Midnight Never Come (5 page)

Delays had slain what remained of May; June rotted away in the harbor of La Coruña, while sailors sickened and starved, their victuals fouled by the green wood of the barrels they were kept in. The commanders of the fleet found new terms by which to damn Drake, who had burned the seasoned barrel-staves the previous year.

In July they sailed again, obedient to God’s mission.

Red crosses waved on white flags. The banner of Medina-Sidonia’s ship carried the Virgin and a crucified Christ, and the motto
Exsurge, Domine, et judica causam tuam!
Monks prayed daily, and even sailors were forbidden to take the Lord’s name in vain.

Yet none of it availed.

Beacon fires flared along the coast of England: the Spanish had been sighted. The wind favored the English, and so did the guns; the trim English ships refused boarding engagements, dancing around their ungainly enemy, battering away with their longer guns while staying out of Spanish range. Like dogs tearing at a chained bear, they harried the Spanish up the coast to Scotland, while the storms kept up their merciless assault.

Storms, always storms, every step of the way.

Storms struck them in the Orkneys, and again off the Irish coast, as the Armada fought to crawl home. From Lisbon into the Channel, around all the islands of England, Scotland, and Ireland — everywhere the fleet went, the wrath of sky and sea pursued.

Sick unto death with scurvy and typhus, maddened by starvation and thirst, the sailors screamed of faces in the water, voices in the sky. God was on their side, but the sea was not. Ever fickle, she had turned an implacable face to them, and all the prayers of the monks could not win her goodwill.

For a deal had been struck, in underwater palaces spoken of only in sailors’ drunken tales. The sea answered to powers other than man’s, and those powers — ever callous to human suffering — had been persuaded to act in favor of the English cause, against their usual disinterested neutrality.

So it was that the skies raged on command and alien figures slipped through the water, dancing effortlessly around the foundering vessels, luring men overboard and dragging them under, discarding many to wash up, bloated and rotting, on the Irish shore, but keeping a few for future amusement. It was difficult to say who had the more unfortunate fate: those who died, or those who lived.

In Spain, bells rang out in premature celebration, while his most Catholic Majesty awaited news of his most holy mission.

In England, the heretic queen rallied her people, while reports trickled in from Drake and the Lord Admiral, speaking of English heroism.

In the turbulent waters of the Atlantic, the remnants of the Armada, half their number lost, captured, or sunk, limped homeward, and took with them the hopes of a Spanish conquest of England.

T
HE
O
NYX
H
ALL
, L
ONDON
:
September 18, 1588

The mortal guise fell away from Lune like a discarded cloak the moment the alder tree grew shut around her, and she concealed the bread within the deep folds of her skirts. Those who wished to, would find out soon enough that she had it, and where she had obtained it, but she would hide it as best she could. Plenty of lesser courtiers would come begging for a crumb if they knew.

Some of them might smell it on her; certain fae had a nose for mortality. Lune hurried through the Onyx Hall to her chambers, and tucked the heel of bread into her coffer as the door closed behind her.

With it safely stowed, she rested her hands upon the inlaid surface of the table, tracing with one fingertip the outline of its design. A mortal man knelt at the foot of a tower; the artisan had chosen to show only the base of the structure, leaving to the imagination which faerie lady had caught his heart, and whether she returned his love.

It happened, sometimes. Not everyone played with mortals as toys. Some, like hobs, served them faithfully. Others gave inspiration to poets and musicians. A few loved them, with the deathless passion of a faerie heart, all the stronger for being given so rarely.

But mortals were not Lune’s concern, except insofar as they might provide her with a route to Invidiana’s favor.

She lowered herself onto the embroidered cushion of a stool. With deliberate, thoughtful motions, Lune began to remove the jeweled pins from her hair, and laid each one on the table to represent her thoughts.

The first she laid down glimmered with fragments of starlight, pushing the boundaries of what she, as a courtier in disgrace, might be permitted to adorn herself with.
A gift,
Lune thought. A rare faerie treasure, or a mortal pet, or information. Something Invidiana would value. It was the commonest path to favor, not just for fae but for humans as well. The difficulty was, with so many gifts being showered at the Queen’s feet, few stood out enough to attract her attention.

A second pin. The knob at the end of this one held the indigo gems known as the sea’s heart. Lune’s fingers clenched around it; she had dressed for court in a rush, and had not attended to which pins she chose. Had Vidar seen it? She prayed not. Bad enough to have lost the Queen’s goodwill by that disastrous bargain with the folk of the sea; worse yet to wear in her hair their gift to the ambassador of the Onyx Court.

Dame Halgresta certainly had not seen it; of that, Lune could be sure, because she was not bleeding, or dead.

She set it down on the table, forcing her thoughts back to their task. If not a gift, then what? A removal of an obstacle, perhaps. The downfall of an enemy. But who? The ambassador from the Courts of the North had quit the Onyx Hall in rage after the execution of the mortal Queen of Scots, accusing Invidiana of having engineered her death. There were enemies aplenty in that coalition of Seely and Unseely monarchs, the courts of Thistle and Heather and Gorse. To move against them, however, Lune would have to go there herself: a tedious journey, with no assets or allies waiting for her at the end.

As for other enemies, she was not fool enough to think she could take action against the Wild Hunt and live.

Lune sighed and pulled a third pin from her hair.

Silver locks spilled free as she did so, sending the remaining pins to the floor. Lune left them where they fell, fingering the snowflake finial of the one in her hand. Give the Queen something she wanted, or remove something that stood between her and what she wanted. What else was there?

Amusement. The Queen was a cold woman, heartless and cruel, but she could be entertained. Her favorite jests were those that accomplished some other goal at the same time. Even without that, though, to amuse the Queen . . .

It was a slim enough thread, but the last thing she could grasp for.

Lune held the snowflake pin, pressing her lips together in frustration. The outlines of her options were simple enough; the difficulty lay in moving from concept to action. Everything she thought of was weak, too weak to do her much good, and she was not positioned to do more. The trap of courtly life: those in favor were the best positioned to gain favor, while those who fell out of it were often caught in a spiral of worsening luck.

She would not accept it. Running her thumb over the sharp, polished points of the snowflake, Lune disciplined her mind. How could she better her position in the Onyx Court?

“Find Francis Merriman.”

Lune was on her feet in an instant, the snowflake pin reversed and formed into a slender dagger in her hand. Her private chambers were charmed against intruders, a basic precaution in the Onyx Hall, and no one would break those protections unless they had come to do her harm.

No one, save the slender figure in the shadows.

Lune let out her breath slowly and relaxed her grip on the dagger, though she did not put it aside. “Tiresias.”

He was often where he should not be, even where he
could
not be. Now he crouched in the corner, his slender arms wrapped around his knees, his pale, ethereal face floating in the darkness.

Lune avoided Invidiana’s mortal pets for a varied host of reasons: Orpheus for fear of the effect his music might have on her; Eurydice for her ghost-haunted eyes; Achilles for the barely contained violence that only the Queen’s will held in check. Tiresias was different. She did not fear the gift for which he was named. Sometimes Lune doubted even Invidiana could tell which visions were true, which mere constructs of his maddened brain.

No, it was the madness itself that gave her pause.

He was older than the other pets, they said, and had survived longer than any. Achilles died so often that one of the quickest routes to Invidiana’s favor, if only briefly, was to find another mortal with a gift for battle fury and bring him to court; she was forever pitting the current bearer of that name against some foe or another, just for an evening’s entertainment. They fought well, all of them, and sooner or later died bloodily.

They rarely survived long enough to suffer the effects of the Onyx Hall.

Tiresias survived, and paid the price.

He had flinched at her sudden movement, fear twisting his face. Now he looked up at her, searchingly. “Are you real?” he whispered.

He asked the question incessantly, no longer able to distinguish reality from his own delusions. It made for great sport among the crueler fae. Lune sighed and let the dagger revert to a pin, then laid it on the table. “Yes. Tiresias, you should not be here.”

He shrank farther back into the shadows, as if he would meld into and through the wall. Perhaps he could, and that was how he arrived in such unexpected places. “Here? ’Tis nothing more than a shadow. We are not here. We are in Hell.”

Lune moved away from the table, and saw his eyes linger on the coffer behind her. A few bites of mortal bread could not lift the faerie stain from his soul; after untold years in the Onyx Hall, she doubted anything could. If he set foot outside, would he crumble to dust? But he hungered for mortality, sometimes, and she did not want him thinking of the bread she had. “Go back to your mistress. I have no patience for your fancies.”

Tiresias rose, and for a moment Lune thought he might obey. He wandered in the wrong direction, though — neither toward the door, nor the coffer. The back of his sable doublet was torn, a thin banner of fabric fluttering behind him like a tiny ghost of a wing. Lune opened her mouth to order him away again, but stopped. He had said something, which she had overlooked in her fright.

Moving slowly, so as not to startle him, Lune approached Tiresias’s back. He would always have been a slender man, even had he lived as a normal human, but life among the fae had made him insubstantial, wraithlike. She wondered how much longer he would last. Mortals could survive a hundred years and more among the fae — but not in the Onyx Hall. Not under Invidiana.

He was fingering the edge of a tapestry, peering at it as if he saw something other than the flooded shores of lost Lyonesse. Lune said, “You spoke a name, bade me find someone.”

One pale finger traced a line of stitchery, moonlight shining down upon a submerged tower. “Someone erred, and thus it sank. Is that not what you believe? But no — the errors came after. Because they misunderstood.”

“Lyonesse is ages gone,” Lune replied, with tired patience. She might not have even been there, for all the attention he paid to her. “The name, Tiresias. Who was it you bade me find? Francis Merriman?”

He turned and fixed his sapphire gaze on her. The pupils of his eyes were tiny, as if he stared into a bright light; then they expanded, until the blue all but vanished. “Who is he?”

The innocence of the question infuriated her, and in her distraction, she let him slip past. But he did not go far, halting in the center of the room, reaching for some imagined shape in the air before him. Lune let her breath out slowly. Francis Merriman: a mortal name. A courtier? A likely chance, given the political games Invidiana played. No one Lune knew of, but they came and went so quickly.

“Where can I find him?” she asked, trying to keep her voice gentle. “Where did you see him? In a dream?”

Tiresias shook his head violently, hands scrabbling through his black hair, disarranging it. “I do not dream. I do not dream. Please, do not ask me to dream.”

Lune could imagine the nightmares Invidiana sent him for her own entertainment. “I will do nothing to you. But why should I seek him?”

“He knows.” The words came out in a hoarse whisper. “What she did.”

Her heart picked up its pace. Secrets — they were worth more than gold. Lune tried to think who Tiresias might mean. “She. One of the ladies? Or —” Her breath caught. “Invidiana?”

Bitter, mocking laughter greeted the suggestion. “No. Not Invidiana; that is not the point. Have you not been listening?”

Lune swallowed the desire to tell him she would start listening when he said something of comprehensible substance. Staring at the seer’s tense face, she tried a different tack. “I will search for this Francis Merriman. But if I should find him, what then?”

Slowly, one muscle at a time, his body eased, until his hands hung limp at his sides. When he spoke at last, his voice was so clear she thought for a heartbeat that he was in one of his rare lucid periods — -before she listened to his words. “Stand still, you ever-moving spheres of Heaven. . . .” A painful smile curved his lips. “Time has stopped. Frozen, cold, no heart’s blood to quicken it to life once more. I told you, we are all in Hell.”

Perhaps there had never been any substance in it to begin with. Lune might be chasing an illusion, pinning too much hope on the ramblings of a madman. Not everything he said came from a vision.

But it was the one possibility anyone had offered her, and the only one she was likely to receive. Her best hope otherwise was to bargain her bread for information that might be of aid. There were plenty of courtiers who would have use for it, playing their games in the world above.

When she made her bargains, she would ask after this Francis Merriman. But secretly, so she did not betray her hand to the Queen. Surprise might count for a great deal.