One pale finger tapped against the table’s pearly surface. After a strange pause, during which Irrith could not begin to guess the thoughts in her head, Lune said, “You’ve been his lover, though.”
Most of the Onyx Hall probably knew, without need for royal spies. “I was. Until he got married. He means to keep faith with his wife.”
“But he doesn’t love her.” Lune shifted, leaning back in her chair, still thoughtful. It wasn’t idle thought: she was more like an owl, searching out suitable prey. “I’ve watched them closely, because I hoped he might, but no. They feel nothing more than friendship for each other. In time it might grow to love . . . but not soon enough.”
Irrith regretted it even as she asked, “Soon enough for what?”
The Queen’s mouth settled into a line Irrith had seen before, determination in the face of impossibility. “To save him. He might not throw his life away if he felt it would hurt another. Unfortunately, he’s done his duty by his family—their wealth is restored—and he has no children yet. I am the only one he loves, and he knows too well that I do not love him back. I would regret his passing, but not deeply enough.”
Her silver regard settled on Irrith, who suddenly felt like the mouse the owl had been waiting for. “You could make that choice.”
To love him. It was a choice, on the part of the fae; that was why they adored stories of mortal passion. The notion that love could strike without warning and sweep away all reason was alien, baffling. Fondness could happen that way, even infatuation, but not love. That required a conscious decision to give over one’s heart.
She’d wondered, ever since she met this Queen who loved a mortal man, what it would be like.
But she also knew the price.
“Tell me this,” Irrith said, crossing her arms and tucking her elbows close against her body, as if to warm the chill inside. “What Dr. Andrews did to you, that ‘cleansing.’ Did it take away the grief you feel for Michael Deven?”
The first Prince of the Stone, dead these hundred years and more. Lune said, “No.”
So even alchemy could not end the mourning of a faerie who gave her heart. Irrith shook her head. “Then no. I won’t. Even if it did stop him, I’d have at most, what—fifty years more? Sixty, if his health is very good? Then an eternity of grief. And he would hate me for having made him choose between me and you.” If it was even a choice. Just because one person loved, didn’t mean the other would. Galen’s fruitless devotion proved that.
Something finally broke through the serenity Lune had maintained all this time, ever since her rescue from Dr. Andrews’s knife. “He’ll throw his life away,” she said, helplessly. “For no better reason than to save himself from watching me die.”
Much as Lune herself proposed to do. But it wasn’t a fair comparison; she at least had some hope of appeasing the Dragon, even if only for a while.
“Stop him,” Lune said. “Please, Irrith. I cannot.”
The only way to stop him would be to find a better answer. One that didn’t end in either a dead Queen or a dead Prince, much less both.
Irrith didn’t know if such an answer existed. But it wouldn’t do any good to say that, and so she answered, “I will.”
Great Marlborough Street, Soho: April 9, 1759
A few awkward conversations at Royal Society meetings and the dinners beforehand did not a true acquaintance make. Galen cared little for such niceties, though—not now. As soon as he discovered Henry Cavendish’s address, he went there straightaway, and made it clear to the servants that he would not be put off. “I must see Mr. Cavendish on a matter of most urgent business. He is the only man who can help me.” I only pray that he can.
Henry lodged with his father, Lord Charles, and so the footman was accustomed to far more important visitors; he was not easily impressed. But at Galen’s insistence, he did bear word to the young master that a very determined madman was at the door.
And whether by his determination or his target’s pity, Galen won through. Soon he was shown into a small parlor, where he tried not to wear a hole in the carpet with pacing before Henry Cavendish came in. The man was as shabby as ever; Galen only prayed it would be easier to get him to speak in this more private setting. “Mr. Cavendish,” he said as he made a perfunctory bow, “I apologize for the vehemence of my approach, but I have a very great problem, and little time in which to solve it. I must beg you to tell me everything you know about phlogiston.”
Cavendish was taken aback. Whatever business he’d believed brought Galen to his door, surely it hadn’t been this. It might have been surprise more than the stammer that made him hesitate in saying, “Phlogiston? Ah, yes—” His high-pitched voice went even higher, and the next words took forever to come out. “You said you could get a sample.”
Ages ago, at dinner in the Mitre Tavern. Just before he revealed the Onyx Court to Dr. Andrews. Galen cursed his choice: what might have been achieved had he trusted this young man, instead of the mad consumptive?
Possibly nothing. It might even have been worse. It was too late, regardless; the fae would never tolerate him bringing a second philosopher among them. Not now, with the end so near at hand. Cavendish would have to work blind. “I—yes. I have. That is, I think I have,” he cautioned, as his host came alive with curiosity. “I’m not certain. But what I have is extremely dangerous, Mr. Cavendish—very destructive—and I must find a way to render it safe again, before it can do more harm.”
“Let us go, then!” All hint of a stammer had vanished, along with Cavendish’s awkward shyness; he even tried to grab Galen by the arm.
Galen pulled back. “No. My apologies, Mr. Cavendish, but—” He floundered for an excuse. “Its destructive potential is too great. I mean no offense to you, but if anyone else learned how to isolate phlogiston, before I discover a means of securing it again, the consequences could be disastrous.”
An ordinary man would have been offended; Cavendish was already lost in his own thoughts, talking to himself. “So far as we understand it, phlogiston exists in all combustible materials. When they burn, the phlogiston is released into the air. If you burn a candle in a sealed jar, in time it goes out; this, I think, is because the air has absorbed all the phlogiston it can hold.”
“How does it get into those materials in the first place?”
Cavendish shook his head. “I don’t know.” He began to pace, chewing on one knuckle in what looked like a habitual gesture. “Perhaps trees produce it as they grow? . . . but that does you no good; you don’t want to make more. Not yet, at any rate.”
Galen twisted his fingers together. He’d forgotten gloves, and even his walking stick; he wished desperately for something to occupy his nervous hands. “Then to break it down instead. But no—it’s elemental; it can’t be broken into other substances. What about its opposite?”
“Opposite?”
“As in alchemy. Fire was opposed by water, cold and wet instead of hot and dry. What would that be, in modern terms? Not water itself, I know that much; it must be something else, more fundamental, perhaps some quality in water, that would be antithetical to phlogiston.”
But Cavendish was already waving for him to stop. “No, no. As you said—that’s alchemy. And it doesn’t work. Phlogiston has no ‘opposite,’ not that I’m aware of; for it to have an opposite, it would have to exist within a scheme like Aristotle’s, tidy and patterned. But the world is not so.”
Not this world. Galen’s throat seemed to be closing, making it hard to swallow, cutting off his air. Only in faerie science was there such patterning, and it had pointed to the answer: Lune. The moon queen; sophic mercury. But that would kill her, and then they would face the Dragon, perfected and unstoppable.
Cavendish suddenly bounced where he stood, a stiff-legged hop that would have been comical had Galen been less desperate. “Saturating the air! If phlogiston moves from wood to air, and stops when the air is saturated, then perhaps it could be contained by material already filled to the brim with it.”
“Wood?”
The young philospher shook both hands by his head, as if warding off distraction. “Too fragile. Gold? Though how you’d get the substance inside, I’m not sure. Draw it into something lacking phlogiston, I suppose, but then you’d lose the purity. If you would let me see your sample—”
Gold. Not iron. Galen had no idea if it would work, but Cavendish had told him what he needed to know; the container had to be something saturated with fire. And the fae had gold they said was drawn from the sun itself. If anything would suffice . . .
“Thank you, Mr. Cavendish,” he said, the words almost tumbling over each other in his rush to get them out. “I must go, my apologies, but I’ll let you know what happens—this has given me an idea—”
With Cavendish’s protests following him, Galen fled out the door and downstairs, running to find the dwarves.
Cinnamon Street, Wapping: April 12, 1759
Irrith hadn’t been in the eastern parts of London for a hundred years. There was a lot more of eastern London now, and while she’d seen it from the air when she rode with the Queen on All Hallows’ Eve, going through it on foot was rather different. She passed all manner of strange people, scarcely one in five an Englishman, or so it seemed: Irish, Negroes, Lascars, and more, living cheek by jowl among the workshops that served the docks and the ships crowding the river.
She didn’t know her way around, and she didn’t know where to go, either. It took more than an hour of questioning before someone could point her to the shop of the Jew Schuyler. It was her one hint of direction: Abd ar-Rashid lived near the Dutchman who made the lenses and mirrors for the Monument, and the bowl they used to summon the clouds. No one had seen the genie since Dr. Andrews died, and so she had to find him the hard way.
The girl inside the shop listened to Irrith silently, as the sprite tried to describe the bowl; then she vanished, still without a word, through the curtain behind the counter. A moment later, a gray-haired Jew came out. “Why do you look for him?” Schuyler asked, wariness clear even through his accent.
“I need his help,” Irrith said, realizing too late that she might have sounded more sympathetic as a woman. Schuyler looked as if he expected Irrith to assault the Arab when she found him. Around here, that’s probably a fair fear. The docks were just a stone’s throw away, with all their drunken sailors.
After a moment Schuyler jerked his thumb to the side. “End of the street. There is a house with lascars in it; he lives on the top floor.”
She found the dark-skinned sailors, and the staircase that served their house. Irrith took the steps three at a time, and pounded on the door at the top.
The man who opened it didn’t look like an Arab. Nor did he seem quite like a fae; whatever Abd ar-Rashid did to disguise himself, it didn’t feel the same as an English glamour. But she knew it was an illusion, and knew it was him.
And he knew it was her—or at least a faerie. He backed up sharply. Irrith held her hands out, soothingly. “It’s me. Irrith. I’m just here to ask you something.”
The strange-looking man hesitated, but finally beckoned her in, and closed the door behind her.
“It would have been a lot easier to find you if you hadn’t vanished,” Irrith said, glancing around. The genie appeared to live in a single room, with few possessions: a narrow bed, a few cushions, a shelf of books. She supposed exotic silks were unlikely, if he was trying to live as an Englishman, or whatever he was supposed to be. His clothing wasn’t English, though it was less showy than what he normally wore.
“I know,” he said, and his voice was the same, accent and all. “That was the hope.”
She turned to face him, surprised. “You didn’t want to be found? Why?”
His illusion didn’t drop away like a glamour, either. His flesh looked like it was shifting, rippling into a different shape, and darkening as it went. It steadied into the genie’s familiar face, and a frown. “I suggested alchemy to the Prince, and to Dr. Andrews. I determined the best source for sophic mercury. I helped devise a plan for the use of that mercury. I, a foreigner, did all these things, and because of it, Dr. Andrews attempted to murder your Queen. And you ask why I wish not to be found?”
Irrith hadn’t thought of that. Neither Galen nor Lune blamed him, so far as she knew, and no one else had said anything in her hearing—but then, she hadn’t spent any time listening for it, either.
She ducked her chin, embarrassed. “How long will you hide for?”
“There is a ship leaving for Cairo in five days.”
“Cairo? Where is—” It didn’t matter where Cairo was. “You’re leaving?”
He nodded.
“What, you’re just going to run away? Better hope we can keep the clouds up for five more days; otherwise your ship may burn before you can get on it.” The floorboards creaked mightily beneath Irrith’s feet as she stamped toward him. “You’d best not hope to come back, either. Because if you run away, people really will think you had something to do with Dr. Andrews’s plan.”
The genie was at least a foot taller; he held his ground as she glared up at him. “They already do. How can I convince them otherwise?”
He wanted to. She heard it in his voice, and she believed it. Irrith’s anger melted away, and left behind something like her usual grin. “You can help me. Which is what I came for in the first place. There’s a challenge on, to see who can throw their life away more uselessly, the Queen or the Prince. I’m trying to stop them. But right now, our only other plan is to stab the Dragon with a big icy spear. We need something better.”
Abd ar-Rashid frowned thoughtfully and moved away, pulling two battered cushions from inside the chest at the foot of his bed. He gestured for Irrith to sit on one, and by the time she’d done so, a coffee urn and two bowls had appeared from nowhere. Sighing inside, she accepted one, and hoped he would get distracted before she had to drink it.
“Beyond the spear,” she said, “there are two other possible plans. One is that Galen thinks gold could be used to trap the Dragon. I don’t quite understand his argument, but it has to do with that flodgy—oh, I can never remember the word—”
“Phlogiston,” he murmured.
“Yes, that. Some philosopher Galen knows says it goes into materials that aren’t already full of it, and so if we trapped it in something already full of fire, it wouldn’t be able to go anywhere. They’re planning to use sun-gold.”
The genie’s frown deepened, and he cupped his coffee as if it held the answer. “Because gold does not calcine. It melts, though, and very easily. This trap might work for a time, yes—but not for long.”
As Irrith had feared. “Can you find a way to keep it from melting?”
“In the time we have? I doubt it very much.”
We. He wasn’t getting on that ship to Cairo, Irrith suspected. Not unless the Onyx Court was destroyed in the next five days. “The other possibility is the philosopher’s stone. Even if we had sophic mercury, though, the Queen’s afraid it would just create a Dragon nobody can destroy, that would still burn down London.”
Abd ar-Rashid jerked, and his coffee almost slopped onto the floor. “But—the philosopher’s stone is perfection. Something that brings perfection to others. Surely—”
Irrith raised her eyebrows. “Do you want to gamble London’s future on ‘surely’? Maybe the best way to perfect things is to destroy them, so something better can be built in their place.”
Alarm filled the genie’s dark eyes. “I had not thought of that.”
None of you did. That was the problem with bringing scholars together. Clever as they were, sometimes they forgot their ideas were more than pretty shapes in their minds.
He sipped his drink, frowning once more. “No, we do not want a perfect Dragon. Even supposing we had the mercury with which to make one.”
They wanted the opposite. And that gave Irrith an idea so startling, she spilled her own coffee. It scalded her hands, but she hardly noticed. “What if we went
the other way?”
“What do you mean?”
“Alchemy perfects things, right?” She put down her cup before she could lose the rest of its contents. “What if you went the other way? Reverse alchemy. Use it to make something imperfect. We’ve said all along that the Dragon is too powerful to be killed. But if we can weaken it, make it vulnerable—”
It was wild speculation, and maybe complete nonsense. The genie’s eyes widened, though, and he fair floated up from the cushion on which he sat. His mind had gone elsewhere, and his body only followed. “Combine it with something that is not pure. The alchemists combined many impure things, misunderstanding their own work, and achieved no particular result—but they were working with mute substances, not things of faerie.” His gaze sharpened, as if his mind had come back from a voyage into possibility. “I do not know if it would work.”
Irrith bit her lip so hard it almost bled. “It must.” The alternative was too dreadful to think of. Lune dead, or Galen, or both. We have to try.
The Onyx Hall, London: April 13, 1759
Galen came through the front door of his chambers and stood blankly for a moment. The hearth was cold and black; the only illumination came from a faerie light, that whisked back to its sconce when its limited awareness realized someone had entered. Beyond that, the room lay still.
Of course. Edward was at Sothings Park. Podder was dead, and the knights who guarded Galen below didn’t know he’d returned. In his absence, charms were enough to protect his chambers, while the knights prepared for battle.
He should light a fire. The Onyx Hall was a chilly place, and the gloom pressed in on him. But he was still standing there when he felt eyes upon him.
Galen turned and found Irrith in the open doorway. His heart skipped a beat at the sight of her. She’d discarded the civilized fashions of the Onyx Hall for rougher garb—perhaps what she wore in the Vale. A short tunic over hose, displaying a figure that, while slender, was not boyish. She shifted from one foot to the other, hands tugging at the hem of the tunic, and said, “I . . . was looking for you.”
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