A Star Shall Fall

The adjoining room was far too silent. Irrith hoped Edward Thorne was entertained. “You aren’t giving all of yourself—just pieces. Lune has your love. Miss Northwood has your promise. I don’t ask for either of those things; your body is enough for me.”

He turned very red, and shot up out of his chair like a jack-in-the-box. “You would treat me like some kind of male prostitute?”

Where had this anger come from? Irrith rose to her own feet, letting her own hurt show. “Did I say that? Did I imply it? What have I paid you, that gives you the right to accuse me like that? I’m only acting on what I saw in you. When you look at me, you see something you wish you could be: a person who doesn’t care what’s proper, who does what she likes and smiles at it all, a person without any chains. And it attracts you. But you’re too scared, too worried about what Lune thinks, and your father, and everyone else, to do what you want, and so I did it for you. How is that wrong?”

All the anger had gone out of him while she worked herself up to a shout. He wasn’t really mad, she realised—not at her. At himself, yes, for letting his father sell him in marriage, and for wanting what he thought he shouldn’t. Irrith had listened to farmers in Berkshire complain about the bad behaviour of the so-called polite folk, keeping mistresses under the same roof as their wives, and had thought it common; and maybe it was, but not with Galen.

At least, he didn’t want it to be.

He’d retreated behind his chair; now she followed him, standing so close their buttons touched. “I’ll go away when you marry,” Irrith whispered, realizing only after it came out that for the first time in her timeless life, she was willing to let go of a mortal before she tired of him, for his sake. Because otherwise it would hurt him too much. “Let me enjoy this now, Galen. You love the Queen, and you want to hold faith with Miss Northwood, and you want to honour your father and help your sisters and learn great things and save the Onyx Hall—you want so much, and so intensely, and there’s nothing like that for us, don’t you understand? Nothing except you.”

By the end she wasn’t even sure she was making sense. It didn’t matter, though, because this time Galen was the one to move; his arms lifted her onto her toes so he could more easily reach her mouth, and for a few moments Irrith forgot to think about the listening Edward Thorne at all.

But the servant must have been waiting, for when Irrith lost her balance and staggered, breaking Galen’s embrace, he coughed politely from the doorway. “Lord Galen,” Thorne said, for all the world as if he’d seen nothing at all, “you asked me to remind you of Dr. Andrews.”

He might have been speaking Greek. “Yes, thank you,” Galen said distractedly, then came to himself with a jump. “Oh, yes. Irrith, I’m sorry—I’m to meet with Dr. Andrews, now that we’ve made a place for him in the Onyx Hall, and to introduce him to a few scholars who have volunteered their assistance. We must get him started on his work.”

She could hardly begrudge it. If they didn’t save the palace, there would be no more Galens for her to play with. “May I come?”

“If you wish to—though I fear it will be terribly boring. We cannot expect to solve our problems on the first day.” Galen accepted Thorne’s ministrations, straightening what Irrith had disarranged.

“If I grow bored, I’ll leave.” Andrews was a consumptive, after all. She wasn’t hoping for him to drop dead in front of her—that wouldn’t help Galen at all—but it was interesting to watch a man die by degrees. “Until then, I should like to hear what he has to say.”

* * *

Following on his Midsummer thought, Galen had assembled a small group of faerie scholars to work with Dr. Andrews. Lady Feidelm; a lesser courtier named Savennis; Wrain, a sticklike sprite who looked to be half again Irrith’s height but no more than her slight weight. The von das Tickens said they would look in from time to time, or rather Wilhas did; Niklas, being his usual unsociable self, declined. Ktistes would follow their efforts from his garden pavilion.

They met in the chamber Galen had arranged for Dr. Andrews’s use, and settled into chairs near the hearth. “How do you like your laboratory?” he asked, gesturing toward the other end of the room. Servants had brought in suitable furniture, and he’d tried to equip the place with things he thought Dr. Andrews might need: bookshelves, a writing desk, a large table for experimentation. Proper equipment would have to wait until the doctor made more specific requests.

“This place is incredible,” Dr. Andrews admitted. “The palace, that is—though I do appreciate the laboratory. To think that all this lies beneath the feet of unsuspecting Londoners…” He shook his head, lost for anything else to say.

“And they will stay unsuspecting, won’t they?”