Once Ktistes and the doctor were settled, Galen left them to their conversation, intending to go apologize to the Queen. Before he got that far, though, the sylph Lady Yfaen accosted him. “Lord Galen—I understand from Mrs. Vesey and her Grace that this Dr. Andrews of yours is a member of the Royal Society.”
“He is,” Galen said. “I’m very sorry for his mistake—”
She waved it away. “That isn’t what concerns me. Rather—” She bit her lip. “To put it very bluntly . . . how can we be certain he won’t tell them about us? Isn’t that what they do there? Learn about new things, and then tell others about them?”
To ask him that called into question his judgment as Prince. But Galen knew very well how green he was, in the eyes of the fae; he would do better to answer her concern than to object to her speaking of it. “That is what they do,” he agreed, “but do not fear Dr. Andrews. I’ve impressed upon him the need for secrecy—and indeed, I think his error here tonight has helped with that.
“More to the point, I know what he wants. He has no interest in running to anyone with his first, unformed thoughts; he prefers to keep matters secret until he can astound the world, as Isaac Newton did, with a singular work that will change their thinking forever. If he begins such a work, I will know about it, in plenty of time to convince him to keep silent.” His duty to the Onyx Court made him add, reluctantly, “Or to prevent him from speaking, if need be.”
Yfaen lowered into a small curtsy. “You know him far better than I, Lord Galen. If you trust his discretion, then I will trust you.”
She said it, but he wondered if she meant it. Yfaen, though friends with Mrs. Vesey, and therefore hardly an enemy, still had doubts. How much worst must it be among the Sanists, and those who scorned him as Prince?
He doubted the answer was one he wanted to hear. And there was no cure for it but to do his best, and pray that would be good enough.
The Onyx Hall, London: June 28, 1758
Irrith’s cabinet was her favorite solace, almost as good as going among mortals themselves, and far cheaper when it came to bread. She ran her hands over the shelves and little drawers, picking objects at random: an embroidered handkerchief, a toothbrush, a locket with a curl of hair inside. A child’s doll, with one arm missing. The polished buckle of a shoe, blood stiffening its hinge. Every one of them a fragment of a story, a life, reeking of passion or mortal ingenuity. She could spend hours studying them and never grow bored.
Unless she was interrupted. When a knock came at her door, she closed the panels of her cabinet, sighing, and went to see who it was.
She would have been less stunned if a poleax had been waiting outside to fall on her head. Valentin Aspell said, “Dame Irrith. If I might have a moment of your time?”
What in Mab’s name is the Lord Keeper doing here? Her immediate, suspicious answer was, nothing good. Irrith had never liked Valentin Aspell. As far as she was concerned, he was an oily, untrustworthy snake. But he’d served the Queen for a long time, and might be here on her business. Grudgingly, Irrith opened the door wider and let him in.
He surveyed the room as he entered. It wasn’t as nice as the chamber Irrith had lost; this one was plain black stone, with only her scant furnishings for contrast. The cabinet was nice, though. It, too, was a mortal thing, built of lacquered wood, with brass fittings on its many drawers and doors, and Irrith had long ago fitted it with a detector lock. Fae had ways around charms, but few of them knew how to defeat the complicated mechanism—and if they tried, the lock would tell her.
Aspell said, “I am sorry for the loss of your previous chamber. It was one of the more unusual in the Onyx Hall, and the Queen had shown you great kindness in bestowing it.”
Now she definitely didn’t trust him. Irrith had never once seen Aspell use compliments or sympathy without intending to get something in return. But he was used to people who played the same game, dancing around the target before finally stabbing it. Not people like her. “Why are you here?”
It didn’t discomfit him as much as she’d hoped. “To ask you a question,” the Lord Keeper said. “May I sit?”
Irrith wanted to refuse, but that would be petty. She waved him to one of her two chairs—both of them old and uncomfortable, since she didn’t entertain guests often. He flicked his coat clear with a smooth gesture and coiled onto the more battered of the two. “Thank you. Dame Irrith, you absented yourself from the Onyx Hall for about fifty years, and that gives you a certain perspective that we who dwell here lack. You also know the Queen moderately well.”
“Not so well,” she said warily. “I’m not one of her ladies.”
“Well enough for my purposes. Tell me: do you find her as she once was?”
The question was both perplexing and worrying—the latter mostly because it was Aspell who asked it, and Irrith distrusted everything he said. “What do you mean?”
He shook his head. “I would prefer not to prompt you. Your uninfluenced opinion is what I need right now.”
Irrith bit her lip and perched on the edge of the other chair. Had Lune changed?
“Lots of people are different,” she said, after some consideration. “That’s one of the odd things about this place. Fae don’t often change, not in so short a time as fifty years, but the folk here do.” She gestured toward Aspell. “When I left, you were wearing one of those enormous long wigs with all the curls. Now it’s—I think they call that kind a Ramillies? Which, by the way, looks less ridiculous. Guns and cricket and backgammon . . .”
Despite his assertion that he wouldn’t prompt her, Aspell said, “I do not mean our activities or dress.”
“Ways of thinking, too,” Irrith said. She suspected what he was after, and didn’t want to say it. “This business of having a treasury—who ever heard of something like that in a faerie court? It’s so orderly. And—”
“Dame Irrith,” Aspell said, and it was enough.
She stared down, biting her lip, digging one bare toe into the ragged rush mat that might have covered this floor for the last two hundred years. “I suppose she’s tired.”
“Tired,” he repeated.
“With all that’s going on—trying to make arrangements with someone in Greece so we can hide ourselves with the clouds, and I know she’s still searching for a weapon against the Dragon; and then of course there’s all the usual affairs of the court, people scheming against one another and causing mischief above, and it’s a good thing we don’t always have to sleep, because when would she find the time?”
The Lord Keeper let out a slow sigh. “Dame Irrith . . . I do not ask out of malice. I am concerned for the Queen, and for the Onyx Court. If you think it simple weariness, then that is one matter; within a year, one way or another, the threat of the comet will be ended, and her Majesty can rest. But if you think it something more, then for the good of the Onyx Court, I beg you to tell me.”
All the suspicion that had been wafting through her mind since he asked that first question hardened into a leaden ball. “Why do you want to know?”
Aspell lifted one elegant hand. “I mean no trap, Dame Irrith. Yes, I have some spies in my keeping, but I haven’t come to lure you into indiscreet speech, which I can then clap you in prison for. Her Majesty knows that not all fae who speak of such things would call themselves Sanists, and not all who call themselves Sanists are treasonous. There can be loyalty in opposition. The ultimate concern of most on both sides is the preservation of our shared home, though they differ on how.”
She’d been on the verge of throwing him out. His mention of loyalty, though, loosened the knot around her heart. I don’t mean any harm to Lune, or the Onyx Hall. But the situation . . . it does worry me. She’d been carefully avoiding such thoughts ever since talking to Magrat in the Crow’s Head, for fear they would make her a Sanist.
And maybe she was. But that didn’t have to be treason.
“Maybe,” she said, the admission as grudging as any she’d ever made. “It might be affecting
her. The palace. With the wall going away. They’re connected, after all, and she’s used that in the past—against the Dragon, for example. The damage might be sapping her strength.”
The Lord Keeper’s mouth had thinned into a frown when she began speaking; now the frown deepened. “Or she is giving her strength, in an effort to slow the damage. She might even be doing it unconsciously.”
That sounded like Lune. The question slipped out of Irrith’s mouth. “What happens when her strength runs out?”
He said nothing, merely lifted his narrow brows.
She scowled at him as if it had been a trap. “It won’t. She’s strong. Fifty years of this has barely made a mark on her; she could go for a hundred more. And Ktistes is working to mend the palace, anyway.”
“I wish him all the good fortune in the world.” Aspell sighed again, looking melancholy. “I could also wish her Grace had better support to sustain her in these crises.”
“Support?”
He opened his mouth, then hesitated. “It isn’t my place to question the Queen’s choices. The selection of the Prince is and always has been her prerogative.”
Galen. In some respects, he was the best support Lune could hope for; the young man worshipped her, and would do without hesitation anything she asked of him.
But that wasn’t enough, was it? Lune needed someone who wouldn’t just react, but act. Someone who thought ahead, or sideways, and came up with ideas she never would have dreamt of. Someone she could trust to address problems on his own, so that she didn’t need to handle it all herself.
And Galen was not that man.
He wanted to be. Perhaps someday he would be. He’d shown signs of it already; this notion of Dr. Andrews and the Royal Society was different, at least, and might bear fruit. But he was more a Prince-in-training than an actual Prince.
Irrith remembered the obelisk in the night garden, with its names and dates. “Lune didn’t expect to lose the last Prince so soon, did she?”
Aspell shook his head. Six years. The least of them had gone for decades longer. She would have expected more time, to find and educate a suitable successor.
Was Galen really the best she could do?
“I have said too much,” Aspell murmured, shaking his head again. “Such matters are the Queen’s affair, and none of mine. I thank you, Dame Irrith, for speaking honestly with me. Uncomfortable as it may be to consider such matters, I feel it’s vital to face them, and to consider possible solutions.”
Like replacing the Queen. The wounded mistress of a wounded realm. Irrith shuddered inwardly. She didn’t want to see Lune deposed, but with the Hall fraying . . .
Aspell reached into one pocket and pulled out a small mother-of-pearl box that he laid atop her cabinet. “For your aid, Dame Irrith. Good day.”
She ignored the box for hours after he left, before curiosity finally overcame her reluctance and spite. Inside lay two items: a locket containing a miniature of some fellow’s beloved and a snippet of her hair, and a piece of mortal bread.
Irrith shut the box, shoved it into her cabinet, and wondered if she’d done the right thing.
Rose House, Islington: June 30, 1758
Islington seemed much closer than it had been. The Aldersgate entrance was still just as far from the Goodemeades’ home as ever, but the land in between had changed; the streets now stretched well beyond Smithfield and the Charterhouse, before suddenly giving way to the market gardens and green grass Irrith expected. After that, Islington was only a brief walk. It didn’t seem right—as if someday she would leave the Onyx Hall and walk past houses and shops, churches and manicured little parks, and find herself at the Angel Inn without ever having left the city at all.
Her mood didn’t help with such discontented thoughts. Ordinarily a visit to the Goodemeades was a happy occasion, for they were always eager to feed guests. Today, however, she had a purpose in mind, and it was not a happy one.
Only the Queen herself knew why she’d chosen Galen St. Clair as her Prince. But if there were two souls in London who could guess at Lune’s reasons, their names were Rosamund and Gertrude.
The brownies had guests when she arrived, two apple maidens and an oak man from the fields around London. They welcomed Irrith, though, settling her down with a plate of food and a mug of their excellent mead, and perhaps it was a good thing; the hospitality loosened her tight muscles and made her questions easier to face. By the time the tree spirits were bid farewell, Irrith felt prepared for whatever the Goodemeades might say to her.
“Now, my dear,” Rosamund said, as Gertrude whisked away the dishes. “You came in here with a face as long as a week of mourning, and though it’s brightened up since then, I’m guessing you didn’t come just for cakes and mead. What troubles you?”
Irrith licked crumbs from her fingers. “Something I have no right to ask, but I will anyway. It’s about the Prince.”
“And the way he’s in love with Lune?” Gertrude asked, coming back in. Her plump hands tugged her apron straight. “Poor lad. He’d make a fine ballad, but it must be dreary living.”
“Did Lune know how he felt before she chose him?” The brownies nodded in unison. “Is that why she chose him?”
Gertrude went still. Rosamund busied herself with brushing the last few crumbs from the tabletop. Glancing from one to the other, Irrith said, “I promise, I’m not malicious. I just—I don’t understand. He isn’t political, and he doesn’t have connections in the mortal world, not like some of the men before him. I know the previous one died awfully fast; is it just that Lune expected to have more time to educate Galen?”
Rosamund pursed her lips, then tossed the crumbs into the fire. “Well, for questions one has no right to ask—but that’s hardly ever stopped us, now, has it? Irrith, my dear, a little whisper has reached our ears that you’re sharing Lord Galen’s bed.”
If she’d stopped to consider it, she never would have believed they could keep it secret, not in the Onyx Hall. But she hadn’t, and so the mention surprised her. “I am. I didn’t think the Queen would mind.”
“She doesn’t. He’s hardly the first Prince to enjoy a little dalliance among her subjects. It’s more a matter of how it affects you. Do you love him?”
Irrith laughed, incredulous. “Love? Can you really imagine me shackling my heart to some mortal who will be dead in a few years? Not hardly. He interests me, certainly.” That mild description fell far short of the truth. Fascinated would be closer. Entranced.
The brownies exchanged one of their usual inscrutable glances. After untold ages of practice, they were very good at them. Rosamund said, “But you’re on his side.”
With Valentin Aspell’s oily concern fresh in her memory, Irrith didn’t have to guess what she might mean. “Well, he seems determined to hurt himself with this adoration of the Queen—but no, I don’t want to add to it.”
“Good,” Gertrude said, with unexpected firmness. “Because the truth of the matter is something Galen must never learn.”
Irrith’s eyes widened. Rosamund laid a reassuring hand over hers and said, “Now, Gertie, it isn’t so bad as all that. Just that things have changed, Irrith, and they’ve made new problems for Lune, that none of us ever foresaw.”
“Isn’t that always the case?” Irrith asked sourly, thinking of the comet.
The sisters sighed in rueful agreement. “The problem in this case,” Rosamund said, “is that there have usually been three requirements for the Prince, and two of them don’t fit together very well anymore.”
Three requirements? “He has to be someone Lune likes.”
“And he has to be a gentleman,” Gertrude said.
“And,” Rosamund finished, “he has to be born within the walls of the City.”
Gertrude held up a cautionary hand. “Might be within the sound of the bells. But no one’s quite dared test that yet.”
Irrith thought of the City as it had become—not London as a whole, but the City of London, the central par
t, and specifically the part within the increasingly broken wall. Galen, when he told her where he lived, said Leicester Fields was no longer as fashionable as it had been, that the better sort of people were moving farther west. No one wanted to be within the narrow, twisty, dirty lanes of the City, which had scarce been changed even by the Great Fire. There was a broad new street cutting up from the river to the Guildhall, called Queen Street south of Cheapside and King Street north, but that was the biggest difference. Most of the City was still as it had been these hundreds of years, and that was not good enough for fashion.
She murmured, “So he was the only gentleman who fit?”
“There have never been all that many gentlemen in the Onyx Hall,” Gertrude reminded her. “Well, there aren’t that many gentlemen at all, are there? Not compared to ordinary folk. Peers are even rarer. So most of the ones who get brought below are common. Lord Hamilton was the grandson of a viscount; for all that he wasn’t what anyone would call wealthy, and that was good enough for them as cared. But then he died, and Lune had to choose someone new.”
“Galen was a bit of luck,” Rosamund added. “His mother went into labor without much warning, and they couldn’t move her; so he was born in the house where she’d gone to have dinner.”
Irrith just kept blinking, trying to absorb it all. No, they hadn’t foreseen that—who would expect that London would grow so much, and all the wealthy people would move out to its western edge? “She’s going to have to stop choosing gentlemen. The place of birth has to do with the Hall’s enchantments, doesn’t it, and we can hardly ask her to work with someone she doesn’t like—but the rank, that’s just because no one wants their Queen to be paired with a commoner.”
The brownies looked unhappy. Gertrude said, “If she can. There was an apothecary a few years ago who might have done, but her lords and ladies didn’t much like the idea.”
Rosamund snorted. “And then he ran mad and flung himself off Westminster Bridge, so maybe it’s just as well. Not a stable mind, I fear.”