“Can you make it to Billingsgate?” Irrith asked, alone with Galen in the Monument Yard. “Or do I have to carry you after all?”
He’d forced himself to his feet, but still stood half-bent, shoulders trembling. In the privacy of her mind, Irrith placed a wager on “carry.” But Galen shook his head. “Not Billingsgate.”
“What?”
Another wracking cough. When it ended, Galen rasped, “Have to defend from the center. London Stone. It’s an entrance, too. Might still answer to me.”
An entrance. She shouldn’t be surprised: that was the central point, where faerie and mortal London merged into one. Galen was already staggering past the Monument’s base, stumbling like a gin-soaked beggar, but moving with speed. The mortal face of the London Stone was almost as close as Billingsgate. Irrith hurried after him, flinging a concealment over them both, so that no one would try to stop the half-dressed man and the faerie that was chasing him.
They dodged the carts and carriages, sedan chairs and people on foot that still crowded Fish Street Hill, then turned onto the lane that became Cannon Street a little farther down. Irrith could see the spire of St. Swithin’s up ahead, hard by the Stone, which lay now on the north side of the street. They were almost there when Galen’s foot caught against something in the muck and he went down again, collapsing heavily to the ground.
“Hang your pride,” Irrith muttered, and caught up to the fallen man. She could at least support him, if not carry him. Before Galen could protest, she slipped one arm under his chest and lifted him to his feet.
His skin burnt hot through the thin fabric of his shirt.
“You’re feverish,” she said, foolishly—and then she saw his eyes.
Pupil, iris, and white: all gone, replaced by blazing flame.
Instinct sent her leaping backward, an instant before his hand could close on her throat. Curses flooded through her mind, panicked and incoherent. This wasn’t the Dragon they’d fought before, the ravening, near-mindless beast, its cunning limited only to destruction. No, they’d given it a human mind, a clever one. A mind that knew all about the Onyx Hall: not just its power but its secrets, from the Calendar Room to the truth of the London Stone.
The beast that wore Galen’s body shuddered, an inhuman, spine-twisting ripple. Irrith flinched on instinct, remembering that motion from the infernal days of the Fire—
But nothing happened.
She smelled smoke, the dreadfully appealing scent of meat on the spit—but no flames leapt out at her. The blazing eyes widened. Then the Dragon, realizing its powers were limited by human flesh, did the only thing it could.
It ran for the Stone.
Irrith hurled herself after. She was the faster of the two, and knocked her quarry sprawling a second time. They narrowly missed a maid, sleepily yawning her way down the dark street. An inhuman snarl rose from Galen’s throat, and a foot slammed into her face, hard enough that Irrith saw stars. She rolled free, then forced herself to her feet once more, because a single thought survived the impact of his foot:
I have to keep it from the Stone.
They were already at Abchurch Lane. Irrith snatched out one of her pistols and fired, but running spoiled her aim; her shot chipped the front of a shop. Swearing, she dragged out the other and halted for an instant, concentrating on Galen’s back.
Her second shot flew more true—but not true enough. It struck his hip, spinning him into the brick wall at his side, scarcely three paces from his goal.
Irrith was already running again. She dropped both spent pistols to the ground and drew her last weapon, the knife of jotun ice. He knocked her aside as she came near, but the blow served her purposes well enough; it threw her that last bit of distance, putting her between Galen and the London Stone.
No. It isn’t Galen. Galen died inside the Monument.
But to her horror, she saw something of him in the twisted snarl on his face. “Irrith,” he said, spitting her name like a curse. “Traitor one day, faithful the next. Can’t you change your mind one more time? For me?”
She tightened her grip on the knife. Its cold seared her hand; the Dragon kept well clear of it as he pushed himself away from the wall. His shirt was beginning to smoke, tiny flames curling up where his skin pressed against the fabric. “Odd,” she said breathlessly, trying to delay long enough for her still-spinning head to settle. The Stone was a hard presence just behind her back. If he got so much as a finger on it . . . “You know the things Galen knows—knew—and yet you don’t know me at all.”
He laughed, and the sound itself burnt her. “Don’t I? I know you’re a coward. You could have loved me, but you were too afraid. Not of the grief—of the possibility that your love would never be returned. That even that ultimate gift couldn’t draw me away from my hopeless devotion to Lune, and you would be left as I was, groveling after someone forever out of your reach.”
“Don’t say that word,” Irrith snarled, past the choking knot in her throat. “
I.
You aren’t Galen.”
“Half of me is.”
“The body means nothing.”
“All of the body; half of the spirit. That’s what the alchemy meant, Irrith. A wedding of two separate spirits into one, cleaving unto each other like man and wife. Though in this case, the man
is
the wife.” The Dragon twisted Galen’s mouth into a travesty of a smile. “He welcomed the fire in like a demon lover.”
Fire that was burning his body up from the inside. They weren’t wrong; the conjunction had weakened the Dragon. Might even kill it, in time. But how long would that take?
She saw again the terror in Galen’s face, as he went to his death.
Walking into Hell with his eyes wide open.
Could the torments of damnation be any worse than this, his spirit shackled to a creature that would destroy those he loved?
As if it could read her thoughts, the Dragon grinned and spread Galen’s arms wide. “Do you think death will free him? We are one spirit now. Kill him, send him to Hell, and I will go with him, for I
am
Galen St. Clair.”
They both lunged.
The Dragon was ready for Irrith, because it knew her, as Galen had known her. One searing arm came across to block her thrust. But Galen knew weapons as a gentleman did, with rules and courtesy and honor, and he couldn’t block what he didn’t expect.
Irrith’s right hand was knocked out of line—but the knife wasn’t there anymore. Their joined momentum brought them crashing together hard, her slight weight against Galen’s searing body, and her left hand brought the blade up and into his chest.
They staggered, scant inches from the Stone. Then Irrith set her feet and drove him back, slamming his rigid frame against the brick wall behind. Elemental ice and elemental fire warred, sending waves of heat and cold radiating outward, until she wanted to scream and flee to safety. But she hung on, sinking the knife hilt-deep into his ribs, glaring into those eyes of flame, until the light in them flickered and died, leaving behind pits of black ash. When Irrith let go, the body fell limply to the ground. The knife-hilt clattered free, its blade melted away.
She stood gasping, shaking, staring at the corpse of Galen St. Clair.
His blind face seemed to stare at her in accusation. Pain twisted inside her, sharper than the vanished knife.
I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I didn’t love you—I
couldn’t.
If she had loved him, she could never have killed him.
Slowly Irrith became aware of eyes on her. No one stood near, but mortals were watching from a safe distance, peering through shutters and half-cracked doors, whispering to each other in the shadows. From farther off she heard shouts and running footsteps: a constable, no doubt. Her concealment had fallen at some point, and now she stood over a dead man’s body, with her faerie face bared to the world.
She could not leave him there, lying in the filth of the street. Clenching her jaw, Irrith bent and took hold of Galen’s lifeless, unresisting hand. With an effort, she heaved him over her shoulder, then built another concealment for them both. It was hard, with so many people watching, but the darkness helped; she slipped away down Cannon Street, carrying the dead Prince, taking him home to rest.
The Onyx Hall, London: May 1, 1759
Fae knew little of funerals. Those mortals who died among them were generally deposited back in the world they’d come from, in their beds or in a gutter, according to the kindness of the one who put them there. The fae did not bury their own dead. There was no need, when their bodies fell so soon to nothingness, the spirits that shaped them gone to oblivion.
The Princes of the Stone were always returned to their families, to be buried with Christian rites. Only Michael Deven lay interred in the ground of the Onyx Hall, beneath a stand of ever-blooming apple trees in the night garden, forever close to the faerie Queen who loved him.
Michael Deven—and now Galen St. Clair.
For him, the fae gathered in solemn observance, lining the path through the night garden. Or at least as close to solemnity as they could manage: some were puzzled by this semimortal ceremony, and some showed too-sharp curiosity in his death, fascinated by the experience that came among them so rarely. But knights of the Onyx Guard stood sentinel along the path, and Bonecruncher’s loyal goblins lurked behind; anyone who thought to profane the Prince’s funeral vanished instantly from view, with a minimum of fuss.
The pall-shrouded bier came through the arch, borne on a tatterfoal-drawn open carriage. Preceding it was an honor guard of five elf-knights and one half-mortal valet; Edward Thorne and his father Sir Peregrin led the way, side by side. The plaintive sound of a flute threaded through the quiet air, marking time for their slow procession. Fae knelt as they went by. The bier crossed the Walbrook, passed under the drooping branches of willow trees, and came among new mourners: the mortals of the Onyx Hall, all those who had been under Galen’s authority as Prince. They rarely gathered in one place, those mortals, and made an odd assortment standing together. Men of all classes, from the wealthy through to lawyers and artisans, laborers and the humble poor. Women, some beautiful, some scarred by disease. Old and young, and a large knot of children, lured away into a realm of wonder, their eyes wide as they watched grief go by.
At last the procession reached its end: the obelisk listing Princes of the Stone. A small flame burnt in its base, and a new line had been chiseled into the plaque:
Mr. Galen St. Clair 1756–1759
A small group waited there. Mrs. Vesey supported Delphia St. Clair, who wore mourning sewn for her by the finest faerie seamstresses. Lune stood alone, dressed in the same white she wore every October, when she came to grieve for Michael Deven.
And Irrith, clad in green, the executioner attending the funeral.
The honor guard lifted the carriage’s burden down to the grass. Irrith stared at the pall draped over the coffin, grateful for its presence. She preferred to remember the man she’d first seen, extending his hand to the muddy, swearing sprite who had just fallen through the Newgate entrance; but every time she blinked, she saw the gaping voids of Galen’s eyes, burnt out by the Dragon. And nothing could block her ears to the memory of that searing voice, taunting her with the inexorable truth.
Kill him, send him to Hell, and I will go with him, for I
am
Galen St. Clair.
They had saved the Onyx Hall, but nothing could rob the beast of that victory.
Galen’s family would bury a manikin disguised as their son and brother, thinking Galen the victim of some illness or misfortune. Irrith hadn’t inquired after the lie. There would be Christian rites then, but they could hardly say any here, in the heart of the Onyx Hall. Delphia had not pressed for any. She understood what this court had meant to Galen, and where he would wish to be buried.
Once the bearers folded the pall and retired into a line, Lune came forward, and laid her hand upon the grass.
They weren’t certain if she could do this, without a Prince’s aid. It might come to shovels after all, the indignity of digging a grave and piling the dirt atop the coffin. The Hall answered to Queen and Prince together, a faerie and a mortal. But either Lune could in this small way command it alone, or the palace recognized the interment of its former master, for after a few breathless moments, the bier began to sink beneath the earth. The grass closed over the coffin’s lid, and still the Queen knelt; then, at last, she let her breath out and stood.
No more ceremony than that—but Lune looked to each of them, and repeated the words she’d spoken in the great presence chamber. “Remember him.”
Irrith, hearing the Dragon’s laughter in her mind, wished she could forget.
Word came that evening, from someone’s mortal pet: a Londoner named John Bevis had sighted the comet on the night of April thirtieth.
The people of London had all but forgotten Halley’s prediction. Their fears of fiery demise had flared too soon, sparked by the false alarm of the comet two years ago; the ongoing inability of their astronomers to sight the returning comet had slain the last of their fears. It was just a star now, trailing its diminished tail, an object of astronomical curiosity and little more.
The message was brought to Lune in her privy chamber, where she sat with only the Goodemeades for company. Most of her court was above, in the Moor Fields, celebrating May Day and their release from fifty years of fear. No Sanist concern kept Lune below, not this time; she simply could not join their revelry. Not while she wore her gown of mourning white.
She thanked the usher who brought the message and dismissed him, then lapsed once more into silence.
The two brownies had kept her company before, permitting her quiet and melancholy when she needed it. If they spoke, it was because they thought it necessary. Still, that didn’t prevent a surge of resentment when Gertrude said, “You should go to them.”
Leaving aside the fact that she didn’t wish to go anywhere at all—“Them?”