A Star Shall Fall

He laughed soundlessly. “And so you saved me from my own mistake. I suppose you were worried he would say things he shouldn’t, tell someone about that mad St. Clair boy and the nonsense he spouts. Well, I have his assurance of secrecy now, so you can rest safely.”

“He didn’t believe you,” Irrith said. That still rankled. The need to make Galen understand why drew her closer to him, across the black stone floor. “Men like him don’t, not anymore. As far as they’re concerned, I don’t exist. And someone like you, who does believe… if he weren’t so angry, he would have laughed at you. I couldn’t let that stand, for me or you.”

Galen’s head came up, and only then did Irrith realise just how near she’d drawn. They stood bare inches apart, and then his gaze flickered, in a way she’d seen countless times across the countless ages.

But he didn’t move. So she did it for him, closing that last gap and capturing his lips with her own.

He wrenched back an instant later. “Dame Irrith—”

“What?” she asked, confused and a little hurt. “I saw your eyes move. You wanted to kiss me.”

“No! Well, yes, but—” He shook his head, hands up in midair as if warding something off. “It isn’t right.”

“Why not?”

He opened and closed his mouth a few times, like a man with several explanations competing to come out first, none of them entirely satisfactory.

Irrith sighed. “You aren’t married. You aren’t even betrothed. Are you a virgin?”

“What? I—no—it’s none of your business!”

As if he were the first gentleman to make use of a whore’s services. Irrith guessed it was a whore; the sort of young man who seduced servant girls or the neighbour’s daughter usually didn’t blush like that. “So fornication isn’t the problem. Do you think it’s especially sinful, with a faerie woman? But you don’t mind being in love with—”

He didn’t have to stop her; she stopped herself. The answer was so obvious. But Irrith wasn’t used to accounting for such things. “But—she doesn’t even know how you feel.” Or so he liked to think.

Galen said, very stiffly, “That doesn’t matter. I know, and would feel ashamed.”

“But why should you?” Irrith advanced; he retreated. Step by step, they crossed the roundel beneath the entrance; mercifully, no one chose that moment to fall from the City above. “She doesn’t love you back, and you know it. You’ll never be with her, and you know that, too. Why not have what you can?”

Galen halted just before he would have hit the far wall. “Do you love me?”

Of course he would ask that. Irrith couldn’t remember the entirety of her existence, but surely she would remember if she’d ever encountered another man ruled so deeply by his heart. It defined him—and that, of course, was why he fascinated her so much.

“No,” Irrith said. “But I don’t need to.”

This time when she reached for him, he didn’t try to escape.

PART FOUR CONJUNCTIO Summer 1758

Mankind have a great aversion to intellectual labor; but even supposing knowledge to be easily attainable, more people would be content to be ignorant than would take even a little trouble to acquire it.

DR. SAMUEL JOHNSON,

QUOTED IN THE LIFE OF SAMUEL JOHNSON, LL.D.

BY JAMES BOSWELL

The first vapors wisp free. Tenuous as ghosts, they soon vanish into the blackness; but they are there. The comet’s surface is warming.

Inert blackness converts to a radiant glow. Encouraged by the sun, the subtle matter bursts forth, creating something like air around the solid core. For the first time in more than seventy years, the beast begins to breathe.

Cold. Still too cold. Its awareness is sluggish, stupid, like a lizard left too long in shadow. Once it was mighty, a beast of flame and char, consuming all within its path. The efforts of humans were nothing, a mockery, a mere game for the creature they fought. To be reduced to this, drinking in the sun’s nourishment like a babe at the teat, is a terrible fall indeed.