A Star Shall Fall (50 page)

I tried, Mr. St. Clair, but they all died.

The doctor’s words echoed in his head. The vivisected salamander, the laboratory beneath Andrews’s house—the questions about what happened when a faerie died.
Christ. Lune.

Galen stumbled blindly toward the door. “We have to go
now
. She—she may already be dead . . .”

Cerenel caught him before he could get far. Rosamund hurried to his side, with hasty words of comfort. “She isn’t, lad; you’d know if she were. The Hall would tell you. But you have to plan before you go rushing in, because of a surety they’ll be waiting for you.”

“We don’t have the time!”

Abd ar-Rashid’s accented voice brought him down to earth, unreasonably calm in the face of his own panic. “I think perhaps we do. If I understand Dr. Andrews well enough.”

Galen stopped fighting Cerenel’s hands. “What do you mean?”

The genie folded his arms, frowning. “He seeks the moon queen, yes? Then he will want the moon. Full would be best, but he has missed that; he will not wait for it to come again. But the . . . extraction will be tonight.”

“Then why snatch her now?” Peregrin demanded. “When it gives us time to respond?”

“Because he needs time to prepare.”

Cerenel allowed Galen to step back. The pause had checked the fire in his veins; now, at last, he began to feel the beating he’d taken, the throbbing heat of his hand, the protests of his right ankle when he put weight on it. But the mead gave him the strength to keep going.

Everyone was looking at him. Prince of the Stone, and in Lune’s absence, the voice of authority in the Onyx Hall.

He tried to focus, past the unpleasant pulsating of his bruised face. Abd ar-Rashid’s calm response to Peregrin sounded plausible, but he suspected it was more of a guess than the genie admitted. If the extraction was now . . .

“Lune was supposed to go alone,” he mumbled, mostly to himself. “Not with me.”

“Aspell must know she’s been sneaking out of the Hall,” Irrith said, struggling to sit up, against Gertrude’s insistence.

“Aspell? The Lord Keeper?”

Peregrin’s teeth bared in a snarl. “The Sanist. Dame Irrith told us, while you were away.”

The knight likely didn’t mean it as an accusation, but it cut Galen nonetheless. Irrith brushed lank hair from her face and said, “I followed him to Dr. Andrews’s house. I didn’t know what they were planning, but I was trying to get back here to warn the Queen.”

They shared the same shame, the same failure. He saw it in her face, as no doubt she saw it in his.

So the intent had been for the Queen to go in secret, by herself, or at most with one attendant. There was no reason to suspect Dr. Andrews, and no reason to take a guard. By the time her absence was remarked, and her location determined, it would be too late.

“But they know now that we know,” Galen said. He lowered himself stiffly into the nearest chair. “Andrews won’t use his cellar laboratory. By now they’ll be gone. But to where?”

Silence. The assembled fae looked from one to another, seeking answers, finding none.

Andrews had nowhere else to go, not that Galen knew of. He could not kill a faerie woman inside the house of the Royal Society. “Does Aspell have any familiar haunts, outside the Hall?”

More silence, shaking heads. It sparked Galen’s anger. “Come on! There must be something. Where can they be safe? Abd ar-Rashid, give me the alchemical answer. What place is best for the work he intends to do?”

The genie closed his eyes and began to murmur to himself in rapid Arabic, unintelligible to them all. Then, still without looking, he changed to English. “Ablution. Washing the material in mercurial waters to reach albedo, the white stage before the creation of the stone. He will need to purify her . . . he would not have done this in his house, I think, even without being found. He needs a source of water, away from iron or other things that will harm her.”

Galen’s mind offered up an enormous list of water sources in London. “The ponds in St. James’ Park. The Chelsea Reservoirs. The Serpentine. Not Holywell—the New River Head—”

“No,” Rosamund murmured, cutting him short. “Think, Galen. The Thames.”

The answer so obvious, he overlooked it. Abd ar-Rashid’s lip curled delicately. “It is an open sewer. Not clean at all.”

“But the heart of London, and connected to the Onyx Hall,” Galen said. “Which is part of what Andrews is relying upon. Rosamund is right: he will use the Thames.”

Abd ar-Rashid was right, though, about the state of the waters. Somewhere upriver, then, where they were less fouled. Galen thought back to his Vauxhall visits, what he had seen from the barge. Westminster—no, too many wharves. The swampy banks of Lambeth, perhaps. Or Vauxhall itself? But while all of that, strictly speaking, fell under Lune’s authority—which extended to more than just the Onyx Hall itself—the farther he went, the farther he took her from the London Stone, and the heart of her realm. And Aspell knew about the Stone. Surely he would have told Andrews.

Galen stared blankly at the far wall, seeing in his mind’s eye the journey upriver. The wharves floating by, the fine houses along the Strand, the Palace of Westminster.

Upriver and down. Cleansing before the extraction. No one place would serve, but . . .

“What about a barge?”

A gleam came into Abd ar-Rashid’s dark eyes. He shared a little bit of Dr. Andrews’s flaw, Galen thought, the willingness to love an idea for its own beauty, without concern for its consequences. “A moving laboratory, for the volatile principle. Yes, it would do well.”

Very well indeed—if they weren’t speaking of Lune’s death. “Starting upriver, where the waters are cleaner, and floating down. If it’s her connection to the Onyx Hall he wants, then the—the
extraction
will happen in the City. Beneath the moon, I suppose.” Galen swallowed down bile.

Peregrin said, “Assuming all this speculation is correct. We have nothing but logic to support it.”

Gertrude had convinced Irrith to lie down again, or perhaps simple exhaustion had done it for her. The brownie said, “Might be we have a way to tell. I don’t know how far it goes, but—the Thames is connected to the Onyx Hall, and so are the Prince and Queen. If she’s on the river, he might be able to tell. Once she’s close enough, anyway.”

The Onyx Hall. A quiet presence in the back of Galen’s mind, grown familiar enough that he rarely thought of it. Could he use it to find the Queen?

He could certainly try. “In the meanwhile,” Galen said, “we assume nothing. Sir Peregrin, I’ll tell the Lord Treasurer to provide whatever’s needed. Search this city from one end to the other. If Lune is anywhere within London, find her—before tonight.”

“I’d bring you with me, but you need to rest.”

Irrith shook her head—or at least rolled it on her pillow, the best she could do. “Not even if I could, Galen. Carline almost tricked me once into telling her where the London Stone lay. I’m happier not knowing where it is now.” So long as there were vipers like Aspell in the Hall, she wanted to know nothing that could betray it.

He squeezed her limp hand. Even that light pressure forced her bones together—as it had always done, no doubt, but now she was aware of it, as she was aware of the fragility of her entire body. Irrith felt as if she’d been pounded, head to toe, with an iron club, and one more blow could break her. “I’m sorry,” he said.

She wasn’t sure either of them knew what precisely he was apologizing for. An unaccustomed prickling stung her eyes. “Galen—I think Podder was in that cellar. He didn’t run away.”

It barely touched him; his fear and rage for Lune left little room for anything else. But Galen nodded. Then, when neither of them could think of anything further to say, he turned to go.

When he was halfway to the door, his wife came into the room.

Delphia Northwood—no, Delphia
St. Clair
—gasped at the sight of her new husband. Irrith had no idea what Galen had been up to while she lay unconscious in Newgate, but his shirt was filthy, the back of his coat was slashed to ribbons, and his face was beginning to bruise beneath the blood. Small wonder the woman was horrified. “What in Heaven’s—”

He held up his left hand, seemed to notice the bandage on it, and replaced it with his right. “Delphia, I’m sorry; I don’t have time to explain. I have to find Lune. Something terrible has happened, and I . . . I need to be Prince right now.”

Irrith watched the words settle over Delphia St. Clair. Did the woman see the difference in Galen, beneath the blood and the bandages?
I need to be Prince right now.
He
was
the Prince, maybe for the first time ever. Not merely standing at Lune’s side, fulfilling his duties as required, but making decisions, giving orders. The change showed in his posture, the set of his jaw. The challenge had come—the crisis, not just the creeping threat of the comet—and he had stepped up to meet it.

As a Prince of the Stone should.

Delphia let him go, with only a brief touch of her hand on his shoulder. Then she stood, eyes cast down, in silence, and Irrith would have wagered all her remaining bread that the woman thought she was alone in the room.

But Gertrude would come back in a moment with mead for Irrith, and then it would be embarrassing to admit she’d listened to that exchange without saying anything.
I could pretend to be asleep.

Instead she cleared her throat, and watched Delphia try to jump out of her skin. “It won’t end, you know,” Irrith said. “This fight, yes—one way or another, it will be over tonight. But it will always be true that Galen has to be Prince. He’ll always be running off, and leaving you behind.” Not just for Lune’s sake, but for the entire Onyx Court.

The mortal woman came forward one slow step at a time, hands clasped over her skirts. She studied Irrith with curious eyes, and a hint of compassion. But only a hint; the rest was steel.

“I am not left behind,” Delphia St. Clair said. “I’m a lady of the bedchamber to the Queen. I’ll make my own place here in this court, and when my husband goes to do his duty, I will not resent him for it.”

Irrith managed a weak smile. She
did
like this woman, who commanded admiration instead of pity. “Well said. If you really do mean it, then I suggest you go above, where your words won’t hurt us . . . and pray you still have a queen to serve tomorrow.”

In a tiny alcove well concealed in the Onyx Hall, Galen stood with both hands upraised, clutching the rough surface of the London Stone.

It looked like nothing: a rounded stub of a crude pillar, protruding from the ceiling above, its tip deeply grooved by the abuse of centuries. Its significance to London above was half-forgotten, even as the Stone itself was half worn away.

But in the shadowy reflection that was the Onyx Hall, there was no place of greater significance. This was the axis, the point where the two worlds fused into one, and Galen could touch his entire realm with his mind.

The Hall, fraying and fading in scattered patches. The wall, fragmented more with every passing year. The hill of St. Paul’s Cathedral in the west; the hill of the Tower in the east. The Walbrook, running buried beneath the City, from the north down to the greater waters of the Thames in the south.

The Thames.

This was where Galen directed his thoughts, striving outward, seeking the Hall’s other half. He devoted some attention to the waters downriver, and more to the ground of the streets above, in case Lune should be there; but the greater part of his being he sent upriver, past the Fleet, past the Strand, past Westminster, stretching himself farther and farther as he went, desperately grasping for any tremor that might indicate the presence of the Queen.

He held the image of her before him like a beacon, shining silver and pure. The moon queen, as Dr. Andrews had said. A goddess beyond his reach, but perhaps this once he could serve her as she deserved, saving her from those who would cut that glory out of her flesh and feed it to the fire.

Before she could be saved, she must be found.

Farther. And farther. And
farther,
his spirit strained to the breaking point.

There.

The River Thames, London: March 17, 1759

The barge approached Westminster just after midnight, floating silently on the black waters of the Thames. Even the watermen who managed the craft worked without sound, going about their tasks like automata, their minds fogged by their faerie passengers. They took only as much notice of those passengers as was needed to avoid tripping over them, and no notice at all of the canvas-roofed cabin in the center of the deck, where a cool light unlike any lamp’s flame shone.

The fae were silent, too, until the thrumpin Orlegg elbowed his neighbor and pointed at a shadow on the water up ahead. “Glamour. Big one, on Westminster Bridge.”

All the faerie company, save those inside the cabin, squinted through the darkness to pierce the effect. The first one to succeed snorted. “Swopped the arches half a step, all the way across. Seems they don’t mind risking their Queen drowning.”

Orlegg growled. “They know we’re coming.”

The Sanists moved quickly. One charmed the watermen, persuading them to steer the barge straight for what appeared to be a solid stone pier. Another cracked the door to the cabin and whispered to those inside. Orlegg mustered the rest in preparation for battle.

The loyalists would not give up their wounded Queen without a fight—and so the Sanists would give them one.

All along the Strand, the wide road leading from Westminster to the City, folk waited in shadows. The Lord Treasurer had all but emptied his domain, armoring fae for the long night of readiness. A company had concealed itself in the alcoves of Westminster Bridge, hoping to catch the barge in its deceptive glamour, so they could swarm down on it from above; so far all they had caught were two little scullers, ferrying gentlemen home from their late-night pleasures.

But if fae rode upon the barge, that trap would do little good. And so the rest of the Onyx Hall’s fighting force, all those loyal to the Queen, strung themselves along the Strand, waiting to converge upon their target.