She suspected her quarry did not aim to go above, though. Her suspicions were confirmed when she stole a glance around another corner and found no one in sight.
There was a door in one wall, though, leading to Mab knew what. And the stone nearby was suspiciously clear of dust—the work of either some hob of single-minded cleanliness, or someone who didn’t want to leave his footprints on the floor.
Irrith had assumed the thief was just some courtier, hoarding the food so he could visit a lady-love in the City, or trade it to get political advantage over an enemy. It was the sort of thing courtiers did.
Now, she was not so sure.
Against her better judgment, Irrith crept forward, ready to bolt if her quarry should emerge, and laid one ear on the door. Faint scuffs came from inside—he had released his charm—and a clunk, as of a heavy object set on a table. Irrith wondered, biting her lip, whether she remembered her path to this room well enough to lead someone else back here.
Someone like a guard, or three.
She got no chance to answer the question. A crippling wave of nausea struck her without warning, dropping her to the stone. It vanished a moment later, and she fled like a wild thing, back around the corner to relative safety before she could even think about it.
Iron.
Her own charm of silence was gone, shattered by the cold aura. Iron, and a lot of it. Irrith gulped, swallowing down her nausea. Then held her breath, shaking, as she heard the door open once more.
She pressed herself into another doorway, trying desperately to keep the movement quiet. The faerie lights that floated through the palace were thinly scattered here, and the shadows were deep. They were enough to conceal her as the figure went by, carrying something before him.
Irrith felt no taint from the box he held, and the faerie she saw was not the one she had pursued. But if he had eaten the bread to protect himself from the iron in that room, he could also be wearing a glamour no faerie could easily break.
There was no time to summon anyone else. She had to follow, and hope she knew what she was doing.
Antony rarely used his bedchamber in the Onyx Hall. It meant a great deal to him, when he first came to this place, that he not treat the faerie palace as his home; his place was in the world above. And Lune had warned him that too much time below could warp his mind. But he made greater use of the other chambers alloted to him, particularly the study, for he also understood that as Prince, he must have a visible presence in the court.
He was less and less in those chambers of late, though, as his work above consumed more and more of his time. The papers spread on the table before him told the tale: the Bills of Mortality, numbers gathered from each parish, organized by cause of death. Plague dominated the list. Every week, more hundreds fell. In the parishes outside the walls, they had begun to dig great pits, into which the bodies were thrown without even the dignity of a coffin.
And in his hand, another list, which told him how little he could do to stop it. At his request, Amadea had compiled an estimate of the bread available within the Onyx Hall. It was shockingly small. Few mortals remained at court, and as for the city... people would not give bread to the faeries, when their own starving children needed it more.
That was the work that devoured almost his every waking minute: keeping London on its feet. Half of the Guildhall was gone, its wealthy men fled to safer homes, but Antony toiled on, with his deputy and councilmen and parish officers of his ward—those of them who stayed. Faerie London was at peace, at least for now; mortal London was coming apart at the seams. Orphans and widows, without anyone to feed them; merchants with no one to sell their goods to, for trade was at a standstill. There were no grand gestures that could sweep those problems away, only one small thing after another, alleviating what misery he could.
Which wasn’t much.
The knock on his door startled him. Few fae had anything to ask of their mortal Prince, when they were so reluctant to go above. Antony did not even have a servant attending him. He sat in a circle of warm candlelight, preferring that to the cold illumination of the faerie lights, and had little sense of the hour; it was easy to lose track of time here. The candles, and the darkness beyond them, always made him think it very late.
Shaking his head to clear it of bleak thoughts, Antony rose to answer the door.
The faerie outside was one of Valentin Aspell’s minions, though Antony could not remember his name. He bowed as best he could, despite the burden he carried, and said, “M’lord Prince, if I might beg a moment of your time.”
Antony gestured him in, curious. The box in the fellow’s hands was a simple thing, built from unfinished hawthorn wood, but it seemed very heavy for its size. “I presume your request has to do with this?”
The faerie nodded. He was a broad-shouldered hob, taller than most, but ugly as male hobs usually were. He carried himself stiffly—though perhaps that was merely his scrupulous care as he laid the box on Antony’s table, covering two Bills of Mortality. “Begging your pardon, but—I’m told you look for a way to help those above.”
He had all of Antony’s attention. “Have you found something?”
“In the treasury. Many things in there, and half of them we don’t know what they do, so m’lord Valentin, he laid this aside at first. But I have a notion.” The hob removed the lid, and beckoned Antony closer. He reached inside as the Prince approached, shifting something, and it seemed to Antony that chill air breathed outward, raising the hairs on the back of his neck. Shivering, he reached the table and looked inside—
A squat iron box sat within, its interior black and deep beyond all nature, as if leading to oblivion itself.
The sight shocked him so badly that he didn’t see the hob move. And he was an old man now, slow, while fae were unaging; before he knew what was happening, the hob had his wrist in a crushing grip, and was slashing at his hand with a knife.
Pain tore across his fingers, and blood sprang free. Not much—the cut was not deep—but a drop fell into the blackness, and something seized Antony at the core of his soul, dragging him toward that abyss.
It paralyzed his tongue, locking all his muscles tight. Antony fought to speak, but his throat would give forth no sound, not even Christ’s name. And could that save him from whatever enchantment might reside in iron?
A second drop slid down his fingers. As he tried to pull loose, it too fell, and the terrible pressure increased.
A third drop gathered, hovering at the edge of his palm—
Through the roaring in his ears, he heard a higher-pitched scream, and then the hob was slammed off balance. The third drop of Antony’s blood spattered against the hawthorn. The hob’s grip broke, and half-blind, Antony found the discarded lid and clapped it down atop the wooden casing. All at once he could breathe again, and see the chaos before him.
Irrith straightened with renewed vigor and plowed into the hob a second time, clawing and biting, tangling his feet with her own so he fell to the ground, where she kicked him until his own flailing defense upset her balance. But she collapsed with intent, her knee colliding with his head, and he went suddenly limp.
She stumbled to her feet almost immediately, recoiling from the table, although the hawthorn shielded her from the iron within. Antony’s candleholder had been upset by the struggle; he righted it, and beat out the flaming papers with his hat.
Then, and only then, did he look at the figure on the floor.
Ifarren Vidar.
We should have known.
The accusation would not leave Lune’s mind. Yet how could they? Who would have dreamt that Ifarren Vidar would find his refuge beneath their very eyes?
They found evidence enough of it in the Billingsgate warren. Vidar lived there like a rat—the sight afforded her some vindictive satisfaction—but he had been there for a long time. Perhaps years. There was no safety for him in Scotland, or elsewhere in England, and so he had concealed himself in the one place no one would think to look for hi
m. Lune had not sought him there since the battle ended, and to know who was in the Onyx Hall required effort she no longer had reason to exert. He could have returned to the palace the very next day.
And somewhere in that chaos, he had stolen the iron box and its protective shell from the treasury. Lune should have paid heed to the things there far sooner, but too many of them had been gifts to Invidiana; she was loath to see what the old Queen had kept. From Antony’s description, the thing was obviously a prison—one that would hold even a faerie.
“I expect I was to be a peace offering to Nicneven,” the Prince said, with more equanimity than Lune thought the situation deserved. “She has threatened to kill me before.”
“Perhaps.” Lune tried to think past her instinctive revulsion, and the throbbing of the old wound in her shoulder. Irrith had been green, and understandably so, when a few brave souls came running to see why there was iron in the Prince’s chambers. The sprite was abed now, with a draught from the Goodemeades to restore her, and Lune had every intention of rewarding her with a knighthood. Irrith would likely not see the point of such a title, but Lune meant to acknowledge her valor. “Or perhaps Vidar meant something worse.”
Antony paled, showing he was not so sanguine about his close escape as he had seemed. “Worse?”
She paced across the chamber, stabbing the heels of her shoes into the Turkish carpet. She wanted stone beneath her feet, the hard impact and ringing noise. “It is no secret any longer that you are an integral part of my connection to my realm. What if you were severed from me by iron?” Despite her control, her voice wavered on the last word.
He did not answer. Like her, he could only imagine—but the possibilities ranged from bad to horrific. Lune doubted it would destroy the palace on the spot, but it might vitally weaken the enchantments, and at the very least it would leave her vulnerable, lacking half her power.
She had been one drop of blood away from finding out.
Vidar was locked beneath the Tower now, and the hawthorn box with its dreadful contents secured. But too many fae knew what had happened; they knew Vidar had been found.
Sooner or later, Nicneven would hear.
Antony knew that as well as she did. Leaving aside the question of the traitor’s purpose, he asked, “What do you intend to do?”
It was not a safer or more cheerful direction of thought. Lune was no faerie philosopher, but she had spoken to a few, in roundabout fashion, of Nicneven’s threat. She began with the death of mortal sovereignty in England, reborn when Charles the Second reclaimed his throne, and the philosophers found much of interest in that. But when she asked them to consider faerie sovereignty, their speculation had turned much grimmer.
Her instinct was correct. If she permitted Nicneven to hold the Onyx Hall to ransom—if Lune, a sovereign Queen, bent to the will of another—then she surrendered her realm. To give in to the threat would be to recognize the Gyre-Carling as a greater authority than Lune herself, one with power over the Onyx Hall she could not contest.
And if she did that, she would be Queen no more.
What came after that, even the philosophers could not say. Either Nicneven would be Queen in London, or no one would—but neither fate was acceptable.
She had shared this with Antony, reluctantly, and even begun to hope in the privacy of her heart that the Gyre-Carling would find Vidar before she did. It didn’t matter whether the Queen of Fife got what she desired; it only mattered that Lune not let her realm be used to force her into surrendering him.
But Vidar’s attempt on Antony, and Irrith’s valor in stopping him, had left her with only one option. “I must execute him,” Lune said.
Antony nodded. “So I presumed. I meant something more, though. What will you do before that?”
Lune’s brow furrowed. “Summon all my court...do you think I should send word to Berkshire, and wait for any who wish to attend?”
“If you like. Let me put it more bluntly: will you place him on trial?”
He might as well have spoken French, so little did Lune expect his words. “Trial? Antony, you cannot doubt his guilt. Even were his earlier crimes in question, you saw what he tried to do to you!”
“I do not doubt it,” Antony said. “But if it is certain, then it is easily proved—and why not do so? Conduct a proper trial.”
“Proper?” It came out a disbelieving laugh. “We are not mortals, Antony.”
What made him propose this so somberly? “No, you are not,” he agreed. “But that does not mean you have no concern for justice.”
“Justice will be his death.”
“Because you will it?” The question startled Lune into silence. “That is your royal prerogative, Lune. But you know my opinion on such things; it has not changed these many years. I disagreed with Pym on too many points to count, his endless attempts to strip power from the King and place it in Parliament’s hands, but in one matter he and I were in accord: we detested Charles’s prerogative courts. Justice must be an orderly thing, not the whim of a single person.”
“You think it a whim? ” Pain tightened Lune’s heart. “Antony, the fate of a traitor is death, among fae as well as mortals.”
He nodded again, but this time there was irony in it. “I see. And that, of course, is why you executed all the other traitors—like Sir Prigurd.”
A dozen answers, all trying to emerge at once, choked Lune’s attempt to reply. Prigurd had tried to help, in his belated fashion; as for the others, to kill them all would have been an act of unthinkable murder. She had her reasons—
But that was Antony’s point. She had made her decisions alone, on her own judgment, without recourse to any standard save that she set for herself.
Quietly, without accusation, Antony said, “Arbitrary behavior is made no more attractive because it comes from a faerie.”
Lune winced. “You were upset that I dealt with Prigurd in your absence; I understand that. I will not exclude you a second time. The exile almost killed you, Antony, and it was Vidar’s doing; you have every right to take part in his judgment.”
He smiled, as if she had said exactly what he hoped she would. “Good. Then for my part, I demand you put Ifarren Vidar on trial, and prove his guilt before all.”
Lune closed her eyes, despairing. “You will not give this up, will you?”
“Indeed I will not.”
She gritted her teeth. “He will be shown guilty.”
“I have no doubt of it.”
Then what was the point? To establish a procedure; to make the judgment of a traitor an orderly thing. And, Lune suspected, to give the people of her court some voice in punishing the author of their suffering.
Antony had absorbed more of the Commonwealth’s ideals than he realized.
“Very well,” Lune said through her teeth. “You shall have your trial.”
THE ONYX COURT, LONDON: July 28, 1665
She had cause to regret that concession as the next fortnight passed. Promising a trial was one matter; deciding how to conduct it was another. While Vidar languished in a cell, bricked up so thoroughly that only a tiny sprite no bigger than a dragonfly could get through to verify his presence, she tried to sort out a basis for the event.
The problem, which Antony no doubt had foreseen, was that trials were a thing of law, and the fae had none. They ran their world on common sense and royal prerogative: if the Queen deemed something a crime, it was, and she had the right to pass sentence. She suspected Antony’s true hope was that they would write themselves a proper code of law—but she was certainly not delaying Vidar’s execution for that.
We are not humans, she thought, but wondered how much strength lay in that defense. True, her realm was smaller, her subjects fewer, their society much simpler than the one above. Did they truly need laws and trials? But though she could reassure herself that she was a better Queen than old Charles had been King, she had enough perspective to understand how little that meant. Royal prerogative was royal prerogative, wh
ether exercised with good judgment or bad. The rightness of the thing itself was separate from her person.
She damned Antony for putting such thoughts into her head, where they buzzed about like bees, and did not give her a moment’s peace.
In the end, she prepared for the trial by dividing her court into groups: the Onyx Guard, the Berkshire fae in residence, her privy council, and so on, allowing each one to select a single individual to serve on the jury. She ended up with nine, not the twelve the mortals liked, but no matter. Nine or twelve, she had no fear any of them would find Vidar innocent of his crimes.
The final problem came when she turned to the mortals, and discovered just how few of them remained. She knew the plague had thinned their ranks, either by killing them or sending them into flight, but she was disturbed to find only two left, not counting Antony.
While she was distracted, a vital part of her court had all but melted away.
I will fix it, Lune promised herself. But, as with so many things, it would have to wait. The mortals met to choose their juror, and by a vote of two to one chose Antony. “This is a faerie matter,” he said when she expressed her doubts. “You will be the judge of this case, not I. It would have been better for one of them to serve, but I will do it.”
He was playing a lawyer’s game, asserting his authority when it suited him, discarding it when it did not, but by then Lune’s patience had worn so thin she did not quibble. She just wanted the trial to be done.
They met beneath the mended ceiling of the great presence chamber. The jury sat in a line to either side of Lune’s throne, four to her left, five to her right; Antony’s own seat had been removed, and he sat at the far end of the line, so as to avoid the impression that he sat in judgment as the Prince. A chair faced them, awaiting the accused, and from behind it her subjects watched in silence.