If he couldn’t, then who could? “You’re Prince of the Stone,” Irrith reminded him. “The mortal half of the Onyx Court’s rulership. You of all people should have an answer.”
The compression of his mouth, the shift in his eyes, illustrated a welter of emotions. Embarrassment, nervousness, frustration. Irrith had clearly reminded him of something he knew, and tried not to think of. He’s a very odd Prince, she thought; she had seen enough to compare. And it isn’t just him being new, either.
Galen said, seemingly out of nowhere, “There is such beauty here—and such ugliness, too.”
Magrat’s face suggested itself. “And that’s somehow good for mortals?”
“In a way.” He rose from the table, hands half-raised, cradling empty air as if trying to grasp the idea in his mind. “Whatever a faerie is—beautiful or ugly; friendly or cruel; amusing or appallingly rude—you’re pure. They say evil exists in the world because without it, good would have no meaning. I wonder sometimes if that’s what the fae are. Not evil—I don’t mean that—” Galen’s half-distracted words stuttered into apology, before he saw Irrith hadn’t taken offense. “More like the, the pigments a painter works with. The pure colors, before they’re blended. When you hate, you hate. When you love—”
“We love forever.” Or at least Lune did. Irrith had never given her heart, and had no intention of ever doing so. “But how does that help London?”
“How does water help, or air, or the downward pull of gravity? Those things simply are, and without them, there is no London.”
Irrith shook her head impatiently, hopping off her own chair. “There was a London, though, before there was an Onyx Court. It hasn’t always been here, you know. I never saw the city until a hundred years ago, but I can’t imagine it was somehow less real, less full of life, back when they didn’t have a bunch of mischievous, meddlesome faeries being friendly and ugly and all the rest of it beneath their feet.”
“A hundred years,” Galen said, on a breath of startled laughter. “The charms and enchantments, you know—those I can accept, without much trouble. It’s the immortality my mind can’t encompass. You don’t look a hundred years old.”
She was far older than that. She suspected, though, that Galen didn’t need to hear her talk about the Black Death, or any of the other fragments she remembered from humanity’s long-distant past. Instead she went back to the original point. “What would happen, if we all left? Not just London—all of Wayland’s court, and Herne’s, and every other faerie realm in England. No more faeries. What would you lose?”
Galen looked as if the mere thought was enough to break him into splinters. “I—”
He would lose Lune. A more thoughtless young man might have said it; Irrith had known many mortals who scarcely past their own desires. Galen, for all his youth and uncertainty, had a larger heart than that. But why? It frustrated her, that she could not understand. What made him care so much about the fae?
At some point his hands had curled into helpless fists; now they relaxed, one joint at a time. Galen’s eyes—nearly the same blue as the walls—were unfocused, gazing off into the distance, and in them was a well of feeling deep enough for Irrith to drown in. Then he blinked, and so did she; the spell was broken. Galen said ruefully, “You want a single answer, one thing I can name that will account for all the fae at once. I don’t know if it’s that simple—if it can be that simple. The good comes in many diverse ways. Some of it is grand, like the saving of England from the Spanish Armada; some of it is slight, like the rescue of a single child from starvation in a gutter. If I must name a single thing . . .” He turned to her, and the longing in his eyes made Irrith shiver down to her toes. “You are our bridge to Faerie. If you leave, then it goes beyond our reach. And that would be a terrible loss.”
He believed it. He really did. Irrith was used to fae hungering for the brightness of mortals, but to see that hunger reflected back in his eyes . . .
“I’m not leaving.”
Her own voice, speaking without instructions. But the words, Irrith realized, were true. She repeated them. “I’m not leaving. Others probably will, because it’s easier than fighting. But I’ll stay. If nothing else, London deserves this much good of us: that we mend the things we broke.”
That sounded good. And it was easier than saying the other thing in her mind, the one called forth by Galen’s eyes. I cannot refuse you.
Odd as it was, a mortal wanted something from her—and she wanted to give it, if she could.
Galen caught up her hand and kissed it, then gripped her fingers as if holding fast to a rope. “Thank you, Dame Irrith.”
Common words, a courtesy tossed back and forth a thousand times a day. But the words, and the touch of his hands, stayed with her long after she departed.
PART THREE
Fermentatio
Spring 1758
I court others in Verse, but I love Thee in Prose; And They have my Whimsies, but Thou hast my Heart.
—Matthew Prior,
“A Better Answer to Cloe Jealous”
In certain lights, there might almost be a face within the dark mass. A long snout here; two indentations there, that might be eyes, set predatorlike in the dust and ice.
Hunger stirs within the dream. The sun’s radiance is warming the comet: heat, light, fire. Things the sleeper remembers. Like calls to like, and it is kindred to the sun, a wayward child sent farther than it was ever meant to go. There is nothing to burn, out here in the black; even the strongest spirit is vanquished by this absolute cold. They crafted better than they knew, those enemies, those jailers, when they banished their foe; this prison is a torture beyond any it has ever known.
But release is coming. Heat, light, fire. Things the sleeper remembers.
Things it will know again, and soon.
The Onyx Hall, London: April 2, 1758
Niklas von das Ticken glared at Irrith as she came through the pillars into the antechamber of the Calendar Room. She could never tell whether he hated her particularly, or whether he turned that expression on the world as a whole. Even his conversations with his brother sounded like arguments—though admittedly, everything sounded like an argument in German. Either way, the red-bearded dwarf soon turned his scowl back to the half-built contraption on his worktable, ignoring Irrith as if she weren’t there.
That suited her just fine. Wilhas was far more pleasant to talk to anyway. “What’s he building, a birdcage?” Irrith asked, not caring if the other dwarf overheard.
“Drachenkäfig. A Dragon-cage,” Wilhas said. His fierce and bloodthirsty grin faded a moment later. “That is the idea. So far, though . . .”
“It doesn’t work.” Irrith didn’t ask why he wasn’t working on it inside the Calendar Room. She’d made that mistake precisely once, and gotten as her reward a half-hour diatribe from Niklas—she’d timed it by the assorted clocks—all throat-hacking consonants and spittle, the gist of which was that the chamber’s time out of time was only useful if you didn’t need to keep coming out to fetch things or question someone or test your results. And apparently that happened often.
Someone was in the Calendar Room right now, to judge by the closed door. Or more than one someone, perhaps. Wilhas talked endlessly about Körpertage, which Irrith didn’t fully understand; it had something to do with each person inside using up one day for every day the group remained in the room—but the sum of the collected time was great enough that no one other than Wilhas was overly concerned about how many they might be using.
If they didn’t find a solution, they’d never get a chance to use the remaining days anyway.
Irrith gave the Dragon-cage a dubious look. So far it was little more than a haphazard assortment of metal strips, like a barrel that had sprung all its staves, then lost about two-thirds of them. Whatever metal Niklas was using, it didn’t seem like much of a prison.
“That isn’t iron, is it?” she asked. Ktistes had made a passing comment about the dwarves tryi
ng to find a way to forge iron so it wouldn’t bother fae, but so far as she knew, nothing had come of it.
Wilhas shook his head, and she breathed a little more easily. Iron would seem like the logical choice; after all, the Dragon was just a kind of salamander—a really, really overgrown salamander—and therefore a creature of faerie-kind. But the box Lune had imprisoned the beast in at the end of the Great Fire had been solid iron, and that only worked for a little while. The Dragon’s power was just too great to be confined so easily.
Still, the box had given them ten years of peace, and its weakening structure held together for another six, until they hit upon the idea of exiling the Dragon to a comet. If Niklas could achieve half that result, it would still be more than they had now.
She hopped up onto the edge of Wilhas’s table, and got a scowl like his brother’s as he moved various tools to safety. The dwarves fascinated her almost as much as mortals did. They’d come to England when the crown passed to a German cousin, George I, and as near as Irrith could tell, they considered Lune the counterpart of the Georges: Queen over all of faerie Britain. So long as they didn’t say that where any of faerie Britain’s other monarchs could hear—or their ambassadors—Irrith supposed it didn’t hurt. At least it meant they worked hard on Lune’s behalf.
On various things, some more plausible than others. “What do you think?” Irrith asked.
“Of vat? Of my brother’s cage?” Wilhas shrugged, which was probably a wise move when Niklas was standing right there. Not listening, or at least not appearing to, but Irrith had already broken up more fistfights between them than she wanted to.
“Of the current plans,” Irrith said. “Or lack of same.”
The blond dwarf fiddled with a mirror, mouth twisted into a grimace. “There are plans. Many plans. Keep the Drache on its little star; trap it ven it comes down; kill it if ve can. Any of those vould be good, ja? If ve can make them vork.”
Which made them no plans at all, as far as Irrith was concerned. “Wayland made a sword once, ages and ages ago, that— Hey!” She gestured at the two stocky faeries. “You two are dwarves!”
Niklas spun to face her, a tiny hammer clutched in one meaty hand. “You are going to ask about Gram.”
“I’m from the Vale of the White Horse,” she reminded him. “Our King, Wayland Smith, was the one who made that sword. But he said Gram was broken and reforged before it was used to kill the dragon Fafnir—and that a dwarf did the reforging. Can’t you do something similar?”
“Reginn vas Nordmann,” Niklas said, face reddening to almost the shade of his beard. “Nicht Deutscher. You understand? Not from our land. Ve are not all the same, happy little Schmiede hammering away in—”
Wilhas clapped a hand over his brother’s mouth to stop the flood of words, fewer and fewer of which sounded like English, and Irrith threw her hands up. “I’m sorry I asked! I just thought— Never mind.”
Niklas had by then clawed free of his brother and gone back to his work, snarling more German under his breath. “Honestly,” Irrith said, “I’d rather it stay on the comet, or get trapped here, and we avoid battle entirely.”
Shaking out his hand—Irrith rather thought Niklas had bitten it—Wilhas said, “There is nothing wrong vith fighting.”
“There is when you don’t have a weapon! Segraine tells me they’re still wrestling with that jotun ice, but they haven’t gotten very far. Bonecruncher wants to hack chips off for shot.”
Wilhas chewed on an available bit of mustache, before shaking his head. “Even if you could make it round enough, I do not think the bullets vould survive the explosion. Too much fire, and ice is too brittle.” The chewing turned into a meditative sucking, and he rolled his eyes up to contemplate the ceiling. “Unless you could do it vithout fire . . .”
“Afraid of a little battle?” That came from Niklas, though he didn’t bother to turn around.
He sounded like he was trying to needle her. Irrith, however, felt no shame about her cowardice. “Have you looked at me? I’m not one of those fae who look like twigs and feel like stone giants; the Dragon broke my arm at Pie Corner, with just a swat of its tail. If battle comes . . .”
He turned his head far enough to sneer at her. “Vat? You vill run avay?”
Run away . . .
“Or hide,” she said, eyes widening.
Wilhas came out of his contemplation and shook his head. “You vould be safer to run. Hiding—”
“Not me,” Irrith said. “London.”
Now both dwarves were staring at her.
“Hide the city!” she said. Inspiration goaded her off her perch on the table; she had to pace. “The Onyx Hall is a place of power, right? The Dragon ate a little of it back then, and wanted more. Everybody’s pretty sure it will come looking for us again. But what if it can’t find us?”
“Then it vill go elsevere,” Wilhas said.
Then it will be someone else’s problem. Irrith didn’t say it, though. What if the Dragon went for the Vale, instead? “Hide all of England, then.”
She didn’t know if it was possible for someone’s eyes to literally bulge out of his head, but the dwarves’ were certainly trying. Irrith grinned. “I know, I know. A whole island—might as well toss in Scotland while we’re at it—I’m insane. You might have noticed, though, that we’re standing in a rather insane place. Ash and Thorn—who looks at the biggest city in England and says, I think we need a faerie palace underneath it? Who steals eleven days from millions of people and traps them in a room? If anyone can hide us from the Dragon, it’ll be someone in this court, if only because they’re too mad to realize it’ll never work.”
Niklas crossed his arms belligerently. “Say it vorks. Say ve hide England. Say the Drache stays on its comet instead of going somevere else—it’s a lot to suppose. But even then, it only delays the problem. The beast still comes back.”
He was just saying it to be contrary; the set of his glare had shifted. Irrith answered him anyway. “And in the meantime, you’ve had seventy-five more years to figure how to chip jotun ice into usable bullets.”
She got to enjoy a brief moment of pride; then Wilhas deflated her with a single word. “How?”
“Don’t ask me,” Irrith said, putting her hands up in protest. “I said someone would be mad enough to figure it out. I haven’t been here in fifty years; my lunacy’s out of practice.” Wilhas was still looking at her. “What? You need a puck for this, not a sprite! They’re the ones with all the tricks!”
“Then ve vill get you pucks,” he said, with a decisive nod. “How many do you need?”
“None. I came up with the idea; my work is done.”
Wilhas smiled. “Ve shall see vat the Queen says.”
Irrith realized, far too late, that she should have kept her mouth shut.
The Onyx Hall, London: April 3, 1758
Remembering Irrith’s first visit to his chambers, Galen had told Edward to let the sprite through if she came calling again. When Irrith tried to barge past him without even the barest courtesy, though, the valet stopped her with one efficient arm. “Dame Irrith, I have told you—”
Her undoubtedly obscene response got swallowed when she saw Galen standing a few feet away, dressed save for his shoes and hat. Galen said, “My apologies, but I’m afraid I have an engagement. Can your matter wait?”
She answered with her usual impudence. “As long as you don’t mind losing another day.”
Edward dropped his blocking arm with a scowl. Like all good valets, he could read his master’s mind: if this had to do with the comet, then it couldn’t be postponed. The days ticked steadily away; already it was spring, and once winter came, astronomers would begin searching the skies.
His engagement was to escort his mother, Cynthia, Miss Northwood, and Mrs. Northwood through the British Museum’s collections in Montagu House, and Galen was looking forward to it, but he had a little time before he must depart. “Have you come up with an idea?”
�
�Yes,” she said, passing Edward with an expression just this side of sticking her tongue out at him. “And I told the dwarves, and that should have been the end of it. But now Lune wants me to make it happen.”
Her tone and posture clearly proclaimed that there was a problem somewhere in this. Galen could not see it. “What is it you wish me to do?”
“Convince her to have someone else do it!”
“Dame Irrith . . .” Edward was hovering with his hat and shoes, but Galen gestured him back for the moment. “I was under the impression you were interested in helping us.”
She shifted, not meeting his eyes. “I am.”
“Then where’s the problem?”
He heard the catch in her breath, before she turned and became very interested in the porcelain figure of a hound on a nearby table. “I can’t possibly do it. Because I haven’t the slightest idea how.”
That hound might have dragged the admission from her, it came out so strained. Galen bit his tongue. He was so accustomed to Lune, who rarely betrayed anything of her inner state, even when it was in turmoil; or her closest courtiers, who followed the model of their Queen. He wasn’t used to someone like Irrith, whose attempts at guile fell as flat as his own.
It gave him a sense of kinship with her, though. Neither one of us is half so polished as this place would like us to be.
“What is the idea?” Galen asked, and listened as Irrith summed it up. No one, to his knowledge, had suggested hiding from the Dragon; he had to admit the notion held some appeal. As for how to make it happen, though, he was forced to admit he had no more notion than she did.
Floundering for a starting point, he said, “Don’t fae have some means of hiding from mortals? Charms and the like?”
“Yes, but we aren’t trying to hide from a mortal, are we?” Irrith gesticulated with the porcelain hound, and Galen spared a moment to hope she wouldn’t throw it into a wall for punctuation. The piece was a gift from the French ambassador, the faerie one—though in truth, Galen wouldn’t miss it all that much.
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