A Star Shall Fall

Il Veloce, one of the Onyx Hall’s Italian fauns, began to play a meandering tune on a syrinx, guiding the masked nymphs into a circle around the mirrored bowl that rested in the centre of the courtyard. Their dance was a simple thing—they could hardly manage more, burdened as they were—but its movement swirled in gentle, liquid arcs, bringing them gradually inward. One by one, the nephelae poured the contents of their pitchers into the bowl.

It would have been prettier if it were clean, Irrith thought with grumpy distaste. But prettiness wasn’t to the purpose. For the making of clouds, the Thames’s cloudy water was very good indeed.

The hairs on her arms and neck were rising, in response to the presence gathering above. The night was clear—for the moment—but something waited in the sky, a power both foreign and familiar. Lune’s negotiations through Ktistes had spoken of the winds by their Greek names, because the Greeks knew how to form deals with them, but surely these were the same winds that had blown across England since the beginning of time. Call them Boreas, Euros, Notos, and Zephyros, or simply North, East, South, and West; it makes no difference. Some fragment of their power had agreed to serve as temporary shepherds for what the earth-dwelling fae would create tonight.

The time for that creation had come. Galen walked alone across the courtyard to the mirrored bowl. He turned a little as he searched for a good grip on the Arabic-inscribed rim, and so she saw the strain on his face as he heaved the thing upward; it had not been light when empty, and now it contained twelve pitchers’ worth of water. Lune should have been there to help him, Irrith fumed. Instead the Prince had to set his feet and force it above his head without aid. Hurry, Irrith whispered silently. Before he drops it.

As if they heard her, the nephelae drew close, lifting their fog-robed arms toward the bowl’s rim.

The water within began to stir.

At first it was just a wisp, too faint to be certain it had been there at all. Then a mist arose, clearly visible above the rim, glowing faintly in the night. The mist thickened, and grew, and billowed slowly upward, into the empty and waiting sky.

Mortals said that clouds, however dark, contained silver linings. If clouds were the clothes of Britain, then to turn those linings outward required something of silver: a bowl, whose mirrored interior showed the world upside down, reflecting skyward the clouds that were born in its heart. Up they floated, to be met by their guides; will-o’-the-wisps leapt free of their holders’ hands and, to the tune of Il Veloce’s continued piping, danced away from the hilltop, toward the island’s far-distant edges. Errant breezes stirred Irrith’s hair against her cheeks, little brushes this way and that, as the winds above coaxed the nebulous masses of the clouds toward their new homes.

Still the clouds issued from the bowl. One of the dancers was the sylph Yfaen, and another was a river nymph, both with some touch on the weather; Irrith had never seen such a large effort from either. How much water could be left inside, with so much fog already streaming outward from Greenwich? It wasn’t nearly enough to cover the entire island, but that was the purpose of the next two weeks: to grow from this seed, until all of Britain was protected.

Surely they had enough for that now. Yet Galen still stood, arms trembling, head thrown back, teeth clenched with the effort of keeping the bowl aloft. His body arched like a bow beneath the weight. Irrith almost ran to support him, but her hands would not reach so high, and she couldn’t disrupt the ceremony. Lune should have been here. He can’t do this alone.

At least one nephele seemed to think the same. Her hand twitched foward, as if to take some of the burden. But whether that broke the ceremony, or she was simply too late, it did no good; with a cry, Galen dropped the bowl. It clanged off his left shoulder as he tried to wrench clear, its remaining water leaping outward, and then the metal rim struck the ground, denting and sending the whole thing rolling away.

Irrith hurried forward, cursing under her breath. The nephele was supporting Galen on his good side, while he let out a flood of his own foul language. Even in pain, though, he remained aware of those around him; not a single word belonging to Heaven slipped out.

“You did well,” Irrith said, knowing he wouldn’t believe her. “We have enough to protect us.”

“Yes,” the nephele murmured, too quietly for anyone beyond Irrith and Galen to hear. “You did very well indeed.” And then her eyes flicked upward, toward Irrith, and even through the shimmering uncertainty of her mask, they gleamed silver.