A Star Shall Fall

by Marie Brennan

  “Every marriage is a compromise,” Hurst said—a declaration so authoritative, it could almost make one forget he was still unmarried himself.

  “I’ll compromise on beauty,” Galen said; none could meet the standard of Lune, anyway. “But not upon fortune, nor upon respect. If that means there end up being lapdogs, then Byrd, you’ll just have to endure.” He drew a small book and pencil from his pocket. Opening it to a blank page, he asked Hurst, “Which names did you suggest, again?”

  The Onyx Hall, London: March 11, 1758

  Irrith didn’t have the temperament for spying and intrigue, nor the inclination to publish her thoughts in either of the Onyx Hall’s newspapers. But reading The Ash and Thorn for a few weeks vexed her enough that she did the one thing she was good at, which was to go after the source of her problem.

  Carline.

  Not Lady Carline, not anymore; she’d lost her position in Lune’s bedchamber after her ill-fated attempt to trick Irrith. She still occupied the same rooms as always, though, and that was where Irrith sought her out, pounding on the door with an impatient fist.

  A mortal servant opened the door, a wrinkled old woman quite unlike the beautiful youths that had waited on the elf-lady before. The woman eyed her dubiously. “What do you want?”

  “Carline. And my business with her is serious, so don’t even—”

  “Irrith?” The surprised call was unmistakably Carline’s velvety tone.

  The woman scowled and let Irrith pass. The chamber beyond was embarrasingly luxurious, with red-cushioned benches in some Oriental style; Carline lounged upon one of these, wine in hand. She rose as Irrith entered. “Why, it is you. I’d heard you were in London once more, but I confess, I never thought you would come to me.”

  The fallen lady’s lush body showed to great advantage even in the relatively plain gown she was wearing, and she towered nearly a head over Irrith. Undaunted, the sprite put her hands on her hips and glared upward. “I wouldn’t have, except that I have something to say to you.”

  The black eyebrows rose. “I see you haven’t changed. Or rather, you’ve changed back to what you were before I tried to refine you. Very well, be blunt: say what you have come for.”

  “Stop trying to overthrow the Queen.”

  The previous rise had been an elegant affectation; this time, Carline’s brows shot upward like startled crows. “I beg your pardon?”

  Irrith dug a folded copy of the most recent Ash and Thorn out of her pocket and waved it. “You didn’t stop, did you, even after Lune found out. I told you fifty years ago, Carline: you don’t just vote your monarch out.”

  “The mortals did,” Carline said. She’d recovered from her surprise, and set her wineglass down with a clink. “Seventy years ago. And now the Jacobite pretenders try to regain the throne through the votes of swords—which is better? But I have no wish to debate political philosophy with you, Irrith, as entertaining as it would be to watch the result. Since I have somewhere I must be, let me say this instead: come with me. I’d like to show you something.”

  Irrith recoiled, sensing a trap. “No.”

  “What do you expect—that I’ll knife you and leave you in an alley? I promise, I mean no harm.”

  Carline might be taller, but she’d never be able to kill Irrith, especially not when Irrith had a pistol in her other pocket. “I’ve learned my lesson about trusting you.”

  The former lady sighed in disappointment. “I confess, that was an error on my part. I didn’t think you clever enough to realize what I was doing. Well, I have learned my lesson; no more tricks.” She tilted her head and looked down at Irrith with an expression that might almost be called fond. “You had a certain charm, though. Unlettered, uncultured—I enjoyed introducing you to the beau monde and watching you scandalize them. Consider this a favor, in repayment for that diversion. I’ll even give you bread. And when it’s over, I’ll answer the demand you came to make.”

  That Carline was dangerous, Irrith had no doubt. But it was danger of a sort that could be avoided, so long as she kept her eyes open. And the offer, she had to admit, had aroused her curiosity. “Very well. But if you’re deceiving me after all, you’ll find out just how uncultured I can be.”

  Covent Garden, Westminster: March 11, 1758

  Carline led her above and west. At first Irrith thought this more of her usual beau monde business, entertaining herself with society’s high-born and beautiful people. But their destination lay in a warren of narrow streets just north of the Strand, where a crowd of people both fine and not waited outside a large building. “Three shillings for a floor seat,” Carline said. “I will find you afterward.”

  It was a theater. “Where will you be?” Irrith asked, but her companion had already vanished into the crowd.

  If this was a deception, it wasn’t Carline’s usual style. Irrith frowned, paid, and went inside. There she found herself a seat on one of the backless benches that covered the floor. The theater, being crowded, she had to fight for a place, but being in London made her remember the use of her elbows. Soon she had a patch of green cushion large enough for her rump, just in time for the play to begin.

  She’d been to the theater before, though not this particular one. It amused her to watch mortals invent and play out stories that never happened. With their studied gestures and bombastic delivery of lines, they almost became something other than humanity, strange beasts in a ritual pageant.

  She’d never seen anything like this before.

  It was as if real people were on the stage, unaware of the audience observing them. They laughed and shouted and wept, for all the world as if these things were happening to them in truth. If their words were more eloquent and their lives more strange than any real person’s would have been, it only heightened the effect, like a polishing cloth bringing out the fine grain of wood.

  It was magic. The charms and enchantments of faerie-kind were nothing to this. During one of the pauses for applause, Irrith realized she’d even seen this play before; it was an old one, The City Heiress, written by a woman last century. But this new style of acting made it all seem fresh. They wove an illusion with nothing more than the tools of ordinary life, until the audience vanished and there was nothing but the story on the stage. Here was a rich heiress, and here, the two men who would woo her, and Irrith had to struggle to remember they were simply mortals playing a part.

  Mortals—and one faerie.

  Irrith’s jaw fell slack when Carline walked onto the stage. That it was the elf-lady, she had no doubt; Carline looked almost exactly like herself, the glamour only serving to remove the faerie cast from her features. But she was dressed in sumptuous clothes befitting a wealthy man’s mistress, for that was the role she was playing: Diana, mistress to the younger of the two would-be suitors.

  It broke the magic, and for that, Irrith resented her. In the scenes that didn’t include Diana, she could briefly lose herself once more, but every time the faerie actress reappeared Irrith was back in a noisy and boisterous theater, watching people in costumes pretend to be something they were not. And Carline was no good at it: she could not counterfeit emotion, not as the humans could. For fae, there was little distance between pretense and feeling, and without the latter it was hard to manage the former.

  When the play ended, Irrith turned to the drunken young gentleman at her side. “What was that woman doing up there?” she demanded.

  “Mrs. Pritchard?” He seemed to have forgotten Irrith’s use of her elbows, for he peered at her in a friendly enough manner, albeit an unsteady one. “Too old for the role of Charlot, but she’s so splendid that—”

  “Not the heiress,” Irrith said impatiently. “The other one. The mistress. Diana.”

  “Oh, her.” The gentleman blinked, then turned to his companion. Her occupation was obvious enough, for he seemed to have forgotten her name. The woman, painted an inch thick, merely shrugged. He echoed the shrug back at Irrith. “She plays here on occasion. Don’t know why
Garrick lets her; she isn’t any good.”

  Irrith could guess. Further application of her elbows got her through the crowd and out the lobby once more, and then she followed two gentlemen around to the back of the theater.

  They had come to see Mrs. Pritchard, but were turned away at the door. Irrith loitered a little distance off until Carline emerged, dressed once more in plain clothing.

  The sprite shook her head in disbelief as Carline came toward her. “All right, so you’ve charmed the manager into letting you make a public display of yourself. Why did I have to see this?”

  Carline looked hurt—genuinely so. “Mr. Garrick knows my worth. Some of the best people in London have come to see me perform. Did you not enjoy the play?”

  She sounded like she truly believed it: that the rich gentlemen and their ladies came to see her, rather than the splendid Mrs. Pritchard. “I enjoyed it,” Irrith said grudgingly. “But what did this have to do with anything?”

  She jumped back when Carline tried to grab her arm. “Stop that,” the lady said through her teeth. “We’ve drawn attention, Irrith, and unless you want to make new friends, you’ll come with me, quickly.”

  Glancing around, Irrith saw they were almost alone in the alley, save for two pipe-smoking actors, one prostitute trying to drum up a bit of business, and a rough-looking fellow taking far too much interest in herself and Carline. They went swiftly around a corner, then another, then a third; the elf-lady clearly knew her way through this warren. They emerged without warning into an open space, edged with taverns doing roaring business: Covent Garden Market, Irrith realized, much seedier than when she last saw it.

  There were prostitutes and thieves here, too, but being out in the open gave them a measure of safety from the latter, and Carline’s company deterred many of the former. Not all, though; one half-fed wretch asked through bruised lips if the gentleman might perhaps like the company of two ladies. “No, thank you,” Irrith said, and hastened past.

  Carline breathed deep of the reeking air, then let it out in a gusty sigh. “I brought you here so you could see the truth. This is what I’m doing these days—not scheming, or plotting, or egging on the Sanists. You’ve no reason to believe me, Irrith, but I swear to you: I don’t want Lune’s crown.”

  She was right; Irrith had no reason to believe her. “You wanted it before.”

  “That’s true.” She looked thoughtfully across the riotous square. “But with Lune’s crown come Lune’s problems, don’t they? It was one thing fifty years ago: the Dragon’s return just announced, and all that time in which to figure out how to get rid of it. Now we’ve scarcely a year left. The Queen can say what she likes about that Calendar Room, but I know the truth; she hasn’t got a plan. The Onyx Hall will burn, and maybe London, too. Why should I make that my fault, instead of hers?”

  Irrith tasted bile. “So you’ll wait until afterward. Until it’s all been destroyed.”

  Carline gave her a pitying look. “And how would that profit me? I have no desire to rule over ashes. No, little sprite: my political ambitions are finished. My intention is to spend this last year doing everything I’ve always wanted to, everything that can only be done in London, and then when that bearded star appears in the sky, I will go someplace where it is not.” Now her eyes fixed on a distant point—a point, Irrith suspected, not in this world. “Faerie, I think. I have no desire to exile myself to some rustic hovel like your Vale. But I haven’t decided; it may be France instead.”

  Her words cut close to the bone. Hadn’t Irrith thought almost the same thing, when she arrived in the autumn? Enjoy the Onyx Court while it lasted, then abandon it to its doom.

  Now the bile in her throat was for herself. She’d never thought to feel kinship with Carline.

  As if hearing those thoughts, the elf-lady laughed softly. “I’m not the only one, either. It was different when the Dragon took us by surprise, birthing itself out of the Great Fire; we were trapped, with little choice but to fight. Now we know it’s coming. Only the foolhardy wish to stand in its path.”

  Despite the evidence of the past, Irrith found that she believed Carline. The lady really was done. “So what do the Sanists want?”

  She got a shrug in reply. “Precisely what they say they want, I imagine. A new sovereign—presumably one who has both health and a plan for defeating the Dragon. But it won’t be me. In truth, I think they’ll get only half of what they want, and they know it; they can build whatever court they please after this one is gone.”

  If that was true, Irrith despised them. Lune was wounded, yes, and that was a problem in need of an answer. Letting the Dragon destroy the court, though, was no answer at all. “What about the mortals?”

  “What of them?”

  That sounded like honest confusion, not artful innocence. Irrith said, “If the Dragon destroys the Onyx Hall, and the court is broken—what will become of mortal London?”

  “It will continue on, as it always has,” Carline said dismissively. “Even if their city is destroyed again, they’ll simply rebuild; they’ve done it before. But you don’t mean that, do you?” Her eyes regarded Irrith with cool irony. “What you mean is, however will they cope, without faeries beneath their feet?”

  They were speaking far too frankly, in far too public of a place; even if nobody nearby had reason to understand or care, it still made Irrith twitch. Back in the Vale, fae did not stand in the village square discussing Wayland’s affairs. But Carline’s sardonic question demanded an answer. “We’ve done so much for them.”

  The twist of Carline’s lips mocked her assertion. “Have we?”

  “We stopped the Dragon. Without us, it would have burnt down the rest of London.”

  “And with us, it only burnt down most of London. Such a gift to the people of this city! It isn’t just that we failed to stop it sooner; we fed it. With our wars and our magics. Without us, would it even have become a Dragon? Or would it have stayed a simple fire, the kind London has seen before? Consider that, Irrith, before you speak so righteously of what we’ve done: it may be that our very presence in this city, the enchantments that bind the world above to the world below, transform London’s troubles into something more than they can handle alone . . . or create trouble where none was before.” Carline’s smile was poisonous. “Without us, the comet would be nothing more than a light in the sky.”

  Irrith felt as if she’d swallowed fire. Carline was wrong; she had to be. The Onyx Court was important—

  To whom? To fae like Irrith—and yes, like Carline—who wanted to be close to mortals, to observe them and talk to them and bask in the reflected glow of their passion. Brief lives, flickering in and out like fireflies, and all the more brilliant because of it. But what benefit did the fireflies gain?

  Carline recognized the selfishness of it, as Irrith had not. And far from repenting, she embraced it, reveled in it. But when the music stopped, she would leave the dance.

  Would Irrith do the same?

  “Think about it, little sprite,” Carline said softly, leaning in uncomfortably close. “Decide whether you believe the Queen, that this place, this court, is so grand as to be worth preserving. Or admit the truth of it—use these mortals while you can—and then move on. You have eternity to live; do you want to risk it for those who would be better off without us?”

  She didn’t wait for an answer. Perhaps she knew Irrith didn’t have one to give. Without a backward glance, Carline left Irrith standing in the clamor of Covent Garden Market, surrounded and alone.

  New Spring Gardens, Vauxhall: March 11, 1758

  Galen paced the deck of the barge with restless strides, staggering occasionally when the river slapped its side and tilted the vessel without warning. It didn’t disturb the consort of viols who entertained the barge’s passengers, seated as they were midway down the deck, but he had taken refuge in the bow, where the small turbulences of the river were felt most strongly.

  Better that than to take a carriage. As the barge
drew near the western bank and the waiting stair, he could see an unmoving line of conveyances clogging the road to the entrance of the Vauxhall Spring Gardens. Had his family gone that route, he would have spent even more time listening to his parents quarrel about the respectability of the place, with even less opportunity to escape it.

  A footstep behind him, coming down unexpectedly hard as the barge juddered in the rough water. It was a windy night, and when Galen turned, he saw Cynthia clapping one hand to her gypsy hat, lest a sudden gust carry it away. He came forward and retied the bow beneath his sister’s chin, and she smiled her thanks. “The barge-men hardly need to row,” she said, brushing one hand over her sarcenet skirts. “They could just get the ladies on deck, and we’d sail all the way upriver.”

  Galen offered his arm to steady her. From farther down the boat, he heard his father say to his mother, in a tone that ought to brook no argument, “I don’t give a damn what goes on in the bushes, so long as the father has money to hush it up.”

  He winced. Cynthia tightened her hand on his arm, and they stayed where they were as the other passengers crowded the rail in anticipation of arrival. “That’s his sentiment,” she reminded him, rising on her toes to murmur it in his ear. “Not yours.”

  As if he could so easily disown his relations. “I’m tarred with it regardless,” Galen said. He tried to summon some enthusiasm for this night, and failed. “I’ve come in search of a fortune, and everyone will know it. What young lady wants to wed such a man?”

  Another squeeze of Cynthia’s hand. “I don’t see such a man at all.”

  “You’re my sister, and partisan.”

  “Yes—but that doesn’t mean I’m wrong. I see a man determined to do what’s best for his family, particularly as it concerns the future happiness of his sisters. Young ladies find that sort of thing very touching.”

  The barge thudded gently into the lower end of the river stair and was made fast. Passengers began to disembark, gentlemen assisting ladies to solid land once more. “Touching,” Galen said, amused despite himself. “So I’m a charity cause, now.”