The black eyes glimmered with cold amusement. “Or dead in the leaving, save that the nucklavee showed unexpected loyalty. I would the monster had drowned her; ’twould have saved much tedious effort on my part. And then your precious hands would be clean.”
Words hovered behind Elizabeth’s lips, all her customary oaths, swearing by God’s death and his body and countless other religious terms. How fitting it would be, to hurl them now: proof that although Protestant rites might lack the power of Catholic tradition, words of faith yet held some force.
But again, what purpose would it serve? Nothing she said now would save Mary. The Queen of Scots had been proven complicit in a scheme against Elizabeth and England; there was no concealing it. Invidiana had seen to that. Elizabeth’s councillors, her parliament, her people — all wished to see Mary gone. Even James of Scotland had bowed to circumstances. His last letter, sitting open on a table nearby, offered no more trouble than the weak protest that his subjects would think less of him if he made no reprisal for his mother’s execution.
“And what if I will not do it?” Elizabeth said. “ ’Tis plain you wish her gone for your own purposes. What if I refuse you? What if, this once, I refused to play a puppet’s part?”
Invidiana’s lips thinned in icy displeasure. “Would it please you more if I removed my hand from your affairs? Your end would surely then be swift.”
Elizabeth almost told her to do it and be damned. The threats to English sovereignty were manifold — they were at war with Spain, and Leicester had bungled the campaign in the Low Countries — but she refused to believe herself dependent upon the faerie queen for her survival. She was Queen of England, by God, and needed no shadowy puppeteer to pull her strings.
Yet she could not deny the strings existed. Some of the demands Invidiana made of her seemed innocuous; some were not. The faerie woman had required no devilish rites, no documents signed in blood, but she had imposed a real cost — if a subtle one. A certain ruthless cast to particular affairs, colder and harder than it would otherwise have been. The persistent reminder of her own mortality, more unbearable because of its contrast with the faerie’s eternal youth. And, in a blending of the personal and political, solitude.
Once, there had been many suitors for her hand. Leicester, Alençon, even the King of Sweden. None without complications of religion or faction, none without the threat of losing her independence as a ruling queen . . . but there might have been happiness with one of them. There might have been hope of marriage.
None of it had come to anything. And that, Elizabeth was certain, she could lay at the feet of her dark twin, the loveless, heartless, solitary faerie Queen.
She did not ordinarily resent the price she had been forced to pay, for security on her throne. What Elizabeth resented was the creature to whom she had been forced to pay it.
“You must execute her,” Invidiana said again. “However you have come to this pass, no other road lies before you.”
True, and inescapable. Elizabeth hated the elfin woman for it.
“Leave me be,” she snarled. Invidiana smiled — beautiful, and ever so faintly mocking — and faded back into the shadows, returning whence she had come.
Alone in her bedchamber, Elizabeth closed her eyes and prayed. On the morrow, she would sign the order, and execute her cousin and fellow Queen.
BEER HOUSE, SOUTHWARK: May 5, 1590
“The thing to remember,” Rosamund said, “is that she’s not all-knowing or all-powerful.”
The words hardly reassured Lune. All around them the alehouse was bustling, with voices clamoring in half a dozen languages; the river thronged with travelers, merchants, and sailors from all over Europe, and the Beer House on the south bank attracted its fair share. The noise served as cover, but also made her nervous. Who might come upon them, without her ever knowing?
Rosamund clicked her tongue in exasperation. “She cannot have eyes and ears everywhere, my lady. Even if she has somehow trapped his ghost. . . .” The prospect shadowed her face. “I know we haven’t the rose here to protect us, but this will serve just as well. Her attention is bent where ’twill matter, and that is elsewhere.”
The brownie was probably right. The greatest threat they faced here was from uncouth men who targeted them with bawdy jests. Lune and the Goodemeades had made certain they were not followed, and with glamours covering their true appearances, there was nothing to draw Invidiana’s attention here.
They might as well meet; if Francis were in her clutches, Lune’s only hope lay in following this matter through.
Her nerves wound a notch tighter when she saw a familiar head weaving through the noontime crowd. Deven wore a plain woolen cap and clothing more befitting a respectable clerk than a gentleman; Gertrude, who came into view before him, might have been any goodwife of the city. The brownie squeezed herself in next to her sister, leaving Deven no choice but to take the remaining place beside Lune. Rosamund passed them both jacks of ale.
Deven cast a glance around, then said in a voice barely audible through the racket, “Have a care what you say. Walsingham often picked up information from the docks.”
Lune gave Rosamund a meaningful look.
He saw it, and an ironic smile touched his lips. For a moment the two of them were in accord; Gertrude, curse her, looked smug. “Escaping both sides at once takes more doing than this, I see. A moment.” He vanished into the crowd, leaving behind his untouched ale and a fading warmth along Lune’s side, where he’d pressed up against her.
He returned quickly, and gestured for them to follow. Soon they were upstairs, in a private room hardly big enough for the bed and table it held, but at least the noise faded. “Someone may try to listen at the door or through the wall,” Deven said, “but ’tis better.”
“I can help with that,” Gertrude said, straightening up from where she crouched in the corner. A glossy rat sat on its hindquarters in her hands, and listened with a bright, inquisitive manner as she explained what she wanted. Deven watched this entire conference with a bemused air, but said nothing.
When the rat was dispatched to protect them from eavesdroppers, Deven gestured for the women to take the available seats. Lune perched on the edge of the bed — trying not to think about the uses to which it was put, nor what the Beer House’s owner thought of the four of them — while the Goodemeades took the two stools.
Deven outlined for them in brief strokes what Elizabeth had said about the London Stone. “But I rode by it coming here,” he said, “and saw no sign of a sword.”
The fae all exchanged looks. “Have you ever seen it?” Gertrude asked, and Rosamund shook her head.
Lune followed their thoughts well enough. “But who knows every corner of the Onyx Hall? It might be there.” Taking pity on Deven’s confusion, she said, “The London Stone is half-buried, is it not? The lower end might extend into the palace below. But if it does, I know not where.”
“She might well keep it hidden,” Rosamund said.
Deven seemed less interested in this than he might have been. His face was drawn into surprisingly grim lines. “There’s another problem.”
Their speculation halted suddenly.
He looked straight at the Goodemeades. “You spun me a good tale the other day, of curses and lost loves. My Queen tells a different one. She met this Invidiana nearly five years before they were crowned, and says she was no kinder then than she is now, nor did she bear any other name. Have you any way to explain this?”
Lune was as startled as the brownies were. Had the sisters lied? No, she could not believe it. Even knowing they could and did lie with great skill, she did not believe they were feigning their confusion now. Was this some game of Deven’s? Or Elizabeth’s?
“We do not,” Gertrude whispered, shaking her head. “-I — that is —”
The unexpected hostility of Deven’s tone had distracted Lune, but now she thought about his words. Five years. Her grasp of mortal history was weak, but she thought she r
emembered this much. “Mary would have been on the throne then. Was that not when Suspiria lifted her curse?”
Rosamund’s brow was still furrowed. “I suppose so, near enough. But I do not see —”
Lune rose to her feet. Deven was watching her, with his eyes that kept reminding her of Francis — moreso since she learned what Francis had once been. “Not what Invidiana did — what Suspiria did. That is what he knew. That is what he was trying to say!”
“What?” Now everyone was staring at her.
She pressed one hand to the stiff front of her bodice, feeling sick. “He was dying, he could barely speak, but he tried to tell me — he could not get the words out —” Her fingers remembered the uncontrollable shaking of his body. Something hot splashed onto her hand. “The last thing he said. ‘She is still c —’ ”
Lune looked down at the Goodemeades’ pale faces. “She is still cursed.”
“But that’s impossible,” Rosamund breathed. “ ’Tisn’t a glamour we see now; she is as she appears. Young and beautiful. She must have lifted the curse.”
“Lifted?” Deven asked, from the other side of the table. “Or changed it somehow? Traded it for some other condition, escaped its terms?” He shrugged when Lune transferred her attention to him. “I know little of these things; you tell me if it is impossible.”
“But did it happen before she met Elizabeth?” Rosamund twisted in her seat. “Or after?”
“Before, I think — but not long before. Elizabeth believes their meeting was the first time she claimed the name Invidiana.”
Gertrude seized her sister’s hand. “Rose, think. ’Twas after that she began gathering a court, was it not? No, she was not as we know her now —”
“But that might have been a mask.” All the blood had drained from Rosamund’s face; she looked dizzy. “She could have pretended to be the same. Ash and Thorn — that was when Francis began to lose his name. Do you remember? She always called him Tiresias, after that. And he said things had changed between them.”
Lune said, “Then it was not Elizabeth’s doing.” Everything she had thought clear was fading away, leaving her grasping at mist. “But he said her pact . . .”
Into the ensuing silence, Deven said, “Perhaps this is a foolish question. But what certainty have we that she formed only one pact?”
No one seemed to be breathing. They had all leapt so quickly to the thought of Elizabeth and the mortal court — and they had not been wrong. There was a pact there. But was that what Francis had meant? Or did he know something they had never so much as suspected?
Lune whispered, “Where do we begin?”
“With the curse,” Deven said. “Everything seems to have spun out of whatever she did to escape it. Creating the Onyx Hall did not free her, you said. What did?”
“Something Francis saw,” Gertrude said. “At least, we think so.”
Lune lowered herself slowly back onto the bed. Briefly she prayed that the rats were doing their jobs, and no one was listening to this mad and treasonous conversation. “He said she misinterpreted it. But we cannot know what she did until we know what she was escaping. What crime did she commit, to be cursed in such fashion?”
“We never knew,” Rosamund replied, clenching her small hands in frustration. “Even once she knew, she would not tell us. Or even Francis, I think.”
“But where did she learn it herself?”
Gertrude answered Deven far more casually than her words deserved. “From Father Thames.”
His shoulders jerked. “From who?”
“The river,” the brownie replied.
“The river.” Coming from him, it was an expression of doubt, and he turned to Lune for a saner answer, as if she would be his ally in disbelief.
“The spirit of it,” she said; his jaw came just the slightest bit unhinged. Hers felt like doing the same. “She spoke to him? Truly?”
Rosamund shrugged. “She must have done. We were not in London when the curse was laid; ’twas long ago, when we lived in the North. Gertrude told her she must find someone who was here long ago. Who else could she turn to, save Old Father Thames himself?”
Who else, indeed. Lune felt dizzy. Father Thames spoke but rarely, and then to other creatures of the water. She did not know what could possibly induce him to speak to a fae of the land.
But she would have to find out, because they had no one else to question.
“I will try tonight, then,” she said, and the Goodemeades nodded as if they had expected nothing else. She met Deven’s gaze, briefly, and looked away. This was a faerie matter; he would want none of it.
“We should arrange to meet again,” he said into the silence. “Your pigeon was most helpful, Mistress Goodemeade, but I pray you pardon me if I find communicating in such a manner to be . . . disconcerting.” When the sisters smiled understandingly, he said, “There is a tavern along Fleet Street, outside the city’s western wall. The Checkers. Shall we find one another there, three days hence?”
Three days. Giving Lune extra time, in case she failed the first night. Did he have so little confidence in her?
The brownies agreed, and they all dispersed, the Goodemeades leaving first. Alone with Deven, Lune found herself without anything to say.
“Good luck,” he murmured at last. His hand twitched at his side, as if he might have laid it briefly on her shoulder.
That simple note of friendship struck an unexpected chord. “Thank you,” Lune whispered in response. Perhaps this alliance of theirs was leading him to forgive her — at least a little — for the harm she had done him before.
He stood a moment longer, looking at her, then followed the Goodemeades out the door.
Standing by herself in the center of the room, Lune took a slow, deep breath. Father Thames. She did not know how to reach him, let alone gain his aid . . . but she had three days to find out.
RIVER THAMES, LONDON: May 5, 1590
She had changed her appearance again, but Deven still recognized her. There were certain mannerisms — the way she walked, or held her head — that echoed his memories so powerfully it made him ache inside.
He followed the disguised Lune at a safe distance as she left the Beer House. Doing so required care; she was wary and alert, as if she might be observed or attacked. It was a tension that had not left her since he found her on Cloak Lane, wearing a bad illusion of Anne Montrose. The mere thought of living in such constant fear exhausted him. In comparison with life in her own court, masquerade as a human woman must have seemed a holiday for her.
Not that it excused a year of unending lies.
The crowds on London Bridge helped conceal him from her searching eyes. Disguised as he was, he blended in fairly well. So he followed her through the afternoon as she walked back and forth along the river’s bank: first to the Tower of London, with its water port of the Traitor’s Gate, then back westward to Billingsgate, the bridge, Queenhithe, Broken Wharf, pausing each time she passed a river stair, occasionally watching the watermen who rowed passengers from one bank to the other. Her feet at last took her to Blackfriars, on the far side of which the noisome waters of the Fleet poured out into the Thames. Deven, who had been wondering what manner of creature the spirit of the Thames would be, thought he would not want to meet anything that embodied the Fleet.
It seemed that Lune could not make up her mind where to make her attempt. Did it matter so much? Deven could imagine the Thames at its headwaters in the west might be a different being than the Thames where it passed London, but what might distinguish the Blackfriars Thames from the bridge Thames, he had no idea.
That was part of why he followed. Lune had not asked for aid, but his curiosity could not be suppressed. Though it was being sorely tested by all this walking; he had grown far too accustomed to riding.
Night fell, and still Lune delayed. Curfew had long since rung, and for the first time it occurred to him that his sober disguise might pose a problem; with neither horse, nor sword, nor finery, n
or anything else save his word that might identify him as a gentleman, he had no excuse for why he might be on the street. The same was true of Lune, but remembering the befuddled guards at Aldersgate the night she fled the city, he was not concerned for her.
When the moon rose into the sky, she made her way back eastward, and Deven at last understood what she had been waiting for.
The tidal waters of the Thames, answering the call of the gibbous moon.
As the river’s level rose, he trailed her through the darkness, and mentally rewarded himself the groat he had wagered. Lune was heading for the bridge.
For it, and onto it. The Great Stone Gate on the Southwark end would be closed for the night, but the north end was open. Deven wondered what she was doing, then cursed himself for distraction; he had lost her among the houses, chapels, and shops built along the bridge’s length.
Only the scuff of a shoe alerted him. Peering cautiously over the edge in one of the few places it was accessible, he saw a dark shadow moving downward. The madwoman could have hired a wherry to take her there by water — well, perhaps not. Shooting the bridge, passing through the clogged, narrow races between the piers of the arches, was hazardous at the best of times; even the hardened nerves of a London waterman would be tested by a request to drop a passenger off along the way. But that might still have been better than climbing down the side of the bridge.
Lune reached safety below, on one of the wooden starlings that protected the stone piers from collision with debris or unlucky wherries. There was no way Deven could follow her without being heard or seen. He should give up, and he knew it, yet somehow his feet did not move homeward; instead they carried him to the other side of the bridge, one arch farther north, and then his hands were feeling the roughened stone as if this were not the worst impulse he’d had since the night he followed a faerie woman out of the city.