In Ashes Lie

LOMBARD STREET, LONDON: May 9, 1665

Jack Ellin barely waited for the hackney coach to rattle to a halt before he leapt free like a schoolboy released on holiday. Flicking a coin up to the driver, who caught it adroitly, he dodged through the press of bodies, horses, and carts that filled Lombard Street, and across to a familiar door.

Two clerks sat in the front room, tallying up accounts for the goods that filled the rest of the ground floor. Once there had been more, but Antony’s wealth had suffered almost as badly as his health during the King’s long exile. He had regained the house, but not all his former stature. The clerks nodded greetings at Jack when he passed them, heading for the staircase that led to the family’s living quarters.

The manservant Burnett met him at the top. “Is Sir Antony in?” Jack asked.

“He is, Dr. Ellin, but not in good spirits. Ill news came today, I believe, and Lady Ware is away—visiting family in Norfolk.”

Jack had forgotten. Kate’s absence was a great pity; she, more than anyone, could lift Antony from his black moods. Well, I shall have to do my best. Jack slung off his cloak. “He needs distraction, then. He’s in his study?”

He found Antony bent over a stack of papers. Guildhall work, most likely; the baronet had withdrawn from Parliamentary life just before the restoration of the monarchy, but he stayed firmly engaged with the politics of London. Last year he served as one of the City’s sheriffs. Jack would lay money on his election as Lord Mayor some day.

If he didn’t fret himself into his grave first. “Jack. I apologize for my distracted state—some business has me concerned.”

The ill news Burnett had mentioned, no doubt. “Oh?”

“A plague death in my ward. On Bearbinder Lane.”

It dampened Jack’s good cheer, and more than explained Antony’s own mood. Plague raised its ugly head year after year, but to find it in Langbourn Ward was worrisome indeed. Professional curiosity sparked. “I knew there was plague in the pestered suburbs, St. Giles-in-the-Field and the like—but here? Are you certain?”

“The searchers verified it. But there’s some suggestion the man was a foreigner, a Frenchman, who had only just removed from St. Giles; we may hope the distemper will not spread here.” Antony rubbed his eyes tiredly. “But you did not come here for that. I judge by the spring in your step that you have some good news to share.”

It seemed less bright, after speaking of the plague, but Jack put on his best grin and offered Antony a florid, courtly bow. “And so I do. You see before you, my good sir, the newest Fellow of the Royal Society of London.”

“Wonderful!” Now the smile was genuine. “I should mock you for this; is it not enough to be both physician and surgeon? Now you must be a natural philosopher as well.”

At Antony’s gestured invitation, Jack claimed the room’s other chair. “My love will always be the physicking of people, I promise you. But theories have their uses. Take Harvey’s work on the blood—”

“My dear Dr. Ellin, if you are about to subject me to some abstruse lecture on anatomy, you may save your breath; I will not understand it.”

Jack waved the objection away. “Nothing abstruse, I promise you. Merely this: that Harvey showed the heart is a sort of pump, propelling blood around the body with its action. Now, knowing this does not change the fact that if you put a hole in a man, his blood will all come out, and he will die. But! Harvey’s observations suggest that the veins carry blood only to the heart, and the arteries away from it.”

The old man’s expression said clearly that he did not see the point.

Jack sighed. “It all depends on where a man is wounded. What has been damaged: an artery or a vein? We might find ways to improve the efficacy of bloodletting, were Harvey’s notions more widely understood. And you see, that is what the Society is about! Sharing knowledge, and testing it—deriving knowledge from observation of the world, rather than relying solely on ancient authority.”

Chuckling, Antony turned back to his papers and straightened them, sweeping aside fragments from a newly cut quill. “I have no doubt you will fit with them like a hand in a glove. You certainly have the curiosity.”

“And the disrespect for authority—only you’re too kind to say it.” Jack leapt to his feet, still bursting with excitement. Once he was sworn in, he would have the Society’s patronage behind his work, and the Society had the King’s. What could he not do with that? “Come! Let us have a supper to celebrate. We could see one of those Punch shows in Covent Garden, or go to the gardens at Vauxhall. I only wish Kate were here to join us.”

A shadow crossed Antony’s features, most unexpectedly. What ailed the man? Something more than a single plague death, or even the larger threat in St. Giles.

Simple loneliness? His children were all gone: Alice married, Robin at sea, and Henry maintaining polite distance, with letters and the occasional visit, but nothing more. The thriving trade Antony had once ruled over now faltered; though still enough to keep body and soul together in decent comfort, it no longer seemed to give the baronet much joy in life. Kate’s journey to Norfolk could turn a man’s thoughts to his empty house.

Or more than that. “Did you and Kate quarrel?”

Antony rose and crossed to the window, gazing out into the cloudy day—and, as it happened, hiding his expression from Jack. He stood there a long moment, hands braced on the sill, until Jack almost gave up and changed the subject. But then Antony spoke. “I dislike keeping secrets.”

Jack blinked. “Then don’t.”

His old friend shook his head. “I do not—in every respect I can. But there are some few things in my life I can never tell her about.”

Which meant he should not be saying anything to Jack, either; it only roused the physician’s curiosity. Asking would gain him nothing, though. Jack said, “For fear of what? That she’ll turn against you? Antony, your wife loves you. You could burn down a church with a hundred parish orphans inside, and she would try to find out what good reason you had for doing it.”

“Not that.” Antony bowed his head, and the gray light gleamed through the gray hairs on his scalp. “I simply—cannot explain my actions to myself. I surely cannot explain them to anyone else.”

Though rarely at a loss for words, Jack had little notion what to say to that. Antony was not the sort of friend who shared the confidences of his heart—and while Jack might know about the circulation of the blood, he had no skill for dealing with that organ’s less physical functions. He bit his lip, thought it through, then asked, “Do you regret what you’ve done?”

Antony went still. “No.”

“Then why do you need to explain it, to yourself or any other?”

After a moment, the old baronet laughed ruefully. “I suppose I do not.”

“Just so. Now come.” Jack came forward and took his friend by the arm. Antony, surprisingly, permitted him the touch. “Supper, and some good cheer, and I will tell you about this ridiculous chymical physician who’s trying to gain entrance to the Royal Society.”

THE RED BULL THEATRE, CLERKENWELL: June 15, 1665

The audience roared with laughter as a gaily painted actor tumbled to the boards of the stage. The air in the Red Bull was stiflingly close and none too sweet, its foulness hardly veiled by thick clouds of tobacco smoke, but Lune laughed with all the rest, as coarsely as the red-faced mortal she pretended to be. Carline had persuaded her to come and see the new innovation of women actors, and while Lune thought the Bull’s lady shrill and overwrought, she was glad of the chance to distract herself.

The decision to come was not easy. There were six fae in the theatre that night, which meant six pieces of bread consumed—or rather, four pieces of bread, and two swallows of milk, though the latter was rarely seen in the Onyx Hall. Scarce resources nowadays; of the mortals who followed them from Berkshire, some had drifted away slowly, others with more speed, once the plague broke out in London’s parishes.

But Lune needed the diversion. Her messengers—she might call them spies—had returned again, footsore and annoyed, without word of Vidar. It worried her, not to know where he hid; she did not believe he would flee so far she could not find him. Not that her reach was so long, but she knew Vidar, and knew his arrogance. To take refuge in Italy would be to admit that he had failed, and that he would not do.

Nicneven had not found him either. Which was less of a surprise, the Gyre-Carling having a shorter reach than Lune’s own—but it did not put her heart any more at ease.

The Red Bull Theatre was glad to provide the diversion she needed. Why exactly the man now onstage was wearing a wooden tub around his naked body, Lune did not know—she had missed the explanation, if indeed there had been one—but the sheer absurdity of it was infectious.

All her amusement fled, though, when she spotted a figure forcing his way through the patrons of the Red Bull. Antony did not belong here; his back was stiff with disapproval, and more than a few of the men he shouldered aside glared at him. The baronet paid them no heed.

It did not take a great sage to realize some pressing errand brought him. Lune touched Carline’s arm and murmured in her ear, then rose to greet Antony.

“A moment of your time?” he muttered.

“Of course.” A man behind her was already complaining that she blocked his view; she eased her way clear, stumbling as someone’s foot snagged her hem. I am no Queen here, she thought wryly. Were I mortal and Christian, I would call it a lesson in humility.

Being neither of those things, she had no particular appreciation for humility, and was glad to gain the freer air of St. John’s Street outside. Straightening the disarray of her skirts, Lune opened her mouth to ask Antony what was so pressing it could not wait a few hours for her return.

He spoke before she could get one word out. “What in God’s name do you think you are doing?”

The harshness of it put her back up, for it evoked the guilt she felt in spending their scarcity on an evening’s entertainment. “I’ve hardly spent a moment outside since returning from Berkshire,” she began, prepared to defend her choice.

Antony cut her off with a violent motion. “That theatre is supposed to be closed. All of them are, by command of the King and Lord Mayor. And I find you in their midst, with no regard for the law!”

Lune winced. She could not pretend she hadn’t known. Kings came and went, but the plague orders remained the same: in times of sickness, all such public gatherings were banned, to prevent the spread of the distemper. After the strangulation of the Puritan era, though, London’s inhabitants, mortal and fae alike, were wild to partake of the licentious mood fostered by King Charles the Second—even in the face of danger.

“Fae are not vulnerable to disease,” she said, in vain defense. “We can neither contract it nor spread it; our presence here makes nothing worse.”

“It makes nothing better, either.” Antony snatched off his hat, crumpling the brim in his fingers. The hair beneath was thinner than she remembered it, and brittle. Their exile had broken his health; Antony had never fully recovered. But there was life in him still, and most of it currently burning with anger. “Lune, the plague is spreading, and at such a rate as to frighten me. They say it is God’s judgment for our license. I do not know about that, but certainly such behavior does not help.”

Lune spread her hands in bafflement. She was not to blame for the folk inside, and she could not see why Antony behaved as if she were. “What would you have me do? Send Bonecruncher and his friends in without glamours, to frighten everyone out?”

“It would be a start. But I had in mind a great deal more than that.”

She blinked. “Such as?”

He stepped closer, until only the crown of his hat separated them, so his voice would not carry. The passion in him had faded, leaving behind something less easily read. “You have more at your disposal than simple plague orders and medicines.”

“Magic?” Lune, too, kept her voice low. “Antony…our enchantments have no power over this sickness.”

“None?”

She let him see the honest regret in her eyes. “Disease is not something we know. We may speed the closing of wounds, a little; there are tales of greater things, that have more power to heal. But none in our possession. And none, so far as I know, that can banish the plague.”

Frustration hardened his features anew. Deven had asked this once, too; the plague was a frequent visitor to London. Lune had expected it from Antony during the last great visitation, some years before the war. It might have been easier for him to accept back then, before his own age made him so aware of his inevitable death.

Or not.

The Prince half turned away, jammed his hat back onto his head. Then he said, “There are other possibilities. Some of your stealthier folk could watch shut-up houses. The watchmen assigned to keep them closed are sent away on errands, and then the people escape; or else they threaten their watchers outright, hold them off with pistols or swords while their families flee, carrying the plague with them.”

“Antony—”

“Or the gentler ones, they could bring comfort to those in confinement, and perhaps keep healthy those who have not yet fallen sick.”

“Antony!”

Her call silenced him for just an instant, and into that gap came the sound of a bell. It did not ring the hour, which had passed just short while ago, but tolled six times: the death of a woman.

It might not be plague, but she knew they both thought it.

As the holy sound washed harmlessly over her, Lune said, “How often are the bells heard? Too much for safety. You will tell me I should not have spent bread on this visit to the theatre, and you will be right. But even without that—Antony, we cannot afford to be in the streets, not such as you ask. Not with people praying constantly for deliverance; not with crosses painted on the doors of the sick.”

“We said we would protect London,” he said, with ragged determination. “If not all of England, then at least the City. Lune, you have to try!”

Something black and desperate curled in her stomach, shortening her breath, making all her nerves hum. The bell was still sounding, ringing out the age of the unknown dead woman. Somewhere nearby, a parish servant pulled on the rope, fearing that soon someone else would ring the bell for him.

“I cannot,” she said, through the thickness that made her tongue stumble. “This is not something I can affect, Antony. I am sorry.” And without waiting for his reply, she fled back into the desperate frivolity of the theatre.

ROSE HOUSE, ISLINGTON: June 20, 1665

“Oh dear,” Rosamund said, somehow communicating a world of concern and frustration in that short exhalation.

The new rose bush planted behind the Angel was yet a slender thing, but the house below had been more than restored; one of Lune’s first actions after retaking the Onyx Hall had been to lend the sisters aid in improving their home. The bedchambers were enlarged, and each had its own hearth, until the place had the feel of a sumptuous little inn that just happened to be underground. The courtiers were calling it “Rose House” now—a name that caused Gertrude endless vexation.

As a concession to her, the upholstered chair Antony rested in was embroidered with daisies, instead of her sister’s endless roses. The two sat in their own small chairs, having listened to his frustrated account of the argument with Lune, while food sat untouched before him. He had no stomach for it, not with the problems he faced.

Gertrude nobly did not comment on his refusal, though her eyes followed the dish as he pushed it aside. “She’s right, I’m afraid. We have no charm to simply banish disease. Not once it’s taken hold in the body, and we are none of us great powers of Faerie, to bless the whole City of London.”

“But that is not what I asked for!” Antony sighed and clenched his fists. “Very well, it is—but I understand why you cannot. What of my other suggestions, though? Why will she not even consider those? She all but ran from me when I asked!”

The sisters exchanged a glance—an ingrained habit that today only made Antony’s useless anger worse. His ill temper was not for them, and not even, he thought, for Lune; but it was hard to be anything like calm, when every day brought news of more parishes infected. The further it spread, the dimmer his hope of doing anything to combat it.

Their silent conference seemed to pass the responsibility for answering to Gertrude. “She’s afraid,” the little brownie said.

“Of church bells, yes, and crosses on the doors, but there are ways to shelter oneself—”

“Not of those,” Gertrude said. “Of death.”

Antony’s brow knitted in confusion. “Death? By the plague? She told me herself, fae are not vulnerable to it.”

“That isn’t the point,” Rosamund said softly. “The point is death itself. To see humans in such a state—not just one or two, but dozens, hundreds, and all the rest living in fear. Mortality. Some of the crueler goblins find sport in it, but not Lune.”

Gertrude nodded. “She’s touched mortality too closely, with all the bread she’s eaten, and loving one of your kind. She understands it just enough to fear it even more than most. But you’ll find few fae who would like the thought of being surrounded by the dead and dying.”

“No one likes it,” Antony said, staring. “No one with any spark of compassion in them. That does not prevent us from caring for those in need!” Except that it did. Already, those who could afford to were retreating from London, the wealthy going to their country estates, or imposing themselves upon cousins. He could understand the King leaving; they could not afford the risk of him dying. But others fled, too—even doctors, who of all people should stay to help.

People fled, though, because they feared the danger to themselves. What the brownies were trying to say was that fae feared the thing itself: death, stark and omnipresent, as incomprehensible to them as love.

They could love. And they could die. But it came rarely, and few of them understood either one.

He tried to have sympathy, without much success. He had greater concerns than to coddle the fragile feelings of immortal creatures who were in no immediate peril. But sympathy or no, at least now he understood the source of the Queen’s reluctance. And knew, too, that it would go beyond Lune alone, if he tried to seek help elsewhere in the court.

He would just have to find a way to move them past that reluctance.

It could start here, in Rose House. “Will you, at least, do what you can to help?”

“We always do,” Gertrude answered him stoutly. “Though it’s little enough, I fear.”

Antony sighed. “It will be no worse than mere mortals can do.”

THE ONYX HALL, LONDON: July 16, 1665

Someone was stealing Irrith’s bread.

The realization annoyed her; then, a few moments later, her annoyance surprised her. The mortal food was a gift from the Queen—more like wages, really, given over the years both for reward and practical use, as Irrith played messenger to the Vale and other faerie courts. Despite seven years in Berkshire, where such protection was rarely necessary, Lune had soon reverted to the assumption that one could not set foot in the mortal world without being armored by their food.

Now that she had experience of London, Irrith understood it. The fae of the Onyx Court lived with one hundred and nine churches above their heads, and more iron than any sensible faerie should get within smelling distance of. But once clear of the city, Irrith had no need of bread on her journeys, and so she hoarded much of her allotment. Sometimes she traded it for favors, using the little morsels like currency, but more often she ate it so she could venture outside in safety.

Proof of her own madness, really. She hadn’t done it as much of late, because of the plague; London was not a friendly place nowadays. She even thought about returning to Berkshire, where she wouldn’t have to worry about such horrors. If she did leave, though, Irrith knew she would return. The mortals here kept changing! New plays, and new broadside ballads, and men’s clothing had recently sprouted masses of ribbons like brightly colored fungus. She couldn’t give up the chance to stare at them.

But she could only do that if she had bread to protect her, and someone had begun pilfering it.

When she realized it, she thought of informing the guards—not the Onyx Guard, who protected the Queen, but the lesser warriors. She preferred not to bother them, though, and so one day, after receiving her allotment from Lune, Irrith left her bedchamber and passed very obviously through a public area where other fae gathered, then circled back by a more secret route.

For all that dwelling encased in stone bothered her, she liked the bedchamber Amadea had found for her. The Lady Chamberlain, searching for something that would evoke Irrith’s home, put her in a room where pillars of silvery marble had been carved to look like birch trees, sprouting leaves of green agate along the arching branches that supported the ceiling. It was in the shadow of one such pillar that Irrith concealed herself, to catch the thief.

She was a patient creature, when she had to be. Fae ate when they felt like it, and so Irrith could sit there for days, if necessary. And she was prepared to.

Patience, unfortunately, was a tedious thing. Irrith didn’t even realize she had dozed off until she heard a click—the lid of the box in which she kept her bread. By the time she had her wits about her, the door to her chamber was swinging closed.

Irrith was on her feet instantly, but not fast enough. The corridor outside was empty, with no footsteps to be heard. Charms for silence were easy things, though; she called one of her own, and stole with rapid, noiseless strides to the corner.

A shadowed figure vanished down another passage just as she peeked around the edge.

Despite herself, the sprite grinned. Very well, then. This was not the woods of Berkshire, and she lacked her bow, but it was a hunt all the same. She would track her quarry, and see where the creature went.

He—she thought the indistinct figure was male—knew the Onyx Hall well, whoever he was. The doorways and turnings he chose were familiar to Irrith only because Lune made her memorize them six years ago. They led her through parts of the Hall rarely used, leaving behind the bedchambers of the courtiers and common subjects. The warren she entered lay near the cathedral entrance Lord Antony had used, though its own passage to the surface came out in Billingsgate, near the Tower.

She suspected her quarry did not aim to go above, though. Her suspicions were confirmed when she stole a glance around another corner and found no one in sight.

There was a door in one wall, though, leading to Mab knew what. And the stone nearby was suspiciously clear of dust—the work of either some hob of single-minded cleanliness, or someone who didn’t want to leave his footprints on the floor.

Irrith had assumed the thief was just some courtier, hoarding the food so he could visit a lady-love in the City, or trade it to get political advantage over an enemy. It was the sort of thing courtiers did.

Now, she was not so sure.

Against her better judgment, Irrith crept forward, ready to bolt if her quarry should emerge, and laid one ear on the door. Faint scuffs came from inside—he had released his charm—and a clunk, as of a heavy object set on a table. Irrith wondered, biting her lip, whether she remembered her path to this room well enough to lead someone else back here.

Someone like a guard, or three.

She got no chance to answer the question. A crippling wave of nausea struck her without warning, dropping her to the stone. It vanished a moment later, and she fled like a wild thing, back around the corner to relative safety before she could even think about it.

Iron.

Her own charm of silence was gone, shattered by the cold aura. Iron, and a lot of it. Irrith gulped, swallowing down her nausea. Then held her breath, shaking, as she heard the door open once more.

She pressed herself into another doorway, trying desperately to keep the movement quiet. The faerie lights that floated through the palace were thinly scattered here, and the shadows were deep. They were enough to conceal her as the figure went by, carrying something before him.

Irrith felt no taint from the box he held, and the faerie she saw was not the one she had pursued. But if he had eaten the bread to protect himself from the iron in that room, he could also be wearing a glamour no faerie could easily break.

There was no time to summon anyone else. She had to follow, and hope she knew what she was doing.

Antony rarely used his bedchamber in the Onyx Hall. It meant a great deal to him, when he first came to this place, that he not treat the faerie palace as his home; his place was in the world above. And Lune had warned him that too much time below could warp his mind. But he made greater use of the other chambers alloted to him, particularly the study, for he also understood that as Prince, he must have a visible presence in the court.

He was less and less in those chambers of late, though, as his work above consumed more and more of his time. The papers spread on the table before him told the tale: the Bills of Mortality, numbers gathered from each parish, organized by cause of death. Plague dominated the list. Every week, more hundreds fell. In the parishes outside the walls, they had begun to dig great pits, into which the bodies were thrown without even the dignity of a coffin.

And in his hand, another list, which told him how little he could do to stop it. At his request, Amadea had compiled an estimate of the bread available within the Onyx Hall. It was shockingly small. Few mortals remained at court, and as for the city… people would not give bread to the faeries, when their own starving children needed it more.

That was the work that devoured almost his every waking minute: keeping London on its feet. Half of the Guildhall was gone, its wealthy men fled to safer homes, but Antony toiled on, with his deputy and councilmen and parish officers of his ward—those of them who stayed. Faerie London was at peace, at least for now; mortal London was coming apart at the seams. Orphans and widows, without anyone to feed them; merchants with no one to sell their goods to, for trade was at a standstill. There were no grand gestures that could sweep those problems away, only one small thing after another, alleviating what misery he could.

Which wasn’t much.

The knock on his door startled him. Few fae had anything to ask of their mortal Prince, when they were so reluctant to go above. Antony did not even have a servant attending him. He sat in a circle of warm candlelight, preferring that to the cold illumination of the faerie lights, and had little sense of the hour; it was easy to lose track of time here. The candles, and the darkness beyond them, always made him think it very late.

Shaking his head to clear it of bleak thoughts, Antony rose to answer the door.

The faerie outside was one of Valentin Aspell’s minions, though Antony could not remember his name. He bowed as best he could, despite the burden he carried, and said, “M’lord Prince, if I might beg a moment of your time.”

Antony gestured him in, curious. The box in the fellow’s hands was a simple thing, built from unfinished hawthorn wood, but it seemed very heavy for its size. “I presume your request has to do with this?”

The faerie nodded. He was a broad-shouldered hob, taller than most, but ugly as male hobs usually were. He carried himself stiffly—though perhaps that was merely his scrupulous care as he laid the box on Antony’s table, covering two Bills of Mortality. “Begging your pardon, but—I’m told you look for a way to help those above.”

He had all of Antony’s attention. “Have you found something?”

“In the treasury. Many things in there, and half of them we don’t know what they do, so m’lord Valentin, he laid this aside at first. But I have a notion.” The hob removed the lid, and beckoned Antony closer. He reached inside as the Prince approached, shifting something, and it seemed to Antony that chill air breathed outward, raising the hairs on the back of his neck. Shivering, he reached the table and looked inside—

A squat iron box sat within, its interior black and deep beyond all nature, as if leading to oblivion itself.

The sight shocked him so badly that he didn’t see the hob move. And he was an old man now, slow, while fae were unaging; before he knew what was happening, the hob had his wrist in a crushing grip, and was slashing at his hand with a knife.

Pain tore across his fingers, and blood sprang free. Not much—the cut was not deep—but a drop fell into the blackness, and something seized Antony at the core of his soul, dragging him toward that abyss.

It paralyzed his tongue, locking all his muscles tight. Antony fought to speak, but his throat would give forth no sound, not even Christ’s name. And could that save him from whatever enchantment might reside in iron?

A second drop slid down his fingers. As he tried to pull loose, it too fell, and the terrible pressure increased.

A third drop gathered, hovering at the edge of his palm—

Through the roaring in his ears, he heard a higher-pitched scream, and then the hob was slammed off balance. The third drop of Antony’s blood spattered against the hawthorn. The hob’s grip broke, and half-blind, Antony found the discarded lid and clapped it down atop the wooden casing. All at once he could breathe again, and see the chaos before him.

Irrith straightened with renewed vigor and plowed into the hob a second time, clawing and biting, tangling his feet with her own so he fell to the ground, where she kicked him until his own flailing defense upset her balance. But she collapsed with intent, her knee colliding with his head, and he went suddenly limp.

She stumbled to her feet almost immediately, recoiling from the table, although the hawthorn shielded her from the iron within. Antony’s candleholder had been upset by the struggle; he righted it, and beat out the flaming papers with his hat.

Then, and only then, did he look at the figure on the floor.

Ifarren Vidar.

We should have known.

The accusation would not leave Lune’s mind. Yet how could they? Who would have dreamt that Ifarren Vidar would find his refuge beneath their very eyes?

They found evidence enough of it in the Billingsgate warren. Vidar lived there like a rat—the sight afforded her some vindictive satisfaction—but he had been there for a long time. Perhaps years. There was no safety for him in Scotland, or elsewhere in England, and so he had concealed himself in the one place no one would think to look for him. Lune had not sought him there since the battle ended, and to know who was in the Onyx Hall required effort she no longer had reason to exert. He could have returned to the palace the very next day.

And somewhere in that chaos, he had stolen the iron box and its protective shell from the treasury. Lune should have paid heed to the things there far sooner, but too many of them had been gifts to Invidiana; she was loath to see what the old Queen had kept. From Antony’s description, the thing was obviously a prison—one that would hold even a faerie.

“I expect I was to be a peace offering to Nicneven,” the Prince said, with more equanimity than Lune thought the situation deserved. “She has threatened to kill me before.”

“Perhaps.” Lune tried to think past her instinctive revulsion, and the throbbing of the old wound in her shoulder. Irrith had been green, and understandably so, when a few brave souls came running to see why there was iron in the Prince’s chambers. The sprite was abed now, with a draught from the Goodemeades to restore her, and Lune had every intention of rewarding her with a knighthood. Irrith would likely not see the point of such a title, but Lune meant to acknowledge her valor. “Or perhaps Vidar meant something worse.”

Antony paled, showing he was not so sanguine about his close escape as he had seemed. “Worse?”

She paced across the chamber, stabbing the heels of her shoes into the Turkish carpet. She wanted stone beneath her feet, the hard impact and ringing noise. “It is no secret any longer that you are an integral part of my connection to my realm. What if you were severed from me by iron?” Despite her control, her voice wavered on the last word.

He did not answer. Like her, he could only imagine—but the possibilities ranged from bad to horrific. Lune doubted it would destroy the palace on the spot, but it might vitally weaken the enchantments, and at the very least it would leave her vulnerable, lacking half her power.

She had been one drop of blood away from finding out.

Vidar was locked beneath the Tower now, and the hawthorn box with its dreadful contents secured. But too many fae knew what had happened; they knew Vidar had been found.

Sooner or later, Nicneven would hear.

Antony knew that as well as she did. Leaving aside the question of the traitor’s purpose, he asked, “What do you intend to do?”

It was not a safer or more cheerful direction of thought. Lune was no faerie philosopher, but she had spoken to a few, in roundabout fashion, of Nicneven’s threat. She began with the death of mortal sovereignty in England, reborn when Charles the Second reclaimed his throne, and the philosophers found much of interest in that. But when she asked them to consider faerie sovereignty, their speculation had turned much grimmer.

Her instinct was correct. If she permitted Nicneven to hold the Onyx Hall to ransom—if Lune, a sovereign Queen, bent to the will of another—then she surrendered her realm. To give in to the threat would be to recognize the Gyre-Carling as a greater authority than Lune herself, one with power over the Onyx Hall she could not contest.

And if she did that, she would be Queen no more.

What came after that, even the philosophers could not say. Either Nicneven would be Queen in London, or no one would—but neither fate was acceptable.

She had shared this with Antony, reluctantly, and even begun to hope in the privacy of her heart that the Gyre-Carling would find Vidar before she did. It didn’t matter whether the Queen of Fife got what she desired; it only mattered that Lune not let her realm be used to force her into surrendering him.

But Vidar’s attempt on Antony, and Irrith’s valor in stopping him, had left her with only one option. “I must execute him,” Lune said.

Antony nodded. “So I presumed. I meant something more, though. What will you do before that?”

Lune’s brow furrowed. “Summon all my court…do you think I should send word to Berkshire, and wait for any who wish to attend?”

“If you like. Let me put it more bluntly: will you place him on trial?”

He might as well have spoken French, so little did Lune expect his words. “Trial? Antony, you cannot doubt his guilt. Even were his earlier crimes in question, you saw what he tried to do to you!”

“I do not doubt it,” Antony said. “But if it is certain, then it is easily proved—and why not do so? Conduct a proper trial.”

“Proper?” It came out a disbelieving laugh. “We are not mortals, Antony.”

What made him propose this so somberly? “No, you are not,” he agreed. “But that does not mean you have no concern for justice.”

“Justice will be his death.”

“Because you will it?” The question startled Lune into silence. “That is your royal prerogative, Lune. But you know my opinion on such things; it has not changed these many years. I disagreed with Pym on too many points to count, his endless attempts to strip power from the King and place it in Parliament’s hands, but in one matter he and I were in accord: we detested Charles’s prerogative courts. Justice must be an orderly thing, not the whim of a single person.”

“You think it a whim? ” Pain tightened Lune’s heart. “Antony, the fate of a traitor is death, among fae as well as mortals.”

He nodded again, but this time there was irony in it. “I see. And that, of course, is why you executed all the other traitors—like Sir Prigurd.”

A dozen answers, all trying to emerge at once, choked Lune’s attempt to reply. Prigurd had tried to help, in his belated fashion; as for the others, to kill them all would have been an act of unthinkable murder. She had her reasons—

But that was Antony’s point. She had made her decisions alone, on her own judgment, without recourse to any standard save that she set for herself.

Quietly, without accusation, Antony said, “Arbitrary behavior is made no more attractive because it comes from a faerie.”

Lune winced. “You were upset that I dealt with Prigurd in your absence; I understand that. I will not exclude you a second time. The exile almost killed you, Antony, and it was Vidar’s doing; you have every right to take part in his judgment.”

He smiled, as if she had said exactly what he hoped she would. “Good. Then for my part, I demand you put Ifarren Vidar on trial, and prove his guilt before all.”

Lune closed her eyes, despairing. “You will not give this up, will you?”

“Indeed I will not.”

She gritted her teeth. “He will be shown guilty.”

“I have no doubt of it.”

Then what was the point? To establish a procedure; to make the judgment of a traitor an orderly thing. And, Lune suspected, to give the people of her court some voice in punishing the author of their suffering.

Antony had absorbed more of the Commonwealth’s ideals than he realized.

“Very well,” Lune said through her teeth. “You shall have your trial.”

THE ONYX COURT, LONDON: July 28, 1665

She had cause to regret that concession as the next fortnight passed. Promising a trial was one matter; deciding how to conduct it was another. While Vidar languished in a cell, bricked up so thoroughly that only a tiny sprite no bigger than a dragonfly could get through to verify his presence, she tried to sort out a basis for the event.

The problem, which Antony no doubt had foreseen, was that trials were a thing of law, and the fae had none. They ran their world on common sense and royal prerogative: if the Queen deemed something a crime, it was, and she had the right to pass sentence. She suspected Antony’s true hope was that they would write themselves a proper code of law—but she was certainly not delaying Vidar’s execution for that.

We are not humans, she thought, but wondered how much strength lay in that defense. True, her realm was smaller, her subjects fewer, their society much simpler than the one above. Did they truly need laws and trials? But though she could reassure herself that she was a better Queen than old Charles had been King, she had enough perspective to understand how little that meant. Royal prerogative was royal prerogative, whether exercised with good judgment or bad. The rightness of the thing itself was separate from her person.

She damned Antony for putting such thoughts into her head, where they buzzed about like bees, and did not give her a moment’s peace.

In the end, she prepared for the trial by dividing her court into groups: the Onyx Guard, the Berkshire fae in residence, her privy council, and so on, allowing each one to select a single individual to serve on the jury. She ended up with nine, not the twelve the mortals liked, but no matter. Nine or twelve, she had no fear any of them would find Vidar innocent of his crimes.

The final problem came when she turned to the mortals, and discovered just how few of them remained. She knew the plague had thinned their ranks, either by killing them or sending them into flight, but she was disturbed to find only two left, not counting Antony.

While she was distracted, a vital part of her court had all but melted away.

I will fix it, Lune promised herself. But, as with so many things, it would have to wait. The mortals met to choose their juror, and by a vote of two to one chose Antony. “This is a faerie matter,” he said when she expressed her doubts. “You will be the judge of this case, not I. It would have been better for one of them to serve, but I will do it.”

He was playing a lawyer’s game, asserting his authority when it suited him, discarding it when it did not, but by then Lune’s patience had worn so thin she did not quibble. She just wanted the trial to be done.

They met beneath the mended ceiling of the great presence chamber. The jury sat in a line to either side of Lune’s throne, four to her left, five to her right; Antony’s own seat had been removed, and he sat at the far end of the line, so as to avoid the impression that he sat in judgment as the Prince. A chair faced them, awaiting the accused, and from behind it her subjects watched in silence.

“We hereby open the trial of Ifarren Vidar,” she said into the still air, “formerly a subject of this realm, having the title of Lord Keeper, which was stripped from him when he fled into foreign parts after our accession. His guilt will be judged by this assembly of nine, chosen out of the groups most affected by the late rebellions and invasions that have afflicted this realm. Let the—” Do not call him traitor; not yet. “Let the accused be brought in.”

A path had been left for him, down which a pair of goblins marched him under guard. The rowan-wood shackles once binding Prigurd were on his ankles and feet, though simple chains would have been enough to hold his bony limbs. Vidar wore them with disdain, and did not acknowledge the presence of any others in the chamber. His black eyes fixed unblinkingly upon Lune.

Now their positions were reversed; she sat upon the throne from which he had revealed his invasion of her realm. The throne that had been Invidiana’s.

She had not dared destroy it; the great silver arc of its back concealed the London Stone, and she could not risk that secret being revealed. But Vidar’s regard made her unpleasantly aware of the throne’s history, and of the crown upon her head. He gave her a brief nod, a faint smile—as if approving her achievements. As if to say, You have won the game I once played.

But it had never been a game to her. She was not like Vidar.

The contact between them broke when he sat, sprawling elegantly in the chair provided. Lune spoke again, words prepared with care. “Ifarren Vidar. You stand accused of conspiring with two foreign powers for the overthrow of our authority; of abetting the efforts of the late Kentigern Nellt to subvert our royal guard; of giving information to our enemies so that they might send murderers and other attackers against our safety; of attempting violence against the Prince of the Stone, and the final destruction of this palace that shelters us now. You also stand accused of fomenting riots and conflict among the mortals above, to disrupt our realm below. How do you answer these charges?”

Vidar’s bone-white skin was unmarked, and his black clothes were immaculate. Someone had given him water to wash in; perhaps Antony. It would be like the Prince, to insist on giving the accused his dignity, despite everything. If there was to be a trial, it must appear—must be—legitimate.

Yet trials were not a thing fae did. Lune expected the mocking smile that spread across Vidar’s face. He might sneer at mortals, calling them pawns, but he would have paid at least enough attention to know the farce Charles had made of his own trial, denying the authority of the court that faced him. But unlike the Lord President then, Lune was prepared for it. Her prerogative was to dispose of traitors as she pleased; if it pleased her to delegate that authority to others, she had the right.

“I am guilty,” Vidar said.

What?

He laughed outright at her dumbfounded expression. “What, should I dance for your pleasure? Plead my innocence, when not a faerie soul here would call me anything other than guilty?” His voice dripped venomous emphasis on faerie, dismissing the mortals as without consequence. “I could deride this trial of yours, but it hardly seems worth the effort. I am surprised you do not let the humans drip holy water on your head and wash your immortality from you, you love their world so much.”

Lune fought her breath back under control before she answered him. Murmurs ran through the hall, and the jurors were shifting in their seats. Antony was as startled as she—but she could not look to him for help. It would only lend credence to Vidar’s words.

“You are guilty, by your own admission,” Lune said, striving to sound neither surprised nor displeased. “Therefore there is no need for trial.”

Vidar bared his teeth at her in a terrible smile. “Indeed. This is my favor to you, Lune. After all, you have thirsted for my blood since before you stole the throne you sit upon now. I am your enemy, and I threaten the security of your power. Does this sound familiar? Speak the words! Order my death. It is what Invidiana would have done.”

Bile scalded her throat. Sun and Moon…

How many had Invidiana sent to their deaths, from this very seat? For a whim, for an evening’s entertainment—Lune was not like that. But amusement was only the secondary force driving the former Queen’s actions. Foremost, always, was the security of her own power.

Invidiana did not always kill those who posed a threat. If they could be punished in other fashions—disgraced, exiled, forced into penance, and thereby used to serve some larger scheme—then they lived.

Lune tried, and failed, to banish Cerenel’s voice from her memory, swearing the oath she forced upon him.

But if a courtier had no further value to Invidiana, if the danger they presented outweighed their use…then she ground them beneath her heel, to keep all the rest in line.

I am not like her.

Or was she? How often had she dreamed of Vidar’s death, sought it with every power at her disposal? She hesitated to kill—except for him. Not because he threatened her immediate safety, as Kentigern had when they called down the stones to crush him, but simply because he could serve no purpose but to threaten her power.

Silence reigned in the chamber. Few even seemed to be breathing. Vidar waited, smirking. Why would he do this? He gains nothing by admitting his guilt, save his own death!

But his death was a foregone conclusion. By advancing to meet it, he achieved the one victory left to him: he hurt Lune, struck at the very heart of her confidence upon the throne.

And if she executed him, every faerie who remembered Invidiana would recall his words forever.

Yet he could not live. Casting desperately about for any escape from this trap, Lune felt a smile spread across her own face, rising out of the vindictive triumph growing in her soul. He thought to claim one final victory, but she would deny him.

“Lord Valentin,” she called out, not looking away from Vidar, and heard a startled reply from the audience. “We have need of the item we recently entrusted to your safekeeping.”

“The b—” The Lord Keeper’s answer cut off abruptly. “Your Majesty—”

“We are waiting, Lord Valentin.”

At the edge of her vision, she saw him bow and exit the chamber, dragging one of the remaining mortals with him. Murmurs ran through the hall, fae asking one another what the Queen referred to.

“Silence,” Lune commanded, and received it. “We have delegated our authority to judge these crimes; we therefore ask the jury to render their verdicts.” How long would it take Valentin to return? Once out of her sight, he would run very fast. “Ifarren Vidar has confessed his guilt to all the crimes named. Do you acknowledge and confirm that guilt?”

Mere pageantry, making a grander occasion out of the truncated trial, and giving Valentin time to return. Vidar waited with the patient smugness of an incipient martyr. One by one, the nine jurors stood and stated their recognition of his guilt. We shall leave it beyond all question.

And when they were done, she said, “What sentence do you advise for such a traitor?”

Fae were often reluctant to kill, but not now. Every group had chosen the individual most eager to have a part in punishing Nicneven’s chief lieutenant in the long struggles between London and Fife. One by one, the jurors stood and called for death, Antony last of all.

The Prince would not like what she was about to do. But in the end, she was the Queen; she might listen to advice, but in the end the decision was hers, for the good of her realm. Antony was not here as Prince, and this faerie matter was not his to judge.

Vidar thought it nothing more than a means of shedding the guilt for his death. His smirk grew ever wider. But when Aspell and his companion reentered at the back of the hall, and Lune dismissed the jurors from the dais, a hint of confusion began to creep into the traitor’s expression.

The watching fae turned, and saw the box of hawthorn in the mortal’s hands.

The chamber rang with a gasp of horror so loud it was nearly a shout, and everyone shied back, forgetting the solemnity of the occasion. It left a wide aisle down which Valentin passed, followed by the mortal bearer.

While all eyes in the hall were upon them, Lune slipped a piece of bread free of her pocket and swallowed it. She carried some with her always now, for safety, and was glad of it.

The two reached the dais. All others had shifted well back, save Lune, Vidar, and Angrisla, who held the traitor forcibly in his chair. At Lune’s gesture, the mortal placed the box at her feet, and then gladly joined Valentin in retreating.

“Ifarren Vidar. For your crimes,” Lune said, “you merit death. But the murder of fae is abhorrent to us, and so we grant you this measure of mercy. We sentence you to imprisonment eternal—guarded not by lock and key, which may be broken, nor by watchmen, who may be bribed, but by the elemental forces that bind all fae.”

She lifted the lid of the hawthorn box.

The thing inside was small, no wider than the span of Lune’s hand. But it exuded a cold aura far beyond its size, that chilled her even through the protection of the bread. Iron had tasted of her flesh; its taint lingered in her blood, inside the defense of the mortal tithe. Lune had not expected that. Her intention had been to lift the box free herself, but she could not bring herself to hold it so closely. She had to gesture the mortal forward again, and have him set it atop the replaced hawthorn lid.

Now everyone could see it. The black sides were unadorned; its lid bore only a blank shield. But it was the one prison nothing could break free of, not even a faerie spirit—and she had in mind a way to ensure no one would ever let him out.

Vidar knew it, too. All the smugness was gone, and sick horror had descended in its place. But this was the fate he would have condemned Antony to; Lune remembered that, and used her fury as armor and goad alike. It is no mercy, but then again, he deserves none. She forced herself to reach out.

The touch of the iron was like the hottest fire and the coldest ice, and it called forth an excruciating answer from the half-healed wound in her shoulder. Lune was dimly aware of a scuffle, but had no attention to spare; clenching her teeth until she thought her jaw would break, she lifted the lid, and snatched her hand back the instant it was done.

The scuffle, it seemed, had been Vidar’s attempted escape. He now lay face-down on the floor three paces from his chair, with Angrisla on his back, twisting his hands in a tight grip. He might be sanguine about his death, but not this.

Lune was more than ready for the box to be gone. “Bring me the prisoner’s blood,” she said, and the mara grinned toothily. A demented light shone in her eyes as she faced down the iron aura, holding her position by will alone. Bonecruncher would not come near, but slid a knife along the polished floor to her. Angrisla carved a long slash down Vidar’s arm, then glared at the mortal until he fetched it and bore it to Lune.

She took the dagger and held it over the black interior of the box. “Thus do we carry out the traitor’s sentence,” she said, through her nausea and pain. Three taps of her finger sent three droplets flying from the tip, swallowed up by the impenetrable darkness.

Vidar howled. He writhed with abrupt strength, hurling Angrisla from his back, but then his body locked into a rictus; frozen, contorted upon the stone, he was a picture of perfect agony. Then he was insubstantial, then faint as a ghost; then he was gone, leaving blank marble and empty chains where his body had been.

A new light shone within the box, bloodred and murderous.

Lune slammed the lid shut. A spider now stared at her from the formerly blank shield. Shuddering at the sight, she gestured the mortal to retreat. He did so, with visible relief.

No one else looked relieved. But they would not have to endure much longer. “Lord Antony, if you would join me? Let us together place Vidar’s prison where it will disturb no one’s rest.”

A deep line cut between his brows as he approached; she thought he understood her meaning, but doubted whether it would work. I hope it does. I can think of no better way. He took up the box, and at Lune’s nod replaced it within its hawthorn case.

Her subjects breathed easier with the iron thus shielded, but when Lune reached out to the Onyx Hall, she still felt the taint inside the wood, like poison beneath a sugared coating. Or was that her imagination? Her hand tightened on Antony’s, and she heard his breath hiss between his teeth, as if he felt it, too. But the Hall answered when they called; the marble split open, as if it were sand falling away from beneath the box. Down it went; down, and down, deeper into the foundations of the Hall than she had ever gone, until at last it reached some indefinable boundary. The palace lay beneath London, but only in a mystical sense; one could not reach it with a shovel. Yet there was a point at which the Hall gave way to ordinary earth once more, the bedrock upon which London sat.

They left the iron box there, and sealed the stone above it.

Every single pair of eyes in the chamber was fixed on the floor, which had swallowed Vidar’s prison without a trace. Lune pried her hand free of Antony’s, and cast a sideways glance at him. He met it with a faint smile, knowing her concern. But his eyes were clear, and he showed no sign of weakness.

“It is finished,” Lune said. “Let Ifarren Vidar be forgotten.”

GUILDHALL, LONDON: August 12, 1665

The hoof beats of Antony’s horse echoed off the walls and overhanging jetties of Ketton Street. He might have been alone in the world, the street devoid of its usual hawkers and housewives. London might as well have been snatched away to a different realm, leaving its people behind; even the Onyx Hall seemed more populous these days than the city above it.

Antony sweated behind the kerchief wrapped over his nose and mouth, and wondered how much it protected him against the infected air. But leaving it off would certainly not help, and so he kept it on—just as he rode, instead of hiring a hackney coach, whose previous occupant might have borne the plague. His own coach gathered dust for lack of anyone to drive it. Antony’s household was reduced to Burnett and himself, and Burnett had enough to do, keeping his master fed and clothed. He was lucky to still have a horse, so many had been stolen.

A pile of rubbish half-blocked the turn onto the narrow lane between the church of St. Laurence Jewry and Blackwell Hall—the remnant of some shopkeeper’s effort to sweep the street before his house, in accordance with the plague orders. But no one had taken the refuse away, and the shopkeeper had clearly abandoned his effort weeks ago. Antony guided his horse past and emerged a moment later into the tiny courtyard of the Guildhall. On an ordinary day it would have been thronged with men engaged in government and trade; now it stood all but empty under the gaze of the statues adorning the Guildhall porch. Christ and the Virtues, their faces blank and stern. The only living figure in sight was a lone watchman, standing by the Triple Tun, whose door was marked with the familiar red cross and the legend Lord Have Mercy Upon Us.

Antony had long since given up shuddering at the sight. One could hardly find a street in London that did not hold at least one infected house.

The Guildhall itself stood forlorn, nearly as empty as the courtyard outside. Lord Mayor Lawrence had not called a meeting of the aldermen in weeks; half the council was fled. But Antony hoped that very desolation would aid him today. Men feared gathering in public places, where plague might spread. Here, though, their only company would be the spiders spinning their webs undisturbed.

He lit tallow dips in the Court of Aldermen, and brushed dust from his own seat. How many would come today? Sir William Turner for certain; he understood that his City needed him. Others had stayed as well. With the help of parish officials, they carried out the plague orders issued by Charles before he withdrew with his court, in the withering hope that it would somehow check the plague’s ever-rising tide. Nearly three thousand dead in the last week alone, and no sign of ebb.

Lune’s thoughts were elsewhere, waiting to see if Vidar’s cruel punishment would satisfy Nicneven and prevent war. But Antony had given up on blaming the fae for their inaction. In the dark of the night, when he lay in his bed alone, he did not believe any effort, faerie or otherwise, could make a difference.

And then the morning came, and he rose, and carried on nonetheless.

Footsteps outside the door. Antony straightened, but could not prevent a slump of disappointment when he saw Jack Ellin. “I hoped you were an alderman.”

“Then I am even sorrier to bring you this news.”

The bleak tone pierced Antony’s weariness, and he saw in the candlelight that Jack’s ironical face was pale and strained. “You—are not ill? ”

His mind leapt to that conclusion without prodding; it was the obvious one, nowadays. With Jack, more than obvious: the man, in his lunacy, was offering his services as a physician in the parish of St. Giles Cripplegate, now among the worst afflicted. Over three hundred and fifty dead there last week, and those were only the ones reported as plague; they were scarcely half the full total. Antony’s mind tallied the numbers reflexively.

The doctor shook his head. “Not I. But Burnett, yes.”

It should have upset Antony. Perhaps somewhere, far beneath his exhaustion, it did. At the moment, it was a blow to insensate flesh. Impact, without meaning. “How—”

“I called at your house this morning. He answered the door in a fever.” Jack’s jaw tensed, heralding his next words. “I examined him, and found the tokens.”

Hard red spots on the body, like fleabites. Coupled with fever, an infallible sign of the plague.

“Antony.” The name broke through his dazed blankness. Jack crossed the room with swift strides, but halted himself before he could take Antony’s arm. No doubt the doctor had worn gloves and all the rest of his usual costume when examining Burnett, but even standing this close could be dangerous, if Jack had breathed in the distempered vapors. How much longer could the man survive, going so often among the diseased?

“Antony,” Jack said, softly. “You must send him to a pest-house.”

He shook, roused himself. “Incarcerate him among the dying? I might as well shoot him myself.”

“He’ll likely die anyway,” Jack said. The topic was too familiar for tact. “The pest-house will not help his chances—but it will help yours. Antony, if you don’t send him away, they’ll shut up your house. With you in it.”

The backbone of all their attempts to stem the plague. A man could carry the distemper without knowing it; anyone who lived under the same roof as a victim must be locked in, until enough time had passed to prove they were not sick.

Or until everyone inside was dead.

Antony swallowed and turned away. “You have said yourself—the pest-houses are overwhelmed.” They had managed to build three, supplementing the two left over from the last great visitation, but they were scarce able to hold a few hundred, let alone the stricken thousands.

Jack would not let him dodge the question. “If you will not send him away, then you must leave. Remove yourself from the house, today, and go into the countryside. Join Kate. Shutting yourself in with him…you might as well put that pistol to your own head.”

They had fought this point before. Jack hated that order, and championed the pest-houses. What he advised now was nothing less than the knowing subversion of law. If Antony already bore the plague, he would carry it with him into the countryside, as others had done before him: the exact situation the plague order was designed to prevent.

That argument would make not a dent in Jack’s skull. Instead Antony said, “I cannot leave. We are meeting today to arrange relief; we’ve found ways to shift collections of coin from the parishes that can spare it to those that cannot, and to delay the payment of certain debts. Half London can scarcely feed itself, Jack, and trade is at a standstill. Would you have me abandon my city to famine and collapse?”

“No.” A trace of the old, wry smile crossed Jack’s face. “I know you better than that. But you cannot do that work shut up in your house with a red cross on the door, either. You must send Burnett away.”

The very thought of it ached. Burnett was loyal, and deserved loyalty in return. Antony would gladly have kept him at home, and hired some woman to nurse him—one who had survived the infection already. Far better than sending him into that festering realm of hell in St. Giles Cripplegate, where they could almost throw a corpse out a window and have it land in a plague pit.

Where Burnett would die, alone.

But keeping him would mean the end of Antony’s own ability to help.

More footsteps outside. Sir William Turner appeared in the doorway, and someone else hovered behind him. Two aldermen, at least; with Antony, three. Perhaps they would get more. And together, they might keep London on her feet.

They would. They had to.

Antony lowered his voice, and hoped that hid the shame in it. “Very well. Do everything you can for him, Jack.”

The doctor gripped his arm, heedless of risk. “My oath to God. I will save him if I can.”

CHEAP WARD, LONDON: September 13, 1665

Despite the oppressive heat, Antony shivered as he made his way on foot down Cheapside. Charred logs still crouched at the corner with Old Change, though the sudden downpour that extinguished the bonfire last week had vanished without a trace, returning the summer’s terrible dryness in its wake.

Three days of bonfires, burning throughout the City, ordered by the King from his court at Salisbury. Three days of flame, to purify the air.

Seven thousand dead, that very same week.

He swerved left to give a wide margin to a body slumped against the wall of the Mermaid Tavern. Dead, or dying; it hardly mattered which. The reek of death was in the air, the churchyards filled to overflowing and beyond, despite the orders that insisted all corpses be buried at least six feet deep.

His change of course brought him too close to another man, who shot out bony hands and seized Antony by the front of his waistcoat, crumpling the sweaty cloth in his fingers. “They insist we purge our bodies with potions,” the man gasped, foul breath gusting into Antony’s face. “They insist we purge the air with fire. But do we purge our souls? Do we repent our sins, which have brought this visitation upon us?”

A moment of frozen paralysis; then Antony shoved at the man, struggling to force him away. The buttons of his waistcoat gave way before the stranger did. “Get back! Do not come near me.”

The man laughed at him, exposing broken teeth, as if he had been struck in the face. “You have nothing to fear—if you are a righteous man. This is the Lord’s will, His divine punishment for a nation that has strayed from the path of holiness.”

A filthy, damnable Puritan. Rage flushed Antony to the roots of his thinning hair. “God,” he snarled in the man’s face, “has nothing to do with it. This? Is random bloody chance. It is our physical squalor, the garbage in our streets, the foul air we breathe. The pestilential suburbs we permit to crowd around our walls. God is not here. He watches from above as we scream in our agonies and die, begging His mercy or cursing His name, and He has nothing to do with any of it!”

The last shouted words echoed in his ears, reflecting off the smoke-stained walls of the shops that lined this once great street. The Puritan was running by then, staggering down Bow Lane, desperate to get away. Antony gasped for breath, his head pounding. When had he last eaten? He could not recall. With Burnett gone, vanished into the maw of the pest-house, no doubt dead by now, he made shift for himself as best he could.

There should still be a cold meat pie for him at home—if he had not eaten it already. Antony could not remember. They could feed him below, but he would not go; he could not bear the sight of the fae anymore, clean and whole and safe from the cataclysm above. If this heat did not break, if the plague did not subside, then even the living few would soon be gone, and London left to the ghosts and the faeries in the shadows.

He set off again, moving more by force of habit than anything else, down Lombard Street to the familiar door. He fumbled a cluster of rue out of his pocket and breathed deeply of its pungent scent, hoping to clear any contagion picked up from that man. Was there anything yet in his house that could take this headache from him? He could scarcely think through its clamor.

The door opened. The interior of the house was blessedly cool, no fire having been lit in the hearth for days, and Antony wrenched off his doublet and waistcoat, baring his sweat-soaked undershirt. The thought of food turned his stomach. He would eat later, after he had rested. Dropping the garments to the floor, Antony sought his bed, where he lay shivering and restless, waiting for his tremors to cease.

THE ONYX HALL, LONDON: September 14, 1665

“The problem,” Valentin Aspell said patiently, “is that it fades, your Majesty.”

Lune resisted the urge to snarl at him. Instead she forged her irritation into a sharper, cooler edge of condescension. “I am aware of the nature of faerie gold, Lord Valentin. But with judicious timing, we might yet be able to assist Lord Antony in a manner that does not expose us to the threats above. If we can do nothing for the sick, we may at least help those who are still well, by giving them the coin with which to buy food and other necessities.”

As her Lord Keeper reminded her, faerie gold would eventually turn back to leaves, and that could draw unwanted attention. But from what Antony said, the chaos above had reached such a pitch that their interference might pass unremarked. He had even named a few fellows that might be suitable targets. One boasted of increasing his personal wealth as he rushed all over London and Westminster to obtain supplies for the Navy in their wars against the Dutch, yet gave only a few pounds for the relief of the afflicted.

“Samuel Pepys,” she suggested to Valentin. “In Seething Lane. Substitute faerie gold for some of his own, and I shall give the true coin to Antony, for distribution elsewhere.”

The Lord Keeper bowed. He did not see the point of this, Lune knew. To his way of thinking, the plague was a necessary cleansing of the filthy, overcrowded streets of London and its suburbs. Humans were not meant to live like maggots, crawling over the rotting corpse of their home, polluting their houses with their own smoke and waste. He had little understanding of them as people, and no sympathy for their plight.

But Lune did. The carnage above sickened her, evoking the terrifying specter of mortality; she shuddered at the thought of going above, among the boarded-up windows and the painted crosses and the desperate prayers of the dying. Yet this little thing, she could do. She knew Antony thought her wholly occupied with faerie affairs, the breathless wait for Nicneven’s next move, but the waiting threatened to drive her mad. And it would ease his heart to know she had done something, small though it was. When he returned, she would have a surprise for him: a windfall from the men who gilded their own coffers while others starved for want of charity.

“Why are you still here?” she asked Valentin, who flinched. “Find someone to carry this out—or I will send you.”

“Yes, madam,” he murmured, and fled.

LOMBARD STREET, LONDON: September 15, 1665

Antony needed water. A raging thirst had scoured him for hours, parching his throat and mouth and gut, while sweat poured off his skin to soak the clinging bedclothes. He had fetched watered wine from the cellar…he could not remember how long ago. The jug sat empty now, knocked onto its side, though he could not recall drinking from it. Perhaps he had spilled it all.

He called weakly for Burnett, in a voice that went no farther than his bed, before remembering the servant was gone. In the pest-house. Dead, by now.

Pain stabbed upward from his groin, curling his body in protest. Medicine. Was there nothing in the house for pain? For the headache that threatened to split his skull in half? Antony knew dimly that he had a fever, and must bring it down—cool cloths, soaked in water, to lay across his forehead. Kate would do that. She had gentle hands.

No. Kate was not here either. Dead? God forbid… no, she was in Norfolk still. They exchanged letters, but only rarely, since few men were brave enough to carry the post. He prayed the plague had not come to her there. She was safe, as Jack wanted Antony to be.

The stairs creaked. Burnett at last; the servant must have heard him call. No, his voice was gone; but Burnett was a good man, and came to check on him regardless.

“God have mercy…”

Not Burnett. Antony forced his eyes open, and Jack Ellin’s face swam into focus. He croaked the name, unsure whether this was another figment of his fever.

Jack had nothing over his mouth; he should be wearing a kerchief, or one of those ridiculous beaked masks some doctors affected, stuffing the front with strong herbs to cleanse the air they breathed. The man’s hands felt like ice through Antony’s sodden linen shirt. He shivered uncontrollably and tried to push them away, but Jack evaded him with ease and yanked the laces open. Antony gasped in pain as the physician rolled his head to one side and then the other, checking his neck and under his arms; then agony lanced through him again as Jack pulled aside his drawers to examine his thighs.

The doctor growled an oath, and that forced home the truth Antony had been denying all this time. Telling himself it was just a fever. A headache. It would pass.

“I am dying,” he whispered.

The pain was unmistakable. Bad now, it would only grow worse, until he ran mad, and thought of ending his own life to end his suffering. Antony could feel the swellings in his groin, not just tokens but the very stamp of the plague.

“You will not die,” Jack said violently, and shifted his weight back, preparatory to a burst of activity that would bring all his medicinal art to bear on the task of saving Antony’s life.

Antony caught his arm before he could stand, digging his fingers in hard. “Listen. You must do something for me. You must.”

Jack covered the hand with his own. “Tell me.”

“You must do it. Your oath on it. Swear to me, before God, that you will do exactly as I bid you. No matter—no matter how strange it seems. No matter what you see.”

The physician’s face grew hesitant. “Antony—I must fetch my medicines, lance the swellings—”

“Later,” Antony rasped. He did not know whether it was sweat or tears that ran down his cheeks. “Swear it!”

Jack swallowed, then nodded once. “As God is my witness, I will do as you bid me. If it will get you to cooperate, I’ll do anything.”

Antony sagged back against the pillow, made weak by relief. His hand trembled against Jack’s arm, its grip now slackened. “Thank you. God bless you, John Ellin. You may save my life indeed.”

THE ANGEL INN, ISLINGTON: September 15, 1665

What in the name of the Devil’s unholy arsehole am I doing here?

Fulfilling his oath to Antony. Every stride Jack’s horse took northward felt like another strip carved out of his heart; he should be back in Lombard Street, burning quicklime and spices to cleanse the room, getting opium and hopefully some food into his afflicted friend.

But Antony would not rest; he kept repeating his feverish words. And so Jack rode north into Islington, on the word of a dying—

Do not say “dying.”

On the word of a very sick man.

The faster Jack carried out his duty, the sooner he could get on with his treatment. It had saved some patients, he believed. None of them so old as Antony, true—

He snarled the thought away, and dismounted behind the Angel Inn.

Go to the rosebush, Antony had said, and tell it your name.

Jack felt like an ass, but he suspected a secret meaning in the instruction. Antony had friends, he knew, from before the King’s restoration, and subtle means of passing information; Jack had long thought some of them associated with the Angel Inn. Speaking to the rosebush was no doubt a signal. But he didn’t share Antony’s apparent conviction that someone would be watching, ready to receive his message.

Nevertheless, he had sworn it. So, taking a deep breath, Jack bent to one withered, rain-starved blossom and said, “My name is Dr. John Ellin. Sir Antony Ware has sent me to say that he has fallen ill with the plague. He is in his house in Lombard Street, and begs—”

He got no further, because the rosebush began to move. The tendrils stretched themselves upward, forming a graceful arch. Jack stumbled backward in surprise, then fell without dignity on his rump as a woman appeared in the arch. “Lord Antony? Sick? Oh, no—”

Then she stopped, because a familiar sound rang out over the grassy field: the church bell of Islington, tolling the death of a parishioner.

The woman’s eyes rolled up in her head, and she crumpled to the ground.

Jack sat in the grass, staring. Did a three-foot-tall woman just come out of a rosebush and faint at my feet?

He had his answer an instant later, when a second woman of equally small stature popped out of the arch, looking harassed and bearing a tiny cup in one hand. She made an exasperated noise when she saw the figure on the ground. “Honestly, if she had just listened—I warned her not to come out unprepared.”

Reflex took over; Jack crawled forward and supported the unconscious woman—girl? No, she was mature, though dwarfish in size—helping the other pour what looked to be a swallow of milk down her throat. “She fainted—”

“Yes, the bell. I heard it.” The woman tucked the cup into her rose-embroidered apron. “Come now, Gertrude, wake up—there’s a good girl.”

Honey-brown eyes fluttered open. She blinked twice, dazed, before seeming to realize she was lying against Jack’s knees. Then she sat bolt upright. “Antony!”

He rose, backing up a pace, and brushed the dirt and dried grass from the knees of his breeches. The two women were so much alike, they could only be sisters; were it not for their different aprons, he would have trouble distinguishing them. Antony had told him to bear this message to “the sisters,” and one thing more, to a specific name. If the woman with the daisies was called Gertrude, then the other…“Are you Lune?”

The woman with the roses blinked. “What? No, of course not. She isn’t here. Why—”

“I have a message for her as well.”

Focusing his mind on that errand helped. As long as he concentrated on his promise to Antony, he could keep the rest of that promise: to carry out his task no matter what he saw.

Both of the women were standing now. “Tell us,” Gertrude said.

Their faces were pitiful with concern; whoever else—whatever else—they were, Jack believed them true friends of Antony’s. But his oath was the only thing holding him together right now. “No. The words are for Lune alone; I’ll give them only to her.”

“Young man,” the rose-woman began, but her sister cut her off. “Rosamund, we haven’t the time. Lord Antony sent him; we must trust him. And the Queen will want to know, regardless.”

Catherine of Braganza? She was in Salisbury with the King. Let it pass. Rosamund fixed him with a piercing glare and said, “For Lord Antony’s sake, then—follow us, and do as we bid you, without question.”

He’d already sworn it, but there was no point in wasting time telling her that. Jack nodded, and they both sighed in relief. “I will make the horses,” Gertrude said, “and we shall go.”

THE ONYX HALL, LONDON: September 15, 1665

He went along with everything. He didn’t ask why Rosamund and Gertrude were taller when they mounted up for the ride. He didn’t blink when they stopped at an alder tree along St. Martin’s Lane and the sisters’ horses seemed to vanish into thin air, straws falling to the ground where they had been.

He even managed to keep from screaming when the alder tree swallowed him whole.

A distant, perversely calm part of his mind suggested that his brain was too dazed for questions or even fear, but that when he had a moment to think, he would react very strongly indeed. It was probably true. For now, Jack just gaped at everything, like a clod of a farmer come into London for the first time.

Smooth black walls rose around him, lit by cool lights that seemed to float without support. Creatures stared at him as he passed—beings that made Rosamund and Gertrude look entirely normal by comparison. The very air felt different, secret and hushed, as if he walked in a shadow made solid.

Any doubt he might have had as to the nature of this place and its inhabitants fell into dust when he walked into a great, vaulted chamber and saw the woman on the throne.

She sat beneath a glittering canopy of estate that would have beggared Charles to buy, framed by the sweeping arch of silver that formed the throne’s back. Her own hair gleamed as brightly beneath the fanlike coronet that capped it, while the midnight silk of her gown provided a splash of jeweled color. The high bones of her face never belonged to anything human.

The elfin woman was speaking to a serpentine man, her tone quite sharp, but she cut off when the sisters hurtled past a startled and sticklike usher, their shoes tapping a rapid beat against the marble floor. “Gertrude? Rosamund?” she said, in clear, resonant tones. “Is something amiss?”

They dropped perfunctory curtsies, as if begrudging even that instant of delay. “Your Majesty,” Rosamund said, “this man bears you a message from Lord Antony.”

Immediately, every eye in the chamber was on Jack. He had followed at the sisters’ heels, but forgotten in his stupor to bow; he did so now, as clumsily as he had ever done, and felt the amusement of some of the watching courtiers. The resulting spark of anger steadied him, and when he straightened, he met the faerie Queen’s gaze without flinching. “Are you Lune?”

“I am,” she said, ignoring the gasps at his insolent address.

“Then Sir Antony bids me ask you this: if you will not save London, will you at least save him?”

Dead silence. No one so much as breathed, let alone laughed. Seeing Lune’s stricken face, Jack wondered for the first time at the content of Antony’s message. He’d taken it without thinking, assuming it all to be part of the man’s feverish rantings—but no. Clearly it had meaning.

A meaning that hurt this elfin Queen, struck deeply at her heart. He had not realized, coming here, that his first words to her would be so terribly cruel.

“Madam,” Gertrude whispered into that terrible hush, “’tis the plague.”

The Queen came to her feet in a movement so swift his eye missed it. “Take me to him.”

LOMBARD STREET, LONDON: September 15, 1665

The stench of putrefaction and death filled the house, a foul miasma that choked Lune’s breath. The doctor hung back, strangely reluctant, and nodded at the staircase. Covering her mouth, she hurried up the stairs, terrified of what she might find.

His skin was corpse-pale and beaded with sweat, and he did not so much as twitch when she threw the door open. Lune hesitated on the threshold, trembling in every limb. Mortality, in its most dreadful form: the slow rotting of the flesh, with agony as its excruciating handmaiden. Gangrenous black spots marked his throat, striped with red where he had torn at them with his nails. Plague had come to London before, many a time; she knew enough to recognize what she saw.

And to hope, for one awful moment, that he was dead already, and free of this suffering.

The physician was behind her. Lune forced herself forward, one unwilling step at a time. “Is he—”

The man knelt at Antony’s side. John Ellin; that was his name. Jack. The memory swam up through her horror. Ellin covered his hand with a kerchief and pressed his fingers into Antony’s neck. “His pulse is weak, but he lives.”

Her breath rushed out in a gasp. Ellin examined Antony with gentle care, then paused. Not looking at her, he said, “He told me you would save him.”

The gasp became almost a sob. It is the war, all over again. Had I acted more decisively, and sooner—

She could not have stopped the spread of this plague. The mortals believed it was God’s punishment, for the licentious behavior of the City and its King; whether that was true or not, she had no power to halt it. But I could have kept him below.

He would never have stayed there, not when London needed him. If he sheltered in the Onyx Hall, though, where the air was unfouled, where there was no filth to breed disease…or if she had done as he asked, aiding in the mortals’ plight, so he did not exhaust himself in a battle he could not win.

Ellin pivoted on his knee, his pale face desperate. “If you have some charm that can save him, use it. I don’t know how long he has.”

Lune forced away her anguished thoughts; there would be time enough for those, later. The reply hurt her throat. “I—disease is not something we know. I cannot make him well.”

She watched the light in his eyes die. “But he believed—”

“He hoped.” Lune came forward, standing over Ellin’s shoulder, unable to look away from her dying Prince. “Had we any charm to dismiss the plague from a man’s body, I would have used it ere now. But we do not. The best I can give him…”

She trailed off, lost. Ellin shot upright and seized her by the shoulders. “What?”

The sheer affront of his conduct tore her attention away from Antony at last. “We might strengthen him,” she said. “A draught—something to aid him in the fight.” Whether it would do any good, she did not know.

“Then fetch it,” Ellin said. “At this point, nothing can hurt.”

LOMBARD STREET, LONDON: September 16, 1665

Cramps bent Antony’s legs up to his chest, setting off an agonizing fire through his hips and thighs. He cried out, driven from hazy, tormented unconsciousness into a waking state he had not thought he would see again.

Delicate hands touched his face, bathing his brow with blessedly cool water. He wept at the pain, and a voice soothed him, whispering reassurance it did not believe. I am dreaming, he thought. The fever has sent me mad.

If so, his madness was cruel. It should have brought him both Kate and Lune—though it was not safe for Kate to be here. He did not want her shut in with him.

Lune could not be here, not as he saw her, wearing her own face. But then a bell tolled, black herald of yet another death, and she shuddered; and that convinced him. This was no fancy of his fevered brain. She truly was here, without glamour, without protection, comforting him in his extremity.

“You are awake,” she said: an inanity to fill a void that could not be filled.

Somehow, a smile found its way to his face, though he suspected it looked more like a rictus. “Jack found you.”

She nodded. “And he is here now, brewing some strange concoction for you. I have never seen the like.”

Antony began to laugh, as if the notion were surpassingly funny. God above—had he at last driven Jack into the arms of the chymical physicians, with their inexplicable remedies for bolstering the body’s vital spirit? Salts and mercury and Heaven knew what else. Lune smiled at first, but it faded to concern as he continued to laugh, long after he should have stopped. Once he subsided to wheezing, she said, “You must be feeling better, to show such humor.”

His breath caught in his throat, and he coughed, rackingly, on his own spit. When he could speak at last, he answered her bluntly. “I am dying.”

So he had told Jack, and the doctor denied it. Lune was not so practiced at a physician’s politic lies. Her eyes told the truth.

“Forgive me,” she whispered. Her hands sought out his own and clutched them tight. “I would save you, if only I could.”

Antony hissed, almost crushing her fingers. The swellings were excruciating, enough to drive a man mad; he wanted to run, scream, do anything to distract himself from the pain. Fling himself into a plague pit, perhaps, and wait for the dirt to blot out the sun. “You cannot. I understand that. And I—I forgive you.”

The words cost him. So many years he had stood at her side, always knowing that he would die, and she would go on. But it was bitter indeed when it came. I will be forgotten, soon enough. A single name, in a litany that will stretch far beyond my time.

But he did not want his name remembered, if the cause to which he had dedicated his life fell into ruin. “Lune,” he whispered, half-strangled, but determined to get it out. “I am lost. Do not let London be lost with me.” What remained of it, after death’s scythe had swept across it these long months.

“I will not,” Lune promised. Anything, no doubt, to give him peace.

His hands were slick with sweat, although thirst parched his body dry. “The people are what matters. Yours and mine both. They need you. They need all who love this City, to preserve it against its fall.”

Her silver eyes wavered with shame. He did not hate her for her weakness, the terror that paralyzed her—but she hated it in herself. And abruptly, in a voice made strong by wild determination, Lune spoke. “In Mab’s name, I swear to you that I will do everything I can to preserve London and its people from disaster—and let fear hinder me no more.”

He inhaled sharply. Not the empty assurances she gave before: an oath. Still binding to fae, though mortals broke their sworn word with impunity.

This, then, would be his legacy to the Onyx Court: that he had shamed their Queen into making fast her commitment to the mortal world. Not just the one mortal at her side, but all the ones above.

His time among the fae was one of success and failure so closely interwoven that few strands could be picked out, but this, the last thread, shone gold among them all.

It did nothing to abate the agony of his swollen body, the delirious heat of his fever. It did not make Jack’s treatments hurt any less, as the physician lanced the pustules and fed him medicines that burned his throat. Nothing, in the end, could make the remaining span of his life any less of a torture—not even God. He almost asked Lune to end it for him; there would be no stain upon her inhuman soul, and one more could not blacken his by much.

But he had always fought before, and so he fought now, until the last of his strength gave out, and blackness took the pain away forever.

LOMBARD STREET, LONDON: September 18, 1665

The silence had lasted for over an hour, and it told Jack everything. He waited in the deserted kitchen, mortar and pestle forgotten in his hands, and stared unseeing at the floor, while periodically his vision blurred with tears.

Guilt gnawed at his insides, inescapable and cruel. Not only had he failed here; how many others had he neglected, in trying to save Antony? What would be the death toll this week? Could he have preserved any of them, if he left this place and went to their aid?

A question not worth asking, for no force in the world could have pried him from this house.

But the footsteps on the stair confirmed what he already knew: that his use here had ended. He put down the mortar and pestle, scrubbed his face dry with one sleeve, and stood to face the door.

The faerie woman looked as haggard as he, as if every vital drop had been drained from her. She met his gaze without flinching and nodded once.

He clenched his teeth and looked down. Not so ready for it, after all. And how would he tell Kate?

Lune, it seemed, was thinking of matters even more immediate. “His parish was St. Nicholas, was it not?”

The reminder stung Jack. Antony had refused a priest at the end, with bitter words that horrified the physician and put Lune whimpering on the floor. But whatever the man’s anger at God, he must be buried. “The churchyard at St. Nicholas is full. As they are everywhere.”

Her eyes might have been steel instead of silver. “I will not see him flung into a plague pit outside the walls. Antony will rest in sanctified ground.”

Her concern for such matters surprised him. Jack sighed wearily. The wealthy could afford to buy such concessions, and despite his charity these past months, Antony no doubt still had enough. “I’ll see to it.”

“Thank you, Dr. Ellin.” Raggedly spoken, but gracious. Lune sounded far too serene. Was she even capable of grief? Something had torn at her during those long hours at the dying man’s side, but he did not think she wept.

He began cleaning away the scattered remnants of his ineffective medicines. “I did little enough.”

“You stayed with him,” Lune said. “Which is all anyone can do.”

It made his hands pause in their task. Another bedside, with Antony lying insensate. Another woman who aided him then. Jack had given his name to the sisters, but not to this woman, and yet she spoke as if she knew him—as if they’d met before.

“You were Mistress Montrose,” he said.

A slight intake of breath, audible in the perfect silence of the house. “You have a good eye.”

A host of other questions followed on the heels of that one, but he had not the heart to ask them. Antony had spoken of secrets; it seemed Jack had found them. He emptied the mortar into a bucket, wondering what he would do now.

Lune shifted her weight. “Dr. Ellin. You’ve seen a great deal that few others have. I know you have little enough reason to hear me—but I would propose an exchange between us.”

His fingers tightened on the stone bowl. Facing her was hard; her inhuman presence unsettled him too much, at a time when he had not much stability to spare. But her words put all his nerves on edge, and he could not stand with her at his back. “What could I give you, that you would desire?”

The sculpted lips tightened in a painful, ironic smile. “Not your soul, Dr. Ellin. Tell me: how large is a penny loaf of bread these days?”

“Nine and a half ounces.” What did that have to do with anything?

“Could you afford an extra one each day?”

On the money the City was paying him for his services, no. A bloody apothecary was paid more, because of the medicines they mixed; he should give up his place in the College of Physicians and hire himself out as a vendor of drugs instead. But Jack was already bankrupting himself fruitlessly in combating the plague; if this could gain him anything in return, he would do it without hesitation. “To what end?”

“Our greatest obstacle,” Lune said, “is a l—” A nearby bell rang, and she staggered. Jack was there before he could think the better of it, taking her arm and lowering her onto a stool. For all her height, she weighed less than a bird. She had fainted, he thought, but recovered an instant later, and let out a breathy laugh. “My point precisely. We lack protection, as you can see. If you are willing to tithe a loaf of bread to the fae each night, then we will help you.”

It sounded simple—which made Jack suspicious. “Did Antony do this?”

“He could not. He was…too close to us.”

A phrase with disturbing implications. “What help do you offer?”

Lune lifted her chin. “What do you need?”

The silver eyes chilled him, but Jack forced himself to think past their inhuman touch. “Assistants—ones who need not fear catching the plague. Money for medicines. A place to shelter the sick, away from the healthy, instead of shutting them up together so that all will die. Clean places to bury the dead. An end to the arguments between the Galenic physicians and the chymical physicians and the surgeons and the apothecaries, and all the quacks who prey upon the desperate driven out of town with a whip. Rain, to cleanse the air and end this heat that breeds distemper.” How much lay within her power, he had no idea—but she had asked.

The elfin woman nodded slowly, thinking. “I cannot give you all of that. But if you give us the bread we need… I dislike begging the tithe so baldly, but we have reached a pass where it is necessary. With bread, I can order my people into service.”

Jack thought of the disdainful looks he had received from her courtiers. His mouth quirked. “So long as you give me the least resentful ones as my nurses, Lady, we have an accord.”

THE ONYX HALL, LONDON: December 9, 1665

Dame Segraine stepped ahead to open the bronze-bound door, which meant she did not see the involuntary shudder that rippled across Lune’s shoulders. Most of her subjects didn’t notice the tremors—not unless they came near this place, and few enough did that without explicit orders. She felt them, no matter where she was.

Despite being alone.

The gravedigger had laid Antony to rest in his parish churchyard. Late at night, in accordance with the plague orders, with no one there to mourn; but Lune and John Ellin watched from the shadows, concealed by a charm, and protected by some of the bread he gave to the court. The ground was clogged with bones and fragments of coffins, past burials broken open by the need to make space for more. It was hardly the dignified end Antony Ware deserved. But he had deserved far better than the death he had, too.

His absence left a hole in her life. Strange as it sounded, she missed their arguments; she missed having someone to confront her when she needed it, even in front of her own courtiers. His solidity had been a foundation she depended on.

And without him, there was likewise a hole in her power. Lune hoped no one guessed just how vulnerable she was, ruling on her own. At least she was still able to command obedience—however much her courtiers resented it.

The door creaked open, and moans ghosted through the gap. Lune went through quickly, and Segraine shut the portal behind them, closing them in with the scent of death.

She’d chosen this area carefully. The twists and turns of the Onyx Hall had no logic to them; some parts were open and airy, while others were confined warrens. This part was accessible from only three points, one of those leading above to Billingsgate. The other two could be closed off, creating a space Dr. Ellin could use as his pest-house.

The idea had seemed absurd at first. Bring mortals into the Onyx Hall? Well enough when they were trusted friends, or passing diversions brought in for brief glimpses, and few in number. Over a hundred lay on pallets throughout these chambers, and they stayed until they recovered or died. They were the poor, the forgotten, those whose families could not care for them. Ellin brought them below, sequestering them so they would not spread their infection to the healthy. With the chambers stripped of all furnishings save those needed for their care, and the doors guarded against their wanderings, there was little enough to tell the patients where they were. And if the otherworldly atmosphere of the place struck them as strange…well, high fevers could explain much.

How much of a difference did it make? Lune wondered if she deluded herself into thinking it too much, assuaging her own guilt through a show of action. Antony had bade her protect the people of London, and so she did what she could. Ellin, who was far more knowledgeable in these matters than she, said it did some good.

Fae moved through the space, carrying water, medicines, food brought from above. Hobs made up the greater part of their number, called to this service by their helpful natures, but there were others as well. Some of the goblins came out of a twisted interest in the suffering and putrefaction of flesh. Ellin hated them, but so long as they followed his orders, they were permitted to stay.

A despairing cry broke the quiet atmosphere. “God help me—please, I beg you, end my pain…” Several fae flinched, purely out of reflex. They were all protected. None of them, though, liked it when the mortals called out in their extremity. And the Onyx Hall’s stones trembled, but held.

Lune exhaled slowly. Isolated voices, crying out in delirium, could not destroy this place—but she tensed every time it happened.

She saw Ellin up ahead, wiping sweat from his face despite the cool air. Lune touched Segraine’s arm and pointed at an ugly little hob struggling along beneath a copper of water. “Aid him. I will not go far.”

Alone, she approached the doctor, who gave her a weary smile. “Did the Goodemeades send you?”

“No one ‘sends me’ anywhere,” Lune said with asperity. The shared misery of easing Antony through his final hours had created a peculiar bond between them, one that bypassed the deference of her rank. They had somehow transformed from strangers to close allies without any intervening stages, as if they had known each other for years. “I keep my own eye on you, Dr. Ellin.”

“They left here not an hour ago,” he said, dropping his sodden handkerchief on a tray carried by a passing puck. “To purchase more food, I think.”

Lune raised an eyebrow. “They left nearly half a day ago, and the food came not long after. They are resting. As you should be.”

His surprise looked genuine. Lune smiled wryly. “Time is strange in this place. You are still not accustomed to it.”

“Apparently not.” Ellin sank down upon a crate, resting his back against the wall. He could do courtesy when he chose to, but here, working in his element, he lapsed into a more casual manner, sparing his energy for those he tried to save. “I’ll rest; you have my word. In fact…”

While he trailed off into thought, Lune snapped her fingers and summoned a hob. Exile in Berkshire had taught her the names of all her subjects who followed her there, but those who stayed apart were often unfamiliar to her. She knew her courtiers, but not those who lived below the glittering beauty of her court, shunning the elegant amusements of the privileged. “Mead, for Dr. Ellin,” she said. The Goodemeades provided barrels full, though when they had the time to make it, she could not guess.

Ellin accepted the cup when it came. Initially he had feared its effect on him, but Gertrude convinced him it was safe for mortals to drink. After a hearty swallow, he said, “I think it may be time to close this place.”

“Oh?”

He nodded, gesturing around. “If you look, you’ll see that it’s emptier than it was. Plague weakens in the winter months. I don’t think this visitation has run its course, but I’m mindful of the dangers posed by keeping people here. G—” He almost choked on the name. “Ah, that is—someone forbid that next summer should be as bad as the last, but if it is, we might consider this little pest-house again. But for now, we may return these people to the London they left.”

I almost want to argue with him. Having come so late to the defense of the city, Lune was loath to end this service. But if she deferred to Ellin in the creation of the pest-house to begin with, she could hardly disagree when he decided to close it. “I have noticed myself that trade is reviving.”

“Yes, and the King may return soon. Nor is he the only one.” Ellin contemplated his mead cup for a moment, then muttered, almost too quietly to hear, “Lady Ware has returned.”

Lune went still. Then she asked, “Is that safe?”

He snorted. “Safety has rarely been her foremost concern.”

Antony’s children were grown and gone. The blessings they had received in the cradle would shelter them as much as could be; beyond that, Lune had no interest in them. Some fae assumed she would pursue the eldest as the next Prince of the Stone, but Lune had no such design; Henry’s disposition would be far too hostile to her, both as a faerie and a Queen. Antony, however, had loved Katherine Ware, and would want her looked after.

“Thank you for telling me,” Lune murmured, then strengthened her voice. “Well. If you are certain it is time to move on, then let us arrange the return of your patients to their homes.”

LOMBARD STREET, LONDON: December 31, 1665

The church service was a long one, praying for the souls lost to the plague, and beseeching the Lord God to preserve those who remained. Many who filed out of St. Nicholas’s afterward wore deep mourning; it was a wealthy parish, whose members could afford the black cloth that had grown so dear.

Fortified by the tithe, Lune could have gone in. It felt too great a hypocrisy, though, and so she waited outside in the winter air, watching, until she saw the drawn face and white hair of Lady Ware among the mourners. Then she followed at a discreet distance, from the church to the house on Lombard Street. Once enough time had passed to make it seem she had not followed, she crossed the street and knocked on the door.

Lady Ware answered it herself. Her weary eyes hardened at the sight of the face Lune wore: Anne Montrose, a familiar guise for her, and the one Antony’s widow would recognize. She had altered it for the years that had passed since their last meeting, but that was not so much.

“What do you want?” Lady Ware asked.

Lune offered her a respectful curtsy. “If it please you—I would beg a moment of your time. Nothing more.”

Katherine Ware hesitated, then grudgingly stepped back. “Come in.”

The parlor upstairs was a bare place; like so many other Royalists, Antony had been but meanly rewarded by the bankrupt King upon his restoration. What recovery he made through trade, he had spent in parish relief during the long, awful summer. His widow’s stiff posture suggested her embarrassment at the spartan furnishings—or perhaps that was hostility.

Lune sat upon a hard chair and doubted her own purpose in coming. What could the two of them say to one another, across the chasm that divided them?

She must say something. Smoothing the looped-up layers of her skirt, Lune said, “I am very sorry for your husband’s death.”

The aging woman across from her closed her eyes briefly against the grief. “Dr. Ellin tells me you were here.”

“Yes. I—am not vulnerable to plague. I have survived it already.” It happened; Antony’s old manservant Burnett was one of Ellin’s assistants now, having emerged alive from the pest-house. “If I could have done anything to save him, I would have.”

Lady Ware’s brown gaze was steady now. “I see. You were close to my husband?”

This, at least, Lune was prepared for. She said, “He was a treasured friend. No less, and no more.”

“Yes,” the widow said. “Antony told me.”

An unspoken world whispered in the name. That was their bridge across the chasm: the man who had been such a vital part of both their lives. And if Lune’s own life would go on for ages to come, as Katherine Ware’s would not, still, she would not forget the forty years they shared.

Nor the principles he championed, nor the promise he wrung from her at the end.

She stared at her gloves, struggling with herself. When Lune looked up, she saw a faint smile grace Kate’s lips. “You are wondering whether you should tell me more,” the widow said. “I will save you the trouble: do not. I know something of who you are, and what you did with my husband; some of what I know, he told me, and some I pieced together on my own. I suspect, for example, that the printing press we used during the war belonged to your secret fellowship.”

Lune’s eyes widened. It deepened the smile briefly. Then the merriment faded, and Kate’s chin trembled before she regained control. “I had hoped,” the woman went on, “that in time he would find the courage to tell me what secret he kept back. The plague has robbed us of that chance. But if I cannot hear the remainder of it from my husband, then I do not wish to hear it from you. Let it be, Mistress Montrose.”

The speech surprised Lune, and she wondered if Lady Ware had rehearsed it against the possibility of this day, so that familiarity wore the most painful edges off her declaration, allowing her to speak it without faltering.

But there was no hostility in it; just sorrow and regret. Lune bent and retrieved the box at her feet. “You may refuse this,” she said, “and I will not be offended. But I should like you to have it. I have no family to whom I may pass it on, and it seems to me such a thing should be given as a gift.”

Curious, Kate accepted the box, gliding her fingers over the polished holly of its lid. Then she opened it, and lifted out a small bowl, blown from delicate glass, glowing emerald in the light.

“It is a luck,” Lune said. “The story is that a faerie woman gave it to a great-grandfather of mine, in exchange for some kind deed on his part. So long as it is not lost or broken, it will bring good fortune to the family that owns it.” She permitted herself a brief hesitation, then said, “It is, I suppose, not the most godly object I could offer—”

Kate laughed quietly. “I’ve had enough of godly folk for a lifetime. But will it not be unwise for you to give it away?”

Lune shook her head. The bowl was made for Lady Ware herself, at Lune’s request. She had blessed Antony’s three children; now she did what she could to look after his wife.

And not just his kin, of course, but all the City he had placed in her charge.

“I would rather see it passed on to a friend,” she said. “Or at least the family of a friend.”

Kate answered her with a wavering smile, but an honest one. “Say ‘friend,’ ” she replied, and held out her hand to Lune. “You may use that word without fear.”

THE ONYX HALL, LONDON: December 19, 1665

Irrith did not like the snaky Lord Keeper, Valentin Aspell. He was one of those fae who seemed to take a certain delight in cruelty, though he kept it hidden behind well-oiled courtesy. He bowed often as he conveyed his ill news to the Queen, but it never went deeper than the surface. “The Gyre-Carling’s demand is unreasonable, of course, madam. Your own justice has already dealt with Ifarren Vidar, and it is not for another Queen to demand possession of him—most especially when his crimes against this court were so great. But her message was most…insistent.”

Lune scowled and spun away from Aspell, skirts whirling in a sapphire blur. She had been pacing the length of the privy chamber through his entire recitation, and showed no sign of stopping. “She can be insistent all she pleases; we will not give her Ifarren Vidar.”

Irrith wished she would. At least that damn box would be out of the Onyx Hall.

The sprite concealed a shudder. Living in the Vale, she had heard of the Onyx courtiers and their well-crafted intrigues, the poisonous traps they wove for one another. That was under the old Queen, of course, and in Lune’s time the stories were not so foul, but everyone agreed the fae of London had learned all the backstabbing, manipulative lessons of their mortal counterparts. In the Vale, if two fae hated one another, they had a duel and ended it. Here, they devised far more intricate ways of making their enemies suffer. Nothing she had seen, though, measured up to the terrible fate Lune meted out to Ifarren Vidar.

She had called it mercy, but it was nothing of the sort.

Aspell coughed delicately. “Madam—though the Gyre-Carling cannot mount a second attack, with her Irish allies lost, she will yet find other ways to trouble us. And in this court’s, ah, parlous state—”

That stopped Lune’s pacing. She glared at the Lord Keeper. “Speak plainly, Valentin; I have no patience for your hesitations.”

“Your Majesty has previously forbidden us to speak of such matters.”

“I have forbidden you to contrive about them. Speak, before I have that forked tongue of yours torn out.”

Irrith sidled backward, wishing she had some excuse to leave the room. The Queen’s temper had been uncertain ever since the death of her mortal favorite—and she had not even loved that one.

The Lord Keeper bowed deeply. “Without a Prince, madam, this court is vulnerable. I know Lord Antony was more than a symbol of your Grace’s principles; he was essential to the stability of your crown. With the Gyre-Carling threatening us once more, I must beg your Highness to consider the possibilities for his successor.”

Lune scowled and gestured sharply for wine. Irrith, unfortunately, was the nearest to it; she had to hurry forward with the cup. But Lune merely took it and drank, without so much as subjecting Irrith to a glare. “We shall take that under advisement, Lord Valentin. But our previous command still holds: this is a matter for us to decide. Anyone who attempts to interfere shall find our displeasure great indeed.”

MONKWELL STREET, LONDON: January 3, 1666

She showed up on the tenth day of Christmas, wearing the Montrose face, and startled Jack nearly out of his wits.

Christmas it might be, but disease waited neither for man nor for the Son of God; it still brazenly afflicted people, in total disrespect of the holy season. Jack worked every morning in his shop near Cripplegate, and went every afternoon to the houses of those who could not come to him. Though the plague was mostly held in abeyance by the winter cold, there were other complaints, in numbers more than sufficient to keep him busy.

He hadn’t been below for weeks, and perhaps some part of his mind had given up on curiosity, and dismissed the whole thing as a delusion.

Mistress Montrose looked so resolutely ordinary, just another gentlewoman come in to consult with a physician, that he would never have connected her with the faerie Queen of London had she not admitted it that day in Antony’s house. He even wondered briefly if it might be another; he knew well enough by now that the fae could adopt any faces they chose. But she offered him a grave nod when she entered, and he knew it was her.

Jack got rid of his patient as quickly as he could; the man had a cold, nothing more, which his fears had magnified into plague and spotted fever and the old sweating sickness, all at once. Then he offered the disguised Queen a bow. “I…didn’t expect to see you here.”

She smiled faintly at his restraint. “My apologies; I do not mean to discomfit you. We have not seen you in our halls, though, and I have a question I would put to you—before you grow too far from us, and convince yourself it was all a dream.”

Close to the mark; she was sharp, this elfin woman. He supposed she had unknown ages in which to practice. “Then please, come into the back. A poor enough place, compared with your home—”

Lune dismissed that with a wave of her gloved hand. “Hard as it may be to believe, Dr. Ellin, a hovel is as interesting to me, in its own way, as a palace. Both are reflections of humanity.”

And that, in turn, interested him. Jack showed her through into the back room, where a fire warmed the air, and offered her wine, which she accepted.

While he busied himself with such small tasks, Lune waited with the patient air of one who recognized nervous delay when she saw it. What question was pressing enough to send her into his home? Not until he was seated did she speak. “Tell me, Dr. Ellin—were you born in London?”

He blinked. “On Gracechurch Street. Is that what you came here to ask?”

She laughed quietly. He heard the faintest undercurrent of tension in it; was she nervous, too? Something had ruffled the faerie woman’s composure, beneath the mask of her mortal face. “No. But it’s a necessary prelude. As is this: how much do you know of Antony’s relation to my court?”

“Fragments,” Jack said honestly, and took a gulp of his wine while he considered. “I heard a few call him ‘the Prince.’ ” Though a man less like a faerie prince, he was hard-pressed to imagine. I suppose a Puritan would be less like.

“Prince of the Stone,” Lune said. “You will hear some call that the title of my mortal consort, but the…intimate relationship the word consort implies was no part of my dealings with Antony. I swore years ago to always rule the Onyx Court with a mortal at my side, and the Prince is the man who fills that role.”

Jack listened with a distracted ear; half his attention was taken up by the light this shed on Antony’s behavior, particularly with regards to Kate. Consort and yet not to a faerie Queen—no wonder he feared to confess it to his wife.

“If you wish it,” that selfsame faerie Queen said, “the title shall be yours.”

He blinked. Then blinked again. Then fought the urge to clean out his ear, as if its physical state could be blamed for what he’d just heard. “I beg your pardon?”

Lune met his gaze without flinching, though her hands were wrapped tight around the wine. “There has been no Prince since Antony’s death. Already some of my courtiers whisper that my vow was but a passing fancy, and that henceforth I will rule as our kind usually does—alone, or with a consort more fitting to my nature. Some would like it to be true. But I promised Antony before he died that I would do everything in my power to help London and its people, and I cannot do that without someone to speak for them.”

Words fled like startled cats when he reached for them; Jack became aware that he was gaping, and tried to stop. “So—” He trailed off, unsure where to begin. “You need a consort, and so you come to me.”

“I need a Prince,” she said. “I do not offer it to you out of desperation; were you not suitable, I would search until I found another.”

“Suitable?” The word came out on an undignified laugh. “I’m no Prince. My unsavory habit of dabbling in surgery and other such matters even tarnishes my name as a gentleman. And I know nothing of your world.”

She smiled, with more than a touch of sadness. “Your predecessors learned. I have no doubt that you shall, too.”

Did she calculate that response for its effect on him, or speak it without thinking? Either way, its effect was undeniable. The strangeness of that world seemed so distant as he sat here, advising patients on their ills, but it haunted him again and again in dreams, and every morning he woke up with a head full of unanswered questions. Now Lune sat before him, offering the answers to them all—or at least the unfettered opportunity to ask them.

The sudden light in his eyes must have given him away; either that, or he’d begun to visibly salivate at the thought. Lune raised a querying eyebrow, and he responded with a lopsided grin. “Are you familiar with the Royal Society?”

“I have heard the name,” she said cautiously. “Some group of learned men.”

“Some group of men who wish to learn. To increase their store of knowledge, to test it against the world around them, and to share that knowledge with others. I could tell you such stories—”

But his eager chatter cut short at the look on her face.

Lune said, only slightly unsteady, “Have you told them of us?”

“What? Certainly not. When have I had the chance?”

She breathed more easily, but not all the tension left her. “Then I must beg you not to. We live here in secret, Dr. Ellin. I wish it were not so; it would be a great victory indeed if we could walk the streets in safety. But yours is a world of iron and faith, and these weapons may easily be turned against us. People, some of them, are content to know that the fae live in hollow hills and shaded glens, old peel towers and other remote places. Those same people would not likely rest well if they knew we went about beneath their very feet.”

He had never stopped to give it particular consideration. Now that he did…

She spoke of a threat to her kind, but that was not the only danger in play. Though Lune might look like an ordinary gentlewoman, she was not. She was a queen, and if he threatened her realm, he had no doubt this quailing fear would all too quickly turn to action. He did not think the fae would let him speak before the Royal Society.

Even if I did so, I would be laughed out of the room.

Faeries in London—the very thought was preposterous. And yet there they were; and knowing that, Jack could hardly walk away from them. Not with Lune offering this chance to know more. “I hope you would not forbid me to indulge a personal curiosity, at least.”

Her eyes weighed him to the last ounce, but she shook her head.

Curiosity had come first, hard on the heels of her offer; now the more sensible part of his mind caught up, and brought with it a question insufficiently answered. “But why me? I’m no great citizen of London, as Antony was. Until I came into your realm, I had never set foot in a royal court. I know little of such grand ways—or such intrigues.” He assumed they had intrigues. Every court did.

Lune accepted the protest without concern. “I could answer you at greater length, and I will, if you choose to join me. But for now, I shall put it in plain terms, for they are the most powerful I have: You love London. You have stood fast by her side, even in the face of a disaster that surpasses any in living memory. If I am to fulfill my promise to do the same, I will need assistance.” A quiet shadow darkened her eyes, and for a brief moment, she looked away. “Each Prince teaches me something new. I should like to learn this dedication from you.”

What had she learned from Antony? Jack was not about to ask. For his own part, he felt supremely unqualified to teach anything to a faerie queen, but he believed her words sincere.

She wanted to learn; so did he. Her curiosity was a simple one, his rather more voracious—but they both betokened open minds, and that was not a bad foundation upon which to build.

And a whole world lay beneath his feet, waiting for him to explore it.

An unrestrainable smile spread over his face, as much rueful as amused. No sense fighting myself, when I’ve clearly already decided the point.

Jack drained his wine and said, “Tell me, then—what would this require?”

THE ONYX HALL, LONDON: May 1, 1666

Why he expected the creation of a faerie prince to be much less complicated than the coronation of a king, Jack didn’t know. Simple-minded hope, perhaps. Lune’s visit to him in Monkwell Street, without so much as a single attendant shadowing her heels, had made it seem like all that was needed was the offer and acceptance.

Of course not.

The antechamber he stood in now was too small for satisfying pacing; he could go barely three strides before reaching a wall. At least his boots didn’t squeak, for all they were new. Whatever cobbler elf had made them, he knew his craft. The supple leather encased his legs like a glove, and was far from the richest part of his garb.

Fortunately, Jack had won the fight over the style of his clothing. The beauteous lordling in charge of dressing him had fallen victim to the excesses of Charles’s court, and would have put Jack in a frothy confection of multicolored ribbons, petticoat breeches, shoe roses, scented curls, and worse. Jack could not imagine anyone had ever forced Antony into such nonsense, and stood his ground. Three shouting matches later, Lune ordered Lewan Erle to dress Jack as the physician pleased, so long as the material was rich.

And so it was. Jack ran one nervous hand down the emerald-green moire of his doublet, fingertips catching on the silver lace that edged it. The buttons on his waistcoat were diamonds—diamonds, which the fae accounted not the most precious of their jewels. The brooch on his hat glittered with starlight itself, somehow caught in crystalline form. And the silk of his shirt was so fine, it might have been woven of wind.

He hoped the finery would stand him in good stead today. Jack knew full well that many of Lune’s subjects were less than happy at the thought of his elevation.

Somehow, I managed to convince myself there would be no politics. Willful blindness on his part. How could a Prince not get tangled in politics? Aside from the simple fact of his mortality, he was not high-born enough for the courtiers, who considered Antony’s baronetcy scarcely acceptable. They would prefer a peer. Jack tried to imagine Lune making her offer to the Duke of Albemarle, and snorted with suppressed laughter.

Lewan Erle gave him a reproving look. The elf ’s curls hung in golden perfection, and his clothing was even in good taste; it would not be seemly for him to outdo the future Prince in extravagance. He took such matters very seriously, even if Jack did not.

A twinkling light slipped beneath the door and flitted into the center of the room, where it dimmed and brightened three times. Our cue. The ceremony had begun some time before, Lune speaking in memory of her late Princes—Antony, and the one before—but the time had come for its final scene.

Erle bowed and opened the door. Jack took a deep breath, steeling himself, then went through.

The antechamber stood just off the entrance to the great presence chamber, where a pair of burly creatures like very small giants stood at the bronze doors. At his nod, they grasped the handles and hauled the tremendous weight toward them, creating an impressive frame in which Jack stood for a moment, letting everyone see him.

I am, without doubt, quite mad.

Everyone was gathered inside. Not just Lune’s courtiers, but all her lesser subjects as well, and ambassadors from every realm that bothered to maintain relations with the Onyx Court. Half the creatures there, Jack had no name for. They came from all over England, from Wales and Ireland and Scotland, even from the continent. The room was packed to the walls, and rippled with a respectful nod as he passed down the narrow aisle left for him in the center. Nods, no more; he was not Prince yet.

To remedy that, Lune waited on the dais at the far end. She was a splendid sight, attired in a midnight-blue gown that harmonized beautifully with his own green, with her formal crown upon her head. Silver, surprisingly—he expected a richer metal—but it might have been poured from the moon itself. Perhaps it had. In this world, Jack could take nothing for granted.

Feeling like an explorer greeting some foreign potentate, Jack ascended the dais to a spot one step below the Queen, where he knelt. Her voice rang clear in the silence of the hall. “John Ellin. Do you give your sworn word that you are a mortal man born of London, within hearing of the Bow Bells?”

“I do so swear, by Oak and Ash and Thorn.” No invoking God, here; they would not thank him for that. And the “ancient Mab” the fae swore by was apparently not for him.

“John Ellin, do you give your sworn word that you intend no harm to the faerie folk of this court?”

“I do so swear, by Oak and Ash and Thorn.”

“John Ellin, do you give your sworn word that you will serve faithfully the interests of the Onyx Court, seeking harmony between the races of London, mortal and immortal alike, speaking on behalf of the humans of this City, and ruling at my side?”

There came a time in every man’s life when he had to wonder what he was doing, kneeling in a faerie court, swearing to carry out a strange double existence on behalf of creatures for whom the entirety of his lifespan would be no more than an eyeblink.

Satisfying my curiosity, Jack thought wryly. And serving, not them, but the ordinary souls who have no idea they’re here.

“I do so swear, by Oak and Ash and Thorn.”

Did he imagine the tiny sigh of relief from above? “Then be welcome in our halls, John Ellin, as a knight of our court,” Lune said, and a heavy weight struck each of his shoulders, stinging him even through the layers of fabric. He’d seen the sword, waiting in the hands of the captain of her guard, but he hadn’t expected Lune to wield it quite so firmly. It seemed she wanted those oaths to leave a mark.

So now he was a faerie knight. Jack felt no different as he rose to his feet. But they were not done; Lune’s Lord Keeper, a snakelike fellow, brought forward his burden without Lune having to gesture. The cup he held must have some significance, or someone, Jack imagined, would have repaired its dented rim—or chosen a richer piece to begin with.

Lune took the cup from the Lord Keeper, so smoothly that the wine inside barely trembled. “No man can serve Faerie without knowing its nature,” she said. “If you would stand at my side, then drink of this, and bind yourself to us of your own free will.”

Until this point, all their ceremony had vaguely amused Jack, unaccustomed as he was to such ritual. Now, looking into the dark wine, he shivered. The months spent wrangling over his elevation had given him time to read, and all the stories told him what an appallingly bad idea this was. Men who tasted of this other world could never leave it again. Lune swore to him he could still go above, that he would not crumble into dust—but the binding was real. It had almost killed Antony during the Protectorate, and the exile of this court.

He could walk away from those oaths just sworn, if he had to. But once he drank, he was trapped forever.

The many eyes on him exerted palpable pressure, weighing every instant of his hesitation. Jack forced himself to reach out and accept the cup, rippling the dark surface.

What price knowledge?

Ah, Hell. Here’s to my health…

Jack set the dented rim to his lips and drank.

It tasted of shadows and secrets, hidden knowledge to tantalize the mind. He shivered and sweated at once, feeling the wine as if it went, not into his stomach, but the marrow of his bones. Beautiful, and terrible; somehow both bitter and sweet at once. Too much for a mortal palate, but from the first drop he craved it, tilting the cup back, gulping greedily, like a drowning man gulping for air, filling his mouth until he almost choked.

And then the cup was empty, and he gasped, his heart pounding in his ears.

I would sell my soul for another taste of that wine.

Perhaps I just did.

Lune reclaimed the cup, handing it back to the Lord Keeper, who bowed and retreated. She’d warned him of this, when she admitted he must bind himself to them to become Prince of the Stone. One cup only; henceforth, all his food and drink would be gathered from above, or made in a fashion that rendered it safe. Too much destroyed a man, she said. Jack could believe it.

“You carry now a touch of Faerie,” Lune said. He became aware again of the watching eyes, the audience that had vanished when the wine reached his lips. They smiled now, in a way he did not entirely like. “We create you Prince of the Stone, and co-ruler of our realm. Hail, Lord John Ellin.”

As a body, the watching fae knelt, repeating her final words. Lune stepped close and kissed him once, chastely, her lips cool against his. She tasted of Faerie, too, and Jack restrained himself from opening his mouth hungrily to hers. This would take more strength of will than he had realized.

Then she took his hand and turned him so they faced the chamber together. “Our realm is whole once more,” Lune said, and the fae dutifully cheered.

The Prince is dead, Jack realized, grieving for his fallen friend. Long live the Prince.

THE ONYX HALL, LONDON: May 1, 1666

The dazed look in Ellin’s eyes, the hectic flush of his cheeks…oh yes, he was bound to them now. It called forth a sharp pang in Lune’s heart, of mixed fondness and grief, remembering the men who came before him. Michael Deven stumbled into this life through love, but Antony Ware had chosen it knowingly—or at least as knowingly as any man could. And John Ellin had done the same. It gave reality to her own choices, the presence of a mortal at her side: one could be accident, or even two, but tonight a third Prince walked the realm, and what might seem a whim had become tradition.

Not all of her subjects were pleased, of course, but they swallowed their objections for now. The celebration was in raucous progress, both here and in the Moor Fields north of London’s wall, where the fae had taken over the grassy meadows and sheltering trees for their May Day festivities. Dawn was yet some hours away, Ellin’s coronation having been carried out just after midnight. Soon enough, they would go above together, and join the courtiers who pretended to like her choice.

First, however, there was one more task to carry out.

They stood alone in the great presence chamber, the bronze doors closed and barred. Around them, the stone reflected back every minute noise, ghostly and faint. “Now,” Lune said, “we shall make you Prince of the Stone in truth.”

Ellin’s eyebrows rose. “How foolish of me—I assumed all that ritual had meaning.”

“It did,” she agreed. His sharp-edged tongue would make their years together interesting, however many those turned out to be. “All of it was necessary, I assure you. But we are not yet done. What I held back, I did for good reason—for this is the most closely kept secret of our realm.” And therefore not something to share with him until she was sure he would not flee.

She beckoned him to follow her down the echoing expanse of marble. Once on the dais, Lune gestured for Ellin to position himself to one side of her throne, while she took the other. He gave the massive silver an extremely dubious glance, and she smiled. “It is not as heavy as it looks.”

Which was not to say it was light; he grunted as they slid it forward. But the grunt turned into a speculative breath, as he saw the opening behind the throne’s back. “I wondered why it stood against the wall.”

“Come and see,” Lune said, and went through.

The alcove behind was scarcely large enough for the two of them, and the wooden platform that occupied most of the floor. Above it, from the unadorned ceiling, hung a scarred and pitted block of limestone, with grooves incised deeply into its surface.

Ellin let out a half-laugh. “Is that—”

“The London Stone. Or rather, a reflection of it. I would explain to you its presence here, but showing is easier. Come.” Lune mounted the steps. The platform put her high enough that the Stone hung just above her head, within easy reach.

Her companion was taller; he could knock his head against the Stone if he was not careful. “Please don’t tell me I have to kiss it. I fear too much that it might also carry a reflection of the filth above.”

She smiled again. A sharp tongue, but an amusing one. “Not at all. Simply give me your left hand, and place your right upon the Stone.”

He bent to give her a wary look. “That’s all?”

“That is all.”

After a moment’s consideration, Ellin shrugged. “I should hardly balk at a simple thing like that, given what else I’ve done this night.” Their left hands crossed beneath the Stone. His palm was dry and bore few calluses, as befit a gentleman, and he held hers with ginger care.

Lune mirrored him as he raised his right hand, and they laid their fingers on the Stone together.

CANNON STREET, LONDON: May 1, 1666

“What in the name of—”

The exclamation was enough to draw the disinterested attention of a constable, standing where Walbrook and Dowgate crossed Cannon Street, but after a moment the man continued on his way, swinging his lantern as he went. Other than that, the lane was deserted. And the London Stone, like all entrances to the Onyx Hall, concealed in some measure those who passed through it.

Lune stifled a laugh as Jack Ellin peeled his hand loose from the limestone, as if from a block of ice. “That—”

She let him absorb it for a moment. The London Stone was the linchpin of the Onyx Hall, and touching it communicated a great deal about the palace’s structure and nature. They could have stayed below, but she wanted him to see as well as feel that connection, the way the Stone anchored itself into the earth and then reflected below. Here, it did not seem like much—an unremarkable block along the south side of the street, half-buried in the dirt—but it was the key to everything. The Onyx Hall would not recognize him as its master until the Stone knew his touch.

Finally Jack said, breathlessly, “You could warn a man.”

“But words would cheapen it,” Lune said, letting go of his other hand. “I am sorry for the surprise.”

“No, you’re not. You enjoyed that.”

She could feel the ease between them now, the connection that bound them through their shared realm. It was unlike what she had shared with Antony, as it would be unlike her bond with his successor, whoever that might be. Each mortal felt slightly different, like the same note struck on a variety of instruments.

Jack shook his head as if to clear it, opened his mouth, and choked on a sound. Lune nodded. “It will fade; you have my word. In time you will be able to call on your divine Master again.”

He swallowed, like a man swallowing his own tongue. When he could speak, he said, “I suppose I’m grateful it’s Tuesday, then. That gives me time.”

The reminder of religion put Lune on edge. She was vulnerable, out here; she had not wanted to go through the coronation and this ritual while shielded against mortality. Soon, though, a bell might ring, and there was iron enough to make her shiver regardless. And they were expected in Moor Fields.

Holding out her hand again, she said, “Shall we go back down? Our escort awaits us there.”

THE ONYX HALL, LONDON: August 30, 1666

“Your Majesty,” Valentin Aspell said, “an ambassador has arrived, and begs a grant of safety while he delivers his message to you.”

Safety? Lune’s curiosity came alight. I can think of few who would need to remind me of the safe conduct owed an embassy. And Valentin looks like he’s swallowed a wasp. “An ambassador from where?”

The Lord Keeper bowed, as if afraid she would strike him for his answer. “From the Gyre-Carling in Fife.”

It startled her more than angered. Startled, and somewhat encouraged: since when did Nicneven send ambassadors? Unless this was some diversion, meant to distract from an attack elsewhere—but that was the sort of thing Vidar would have planned, and he was firmly out of the Unseely Queen’s reach. “Is the ambassador here? ”

Valentin shook his head. “He waits beyond the border of your realm, and sent a gruagach in his stead.”

Politeness, even—or perhaps just prudence. Either way, the surprises continued. “Grant him passage,” she said, “and have him meet me…” Where? The great presence chamber would be the best place to awe him, but that would also make it far more public than she wanted. “In the lesser presence chamber. Have it cleared; we shall speak in private. No sense giving rise to more rumors than we must.”

Bowing, Aspell began to retreat. “Also,” Lune said, before he could vanish out the door, “send word to Jack Ellin, requesting his attendance.” He needed more seasoning in politics, and she had every intention of forcing the Fife ambassador to acknowledge the Prince’s existence. Just because Nicneven had chosen civil conversation was no reason for Lune to back down from those things the Gyre-Carling most hated.

With the Lord Keeper gone, Lune flew to her preparations, summoning her ladies to help her change into a more formal gown and adorn her curls with a crown. Sun and Moon, I hope Aspell’s messenger tells Jack what is afoot, and the man has the sense to dress for it. Surely he had learned that much already.

She knew to a nicety the time it would take a traveler to reach the wall from any northern approach, and the distance to all the closest entrances. Lune might have insisted on meeting the ambassador above, but beginning with an insult would hardly be auspicious—and besides, there was little to gain in hiding the doors to her realm. Nicneven knew them all by now.

Examining her own thoughts, Lune found in them no small amount of fear. Attacks, she understood and anticipated; the Gyre-Carling was trying something new. She had no idea what to expect from this.

Jack was waiting for her in the chamber, and she breathed a sigh of relief. Perhaps someone had taken clothes to him, for he had changed with tremendous speed. “Do you recall what I told you of Nicneven?” she asked, settling into her chair of estate.

He recited the basic facts back to her in a crisp tone that concealed any nerves he might feel. The man’s memory was well trained; he missed nothing. “Do not hesitate to speak if this ambassador says anything touching on the people of London,” Lune said when he was done, “but beyond that, I expect to handle this myself. The ambassador will acknowledge your presence, even if I must force him, but I doubt he will deign to speak to you.”

A hint of relief was in his nod. And that was all they had time for; Aspell entered, received Lune’s nod, and threw the door open. “From the Gyre-Carling of Fife, her ambassador, Sir Cerenel.”

Only her preformed determination to keep a serene countenance, no matter what happened, kept Lune from staring. It was no trick: her own former knight entered, approached the dais, and made his formal bow. To them both, she saw; whether it was in his instructions or not, Cerenel included Jack in the reverence.

“Be welcome to the Onyx Hall, Sir Cerenel,” she managed, and he rose. “We hope you are well?”

“I am, your Majesty.” He, too, must have resolved before coming that he would keep the whole encounter polite. Did he feel hostility toward her? Bitterness? Fear? The violet eyes showed no hint.

He had bowed to Jack; Lune decided to press that. “You have not met John Ellin, who is now Prince of the Stone.”

A slight tightening of Cerenel’s lips, maddeningly unreadable. “I had heard that Lord Antony died. Please allow me to offer the compliments of my condolence for your loss.”

His condolence; not theirs. So Nicneven had not been replaced by some soft-hearted human changeling. Oddly, Lune found it reassuring. She made the expected reply to his words, and indicated subtly to Jack that he should do the same; the physician exchanged empty courtesies with the knight, while Lune tried to glean any further clues from Cerenel’s manner. He dressed as a Scot again, but that might not mean much.

Or it might mean a great deal. Why was he, of all fae, Nicneven’s ambassador?

Cerenel at least did not keep her wondering long. “Madam,” he said, “my lord—I have been sent hither to bear you a message from my Queen.”

The phrase stung, even though she expected it. Nicneven is his Queen now. “We are pleased to receive it,” Lune said, and waited.

“She bid me say this: that although there has been much strife between your two realms, she will lay that aside and offer you peace, in simple exchange for the person of Ifarren Vidar.”

Not a demand. An offer. Trade. Jack was alive with curiosity; he knew Vidar’s name, but not all the tortuous details of that war. The man’s thirst for knowledge never ended, but now was not the time to sate it. Lune said to Cerenel, “You understand the cynical response this occasions, I trust. Nicneven’s hatred preceded Vidar’s arrival at her court. Why should she relinquish it now?”

A faint smile ghosted across Cerenel’s lips. “If I may speak plainly, madam—this very matter is why I begged her Majesty to send me as her emissary. I understand your suspicion. But the Gyre-Carling is a creature of passions, not politics. Her hatred was born the day the mortal Queen of Scots died, manipulated onto the scaffold in part by the machinations of this court. But Charles Stuart is dead as well, and her revenge complete; what cares she any longer for such matters? Her hatred now is reserved for another.”

“Ifarren Vidar.”

“He betrayed her, and she does not forgive that lightly. At his urging, she surrendered the Sword of Nuada to the Irish, believing they would help her destroy this place. And in the taking and retaking of the Onyx Hall, she lost warriors—fae she cared for, as any Queen must.”

The bitterness Lune might have expected in that last touch was not there. She found, to her surprise, that she sincerely wanted to lay aside this embassy, and speak to Cerenel in his own right. Perhaps they could mend the breach she had created. But Nicneven could not be laid aside, and so Lune answered his point. “I have no doubt of her hatred for Ifarren Vidar. But the substance of the Gyre-Carling’s words to me have not changed, have they? She may couch it in terms of offered peace, but that is simply the other face of the original coin. If I do not give her the traitor, then it is war between us once more, and the threatened destruction of the Onyx Hall.”

Reluctantly, Cerenel nodded.

“Then my answer is unchanged,” Lune said. “I have sentenced Vidar to eternal imprisonment, and there he shall stay.”

She could sense Jack’s uncertainty; no doubt Cerenel could, as well. Her new Prince did not yet understand these matters, for all he learned as quickly as he could. This was a poor time for him to come among them, as it would have been for any man. Cerenel’s reaction was the one that surprised her: disappointment, and worry. Even fear? He came because he wanted this to succeed, and trusted no other with it. And now he has failed.

“Madam,” Cerenel said, going unexpectedly to one knee, “I do not wish to bear you these words, but my Queen’s instructions were clear. I am to tell you that the Gyre-Carling will have him, by one means or another.”

The threat had never been so deeply concealed, after all. “Has she more soldiers, then?” Lune asked, with contemptuous bravado. “What other treasures has she sold to the Irish, for their aid? It does not matter. The Onyx Hall rose to fight them once before, and it can do so again. Let her waste their lives, if she will.”

“Not soldiers, madam.” Cerenel’s fingers whitened against the carpet, and desperation laced his voice. “She has another ally—one you cannot fight. Even now she comes. Give over Vidar, and your realm will be left unharmed. Remain obstinate, and all will suffer, from you down to your humblest subject.”

She could not begin to imagine what he meant, but neither would she ask. Cerenel could not be allowed to know it troubled her. Jack was already showing too much, gaze flicking between the kneeling ambassador and the Queen at his side, hands curling on the arms of his chair. But Lune felt the weight of the Onyx Hall upon her shoulders, the mantle of her sovereignty, and knew herself at the precipice. Whatever ally Nicneven had found, Lune could not acknowledge it as her superior, as a force that held power over her realm.

If only Nicneven had not threatened, she thought with grim resignation. If I could make this decision on some ground other than coercion.

But even then, no. She remembered Vidar’s words: It is what Invidiana would have done. She would not let the Gyre-Carling kill him, just to protect her own power.

Lune rose to her feet, towering over Cerenel; a belated instant later, Jack mirrored her, following the gesture she made behind her back. “We do not fear the Gyre-Carling or her minions,” Lune said, pronouncing it with razor clarity. “Return that message to her. Tell her Vidar shall stay imprisoned until it is our pleasure to release him. Tell her that if our presence here, our dealings with mortals, trouble her so greatly, then we invite her to retire from this world into the deep reaches of Faerie, where she need not concern herself with such matters. No threat from her shall shift us from our course.”

Bleak with disappointment, but fighting not to show it, Cerenel bowed his head, rose, and backed from the chamber, leaving Lune and Jack Ellin alone.

“What—” the Prince said, after a moment of staring silence.

“Another time,” Lune cut him off, sinking exhausted into her chair and rubbing her brow with one hand. There must be some way to end this threat, without sacrificing myself and the Onyx Hall to the Gyre-Carling of Fife. “There is more you should hear, but I have not the will for it now. Please.”

He hovered for a moment, obviously frustrated by all he wanted to ask, but finally he nodded. “As you wish.” Then he, too, left her, and Lune sagged wearily in her chair, listening to the shadowed silence of her home.

She thought at first she imagined it—the stir of a curl against her cheek. Then it came again, for longer this time, bringing with it a chilling whisper of age and death.

Wind, in the unmoving air of the Onyx Hall.

WEDNESDAY SEPTEMBER 5, 1666 The Battle for London

The City still burns.

The wind has fallen to deathly calm, but in its absence the flames do not simply wink out. Yet at Temple Bar, and Holborn Bridge, and all about the fringes of London, men bend their backs with renewed will, determined to overmaster at last the beast that has driven them so far.

Gunpowder still shatters the air with its detonations, clearing space the sparks, robbed of their ally the wind, cannot leap. Though at Cripplegate the battle yet rages in strength—led by the Lord Mayor, eager to redeem his earlier ignominy—much of the leveled ground now lies smoking, such that when daybreak comes men will walk across its embers, and see what they have lost.

An unfortunate few see more than that.

On the heights around the cathedral, where the ashes of the books still blow, little tongues of flame race along the ground.

They seek one another, blending together like droplets of water, merging into a greater whole. Salamanders crawl atop each other, the larger consuming the smaller, and growing ever more, until a coiling body takes shape, crusted with black cinders like scales, that crack to reveal the fiery flesh beneath.

It is legion, and too powerful to be slain so simply. Calling all its children from across the City, the Dragon lifts its head from the ashes, and scents its prey once more.

THE ONYX HALL, LONDON: one o’clock in the morning

Armored in the fine clothes he’d worn for his creation as Prince of the Stone, Jack Ellin went forth to do battle.

Only now, when the breath of the Cailleach Bheur had subsided at last, did he realize how much the Blue Hag’s touch had worn on him, too. Even if age and the slow decay of flesh were natural to his kind, no one liked to be reminded for days on end of how he would, in time, fall to dust. Free now of that ominous whisper, he felt a tiny surge of life infusing his weary limbs. Enough, he hoped, to see him through this confrontation with the Gyre-Carling.

And before that, a confrontation with Lune.

He found her still dressing in her wardrobe. Her ladies fussed around her, smoothing the fashionably wide neckline of her gown, kneeling to place silver shoes on her feet. Two miniature sprites hovered in the air, tucking the scorched ends of her hair out of sight, until her coiffure gleamed like polished metal under the faerie lights of the chamber. The melting frost on the walls steamed in the warmer air.

“Good, you are prepared,” Lune said when she saw him. Nianna dabbed color on her lips between phrases, trying and failing to conceal her vexation with the Queen’s insistence on speaking. “Nicneven should be at Aldgate soon.”

“What should I expect of her?”

She gave a tiny shrug, so as not to interfere with Carline sliding an earring into her lobe. “As much as a mouse might. You are beneath her notice. I would say to make her acknowledge you if you can, but tonight of all nights, we might be better served not to annoy her.”

If saving what remained of London meant lying down on the presence chamber floor and letting Nicneven walk over his face, he would do it. But Jack had something of far greater use in mind. “Allow me,” he said, claiming Lune’s rings from Amadea without waiting for the chamberlain to respond. “I would speak with her Majesty alone.”

Amadea raised her eyebrows at him again; he wondered if Antony had not claimed private audiences so much. Perhaps the old Prince had not minded public confrontations.

The ladies curtsied and took their leave. When the door closed, Jack came forward and began sliding the rings onto Lune’s fingers. She had the bones of a bird, and her skin was cool to the touch. “Do you intend to give her Vidar?” he asked.

“No.”

“Why?”

Her fingers curled around his. Jack met the silver gaze squarely, rings clutched in his free hand. Lune stared at him for a moment, then shook her head, curls dancing. “I have not the time to explain.”

“You have time for nothing else. This is the thread upon which your kingdom hangs, Lune. Your people cannot endure more of the Cailleach’s assault—and why should they? For the sake of a creature I know to be your enemy?”

The point edging her sleeve shivered briefly; then she pulled free of his grasp. “Not for his sake,” Lune said. “For the sake of the Onyx Hall.”

Now it was Jack’s turn to raise his eyebrows. “The same Onyx Hall that twice almost became a Dragon’s meal? This is how you protect it?”

Lune winced. “I never anticipated that. Had it been just the Cailleach…”

“Then London would not have burnt. But it has, and the Onyx Hall very nearly joined it. So tell me, Lune, just how you are protecting anything by protecting Ifarren Vidar.”

She bowed her head, half-ringed hand closing over the gloved one. “Because that is how faerie sovereignty works,” she said, weary and flat. “I cannot bend to Nicneven’s will and still be Queen. If she had threatened something other than my realm, perhaps. If she had threatened me. But the Onyx Hall is the lever she would use to move me. And if I succumb, then I acknowledge her power over it. I admit that she could destroy it, and give in to prevent that. Which means I surrender it to her.”

Lune lifted her gaze at last, and he saw to his great shock that tears rimmed the lids of her eyes. I did not think she could weep. “She would obliterate this place. But resistance, it seems, will bring about the same end.”

Some day, when the two of them sat at peace before a comfortable fire, Jack would question her more; Lune’s explanation opened up a wealth of ideas he had never considered before. But he wanted that comfortable fire to be inside the Onyx Hall, and that meant finding a way out of this trap.

“Let me do it,” he said, with sudden inspiration. “Let me give her Vidar. Then you acknowledge nothing—it is all my doing!” And if it cost him his title, so be it. He didn’t mind, so long as he could still come among the fae.

But Lune flinched again, as she had done when he suggested sending knives after Nicneven. “No! She would kill him.”

Jack spread his hands in bafflement. “He’s a condemned traitor, Lune! From what I gather, you were about to sentence him to death yourself, before you decided it was somehow more merciful to stick him in an iron box for all eternity. You would not kill him then; you will not kill him now. Why?”

Lune turned her back on him—to conceal, Jack thought, the emotions she was too weary to hide behind her accustomed mask. The long, stiff line of her bodice kept her back straight; above it, her shoulders were rigid with unspoken tension. “You have heard of Invidiana?”

“Some, yes.”

“She did not hesitate to kill any she could not use. Any who threatened the security of her power. Killing Vidar…” Lune’s breath wavered when she released it. “He said it to me himself, during his trial. It is what she would have done.”

Jack’s lips parted, but no words came out. He blinked several times, trying to encompass what she said, trying to find some response that would not send her out of the room in a rage. Finally he bowed his head, tucking the forgotten rings into his pocket, lest he drop them. “Let me see if I understand. We have here a fellow who has been traitorous to every sovereign he ever served. He betrayed Invidiana to her enemies and sold Nicneven to the Irish; in fact, he will sell anyone to anybody if it might gain him power. He confessed his guilt during his trial. Your own people want him dead. And you can buy peace for your entire realm simply by letting Nicneven carry out the sentence you intended to deliver—had he not said the one thing that would convince you it was wrong. But because he said it, you will not do what you should.”

Lune stiffened even further. “Invidiana—”

“Is gone! Will you let her shadow dictate your choices?” Jack buried his hands in his hair, and realized too late he had just destroyed Lewan Erle’s careful arrangement. To Hell with elegance. “Are you Lune, or merely not Invidiana?”

She spun to face him, eyes wide. But what answer she would have given, Jack never learned, because at that moment Valentin Aspell bowed himself into the room. He could have strangled the Lord Keeper.

The serpentine fellow’s words, though, explained his intrusion all too swiftly. “Your Grace, my lord—the Gyre-Carling has arrived.”

Lune had spent hours planning what she would say to Nicneven, and now all the words had fled.

Are you Lune, or merely not Invidiana?

No respite, no time to regain her equilibrium. They could not afford to keep Nicneven waiting. Side by side, Lune and Jack Ellin hurried through the Onyx Hall to the great presence chamber, where they would receive the Gyre-Carling of Fife.

Her subjects were flooding toward the chamber as well, humble and grand alike. Lune even thought she glimpsed the Goodemeades, before taller figures hid them from sight. “We must keep everyone back,” she murmured to Aspell, noting more than a few vengeful expressions. I should order them out, and hold this audience in private. But that would only raise questions, undermine their trust in her. If they even trust me at all, after what they have endured.

I do not even know if they should.

Her breath was coming too fast. “Where is the Onyx Guard?” she demanded, noticing for the first time their absence.

Valentin shook his head. “Madam, they are not returned.”

Worry clutched at her gut. She had felt the collapse of St. Paul’s, but knew nothing more. Prigurd, and her loyal knights—they could all be slain, and she unaware.

More concerns she could not address. For now, the Gyre-Carling was all, and the threat of the Cailleach Bheur. Ahead loomed the bronze doors, and beyond them the great presence chamber, where Ifarren Vidar’s spirit lay trapped in iron beneath the stone.

Will you let her shadow dictate your choices?

Quickly as they moved, they were only just in time. One of Aspell’s underlings hurried up to his master’s side and said, “My lord, the embassy approaches.” Running her thumb over the nearly bare fingers of her good hand, Lune hurried onto the dais, Jack at her side. Like actors upon a stage, her courtiers rushed into their places. The last settled just as her herald bellowed out, “The embassy of Fife: her Majesty the Gyre-Carling Nicneven!”

For the first time in decades of conflict, Lune saw the face of her enemy.

Nicneven could never have passed for an Onyx courtier. Her face—neither handsome nor unhandsome—had a wildness to it that made Irrith look tame, from the sweep of her cheekbones to the high wings of her brows. The garb she wore would not have seemed out of place in Scotland these thousand years or more, a kirtle of intense woad blue and leather shoes cross-gartered on her legs. But for all her rustic dress, she carried herself with the presence of a queen.

Lune met the fierce eyes of the Gyre-Carling and understood the truth of Cerenel’s words. This was not the cold, passionless evil of Invidiana. Nicneven simply held fast to the old ways of the fae—and hated the lord who had betrayed her.

So fixed was Lune upon her fellow sovereign that she took no notice of anything else, until Jack gasped quietly and nudged her hand.

The attendants behind the Unseely Queen made a surprising crowd, far more numerous than she expected. Lune recognized Sir Cerenel, of course; but it took her a moment longer to realize she recognized others, as well. Not attendants at all. Stumbling forward, prodded by the goblins who followed behind, were the ragged and soot-stained figures of her missing knights.

Her attention leapt back to Nicneven just in time to see the Gyre-Carling smile. “We found them escaping the ashes of your City,” she said in her broad Scottish accent, the words carrying to the far corners of the hall. Behind her, Peregrin and all the rest jerked to a halt—but not Prigurd. Lune could not see the giant anywhere among them. “And I thought to myself, this Onyx Queen is reluctant to give up Vidar. Perhaps we shall give her more reason.”

The threat struck home. How Nicneven had brought in the prisoners without anyone marking it, Lune could not guess; Aspell looked honestly stunned. Some charm, perhaps. For prisoners they most certainly were: tight twists of grass bound their hands and gagged their leaf-stuffed mouths. All their proud dignity was worn and broken, lost in the exhaustion of their battle above—but if Segraine could have killed with her eyes, the Gyre-Carling would lie cold on the stone.

Instead that Unseely Queen stood in the heart of Lune’s own realm and smirked. And this blow, coming without warning, shattered Lune’s last attempt at cool serenity. With Jack’s words ringing in her ears, she came to one stark realization, diamond-edged and clear.

Ifarren Vidar was not worth the lives of these loyal subjects.

Indeed, he was worth very little at all. These, who had fought so hard to preserve their home, were worth far more. If by surrendering her throne Lune could preserve the Onyx Hall and its people, she would have done it. Better that than to betray the service these had given, and all the loyalty she had won from her own subjects, both during the exile and after it. They deserved more from her.

Which told her, quite simply, where Ifarren Vidar was wrong.

Not my power. My people. They are what I wish to protect.

Lune fought her expression under control. Though her hands shook upon the arms of her throne, she could not simply concede Vidar to Nicneven. Not to save his life, but rather to save the Onyx Hall. It would survive no longer in Scottish hands than it took the Gyre-Carling to break the enchantments. But would it be enough to let Jack capitulate on her behalf?

“My heart,” Jack drawled, into the gap left by her faltering. “And here I thought they came under the aegis of a safe conduct.”

May all the powers of Faerie bless John Ellin. “Indeed,” Lune replied, narrowing her eyes. “I do believe this would violate the terms by which the Gyre-Carling was invited into our court. But I cannot believe she would err so foolishly as to threaten our subjects; why, if she did that, then she in turn could not expect us to keep our word as given.”

The Onyx Guard might be in Nicneven’s grasp, but there were other knights in the chamber, and goblins aplenty. Now all those toothy grins served Lune well. The Scottish folk had been chosen too well to flinch obviously, but she saw them note the odds, and mislike them. Cerenel, to his credit, looked unhappy with the entire affair.

As well he might be. If it did come to battle, he would fall with the Scots. And he did not deserve that, either.

But Nicneven simply laughed. “So it would be. Our paths crossed, as I said, and now we return them to you, like lapdogs found wandering. Besides—they have something to tell you.” She nodded, and Cerenel leapt to unbind Peregrin, not bothering to hide his relief.

The weary knight spat out the leaves that filled his mouth. Before his hands were even free, he gasped, “Your Grace—the Dragon is not dead!”

Lune’s heart might have stopped. All her thoughts were on how to manage Nicneven without surrendering too much; his cry made no sense at first. Then it penetrated, and all her blood went cold. “What?”

“We saw it,” Segraine rasped, chafing her freed wrists. “In the ashes of the City. Prigurd cut it to bits before he died, and we thought it dead, too. But it has reformed.”

Prigurd dead. The tears that threatened took her by surprise; Lune had not thought herself capable of grieving for the giant who had betrayed her. But in the end he was loyal—to the point of reason, and beyond—and the great cruelty was that she could not mourn him as he deserved.

Not with her oath suddenly binding her soul tight.

In Mab’s name. I swear to you that I will do everything I can to preserve London and its people from disaster—and let fear hinder me no more.

The Gyre-Carling’s smile deepened, as if anticipating blood. “So again you face your choice, as I gave it to you before. Give me Ifarren Vidar—or your realm shall be destroyed.”

Not just the Onyx Hall, but the City. The Cailleach alone was no threat to the mortals above, but with the Dragon still alive…Lune had escaped the trap of her oath thus far by seeking parley, by battling it at the Stone, by making plans to slay the beast. Any means of saving London that did not mean giving in to Nicneven. If she had failed, at least she had fought, had done everything she could.

Now only this remained: to surrender her realm and her throne. To sacrifice the Onyx Court for the mortals above.

The oath tightened its grip, forcing the words toward her lips. Lune clenched her teeth until her jaw ached, knuckles rigid and white. Jack Ellin’s gaze bored into her, but he could not save her from this; she was caught. It was too late for any more evasions.

She might as well have surrendered days before, when that first street began to burn. Lune wished she had. But she had not foreseen the terrible price of resistance—and now she must give her realm into the hands of Nicneven, who was glad to see London burn.

And upon that thought, the pressure vanished.

Breath rushed back into her lungs. Lune released her grip on the arms of her throne, steadied herself, then said, “And when we have given you the traitor—why, then, we still have a Dragon on our doorstep, and the Cailleach under your command. You, madam, have sought the destruction of our realm since first you sent a man to the Aldersgate tree, flint and tinder in hand. What reason have we, in this world or any other, to believe that you will simply take your prize and go home?”

Those who lived in the Onyx Court soon learned to lie very well. Nicneven, Queen of a simpler and more honest land, had no such skill. Anger flared across her wild features, obvious even to the most naïve of hobs.

Lune lifted her chin and turned her attention to those hobs, and the goblins and pucks, the sprites and elves, and those few fae of the natural world who brought themselves within her stone halls. “You see the truth upon her,” she said, pitching her voice more loudly. “She would burn us out, with Ifarren Vidar or without him. London lies in ashes because she, seeing the Fire driven on by the wind, refused to spare the City you love. We are twisted, she thinks, every one of us corrupted by the mortal shadow in which we dwell. Nothing less will suffice for her but the utter destruction of our home—below and above.”

She returned her gaze to Nicneven then, and took strength from the throne on which she sat, the London Stone lying concealed at her back. Lune had traveled the breadth of England as a beggar Queen, a supplicant to the courts in which she dwelt; now, for the first time, she faced a fellow sovereign as an equal, from the seat of her own power.

This is my throne. Not Invidiana’s, nor any other.

Her throne, her realm—and her people. Lune let a fierce smile curve her lips, and addressed a question to her subjects, even as she stared unblinking into the Gyre-Carling’s wild eyes. “My lord Prince—my lords and ladies of my council and court, my faithful knights, my devoted servants, you who are the humblest of my subjects—I ask you then, what answer shall I make to this threat from the North?”

She meant it to be rhetorical, a mere flourish before she threw her defiance in Nicneven’s teeth. But a hoarse voice answered her, from among the battered remains of the Onyx Guard: Segraine, standing proud on the last ragged edge of her will. “Tell her to go home; she’ll find no victory here. We’ll kill this Dragon for you, madam, and anything else she sends at us.”

“Me and my pretty mortal guns will help you,” Bonecruncher growled. “They’re a corruption I like well.”

Nicneven had not expected the responses, either. Until now, she’d spoken only to Lune, not acknowledging with so much as a glance that anyone else stood in the hall; now her hair flew like snakes as she whirled to face the goblin and the knight. “You are mad,” the Gyre-Carling said flatly. “Why dwell here, locked in stone, with a hundred churches above your head? This lunatic Queen of yours has robbed you of your common sense.”

Angry murmurs greeted her words. Not threats, but arguments: fae speaking in defense of their home, and then a lighter voice rising above them all. “Why?” Irrith asked. “Because of the mortals. No one robbed me of anything; I came here by choice, because I was curious.” The sprite managed one of her impudent smiles, as if aware of how much it would infuriate Nicneven. “I’m afraid London’s not at its best right now—taverns burnt, people camping in fields outside the walls—but if you come back next year, I could guide you around. You might find you like it here.”

A handful of pucks took that jibe and embroidered upon it, turning the anger to mocking laughter. Like barbed darts, the laughs pierced the Unseely Queen’s skin and lodged there, maddening her like a boar brought to bay. Her attendants drew closer, fearful again of violence—all except Cerenel, who stood apart, unreadable, watching as Nicneven’s rage crested and finally broke.

“This City of yours,” she shouted above the laughs, spitting the word as if it were an obscenity, “is gone! And soon your palace shall be, too.”

The laughter stopped. And in that silence, Jack Ellin stepped forward.

For one blind instant, Lune feared he would throw the courtesies of safe passage into the midden, and incite her subjects into attacking the Scottish party. They would do it, too; Lune had not meant for this to happen, for the confrontation between her and the other Queen to spring so suddenly from her control.

But it was Jack. Not a soldier, but he wielded words like a weapon.

“The houses are burnt,” he said, as if it were no great matter. “Some churches are gone, taverns, shops—but not the City. London, madam, is more than its walls and its roofs. So long as there are Londoners, there will be a London.”

Then he turned to Lune and made her a courteous bow. “I dare-say our subjects are of equally hardy stuff. Perhaps you would care to instruct me in the building of a faerie palace?”

She stared at him, trying not to release the disbelieving laugh that trembled in her throat. He is mad. But he was not the only one; from down on the floor, she heard Rosamund Goodemeade say, “We can help you with that, my lord.”

“I don’t know if we can fit everyone into Rose House,” Gertrude said, with artful doubt, “but I’m sure we’ll find homes for the rest, while we rebuild.”

“Might redesign a few entrances while we’re at it,” her sister mused.

“And try for something more cheerful than all this black stone.”

“Make my bedchamber larger!” one of the pucks called out, and another jested in response, “What for? You’re the only one who uses it.” As if the floodgates had opened, a hundred other suggestions filled the air, for the improved design of a new Onyx Hall.

They were mad, every last one of them. Lune did not know if it was the strain of living under the Cailleach’s assault, or the transmuted fire she and Jack had poured into them, the radiant heart of London. But their madness gave her heart, because it meant they stood behind her, even in the face of a Dragon.

Without them, she was Queen of nothing. With them, there was no distance she could fall that she could not climb back up again.

Fierce pride swelled in her heart. Lune waited, letting her subjects have their say, and then when the shouts subsided she spoke once more to the dumbfounded and furious Nicneven.

“You can destroy the Onyx Hall,” she admitted, mimicking Jack’s casual tone. “But not the Onyx Court. So long as these people call London their home, you cannot destroy us. Not without killing every last fae who chooses to dwell in this city, and every mortal who stands beside us. And that will start a war you cannot win.

“So this is your choice, Gyre-Carling. You can raise the Cailleach once more and hope the Dragon burns us out. If it does, you lose Ifarren Vidar, for he will be destroyed with the palace. In the aftermath, we will rebuild our home, and you will have nothing but the vindictive satisfaction of putting us to that work.

“Or you can stand aside and let us destroy this beast. When we are done, you shall have Ifarren Vidar—but in exchange, you will return to Fife, and make no further war against us.”

Nothing shivered within. Her realm was more than stone; it was her people. And they were outside Nicneven’s control; they could not—would not—be used to make Lune kneel.

Nicneven did not understand. Lune doubted she was capable of it. That fae should find mortals interesting, that was comprehensible. Faerie-kind had always been drawn to their endless passion and capacity for change. But to live so close beside them, and stand so proudly in defense of such a home…

The Gyre-Carling would never understand that choice. But neither could she win against it. No victory was possible, against those who would not admit defeat.

She stood frozen in the center of the floor, balked of her prey. She could still drive them out, destroy the Onyx Hall, and retire to Fife with her empty triumph. But it would cost her Ifarren Vidar.

Passions, not politics, Cerenel had said. Vidar’s treachery had hurt her far more deeply than the Onyx Hall ever could.

Through teeth clenched hard, the Gyre-Carling said, “How do I know you will give him to me?”

An oath was the easy answer. But Lune was tired of those, tired of cheapening Mab’s name by swearing to this and that. She cast about for another solution, and then Rosamund stepped forward. “Madam, if it would be acceptable to you, Gertrude and I will stand surety for your word.”

Hostages. Fear stirred in Lune’s heart, but Cerenel bowed to her, and to the Goodemeades. “And I will vouch for their safety, if the Gyre-Carling pleases.”

The Gyre-Carling did not please much at all, by the look on her face, but to say so would gain her nothing. “Go kill your Dragon,” she spat at last. “If you can.”

THE ONYX HALL, LONDON: two o’clock in the morning

“Madam—it cannot be done.”

Jack paused, halfway through shrugging out of his stiff doublet, and stared at Sir Peregrin Thorne. The knight was weary, and covered head-to-toe with filth; he hadn’t spoken up during the pretty little show out in the presence chamber, when the fae of the Onyx Court defied Nicneven. Standing closer to him now, Jack saw the despair in his eyes. “If anyone could kill the Dragon, Prigurd would have done. I have never seen such strength. But it has devoured so much…” Matted hair swung as he shook his head, except where it had been scorched from one side. “It has grown too great. Not all your knights together could kill it now.”

His flat declaration produced an awkward pause. Good humor had been running high among Lune’s advisers, gathered for this urgent war council, but it faltered badly under Peregrin’s words. Jack finished taking off his doublet and laid it over the back of a chair, less confident than he had been.

“Guns?” Bonecruncher suggested, hopefully. The barguest liked the weapons rather too well. But Peregrin shook his head.

“If we had iron shot, perhaps,” Segraine said, lowering herself into a chair. No one grudged her the comfort—or Peregrin either, though he refused to take it. “It’s a mystical being, as we are. But by the time we arm ourselves thus, it will be too late.”

Lune laid her hands flat on the surface of the council table, aligning them with exaggerated care along the floral pattern outlined in bright commesso. “Iron,” she said.

Everyone except Jack shivered.

She lifted her head, and smiled without mirth. “Not iron shot. It seems Nicneven has done us a favor after all.”

By forcing her to give up Vidar. Jack said, “That iron box you locked him in.”

The Queen nodded.

“Will it hold the thing?” he asked doubtfully. “You’ve not seen the Dragon, Lune; it’s huge.”

“The box does not work that way. It is small; what it entraps is the spirit. But yes, it will hold the Dragon.”

You think it will. Jack would not voice the doubts she kept silent, though. Rolling back the cuffs of his sleeves, he said, “Then once we take Vidar out again, we need two things: a way to force the Dragon inside, and bait to draw it near.”

Bonecruncher snorted. “Just offer it what’s left of the City.”

Jack glared at the goblin. Fortunately, Lune answered before he could speak his mind. “The Dragon does not want the City. Rather, it does—but more than that, it craves the power we have here. The Onyx Hall. It has tried for us twice already.”

Her mind was on tactics. Jack saw, as she did not, the shudder that rippled through the room. They knew of the battle in the cathedral, and rumors had spread of Lune’s defense at the Stone; they saw her crippled hand, and understood what it betokened. Now she wished to bait the Dragon again?

But they had barred the Stone against their enemy, and Prigurd had closed the cathedral door himself. “We need some new lure,” the Queen said.

Jack hated to suggest it, but she would think of it regardless. “The Tower?”

He was both relieved and dismayed to see her shake her head. “They’ve blown up all the houses nearby; the Fire cannot approach. And while a beast of flames might be overlooked in a great inferno, we cannot battle it inside the Tower of London without drawing far too many eyes.”

Segraine’s head had sagged, until Jack thought her asleep; now she raised it and said, “It is flame no more. Black cinders, like char crusting meat—but beneath is molten flesh.”

“We saw it,” Peregrin said, though no one had forgotten. “Prowling in the vicinity of Newgate.”

Which only lent more weight to Lune’s point. Men might convince themselves they saw no shape in the flames, but a giant black beast was rather much to overlook. Jack pressed the heels of his hands against his eyes and thought. We cannot bring it below. Two of the key points are barred to it, the third unusable—the Thames and the wall will not work—

But there was one more element of the Onyx Hall the Dragon might hunger after.

“We offer it ourselves,” Jack said quietly.

His hands were still blindfolding his eyes; hearing only dead silence, he lowered them and managed an off-balance grin. “I know. In a moment someone will find his tongue and remind me that a Queen is not to be used as bait. But if what the Dragon desires is a conduit to the Onyx Hall…well, at least these conduits can fight back.”

The faces surrounding him might have been a painter’s study in seventeen kinds of horror. Seventeen of horror, and one of calm understanding. Lune knew as well as he did that they were the tastiest morsels they could dangle before their enemy—and that it had to be both of them, together.

She let her advisers argue it for a moment; then she diverted them down a secondary path, leaving the idea to stew in their minds. By the time she came back to it, they would be more resigned to the notion. Or at least Jack assumed that was her plan. In the meantime—“We must get it outside London, I think,” she said. “Outside the wall. Who knows what will happen when we trap it, both above and below. But nowhere that has not burnt already.”

“The liberties to the west, then,” Jack said. “We find the Dragon, draw its attention, then run for Ludgate or Newgate as if the Devil himself were on our tails.” On the whole, I might prefer the Devil.

But that left unanswered the question of how to force it into the trap they hoped would hold it. Lune put it very plainly. “We need some piece of the one to be trapped. With Vidar, it was blood, but the Dragon has none. I think it must be flesh—such as it has. And for a being as powerful as this, I would not trust anything less than its heart to suffice.”

“Does it have a heart?” Irrith asked.

For some reason everyone looked to Jack, as if a mortal physician knew anything about the organs of elemental beasts. “It has something at its core,” he said, “that we may as well call the heart.” It sounded good, and he prayed it was true.

As for how to get at it…“How did George slay his dragon?” Amadea asked.

Jack’s breath huffed out in a voiceless laugh. “The princess he was rescuing threw him her girdle, which, placed around the neck of the beast, made it docile as a lamb. Then he led it about for a time before slaying it.”

“I do not think we will try that,” Lune said dryly. “We need some means to split its breast.”

Jack tapped his lip in thought. “It’s molten within, you say. Hot glass shatters if swiftly cooled. Might that not work here?”

“Do you have a boulder of ice to throw at it?” Bonecruncher growled.

“I can offer you something better.”

That voice came from near the door. When had that ambassador of Nicneven’s joined them? Cerenel made the briefest of bows, shoulders stiff under the disapproving stares around him. Yes—he used to be a knight of this court. Is that why he comes among us now?

“Your Grace, my lord,” the violet-eyed knight said, turning from Lune to Jack, “what you need is the staff of the Cailleach Bheur.”

After suffering under her touch for days, no one looked happy at the suggestion. The Cailleach was winter, though, and for once that might work to their purpose. “Her staff hardens the ground with frost,” Lune murmured, considering. “It would do very well indeed. But we do not have it.”

“I shall get it for you.”

He spoke with perfect confidence, enough to make Bonecruncher snort again. “Nicneven will just hand it over, will she?”

Jack would not have thought a slender elf-knight could glare down a barguest, but Cerenel managed. “I shall get it,” he repeated. “Her Majesty knows my word is good.”

For some reason that made Lune flinch. But the tight line of her jaw softened when Cerenel turned back to her; she even offered him a painful, grateful smile. “So it is. If you can bring us the staff of the Cailleach Bheur, then we shall face our enemy at last.”

NEWGATE, LONDON: six o’clock in the morning

Swirling ashes choked the dawn air, giving all the light a sullen red glow, as if cast by the fire. The rising sun was a flat disk through the haze, comfortable to the naked eye, though Lune had precious little attention to spare for it. She had to pick her way carefully across the smoking debris, the embers roasting the soles of her boots until she wondered how Jack could stand it. He kept close by her side, one hand always prepared to steady her elbow, though she had dressed herself once more in the clothes she’d worn in retaking the Onyx Hall.

Not the armor, though. It would do her no good against the Dragon, and make running much, much harder.

Running, they would likely have to do. She had never felt so physically vulnerable in her life. Not even when making her stand at the Stone—perhaps because she had thrown herself into that confrontation before she had time to think. Now, wandering the ruin of her City, she felt the Hall’s power breathing in her flesh. Hers, and Jack’s, and the two of them out here, offering themselves to the Dragon.

Not alone, at least. All around them, slipping like ghosts through the gray air, their companions spread out in search of their enemy. Prey sighted, they would give the cry, and then all would try to harry the beast toward the nearest gate. Fire still raged in the liberties and elsewhere, but on this side of the Fleet it was mostly burnt out. They hoped to make their stand on the near side of the river.

“What sort of sound does one make to call a Dragon?” Jack muttered at her side. “I hear tell there are different calls for cattle, and pigs, and sheep…”

Lune’s hands tightened around the staff. She often enjoyed his levity, but not now. Not with winter itself sending lances of cold through her bones.

The Cailleach’s staff was knotted black wood, cold and hard enough to be mistaken for iron. Nor was it much less unpleasant to Lune: all the effects of the wind were nothing compared to this. Jack could not carry it for her; one touch, and he had dropped it screaming. “I saw my death,” he whispered, eyes raw, and would not tell her what it was.

So Lune had to bear the staff, and with it, a thousand dreams of what her own death might be. One might expect nineteen of twenty to give the Dragon a prominent role, but in truth they were of all kinds, which was almost a comfort. Every time she imagined drowning or being stabbed through the heart, it distracted her from the very real death that might be just moments away.

For as right as Jack was to suggest the two of them as bait, Lune knew very well the risk they embraced. One or both of them might not survive this encounter.

Her own death was not the only one dancing before her eyes.

“Do you suppose that might kill it?”

Wrapped up in her dismal thoughts, Lune did not understand him at first. Concentrate. You cannot afford to be distracted. Following Jack’s nod, she glanced down at the staff. The Cailleach was powerful—perhaps even more so than the Dragon—but only the weapon was here, not the Hag herself. “I do not know.”

He shrugged, as if it did not especially matter. “If it does, splendid—we shall go and get drunk. If not, we still have this.” Jack patted the empty box cradled in his arms. He carried it as if the iron sides were as fragile as the shell of a blown egg, as if too much pressure from his hands might shatter their one real hope. Lune had spent bread with a prodigal hand, armoring herself and everyone else coming above until their coffers were all but bankrupt, but she remembered what happened the last time she touched iron.

So instead I have the weapon, which I scarcely know how to use.

The gloves on her hands did no good at all. The burned flesh on the left ached from the cold, and the unhealed wound in her shoulder throbbed in response. But the staff was hope, and so she clung to it.

Through the drifting ashes, she heard the whispers. “Do you see it?” “No.” “Perhaps it’s moved on…”

It could be anywhere. The Onyx Guard had glimpsed it near Newgate, but the Dragon might have gone across the City since then. It could be at the Stone. Or in the liberties, where the fire still raged. Or planning some assault against the Tower.

In this, the City she knew so well, Lune was lost. The streets had vanished beneath fallen timbers and tile; only occasionally did one stumble across a clear patch of cobbles, even that dusted with a layer of cinders and ash. But up ahead she saw the remnants of an arch across the street, and beyond it the corner where the wall turned north from its eastward path. They must be on Foster Lane—such as it was—and the blackened, smoldering wreck on the right was the Goldsmiths’ Hall, where generations of the Ware family had learned their craft, and generations more, members by patrimony, had exercised their influence on London life. Lune’s throat closed at the sight. I have tried to fulfill my promise—but without much success.

The charred timbers shifted, sending sparks into the air.

Jack halted her with one hand on her arm. The tottering chimneys might yet crumble into their path. But by the tightening of his fingers, he realized at the same instant she did that the debris was not collapsing.

It was rising.

The black, searing bulk of the Dragon rose from its lair.

Liquid gold and silver, the lost treasures of the company hall, dripped from its sides like blood. The jagged head swung around, skin cracking where it bent, exposing the fiery substance beneath. Hellish wind blasted them both as the beast exhaled, and then it opened its eyes.

Pinned beneath that gaze like mice beneath a hawk, neither of them found the voice to speak. They needed no words: the instant their muscles could respond, they fled.

But the flight Lune had imagined was nothing like what they faced. There were no streets to run down; instead they staggered across a treacherous plain, twisting their ankles with every third stride. Lune planted the staff for footing, and the ground cracked beneath the sudden frost. Jack clutched her shoulder to save his own balance. They swerved around a chimney, then heard the bricks crash down behind them a moment later. Bereft of all their landmarks and paths, Jack and Lune sought the gate by instinct, and behind them the Dragon gained.

Shouts in the choking air. The others had noticed their flight, and harried the beast’s flanks, as if it needed encouragement to follow. A scream: someone perhaps had come too close. Lune dared not turn to look. They’d passed Aldersgate in their terror, but the unburned houses lay too near outside that wall; Newgate would be safer.

If they could reach it in time.

The shattered bulk stood up ahead, all the prisoners of its jail fled. Gasping for want of clean air, Lune flung herself at it; Jack coughed out something that might have been an oath. They passed through the shadow of its arch, and she thought, We made it.

A snarl came from above.

The Dragon coiled atop the scorched and crumbling structure of the gate. Its long neck thrust downward, maw wide to reveal the inferno within. Lune screamed, and then Jack had her sleeve and jerked her to the side. The serrate teeth snapped shut where they had been.

They had meant to go down Snow Hill, and make their stand at Holborn Bridge over the Fleet, where Blacktooth Meg might still lurk. But in their panic, they were running north, along the line of the wall, while the Dragon’s bulk thundered down from the gate, shaking the earth with its landing. Up ahead—far too close—sat an unbroken line of houses, preserved with terrible effort from the calamity that even now pursued Lune and Jack.

She dragged him to a halt in the embers. “We cannot go farther! It must be here!”

Jack spun to face the oncoming worm. Lune wrapped her aching hands around the staff and did the same. But not quickly enough, for the Dragon was upon them, and a claw of black heat snapped tight around her body.

PIE CORNER, LONDON: seven o’clock in the morning

Jack leapt without thinking, grabbing hold of Lune’s leg. The iron box clanked into the ashes, and for a moment Queen and Prince alike swung in the air, dangling from the Dragon’s claw. Then something ripped and they fell. Jack slammed his hip badly against the box, but worse, he heard the staff clatter away.

He inhaled, caught a lungful of dust, and spasmed in a cough. Only instinct made him roll, and an instant later something crushed the ground where he had been. Blind and choking, he scrabbled away, repeating to himself, This is not the death I saw. This is not the death I saw. But was the vision he’d seen when he touched the Cailleach’s staff prophecy, or merely one possibility out of many?

Through his own coughing he heard other voices. They were not alone. As his streaming eyes cleared, though, he saw that no one could get past the Dragon’s lashing tail; he and Lune were the sole prey for its claws and teeth. Lucky us.

His back hit some fragment of wall, and Jack reached for a hold that could help him to his feet. But before he found anything, his body locked in new paralysis.

Above him, the seething face of the Dragon rose.

It was a horror beyond fire, beyond plague, beyond war. Those did not have eyes that transfixed a man, that blazed down upon him and hungered for the power his flesh bore. Jack could not breathe; his lungs convulsed, unable to draw air past the constriction in his throat.

Then came a scream unlike any he had heard. Lune—the elegant faerie Queen of the Onyx Court, the silver statue who played politics like chess but knew nothing of battle—had the staff in her hands once more, and she swung it full-armed at the Dragon, fury taking the place of skill. “I shall not lose two!”

The Dragon hissed when the staff struck its leg, not from its throat, but from the steaming flesh itself. The Cailleach’s winter chill blackened the surface and stiffened the joint. But it didn’t slow the beast’s other limbs; the undamaged claw slapped Lune down, sending her sprawling across the ground, before seizing her once more in an unbreakable grip.

The staff, knocked from her hands, skidded within Jack’s reach.

For one horrific instant, his arms would not move. They refused, knowing the pain that awaited them. But Lune screamed from above, and it turned out that loyalty trumped self-preservation.

Clenching his jaw so hard a tooth split, he grabbed the staff of the Cailleach Bheur.

I know how I will die.

Roaring, Jack thrust the end of the staff at the underbelly of the Dragon, at the place where the heart might be if this were an ordinary creature. The impact made no mark on his numb, insensate hands, but the force traveled through his arms and into his spine, staggering him back a step.

And this time the Dragon screamed.

A crack opened through the chest and belly of the Dragon, like stone contracting beneath a harder frost than the world had ever known. At the very root of that fissure burned a tiny sun, light and heat beyond the ability of the human eye to bear. The Dragon’s heart was there for the taking—but it would annihilate mortal flesh at a touch.

He had seen his death twice, and this was not it.

A shadow eclipsed that terrible light. Lune plunged her left hand into the fissure, sinking her arm in up to the shoulder, and when she pulled out again, the sun was in her hand.

The box!

Jack dove into the ashes. He felt but didn’t hear his body strike the ground; he couldn’t tell whether all the world had gone to clamor or silence, in the dreadful inaudible sound of the Dragon’s agonized bellow. The box, where is the box—Lune will have no hand left at all—

His fingers stubbed themselves against the iron, then found a corner and pulled.

More ashes flew to choke him as he lurched to his feet, snatching the lid open as he went. Above them, the black mass of the Dragon writhed. Wounded, but not dead. It could live without its heart. He ducked as a claw snatched blindly above his head, and ran for the Queen.

Lune blazed as if the sun had lent the moon all its glory. No time for transmutation now. Jack shoved the iron prison at her. Christ Almighty, I can see the bones of her hand. They spasmed just above the black opening, as if Lune could not make her fingers release. Her face was a rictus of agony.

Forgive me—

Jack drove the iron edge against her wrist.

Blackness swallowed the sun. So great was the light of the heart, Jack thought for a moment the light in the sky had gone out. But he didn’t need his eyes to feel the metal in his hands, and he slammed the lid shut.

Silence.

His ears popped with it. Squinting in the now dim light, Jack realized that nothing stirred up the dust about them. He could see the wall, and the unburnt houses nearby, and the fae regaining their feet some distance away, but where the black bulk of the Dragon had been, there was nothing. Just a swirl of ash, now settling once more to the ground.

The iron was warm in his hands. The shield on top, he saw, bore a tongue of flame.

Lune swayed. He almost dropped the box again, but caught himself in time to set it down with hasty care. Her hand still hovered in the air; where blistered flesh had been, now there was nothing more than a blackened claw, and a charred ring of leather that was all that remained of the cuff of her glove. Her eyes were wide and staring, as if she could not believe he stood before her.

Jack managed a smile, though when he spoke he discovered he must have been screaming a good deal, for his voice almost did not answer. “You needn’t have feared,” he said. “This is not how I die.”

Then they both sagged down into the ashes, and waited for the others to come help them home.

LONDON AND ISLINGTON: ten o’clock in the evening

She woke so soon only because she must, because she had yet to face the Gyre-Carling.

Lune, who scarcely needed sleep at all, could have remained in her bed for a month. She was still half-blind from the light of the Dragon’s heart, her eyes adjusting only slowly to the dimness of her home, and as for her hand…

I thought it ruined before. Perhaps I shall ask Nuada of Temair who made his silver hand.

But had Jack touched the heart, he would be dead. She had feared it too much to say; the thought of losing another Prince so soon after the last was more than she could bear. Jack would not tell her what death he saw in the black wooden staff. She had been so certain it was in battle with the Dragon.

Michael Deven. Antony Ware. Jack Ellin would follow them someday—but not yet.

Amadea helped her sit upright, supporting her left side where her hand no longer could. Once Lune was well propped with pillows, the Lady Chamberlain handed her a cup filled to the brim with the Goodemeades’ best brew. “We have taken a cup to the Prince as well,” Amadea told her. “For when he wakes.”

“Wake him now.” Lune’s voice was a rasping ghost of its normal quality. “He must be at my side when we face Nicneven.”

With help, she struggled into clothing, and pulled a new glove over her hand. It was difficult, the fingers now incapable of bending. Lune saw the delicate bones had fused together, before she concealed the black skeleton from her sight. The glove sat poorly, without skin and flesh to fill it out. But it would have to do.

Sun and Moon. We must return the Cailleach’s staff.

She had not asked how Cerenel got it. She was afraid to know. But for the use they had of it, she would pay almost any price; it had saved them all. Irrith brought a report as Lune dressed, with news of fires everywhere beaten down; some few still burned here and there, but the great danger was past. Tomorrow the King would address the people in Moor Fields, and commence the work of rebuilding his great City.

She scarce believed it could be done, despite all Jack’s bold words. To hear of the destruction was one thing, to feel its progress above her another; to walk the blowing ashes in person was yet another entirely. When the breeze cleared gaps in the dust, she had looked from Aldersgate down to the river, past the shattered ruin of St. Paul’s. And the wasteland to either side stretched farther than she could see.

Enough. Nicneven waits.

As did Jack Ellin. Lune met him outside her bedchamber. The man was haggard, but hale; she wondered how much mead his attendant had poured down his throat. Well, when it wore off, he could sleep for a year, if he wished. “Shall we?” he asked, and offered her his arm. Lune wrapped the paralyzed claw of her hand around it, and together they went above, into the ashes of London.

The Goodemeades had offered Rose House for the parley, perhaps in a clever scheme to soften Nicneven with hospitality while they awaited the outcome of the battle. Certainly the sisters did not seem hostages when Lune and Jack joined them—though it seemed, by Gertrude’s petulance, that she had not convinced the Gyre-Carling to accept any food. The two Queens sat in comfortable chairs, facing one another, both attended by guards, with Jack at Lune’s side, and Cerenel at Nicneven’s.

“First,” the Gyre-Carling said, bypassing all the ordinary courtesies of such a meeting. “You will return the staff of the Cailleach Bheur.”

Without the Dragon to fight, Lune had no need to carry it herself; the Onyx Guard had drawn straws, and Segraine had lost. The lady knight presented it with a bow, and either Nicneven was not bothered by its touch, or she was too proud to admit it, for she took the staff in her ungloved hand before passing it to one of her own attendants.

“We are grateful for the use of it,” Lune said, and the Gyre-Carling’s mouth twisted poisonously. “Moreover we must thank your knight Sir Cerenel, for without his aid, our battle with the Dragon would have gone much harder.”

Nicneven glared at Cerenel. What is here? The knight bowed to his Queen, then to Lune, and said, “For a past service I rendered to the Court of Fife, her Highness permitted me to claim a boon of her. I chose the staff of the Cailleach. She was most…gracious in granting my wish, but on the understanding that I would leave her service, and her realm, once it was returned.”

Lune heard the unspoken implication. He had been a hostage for its safe return, even as the Goodemeades were hostages for Vidar. For the first time, she wondered if contact with the Dragon could have broken even that ancient wood.

Then she noticed the all-too-innocent expressions on the Goodemeades’ faces. They had been scheming, it seemed—with Cerenel. Whose exile the sisters had never approved of, either when Lune forced it on him, or when he returned to it in bitter freedom.

Cerenel, who was no longer Nicneven’s knight.

“I believe,” Lune said, as if just now recalling it, “that we still owe you a boon, as well.”

Cerenel bowed again. “Your Majesty is likewise most gracious. I would be grateful for the hospitality of your court, as I find myself without a home.”

All the lingering ache briefly vanished from her hands and shoulder, and Lune smiled at him. Cerenel had a home, as he had told her years before: London. And now, after too many years away, he would at last return to it.

Nicneven had no such joy in her face. She glared again, not blinking as Cerenel offered his last bow, and waited until he was gone from her side before speaking again. “Now. The traitor. So I may be gone from this place.”

Lune was more than ready to see her go. Turning to Sir Peregrin, she said, “Bring us Ifarren Vidar.”

He came down the staircase with unsteady steps, bound again by the rowan-wood shackles, and haggard as a skeleton from his iron imprisonment. Vidar had come out of the box unconscious, which Lune was grateful for; it allowed her to face the Dragon without distraction. The Scottish and English fae who kept watch over him in his prison said he recovered his senses soon enough, though, and cursed them all with fine inventiveness. Now he merely waited, black and contemptuous.

“I want him to suffer,” Nicneven said without preamble.

Lune tried to remember the Scottish policy on torture—not that Nicneven would care what mortal kings and queens considered legal. “He is yours, as promised. What you do with him beyond that is not our concern, save to say that he is a confessed traitor, and worthy of death.”

Vidar let out an ugly laugh. “So your fine principles have fallen to expediency after all. Or was your heart too soft to keep me in that box?”

They had taken him out the Crutched Friars entrance and around the outside of the City; though he must have smelled the smoke, in the darkness he could not see the pall that still hung over London. Locked in iron, Vidar did not know the great changes that had befallen the world outside.

Lune faced him with tranquility. She did not have to convince Vidar of her principles; it was enough that she knew them, as did those around her. “The Prince and I merely remand you to the justice of the Gyre-Carling, as a gesture of our goodwill.”

That got a curled lip from Nicneven, who showed no particular evidence of goodwill. But she surprised Lune by saying, “You shall have your part. Vidar will die, but not by my hand.”

Lune blinked. “You wish us to execute him?”

“Not you.” Now the other Queen did smile, and it held all the hatred that had been thwarted in the Onyx Hall. “Let the mortals kill him.”

“What?” Vidar snarled.

For once, the Gyre-Carling’s wolfish look was not turned against Lune. “I have no love for such dealings—but it is a fitting end for you. Let those you despise be your executioners. The Onyx Court can arrange it, I’m sure. A stoning, perhaps; I imagine you have folk enough afraid of witches and uncanny things.”

Fury and fear were mingled in equal parts in Vidar’s expression. The Gyre-Carling could not have devised a crueler sentence for him had she tried. The passion of her hatred was fierce indeed.

It made Lune uneasy. While she could do what Nicneven asked, it smelled too much of revenge, instead of justice. Antony’s fine principles left a mark upon me, after all.

But it was, as Nicneven said, fitting. Vidar had always used mortals in pursuit of his own power, without regard for their well-being. And he went beyond the ordinary cruelty of Invidiana’s days during their own years of war: fostering riots, encouraging the Army’s madness, feeding all the worst impulses of England’s people. He was not the sole author of their suffering, but he played his part.

Perhaps she could consider it their justice, too.

But bringing mortals into the process meant bringing in the Prince of the Stone. Lune turned to Jack, and he shrugged. To him, Ifarren Vidar was a name accompanied by a curse, and now a bound prisoner rousing hatred that began long before his birth. Whatever opinion he had, it would be more impartial than hers.

“Mortal affairs are yours to decide, my lord,” Lune said, and enjoyed Nicneven’s expression of disgust. “The fae of this court accede to the Gyre-Carling’s request. Can a suitable way be found?”

Jack gave it a moment’s thought. Then a smile spread over his face—a strange one, equal parts amusement and pain. “Yes. I think it can.”

TYBURN, LONDON: October 27, 1666

A festival atmosphere prevailed around the gallows at Tyburn. It mattered little if four-fifths of the City lay in ruins not far away, and an area outside the walls as large as that remaining fifth; or if thirteen thousand houses were reduced to charcoal and ash, along with churches, livery company halls, and most of London’s centers of commerce. The author of it all was soon to hang.

“They don’t believe it,” Jack murmured to the woman at his side. “And yet, they do; they choose to believe it, because it’s what they wanted someone to tell them. Now they have someone to blame.”

“And to punish.” Mistress Montrose stood straight and solemn, hands clasped over her plain bodice. “Because no such disaster could be pure accident.”

And yet, accident it had been. The committee set up by the House of Commons knew it full well, despite the scores of accusations that had poured in. But if it was not the work of papist conspirators, then it must be an act of God: a second judgment for London’s sinful ways. They had not learned from plague, so now the Almighty tried fire.

The godly were happy to believe that. Others—the ones who enjoyed their sinful ways too much to give them up—insisted on a papist conspiracy. And Robert Hubert was its convenient author.

The man swore blind to the judges, again and again, that he had thrown a fire-ball through the window of Farynor’s bakery. Farynor supported this wholeheartedly, for certainly such a disaster could not be due to his negligence, the slovenly keeping of his kitchen. Never mind that Hubert confused details, sometimes contradicted himself; led among the ashes, he could point to where the bakery had been, and that was damning enough.

The judges believed him simple. They knew Hubert wasn’t guilty; they tried to get him to admit it. A strange sort of questioning, when the prisoner’s jailers wished him to retract his confession—but they didn’t want to hang an innocent man. The people of London, though, wanted blood, and Hubert seemed determined to offer it to them. In the end, what could they do but accept his martyrdom?

By this disreputable means did Jack tender London his services.

They were leading Hubert onto the scaffold now. There was no trace of Vidar in his body or manner; the enchantments binding his mind might confuse his behavior at times, but there was nothing to show him for a faerie lord. And though Lune had promised Nicneven that the traitor would scream inside, fully aware of the fate he suffered, in truth they had done what they could to confuse his thoughts as well. Lune did not have it in her nature to torture him thus, enemy though he undoubtedly was.

For the Onyx Court, justice. For the Gyre-Carling, revenge. And for London, a sense of peace: with the guilty punished, they could turn their thoughts from accusing their neighbors to rebuilding the streets they shared.

Soon enough the clearing would begin. Charles had already laid down rules for the restoration of the City; streets were to be widened, all the houses built of brick, so that this calamity could not happen again. Half a dozen men had submitted plans for a comprehensive change, seeing an opportunity to sweep away the detritus of London’s ancient past and make it a city worthy to stand alongside the brightest gems of the Continent. Jack didn’t know if any of them would bear fruit; too much of London was bound up in its shape, the parishes and ward boundaries and the encircling wall.

But even if no such changes occurred, the City he had known was gone. The half-timbered houses, the overhanging jetties; the churches hundreds of years old. All would be made anew.

What that meant for the Onyx Hall, they would just have to wait and see.

The rope jerked tight. Hubert swung, kicking. Jack closed his ears to the roar of the crowd, and took hold of Lune’s hand. Disguised by her glamour, it felt like healthy flesh.

She still could not tighten her fingers on his, but she covered them with her other hand. “We will recover from this,” she said, and he nodded. A year of calamities had given him a difficult start in the Onyx Court, but he had no intention of leaving. They had far too much to do.