A Star Shall Fall

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What about a barge?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * *

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

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

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

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

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

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