With Fate Conspire (34 page)

It came near enough the truth to make Hodge furious. “No, I won’t let you see ’er because you’re a fucking traitor. Or did you think I’d forgotten that? Even if you told me why you wanted in, I probably wouldn’t believe you; there’s no reason I should. But you stands there with your bloody ‘that’s between me and the Queen’ rot, and you expects me to say yes? ’Ow stupid do you think I am?”

The heat in the faerie’s eyes said,
Very
. Hodge heard Cerenel shift, as if ready to throw himself in front of the Prince—but without warning, the fire faded, and Aspell relaxed. Too abruptly; Hodge didn’t trust it. Aspell said, “You know of the harm I did this court, of course. But I have also done good on its behalf.”

“I know; you was Lune’s Lord Keeper. That was ’undreds of years ago, mate.”

“Not that,” Aspell said. “Much more recently. Do you think I want to see the Onyx Hall fall into ruin? When the purpose of my treason was to prevent that very thing? I have tried to halt the progress of the Inner Circle, more than once. I arranged the bombs last fall, at Charing Cross and Praed Street.” He grimaced. “There should have been more, a few days ago—enough to break the line completely, and force repairs—but I’m afraid those who took them were not so tractable as I had thought; they chose to direct their efforts elsewhere.”

The Goodemeades had told him their suspicions about Aspell and the bombs. His surprise at hearing the faerie confess it so openly, though, was shouted down by his anger. “Oh, and you expects me to thank you for it? Man, if I wanted the line blown up, Bonecruncher would do it tomorrow. But people got
’urt
by that. And I didn’t become Prince so I could ’elp fae murder my own kind.”

“Not even to save faerie lives?”

“You won’t die,” Hodge said grimly. “You’ll just go away.”

He hid the pain the words brought. Even his fellow mortals knew the Fair Folk were leaving; it was a common story in rural parts of the British Isles, as common as the flower fairies supposedly haunting the gardens of middle-class girls. Unlike the flower fairies, the stories of flitting were true. He wondered how many people telling the stories, though, knew their immortal neighbors personally. It wasn’t so easy to accept when the faeries were friends.

Or even enemies, like Aspell. Nothing was showing through that bastard’s mask, not anymore; Hodge might have been some exotic bird, stuffed and put on display for a ha’penny a look. “Your predecessors would have considered that a great tragedy.”

“It don’t matter ’ow great a tragedy it is; I ain’t going to blow up London to stop it.”

Aspell’s gaze flickered, ever so briefly, to either side of Hodge. The Prince couldn’t tell what he was thinking: wondering whether Peregrin and Cerenel would attack? Gauging whether he could fight them himself? Looking to them for support? Whatever Aspell saw, it didn’t seem to please him. The frustration his face didn’t show came through in his oily voice as he said, “I do not want the Onyx Hall to be lost. I have been fighting to preserve it for well over a hundred years. Yes, that has of necessity involved some violent acts—my treason of before, the bombs, the River Fleet—”

The lurch in Hodge’s mind felt like another earthquake, this one internal. “What?”

“Twenty years ago, or thereabouts,” Aspell said. “When they were building the first stretch of the Underground. I feared even then what damage it might do, and loosed the hag of the Fleet from her bonds, so that she broke through into the railway works.”

Peregrin and Cerenel moved forward in one swift, coordinated movement, keeping themselves ahead of Hodge as the Prince catapulted to his feet. “
You’re
the reason that ’appened?” He didn’t wait for an answer. “My father bloody well
drowned
that day, you bastard. And you sits there telling about it like you’re
proud
?”

The former lord’s composure faltered; his jaw hung briefly slack. “I—did not realize.”

Hodge spat a curse. “You didn’t care. Just a fucking mortal life, eh? And those ain’t worth a farthing. You
still
don’t care, except that you picked the wrong bleeding man to brag to.”

Aspell stepped back, hands out as if they could somehow calm the Prince’s rage. “Please—you do not approve of my methods; so be it—but I can be of better use to you, if you’ll only let me speak with her Majesty—”

A blow to the jaw stopped his words. The elf-knights didn’t try to stop Hodge; they only caught Aspell by the arms and dragged him clear as he stumbled, so he could not strike back. “You ain’t getting within ten yards of Lune. You ain’t going to see so much as the tip of ’er shoe. Only reason I ain’t telling my boys to blow your fucking ’ead off is that ain’t the Prince’s job. Now get out of ’ere before I change my mind.”

He never had a chance to obey or refuse. Peregrin and Cerenel wrenched Aspell’s arms up behind his back and shoved the faerie out the door, leaving Hodge alone with his fury.

Memory: March 30, 1859

Lune could have tried to conceal the truth. There were any number of rooms in which the Queen of the Onyx Court might choose to grant audience to a prisoner; some of them were quite impressive. But this prisoner would learn the truth soon enough. To delay that would only make her look weak.

She instructed the guards to bring Valentin Aspell to the greater presence chamber.

With so many refugees crowding the Hall, fae were living almost everywhere they could pack in—but not there. The chamber was haunted, Lune thought, by the ghost of the Onyx Hall itself, the glory that had once been her court. No one could live in the shadow of her silver throne, still placed like a sentinel against the far wall, guarding an empty hollow where the London Stone used to be. When the guards brought Aspell in, the only people waiting for him were Lune and Alexander Messina, her Prince.

Despite Aspell’s near-flawless control, she saw him check at the threshold. He must have seen signs on his way from the cells beneath the Tower; at the very least, they would have taken a different path than he expected, avoiding rooms and passages that were no longer there. But it clearly had not prepared him for the crack that ran like a scar through the black and white
pietra dura
marble of the floor, the warped and missing columns where the greater presence chamber had
bent
during the shift of the London Stone. It violated all the laws of mortal geometry, and carried a chilling message in the language of faerie science.

While he slept for one hundred years, sentenced for his treachery, the world had changed around him—and not for the better.

If the sight of the presence chamber struck him a blow, the sight of him did the same to Lune. Aspell still dressed as he had a hundred years before, in the long coat and knee breeches of the Georgian kings. For nearly a century she’d put him from her mind, but now he came before her, unchanged, a traitor out of the past, who had tried to murder her for the sake of her realm. The unhealed wound in her shoulder, where an iron knife had stabbed her long ages before, throbbed with brief pain.

With four knights flanking him and rowan chains binding his hands and feet, he reached the edge of the dais and bowed.

“Madam,” he said, “my one hundred years are complete.”

He did not, she noticed, claim his punishment was done. Whatever sentence she had passed before, she was the Queen of the Onyx Court, and he, one of her faerie subjects; if she changed her mind, not even the Prince of the Stone could gainsay her. Aspell had never been one to choose his words carelessly.

But she’d been wrong to think him unchanged. Lune saw it in his eyes, when Aspell straightened: no one, not even a faerie, woke from a century-long sleep without consequence. A remoteness clung to him still, as if he gripped wakefulness in his hands, but had not yet claimed it for his own. “They are complete,” Lune agreed.

She let the silence between them grow taut, then said the words she and Alex had argued over for days. Her Prince had never known Aspell, but he knew what common sense looked like, and this, he said, was not it. Lune granted him that point. The time for common sense, though, had passed.

“One hundred years ago,” Lune said, “when I sentenced you to your sleep, I made a prediction. I said that by the time you woke, either the Onyx Hall would be whole once more, or I would no longer be its mistress.”

Perhaps it was the lingering effects of sleep that made Aspell interrupt her, as he would never have done before. “Yet here you stand, with your realm cracking beneath your feet.”

He would have learned it soon enough. Lune hoped that admitting it now, while he stood before her, would prevent the trouble that might otherwise follow. “Can you guess why?”

Shackled hand and foot, with two elf-knights more than ready to stab him should he blink wrong, Aspell tilted his head and studied her. The distant look in his eyes gave her a chill, as if he looked
through
her. “You have your share of pride,” Aspell said, with uncharacteristic bluntness, “but that, I think, is not it. If you remain, it is because you honestly believe that is best for the Onyx Hall.”

Left unspoken was the qualifier:
You may be wrong.

Lune said, very simply, “I remain because I cannot leave.”

His indrawn breath was audible.

With her crippled left hand, she gestured at the warped space of the greater presence chamber, the crack that split its floor. “The destruction begun in the eighteenth century continues today, and the Onyx Hall continues to break. An unwounded Queen would not be able to stop it. She might be able to slow it, better than I have done … but by the time I conceded that possibility, it was too late.

“If I withdraw myself from my bond with the Onyx Hall, the palace will not survive.”

Alex watched silently from her side. There had been a time when she could rule for weeks, even months, without a Prince; it made her bond incomplete, but not fatally so. That time was past. He had been created Prince of the Stone when his predecessor Henry Brandon was not even one day gone, because Lune needed her consort; she could not hold the entire weight of her broken realm alone. If she let go her share of the burden, his mortal frame would not last one hour.

Aspell’s thin mouth did not press into the sharp line she expected. He simply stood, eyes still remote, and then he said, “You have woven yourself too thoroughly into the fabric of your realm.”

The accuracy of his description startled her. He saw it, and his mouth curved into a strange half smile. “Do you know how I passed my one hundred years of sleep, madam?”

Wordlessly, she shook her head.

Aspell said, “In dreams.”

Fae did not dream. Were it not for that look in his eyes, Lune would have tried to correct his words, suggesting that he had experienced hallucinations, or some other kind of vision. But Aspell never chose his words carelessly, and his not quite wakeful state would accept no other term: he had dreamt, and some portion of those dreams held him still.

“I dreamt of many things, as the years slipped by,” he said. “I felt the Hall continue to crumble, though I did not understand what it was I felt until I entered this room. I sensed your presence, madam, working itself into the cracks and gaps of this realm, holding together what would otherwise break apart. I sensed…” He trailed off, then shook his head, as if trying to escape the seductive clutches of something faerie-kind was never meant to experience. “Even now, much of what I dreamt is unclear to me. But I believe that you are right. Having given so much of yourself to preserve your realm, you cannot leave it now.”

But she could have done it before. Lune trusted everyone else in the chamber, her knights and her Prince of the Stone; in front of them, she could admit her mistakes. Her gamble was to do so in front of Aspell. “I wish I had done it sooner. Whether that would have been better or worse, I cannot say—there is more at stake than merely the palace—but I wish I had not left the choice until it was too late.”

Aspell’s eyes widened in unguarded surprise. Then, with careful consideration, he bowed.

Lune did not let herself breathe out in relief. Not yet. “Valentin Aspell. You have been condemned and punished for your treason. If we should grant your freedom, how would you use it?”

As always, he chose his words with care. After a long pause, he said, “I do not know. But I would not seek to unseat or replace you. It would serve no purpose now.”

Hardly a ringing declaration of fealty. But it was what she had hoped for. “Swear to it,” Lune said, “and liberty will be yours.”

He did not hesitate. Valentin Aspell went down on one knee, and swore the oath, and Lune let the traitor go.

St. Mary Abbots Workhouse, Kensington: July 18, 1884

Nothing would stop the shivering. It wasn’t the cold, not anymore; the icy water into which they’d forced her head and most of her upper body had long since dried. The drafts blowing through her cropped hair still made Eliza feel peculiarly naked, but only when she let herself think about it.

She shivered because she was not alone.

Or because she was going mad. She couldn’t be sure of the difference between the two. The gusts of misery and dread that kept surging through her—were those her own? Or did they belong to the woman who had died in this cell? She felt the ghost hovering about her, some poor soul who’d made the same mistake she had—trying to run, trying to flee, as if the workhouse were something that could be escaped. All it did was make things worse. Convinced the workhouse master that Mrs. Kitteirng was right, that Elizabeth White, called Hannah, was a dangerous lunatic in need of the strictest restraint.

How long had she been in the cell? A day, at first; then they’d taken her before a justice and gotten permission to keep her there longer. She’d laughed when they shoved her through the door, calling it a holiday; so long as they kept her in here, she didn’t have to pick oakum or sew shirts or do any of the other tedious labor that was supposed to teach workhouse inmates virtue. But she’d never been forced to sit, for hours and days on end, in a pitch-black cell too small to pace, her only contact with the world coming when they opened the door to deliver food or empty her chamber pot. The single candle they carried hurt her eyes, and if she spoke, they struck her without answering back.