With Fate Conspire

  London.

  * * *

  The weave flung itself outward, sweeping through the City of London, Westminster, Southwark, Whitechapel, and beyond. Every hair on Dead Rick’s body stood on end. He had a body; gravity had returned, and so had air, and the proper spaces between things. He wasn’t in every London at once, all the centuries interlaced; he was in a room, clutching Eliza, and the simultaneous pressure and tension that had threatened to destroy him were gone.

  Nearby, the Ephemeral Engine clattered away, tireless and steady.

  Movement in his arms. Warmth, too, and when he drew back enough to see, Eliza’s eyes were open and alert. She had survived.

  And so, he realized, had he.

  Dead Rick sagged to the floor, exhausted beyond the telling of it. The tiles were cool against his cheek, and he might have stayed there forever; but Eliza, damn her, had actual energy, though Mab knew where she’d gotten it. She tugged at his arm. “Dead Rick—come and see.”

  With great effort, he braced his other hand against the stone—Stone? Weren’t it tiles, a moment ago?—and pushed himself to his feet.

  The room kept shifting. It wasn’t just his imagination; every time his attention drifted, something changed, and if he tried to follow it his brain might melt. Dead Rick kept his eyes on Eliza, on her hand in his, and followed her through the gap in the wall to where the bulk of the Ephemeral Engine stood.

  The gears still turned, the rods still rose and fell; on the far side of the weaving apparatus, something still shimmered. People circled the Engine, whispering quietly; the Goodemeades were hugging one another and sniffling. Irrith stood a few steps away, staring unblinking at the machine. “Shouldn’t—shouldn’t it be stopping now?”

  Wilhas laughed, a sound of mixed astonishment and glee. Wrain licked his lips and said, “It—may never stop.”

  “But if it keeps weaving—” Eliza said.

  The palace was growing still. Dead Rick could feel it, if he concentrated. He imagined it expanding, farther and farther, until it covered not only London but England, Europe, the world …

  Wrain said, “It has to keep going. I think. This place … doesn’t resist the world outside. Not like the old one did. It will break down; rooms will fade and go away. But the Engine will gather their substance back in and weave them anew. It hasn’t made a palace—well, it has—what I mean is, it is making a palace, and will go on doing so. For as long as it needs to. That’s how it will last.”

  So it wouldn’t cover the world. Dead Rick suspected its boundaries would be those of London: the farther one got from areas that could truly be considered part of the city, the weaker the Engine’s power would be, and the faster it would fray. If the city grew more, though—

  It would grow more. He’d seen it, through Francis Merriman’s eyes.

  The thought brought Dead Rick around in a sudden whirl, to stare into the room he and Eliza had left behind.

  Benjamin Hodge lay on the floor, curled fetal on his side. Eliza cried out and ran toward him; Dead Rick opened his mouth, but she saw the truth for herself soon enough. Hodge stirred as she touched his shoulder, and opened weary eyes.

  “She’s gone,” Hodge said.

  The room around him was empty. The ghosts had dissipated, Galen St. Clair and all the rest, Francis, Suspiria.

  Lune.

  Her chair remained, a battered thing beneath the London Stone, and a crack piercing the floor where Sword had been, with a pair of embroidered silver shoes between. These alone marked the Queen’s fourteen-year battle to preserve her realm, and the three hundred years of her reign.

  Dead Rick knew a few things about death. The scholars of the Academy said faerie souls and faerie bodies were not separate things, that the latter was the former made solid. When most fae died, their souls were destroyed; there was no afterlife for them, whether Heaven or Hell, and their bodies soon crumbled to nothing.

  Soon, but not immediately. Sometimes, though, when a faerie died, she vanished on the spot. And then, they said, it meant her spirit had moved on, going to somewhere beyond anyone’s ken.

  Suspiria had gone into the London Stone, following the bond placed there when the Onyx Hall was created. Where Lune had gone, now that she was free of both body and Hall, Dead Rick could only guess—Faerie, perhaps—but wherever it was, he suspected Michael Deven was there with her. Lune’s love, and the first Prince of the Stone. They, and their predecessors, had moved on at last.

  Dead Rick joined Eliza, and between them they got Hodge on his feet. The man was still old before his time, still exhausted; his years holding the palace together had taken things from him that could never be restored. But he was alive, and while the Onyx Hall was gone, something new had taken its place. Lune’s last Prince had served her, and her realm, very well.

  The von das Tickens stayed to watch over the Engine, already conducting an argument in German that sounded more excited than angry. The rest of them, those dedicated few who had witnessed the rebirth, went out through a portal that shifted from wooden beams to brass arch to cleanly carved stone, to explore the new faerie realm of London.

  The Angel, Islington: October 6, 1884

  Benjamin Hodge did not look like a man who should be out of his sickbed. “I would have been happy to come to you below,” Frederic Myers said, as one of the coaching inn’s young maidservants set hot meat pies on the table before them.

  Hodge waited until she was gone, then shook his head with a weary grin. “I spent fourteen years ’ardly daring to come up ’ere, for fear the place would fall apart as soon as I turned my back. And believe me, it ain’t good for one of us to stay down there so long. It’s a breath of fresh air, being outside.”

  The way he attacked the meat pie said the journey had taken a good deal out of him, whatever he claimed. Myers said, “I will endeavor not to tax you too much. Indeed, I would not have written to you at all, except that I have a rather pressing matter which I believe must be laid before you, as Prince of the Stone.”

  “’Old on,” Hodge said through a mouthful of crust and gravy. Myers paused while he washed it down with a swallow of stout. “I ain’t Prince no more.”

  Given the man’s exhaustion and ill health, it wasn’t surprising. “Who is?”

  Hodge sucked a bit of meat out of his teeth and said, “There ain’t one.” Another swig of beer, and a rueful smile. “What we did with the palace … I don’t know if it’s the machine, or all the people’s ideas we poured into that thing, but it don’t ’ave a Prince no more, nor a Queen neither. So ask what you want, and I’ll tell you what I think—but it’ll be just one man’s notion.”

  The revelation unsettled Myers, less for the change in faerie society than for the loss of an authoritative voice to tell him yea or nay. This was the sort of question that ought to be answered by someone official—but it was also a question that could not be left until later, after the fae had decided how they would proceed.

  He might as well ask Hodge. “Very well. I believe you are aware of the London Fairy Society, and the Goodemeades’ plan for it?” Hodge nodded. “They had, of course, assumed the city would be mostly deserted of fae, with the remaining few largely scattered, and that announcing their presence to the general populace would therefore create trouble only for themselves and their associates. Given your recent miracle, however…”

  “It ain’t so simple,” Hodge finished. “More than you know, guv. You got any notion what’s ’appened, with the new palace?” Myers shook his head. Apprehension meant he was making but slow progress on his own pie, though Hodge managed to gulp down healthy bites during pauses. “Anchored it to the idea of London, didn’t they? Now it’s everywhere. Next to London. All around it. Inside it. Step to the left, and you’re there. So says Abd ar-Rashid, anyway, and ’e’s the sort of cove to trust on this.”

  Myers’s appetite vanished entirely, though whether it was from fear or excitement, he couldn’t have said. “And with the dreams so many had that night…??
?

  “Won’t be long before they starts puzzling it out,” Hodge said. “Ain’t ’ad nobody wander in yet, but it’s only a matter of time. Not to mention there’s ’alf a dozen constables as saw some bloody peculiar things in West Ham not long ago, and no telling ’ow long they’ll stay quiet.”

  “In that case,” Myers said, “I hope it is not too presumptuous of me to suggest that the Goodemeades and the London Fairy Society should proceed with their plan? Suitably modified, of course, for the circumstances—but I had thought to present some introductory information to the Society for Psychical Research, who would take a very great interest in this matter. I—I cannot promise the results will be entirely positive—”

  Hodge waved it away with gravy-stained fingers. “Ain’t going to be, and we knows it. More like bleeding chaos. But it was that or leave, so…” He shrugged. “Them as doesn’t like it can live quiet somewhere else, or push off to Faerie. Same as they would ’ave done anyway.”

  It wasn’t quite that simple, of course; as soon as it became public knowledge there were faeries in London, curiosity seekers would be poking under every hedgerow and hill in England. Likely elsewhere, too. Myers imagined there would be no little resentment of London’s fae for that. But for better or for worse, that was the consequence of their decision, and refusing to face it would not improve anything.

  “I will consult with the rest of the Society, then—the London Fairy Society,” he clarified. “And, of course, take suggestions as to how you, or rather they, wish to make their debut. But it should be done swiftly.”

  Hodge nodded and drank down the last of his beer. “I’ll ’elp as much as I can.”

  Myers dropped a shilling onto the table and rose, intending to begin work immediately—he had taken a room in a hotel nearby—but hesitated. “If I may ask one other question?”

  The former Prince gestured for him to go on.

  “During the meeting where the notion for the Ephemeral Engine was drafted, I believe I saw a young lady of my … acquaintance.” The word stuck in his throat. Myers had not gone home to Cambridge since that inexplicable day in Paddington Station, when Louisa Kittering vanished from not two feet away. Confused and shattered, he had clung to what sent him on that disastrous journey to London in the first place: the notebook, with its record of ideas he did not remember. That led him back to the Goodemeades, and to the meeting down below, and somewhere in between the two, his feelings for the young woman had vanished as completely as the young woman herself. And with as little explanation.

  Into the pause, Hodge suggested, “Eliza O’Malley?”

  “What?” Myers said, startled. Ah, yes—the Irishwoman. Though I thought her English, when I saw her in Mrs. Chase’s house. “No, Miss Louisa Kittering. She was sitting with a faerie woman—”

  “I know the one you mean. And I’d wager it’s the faerie woman you actually need. I’m done ’ere,” Hodge said, rising from his seat like a old gaffer with aching joints. “I’ll show you where she is.”

  Oakley Street, Chelsea: October 6, 1884

  Had Cyma felt a whit less pity for Hodge, broken and scarred as he was by his long ordeal as Prince, she would have thrown her shoe at him for bringing Frederic Myers to see her.

  She had successfully avoided him in the Academy, hurrying Louisa Kittering away before the man could escape his fellow scholars and come after the girl. But while Hodge had lost his authority, he hadn’t lost the habit of paying attention to what went on around him; he knew about her brief tenure as a changeling, and would not let her escape its consequences so easily. He ran her to ground in Chelsea, where she and Louisa had taken refuge with Lady Wilde, and then he left her and Myers alone.

  She felt awkward in ways she never would have believed possible. Though her changeling face had gone, the memories stayed, of caring so intensely what he thought of her. Of loving him.

  Only the memory of that love, though. Not the passion itself. Cyma’s heart was her own—and so was the choice to withhold it.

  “I don’t understand,” Frederic Myers said, his sad eyes clouded with pain and confusion; and because she remembered caring for him, but did not crave his love anymore, Cyma told him the truth.

  All of it, from Nadrett onward. Haunting him as Annie Marshall, keeping his grief alive. Surrendering him to the Goblin Market master, to be used, broken, and discarded. Encountering him once more at the London Fairy Society, where she had gone to seek out someone who might be persuadable to a changeling trade; taking the place of Louisa Kittering, and only then finding that what had been mere faerie infatuation, a fascination with his imagination and his grief, bloomed without warning into an obsession.

  Through it all, she could not help but absorb every detail of his reactions: the incredulity, surprise, anger, and hurt. It was a relief, to be able to enjoy that rise and fall, without having her own emotions shackled to his.

  “You are a monster,” Frederic Myers whispered, when she brought the story to its close.

  Cyma shrugged gracefully. “Undoubtedly I seem so to you. I am a faerie, sir; I am not human.” For all the sympathy she once thought she had for them—perhaps it would be better to say interest in them—in the wake of her changeling experiences, she was glad to be herself again.

  “To the best of my knowledge,” he said with biting precision, “a faerie nature does not require one to be heartless. You have my forgiveness for those actions you took while under the fist of your former master—but what, pray tell, justifies your deeds since then? Charming me into an affection I did not naturally feel, and estranging me from my wife? The most infamous trull, ma’am, would shame to use your methods.”

  She would not have them to use. But Cyma did not want to deal with the fury that might result if she said it, so instead she told him, “I did not know how else to respond. The panic I felt at the thought of not having you made any method seem reasonable, so long as it produced results.”

  Myers stared at her, then released his held breath in a sound that was half sob, half laugh. “You are not a monster. You are a child, stubbing her toe for the first time, and weeping that she cannot walk for the pain. Heaven preserve us against your innocence; it runs a bare second to your malice for cruelty.”

  Something in his tone made uneasiness stir in the depths of Cyma’s mind. Myers turned to go, and she would have been happy to let him; but concern made her say, “One moment. My understanding is that you were to help the Goodemeades with their plans. Will you now refuse? Because of what I did to you?”

  He halted, and his stooped shoulders had a beaten angle to them she remembered from their earliest encounters, when the grief over Annie Marshall was fresh upon him. But then Frederic Myers straightened. Without turning to face her, he said, “No. Though your people are fortunate indeed that I made the acquaintance of those sisters, before I learned of your perfidy. They alone persuade me that it is possible for faeries to be kind.”

  Satisfied with that answer, Cyma let him go, and went back to the task of reestablishing her life.

  The Underground, City of London: October 6, 1884

  Eliza insisted on riding the train. Never mind that the new stretch of track opened with hardly any fanfare, compared to years past; it was commonplace now, the extension of the Underground, though most of its growth was to the west. To most Londoners, this addition meant little, except that gentlemen in their top hats were saved a minute’s walk from the slightly more distant Mansion House Station. Now they could alight at Cannon Street, or Eastcheap, or Mark Lane.

  Dead Rick resisted coming with her—more, Eliza thought, out of superstitious dread than any real danger. Iron still had power to harm him, though the bread she tithed kept it at bay; he would never be happy in the cold body of a train carriage. In some ways, she couldn’t blame him: the noise and clammy foulness of the air meant the journey would never be pleasant, not until the railway companies made good on their promises of smokeless, steam-free engines.

  They would, s
omeday. She had seen glimpses of it, in that moment when the enchantment burst outward. Gleaming trains capable of terrifying speed, clean as the promises made twenty years ago, when the Underground first opened.

  Faerie gold bought them a place in a first-class compartment at Blackfriars, and Dead Rick glared away anyone who tried to join them. Alone on the padded seats, with the gaslight flickering overhead, they passed from Blackfriars through the underbelly of London.

  Hands cupped against the window, Eliza peered into the darkness. “So we aren’t going through the palace anymore?”

  “You never was,” Dead Rick said. He didn’t look out, but closed his eyes and drew in a slow breath, as if tasting the air for something. “I mean, you sort of was. Two things in the same space, mostly not touching.”

  “And now?”

  He grimaced in a way she recognized; his mouth took on that twist every time he had to deal with the scholars’ theories. His thin lips had softened, though, from their hard set of before. “Sort of yes, sort of no, but in a different way. The palace is all over London now, not just in the ground. But ’ere, too. Blood and Bone, don’t ask me to explain it. You just ‘step sideways,’ is all.”

  It was as good a phrase as any for what had proved to be their first challenge: getting out of the palace. The old entrances were gone, lost alongside every other physical landmark except the London Stone, and after some amount of fruitless effort Dead Rick had finally turned to her and said, “You’re the mortal; you puzzle it out.” She’d almost called on God, just to see what would happen. But she was nervous of disrupting the Ephemeral Engine’s work, and so in the end she took his hand and concentrated, thinking about the world she knew. They walked forward—but yes, sort of sideways, too—and then they were on Whitechapel Road, a stone’s throw from where the Darraghs lived. There was a possibility that going from faerie to mortal London would always require the assistance of a mortal, and a faerie for the reverse, but no one yet knew for sure.