Lune pressed one slender hand to her brow, then lowered it. “We do not begrudge you that grant from your King. Did you recognize the dog?”
Irrith shook her head. “Maybe if I’d seen his other face. But it was raining; I can’t even tell you what kind he was—padfoot, skriker, or what.”
The Queen exchanged a glance with her Prince. Irrith didn’t miss Galen’s helpless shrug. New, indeed. But there was something more in his manner, that she didn’t have the time to puzzle out; she didn’t want to compound her rudeness by staring at the Prince. Not in front of Lune.
Well, she’d done her duty, handing over the mortal bread the Onyx Court relied on, and telling of the one who’d tried to steal it. Few people in the vicinity of London tithed bread or milk to the fae any longer; Lune had to trade human curiosities to more distant courts, in exchange for their surplus. Those fae with the sense to live in places less riddled with iron and churches had much less need for protection.
But Irrith knew it didn’t end there. Nineteen years since the Fleet was culverted, the Prince said. Tom had hinted at the passage of time, but Irrith had refused to ask for a number. Now she couldn’t hold the question in. “Your Majesty—how long until the comet gets here?”
The Queen sank into her chair, as if suddenly weary, and gestured for her Prince to answer. Galen said, “We don’t know exactly. ‘Getting here’ . . . we know the time of the comet’s perihelion, but not the point at which the Dragon will make its leap.”
What Irrith knew about astronomy would fit into an acorn cap, so she merely rephrased her question. “How much time do you have left?”
“A year and a half,” he said. “Maybe less.”
She shivered.
So little time.
They’d had more than fifty years, when the seer’s warning first came. Where had it all gone?
“It will be enough,” Lune whispered. She sounded as if she believed it, and perhaps she did; the Queen of the Onyx Court had faced down challenges before. Her face, however, was more than usually pale. Irrith couldn’t imagine what it must be like, living under such a threat for decades, counting the time like a mortal. Knowing that it was running out. Fifty years of that could, it seemed, sap the life from even a faerie queen.
Seeing that weakness, even for a moment, made Irrith uneasy. “With your permission, madam,” the sprite said, “I should like to clean myself up now. I didn’t want to delay getting that bread to you—”
“I appreciate your care,” Lune said, straightening in her chair, either banishing or hiding her weariness. “Amadea will provide you with a suitable chamber. Unless you intended to return to the Vale?”
Irrith thought about the culverted Fleet, and the houses around Tyburn, and the court under the patronage of a new and inexperienced Prince. So many changes. And little more than a year until the comet returned, possibly bringing this all to an end. “I will stay, at least a while.”
“Good.” Lune smiled, but it was a tense thing, carrying a tremendous weight of care. “This court needs all the friends it can find.”
When the muddy and half-clad sprite was gone with Lady Amadea, leaving Galen alone with the Queen, Lune rose once more. Instead of returning to the dining room, though, she went to the fireplace, and laid her hand upon the stone.
“So,” she said, her voice musical and quiet. “How did your evening go?”
Galen wished Dr. Johnson could see her now, shining with all the regal glory so absent from Britain’s Hanoverian King. There was transcendence in the polished gleam of her hair, and a portraitist might have wept for the opportunity to render her serene likeness on canvas. She was the reason he dwelt between worlds, the hidden Prince of a hidden court—despite the threat they faced.
A threat that was never far from anyone’s mind. “Pleasantly, but not productively,” Galen was forced to admit. “We may be able to find other allies among them, open-minded gentlemen, or ladies like Mrs. Vesey. But their interest lies primarily in literature, art, and similar topics; I doubt anyone there can offer much help. Not against a Dragon.”
The word came out hushed. Lune’s hand tightened along the edge of the mantel. A slender hand, long-fingered and pale—but all Galen had to do was look to its mate for a reminder of the danger they faced. A glove concealed the blackened, paralyzed claw of her left hand, the mark left upon her in battle with the Dragon of the Fire.
Her timeless face made it easy to forget that she was there when it happened, nearly a hundred years ago.
Distant history, for the city’s mortal inhabitants. A few old half-timbered buildings still dotted the streets, past the margin of the Great Fire’s reach, and the Monument near London Bridge commemorated the disaster. Beyond those few reminders, who gave thought to it now?
The fae did. No amount of time could dull their memories of those desperate, infernal days, struggling against a beast too powerful for them to kill. In the end, they could only imprison and exile it—and both, in time, had proved imperfect solutions.
The sight of Lune’s gloved and ruined hand spurred Galen’s determination. She would suffer no second wound from the Dragon; he would protect her from it.
Somehow.
He searched desperately for inspiration, and came up short. “Madam—surely fae know better than any mortal how to battle a creature like this. I’m told you had some weapon against it before—”
Her swift turn whisked her skirts out of her way. “We did. And my first act, when Feidelm warned me the comet would return, was to seek it out again. I’ve spent decades chasing the possibility of some weapon, from one end of Europe to the other—Sweden, the Germanies, across the Mediterranean, my ambassadors asking everywhere for some means of destroying the Dragon. I would pay any price for a surety of doing so. So far, unfortunately, all we have are possibilities.”
“But if you cannot kill it,” Galen said, “with all the enchanted power at your command—what makes you think mere mortals can do better?”
He tried not to let the desperation through; it was contemptible of him to show it, especially when she had laid this great honor and great burden upon him, making him her Prince. But it fluttered in his throat, like a panicked bird trying to win free, and rattled his voice as he spoke.
Incredibly, Lune smiled. More emotions than he could name lived in that smile, but none of them were contempt. She said, “Everything of great import done in this place—
everything
that has made the Onyx Hall the wonder it is, and preserved it against threats—has been done by mortal and faerie-kind together. Without your people, we would not be here. So when I heard the Dragon was to return, my first thought was not of weapons. It was of the Prince at my side.”
A Prince who had aged and passed away without ever finding an answer. And others had come after him, as the years marched in their inexorable course, all of them the bearers of Lune’s trust, all of them—ultimately—failures.
Now it was Galen’s turn, to carry that burden, and to fall beneath it.
I should never have agreed,
he thought miserably, clenching his hands until his knuckles ached,
when she offered me the title. She deserves better.
“I haven’t the slightest idea,” the Queen said, unaware of his dreary thoughts, “what meeting of worlds will save us this time. But I am certain it will need us both to do it. Whether it is some effect of the Onyx Hall’s nature, or simply the consequence of my governance these centuries, that has always been the case. I will contribute what I can, and you will do the same, and out of that will come the answer.”
She did not sound complacent; she had struggled against this question for too many years to be complacent. But the confidence in her voice gave Galen heart.
Though what my kind can do, when so few even believe in magic now
. . .
His sudden inspiration must have produced an audible sound, for Lune raised her arching eyebrows. “Yes?”
“I,” Galen said, and hesitated. “I don’t know how this could be of help.”
“We have tried everything that might be,” she said, with a hint of weary amusement. “We might as well try the things that
can’t
be.”
It seemed thinner and weaker the longer he thought about it, but the Queen was waiting. Galen said, “Natural philosophy.”
She didn’t laugh, or dismiss it out of hand. It was something mortals could contribute, that fae knew little of: the rational understanding of the world, as achieved through observation and experimentation. Every day, new discoveries, sending beams of light into the dark mysteries of nature. It had warned them of their impending peril; perhaps it could also save them.
Lune followed the thought to its inevitable conclusion even as Galen did. If such knowledge were to aid them, there was but one place to seek it out. “The Royal Society,” she said.
A fellowship of the most learned men in Britain, with allies all over Europe. Lune’s growing smile made Galen’s heart soar—until a new thought dragged it down once more. For him to gain entrée into the Royal Society, he would have to beg a favor of the last person to whom he wanted to owe a debt.
She knew it as well as he did. She said, “Can you get your father’s assistance?”
I don’t know.
But he made himself smile, because this was what the Queen needed of him, her Prince, and he would pay any price she asked. “Yes, madam, I can.”
Memory: September 12, 1682
In the ordinary way of things, night was the ideal time for sneaking and subterfuge. Honest men were in their beds, with only the occasional watchman to sound an alarm, and darkness provided a friendly veil against such eyes.
The Royal Observatory at Greenwich did not operate according to the ordinary rules of society. Here, men slept during the day, and woke at night to observe the stars and moon and the distant planets.
Which became something of a problem when others wished to use their instruments, in secret, without their permission.
But the Onyx Court played home to many creatures that took pride in their stealth. If it was strange for them to operate in sunlight, they adapted. They had good reason to wish for success in this undertaking. So they went to Greenwich in the light of day, and moved either disguised or unseen among the astronomers and clerks and servants who worked there, bearing with them tiny vials of crystal. In those vials lay the essences of faerie herbs, gathered from the gardens of the Onyx Hall, to prepare for the coming night.
The contents of the vials went into food, into wine, into the bitter coffee drink some of the men swore sharpened their wits and kept them alert during their vigils. One by one, the men of the observatory slept, and dreamt the dreams provided to them.
Lune reached the top of the hill as a puck bent to drip visions on the eyelids of the last sleeper, a man who had curled up on the grass at the foot of Flamsteed’s great telescope. Behind her, three stocky yarthkins lugged a heavy crate up the slope. One man in his forties, hair thinning on top but still hale, wheezed theatrically as he staggered through the courtyard gate. “I swear it gets steeper every time.”
“This is the last time you have to climb it, Jack.” Lune stepped from the cobbled courtyard onto the grass, then stood gazing up at the telescope, and the stars beyond.
She could not see the one she sought. But that was what telescopes were for.
Jack Ellin, Prince of the Stone, nodded cheerfully. “Indeed. Either we exile this beast beyond the boundaries of the world—or it gets free and burns us all to ash. Either way, I won’t have to climb the hill again.”
For all his levity, he showed nothing but precision as he directed the various fae to their tasks. Once he’d taken the necessary sights through the telescope of the Astronomer Royal, he sent a few of his more agile assistants up the mast, where they unhooked the ropes that held the sixty-foot tube in place. Others pried open the crate, revealing another, shorter telescope—this one unlike any other in the world.
Lune paced impatiently while her subjects rigged this one to the mast and set up a platform for them to stand next to its eyepiece. Jack ignored her restlessness. Hauling their telescope hither and yon would have jarred the mirrors from their careful alignments, and any error in that respect could lead to disaster. Under his direction, a delicate-fingered sprite tapped them into place, first the great, then the little.
At last he said, “We’re ready.”
“Are you sure?” Lune asked.
His wry face reached for, but did not quite achieve, carelessness. “Am I sure that an inverted model of a revolutionary design of telescope, crafted out of faerie wood and faerie metal, will succeed at focusing and directing the spirit of a Dragon through the aether and onto a comet so far distant it can only barely be seen with the aid of the most advanced astronomical equipment in England? Of course, your Grace. I would never suggest it otherwise.”
Despite the gravity of their task, Lune smiled. But Jack knew the danger quite well, and so he added, too quietly for the others to hear, “What will we do if this fails?”
Lune’s left hip carried the London Sword, the central piece of the Onyx Court’s royal regalia. She touched its hilt with her good fingers. “I yet have another hand. And the prison might hold a while longer.”
Both of them turned to watch the approach of a second crate, this one of hawthorn. Once it was laid in the grass at their feet, all the fae retreated, leaving Queen and Prince alone at the foot of the telescope. All of them drew weapons—as if they would do much good. Jack offered his arm to Lune with a courtly bow, assisting her up onto the platform.
Then he knelt and lifted the top from the hawthorn crate.
Inside that shielding wood lay a small box of black iron, unadorned save for a flame-marked shield on its lid. It had been cold the first time he touched it, sixteen years ago. Now gloves barely protected his hands from the heat. The prison into which they had forced the spirit of the Great Fire of London could not hold it forever. The strange enchantments of the iron were weakening under its power.
He prayed—silently, so the fae would not hear—that this would work. Even if Lune sacrificed her other hand to trap the Dragon once more, it would leave them in hopeless straits. They could not kill the beast, and it seemed they could not imprison it, either. Exile was their only remaining option.