They had not spoken to one another directly since he fled Rose House. She knew what battle he expected, and was prepared for it.
But Galen surprised her by bowing, with the same flawless care that marked his appearance. “Your Grace, I bring you good tidings. I know how to kill the Dragon.”
Kill. Not trap, or banish, or appease. End. And ensure their safety forever.
So why did the Prince not look happier?
Formality rose, unbidden, to her lips; she dismissed it. That was the game he wanted to play, and she didn’t trust it. Instead she asked directly, “How?”
“It requires a little preparation,” he said. “With your permission, Abd ar-Rashid and I will enter the Calendar Room for that purpose—though I know we can ill afford to lose eleven days. But the principle, madam, is sound.
“Much of it will be the prior plan. We will use the Monument to summon the Dragon down into the chamber in its base. This will be armored in gold, to prevent it from fleeing while an alchemical conjunction is performed. But not with sophic mercury: instead we will bind it into mortal form. If this does not immediately result in the death of that host, and therefore the death of the Dragon, then it will at least be vulnerable, as it was not before.” He bowed again. “Your Grace, I will undertake this duty myself.”
Duty. Binding. Elegant words, to blunt the raw edge of his meaning.
He still intended to die.
Galen didn’t flinch away from her gaze. He’d gotten better at lying, but not perfected the art. There was fear beneath the surface, whose existence he was doing his best not to show.
Fear held in check by certainty. The principle was sound. Every detail of their predicament was too firmly graven into Lune’s mind for her to delude herself on that front; offering herself up to the Dragon as appeasement was a weak possibility at best. Even Aspell had known that. Binding the Dragon to mortality stood a far better chance of success.
He hadn’t come here expecting argument, she realised. The armour was not for her. It was for himself, to hold the fear at bay.
She wondered if he had chosen his moment deliberately, tracking her movement through the garden until she came to this point, or whether it was pure chance that put them near the twin obelisks. Michael Deven’s grave, and the memorial to her past Princes.
All of them died eventually. Some from illness, others from misfortune; one had given his life to prepare them for the Dragon’s return. None of them could live forever.
But she hadn’t expected to lose Galen so soon.
She had not answered him. He was stiff as a pike, still where he had been when she stopped, awaiting the answer they both knew she had to give.
Before she could give it, though—“What of your family?”
It was cruel, but necessary. His calm cracked a little. “My sisters,” he said, with a hint of unsteadiness, “have been taken care of. Delphia’s jointure is provided for by our marriage settlement.”
A lawyer’s reply, which told her the answer to her real question. “You have not told her yet.”
His jaw trembled, then firmed. “No. But I will.”
Lune could not guess how the woman would take it. Delphia was too unfamiliar to her still. But the considerations of one mortal woman would not change their circumstances—nor, she suspected, Galen’s determination. He would do this come Hell itself.
And she had no reason strong enough to refuse him.
“Then make your preparations, Lord Galen,” she said formally, acknowledging him with a curtsy, Queen to Prince. “The resources of this court are at your disposal.”
“I think the one thing worse than locking myself in that room for months on end,” Cuddy said, “would be locking myself in that room for months on end to do mathematics.”
The puck’s voice echoed down the corridor as Lune approached. She hid a smile before she came through the pillars into the dwarves’ workshop. Some fae, like the von das Tickens, might have a great deal of love for craftsmanship, but none of them enjoyed mathematics. Even those mad brothers did their work by instinct, not calculation. For that, they needed a mortal.
Eleven days ago, Cuddy and the dwarves had carried stacks of books into the great clock’s chamber: instructions in algebra, elementary works on the calculus, and Newton’s great Principia Mathematica; Flamsteed’s observations from 1682; Halley’s Astronomiae cometicae synopsis, which had started their troubles to begin with. There were rumors that a French mathematician would be attempting to calculate the comet’s orbit and perihelion, but Lune and her court could not afford to wait. The Calendar Room was the only solution, and so Lord Hamilton had offered himself for this herculean task. He knew little of that branch of learning, but that was nothing sufficient study outside of time could not mend.
She’d given him her most heartfelt thanks before he went in, and would do so again when he came out. To be locked inside, alone, with only the great clock for company… Cuddy’s jest aside, even the work could not be enough to distract a man from that dread presence. She hoped Hamilton would not come stumbling out in a few moments to say he could not do it, that he’d only lasted three days and accomplished nothing at all.
The time had come to find out. Wilhas took hold of the sundial on the door and dragged the portal open.
At first she thought Hamilton’s slow, shuffling steps a sign of mere exhaustion. He could not have slept well, inside the Calendar Room. But then he came forward, into the illumination of the workshop’s faerie lights, and she saw his head. Not a wig; he’d taken none into the room. Those long, ragged locks were his own hair—and snow-white.
The Prince of the Stone lifted his head, revealing his time-worn face to the world.
Lune’s breath withered in her throat. Mortal. He is mortal. Time outside of time—we knew he wouldn’t need food, but we did not think of aging.
How long was he in there?
Hamilton extended one wrinkled hand. The papers in it trembled, until Lune took them. “Perihelion on March thirteenth, 1759,” he said, in a reed-thin voice that had spoken only to the walls for years. “The French will need more than one mathematician if they want their answer before the comet has come and gone; the work is enormous. I fear I took too long learning the calculus—it was hard to concentrate in there—”
He staggered. Everyone had been standing like stone, but now Wilhas leapt into the chamber and came back with a chair. Its cushion was worn beyond threadbare, its padding flattened until it was almost as hard as the wood. Hamilton collapsed into it with a motion that spoke of endless, horrifying habit.
Lune sank into a crouch before him, papers forgotten in her hand. A single glance had shown her the unsteady scrawl, replacing his old, meticulous writing. “Hamilton—did you not realise?”
His gaze fixed on her. With a chill she had not felt since she took the throne, Lune saw a familiar madness in his eyes. He had aged as if in the mortal world, but his mind suffered the effects of too long in a faerie realm. Or perhaps it was only the isolation, and the inevitable ticking of the clock.
“I did,” he said gently, as if speaking to a child. “But by the time I did… it was already too late to go back to my old life. Years had passed. People would wonder. So I decided to finish the work. But it was hard, and sometimes I forgot what I was doing…”
Cuddy’s feet scuffed against the floor as he shifted his weight. Hamilton glared at him. “The numbers are right, though,” the Prince insisted, with something like his old strength. “I made sure of that. Only when I had the same result three times in a row did I come out.”