With Fate Conspire (24 page)

In almost all these cases Louisa was chaperoned: by a friend, or one of her married sisters, or Lucy, the lady’s maid. Mrs. Kittering descended next upon the maid, interrogating her mercilessly about every last detail of Louisa’s activities. And here arose some oddities, for there were moments for which Lucy could not entirely account; she had become distracted, or occupied in some unnecessary task, and could not swear with a clear conscience that she knew what Louisa had done during that time. Mrs. Kittering soon reduced her to tears, provoking some sympathy from Eliza—but sympathy was soon pushed aside by the realization that Lucy’s distractions had begun before the changeling took Louisa’s place.
Faerie trickery,
she thought. It wasn’t random; the changeling had been following her target for some time before stealing her away.

It ended as it must, with Mrs. Kittering sacking Lucy, without any of the pay she was owed. “Count yourself fortunate I do not bring you to the attention of the police,” she said, viciously and without much cause; Lucy had committed no crime. But it was a favorite threat in the household, and the Kitterings wealthy enough that they could possibly follow through, condemning their erstwhile maid to the prison, the workhouse, or the lunatic asylum.

Eliza’s relief to have escaped the ax faltered when Mrs. Kittering turned her attention to the remaining servants. “I want to know everything she does. What she reads, from whom she receives letters. She will see no callers without me present; if I am not at home, then you will say that she is not, either. And above all, she is not to go out. Am I understood?”

They all answered promptly and with vigor, eager to avoid Lucy’s fate. It thwarted Eliza’s hope that she might contrive to be the changeling’s companion on a trip out of the house, and thereby corner her away from watchful eyes and ears; she would have to find another way.

She tried to pretend the prospect didn’t call up a note of fear, and failed. It was one thing to force information out of Louisa, a sheltered young woman whose notion of cruelty was to ignore someone at a garden party, but a faerie … Eliza’s breath shallowed at the thought, and her palms grew sweaty-cold. She knew firsthand how cruel they could be.

Think of Owen. Think of Mrs. Darragh, and Maggie. You’re willing to dare the Special Irish Branch for him; surely a faerie can be no worse.

Mrs. Kittering’s eyes were upon her once more. Eliza curtsied, her face a perfect mask of obedience, and left before the missus could guess at the plan forming behind her eyes.

Night Garden, Onyx Hall: May 22, 1884

At first glance, nothing in the night garden had changed. The Walbrook’s foul waters still flowed sluggishly through the rank plants; faerie lights still drifted aimlessly about; the blankets and miserable possessions of the refugees still littered the ground.

But the population of those refugees had changed. In the aftermath of the terrible earthquake, a great many of them had fled, if not in search of Faerie, then to somewhere else less dangerous than London. Into the gaps they left came the dregs of the Goblin Market.

When the first brave souls ventured back into the warren beneath Billingsgate, they found half of that warren had disappeared. Of the two passages connecting it to the rest of the palace, one had fallen in; some of the Cornish knockers tried to dig it out, but new dirt fell to replace what they carried away. That part of the Hall now let into the ground beneath London. Even if they could dig through, there would be no palace on the other side.

Part of Dead Rick’s reason for coming to the night garden was to get out of the Market. The part that vanished had included Lacca’s entire lair, from doss-houses to Po’s opium den; now the goblin woman was fighting tooth and claw—literally—to keep from being forced out by Nadrett and Hardface. And so it went, down to the lowest sprite, everyone kicking and shoving to find new space or keep what they had, and the losers coming here, to the garden.

He didn’t have to claw for a new place—because Nadrett had decided to shorten his leash, keeping Dead Rick in his own chambers more often than not. But if it weren’t for that, he would be homeless. The stone of his refuge had finished its collapse, burying his few treasures under broken marble and onyx. With no bread to shield him, fleeing through London now would be suicide.

The rest of his reason for coming lay near the chamber’s eastern end. Two obelisks rose there, one a gravestone, the other a memorial. The dirty surface of the latter held a list of names and dates, marking the reigns of past Princes of the Stone. In its base, a small flame burned: one of the few things in the garden that wasn’t broken or fallen or stained.

No doubt the names would have meant something to Dead Rick, once. He knew the first one, Michael Deven, belonged to the man buried under the other obelisk, where he’d found and chased that girl. The rest were mysteries to him. Hodge, the only Prince he remembered, hadn’t yet joined his predecessors in the stone; the twelfth and final name carved into the obelisk was Alexander Messina, dead in 1870, long before Dead Rick’s memories began.

The skriker paused, looking at the dates. Doing the precise sums would have taken too long, but a glance was enough to show the pattern: each Prince’s reign had been shorter than the last, for quite some time now. There were two in the middle of the last century who only made it a handful of years each, Hamilton Birch and Galen St. Clair; the next, Matthew Abingdon, had done a good deal better, but after him it went steadily down.

“Probably the palace killing them,” he muttered. “Which one will go first: Hodge or the Hall?”

At the rate of progress on the Inner Circle Railway, it would be the Hall. The navvies were laying a short stretch of rail already, from Mark Lane partway toward Eastcheap Station at the Monument; that had been the cause of the earthquake. From there it was just a short gap to Mansion House, along Cannon Street and past the London Stone. The newspapers said it would be open for service by the autumn.

He scowled and jerked away from the obelisk, with its forlorn list of mortal men who’d served the Onyx Court. The finger bone he’d laid on the ground alongside it was still there, he saw, with no ashes anywhere nearby to signal that his ally the voice had seen it. Dead Rick dug in his pocket and pulled out a beef bone, cracked open for its marrow, dropping it onto the dead grass. Perhaps the finger, placed there after the incident with the ghost in the sewers, was too small, and his ally had overlooked it.

Unlikely. Much more probable that he’d given up. Or been discovered and cut down by Nadrett.

Or been in the Goblin Market when part of it vanished.

Dead Rick nudged the bone into better position with his toes and retreated, not wanting to be seen there. Intending to take a different path out of the garden, he headed toward the center and the Walbrook—only to stop short at the sight of a familiar figure, sitting on the edge of a dry and leaf-choked fountain.

Irrith spotted him at the same time and let out a dry huff of a laugh. “Seven years I don’t see one hair of your tail, and now I can’t turn around without tripping over you.”

“Are you following me?”

It came out hard and suspicious, and her eyebrows went up. “No. I came here because—”

She looked away suddenly, but that did little good against a skriker who sensed the world as much through his ears and nose as his eyes. He heard the catch in her voice, the choked noise after she stopped speaking. He smelled a hint of salt, over the dirt and half-rotted leaves, even if her face hadn’t shown any sign of tears.

Nobody in the Goblin Market cried. Nobody who let herself be that weak lasted long there.

Dead Rick didn’t know what to do or say. He just stood there, wondering if he should go away, until Irrith spoke again. “I used to love this place,” she said quietly, still looking anywhere but at him, across the overgrown tangles of the night garden. “It reminded me of the Vale. I love London, understand—I wouldn’t stay here if I didn’t. But I needed a bit of green, some grass and trees and flowers, to keep from going mad.”

He didn’t know what the Vale was—her original home?—but he heard the ache in her voice, and answered with the only words he had, pathetic and useless as they were. “I’m sorry.”

“So am I.” Irrith hung her head, hands braced against the fountain’s edge so her shoulders hunched up like a hawk’s. Then he heard another laugh, short and hard. “And I keep thinking about Lune.”

The vanished Queen. “What about ’er?”

The sprite gestured with one hand; he couldn’t tell what she meant by it, and maybe she couldn’t, either. “Those speeches she used to make. She would have stood up in front of the court—not just the lords and ladies, but common fae like you or me—and said something about how London is our home, all of us who came here from somewhere else, and we weren’t going to give up on it. People would stay, instead of flitting. And we’d find a way around this problem.”

This problem.
As if it were a simple thing, an overturned cart in the road, and all they had to do was figure out which narrow side lane would lead them past it. Harshly, Dead Rick said, “Too bad she’s gone and pushed off with the rest of ’em, and left us behind.”

Irrith’s head came up so fast, he twitched back. “What? Lune isn’t gone!”

“Oh, is that so? Then where is she, eh? You tell me that.”

“I don’t know.”

He snorted in disgust. “Of course you don’t.”

Irrith glared at him, expression darkening. “She’s still here, though. Somewhere in the Hall. Hodge talks to her sometimes; he says—”

“Oh, the
Prince,
the fucking
Prince
. Of course ’e’d say; without the Queen, ’e’s nothing but a jumped-up cockney bastard, playing at being King of the Faeries. She’s
gone,
Irrith.”

“No, she isn’t!” Irrith shot to her feet. “Dead Rick—just who do you think is holding this place
together
?”

He frowned, not following her. “It
ain’t
’olding together. That’s the problem.”

The energy possessing the sprite seemed far larger than her slender body. “You must have felt it. When the tremors hit. Like a body in pain, but trying so hard to hold still, until it gets too bad; then the whole thing thrashes, like it’s screaming—like
she’s
screaming. I think Hodge hears that, too, though he’ll never say so. She keeps as much of it from us as she can, but even Lune has limits. And she’s being pushed past them more and more often.”

Dead Rick’s skin crawled, thinking of the moment when he woke inside his refuge. That sense of the Onyx Hall as a prisoner chained to a post, writhing beneath the whip.

It’s the Queen.

Irrith nodded. Her cheeks hollowed briefly, as if she were biting the insides of them to keep from crying. “When they laid the rails … sometimes I think it would be better to just pull her away. Let us all move on to something else, rather than hanging on here like the desperate things we are; let the Hall have a clean death, instead of this horrible torture. If I knew where she was, I might try to do it. But I don’t.”

With the railway so fresh in his mind, the answer was obvious. “The London Stone. Ain’t it the ’eart of this place?”

“Yes,” Irrith said grimly. “But where’s the Stone? The part below, I mean; not the part above. Hodge is the only one who knows, and he swore an oath not to tell.”

Human oaths meant nothing. But fae had ways of binding men to keep their word; Hodge’s promise would certainly be of that sort. A secret like that, they couldn’t risk getting out. Even now, control of the London Stone might be a valuable thing.

“Speaking of the Prince…” Irrith sidled closer. “I’ve been thinking about what you told me before. About Nadrett? I was wondering if you knew anything more, or had any proof—”

With a jolt like his brain popping back into place, Dead Rick realized what he was doing: carrying on a friendly conversation with the sprite who recently helped the Prince’s minions carry out a raid on the Goblin Market. In the middle of the night garden. In easy view of any number of Goblin Market refugees, who would be only too happy to sell news of this event in exchange for a place in the warren.

He drew a slow, deep breath through his nose, and spat the last of it back out as a near-silent curse.
We’re being watched, all right.
By at least one person, and maybe more, if his nose was any judge.

Irrith raised her eyebrows, waiting for his answer. Dead Rick had to end this, before she said anything else that could get him killed. Hoping the sprite’s hearing was good, he whispered, “What I’m about to do—sorry.”

Then he backhanded her across the face.

His knuckles only clipped her cheek; the sprite was fast, and his vague warning had at least put her on alert. She stumbled back out of his reach, staring, halfway to angry. He had to stop her before she could say anything loudly enough to be overheard. “Is that why you came ’ere? Looking for me, thinking you could get me to talk? Went after Aspell, now you’re going after my master—well, you’d better know, you set foot in ’is part of the Market, you won’t get that foot back. And you tell your cockney Prince: Nadrett could kill ’im any time ’e wanted to. And what do you think that would do?”

Every bit of color drained out of Irrith’s face, freezing her anger into sudden horror. Dead Rick cursed his choice of threat. Killing the Prince—if it wouldn’t destroy the Hall outright, it certainly wouldn’t help the Queen any. There were some crazy fae around; he prayed he hadn’t put that idea into anybody’s head.
They may not know where she is, but they can sure as ’ell find
’im.

Her jaw clenched hard, and then she drew herself up with contempt worthy of the elf-knights she’d joined for that raid. “Iron rot your soul, Dead Rick,” she spat, and strode off in rigid fury.

He shut his eyes and went through every profane oath he knew.
Stupid fucking whelp. Should never ’ave said nothing to ’er. That’s what you get for trusting somebody you don’t even remember.