With Fate Conspire
She looked away suddenly, but that did little good against a skriker who sensed the world as much through his ears and nose as his eyes. He heard the catch in her voice, the choked noise after she stopped speaking. He smelled a hint of salt, over the dirt and half-rotted leaves, even if her face hadn’t shown any sign of tears.
Nobody in the Goblin Market cried. Nobody who let herself be that weak lasted long there.
Dead Rick didn’t know what to do or say. He just stood there, wondering if he should go away, until Irrith spoke again. “I used to love this place,” she said quietly, still looking anywhere but at him, across the overgrown tangles of the night garden. “It reminded me of the Vale. I love London, understand—I wouldn’t stay here if I didn’t. But I needed a bit of green, some grass and trees and flowers, to keep from going mad.”
He didn’t know what the Vale was—her original home?—but he heard the ache in her voice, and answered with the only words he had, pathetic and useless as they were. “I’m sorry.”
“So am I.” Irrith hung her head, hands braced against the fountain’s edge so her shoulders hunched up like a hawk’s. Then he heard another laugh, short and hard. “And I keep thinking about Lune.”
The vanished Queen. “What about ’er?”
The sprite gestured with one hand; he couldn’t tell what she meant by it, and maybe she couldn’t, either. “Those speeches she used to make. She would have stood up in front of the court—not just the lords and ladies, but common fae like you or me—and said something about how London is our home, all of us who came here from somewhere else, and we weren’t going to give up on it. People would stay, instead of flitting. And we’d find a way around this problem.”
This problem. As if it were a simple thing, an overturned cart in the road, and all they had to do was figure out which narrow side lane would lead them past it. Harshly, Dead Rick said, “Too bad she’s gone and pushed off with the rest of ’em, and left us behind.”
Irrith’s head came up so fast, he twitched back. “What? Lune isn’t gone!”
“Oh, is that so? Then where is she, eh? You tell me that.”
“I don’t know.”
He snorted in disgust. “Of course you don’t.”
Irrith glared at him, expression darkening. “She’s still here, though. Somewhere in the Hall. Hodge talks to her sometimes; he says—”
“Oh, the Prince, the fucking Prince. Of course ’e’d say; without the Queen, ’e’s nothing but a jumped-up cockney bastard, playing at being King of the Faeries. She’s gone, Irrith.”
“No, she isn’t!” Irrith shot to her feet. “Dead Rick—just who do you think is holding this place together?”
He frowned, not following her. “It ain’t ’olding together. That’s the problem.”
The energy possessing the sprite seemed far larger than her slender body. “You must have felt it. When the tremors hit. Like a body in pain, but trying so hard to hold still, until it gets too bad; then the whole thing thrashes, like it’s screaming—like she’s screaming. I think Hodge hears that, too, though he’ll never say so. She keeps as much of it from us as she can, but even Lune has limits. And she’s being pushed past them more and more often.”
Dead Rick’s skin crawled, thinking of the moment when he woke inside his refuge. That sense of the Onyx Hall as a prisoner chained to a post, writhing beneath the whip.
It’s the Queen.
Irrith nodded. Her cheeks hollowed briefly, as if she were biting the insides of them to keep from crying. “When they laid the rails … sometimes I think it would be better to just pull her away. Let us all move on to something else, rather than hanging on here like the desperate things we are; let the Hall have a clean death, instead of this horrible torture. If I knew where she was, I might try to do it. But I don’t.”
With the railway so fresh in his mind, the answer was obvious. “The London Stone. Ain’t it the ’eart of this place?”
“Yes,” Irrith said grimly. “But where’s the Stone? The part below, I mean; not the part above. Hodge is the only one who knows, and he swore an oath not to tell.”
Human oaths meant nothing. But fae had ways of binding men to keep their word; Hodge’s promise would certainly be of that sort. A secret like that, they couldn’t risk getting out. Even now, control of the London Stone might be a valuable thing.
“Speaking of the Prince…” Irrith sidled closer. “I’ve been thinking about what you told me before. About Nadrett? I was wondering if you knew anything more, or had any proof—”
With a jolt like his brain popping back into place, Dead Rick realized what he was doing: carrying on a friendly conversation with the sprite who recently helped the Prince’s minions carry out a raid on the Goblin Market. In the middle of the night garden. In easy view of any number of Goblin Market refugees, who would be only too happy to sell news of this event in exchange for a place in the warren.
He drew a slow, deep breath through his nose, and spat the last of it back out as a near-silent curse. We’re being watched, all right. By at least one person, and maybe more, if his nose was any judge.
Irrith raised her eyebrows, waiting for his answer. Dead Rick had to end this, before she said anything else that could get him killed. Hoping the sprite’s hearing was good, he whispered, “What I’m about to do—sorry.”
Then he backhanded her across the face.
His knuckles only clipped her cheek; the sprite was fast, and his vague warning had at least put her on alert. She stumbled back out of his reach, staring, halfway to angry. He had to stop her before she could say anything loudly enough to be overheard. “Is that why you came ’ere? Looking for me, thinking you could get me to talk? Went after Aspell, now you’re going after my master—well, you’d better know, you set foot in ’is part of the Market, you won’t get that foot back. And you tell your cockney Prince: Nadrett could kill ’im any time ’e wanted to. And what do you think that would do?”
Every bit of color drained out of Irrith’s face, freezing her anger into sudden horror. Dead Rick cursed his choice of threat. Killing the Prince—if it wouldn’t destroy the Hall outright, it certainly wouldn’t help the Queen any. There were some crazy fae around; he prayed he hadn’t put that idea into anybody’s head. They may not know where she is, but they can sure as ’ell find ’im.
Her jaw clenched hard, and then she drew herself up with contempt worthy of the elf-knights she’d joined for that raid. “Iron rot your soul, Dead Rick,” she spat, and strode off in rigid fury.
He shut his eyes and went through every profane oath he knew. Stupid fucking whelp. Should never ’ave said nothing to ’er. That’s what you get for trusting somebody you don’t even remember.
This was why he’d spent seven years under Nadrett’s thumb. Because he wasn’t clever enough to scheme and lie and trick his way out. The moment he tried, he nearly got himself killed.
But he couldn’t give up. The voice had cracked the shell of despair that had hardened around him, these past seven years; there might be something like hope, if Nadrett’s scheme was real. And Dead Rick could barter that hope for aid in getting his memories back.
If you can get your paws on it.
He couldn’t wait forever for his ally to come back. Stupid whelp though he was, Dead Rick would have to keep going on his own.
Memory: July 7, 1798
Lune’s messenger—a pigeon from the world above, given very precise instructions—fluttered into the chamber and settled upon a small table by the wall. Placing her right hand upon the London Stone and extending her left to Robert Shaw, the Queen said, “It is time.”
The Prince mirrored her without hesitation or outward sign of fear. He was a brave man, a colonel in the Horse Guards, and had distinguished himself in battle before taking up his position as Lune’s consort; if the knowledge that he might not survive the next moments unsettled him, he did not show it. He merely braced his feet, set his own hand upon the Stone, and sank alongside the Queen into
the deepest of trances.
Once the Stone had stood alongside the Walbrook, at the heart of the City of London. An ancient relic, placed there long before the creation of the Onyx Hall, it seemed eternal, immutable, the perfect foundation for that edifice of enchantments.
But given enough time, even the eternal changed. The mortals of London had already moved the Stone once, from the south side of Cannon Street to the north, where it would be less of an obstruction to traffic. Now, finding it a nuisance still, they were moving it a second time.
With it, they moved the entirety of the Onyx Hall.
Lune and Shaw prepared themselves for the upheaval. Joining their spirits in concentration, they reached out through their realm, binding it together, from their hidden place within the Queen’s chambers to the farthest reaches of the palace. The frayed edges flared with pain, where the loss of much of London’s wall had damaged the integrity of the whole. There had been some fraying the previous time, too, but it had grown worse in the last fifty years; deep within the quiet of her mind, Lune worried what the effect now would be.
She did not have long to fret. In Cannon Street above, workmen jammed long crowbars beneath the Stone’s exposed base, and began to lift.
A bone-jarring tremor ran through the Stone they touched. This one, suspended from the chamber’s ceiling, was a reflection of the Stone above, the linchpin that held London and its shadow together. The shattering jolts that ensued as its original began to move could destroy the Hall in an instant—if Queen and Prince did not stand together, cushioning the blow.
Whether the ache Lune felt was in her body, or in the Hall itself, she could not say. At that moment, there seemed no difference between the two. Painful as it was, she knew it was only the first stage of the process, and she steeled herself against the next.
The shifting of the Stone to its new home.
Direction lost all meaning as the linchpin, the immovable point around which all else was fixed, began to move. Nausea rose up in Lune’s gorge; distantly, she heard Shaw retch. With her attention spread throughout the entire Onyx Hall, she had little sense of her own vertigo, but she fought to keep that disorientation from the palace itself, fought to hold all the chambers and galleries and entrances to the world above in place. All except the reflection of the Stone itself: not even one of the great powers of Faerie could have held that in position. Once it had resided in a secret alcove at the heart of the Onyx Hall’s power. The first shifting had moved it to Lune’s chambers. Where it would be when this process was done, she could only guess; she had no power to control it.
Still the world shuddered and whirled, until Lune wanted to let go, allow the maelstrom to fling her away. She had no teeth to grit, but she strained every particle of her soul, desperate to hold on. If she released her grip now, it might destroy the Hall; the final moments of this change surely would.
Shaw held on with her, and she felt the Prince prepare himself, sheltering her soul with his own.
In the world above, the workmen grunted and swore, and finally pushed the London Stone into the setting that awaited it.
The exterior wall of St. Swithin’s Church.
Sacred power washed through the connection between the two worlds. Shaw took it into himself, contained it, kept it from flooding on into the Onyx Hall itself. Then Lune, working with him in the shadow of his protecting spirit, reached deep into the Stone. It, too, was an entrance to the Onyx Hall, though it answered only to the Queen and the Prince; but if the palace were to survive having its central point embedded in the wall of a church, that doorway must be closed.
With a sound like grinding rock, the portal sealed, and Lune and Shaw returned to their bodies.
The Queen blinked, dizzy with effort, and looked about to see where they were. The chamber was a larger one than before, perhaps ten paces across, and Lune recognized it as lying in a part of the Hall few fae ever came to; it was very nearly beneath St. Paul’s Cathedral. A consequence, no doubt, of the new placement at the church. She felt peculiar, as if she were looking out over familiar ground from an unaccustomed vantage point.
Shaw wiped sweat from his brow and said, “We’ll need to hide this.”
Yes, they would. Even if few fae ever came here, some did, and the London Stone was a vulnerable point. Extending her hand once more, Lune said, “If you have the strength?”
Robert Shaw’s strength was an endless thing. He wrapped callused fingers around hers, and together they went through the archway into another room, this one larger, just by the stairs that led to the cathedral above. Turning to face that arch, they concentrated, and the black stone grew shut, until it seemed there had never been an opening there at all.
The Onyx Hall would be safe a while longer.
Shadwell, London: May 24, 1884
With much shouting and cursing, the packed body of men surged forward across the dockyard, past the fallen chain that until a moment ago had held them back. Not far ahead, a group of foremen waited on a platform of boards laid across barrels, raised just high enough to allow them to survey the charging mass. As the first runners reached them, the foremen began to bellow with powerful voices, naming off the work they needed done, and calling out the men they would hire to do it.
This was only the Shadwell Basin, not the West India Docks, nor any of the other great pools that had been built in the East End of London to accept the commerce of the world. Even in those places, the foremen could not hire more than a fraction of the fellows who came each morning to beg for work. Here, only a fraction of a fraction met with luck; the rest were turned away, grumbling or silent with despair, to find what employment they could.
Or to drink away what coin they still had. Eliza had watched the scrimmage from the safety of an empty cart along a warehouse wall; she stayed where she was, letting the energetic men depart again, waiting for those who had nothing to hurry on to. As she expected, Dónall Whelan was among the last of these, and one look at him was enough to tell that he’d be lucky to afford a dram of gin, in his current state.
So much the better for her. Eliza hiked up her skirts and jumped over the cart’s rail to land on the filthy cobbles in front of Whelan, startling him from his weary shuffle. She smiled broadly into his surprised eyes. “I knew I’d find you here, for all that you’re too old; sure you know the calling-men will never choose yourself. But I’ve a threepenny bit in my pocket, and that’s enough to get you blind drunk—after you help me.”
Whelan’s face had seen hard wear since she last saw him. He was old for a dockworker, old for any job in the East End; nearly forty, she thought, for he’d been a boy when his father came over during the Hunger. Whelan followed after his mother perished in Galway, waiting for money that never came. His shoulders, though still broad, had taken on a hunch, one riding higher than the other, and most of his hair was long since gone. One of these days he would drown himself in the Thames, or find work and then be killed by it. Or drink himself to death, if he could get enough money to do it in one go.
His rheumy eyes took on what he probably thought was a cunning look, and Eliza wondered if he was thinking of robbing her. Let him try; she had a knife under her shawl, and in his state she was probably the stronger of the two. “You’re looking wondrous fine, Miss O’Malley,” he said, with a mockery of a bow. “Fine enough to be buying a dinner of whitebait, even. And a man can help much better on a full stomach, he can.”
How bad had things been for him lately, that he wanted food more than drink? Against Eliza’s better instincts, a touch of pity stirred her heart. Grudgingly, she said, “Not whitebait, or do you think silver sprouts up wherever I walk? But you’ll have oysters now, and a hot baked potato afterward, if you can keep your hands to yourself. Grab my paps like you did last time, and you’ll have a knee in the bollocks instead, understand?”
Whelan had fewer teeth, too, since the last time she saw them, and what remained were badly tobacco stained. But his smile looked sincere enough. “You always were
a spirited lass. Oysters first, and then we’ll talk.”
It was true, she could have afforded more. For all the many things Eliza hated about working on Cromwell Road, her wages were not one of them; between the pace of her work and her own instinct to keep her head low, she’d scarcely spent a penny more than she had to. It might have been nice to go into one of the riverside taverns, get a table in a bay window, have a proper meal of fish and beer—like a normal woman.
But not in Dónall Whelan’s company. They ended up perched on two piles of rope on one of the sufferance wharves, licking oyster juice off their fingers while gulls circled in predatory hope. Eliza kept one eye on the birds and one on Whelan, not trusting him more than an inch. At the moment, though, he was fully involved with his food, bolting it as if he hadn’t eaten in days—and perhaps he hadn’t.
When he paused for breath, she said, “I need to know what to do about a changeling.”
She was glad she’d waited; her statement set Whelan to coughing, and she wouldn’t have wanted him to choke on an oyster. The coughing turned to laughter soon enough. “A changeling? And you with your harsh words before, swearing it would be a cold day in hell before you asked Dónall Whelan’s advice again, on fairies or any other thing.”
Eliza remembered those words very well. She’d gone to Whelan after Owen vanished, because Mary Kinsella said his father had been a fairy doctor in Ireland, with knowledge of how to treat the ailments they brought on mankind. Supposedly the father had passed that knowledge on to his son. If that was true, Whelan had forgotten half of it, and scrambled the other half. He wouldn’t even believe her about what she’d seen, swearing blind these English had no fairies, that they’d run them all out with their soulless Anglican church. But all Eliza knew of changelings was some half-remembered tales; she needed advice, and Whelan’s—bad as it might be—was the only advice she knew how to get.
“It won’t be your missing lad,” Whelan said, picking bits of oyster from between his teeth with one ragged fingernail. “You’d have more panic in you if it were, and more hope. So who’s been stolen this time?”