A Star Shall Fall

“More to the point, I know what he wants. He has no interest in running to anyone with his first, unformed thoughts; he prefers to keep matters secret until he can astound the world, as Isaac Newton did, with a singular work that will change their thinking forever. If he begins such a work, I will know about it, in plenty of time to convince him to keep silent.” His duty to the Onyx Court made him add, reluctantly, “Or to prevent him from speaking, if need be.”

Yfaen lowered into a small curtsy. “You know him far better than I, Lord Galen. If you trust his discretion, then I will trust you.”

She said it, but he wondered if she meant it. Yfaen, though friends with Mrs. Vesey, and therefore hardly an enemy, still had doubts. How much worst must it be among the Sanists, and those who scorned him as Prince?

He doubted the answer was one he wanted to hear. And there was no cure for it but to do his best, and pray that would be good enough.

THE ONYX HALL, LONDON

28 June 1758

Irrith’s cabinet was her favourite solace, almost as good as going among mortals themselves, and far cheaper when it came to bread. She ran her hands over the shelves and little drawers, picking objects at random: an embroidered handkerchief, a toothbrush, a locket with a curl of hair inside. A child’s doll, with one arm missing. The polished buckle of a shoe, blood stiffening its hinge. Every one of them a fragment of a story, a life, reeking of passion or mortal ingenuity. She could spend hours studying them and never grow bored.

Unless she was interrupted. When a knock came at her door, she closed the panels of her cabinet, sighing, and went to see who it was.

She would have been less stunned if a poleax had been waiting outside to fall on her head. Valentin Aspell said, “Dame Irrith. If I might have a moment of your time?”

What in Mab’s name is the Lord Keeper doing here? Her immediate, suspicious answer was, nothing good. Irrith had never liked Valentin Aspell. As far as she was concerned, he was an oily, untrustworthy snake. But he’d served the Queen for a long time, and might be here on her business. Grudgingly, Irrith opened the door wider and let him in.

He surveyed the room as he entered. It wasn’t as nice as the chamber Irrith had lost; this one was plain black stone, with only her scant furnishings for contrast. The cabinet was nice, though. It, too, was a mortal thing, built of lacquered wood, with brass fittings on its many drawers and doors, and Irrith had long ago fitted it with a detector lock. Fae had ways around charms, but few of them knew how to defeat the complicated mechanism—and if they tried, the lock would tell her.

Aspell said, “I am sorry for the loss of your previous chamber. It was one of the more unusual in the Onyx Hall, and the Queen had shown you great kindness in bestowing it.”

Now she definitely didn’t trust him. Irrith had never once seen Aspell use compliments or sympathy without intending to get something in return. But he was used to people who played the same game, dancing around the target before finally stabbing it. Not people like her. “Why are you here?”

It didn’t discomfit him as much as she’d hoped. “To ask you a question,” the Lord Keeper said. “May I sit?”

Irrith wanted to refuse, but that would be petty. She waved him to one of her two chairs—both of them old and uncomfortable, since she didn’t entertain guests often. He flicked his coat clear with a smooth gesture and coiled onto the more battered of the two. “Thank you. Dame Irrith, you absented yourself from the Onyx Hall for about fifty years, and that gives you a certain perspective that we who dwell here lack. You also know the Queen moderately well.”

“Not so well,” she said warily. “I’m not one of her ladies.”

“Well enough for my purposes. Tell me: do you find her as she once was?”

The question was both perplexing and worrying—the latter mostly because it was Aspell who asked it, and Irrith distrusted everything he said. “What do you mean?”

He shook his head. “I would prefer not to prompt you. Your uninfluenced opinion is what I need right now.”

Irrith bit her lip and perched on the edge of the other chair. Had Lune changed?

“Lots of people are different,” she said, after some consideration. “That’s one of the odd things about this place. Fae don’t often change, not in so short a time as fifty years, but the folk here do.” She gestured toward Aspell. “When I left, you were wearing one of those enormous long wigs with all the curls. Now it’s—I think they call that kind a Ramillies? Which, by the way, looks less ridiculous. Guns and cricket and backgammon…”

Despite his assertion that he wouldn’t prompt her, Aspell said, “I do not mean our activities or dress.”

“Ways of thinking, too,” Irrith said. She suspected what he was after, and didn’t want to say it. “This business of having a treasury—who ever heard of something like that in a faerie court? It’s so orderly. And—”