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A Star Shall Fall

“In a way.” He rose from the table, hands half-raised, cradling empty air as if trying to grasp the idea in his mind. “Whatever a faerie is—beautiful or ugly; friendly or cruel; amusing or appallingly rude—you’re pure. They say evil exists in the world because without it, good would have no meaning. I wonder sometimes if that’s what the fae are. Not evil—I don’t mean that—” Galen’s half-distracted words stuttered into apology, before he saw Irrith hadn’t taken offence. “More like the, the pigments a painter works with. The pure colors, before they’re blended. When you hate, you hate. When you love—”

“We love forever.” Or at least Lune did. Irrith had never given her heart, and had no intention of ever doing so. “But how does that help London?”

“How does water help, or air, or the downward pull of gravity? Those things simply are, and without them, there is no London.”

Irrith shook her head impatiently, hopping off her own chair. “There was a London, though, before there was an Onyx Court. It hasn’t always been here, you know. I never saw the city until a hundred years ago, but I can’t imagine it was somehow less real, less full of life, back when they didn’t have a bunch of mischievous, meddlesome faeries being friendly and ugly and all the rest of it beneath their feet.”

“A hundred years,” Galen said, on a breath of startled laughter. “The charms and enchantments, you know—those I can accept, without much trouble. It’s the immortality my mind can’t encompass. You don’t look a hundred years old.”

She was far older than that. She suspected, though, that Galen didn’t need to hear her talk about the Black Death, or any of the other fragments she remembered from humanity’s long-distant past. Instead she went back to the original point. “What would happen, if we all left? Not just London—all of Wayland’s court, and Herne’s, and every other faerie realm in England. No more faeries. What would you lose?”

Galen looked as if the mere thought was enough to break him into splinters. “I—”

He would lose Lune. A more thoughtless young man might have said it; Irrith had known many mortals who scarcely past their own desires. Galen, for all his youth and uncertainty, had a larger heart than that. But why? It frustrated her, that she could not understand. What made him care so much about the fae?

At some point his hands had curled into helpless fists; now they relaxed, one joint at a time. Galen’s eyes—nearly the same blue as the walls—were unfocused, gazing off into the distance, and in them was a well of feeling deep enough for Irrith to drown in. Then he blinked, and so did she; the spell was broken. Galen said ruefully, “You want a single answer, one thing I can name that will account for all the fae at once. I don’t know if it’s that simple—if it can be that simple. The good comes in many diverse ways. Some of it is grand, like the saving of England from the Spanish Armada; some of it is slight, like the rescue of a single child from starvation in a gutter. If I must name a single thing…” He turned to her, and the longing in his eyes made Irrith shiver down to her toes. “You are our bridge to Faerie. If you leave, then it goes beyond our reach. And that would be a terrible loss.”

He believed it. He really did. Irrith was used to fae hungering for the brightness of mortals, but to see that hunger reflected back in his eyes…

“I’m not leaving.”

Her own voice, speaking without instructions. But the words, Irrith realised, were true. She repeated them. “I’m not leaving. Others probably will, because it’s easier than fighting. But I’ll stay. If nothing else, London deserves this much good of us: that we mend the things we broke.”

That sounded good. And it was easier than saying the other thing in her mind, the one called forth by Galen’s eyes. I cannot refuse you.

Odd as it was, a mortal wanted something from her—and she wanted to give it, if she could.

Galen caught up her hand and kissed it, then gripped her fingers as if holding fast to a rope. “Thank you, Dame Irrith.”

Common words, a courtesy tossed back and forth a thousand times a day. But the words, and the touch of his hands, stayed with her long after she departed.