A Star Shall Fall

The streets slowly filled with people. At this hour, London belonged to its lower classes: the servants and labourers, porters and beggars. Men thick with muscle, and men wasted down to skeletons from illness and starvation. Women in the drab clothes of maids, hurrying to buy for the day’s meals. Yawning apprentices, surly cart drivers, a half-grown girl with a flock of chickens. Watching them go by, Irrith thought of her words to Ktistes. The buildings didn’t matter so much, but the people… they were the ones Lune, and Galen, and all their allies were trying to protect.

Ktistes thought like an architect. He saw the land, whether he was on top of it or inside it, and the structures that could be shaped to it. People mattered because they would use what he built, but that was the only point at which they entered into his plans. When it came to hiding England, he didn’t think of them. He thought only of the land.

It won’t be enough, Irrith realised. London wasn’t its fabric; it was its people. Lune had taught her that. And surely it was true for other places, be they Berkshire or Yorkshire or Scotland.

She had to hide all of it: the ground, the trees, the houses and shops and churches, and most especially the people.

If the buildings weren’t the clothing, then what was?

Something smacked her shoulder hard, and knocked Irrith sprawling into the chilly mud.

“Blood and Bone!” she swore, and got baffled stares from the porters carrying kegs into a nearby tavern. Irrith swore again, then threw a hasty glamour over her faerie face, so that they blinked in confusion and went back to their work. A charm of concealment could make people look away from her, but it did nothing to protect her from collision, and the attention that brought.

Time to get below, or to find a quiet place where she could improve her glamour and continue her wanderings.

But before she could climb to her feet, something caught her eye—and then she began to laugh.

Flat on her back in the mud, with the porters staring again and carts rumbling past her unprotected toes, Irrith laughed and laughed, because the answer was right there, wrapping England in a gray and frequently rainy cloak.

Clouds.

THE ONYX HALL, LONDON

18 April 1758

Lune laid her head against the back of her chair in a rare gesture of frustration. “I don’t suppose any clever mortal has designed a scheme for influencing the weather?”

“Designed one?” Galen said. “Almost certainly. Executed it successfully? That, I fear, is another matter.”

She sighed in acknowledgment. “Then it must be faerie magic.” One pale hand rose to rub at her eyes. “We have some ability to call rain when we need it, but nothing of sufficient force, nor duration—not to hide this entire island, certainly not for months on end.”

Silence ruled the chamber for a few minutes. They were not alone; Lune had called a small convocation of her closest companions: Amadea, the Irish lady Feidelm, and Rosamund Goodemeade, whose sister was occupied elsewhere. With an air that suggested she knew her words would be unwelcome, the little brownie offered, “We do know folk who might manage it.”

Lune winced. Rosamund, upon Galen’s quizzical look, said, “Those who live in the sea.”

“Mermaids?”

“And stranger things,” Lune replied, lifting her head. “You’re right, Rosamund, and if we must, we will ask them. But I would very much like to find another way. For aid of this kind, we’d be heavily in debt to them, and the folk of the sea are strange enough that I cannot begin to predict what they would demand in return.”

A faerie was calling someone else strange? Galen bit down on the urge to ask whether that meant they were of surpassing normality. The unease Lune showed at the thought of dealing with them told him now wasn’t the time for such a jest.

The chamber door opened, and Lewan Erle slipped through. The foppish lord bowed in meticulous apology before approaching the Queen, a sealed letter in his hands.

She broke the seal and perused it, first with a disinterested eye, then with a very interested one indeed. Upon finishing her second reading, she turned to the waiting lord. “He’s in the Onyx Hall?”

“Yes, madam. But he waited at the Crutched Friars entrance until Greymalkin found him—I believe he was there at least an hour.”

“Very courteous.” Lune folded the paper again and turned to Galen. “This is a letter of introduction from Madame Malline le Sainfoin de Veilée, formerly the ambassadress of the Cour du Lys. It recommends to our attention a certain foreigner now waiting—”

“Still at Crutched Friars, madam,” Lewan Erle supplied, when Lune paused.

She passed the folded letter to Amadea and rose. “We shall receive him in the lesser—no, the greater presence chamber. And Lord Galen and myself will take the time to dress more formally. If he is the first faerie of his land to set foot in England, then we can at least make his initial impression a grand one.”