A Star Shall Fall (37 page)

She wished the word
spy
hadn’t crossed her mind.

“We have a newcomer among us today,” Aspell said, gesturing to her. Irrith was glad of her habit of masculine glamours—then she wondered. Everyone in the Onyx Hall knew of that habit. Should she have looked female today? At least Aspell had the wit to use the right pronoun when he said, “I have asked him here to tell us what he’s seen of the Queen.”

Blood and Bone—she hadn’t expected to be shoved into this so quickly. Rising, Irrith made an awkward little bow, and tried to figure out how to begin. “Er—the Queen. She’s . . . at first I thought it was that she’s tired. And, you know, that could be from a lot of things. We don’t have to sleep like mortals do, but working all the time the way she does—that would tire even a hob.

“But I don’t think it’s that. She’s tired, but there’s something else, too.”

Irrith swallowed hard.
Hob
was another word she shouldn’t have thought; it summoned up an image of the Goodemeades. What would they say, if they knew she’d come here today?

She’d come for a reason. Not for Aspell’s sake, or out of disaffection with Lune and the Onyx Court. No, she was here because she didn’t want to see those things lost.

Irrith said, “I think her Majesty’s fading.”

With those words out, it was easier to go on. “My best guess is that the Hall is calling on her strength to hold itself together. Only a little; it’s hard to see the effect. I wouldn’t have noticed it except I—” She caught herself before she could say anything that would betray her identity. “It’s slow. But if Ktistes can’t find a way to mend it, and especially if the mortals tear down more bits . . .” Irrith gestured helplessly. “It will only get worse.”

“Like two cripples holding each other up,” one of the fae said. “Keeps either one from falling over, at least for a while. But it doesn’t make either one whole.”

“The Queen isn’t crippled,” Irrith said sharply, forgetting Lune’s hand for a moment.
That’s only a hand, though.
“And Ktistes already made the entrances work again, after they burnt in the Fire. He’s clever; he’ll probably find a way to repair this, too.”

Aspell made a placating gesture. He’d disguised himself as a pale-faced clerk, though he’d forgotten to put inkstains on his fingers. “All of us are here because we share a common goal, and that is the preservation of the Onyx Hall. If the centaur could restore our home to health, we would all be satisfied.

“But he cannot, because the foundation is too badly cracked. The sovereign is her realm. It cannot be whole unless its ruler is.”

“Has anyone tried healing Lune?” Irrith asked.

It produced grumblings around the table. No doubt they’d been through all of this before, maybe years ago. And she’d just made it obvious that whoever she was, she’d only recently come to the Onyx Hall—if they hadn’t guessed that already. “Well,
have
they?”

The man at the far end of the table said, “There was talk of getting her a silver hand, like that Irish king. But silver doesn’t make you whole.”

“And besides,” another added, “there’s the iron wound. You can talk all you like about healing her hand, but nothing heals what iron does to you.”

Nothing
they
knew of. Irrith wondered if Abd ar-Rashid could do it. Apparently iron didn’t bother his kind, and he said he knew a lot about medicine. If he could heal the Queen, this whole problem would go away.

Or would it? Irrith honestly didn’t know whether making Lune whole would do anything to help the Onyx Hall. It might rob the Sanists of their best argument against her, and that would be something—but the real malcontents would still say that Lune had failed as Queen, because her first duty was to hold her realm together.

Aspell said quietly, “There is another issue.”

The grumbling and argumentation quieted. The Lord Keeper waited until he had perfect silence, apart from the noise of the coffeehouse downstairs, before he spoke again. “The Dragon.”

“We’re hidden from it,” someone said immediately. “Aren’t we?”

Irrith bit back her answer; that really
would
betray her identity. Aspell gave a sinuous shrug. “We’re hidden, yes. And the Dragon was imprisoned; and the Dragon was exiled.”

And all of it, ultimately, had failed. Irrith wished she could argue, but the concealment had been her own idea in the first place. She, of all people, was aware that it might not last.

She asked, “What does that have to do with the Queen?”

He placed his hands carefully on the table, bowing his head. The tallow dips around the room didn’t give off much better light than the smoky fire, but despite the gloom, he looked more weary than sinister. Irrith just wished she could tell whether that was a pose. “An unwelcome thought has come to me,” Aspell said. “One I have labored mightily to dismiss, but it will not go. It is my great hope that we find some other defense against this threat; I want no one here to doubt that. If, however, we do not find another answer, then we must consider this, our last, most desperate resort.”

Irrith’s heart sped up with every word out of his mouth. Whether he meant malice or not, his need for such a preface could not bode well.

The Lord Keeper sighed heavily and went on. “While the Queen hunts answers in the world above, we cannot afford to lose sight of our own world, and the lessons it teaches us. She spent a great deal of time some years ago soliciting advice from other lands, asking after great dragons in their past, and what had been done to address them. In this, I believe, is an answer we must consider.”

“Just say it already,” Irrith snapped, unable to bear the delay any longer.

He lifted his head and met her gaze. “The sacrifice of a woman to the dragon.”

No one said anything. A fellow somewhere beneath Irrith’s feet shouted merrily to one of his companions, until she wanted to run downstairs and bid him be silent.
A strange day, this is, with faeries above and mortals below.

And a far stranger day, Irrith of the Vale, when you stand here and listen to Valentin Aspell propose feeding Lune to the Dragon.

Because that had to be what he meant. “You cannot be serious,” Irrith said, through numb lips.

“She’ll take the whole damn Hall with her!” someone else exclaimed.

The Lord Keeper straightened swiftly, hands raised. “Hear me out. First and foremost, I tell you this:
I intend nothing against the Queen’s will.
”

It broke through the shell of horror that had encased Irrith’s body. Her heart, which seemed to have stopped, leapt back into action with a bone-jarring thud. “I am not advocating regicide,” Aspell went on, distinctly enough that Irrith spared a moment to hope someone had done something to keep their voices from escaping the room.
Regicide
was not a word to toss around lightly in
either
world. “But let me explain my reasoning to you, and the course of action I see before us.”

Again he waited for his audience to quiet. When they had done so, he spoke in a softer tone. “The Dragon has had a taste of her Majesty. It knows her scent, if you will.”

Irrith shook her head. “It knows the scent of the Onyx Hall.”

“Both, then—but in such circumstances, as I understand it, as to make the Dragon connect the two. And certainly, as matters stand now, they
are
connected. The loss of her Grace would almost certainly mean the loss of the Hall.”

Loss.
A delicate word, much less ugly than the two it replaced.
Death. Destruction.

“However,” Aspell went on, “were the Queen to be separated from her realm—to be no longer the Queen—then I believe she would still attract the Dragon’s interest, without endangering the palace. And in that manner, we might divert the beast from its purpose.”

Some of the gathered eight were shifting uncomfortably in their seats. Others had an avid gleam Irrith did not like at all. One of the shifters said, “What’s to stop it from devouring her, then moving on to the rest of us?”

The man next to him nodded. “I’ve heard those stories, too. A maiden a year, or some such. Appeasement isn’t safety; it’s just a bit of breathing space.”

“We could use it to bind the Dragon, though,” another said. “Not just one year, but seventy-five years of safety—or seventy-six, or however long it is.”

“And how much good has more time done us? The Queen’s got that Calendar Room of hers, but it hasn’t given her an answer, has it?”

More voices rose, the entire thing degenerating into just the kind of squabbling that Irrith most hated. But arguments aside, she realized, this was the closest thing to an actual plan she’d heard anyone offer. It was already autumn. The comet would reach its closest point to the sun in March. That meant that even now it drew near, and only a thin veil of clouds protected them. It was all well and good to say that natural philosophy would save them, but so far it didn’t seem to have provided any real proposal for how to do that.

The sacrifice of the Queen might be the only option.

And Lune would do it, too,
Irrith thought. The Sanists’ ordinary arguments might fall on deaf royal ears, but the Dragon could well be a different matter. Aspell didn’t have to intend anything against the Queen’s will: if the beast stood before them, and no other option presented itself, then Lune might sacrifice herself freely, for the sake of her people.

Which was the thing Carline had never understood. Whatever mistakes Lune had made, she always put the interests of her court ahead of her own. That was a rare thing in a ruler, faerie or mortal. Who else could be trusted to do the same?

“We will decide nothing here today,” Aspell said at last, cutting through the general clamor. “As I said, this is a matter of final resort. But we must bear in mind the possibility.”

He looked at each of them in turn as he said it, and last of all at Irrith. She nodded, awkwardly, as if her head were on a string held by some careless puppeteer. A strong part of her wished she had never come to this place, to hear the possibility that Lune’s death was the only thing that could save them.

The rest of her was glad she had. Because if it came to that desperate pass, Irrith would throw herself at the Queen’s feet and beg. If Lune
could
save them, then she must.

The Onyx Hall, London: October 15, 1758

For mortals, Sunday was a day of rest—or at least it was supposed to be. Lune knew quite well that many of them nowadays went walking outside of London, or enjoyed less respectable diversions. Galen was required to attend church with his family more often than not, though, as many Princes before him had done, and so she’d formed the habit of spending her Sundays on work that did not involve the mortal world.

This week, that meant efforts to keep her court from disintegrating. Only a few had left so far, but many more were planning to do so; Lune didn’t need spies to learn that. The prudent ones had chosen dates for their departure, based on their assumptions of when the Dragon would appear. The more reckless—which was most of them—thought they could run when it did.

She intended to consult Rosamund and Gertrude, possibly even to slip away in secret and go to Rose House. Keeping below, for the comfort of her court, was threatening to drive her mad. Before she could make plans, though, a knock sounded at the door. “Come in,” Lune called.

It proved to be her attendant Nemette, who curtsied. “Your Grace, my apologies. Lord Valentin wishes to speak with you.”

Good news, or bad? Nemette could not answer that question for her. “Send him in.”

The Lord Keeper’s expression told her no more than her attendant had. “I am sorry to disturb you with what may just be an idle rumor, your Majesty, but—”

She waved him past the rest of the courtesies. If it was important enough for him to call on her, rather than waiting for one of their ordinary meetings, then she would listen. “It may be,” he said, “that the Sanists are considering a more . . . political solution to their concerns than we thought.”

Now she understood his ambivalence. A “political” solution could be good news, or not. “Of what sort?”

“They seek a successor to your throne.”

His choice of term gave her pause. Those who took power without leave were more commonly called “usurpers”; his phrasing implied something more legal. Inasmuch as such a word could be used for a faerie realm, where laws were haphazard things, when they existed at all.

But her realm had more laws than most. And while faerie monarchs rarely designated heirs as mortals did—after all, they could in theory rule forever—it wasn’t an absurd thought here.

“How did you learn of this?”

Aspell spread his hands. “Fourth-hand rumor, I’m afraid; it may be entirely false. But I believe there was a meeting yesterday, of the Sanist cabal. Somewhere above.”

Lune laid aside the pen she was still holding and frowned at the stain where it had dripped. “Where do they expect to find this successor?”

“Not Lady Carline—I beg your pardon, the former lady—if that is what you were thinking, madam. Possibly elsewhere in England. Some faerie monarch with whom you could be persuaded to form an alliance, perhaps, and who in time would rule here.”

As if she were a mortal Queen, to wed and pass power to her husband. Lune cleaned her pen, to give her hands something to do while she thought.

Aspell waited, then said delicately, “Madam, without meaning to give any sanction to the Sanists . . . might it not be a wise choice, to make some kind of provision for your court? If it should come to pass that—”

He didn’t finish the sentence, for she stopped him with a glare. “Do you recall Elizabeth Tudor? She, too, had councillors who pressed her to name an heir, and she, too, resisted. Because she knew the moment she declared the succession, her own position would weaken; others would begin to look to the next monarch, and she would become . . .” Lune’s lip curled. “Dispensable.”

She heard him draw slow breath. Were it someone other than Valentin Aspell, she would have said it was to steady his temper. “I do recall her,” the Lord Keeper said. “And I also recall the uncertainty her people suffered, wondering what would become of them when she was gone, and the intrigues that resulted.”