstract she could have been talking about anything at all.

A thousand things—and chief among them, the desperation in Galen’s eyes. He wanted to save the Onyx Hall, of course, but sometimes it took on a sharper edge, and now Irrith knew why.

She studied Lune, marking the hollows under her high cheekbones, the sharp line of the muscles in her neck. Fading, yes—but slowly. She could hold on for a very long time. If there was good reason to. “Galen would die to save this place,” Irrith said, and then corrected herself. “To save
you
. I don’t think you would die for him . . . but would you do it for London, and the Onyx Hall?”

Lune stood silent, head bowed, long-fingered hands folded across the stomacher of her simple dress. Irrith could never have asked her this if there were servants present, or even waiting outside the door, but it was just the two of them, and for this brief span she could speak to the elfin woman, rather than the sovereign. The distinction was important to her, though she could not have said why.

“There have been times when I almost did,” Lune said finally, not lifting her head. “I held back because in the end, I believed my death—or even my abdication—would create more problems than it would solve. There are fae here who share my ideals, but none of them, I think, could manage this court. And those who could rule effectively would not do so in a manner I can accept.

“So when it was merely the arguments of the Sanists, it was easy to say
no
. But now there is the Dragon. And now . . . I do not know.”

Irrith’s hands curled into fists. She was vividly aware of her fingers, bones, joints—her body. Her
self
. No separation between the two. “Maybe you wouldn’t die, though. I don’t really understand what they’ve been talking about, but it sounds like what they’re after is just you in a different form, your soul separated from the aether that makes you solid. So you wouldn’t really be dead, would you? You’d just be . . . different.”

The two of them stared at each other, neither one moving, as if both were struck by the same thought. Lune said, “The philosopher’s stone—”

“
Would
it be a stone?” Irrith asked, still not blinking. “Galen told me the alchemists thought it would be some kind of powder, red or shining or whatever—but how would they know? None of them ever made it, not truly. And we aren’t working with metals, are we?” They were working with spirits. The Dragon’s, and Lune’s.

Wouldn’t the result be a spirit, too?

The words seemed to float up out of Lune, without any effort on her part. “I want to save the Onyx Hall.”

“And the Dragon wants to destroy it,” Irrith finished. “Which one of you wins?”

Her answer was the fear in those silver eyes. Lune was strong and determined, yes. But strong enough to defeat the Dragon?

“We could be wrong,” Lune said carefully. “This is mere speculation, and neither of us is a scholar. Nevertheless . . .” Her shoulders went back, and the elfin woman was gone; in her place stood the Queen. “I hardly need tell you not to speak of this to anyone. I will consult with Galen—no, he is occupied. Another, then. I thank you, Irrith; you’ve given me much to think about.”

She swept out the door, leaving Irrith alone once more in the laboratory. Staring blindly at the far wall, she sank into a cross-legged position on the floor.

The philosopher’s stone might not be their salvation after all. Which left them with what? Aspell’s plan of sacrifice?

A chill sank into Irrith’s bones. Until Lune brought it up, she hadn’t given much thought to the question of what would happen to the Onyx Court if its Queen . . . went away. The Hall, yes; but not the court itself, the fae and mortals, with all their conflicting desires. Who would hold them together in Lune’s absence? Who
could
?

Aspell, maybe. But he showed no sign of wanting it; from what Irrith had seen, he was a Sanist only with reluctance, because the situation forced him to it. So who, then? One of the others in the coffeehouse that day?

She didn’t even know who they were—much less what ambition hid beneath their masks. And the more she thought about it, the more fear tightened her muscles. The Lord Keeper might insist he would do nothing against the Queen’s will, but those unknown others. . . .

Irrith paced with small, tight strides, thinking. If she tried to ask Aspell for their names, he wouldn’t tell her; he’d think she was preparing to betray them. And maybe she was. But there was someone else she could ask—someone who might know, who could be intimidated into telling, and who wouldn’t much care what happened afterward.

Irrith went to hunt Carline.

Feidelm sat in perfect silence for a full minute after Lune shared what she and Irrith had discussed. The sidhe’s vivid eyes grew distant; when they sharpened once more, frustrated regret filled them. “Now of all times, I wish I still had my prophetic gift. I could look to the future and tell you if that danger is real.”

Such favors had been precisely what lost her that gift. Tensions between mortal England and Ireland rose and fell, but never subsided entirely, and that colored relations between their faerie courts, as well. The King and Queen of Connacht did not want one of their seers constantly lending aid to Lune, even if the Onyx Court no longer meddled in national politics as it once did.

Reminding Feidelm of that would do no good at all. “You have more gifts than just foresight,” Lune said. “What does your wisdom tell you?”

The Irish faerie bent her head, gripping her hands together. “That you and Dame Irrith are right—and even if it’s unsure, we cannot risk it.” She sighed, knuckles tensing. “We struggled so hard with the question of
how
to do this thing that we could not spare thought for what would happen afterward. But we should have done.”

The brilliance of the idea had carried them all away. Not just to stop an evil, but to turn it to good. It meant more to Galen than it did to the fae, who were already immortal; and it meant the most of all to Dr. Andrews, whose life might be saved by this means.

Lune asked, “Is Dr. Andrews at home now?”

Feidelm nodded. “With Savennis, I think. The last I heard, he insisted he’d conceived of a way to extract sophic mercury, without harming the source; Savennis was trying to find a river nymph to assist them.” She exhaled, not quite a laugh. “I don’t know what they think they’re doing. Nothing Andrews says about it makes the slightest bit of sense. He may have gone mad in truth.”

Staring at his own death so near—any man might lose his wits, even without the touch of faerie. And now Lune would have to crush his final hope.