Deeds of Men

by Marie Brennan

  It was one of the few things that made him feel old—looking at young pups like the one currently kneeling on the floor. Was I that fresh-faced and eager? No doubt. Henry Ware was younger than Deven had been when he swore the oath, scarce two and twenty, with a dreamer’s eyes. He did not seem to care that he was entering an old man’s court, with Scottish James more often ill than not. Or perhaps he was one of those who looked already to Prince Charles, and the heady possibility of war with Spain.

  Scottish James. Another old man’s thought. This boy had barely been out of swaddling clothes when Elizabeth died, ceding her crown to her cousin in the north. Young Ware would not remember a time when a Stuart did not sit the throne of England.

  Which worried Deven. The years slipped away: nearly two of them, since Lune created him Prince of the Stone, and still no successor in sight.

  And the need for one was real. His influence at James’ court waned as the men he’d known succumbed to inevitable time, and he lacked a strong enough position to be a useful patron to the younger generation. Meanwhile the whispers continued, commenting on his unlikely vigour.

  Lune needed a younger man, one who attracted less attention. One who could be of more use here, in the court of a King who knew nothing of the fae and their aid.

  Fortunately, his melancholy contemplations were interrupted. The oath-taking done, it was time for the feast. James had taught his court to drink deep, and while the Gentlemen Pensioners had not needed lessoning, they took the royal encouragement gladly. Soon Robert Penshaw was atop a table, roaring some song, a cup in one hand and the other around Henry Ware’s shoulder, swinging him in a precarious circle.

  Deven could have held his own against the younger men—or so he liked to believe—but he affected elderly moderation, keeping himself to a quiet corner and a careful cup of wine. The others were accustomed to it, and left him in peace. He was therefore surprised to look up from contemplation of his shoes and find someone standing before him.

  It was young Ware, cheeks flushed with excitement and wine. “You are Sir Michael Deven,” he said, in the bright tone of one who thinks he’s far less inebriated than he is.

  “And you are Henry Ware,” Deven said, answering the boy’s smile. “Congratulations on your achievement.”

  “Oh, it is no achievement,” Ware said, moving to collapse next to him, then stumbling to a halt as he realised he had not been given leave to sit. Deven’s grin grew broader, and he gestured the young man into the chair. Before his feet up-end him. “My father bought the place for me, is all. He is a baronet—Sir Robert Ware.”

  Deven knew the man, or else he might have snorted—an incautious habit he had never beaten out of himself. Baronet. A silly invention, but one that served its intended purpose; when the hereditary knighthoods were created and offered for sale, James had refilled his echoing coffers almost overnight. Of course he had just gone on to empty them again, lavishing gifts on his favourites, but his beloved Duke of Buckingham kept finding ways to scrape together more coin.

  Such as selling commissions in the Gentlemen Pensioners. But Deven did not begrudge young Ware his father’s pretensions; Sir Robert was hardly the only wealthy London merchant to put his gold to use buying respectability. “Well,” Deven said, “that is often how our brotherhood grows. ’Tis an advantageous place to be. If advancement at court is what you seek, your father has served you well.”

  Ware shook his head. “I am not ambitious.”

  There was no censure in his tone, only a strange thread of regret. Curious despite himself, Deven asked, “Then what do you seek?”

  Ware’s hand described a lazy arc in the air. He had long fingers, and seemed briefly entranced by them. “They say in the Spanish colonies there are great pyramids atop which the savages used to cut out human hearts. In the Afric jungles, whole tribes of men grow no higher than my knee. In Cathay—”

  Amused, Deven said, “Adventure, then.”

  “Wonder,” the young man answered fervently. “Something more than this familiar round.”

  If Deven’s memory served, Sir Robert Ware had two sons, of which Henry was the elder. “So you bear the burden of your father’s aspirations, while your younger brother has the freedom you desire.”

  “For all he values it.” Ware let his head thump against the back of his chair, then rolled it sideways, regarding Deven with blurry intensity. “He will sit in Parliament someday, I warrant. But take ship for the New World? Never. He has no interest in wonder.”

  Not as young Henry did. Unless it was simply the wine talking—but Deven thought not.

  A hearty roar went up from the far end of the chamber, along with a feminine squeal. Deven was accustomed to the sound, but for a moment he saw the scene through this pup’s eyes: rowdy and artless, much given to coarse pleasures. Men liked to say it had been better in old Elizabeth’s day; they said a great many charitable things about her, building an image that had more to do with what James was not than what his predecessor had been. But Deven might grant this one: for all her courtiers’ diversions, they had not been reputed in the countryside as a pack of drunkards and sodomites, wasting their days and nights in endless and unChristian debauchery. It was exaggeration, of course—but only in part.

  Or perhaps that is simply decades of the Onyx Court speaking, where the courtiers, at least, are refined to a fault.

  His mouth quirked at the possibility—then shifted to a more thoughtful set. The Onyx Court: wonder enough to satisfy one Henry Ware.

  He cast a sidelong glance at the young man. Ware’s attention was elsewhere—or perhaps nowhere; he was hanging on to alertness with his fingernails. He did not seem to notice the scrutiny.

  Just because he was a dreamer did not mean he could be trusted. Deven had to be cautious of those he brought below; one frightened newcomer could threaten them all, betraying their secrets to hostile eyes. But if Ware proved reliable, then he would have the wonder he sought.

  And he was a baronet’s son, and a Gentleman Pensioner, positioned near the king. He might rise at court—if given a reason that appealed to him, beyond simple ambition.

  “Off your feet already? For shame! You drink like a woman, Henry.” It was Penshaw, eyes glittering with wine. His insult brought young Ware lurching to his feet, sputtering denials, and Penshaw laughed. “Come prove it, then, or pay my forfeit. We are not done yet!”

  That quickly, Henry Ware was gone, swallowed once more by the revelry. But he left Deven in thoughtful solitude, wondering if he had found his answer at last.

  Thy follyes now shall taste what kinde of man

  They have provok’d

  —II.ii.8-9

  Whitehall Palace, Westminster: 6 June, 1625

  The funeral was a private one; Henry Ware went to his rest in the churchyard of St. Nicholas with none but family in attendance. Deven visited his grave later and stood silent before it, thinking of the blessed rites the parson might have withheld, had he known the company Henry kept before his death.

  Then he went west, out of the City to Westminster. King Charles was at Whitehall, awaiting word of his new bride, delayed by storms in France. The Gentlemen Pensioners attended him there, those who were serving that duty period. Henry had been one such, and Robert Penshaw was another.

  Deven found the man playing tennis, and not well; his shots kept going wild, as if he were paying little heed to the game. It reminded Deven that Henry had been a friend of his, too. When he accosted Penshaw after the match, he phrased his question as gently as he could. “You might know better than I—has there been any discovery of the murderer, that he might be brought to justice?”

  Penshaw’s face hardened into a mask, and he yanked his doublet straight before buckling his sword on once more. “No.”

  How old was the man? In his thirties, Deven guessed. Too old for his rash nature. If Penshaw knew anything, he would have charged off to pursue it already. Deven had to ask, though. “You spent as much time in Henry’s company as I di
d, or even more. I am, after all, an old man, and not much for tennis or riding. Perhaps he would have told you what took him into Coldharbour.”

  The name drained the blood from Penshaw’s face. “Coldharbour?”

  “Yes,” Deven said, startled. “That is where he was found. Did you not know?”

  “I—I was told he—” Penshaw pulled himself together. “I was told he died in the City, but no more.” His eyes might have been two stones. Too rash, Deven thought in dismay. He will go on a rampage through the tenements, demanding answers.

  Certainly Penshaw had nothing of use for Deven. “I doubt ’twas significant,” he lied. “Likely a wherryman left him off there, and he was to see his family. I’m told Henry asked for a few days’ liberty from his duty.”

  Penshaw nodded, calming.

  “Well, if you see his family, please pass along the compliments of my condolence. I know his father through the Guildhall, but he has not been there of late.”

  “I will,” Penshaw said, and they parted ways.

  They had walked as they spoke, moving apart from the others; Deven was left in a deserted gallery, jaw clenched in frustration. Not the slightest shred of luck, and now he did not know what path to pursue. Henry had other friends, but none half so close as Penshaw. Who else knew him well?

  “You are Sir Michael Deven.”

  The words brought him up like a curb bit. The voice was so very like…Deven jerked around, half-expecting to see Henry’s ghost staring at him down this Whitehall gallery, translucent in the courtyard sunlight, asking why Deven had let him die.

  It was not Henry. The jaw was too square, the nose too straight; the fingers on the hands were blunt and strong. But the voice, the hair, the eyes—they spoke a family resemblance too obvious to be missed. And on a boy young enough to deserve the name, they told Deven whom he faced.

  “You must be Antony Ware,” he said, swallowing down his heart.

  Henry’s younger brother stood stiff-legged, as if holding in some great emotion. Grief? Yes, but over it lay something else.

  Anger.

  Through his teeth, Antony Ware said, “You killed my brother, sirrah.”

  The words struck like a knife to the heart: not the truth, but close enough to hurt. Deven tried to remember how old Antony was. Sixteen? No, seventeen. More than old enough to take worthy offence if Deven slipped up and called him boy. “Not I,” he said, as gently as he could. “Some cutpurse—”

  Three swift strides devoured the space between them, putting the young man less than a pace away. Deven almost reached for his sword, but checked the motion in time. Ware was armed, too, and angry enough to answer him in kind. “You did not wield the knife,” the young man said, his furious voice leashed so the words did not carry beyond the two of them. “But Henry’s dead because you lured him into your foul and unnatural world.”

  All the blood in Deven’s body congealed, ice-cold, in his feet. “H—how did you—”

  “Learn of it? He told me, and begged my forgiveness before God for his sin.” Contempt and disgust warred in Ware’s expression. “I should have chained him to the wall before I let him return to you.”

  Foul and unnatural. Deven wanted to protest the description. Though the Onyx Court harboured creatures who merited it, the court as a whole was not so. Had Henry truly deemed it a sin? Or was that merely the judgment of Antony—the younger son, the practical one, who did not seek wonder as Henry had? Whatever conclusions the young man might have drawn while his brother still lived, they had undoubtedly been poisoned still further by his death.

  For which he placed the blame rightly enough.

  Deven chained his guilt and forced himself to meet Ware’s eyes. “I never intended it to be so,” he said. “And had I realised the danger…” That other factions among the courtiers opposed Henry’s advancement, he knew, but not that they would go to such lengths to stop him. “All I can do now is find the one responsible for his death, and make that murderer pay.”

  Ware scowled. He no longer looked like a boy; his anger befitted a man. As did his ability to control it: most young gentlemen would have called Deven out by now. But no, a duel would make their conflict too public. And it seemed Ware, thanks be to both God and the powers of Faerie, was willing to keep the secrets of the Onyx Court.

  For now.

  “Do you expect,” Ware spat, “that finding the murderer will absolve you of your guilt?”

  “No. But I will do it—I must—and will not rest until I do. After that…” Deven’s shoulders sagged. He could not offer this young man full satisfaction; he was Prince of the Stone, and staying alive was among his obligations. A duel would be too risky. “I will absent myself from here forevermore, and go into exile.” Into the world below. He had already seen one king come and go; he lacked the will to face another. Someone else could find his successor.

  The tension did not leave Ware’s body, but it abated. “How will you catch him?”

  I have no idea. But it wasn’t true, and that slender thread of inspiration—and an even more slender thread of hope—made Deven say, “With your aid, if you will give it.”

  He did not expect any cooperation between them to erase Ware’s hatred. It might not do any good at all. But if Deven could make even the smallest conciliation on behalf of the fae—if he could heal that wound to a scar, and lessen the chance that Ware would finish his vengeance by betraying them to the world—then he had to try.

  Ware’s jaw tightened, then released. For the first time, he looked uncertain. “I do not know what I could do.”

  “Follow me,” Deven said.

  On then, my soule, and start not in thy course

  —II.ii.20

  London above and below: 26 April, 1623

  “You’re being exceedingly mysterious,” Henry said, not quite succeeding at making it sound like a complaint.

  Deven smiled. “You would sail halfway around the world to discover the mystic riches of the Orient…but begrudge me a little mystery?”

  “We are standing in a dank and filthy alley, with a fine English spring about to gift us with cold rain on our heads. I have yet to see any riches justifying you drawing me away from Robin Penshaw’s cards, let alone his excellent wine.”

  “If ’tis more drinking you’d prefer, we can abandon this and find a tavern—” Deven made as if to go.

  Henry’s undignified yelp of protest turned his smile into a laugh. “No?” Deven asked, with a solicitous bow. “Then bind your eyes, and let me guide you on to wonder.”

  The young man accepted the kerchief Deven offered him. The alley they stood in was indeed both dank and filthy, and moreover well-cloaked in night; a mind more fearful than Henry’s could easily populate the shadows with cutpurses and goblins. But there was no risk of the former, and no need to imagine the latter: a goblin did lurk in concealment, both to defend the Prince of the Stone, and to help with Henry Ware should all not go as planned.

  Deven hoped the watching goblin would not have to earn his keep. Henry had proven a ready audience for tales of faeries and enchantment—though Lune had sighed in disgust when she learned Deven had given the young man both Spenser’s poem and Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Neither was anything like a faithful model for the court below—in fact, Lune had encouraged the Dream’s frivolity, as an antidote to the cruelty of her predecessor’s rule—but they were useful for what they showed him of Henry. And what Deven saw in the young man was exactly what that first encounter suggested. He would not run, nor lash out in fear, when he saw the truth Deven had hinted at all this time.

  Or so Deven hoped.

  Henry had covered his eyes. Taking him by the elbow, Deven led his friend around a corner, the goblin following silently. Ahead lay a steep set of steps, and at their base a door, which let onto a dark cellar. Henry, unsteady and blind, relied on Deven’s grip. And then the cellar was a cellar no more, and they stood in an antechamber of the Onyx Hall.

  It might be better to
unbind Henry’s eyes there, allowing him to take in the strangeness of the faerie palace before he saw anything more—especially with the wine in him. But Deven, thinking of poetry, and of his friend’s character, held to the plan he had developed with Lune: he led Henry onward, still blindfold, and let the goblin go before them to clear their path.

  Henry knew something had changed. Deven heard it in the way his breath caught, in the wary caution of his footfalls. The man could hardly overlook it; the very air felt different here, cool and dark, without the damp mustiness of the cellar. Soon enough they were in a narrow passage—not one of the public ways of the Onyx Hall, but a hidden corridor, one of many he and Lune had discovered in their realm. It terminated in a bronze-bound door, which the goblin opened for them, and beyond lay the chamber where Lune waited.

  She smiled at Deven, easing his nerves a little. There was wonder aplenty in this chamber, with the silver-and-midnight figure of Lune and the ceiling showing the alignment of the hidden stars above. Enough, or too much?

  The time had come to find out. And if Deven had chosen poorly, then they must fog Henry’s memory and return him to the mortal world, and hope they had not jeopardised the security of this realm.

  Deven steeled his nerves and unbound Henry’s eyes.

  From her seat beneath a small canopy of estate, the faerie Queen of the Onyx Court said, “Be welcome to our halls, Henry Ware. May you find what you seek here.”

  Henry stared at her for ten drunken, agonising heartbeats, without making a single sound—then collapsed in a faint.

  He that, with such wrong mov’d, can beare it through

  With patience, and an even mind, knowes how

  To turne it backe.

  —I.ii.316-8

  London above and below: 6 June, 1625

  With Henry, he had taken every precaution he could; with Antony, he took almost none.

  There seemed little point. Deven did not know, and feared to ask, exactly what Henry had disclosed to his brother—the location of the Onyx Hall? Its entrances? But Antony Ware would never abide the kind of secrecies employed before, and from his brief dealings with the young man, Deven suspected honesty would serve him better than any amount of hedging.