A Star Shall Fall

by Marie Brennan

  A threat that was never far from anyone’s mind. “Pleasantly, but not productively,” Galen was forced to admit. “We may be able to find other allies among them, open-minded gentlemen, or ladies like Mrs. Vesey. But their interest lies primarily in literature, art, and similar topics; I doubt anyone there can offer much help. Not against a Dragon.”

  The word came out hushed. Lune’s hand tightened along the edge of the mantel. A slender hand, long-fingered and pale—but all Galen had to do was look to its mate for a reminder of the danger they faced. A glove concealed the blackened, paralyzed claw of her left hand, the mark left upon her in battle with the Dragon of the Fire.

  Her timeless face made it easy to forget that she was there when it happened, nearly a hundred years ago.

  Distant history, for the city’s mortal inhabitants. A few old half-timbered buildings still dotted the streets, past the margin of the Great Fire’s reach, and the Monument near London Bridge commemorated the disaster. Beyond those few reminders, who gave thought to it now?

  The fae did. No amount of time could dull their memories of those desperate, infernal days, struggling against a beast too powerful for them to kill. In the end, they could only imprison and exile it—and both, in time, had proved imperfect solutions.

  The sight of Lune’s gloved and ruined hand spurred Galen’s determination. She would suffer no second wound from the Dragon; he would protect her from it.

  Somehow.

  He searched desperately for inspiration, and came up short. “Madam—surely fae know better than any mortal how to battle a creature like this. I’m told you had some weapon against it before—”

  Her swift turn whisked her skirts out of her way. “We did. And my first act, when Feidelm warned me the comet would return, was to seek it out again. I’ve spent decades chasing the possibility of some weapon, from one end of Europe to the other—Sweden, the Germanies, across the Mediterranean, my ambassadors asking everywhere for some means of destroying the Dragon. I would pay any price for a surety of doing so. So far, unfortunately, all we have are possibilities.”

  “But if you cannot kill it,” Galen said, “with all the enchanted power at your command—what makes you think mere mortals can do better?”

  He tried not to let the desperation through; it was contemptible of him to show it, especially when she had laid this great honor and great burden upon him, making him her Prince. But it fluttered in his throat, like a panicked bird trying to win free, and rattled his voice as he spoke.

  Incredibly, Lune smiled. More emotions than he could name lived in that smile, but none of them were contempt. She said, “Everything of great import done in this place—everything that has made the Onyx Hall the wonder it is, and preserved it against threats—has been done by mortal and faerie-kind together. Without your people, we would not be here. So when I heard the Dragon was to return, my first thought was not of weapons. It was of the Prince at my side.”

  A Prince who had aged and passed away without ever finding an answer. And others had come after him, as the years marched in their inexorable course, all of them the bearers of Lune’s trust, all of them—ultimately—failures.

  Now it was Galen’s turn, to carry that burden, and to fall beneath it.

  I should never have agreed, he thought miserably, clenching his hands until his knuckles ached, when she offered me the title. She deserves better.

  “I haven’t the slightest idea,” the Queen said, unaware of his dreary thoughts, “what meeting of worlds will save us this time. But I am certain it will need us both to do it. Whether it is some effect of the Onyx Hall’s nature, or simply the consequence of my governance these centuries, that has always been the case. I will contribute what I can, and you will do the same, and out of that will come the answer.”

  She did not sound complacent; she had struggled against this question for too many years to be complacent. But the confidence in her voice gave Galen heart.

  Though what my kind can do, when so few even believe in magic now . . .

  His sudden inspiration must have produced an audible sound, for Lune raised her arching eyebrows. “Yes?”

  “I,” Galen said, and hesitated. “I don’t know how this could be of help.”

  “We have tried everything that might be,” she said, with a hint of weary amusement. “We might as well try the things that can’t be.”

  It seemed thinner and weaker the longer he thought about it, but the Queen was waiting. Galen said, “Natural philosophy.”

  She didn’t laugh, or dismiss it out of hand. It was something mortals could contribute, that fae knew little of: the rational understanding of the world, as achieved through observation and experimentation. Every day, new discoveries, sending beams of light into the dark mysteries of nature. It had warned them of their impending peril; perhaps it could also save them.

  Lune followed the thought to its inevitable conclusion even as Galen did. If such knowledge were to aid them, there was but one place to seek it out. “The Royal Society,” she said.

  A fellowship of the most learned men in Britain, with allies all over Europe. Lune’s growing smile made Galen’s heart soar—until a new thought dragged it down once more. For him to gain entrée into the Royal Society, he would have to beg a favor of the last person to whom he wanted to owe a debt.

  She knew it as well as he did. She said, “Can you get your father’s assistance?”

  I don’t know. But he made himself smile, because this was what the Queen needed of him, her Prince, and he would pay any price she asked. “Yes, madam, I can.”

  Memory: September 12, 1682

  In the ordinary way of things, night was the ideal time for sneaking and subterfuge. Honest men were in their beds, with only the occasional watchman to sound an alarm, and darkness provided a friendly veil against such eyes.

  The Royal Observatory at Greenwich did not operate according to the ordinary rules of society. Here, men slept during the day, and woke at night to observe the stars and moon and the distant planets.

  Which became something of a problem when others wished to use their instruments, in secret, without their permission.

  But the Onyx Court played home to many creatures that took pride in their stealth. If it was strange for them to operate in sunlight, they adapted. They had good reason to wish for success in this undertaking. So they went to Greenwich in the light of day, and moved either disguised or unseen among the astronomers and clerks and servants who worked there, bearing with them tiny vials of crystal. In those vials lay the essences of faerie herbs, gathered from the gardens of the Onyx Hall, to prepare for the coming night.

  The contents of the vials went into food, into wine, into the bitter coffee drink some of the men swore sharpened their wits and kept them alert during their vigils. One by one, the men of the observatory slept, and dreamt the dreams provided to them.

  Lune reached the top of the hill as a puck bent to drip visions on the eyelids of the last sleeper, a man who had curled up on the grass at the foot of Flamsteed’s great telescope. Behind her, three stocky yarthkins lugged a heavy crate up the slope. One man in his forties, hair thinning on top but still hale, wheezed theatrically as he staggered through the courtyard gate. “I swear it gets steeper every time.”

  “This is the last time you have to climb it, Jack.” Lune stepped from the cobbled courtyard onto the grass, then stood gazing up at the telescope, and the stars beyond.

  She could not see the one she sought. But that was what telescopes were for.

  Jack Ellin, Prince of the Stone, nodded cheerfully. “Indeed. Either we exile this beast beyond the boundaries of the world—or it gets free and burns us all to ash. Either way, I won’t have to climb the hill again.”

  For all his levity, he showed nothing but precision as he directed the various fae to their tasks. Once he’d taken the necessary sights through the telescope of the Astronomer Royal, he sent a few of his more agile assistants up the mast, where they unhooked the r
opes that held the sixty-foot tube in place. Others pried open the crate, revealing another, shorter telescope—this one unlike any other in the world.

  Lune paced impatiently while her subjects rigged this one to the mast and set up a platform for them to stand next to its eyepiece. Jack ignored her restlessness. Hauling their telescope hither and yon would have jarred the mirrors from their careful alignments, and any error in that respect could lead to disaster. Under his direction, a delicate-fingered sprite tapped them into place, first the great, then the little.

  At last he said, “We’re ready.”

  “Are you sure?” Lune asked.

  His wry face reached for, but did not quite achieve, carelessness. “Am I sure that an inverted model of a revolutionary design of telescope, crafted out of faerie wood and faerie metal, will succeed at focusing and directing the spirit of a Dragon through the aether and onto a comet so far distant it can only barely be seen with the aid of the most advanced astronomical equipment in England? Of course, your Grace. I would never suggest it otherwise.”

  Despite the gravity of their task, Lune smiled. But Jack knew the danger quite well, and so he added, too quietly for the others to hear, “What will we do if this fails?”

  Lune’s left hip carried the London Sword, the central piece of the Onyx Court’s royal regalia. She touched its hilt with her good fingers. “I yet have another hand. And the prison might hold a while longer.”

  Both of them turned to watch the approach of a second crate, this one of hawthorn. Once it was laid in the grass at their feet, all the fae retreated, leaving Queen and Prince alone at the foot of the telescope. All of them drew weapons—as if they would do much good. Jack offered his arm to Lune with a courtly bow, assisting her up onto the platform.

  Then he knelt and lifted the top from the hawthorn crate.

  Inside that shielding wood lay a small box of black iron, unadorned save for a flame-marked shield on its lid. It had been cold the first time he touched it, sixteen years ago. Now gloves barely protected his hands from the heat. The prison into which they had forced the spirit of the Great Fire of London could not hold it forever. The strange enchantments of the iron were weakening under its power.

  He prayed—silently, so the fae would not hear—that this would work. Even if Lune sacrificed her other hand to trap the Dragon once more, it would leave them in hopeless straits. They could not kill the beast, and it seemed they could not imprison it, either. Exile was their only remaining option.

  Jack lifted the box free and climbed up to join Lune next to the eyepiece. “Let us hope,” she said, “that Isaac Newton is as great a mind as you say.”

  “He is,” Jack promised her, and opened the box.

  A radiance like the heart of the sun blazed forth, into the waiting eyepiece. An ordinary telescope gathered up the faint light of space and brought it in small to the human eye; this one, adapted from the reflective design of Professor Newton, took the intense light of the Dragon’s spirit and sent it out into the void. That unbearable blaze struck the flawless craftsmanship of the mirrors and ricocheted outward, in an unerring line, straight to the bearded star Flamsteed had been observing these many months.

  Jack could hear nothing past the silent roar of the Dragon. Lune might have been screaming; so might he. But then the light was gone, and the box crumbled to rust in his hands, blistered even beneath the leather of his gloves.

  And Lune swung the London Sword, cutting the ropes that held the telescope in position. It fell to the ground, severing the last link between the Dragon and this place.

  In the aftermath, the only sound was the steady wind off the Thames.

  Lune whispered, “It worked.”

  Jack looked upward. He thought he could discern something in the sky, that had not been visible before: the departing comet, glowing unnaturally bright. Then it faded, and was lost to his eye.

  The Dragon of the Fire was gone.

  The Onyx Hall, London: October 1, 1757

  When she first came to the Onyx Hall, Irrith had found the subterranean palace an incomprehensible maze, through which she could follow only a few memorized paths.

  In the century since, that opinion had not changed much.

  But there was one chamber to which she could find her way blindfolded, for she’d fallen in love with it the first time she stepped through one of its arching entrances. There were many small gardens tucked into odd corners of the Onyx Hall; this, the night garden, was the grandest by far. Here the Walbrook, London’s long-forgotten stream, wound through grassy plots and shadowing trees. Here flowers bloomed, in changeless defiance of the seasons above, blossoms drawn from both the mortal world and the deeper reaches of Faerie. It wasn’t pure nature—with its fountains and charming pathways, the night garden was more like a poet’s notion of the countryside—but Irrith loved it nonetheless.

  And so when she left her chamber after a fitful rest, it was to the night garden that her disconsolate steps took her.

  She glanced up as she entered the green, breathing space, to see the faerie lights twinkling in artificial night above. Sometimes they shaped themselves into patterns that reflected the current mood of the court, but at present they drifted aimlessly, forming no identifiable shape.

  Irrith sighed and walked on. Then she saw something ahead that lifted her spirit, and provoked her into a run.

  A pavilion stood near one end of the night garden, surrounded by a wide swath of grass, and a figure moved within that should be—was—utterly out of place in the airless stone galleries of the Onyx Hall. Hooves clopped a startled tattoo against the polished boards of the pavilion floor as Irrith vaulted the ramp, and then a pair of arms caught her at the apex of her leap.

  “Ktistes!” she cried in delight. “I thought you had gone!”

  “That was my intent,” the centaur said, setting her down gently. “But her Majesty asked me to stay. It has been many a long year, Dame Irrith.”

  “Fifty, I think. I lost count in the Vale.”

  Ktistes laughed. “And you so often beneath the stars, but so rarely watching their dance.”

  He gestured upward as he said it, not to the ceiling of the night garden, with its false constellations, but to the roof of his pavilion. The structure was new, by the standards of the Onyx Hall; Lune had it built following the Great Fire, for Ktistes’s use, when he came from Greece to help repair the damage done to the Onyx Hall. The centaur cared nothing for shelter—he was happy to sleep on the soft grass of the garden—but the roof was valuable to him. It had once been the ceiling of some chamber elsewhere in the Hall, and the chips of starlight set into its surface moved in perfect reflection of the hidden sky above.

  Irrith dismissed it with a wave of her hand. “Years. Why should I count them?”

  “Only for the sake of your friends, who regret your absence. But you thought I was returning to Greece, and so I forgive you. Come, sit with me in the grass.” Ktistes descended the short ramp into the garden.

  Next to him, Irrith felt tiny. His sturdy horse body, a gray so dark it was almost black, was as tall as she; his olive-skinned human torso towered over her. But he folded his white-socked forelegs down onto the grass, and she sat a little distance away, and then it was not so bad.

  Irrith said, “Amadea told me my chamber is gone. Not ‘given to someone more important than you’—missing. Ktistes, what’s happening here?”

  One lock of his black hair, curled in an old style, fell forward as he bowed his head. “Ah. The Onyx Hall is fraying.”

  “It’s what?”

  “The wall,” Ktistes said. “That surrounds—or rather surrounded—the City of London, separating it from the towns beyond, that are now part of the city as a whole. The mortals have been tearing it down, because it impedes the flow of their carts and riders. A portion near Bishopsgate was removed not long after you left, and when she saw its effect, the Queen asked me to stay.”

  Irrith felt obscurely as if she’d betrayed the Onyx Hall�
��as if her departure had introduced that crack. “Without the wall, the palace falls apart?”

  The centaur made a gesture with his hands, that seemed to indicate it was complicated. “The wall is the boundary of the Onyx Hall. When the boundary fragments, the edges of the fabric begin to fray. But because the reflection is not direct, the fraying occurs in unexpected places—such as your old chamber.”

  She had liked that chamber; its pillars were carved in the fashion of trees, with leaves of green agate. She wanted it back. “So mend it.”

  “I am trying,” the centaur said, with a touch of grimness.

  He had repaired the palace entrances, after they burnt in the Fire. No faerie of the Onyx Court had been able to do it, until Lune finally sent an ambassador to Greece to ask for help. Ktistes, grandson—grandfoal?—of the wise centaur Kheiron, had done what they could not.

  He could do this. He had to.

  Her disconsolate mood was back, and worse. Rather than think about the Onyx Hall, Irrith diverted her attention to a more personal wound. “I even lost my cabinet.”

  Ktistes’ strong white teeth flashed in an unexpected smile. “Do you think me so poor an architect, to be caught unawares by the disappearance of your chamber? Or so poor a friend, to let your prized possessions vanish with it?”

  “You saved them?” Irrith leapt to her feet in hope.

  “Yes, I did, little sprite. I will have them brought to your new quarters—what, you thought I kept them here, to clutter up my pavilion with all your odds and ends?” Ktistes laughed. “I’ve never understood your fascination with them.”

  “They’re mortal odds and ends,” Irrith said, dropping to the grass once more. She had little interest in the gems and fossils others kept in their cabinets of curiosities, but anything made by humans was intriguing. Leaving her collection behind when she went to Berkshire had been a terrible mistake. “Actual mortals are better, of course, but I can’t lock them in a drawer. On that topic—did you know this new Prince is in love with the Queen?”