A Star Shall Fall

“Dame Irrith,” Aspell said, and it was enough.

She stared down, biting her lip, digging one bare toe into the ragged rush mat that might have covered this floor for the last two hundred years. “I suppose she’s tired.”

“Tired,” he repeated.

“With all that’s going on—trying to make arrangements with someone in Greece so we can hide ourselves with the clouds, and I know she’s still searching for a weapon against the Dragon; and then of course there’s all the usual affairs of the court, people scheming against one another and causing mischief above, and it’s a good thing we don’t always have to sleep, because when would she find the time?”

The Lord Keeper let out a slow sigh. “Dame Irrith… I do not ask out of malice. I am concerned for the Queen, and for the Onyx Court. If you think it simple weariness, then that is one matter; within a year, one way or another, the threat of the comet will be ended, and her Majesty can rest. But if you think it something more, then for the good of the Onyx Court, I beg you to tell me.”

All the suspicion that had been wafting through her mind since he asked that first question hardened into a leaden ball. “Why do you want to know?”

Aspell lifted one elegant hand. “I mean no trap, Dame Irrith. Yes, I have some spies in my keeping, but I haven’t come to lure you into indiscreet speech, which I can then clap you in prison for. Her Majesty knows that not all fae who speak of such things would call themselves Sanists, and not all who call themselves Sanists are treasonous. There can be loyalty in opposition. The ultimate concern of most on both sides is the preservation of our shared home, though they differ on how.”

She’d been on the verge of throwing him out. His mention of loyalty, though, loosened the knot around her heart. I don’t mean any harm to Lune, or the Onyx Hall. But the situation… it does worry me. She’d been carefully avoiding such thoughts ever since talking to Magrat in the Crow’s Head, for fear they would make her a Sanist.

And maybe she was. But that didn’t have to be treason.

“Maybe,” she said, the admission as grudging as any she’d ever made. “It might be affecting her. The palace. With the wall going away. They’re connected, after all, and she’s used that in the past—against the Dragon, for example. The damage might be sapping her strength.”

The Lord Keeper’s mouth had thinned into a frown when she began speaking; now the frown deepened. “Or she is giving her strength, in an effort to slow the damage. She might even be doing it unconsciously.”

That sounded like Lune. The question slipped out of Irrith’s mouth. “What happens when her strength runs out?”

He said nothing, merely lifted his narrow brows.

She scowled at him as if it had been a trap. “It won’t. She’s strong. Fifty years of this has barely made a mark on her; she could go for a hundred more. And Ktistes is working to mend the palace, anyway.”

“I wish him all the good fortune in the world.” Aspell sighed again, looking melancholy. “I could also wish her Grace had better support to sustain her in these crises.”

“Support?”

He opened his mouth, then hesitated. “It isn’t my place to question the Queen’s choices. The selection of the Prince is and always has been her prerogative.”

Galen. In some respects, he was the best support Lune could hope for; the young man worshipped her, and would do without hesitation anything she asked of him.

But that wasn’t enough, was it? Lune needed someone who wouldn’t just react, but act. Someone who thought ahead, or sideways, and came up with ideas she never would have dreamt of. Someone she could trust to address problems on his own, so that she didn’t need to handle it all herself.

And Galen was not that man.

He wanted to be. Perhaps someday he would be. He’d shown signs of it already; this notion of Dr. Andrews and the Royal Society was different, at least, and might bear fruit. But he was more a Prince-in-training than an actual Prince.

Irrith remembered the obelisk in the night garden, with its names and dates. “Lune didn’t expect to lose the last Prince so soon, did she?”

Aspell shook his head. Six years. The least of them had gone for decades longer. She would have expected more time, to find and educate a suitable successor.

Was Galen really the best she could do?

“I have said too much,” Aspell murmured, shaking his head again. “Such matters are the Queen’s affair, and none of mine. I thank you, Dame Irrith, for speaking honestly with me. Uncomfortable as it may be to consider such matters, I feel it’s vital to face them, and to consider possible solutions.”

Like replacing the Queen. The wounded mistress of a wounded realm. Irrith shuddered inwardly. She didn’t want to see Lune deposed, but with the Hall fraying…

Aspell reached into one pocket and pulled out a small mother-of-pearl box that he laid atop her cabinet. “For your aid, Dame Irrith. Good day.”