A Star Shall Fall

She wondered if he had chosen his moment deliberately, tracking her movement through the garden until she came to this point, or whether it was pure chance that put them near the twin obelisks. Michael Deven’s grave, and the memorial to her past Princes.

All of them died eventually. Some from illness, others from misfortune; one had given his life to prepare them for the Dragon’s return. None of them could live forever.

But she hadn’t expected to lose Galen so soon.

She had not answered him. He was stiff as a pike, still where he had been when she stopped, awaiting the answer they both knew she had to give.

Before she could give it, though—“What of your family?”

It was cruel, but necessary. His calm cracked a little. “My sisters,” he said, with a hint of unsteadiness, “have been taken care of. Delphia’s jointure is provided for by our marriage settlement.”

A lawyer’s reply, which told her the answer to her real question. “You have not told her yet.”

His jaw trembled, then firmed. “No. But I will.”

Lune could not guess how the woman would take it. Delphia was too unfamiliar to her still. But the considerations of one mortal woman would not change their circumstances—nor, she suspected, Galen’s determination. He would do this come Hell itself.

And she had no reason strong enough to refuse him.

“Then make your preparations, Lord Galen,” she said formally, acknowledging him with a curtsy, Queen to Prince. “The resources of this court are at your disposal.”

Memory: 15 April 1756

“I think the one thing worse than locking myself in that room for months on end,” Cuddy said, “would be locking myself in that room for months on end to do mathematics.”

The puck’s voice echoed down the corridor as Lune approached. She hid a smile before she came through the pillars into the dwarves’ workshop. Some fae, like the von das Tickens, might have a great deal of love for craftsmanship, but none of them enjoyed mathematics. Even those mad brothers did their work by instinct, not calculation. For that, they needed a mortal.

Eleven days ago, Cuddy and the dwarves had carried stacks of books into the great clock’s chamber: instructions in algebra, elementary works on the calculus, and Newton’s great Principia Mathematica; Flamsteed’s observations from 1682; Halley’s Astronomiae cometicae synopsis, which had started their troubles to begin with. There were rumors that a French mathematician would be attempting to calculate the comet’s orbit and perihelion, but Lune and her court could not afford to wait. The Calendar Room was the only solution, and so Lord Hamilton had offered himself for this herculean task. He knew little of that branch of learning, but that was nothing sufficient study outside of time could not mend.

She’d given him her most heartfelt thanks before he went in, and would do so again when he came out. To be locked inside, alone, with only the great clock for company… Cuddy’s jest aside, even the work could not be enough to distract a man from that dread presence. She hoped Hamilton would not come stumbling out in a few moments to say he could not do it, that he’d only lasted three days and accomplished nothing at all.

The time had come to find out. Wilhas took hold of the sundial on the door and dragged the portal open.

At first she thought Hamilton’s slow, shuffling steps a sign of mere exhaustion. He could not have slept well, inside the Calendar Room. But then he came forward, into the illumination of the workshop’s faerie lights, and she saw his head. Not a wig; he’d taken none into the room. Those long, ragged locks were his own hair—and snow-white.

The Prince of the Stone lifted his head, revealing his time-worn face to the world.

Lune’s breath withered in her throat. Mortal. He is mortal. Time outside of time—we knew he wouldn’t need food, but we did not think of aging.

How long was he in there?

Hamilton extended one wrinkled hand. The papers in it trembled, until Lune took them. “Perihelion on March thirteenth, 1759,” he said, in a reed-thin voice that had spoken only to the walls for years. “The French will need more than one mathematician if they want their answer before the comet has come and gone; the work is enormous. I fear I took too long learning the calculus—it was hard to concentrate in there—”

He staggered. Everyone had been standing like stone, but now Wilhas leapt into the chamber and came back with a chair. Its cushion was worn beyond threadbare, its padding flattened until it was almost as hard as the wood. Hamilton collapsed into it with a motion that spoke of endless, horrifying habit.

Lune sank into a crouch before him, papers forgotten in her hand. A single glance had shown her the unsteady scrawl, replacing his old, meticulous writing. “Hamilton—did you not realise?”