A Star Shall Fall (53 page)

The formal cadences of her speech wound his nerves tight. She spoke this way in two circumstances, Galen realized: when she held court, and when the burden of her thoughts was so heavy as to be shared only with reluctance.

In other words, when she was afraid.

She saw him realize it, too. Their eyes met, and she discarded formality for simple, horrifying bluntness. “If we cannot kill the Dragon, then I will give myself up to it.”

“No!”
Galen leapt forward, hat falling from his hand. “No, Lune, you cannot—”

“Why not?”

“Because that’s what Aspell wanted!”

“And perhaps he was right.” She didn’t move from her chair, not even to stand; for once he towered over her, and it felt wrong. “A last resort. A choice between my own death, and the death of my realm—not just the Onyx Hall, but London as well. Thousands of mortals,
hundreds
of thousands, who for years now have dreaded a fiery death at the comet’s return, without ever knowing why. Should I stand living, when that disaster comes?”

Galen’s hands ached. He’d clenched them into fists, without any target to use them on. “What if it fails, though? What if we lose you and the Hall both?”

The peaceful acceptance in Lune’s eyes terrified him. “Then at least I will have done everything I can.”

Even unto the sacrifice of her soul, obliterated by the Dragon. Galen felt too light, as if he would drift away; his breath was coming too fast. Had his shouts carried above, or had the watchful roses kept his cries from Delphia’s ears? He wondered if the Goodemeades knew of this. They were Lune’s friends, beyond the bond of subject to sovereign; surely they could not stand by while she proposed such madness!

But they know her. Perhaps they know she won’t be dissuaded.

He shoved that thought away with almost physical force. The Lady Chamberlain, when he looked to her for help, sat white-faced and staring. Lune laid one hand on hers. “You know why you’re here, Amadea. I won’t leave the Onyx Hall without a mistress. If it comes to this pass, I’ll renounce my claim, and you must take it in my place.”

Her mouth says
if
; her mind says
when. Amadea shook her head, little more than a tremble. Lune’s hand tightened. “You must. The court needs a Queen—a Queen, I think, and not a King, because it also needs a Prince of the Stone.” She transferred her attention to Galen once more. “She will need your help.”

He backed up a step, then another. His own head was moving, back and forth, slow denial. “No.”

“Galen, we have no choice.”

“Yes. We do. Or at least I do.” He should have been rigid with tension, but he wasn’t. His body felt loose, supple. Ready to spring. “It would be an insult to the men who have gone before me if I let you die while I still lived.”

“Galen—”

He stopped her with one hand. “No. I swear by Oak and Ash and Thorn that I will give my life before I let you die.”

An echo of his oaths, when he became Prince of the Stone. Lune’s face paled to pure white. Galen bowed to her, then went up the staircase, through the hidden opening, past the Goodemeades and Delphia, and out of Rose House, and he did not look back.

The Onyx Hall, London: April 6, 1759

“Begging your pardon, your Majesty—you’re an
idiot
.”

Lune didn’t flinch at the accusation, much less protest. Irrith would have gone on even if the Onyx Guard were there with swords out to stop her. “You know what he’s like. You know he’s in love with you. And you thought he’d stand by while you put yourself in danger?”

More than just danger, but neither of them would say it directly. Not here, inside the Onyx Hall. Irrith had heard it from the Goodemeades. If she could have gone to the cells beneath the Tower and dragged Aspell out of his hundred-year-sleep, she would have spit in his face.
He’s still succeeded, even after being defeated.

And Irrith herself was partly to blame. She was the real idiot. Not the Queen.

Me and Galen. We’re both too stupid to be let out without keepers.

They were alone in the chamber, with strict guard on the door outside. Lune sat with her head bowed, but in thought, not penitence. Her slender hands rested atop the pillar-and-claw table at her side, as if she were sitting for a portrait—probably some study in melancholy.

“Do you love him?”

The question rocked Irrith back on her heels. “Who? Galen?”

The Queen nodded.

“No. I don’t.”

One pale finger tapped against the table’s pearly surface. After a strange pause, during which Irrith could not begin to guess the thoughts in her head, Lune said, “You’ve been his lover, though.”

Most of the Onyx Hall probably knew, without need for royal spies. “I was. Until he got married. He means to keep faith with his wife.”

“But he doesn’t love her.” Lune shifted, leaning back in her chair, still thoughtful. It wasn’t idle thought: she was more like an owl, searching out suitable prey. “I’ve watched them closely, because I hoped he might, but no. They feel nothing more than friendship for each other. In time it might grow to love . . . but not soon enough.”

Irrith regretted it even as she asked, “Soon enough for what?”

The Queen’s mouth settled into a line Irrith had seen before, determination in the face of impossibility. “To save him. He might not throw his life away if he felt it would hurt another. Unfortunately, he’s done his duty by his family—their wealth is restored—and he has no children yet. I am the only one he loves, and he knows too well that I do not love him back. I would regret his passing, but not deeply enough.”

Her silver regard settled on Irrith, who suddenly felt like the mouse the owl had been waiting for. “You could make that choice.”

To love him. It
was
a choice, on the part of the fae; that was why they adored stories of mortal passion. The notion that love could strike without warning and sweep away all reason was alien, baffling. Fondness could happen that way, even infatuation, but not love. That required a conscious decision to give over one’s heart.

She’d wondered, ever since she met this Queen who loved a mortal man, what it would be like.

But she also knew the price.

“Tell me this,” Irrith said, crossing her arms and tucking her elbows close against her body, as if to warm the chill inside. “What Dr. Andrews did to you, that ‘cleansing.’ Did it take away the grief you feel for Michael Deven?”

The first Prince of the Stone, dead these hundred years and more. Lune said, “No.”

So even alchemy could not end the mourning of a faerie who gave her heart. Irrith shook her head. “Then no. I won’t. Even if it did stop him, I’d have at most, what—fifty years more? Sixty, if his health is very good? Then an eternity of grief. And he would hate me for having made him choose between me and you.” If it was even a choice. Just because one person loved, didn’t mean the other would. Galen’s fruitless devotion proved that.

Something finally broke through the serenity Lune had maintained all this time, ever since her rescue from Dr. Andrews’s knife. “He’ll throw his life away,” she said, helplessly. “For no better reason than to save himself from watching me die.”

Much as Lune herself proposed to do. But it wasn’t a fair comparison; she at least had some hope of appeasing the Dragon, even if only for a while.

“Stop him,” Lune said. “Please, Irrith. I cannot.”

The only way to stop him would be to find a better answer. One that didn’t end in either a dead Queen or a dead Prince, much less both.

Irrith didn’t know if such an answer existed. But it wouldn’t do any good to say that, and so she answered, “I will.”

Great Marlborough Street, Soho: April 9, 1759

A few awkward conversations at Royal Society meetings and the dinners beforehand did not a true acquaintance make. Galen cared little for such niceties, though—not now. As soon as he discovered Henry Cavendish’s address, he went there straightaway, and made it clear to the servants that he would not be put off. “I must see Mr. Cavendish on a matter of most urgent business. He is the only man who can help me.”
I only pray that he can.

Henry lodged with his father, Lord Charles, and so the footman was accustomed to far more important visitors; he was not easily impressed. But at Galen’s insistence, he did bear word to the young master that a very determined madman was at the door.

And whether by his determination or his target’s pity, Galen won through. Soon he was shown into a small parlor, where he tried not to wear a hole in the carpet with pacing before Henry Cavendish came in. The man was as shabby as ever; Galen only prayed it would be easier to get him to speak in this more private setting. “Mr. Cavendish,” he said as he made a perfunctory bow, “I apologize for the vehemence of my approach, but I have a very great problem, and little time in which to solve it. I must beg you to tell me everything you know about phlogiston.”

Cavendish was taken aback. Whatever business he’d believed brought Galen to his door, surely it hadn’t been this. It might have been surprise more than the stammer that made him hesitate in saying, “Phlogiston? Ah, yes—” His high-pitched voice went even higher, and the next words took forever to come out. “You said you could get a sample.”

Ages ago, at dinner in the Mitre Tavern. Just before he revealed the Onyx Court to Dr. Andrews. Galen cursed his choice: what might have been achieved had he trusted this young man, instead of the mad consumptive?

Possibly nothing. It might even have been worse. It was too late, regardless; the fae would never tolerate him bringing a second philosopher among them. Not now, with the end so near at hand. Cavendish would have to work blind. “I—yes. I have. That is, I
think
I have,” he cautioned, as his host came alive with curiosity. “I’m not certain. But what I have is
extremely
dangerous, Mr. Cavendish—very destructive—and I must find a way to render it safe again, before it can do more harm.”

“Let us go, then!” All hint of a stammer had vanished, along with Cavendish’s awkward shyness; he even tried to grab Galen by the arm.

Galen pulled back. “No. My apologies, Mr. Cavendish, but—” He floundered for an excuse. “Its destructive potential is too great. I mean no offense to you, but if anyone else learned how to isolate phlogiston,
before
I discover a means of securing it again, the consequences could be disastrous.”

An ordinary man would have been offended; Cavendish was already lost in his own thoughts, talking to himself. “So far as we understand it, phlogiston exists in all combustible materials. When they burn, the phlogiston is released into the air. If you burn a candle in a sealed jar, in time it goes out; this, I think, is because the air has absorbed all the phlogiston it can hold.”

“How does it get into those materials in the first place?”

Cavendish shook his head. “I don’t know.” He began to pace, chewing on one knuckle in what looked like a habitual gesture. “Perhaps trees produce it as they grow? . . . but that does you no good; you don’t want to make
more
. Not yet, at any rate.”

Galen twisted his fingers together. He’d forgotten gloves, and even his walking stick; he wished desperately for something to occupy his nervous hands. “Then to break it down instead. But no—it’s elemental; it can’t be broken into other substances. What about its opposite?”

“Opposite?”

“As in alchemy. Fire was opposed by water, cold and wet instead of hot and dry. What would that be, in modern terms? Not water itself, I know that much; it must be something else, more fundamental, perhaps some quality
in
water, that would be antithetical to phlogiston.”

But Cavendish was already waving for him to stop. “No, no. As you said—that’s alchemy. And it doesn’t work. Phlogiston has no ‘opposite,’ not that I’m aware of; for it to have an opposite, it would have to exist within a scheme like Aristotle’s, tidy and patterned. But the world is not so.”

Not this world.
Galen’s throat seemed to be closing, making it hard to swallow, cutting off his air. Only in faerie science was there such patterning, and it had pointed to the answer: Lune. The moon queen; sophic mercury. But that would kill her, and then they would face the Dragon, perfected and unstoppable.

Cavendish suddenly bounced where he stood, a stiff-legged hop that would have been comical had Galen been less desperate. “Saturating the air! If phlogiston moves from wood to air, and stops when the air is saturated, then perhaps it could be contained by material already filled to the brim with it.”

“Wood?”

The young philospher shook both hands by his head, as if warding off distraction. “Too fragile. Gold? Though how you’d get the substance inside, I’m not sure. Draw it into something lacking phlogiston, I suppose, but then you’d lose the purity. If you would let me see your sample—”

Gold. Not iron. Galen had no idea if it would work, but Cavendish had told him what he needed to know; the container had to be something saturated with fire. And the fae had gold they said was drawn from the sun itself. If anything would suffice . . .

“Thank you, Mr. Cavendish,” he said, the words almost tumbling over each other in his rush to get them out. “I must go, my apologies, but I’ll let you know what happens—this has given me an idea—”

With Cavendish’s protests following him, Galen fled out the door and downstairs, running to find the dwarves.

Cinnamon Street, Wapping: April 12, 1759

Irrith hadn’t been in the eastern parts of London for a hundred years. There was a lot
more
of eastern London now, and while she’d seen it from the air when she rode with the Queen on All Hallows’ Eve, going through it on foot was rather different. She passed all manner of strange people, scarcely one in five an Englishman, or so it seemed: Irish, Negroes, Lascars, and more, living cheek by jowl among the workshops that served the docks and the ships crowding the river.

She didn’t know her way around, and she didn’t know where to go, either. It took more than an hour of questioning before someone could point her to the shop of the Jew Schuyler. It was her one hint of direction: Abd ar-Rashid lived near the Dutchman who made the lenses and mirrors for the Monument, and the bowl they used to summon the clouds. No one had seen the genie since Dr. Andrews died, and so she had to find him the hard way.