A Star Shall Fall

His cries seemed to have summoned fae out of every crevice of the Hall, and half of them were now crowding into the room. Galen didn’t even know where they were; it was some courtier’s chambers, he thought. Whatever had been nearest when help came running. But the result was chaos, and they were wasting time.

He bellowed loud enough to make Gertrude drop the bandage she was wrapping around his hand, and was rewarded with a ragged fall into silence. “Out,” he snarled. “I need Sir Peregrin and Sir Cerenel—the Goodemeades can stay—and the scholars, get me Lady Feidelm, Abd ar-Rashid, any of them you can find. Everyone else, get out.”

Sir Adenant took up his orders and repeated them, herding almost everyone from the room. Now Galen could see Rosamund, crouching over Irrith, trying to chafe warmth back into the sprite’s limp hands. “What’s wrong with her?”

“Iron,” the brownie said, not looking up. “And holy things, and everything else. She was up there without bread, Galen, I don’t know for how long.”

Would she recover? He couldn’t spare the time for that worry, not right now. Gertrude tied off the bandage as Sir Peregrin came in with his lieutenant. Abd ar-Rashid was not far behind. Good enough to start with.

Galen told them of Red Lion Square. He wanted to be concise, but every word made his face ache, and his thoughts kept scattering to the four winds; Gertrude pressed a cup of mead into his good hand, and he drank it down, shaking almost badly enough to choke. Where were the rest of the scholars? Abd ar-Rashid shook his head when Galen asked. “Lady Feidelm and Wrain are in the Calendar Room. I cannot find Savennis.”

“He’s dead.”

The paper-thin whisper came from Irrith. Rosamund had tucked her into the bed of the courtier whose chambers they’d usurped, where she looked like a small child, wasted by illness. Her shifting eyes had dulled to a flat, muddy green. “In the cellar. Andrews was experimenting. They’re all dead.”

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

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

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

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

“We don’t have the time!”

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

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

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

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

“Because he needs time to prepare.”

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

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

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

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

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

“Aspell? The Lord Keeper?”

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

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

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

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

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