With Fate Conspire

by Marie Brennan

  This felt much the same.

  The face stared out at him from the tattered paper, stiffly solemn, but alert, self-aware, complete in a way the half-daft boy in the library had lost. That was the face Dead Rick remembered, from those moments before the poor bastard vanished into Nadrett’s control.

  “You do know,” the changeling said, staring into his eyes. “Can you tell me where he is? There’s a maid in my household—well, not anymore; she’s been arrested and sent to prison—she’s searching for him. An Irish girl, Hannah someone.”

  So that was her name. Two syllables, empty sounds: they meant nothing to him. It might have been anyone’s name.

  She had once been his friend.

  Both of them had. If the voice told the truth.

  “The Academy,” Dead Rick said. It wasn’t Nadrett’s blood on his jaws, but it was a tiny piece of revenge, putting right what his master had sent wrong. “Feidelm’s got ’im. But ’e’s broken.”

  “Broken how?”

  The skriker shivered. “Like ’e lost half of ’imself. They think somebody tried to do ’im as a changeling, but it went wrong. ’E don’t speak no more, and ’e’s gone soft in the ’ead.”

  Cyma—Louisa—frowned. “I’ve never heard of that happening to anyone before. Normally they just lose their names, their identities. Could it be someone tried to force him into it unwilling? I don’t know how they could, but—”

  He cut her off with a swipe of his hand. “I told you all I know. We’re done.”

  Her animated expression faltered, fell into sad acceptance. “I see. Thank you, Dead Rick. If there’s anything I can do for you—”

  “Don’t bother making promises,” Dead Rick snarled, shoving past her. “They ain’t worth the air they’re spoken on.”

  The Prince’s Court, Onyx Hall: June 9, 1884

  “Now you just drink that down,” Rosamund Goodemeade said, “and you’ll feel good as new.”

  She said it every time she gave Hodge a cup of mead to drink, and every time it was a little less true. He didn’t begrudge her the words, though. In his private thoughts, he’d long since decided the mead was the only thing keeping him alive. It gave a man strength, and he needed as much as he could possibly get.

  Today more than most. Hodge gulped the sweet liquid down without pausing for breath, then handed her the empty cup. “Thank you,” he said; once, early in his reign, he’d forgotten to be courteous, and Gertrude had smacked him, Prince or no. “Now if you’ll pardon me—it’s probably better if you ain’t ’ere for this.”

  The brownie’s expression soured. She didn’t like his plan; even her usually invincible talent for seeing the good in people faltered at times. But he was the Prince, and so long as he remembered to say please and thank you, she wouldn’t defy him once his decision was made. “We’ll be nearby if you need us,” Rosamund said, and hastened out of the room.

  Leaving him with his guard of two elf-knights. Peregrin had tried to convince Hodge to put on fine clothes; he insisted the Prince’s dignity demanded it, especially when holding something like a formal audience. Hodge—who hadn’t held anything one could plausibly call a formal audience in his entire reign—flatly refused. He was the son of a bricklayer; he’d never once worn a top hat, and he had no intention of starting now. I’d look a proper fool, I would. And if I can’t take me seriously, who will?

  Even Peregrin and Cerenel were there less for dignity and more for protection. None of them expected physical danger—but given that Hodge’s death might very well mean the end of the Onyx Hall, nobody wanted to take any chances.

  He took a deep breath, then nodded at Cerenel. The knight murmured to the moth perching on his finger, which fluttered out through a crack in the door.

  A moment later, the door opened, and Dame Segraine escorted Valentin Aspell into the room.

  Hodge’s fingers curled tight around the arms of his chair. He loathed the fae of the Goblin Market; they indulged in all the worst vices of their kind, at the expense of humans, and flaunted it in his face. Their influence had grown through Lune’s long decline, as she became less and less capable of calling them to heel, but since her seclusion they’d flourished like rats. Hodge’s best attempts to check them on his own were laughably inadequate.

  On the surface of it, Aspell wasn’t the worst of the lot: that honor belonged to Nadrett. But he had a distinction the other Market boss didn’t, which was that he was a confirmed traitor, sentenced and punished by the Queen herself. Hodge didn’t trust the bastard an inch.

  A spark of anger—the first of many, he was sure—lit in his stomach when Aspell made him an old-fashioned bow. Polite though it looked, he was sure the faerie meant it as mockery. His suspicion strengthened when Aspell said, “Thank you for seeing me, Lord Benjamin.”

  The formal courtesy twisted Hodge’s mouth. He said roughly, “Don’t waste my time on fancy talk. Why do you want to see Lune?”

  Aspell’s thin eyebrows rose, an elegant display of surprise. But ’e ain’t surprised at all. “That,” the faerie said, “is between me and the Queen.”

  “What’s between you and the Queen is me. You don’t answer my question, this meeting’s done.”

  By the way things should have worked, Hodge had no right to say that; his authority had to do with the dealings between mortals and fae. Not two faeries. He half-expected Apsell to point that out. But the other merely drew in a vexed breath and said, “If you throw me out, you’ll never hear what I have to say about Galen St. Clair.”

  “What’s to ’ear?” Hodge grinned. “We already know Nadrett stuck ’im in a photograph. Oh, I’m sorry—was that what you was going to sell us?”

  He could almost hear Aspell’s teeth grinding. You came in ’ere with your notions of ’ow this would go—but I ain’t playing your game. I may be the last Prince this place ever sees; well, I’m going to be the best fucking Prince I can. And that means not letting you dance me like a puppet.

  When Aspell recovered his composure, the faerie said, “Do you know where the photograph is?”

  “Do you?”

  That was the one piece of information Hodge was willing to bargain for. But Aspell’s fleeting hesitation told him he was out of luck. “I can find out,” the faerie said.

  Hodge snorted. “So can we. Try again some other time, guv. When you’ve got something of value to sell.”

  What looked like real frustration twisted Aspell’s face. The Goodemeades had given Hodge a thorough warning about him; they said he was very good at hiding what he thought. Either this was a pose, or he wasn’t bothering to conceal his feelings. Whichever it was, it boiled down to manipulation. “I am not a fool, my lord. I know the Queen has not been seen in years. Unlike many of her ignorant subjects, I know better than to think her dead—we would have felt it; likely we would not be here—but she cannot be far from her end. Is she even conscious? Is that why you refuse to let me see her, because she has fallen into a coma and can no longer speak?”

  It came near enough the truth to make Hodge furious. “No, I won’t let you see ’er because you’re a fucking traitor. Or did you think I’d forgotten that? Even if you told me why you wanted in, I probably wouldn’t believe you; there’s no reason I should. But you stands there with your bloody ‘that’s between me and the Queen’ rot, and you expects me to say yes? ’Ow stupid do you think I am?”

  The heat in the faerie’s eyes said, Very. Hodge heard Cerenel shift, as if ready to throw himself in front of the Prince—but without warning, the fire faded, and Aspell relaxed. Too abruptly; Hodge didn’t trust it. Aspell said, “You know of the harm I did this court, of course. But I have also done good on its behalf.”

  “I know; you was Lune’s Lord Keeper. That was ’undreds of years ago, mate.”

  “Not that,” Aspell said. “Much more recently. Do you think I want to see the Onyx Hall fall into ruin? When the purpose of my treason was to prevent that very thing? I have tried to halt the progress of the Inner Circle
, more than once. I arranged the bombs last fall, at Charing Cross and Praed Street.” He grimaced. “There should have been more, a few days ago—enough to break the line completely, and force repairs—but I’m afraid those who took them were not so tractable as I had thought; they chose to direct their efforts elsewhere.”

  The Goodemeades had told him their suspicions about Aspell and the bombs. His surprise at hearing the faerie confess it so openly, though, was shouted down by his anger. “Oh, and you expects me to thank you for it? Man, if I wanted the line blown up, Bonecruncher would do it tomorrow. But people got ’urt by that. And I didn’t become Prince so I could ’elp fae murder my own kind.”

  “Not even to save faerie lives?”

  “You won’t die,” Hodge said grimly. “You’ll just go away.”

  He hid the pain the words brought. Even his fellow mortals knew the Fair Folk were leaving; it was a common story in rural parts of the British Isles, as common as the flower fairies supposedly haunting the gardens of middle-class girls. Unlike the flower fairies, the stories of flitting were true. He wondered how many people telling the stories, though, knew their immortal neighbors personally. It wasn’t so easy to accept when the faeries were friends.

  Or even enemies, like Aspell. Nothing was showing through that bastard’s mask, not anymore; Hodge might have been some exotic bird, stuffed and put on display for a ha’penny a look. “Your predecessors would have considered that a great tragedy.”

  “It don’t matter ’ow great a tragedy it is; I ain’t going to blow up London to stop it.”

  Aspell’s gaze flickered, ever so briefly, to either side of Hodge. The Prince couldn’t tell what he was thinking: wondering whether Peregrin and Cerenel would attack? Gauging whether he could fight them himself? Looking to them for support? Whatever Aspell saw, it didn’t seem to please him. The frustration his face didn’t show came through in his oily voice as he said, “I do not want the Onyx Hall to be lost. I have been fighting to preserve it for well over a hundred years. Yes, that has of necessity involved some violent acts—my treason of before, the bombs, the River Fleet—”

  The lurch in Hodge’s mind felt like another earthquake, this one internal. “What?”

  “Twenty years ago, or thereabouts,” Aspell said. “When they were building the first stretch of the Underground. I feared even then what damage it might do, and loosed the hag of the Fleet from her bonds, so that she broke through into the railway works.”

  Peregrin and Cerenel moved forward in one swift, coordinated movement, keeping themselves ahead of Hodge as the Prince catapulted to his feet. “You’re the reason that ’appened?” He didn’t wait for an answer. “My father bloody well drowned that day, you bastard. And you sits there telling about it like you’re proud?”

  The former lord’s composure faltered; his jaw hung briefly slack. “I—did not realize.”

  Hodge spat a curse. “You didn’t care. Just a fucking mortal life, eh? And those ain’t worth a farthing. You still don’t care, except that you picked the wrong bleeding man to brag to.”

  Aspell stepped back, hands out as if they could somehow calm the Prince’s rage. “Please—you do not approve of my methods; so be it—but I can be of better use to you, if you’ll only let me speak with her Majesty—”

  A blow to the jaw stopped his words. The elf-knights didn’t try to stop Hodge; they only caught Aspell by the arms and dragged him clear as he stumbled, so he could not strike back. “You ain’t getting within ten yards of Lune. You ain’t going to see so much as the tip of ’er shoe. Only reason I ain’t telling my boys to blow your fucking ’ead off is that ain’t the Prince’s job. Now get out of ’ere before I change my mind.”

  He never had a chance to obey or refuse. Peregrin and Cerenel wrenched Aspell’s arms up behind his back and shoved the faerie out the door, leaving Hodge alone with his fury.

  Memory: March 30, 1859

  Lune could have tried to conceal the truth. There were any number of rooms in which the Queen of the Onyx Court might choose to grant audience to a prisoner; some of them were quite impressive. But this prisoner would learn the truth soon enough. To delay that would only make her look weak.

  She instructed the guards to bring Valentin Aspell to the greater presence chamber.

  With so many refugees crowding the Hall, fae were living almost everywhere they could pack in—but not there. The chamber was haunted, Lune thought, by the ghost of the Onyx Hall itself, the glory that had once been her court. No one could live in the shadow of her silver throne, still placed like a sentinel against the far wall, guarding an empty hollow where the London Stone used to be. When the guards brought Aspell in, the only people waiting for him were Lune and Alexander Messina, her Prince.

  Despite Aspell’s near-flawless control, she saw him check at the threshold. He must have seen signs on his way from the cells beneath the Tower; at the very least, they would have taken a different path than he expected, avoiding rooms and passages that were no longer there. But it clearly had not prepared him for the crack that ran like a scar through the black and white pietra dura marble of the floor, the warped and missing columns where the greater presence chamber had bent during the shift of the London Stone. It violated all the laws of mortal geometry, and carried a chilling message in the language of faerie science.

  While he slept for one hundred years, sentenced for his treachery, the world had changed around him—and not for the better.

  If the sight of the presence chamber struck him a blow, the sight of him did the same to Lune. Aspell still dressed as he had a hundred years before, in the long coat and knee breeches of the Georgian kings. For nearly a century she’d put him from her mind, but now he came before her, unchanged, a traitor out of the past, who had tried to murder her for the sake of her realm. The unhealed wound in her shoulder, where an iron knife had stabbed her long ages before, throbbed with brief pain.

  With four knights flanking him and rowan chains binding his hands and feet, he reached the edge of the dais and bowed.

  “Madam,” he said, “my one hundred years are complete.”

  He did not, she noticed, claim his punishment was done. Whatever sentence she had passed before, she was the Queen of the Onyx Court, and he, one of her faerie subjects; if she changed her mind, not even the Prince of the Stone could gainsay her. Aspell had never been one to choose his words carelessly.

  But she’d been wrong to think him unchanged. Lune saw it in his eyes, when Aspell straightened: no one, not even a faerie, woke from a century-long sleep without consequence. A remoteness clung to him still, as if he gripped wakefulness in his hands, but had not yet claimed it for his own. “They are complete,” Lune agreed.

  She let the silence between them grow taut, then said the words she and Alex had argued over for days. Her Prince had never known Aspell, but he knew what common sense looked like, and this, he said, was not it. Lune granted him that point. The time for common sense, though, had passed.

  “One hundred years ago,” Lune said, “when I sentenced you to your sleep, I made a prediction. I said that by the time you woke, either the Onyx Hall would be whole once more, or I would no longer be its mistress.”

  Perhaps it was the lingering effects of sleep that made Aspell interrupt her, as he would never have done before. “Yet here you stand, with your realm cracking beneath your feet.”

  He would have learned it soon enough. Lune hoped that admitting it now, while he stood before her, would prevent the trouble that might otherwise follow. “Can you guess why?”

  Shackled hand and foot, with two elf-knights more than ready to stab him should he blink wrong, Aspell tilted his head and studied her. The distant look in his eyes gave her a chill, as if he looked through her. “You have your share of pride,” Aspell said, with uncharacteristic bluntness, “but that, I think, is not it. If you remain, it is because you honestly believe that is best for the Onyx Hall.”

  Left unspoken was the qualifier: You may be wrong.r />
  Lune said, very simply, “I remain because I cannot leave.”

  His indrawn breath was audible.

  With her crippled left hand, she gestured at the warped space of the greater presence chamber, the crack that split its floor. “The destruction begun in the eighteenth century continues today, and the Onyx Hall continues to break. An unwounded Queen would not be able to stop it. She might be able to slow it, better than I have done … but by the time I conceded that possibility, it was too late.

  “If I withdraw myself from my bond with the Onyx Hall, the palace will not survive.”

  Alex watched silently from her side. There had been a time when she could rule for weeks, even months, without a Prince; it made her bond incomplete, but not fatally so. That time was past. He had been created Prince of the Stone when his predecessor Henry Brandon was not even one day gone, because Lune needed her consort; she could not hold the entire weight of her broken realm alone. If she let go her share of the burden, his mortal frame would not last one hour.

  Aspell’s thin mouth did not press into the sharp line she expected. He simply stood, eyes still remote, and then he said, “You have woven yourself too thoroughly into the fabric of your realm.”

  The accuracy of his description startled her. He saw it, and his mouth curved into a strange half smile. “Do you know how I passed my one hundred years of sleep, madam?”

  Wordlessly, she shook her head.

  Aspell said, “In dreams.”

  Fae did not dream. Were it not for that look in his eyes, Lune would have tried to correct his words, suggesting that he had experienced hallucinations, or some other kind of vision. But Aspell never chose his words carelessly, and his not quite wakeful state would accept no other term: he had dreamt, and some portion of those dreams held him still.

  “I dreamt of many things, as the years slipped by,” he said. “I felt the Hall continue to crumble, though I did not understand what it was I felt until I entered this room. I sensed your presence, madam, working itself into the cracks and gaps of this realm, holding together what would otherwise break apart. I sensed…” He trailed off, then shook his head, as if trying to escape the seductive clutches of something faerie-kind was never meant to experience. “Even now, much of what I dreamt is unclear to me. But I believe that you are right. Having given so much of yourself to preserve your realm, you cannot leave it now.”