With Fate Conspire
Milord bent forward to examine a camera. In that moment of distraction, Dead Rick snatched the box from his grasp.
Before the other could do more than cry out in protest, he’d torn the top free, uncovering what lay inside. Nestled in a bed of straw was something Dead Rick recognized all too well.
A plate of glass, held in a thin wooden frame.
Dead Rick glared at his supposed ally, furious. “You knowed. This whole bloody time.”
Milord straightened slowly, warily, hands stiff at his sides. “I suspected. I still suspect; I have no confirmation. But the pieces of glass that hold your memories do sound a good deal like photographic plates, yes.”
Before Chrennois stole ghosts, he stole pieces of faeries’ minds. The same technique, advanced over the last few years? Or different things entirely? It didn’t matter. What mattered was that his ally had lied. Promising all this time to get his memories back, but now that they were here, the deceitful bugger would have rushed him right back out again, with never a mention of what he needed to know.
As much as Dead Rick wanted to knock the smug bastard onto his arse, there was one thing he wanted more. He slammed the box down onto the table and ran back into the side room.
“We don’t have the time!” his ally called after him, real desperation in his voice. “I promise, I will help you, but not tonight—it would take too long to search—”
“Iron burn you,” Dead Rick snarled back. “If you think I’m bloody well leaving ’ere without my bloody mind…” Words failed him. His hands did not; they tore the lid off one crate after another, digging through the straw and other contents. Some things were photographic plates; others were not; he didn’t have to look to know none of those were his memories. He would know them when he found them.
“You can be valuable, Dead Rick, staying where you are—work from within Nadrett’s defenses, and it will be far easier to destroy him when the time comes!”
The time to destroy him was after Dead Rick had his memories back. Growling, he burrowed deeper into the room, following instinct deeper than any physical sense, until his hands settled on a particular crate, and he knew.
“Blood and Bone,” he whispered, the lid falling from his hands to thunk against the floor. So many. Instead of straw, this box was lined with notched strips of wood, holding the small plates in tidy rows. Dozens of them, stacked several rows deep—and yet, when he thought about it, that wasn’t so many at all. Not for a faerie’s eternal life. How much did each plate hold?
This had to be all of them. Nothing else in the room called to him.
Dead Rick jammed the lid back onto the crate. It was almost too large for one man to carry, but he would be damned before he asked Milord for any more help. He ended up lifting it atop another box, then turning around so he could tip the weight forward onto his back, with his hands on the bottom edge.
Milord had given up his protests; he was in the outer room, looking rapidly over the bottles and other containers, as if snatching everything he could into his mind. The plate holding Galen St. Clair was tucked securely under his arm. It wasn’t worth trying to grab, not when Dead Rick had his memories at last. The skriker passed without a word, walking carefully to the alcove and positioning himself beneath the fanlike arrangement of stone tendrils. Hands full, he resorted to tapping one with his nose, hoping that would wake it up.
It did. The tendrils came down, wrapped around his body, and lifted him toward the street.
The City of London: August 6, 1884
He stumbled leaving the entrance, and nearly dropped the box. Panic beat in his throat—visions of it falling, the memories tumbling free, every last one of them shattering—
By the time he had it steadied, his heart was racing. Dead Rick squeezed his eyes shut and thanked all the powers of Faerie for his good fortune. Now, to get them back safe in my ’ead.
Which meant going to the Academy, and hoping he could buy help there. Dead Rick opened his eyes and turned his steps toward the Onyx Hall—but not, for once, the Goblin Market. The thought lit a spark of joy in his soul.
A flare that died when he saw three men coming up the pavement toward him. No, not men: fae, under glamour. And the leader was recognizable as Nadrett.
He could have run—if he abandoned the crate. Dead Rick could have more easily abandoned his legs. Then they were there, and it was too late to flee. “Well,” Nadrett said, his voice soft and malevolent. He cocked a pistol, but didn’t point it at Dead Rick. Not yet. “So my dog’s got a backbone after all. You’ll regret finding that, you will.”
Dead Rick’s hands clenched on the box’s corners. “Iron burn you,” he spat. “I ain’t your fucking dog no more.”
A grinding sound, a whiff of new scent: the entrance had done its work once more, and his ally had emerged—at the worst possible moment. Nadrett looked past Dead Rick, and his eyebrows went up. “So that’s what you’ve been doing all this time, sneaking about. Thinking I wouldn’t notice. I notice everything, dog. Who’s your friend ’ere, then?” No answer from Milord, though Dead Rick heard the other faerie’s feet shift, as if he were settling himself to fight. Nadrett said, “I wonder what’s under that glamour, boys?”
Quick as a snake, he raised his pistol and fired.
It brought the entire street to a halt. The enchantments over the door protected against mortals noticing people coming and going from the Onyx Hall, but nothing more; seeing the gun, passersby began to flee. Dead Rick staggered, flinching instinctively away from the shot, and then one of Nadrett’s underlings seized him, unbalancing him still further. For one horrific moment, he was again on the verge of dropping his memories.
Iron. Not elfshot, or lead—the bastard’s shooting iron!
Bread protected against it, but not perfectly. Milord screamed and collapsed to the pavement, and the glamour covering him shattered.
Revealing Valentin Aspell.
The faerie was bleeding from the shoulder; Nadrett hadn’t aimed to kill. Aspell spat curses worthy of the lowest Goblin Market trash, and he sounded neither like his disguised voice nor his usual oily self; and Dead Rick kept staring. Aspell. All this time.
Nadrett was spitting curses of his own. “I thought you was up to something, sending your lackeys like that, not talking to me yourself. I’m going to enjoy—”
He never finished the sentence. Aspell had one more twisty trick prepared. What he pulled from his pocket, Dead Rick never saw; but it exploded into light and smoke. He staggered again, this time into his captor, and on instinct he sank his teeth into whatever part of the fellow was closest to his mouth. He was rewarded with a howl of pain and freedom from the other’s grip.
For half an instant, his mind tossed out images. Putting down the box. Leaping on Nadrett. Helping the wounded Aspell escape.
Instead he ran. Away from the chaos, toward the Onyx Hall, nothing in the world but feet and lungs, his hands and his back holding his memories secure, and a devout hope that he could find safety in the Academy.
The Galenic Academy, Onyx Hall: August 6, 1884
The strangest thing was the familiarity.
Eliza knew well the look of a formerly decent neighborhood fallen to decay; that described many portions of the East End. She hadn’t expected to find it echoed in a faerie realm—even one that seemed to lie below London.
This is where they’ve been, all this time. Beneath my feet. And I never knew it.
Now they were all around her. She saw one, two, a cluster of four, all before she and her guides reached the arch of silver and gold that shone in the otherwise gloomy air. Even the most human-looking creature was nothing of the sort, and could never be mistaken for it. Yet she knew from experience how well they could change to look like humans. Here, in their home, they had no need to hide.
Their home: some kind of grand, crumbling palace, both timeless and very old. Eliza hunched her shoulders inward and wrapped her hands around her elbows, afraid to touch the stone. Mrs. Chase stayed
by her side, but the Goodemeades walked as if they knew the way blindfolded.
Past the arch, familiarity vanished, and strangeness multipled a hundredfold. She’d been prepared for green fields, or hollow hills, or castles of crystal—not machines. They weren’t even human things, dragged down here like a crow would drag a shiny bit of metal; they had to be faerie inventions. Even the notion of faeries bombing railways paled into sensibility, next to that.
Owen, Eliza told herself, trying not to stare at everything around her. Owen is the only thing that matters. If she held on to that, she might keep her sanity.
Her escorts hurried her onward, past the knot of folk clustered around something like an enormous loom. One of them greeted her companions, and Gertrude stayed back, asking after someone named Feidelm. “They’ll fetch your friend,” Rosamund said, leading her through into a library. “If you’d like to sit down…?”
She couldn’t. Eliza paced the room, up and down the length of the polished table, past shelves of books containing unknown wonders. Oddly, the two statues dominating the far end of the room seemed to be of a mortal man and woman, in old-fashioned clothing. The plaques at the base named them as Galen and Delphia St. Clair. She wondered who they’d been, and what importance they could possibly hold for faeries, that they would be memorialized here.
The click of a door’s latch drove all such thoughts from her head. Eliza turned, and saw Owen.
The sight of him drove all the breath from her body. Owen, exactly as she remembered him—Owen from seven years ago, as if not a day had passed since they parted.
He’d been among the faeries. For him, time had stopped.
The fourteen-year-old boy shuffled forward, guided by the gentle hands of Gertrude and a tall, elegant faerie with ginger hair. He seemed nervous, uncertain, and he didn’t look at her. Eliza had to force the syllables past her lips, a desperate whisper. “Owen.”
He didn’t react. She might have spoken another name entirely. And that was when Eliza knew the appearance was a lie; his face might be unchanged, but inside, he was not at all the boy she remembered.
They had warned her. But warnings didn’t come close to preparing her for the horror of seeing him like this, fourteen years old and shattered.
By this place.
She made herself walk forward, slowly, hands outstretched. The others hung back, giving her the space she needed. For more reasons than one. The boy looked up at her, confused, wary, but he let her take his hand—
“Ave Maria, gratia plena, Dominus tecum. Benedicta tu in mulieribus, et benedictus fructus ventris tui, Iesus. Sancta Maria, Mater Dei, ora pro nobis peccatoribus, nunc et in hora mortis nostrae!”
The prayer spilled from her lips, as fast as she’d ever recited it. Only years of repetition, though, kept Eliza from faltering as it took effect.
She’d thought the faeries would flinch back, as the changeling had, but stronger. And so they did—but everything else flinched, too.
The walls, the shelves, the floor. The entire world shuddered, like a candle flame in the wind. Cries of utter horror came from within the room and without; machinery ground to a shrieking halt; an ominous rumble filled the air.
And Owen, with whom Eliza had intended to run for freedom—through the door, past the distracted faeries, out into the world above—howled and tore himself away.
The shock of it paralyzed her. Eliza was still standing there, gaping, when the door slammed open so hard it bounced off the wall, and a short, stocky figure charged through, swearing in German. His gaze swept the room, then fixed on Eliza with murderous rage. The ginger-haired faerie caught him as he tried to rush at Eliza, and she began speaking in a rapid Irish voice. “She didn’t know, Niklas; she was trying to help her friend—”
“She is going to kill the Queen and bring this verdammte place down upon our heads!”
Rosamund was at Eliza’s side, clutching her sleeve, babbling away beneath the dwarf’s furious tirade. “You mustn’t do that, oh please, you mustn’t—I know you want to help him, and so do we, but if you pray again you’ll only hurt us all…”
Eliza staggered. It was too much, all of it: the shouting, that disorienting lurch, the peculiar and unsettling feeling that the stone itself had been screaming.
And Owen, huddled in a corner. Terrified of her. Of the words she had spoken, that did not belong to this world.
Vision blurred, slid, vanished into a cascade of tears. Eliza cried, the sobs wracking her body, bending her over until she fell to her knees on the carpet. Oh Jesus, Owen. I’m too late. Seven years too late. God help me—Owen, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry …
Gentle hands stroked her hair, the Irish voice spoke to her soothingly with words she couldn’t understand, and none of it did any good. All of it had been in vain. She had lost Owen forever.
PART THREE
August–October 1884
They say that “coming events cast their shadows before.” May they not sometimes cast their lights before?
—Ada Lovelace, letter to her mother, Lady Byron, Sunday, 10 August 1851
Do not let us talk then of restoration. The thing is a Lie from beginning to end. You may make a model of a building as you may of a corpse, and your model may have the shell of the old walls within it as your cast might have the skeleton, with what advantage I neither see nor care […] But, it is said, there may come a necessity for restoration! Granted. Look the necessity full in the face, and understand it on its own terms. It is a necessity for destruction.
—John Ruskin, The Lamp of Memory
Ah, Love! could thou and I with Fate conspire
To grasp this sorry Scheme of Things entire,
Would not we shatter it to bits—and then
Re-mould it nearer to the Heart’s Desire!
—Edward Fitzgerald, The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam LXXIII
Even the tiniest shock threatens her grip, now. The substance of her spirit has been stretched as far as it will go; there is not much of the Hall to protect any longer, but not much of herself to cover it, either. Despite her resolution to protect her mortal consort, she finds herself drawing on his strength more and more, to hold on through these final days.
The worst of it is not the physical pain, not now. It is the knowledge that everything she has fought for all these centuries must end. Some few fae may find a way to stay in London; they will become changelings, or subsist on mortal bread until their spirits are altered beyond recognition. The era of the Onyx Court, though, is over. No more will faeries be a hidden part of the city’s life. Magic will pass a little further out of this world, to fade and be forgotten.
She no longer even has the strength to rage against that loss.
All she can do now is postpone it for as long as possible. Hold on, and give her people as much time as she can.
They are fae. Miracles are not something they pray for.
The Galenic Academy, Onyx Hall: August 6, 1884
By the time he reached the gold and silver arch of the Academy boundary, Dead Rick was completely blown. His lungs burned and his fingers ached with the weight of the box, but he didn’t dare pause or set it down. He’d run all the way from Aldersgate to Cloak Lane, all the way from the entrance to here, until at the end he was staggering like a drunk, for fear Nadrett’s men might be following him. And they might still—but if they burst into the Academy, somebody would stop them.
He hoped.
Certainly the fae and mortals there looked as if they might stop him, when he lurched into the main hall. Dead Rick kept moving, both to avoid any questions, and because once he stopped he doubted he could start again. The library was a quiet place, the safest he could think of; if he collapsed there, surely Irrith would find him.
With his hands full, he resorted to using his foot to open the door. The room beyond was dismayingly full of people, but at that exact moment the only thing he cared about was the table, on which he could lay his burden at last.
He drew in one shuddering
, relieved breath, hearing it loud in the silence around him. Then the silence was broken by a single, murderous word. “You.”
It was all the warning he got. Dead Rick’s reflexes were shredded by exhaustion; he hadn’t even turned his head before a body slammed into him from the side and carried him to the floor.
He howled, reaching out instinctively to protect his memories. Hands slapped his aside, then reformed into fists, striking his face two swift blows. The habits of seven years in the Goblin Market took over: he got one arm between them, grabbed the side of his attacker’s head, threw her hard to the floor. He rolled with her, his free hand moving to crush her throat—
The strong arms that wrapped about his shoulders and arms to drag him back weren’t necessary. He’d already stopped, frozen by the sight of the face beneath him. Seven years older, but he recognized that thick dark hair, the upturned nose, the furious hazel eyes. And the voice, shrieking curses at him, in which he recognized the name Owen.
He couldn’t even answer. All he could do was sprawl on the floor, Feidelm pinning his arms like a wrestler, and stare at her. Of course she was here. The boy was, after all, and Dead Rick remembered her screams when he’d stolen the boy away. Of course she would come after him, no matter how long it took.
They’d gathered quite an audience. An old mortal woman and two fae under glamour; they’d been there when he came in. More crowded the doorway, crouching or stretching or in one case hovering on dragonfly wings to see past their fellows, until a voice said, “Let me through.”
It wasn’t a loud voice; it didn’t have to be. The authority in it parted the crowd like a knife through soft flesh, making a gap for a tall, dark-skinned figure to pass.