Midnight Never Come (36 page)

Colsey. Lune had met him, back when they were all at court, and her greatest concern had been how to evade Deven’s offer of marriage without losing his usefulness to her. She had liked him, and his close-mouthed loyalty to his master.

Gone, that easily. And Deven . . .

Lune turned away and walked two paces. She could go no farther; the room she had rented was scarcely larger than a horse’s stall.

The lure was plain. The question was whether she would take it.

It hardly mattered whether Invidiana had Francis Merriman’s ghost. The Queen knew enough. Would Lune now walk into her trap?

Without thinking, one hand dropped to touch the purse that held the last of the loaf Deven had given her. Mortal bread. She had consumed so much of it, since she met him. Not enough to make her human, but enough to change her.

Michael Deven loved her. Not Anne Montrose, but
Lune.
She knew it the night he led her to his house. What did that love mean to her?

Would she spurn it, and flee to save herself?

Or would she accept it — return it — despite the cost?

She had never felt that choice within her before. Too much mortal bread; it brought her to an unfamiliar precipice. Her mind moved in strange ways, wavering, uncertain.

“My lady?” Gertrude whispered from behind her.

Lune’s hands stilled on her skirt. She turned to find the two brownies watching her with hesitant expressions. It was the first time she had seen them show fear. They had spent years opposing Invidiana; now, at long last, their game might be at an end.

“The London Stone lies within the Onyx Hall,” Lune said. “So does Invidiana, who made a pact with Hell. And so does Michael Deven.

“I will do what we had intended. I will seek out Doctor Dee.”

M
EMORY
:
Long and long ago . . .

T
here was a beauty of night, pale as the moon, dark as her shadow, slender and graceful as running water. A young man saw her dancing under the stars, and loved her; he pined and sighed for her, until his mother feared he would waste away, lost in dreams of love. For that happened at times, that folk should die for love of the strangers under the hills.

Such was not this young man’s lot. A plan was formed, wherein he would have the beautiful stranger to wife. Great preparations were made by his people and by hers, a glorious midsummer wedding on the banks of the river, a little distance from the village where the young man’s father ruled. There would be music and dancing, good food and drink, and if the maidens and youths of the village fell in love with their guests from the other side, perhaps this wedding would be only the first of many. And when it was done, the young man would have a fine house to share with his wife, in time succeeding his father as chieftain and ruling in his place.

So it was planned. But it did not come to pass.

The guests gathered beneath the twilit summer sky. On the one side, the weathered faces of the villagers, tanned by the sun in their labors, the old ones wrinkled, the young ones round-cheeked and staring at the folk across the field. There stood creatures tall and tiny, wide-shouldered and slender, some with feathers, hooves, tails, wings.

The one the young man loved looked at her people, in all their wild glory, and even their ugliness was more beautiful to her, because it was what they were and always would be.

Then she looked at the people of the village, and she saw how accidents marked their bodies, how they soon crumbled and fell, how their houses stood on bare dirt and they scratched out their living with toil.

And she asked herself:
Am I to go from this to that?

So she fled, leaving the young man alone beneath the rising moon, with his heart broken into pieces.

He sickened and died, but not for love. Yet he took strange pride in his illness, laughing a mad laugh that grieved his mother unbearably.
You see, we prove her right. We die so soon, so easily; she will remain long after I am gone. I do not mourn the mayfly, nor yoke my heart to its; why should it be different with her?

Bitterness poisoned the words, the terrible knowledge that his love was as nothing to the immortal creature upon whom it had fixed.

The moon waned and waxed, and when it was full once more, the young man died. On his deathbed he spoke his last words, not to his family, but to the absent creature that had been the end of him.
May you suffer as we suffer, in sickness and age, so that you find no escape from that which you fled. May you feel all the weight of mortality, and cry out beneath your burden, until you atone for the harm you have done and understand what you have spurned.

Then he died, and was buried, and never more did the villagers gather in harmony with the strangers under the hills.

M
ORTLAKE
, S
URREY
:
May 7, 1590

The house, with all its additions and extensions, was like an old man dreaming in the afternoon sunlight, relaxed into a sprawling doze. Yet to Lune it seemed more foreboding than the Onyx Hall: a lair of unknown dangers.

Be it angels or devils he summoned inside, it was not a place a faerie should go.

Lune put her shoulders back and approached the door with a stride more resolute than she felt.

She was a woman on her own, with no letter of introduction to smooth her way. But the maidservant was easy enough to charm, and Dee’s wife proved sympathetic. “He’s at his studies,” the woman said, shifting the infant she held onto her other hip. The small creature stared frankly at Lune, as if it could see through the glamour. “But if ’tis urgent . . .”

“I would be most grateful,” Lune said.

Her reception was warmer than expected. “You will forgive my frankness in asking,” Dee said, once the formalities were dispensed with, “but has this anything to do with Michael Deven?”

This was not in the mental script Lune had prepared on her journey to Mortlake. “I beg your pardon?”

A surprising twinkle lightened the astrologer’s tired eyes. “I am not unaware of you, Mistress Montrose. Your lady the Countess of Warwick has been kind to me since my return, and I had the honor of friendship with Sir Francis Walsingham. When Master Deven came to my door, asking for aid in the matter of a young gentlewoman, ’twas not difficult to surmise whom he meant.”

No magic, just an observant mind. Lune began to breathe again. “Indeed, Doctor Dee — it has everything to do with him. Will you aid me?”

“If I can,” Dee said. “But some things are beyond my influence. If he is in some political difficulty —”

Not of the sort he thought. Lune clasped her hands in her lap and met the old man’s gaze, putting all the sincerity she could muster into it. “He is in great peril, and for reasons I fear must be laid at my feet. And it may be, Doctor Dee, that you are the only man in England who could help us.”

His face stilled behind its snowy beard. “And why would that be?”

“They say you speak with angels.”

All pleasantness fell away, but his eyes were as bright and unblinking as a hawk’s. “I fear, Mistress Montrose, that you may have an overly dramatic sense of his danger, my abilities, or both. Angels —”

“I am not overly dramatic,” she snapped, forgetting in her distress to be polite. “I assure you. The tale is a complex one, Doctor Dee, and I have not the time to waste on it if at the end you will tell me you can be of no aid. Do you hold conference with angels, or not?”

Dee rose from his seat, ink-stained fingers twitching his long robe straight. Turning away to pace across the room, he spoke very deliberately. “I see that you are distraught, Mistress Montrose, and so I will lay two things before you. The first is that angelic actions are no trivial matter, no miracle that can be summoned at a whim to solve worldly ills.

“The second . . .” He paused for a long time, and his hands, clasped behind his back, tightened. Something hardened his voice, lending it an edge. “The second is that such efforts require assistance — namely, the services of a scryer, one who can see the presences when they come. My former companion and I have parted ways, and I have found no suitable replacement for him.”

The first point did not worry her; the second did. “Can you not work without such assistance?”

“No.” Dee turned back to face her. His jaw was set, as if against some unhappy truth. “And I will be honest with you, Mistress Montrose. At times I doubt whether I have
ever
spoken with an angel, or whether, as they accuse me, I have done naught but summon devils, who play with me for their own amusement.”

Her mouth was dry. All her hope crumbled. If not Dee, then who? A priest? Invidiana had destroyed priests before. And Lune did not think a saint would answer the call of a faerie.

“Mistress Montrose,” Dee said softly. Despite the lines that had sobered his face, his manner was compassionate. “Will you not tell me what has happened?”

A simple question, with a dangerous answer. Yet some corner of Lune’s mind was already calculating. If he were not the sorcerer she had expected, then a charm might bedazzle him long enough for her to escape, should all go poorly. She would be destroying Anne Montrose, but no life remained for that woman regardless. . . .

She truly was thinking of doing it.

“Can I trust you?” Lune whispered.

He crouched in front of her, keeping space between them, so as not to crowd her. “If it means no harm to England or the Queen,” Dee said, “then I will do my best to aid you in good faith.”

The door was closed. They were private.

Lune said, “I am not as I seem to be.” And, rising to her feet, she cast aside her glamour.

Dee rose an instant later, staring.

“The Queen of faerie England,” she said, every muscle tensed to flee, “has formed a pact with Hell. I need the aid of Heaven to break it. On this matter rests not only the safety of Michael Deven, but the well-being of your own kingdom and Queen.”

He did not shout. He did not fling the name of God up as defense. He did nothing but stare, his eyes opaque, as if overtaken by his thoughts.

“So if you cannot summon angels,” Lune said, “then tell me, Doctor Dee, what I should do. For I do not know.”

Within the mask of his beard, his mouth was twitching; now she read it as a kind of bitterness, surprising to her. “Did you send him?” he asked abruptly.

“Michael Deven?”

“Edward Kelley.”

The name ground out like a curse. Where did she know it from? She had heard it somewhere. . . .

“When he came to me,” Dee said coldly, “he offered to further my knowledge in magic with faeries.”

Memory came. A human man with mangled ears; she had seen him once or twice at court — her own court — and heard his name. She had never known more. “I did not send him,” Lune said. “But someone may have. Who was he?”

“My scryer,” Dee replied. “Whom I have long suspected of deception. He came to me so suddenly, and seemed to have great skill, but we so often fought. . . .” Now she recognized the note in his voice; it was the sound of affection betrayed. This Kelley had been dear to him once.

“He is gone now?” Lune asked.

Dee made a cut-off gesture with one hand. “We parted ways in Trebon. He is now court alchemist to the Holy Roman Emperor.”

Then he truly was out of reach. Lune said, “Please, Doctor Dee. I beg you.” Never in all the ages she could remember had she knelt, as a fae, to a mortal, but she did it now. “I know I am no Christian soul, but Michael Deven is, and he will die if I cannot stop this. And does not your God oppose the devil, wherever he may work? Help me, I beg. I do not know who else to ask.”

Dee gazed blindly down at her, distracted once more. “I have no scryer. Even Kelley may have given me nothing but falsehoods, and I myself have no gift for seeing. It may be that I have no more power to summon angels than any other man.”

“Will you not try?” Lune whispered.

With her eyes fixed on him, she saw the change. Some thought came to him, awakening all the curiosity of his formidable mind. The expression that flickered at the edge of his mouth was not quite a smile, but it held some hope in it. “Yes,” Dee said. “We will try.”

T
HE
O
NYX
H
ALL
, L
ONDON
:
May 8, 1590

Thirst was the greatest threat.

Deven tried to distract himself. The room, he came to realize, was Invidiana’s presence chamber. Larger by far than Elizabeth’s, it had an alien grandeur a mortal queen could only dream of, for in this place, fancies of architecture could truly take flight. The pillars and ribs that supported the arching ceiling were no more than a decoration born from some medieval fever dream; they were not needed for strength. The spaces between them were filled with filigree and panes of crystal, suspended like so many fragile swords of Damocles.

Beneath and among these structures wandered fae whom he presumed to be the favored courtiers of this Queen. They were a dizzying lot: some human-looking, others supernaturally fair, others bestial, and clad in finery that was to mortal courtiers’ garb as the chamber was to mortal space. They all watched him, but none came near him; clearly word had gone around that he was not to be touched. How much did they know of who he was, and why he was there?

Lacking an answer to that question, Deven decided to test his boundaries. He tried to speak to others; they shied away. He followed them around, eavesdropping on their conversations; they fell silent when he drew near, or forwent the benefit of being so near the Queen and left the chamber entirely. The fragments he overheard were meaningless to him anyway.

He spoke of God to them, and they flinched, while Invidiana looked on in malicious amusement.

She was less amused when he decided to push harder.

Deven took up a position in the center of the chamber, facing the throne, and crossed himself. Swallowing against the dryness of his mouth, he began to recite.

“Our father, which art in Heaven, hallowed be Thy Name. Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done in earth, as it is in Heaven. Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive them that trespass against us. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. Amen.”