A Star Shall Fall

by Marie Brennan

  Sanists.

  “There is no drawing of blood,” Andrews said. “No extraction of the necessary element without harm to the patient. I tried, Mr. St. Clair, but they all died. If there was any other way, I swear to you, I would use it, but—”

  “Dr. Andrews.” Lune spoke his name, but addressed all of them, with courage and dignity that would give the hardest assassin pause. “I understand your desperation, but you must listen to me. The philosopher’s stone is not your salvation. Not if it is created from the Dragon. It’s a creature of destruction; even if you take me, with all the power of the Onyx Hall behind me, I won’t be able to stop it.”

  Andrews shivered. “But it’s perfection. It creates perfection.”

  “And so it may do—by annihilating that which is not perfect.” Lune spread her arms, seeming to encompass the entire city within her embrace. “After London burnt, men submitted plans to the King, grand designs for transforming it into the jewel of Europe, sweeping away the old tangle of streets to create something better. They failed. But if London were to burn again—why, then, they would have another chance. Dr. Andrews, you cannot do this. It will destroy us all.”

  For one timeless, breathless moment, Galen thought she had persuaded him. Andrews’s mouth wavered, uncertainty breaking through the desperation.

  Then the doctor made his choice.

  What he would have said to excuse it, Galen never learned. He charged forward, blindly, but one of the Sanists was there before he got two steps, grabbing him and wrestling him back. Another trapped Lune with brawny arms. “You shouldn’t have come, Mr. St. Clair,” Dr. Andrews gasped, in between coughs. “I meant to spare you this. I’m sorry. I’m sorry . . .”

  Galen screamed. It didn’t last more than a heartbeat before silence blanketed the room. A third Sanist came forward with rowan-wood shackles to bind Lune’s good and crippled hands together. Her silver eyes sought him out, and their touch pierced Galen to the bone.

  Still screaming, feeling it tear out of his chest even if nothing reached his ears, Galen fought like a wild animal. He clawed free of his captor and snatched the nearest thing that came to hand, his chair, swinging it like a tavern brawler. The Sanist knocked it aside contemptuously and punched him in the face. Light burst all across Galen’s vision. He felt the wall beneath his hands, holding him up; then a second blow struck him in the stomach, driving all the air from him, knocking him back. He raised his hands in feeble defense, but it did him no good as the fist came at him a third time.

  This one sent him staggering backward, out of control, and into the window.

  Glass shattered against his back. The wooden sill caught his knees; Galen threw his hand out, trying to catch himself. Pain flared across his palm—he lost his grip—then he was tumbling over the projecting lintel of the front door below, scrabbling for purchase on its edge and then slipping free. Galen hit the front steps and went sprawling in the street.

  He looked up to see his captor’s face at the window, staring in surprised fury. Gasping for air that would not come, Galen staggered to his feet and ran, limping, for the corner of the square. No shouts came from behind him—of course not, the silencing charm—but he ran as if the hounds of Hell chased him, because soon they would. Out onto Holborn, and there was a hackney; he flung himself into the carriage, ignoring the startled protests of the man inside, and rattled away into the faceless masses of the street, where no pursuer could find him.

  Newgate, London: March 16, 1759

  When the hackney driver stopped to throw him out, Galen poured the entire contents of his purse into the man’s hands, demanding he be taken back to the City.

  Only after he staggered out again in Newgate Street, wrapping his handkerchief around his bleeding left hand, did he realize his error. This was the obvious entrance to seek if he were returning to the Onyx Hall. Galen whirled in the narrow alley, trying to look in all directions at once, and nearly fell.

  Then he looked up, and he did fall, straight into the mud.

  A hand dangled over the edge of the roof, at the back of the pawnbroker’s. An unmoving hand, he realized—a hand too delicate to belong to anyone human. Galen lurched to his feet and crept forward, half-crouched, ready to run again.

  When the fingers did not so much as twitch, he climbed onto a crate, and looked over the edge of the roof.

  Irrith lay unconscious, sprawled across the tiles of the building’s back extension. Galen thought she was dead. Her skin held a gray pallor, as if the light of her soul had almost gone out. But when he cradled her face in his hands, she stirred, ever so faintly.

  Favoring his gashed palm, Galen pulled her awkwardly forward, dragging her off the roof. The contents of her pockets rained down, making hazards for his feet, but he managed to lift her onto his shoulder and carry her to the ground. Had the Sanists attacked her? But if so, why had they left her alive?

  The flapping of wings gave him half a second of warning. Galen had just enough time to lay Irrith down before the approaching faerie transformed in midair, falling out of the sky to land in humanlike form. She was a sharp-faced creature, none Galen knew by name, but her predatory leer told her intent clearly enough. And she stood between him and the relative safety of the street.

  Ever since fleeing Red Lion Square, the shame of having abandoned Lune had burnt Galen alive. Now Irrith lay helpless in the mud at his feet. Once the goblin woman finished with him, the sprite would not last long.

  No.

  That single word was the only clear thought in Galen’s head as he lunged for the fallen contents of Irrith’s pockets. It gave him speed: he came up with the pistol in his hands just before the goblin reached him, and fired from a mere foot away.

  The hammer of the gun snapped down—and nothing happened.

  She’d slid to a halt in a vain attempt to dodge. Now she laughed and raised her claws.

  Galen struck her in the head with the empty pistol. The goblin staggered. He struck her again, a third time, a fourth, beating her down into the mud, until his sweaty grip failed and the gun flew from his grip. But by then the goblin wasn’t moving.

  He didn’t trust it. Any moment now she would rise again, and then he would be doomed, because he was no soldier or brawler; he was a gentleman, and had never come closer to battle than his fencing lessons as a youth.

  Galen dragged Irrith out of the mud. How he fit both of them into the cramped alcove of the entrance, he would never know; but a moment later they were in the relative safety of the Onyx Hall, and then he began shouting for help.

  The Onyx Hall, London: March 16, 1759

  His cries seemed to have summoned fae out of every crevice of the Hall, and half of them were now crowding into the room. Galen didn’t even know where they were; it was some courtier’s chambers, he thought. Whatever had been nearest when help came running. But the result was chaos, and they were wasting time.

  He bellowed loud enough to make Gertrude drop the bandage she was wrapping around his hand, and was rewarded with a ragged fall into silence. “Out,” he snarled. “I need Sir Peregrin and Sir Cerenel—the Goodemeades can stay—and the scholars, get me Lady Feidelm, Abd ar-Rashid, any of them you can find. Everyone else, get out.”

  Sir Adenant took up his orders and repeated them, herding almost everyone from the room. Now Galen could see Rosamund, crouching over Irrith, trying to chafe warmth back into the sprite’s limp hands. “What’s wrong with her?”

  “Iron,” the brownie said, not looking up. “And holy things, and everything else. She was up there without bread, Galen, I don’t know for how long.”

  Would she recover? He couldn’t spare the time for that worry, not right now. Gertrude tied off the bandage as Sir Peregrin came in with his lieutenant. Abd ar-Rashid was not far behind. Good enough to start with.

  Galen told them of Red Lion Square. He wanted to be concise, but every word made his face ache, and his thoughts kept scattering to the four winds; Gertrude pressed a cup of mead into his good han
d, and he drank it down, shaking almost badly enough to choke. Where were the rest of the scholars? Abd ar-Rashid shook his head when Galen asked. “Lady Feidelm and Wrain are in the Calendar Room. I cannot find Savennis.”

  “He’s dead.”

  The paper-thin whisper came from Irrith. Rosamund had tucked her into the bed of the courtier whose chambers they’d usurped, where she looked like a small child, wasted by illness. Her shifting eyes had dulled to a flat, muddy green. “In the cellar. Andrews was experimenting. They’re all dead.”

  I tried, Mr. St. Clair, but they all died.

  The doctor’s words echoed in his head. The vivisected salamander, the laboratory beneath Andrews’s house—the questions about what happened when a faerie died. Christ. Lune.

  Galen stumbled blindly toward the door. “We have to go now. She—she may already be dead . . .”

  Cerenel caught him before he could get far. Rosamund hurried to his side, with hasty words of comfort. “She isn’t, lad; you’d know if she were. The Hall would tell you. But you have to plan before you go rushing in, because of a surety they’ll be waiting for you.”

  “We don’t have the time!”

  Abd ar-Rashid’s accented voice brought him down to earth, unreasonably calm in the face of his own panic. “I think perhaps we do. If I understand Dr. Andrews well enough.”

  Galen stopped fighting Cerenel’s hands. “What do you mean?”

  The genie folded his arms, frowning. “He seeks the moon queen, yes? Then he will want the moon. Full would be best, but he has missed that; he will not wait for it to come again. But the . . . extraction will be tonight.”

  “Then why snatch her now?” Peregrin demanded. “When it gives us time to respond?”

  “Because he needs time to prepare.”

  Cerenel allowed Galen to step back. The pause had checked the fire in his veins; now, at last, he began to feel the beating he’d taken, the throbbing heat of his hand, the protests of his right ankle when he put weight on it. But the mead gave him the strength to keep going.

  Everyone was looking at him. Prince of the Stone, and in Lune’s absence, the voice of authority in the Onyx Hall.

  He tried to focus, past the unpleasant pulsating of his bruised face. Abd ar-Rashid’s calm response to Peregrin sounded plausible, but he suspected it was more of a guess than the genie admitted. If the extraction was now . . .

  “Lune was supposed to go alone,” he mumbled, mostly to himself. “Not with me.”

  “Aspell must know she’s been sneaking out of the Hall,” Irrith said, struggling to sit up, against Gertrude’s insistence.

  “Aspell? The Lord Keeper?”

  Peregrin’s teeth bared in a snarl. “The Sanist. Dame Irrith told us, while you were away.”

  The knight likely didn’t mean it as an accusation, but it cut Galen nonetheless. Irrith brushed lank hair from her face and said, “I followed him to Dr. Andrews’s house. I didn’t know what they were planning, but I was trying to get back here to warn the Queen.”

  They shared the same shame, the same failure. He saw it in her face, as no doubt she saw it in his.

  So the intent had been for the Queen to go in secret, by herself, or at most with one attendant. There was no reason to suspect Dr. Andrews, and no reason to take a guard. By the time her absence was remarked, and her location determined, it would be too late.

  “But they know now that we know,” Galen said. He lowered himself stiffly into the nearest chair. “Andrews won’t use his cellar laboratory. By now they’ll be gone. But to where?”

  Silence. The assembled fae looked from one to another, seeking answers, finding none.

  Andrews had nowhere else to go, not that Galen knew of. He could not kill a faerie woman inside the house of the Royal Society. “Does Aspell have any familiar haunts, outside the Hall?”

  More silence, shaking heads. It sparked Galen’s anger. “Come on! There must be something. Where can they be safe? Abd ar-Rashid, give me the alchemical answer. What place is best for the work he intends to do?”

  The genie closed his eyes and began to murmur to himself in rapid Arabic, unintelligible to them all. Then, still without looking, he changed to English. “Ablution. Washing the material in mercurial waters to reach albedo, the white stage before the creation of the stone. He will need to purify her . . . he would not have done this in his house, I think, even without being found. He needs a source of water, away from iron or other things that will harm her.”

  Galen’s mind offered up an enormous list of water sources in London. “The ponds in St. James’ Park. The Chelsea Reservoirs. The Serpentine. Not Holywell—the New River Head—”

  “No,” Rosamund murmured, cutting him short. “Think, Galen. The Thames.”

  The answer so obvious, he overlooked it. Abd ar-Rashid’s lip curled delicately. “It is an open sewer. Not clean at all.”

  “But the heart of London, and connected to the Onyx Hall,” Galen said. “Which is part of what Andrews is relying upon. Rosamund is right: he will use the Thames.”

  Abd ar-Rashid was right, though, about the state of the waters. Somewhere upriver, then, where they were less fouled. Galen thought back to his Vauxhall visits, what he had seen from the barge. Westminster—no, too many wharves. The swampy banks of Lambeth, perhaps. Or Vauxhall itself? But while all of that, strictly speaking, fell under Lune’s authority—which extended to more than just the Onyx Hall itself—the farther he went, the farther he took her from the London Stone, and the heart of her realm. And Aspell knew about the Stone. Surely he would have told Andrews.

  Galen stared blankly at the far wall, seeing in his mind’s eye the journey upriver. The wharves floating by, the fine houses along the Strand, the Palace of Westminster.

  Upriver and down. Cleansing before the extraction. No one place would serve, but . . .

  “What about a barge?”

  A gleam came into Abd ar-Rashid’s dark eyes. He shared a little bit of Dr. Andrews’s flaw, Galen thought, the willingness to love an idea for its own beauty, without concern for its consequences. “A moving laboratory, for the volatile principle. Yes, it would do well.”

  Very well indeed—if they weren’t speaking of Lune’s death. “Starting upriver, where the waters are cleaner, and floating down. If it’s her connection to the Onyx Hall he wants, then the—the extraction will happen in the City. Beneath the moon, I suppose.” Galen swallowed down bile.

  Peregrin said, “Assuming all this speculation is correct. We have nothing but logic to support it.”

  Gertrude had convinced Irrith to lie down again, or perhaps simple exhaustion had done it for her. The brownie said, “Might be we have a way to tell. I don’t know how far it goes, but—the Thames is connected to the Onyx Hall, and so are the Prince and Queen. If she’s on the river, he might be able to tell. Once she’s close enough, anyway.”

  The Onyx Hall. A quiet presence in the back of Galen’s mind, grown familiar enough that he rarely thought of it. Could he use it to find the Queen?

  He could certainly try. “In the meanwhile,” Galen said, “we assume nothing. Sir Peregrin, I’ll tell the Lord Treasurer to provide whatever’s needed. Search this city from one end to the other. If Lune is anywhere within London, find her—before tonight.”

  “I’d bring you with me, but you need to rest.”

  Irrith shook her head—or at least rolled it on her pillow, the best she could do. “Not even if I could, Galen. Carline almost tricked me once into telling her where the London Stone lay. I’m happier not knowing where it is now.” So long as there were vipers like Aspell in the Hall, she wanted to know nothing that could betray it.

  He squeezed her limp hand. Even that light pressure forced her bones together—as it had always done, no doubt, but now she was aware of it, as she was aware of the fragility of her entire body. Irrith felt as if she’d been pounded, head to toe, with an iron club, and one more blow could break her. “I’m sorry,” he said.

  She was
n’t sure either of them knew what precisely he was apologizing for. An unaccustomed prickling stung her eyes. “Galen—I think Podder was in that cellar. He didn’t run away.”

  It barely touched him; his fear and rage for Lune left little room for anything else. But Galen nodded. Then, when neither of them could think of anything further to say, he turned to go.

  When he was halfway to the door, his wife came into the room.

  Delphia Northwood—no, Delphia St. Clair—gasped at the sight of her new husband. Irrith had no idea what Galen had been up to while she lay unconscious in Newgate, but his shirt was filthy, the back of his coat was slashed to ribbons, and his face was beginning to bruise beneath the blood. Small wonder the woman was horrified. “What in Heaven’s—”

  He held up his left hand, seemed to notice the bandage on it, and replaced it with his right. “Delphia, I’m sorry; I don’t have time to explain. I have to find Lune. Something terrible has happened, and I . . . I need to be Prince right now.”

  Irrith watched the words settle over Delphia St. Clair. Did the woman see the difference in Galen, beneath the blood and the bandages? I need to be Prince right now. He was the Prince, maybe for the first time ever. Not merely standing at Lune’s side, fulfilling his duties as required, but making decisions, giving orders. The change showed in his posture, the set of his jaw. The challenge had come—the crisis, not just the creeping threat of the comet—and he had stepped up to meet it.

  As a Prince of the Stone should.

  Delphia let him go, with only a brief touch of her hand on his shoulder. Then she stood, eyes cast down, in silence, and Irrith would have wagered all her remaining bread that the woman thought she was alone in the room.

  But Gertrude would come back in a moment with mead for Irrith, and then it would be embarrassing to admit she’d listened to that exchange without saying anything. I could pretend to be asleep.

  Instead she cleared her throat, and watched Delphia try to jump out of her skin. “It won’t end, you know,” Irrith said. “This fight, yes—one way or another, it will be over tonight. But it will always be true that Galen has to be Prince. He’ll always be running off, and leaving you behind.” Not just for Lune’s sake, but for the entire Onyx Court.