It broke the magic, and for that, Irrith resented her. In the scenes that didn’t include Diana, she could briefly lose herself once more, but every time the faerie actress reappeared Irrith was back in a noisy and boisterous theatre, watching people in costumes pretend to be something they were not. And Carline was no good at it: she could not counterfeit emotion, not as the humans could. For fae, there was little distance between pretence and feeling, and without the latter it was hard to manage the former.
When the play ended, Irrith turned to the drunken young gentleman at her side. “What was that woman doing up there?” she demanded.
“Mrs. Pritchard?” He seemed to have forgotten Irrith’s use of her elbows, for he peered at her in a friendly enough manner, albeit an unsteady one. “Too old for the role of Charlot, but she’s so splendid that—”
“Not the heiress,” Irrith said impatiently. “The other one. The mistress. Diana.”
“Oh, her.” The gentleman blinked, then turned to his companion. Her occupation was obvious enough, for he seemed to have forgotten her name. The woman, painted an inch thick, merely shrugged. He echoed the shrug back at Irrith. “She plays here on occasion. Don’t know why Garrick lets her; she isn’t any good.”
Irrith could guess. Further application of her elbows got her through the crowd and out the lobby once more, and then she followed two gentlemen around to the back of the theatre.
They had come to see Mrs. Pritchard, but were turned away at the door. Irrith loitered a little distance off until Carline emerged, dressed once more in plain clothing.
The sprite shook her head in disbelief as Carline came toward her. “All right, so you’ve charmed the manager into letting you make a public display of yourself. Why did I have to see this?”
Carline looked hurt—genuinely so. “Mr. Garrick knows my worth. Some of the best people in London have come to see me perform. Did you not enjoy the play?”
She sounded like she truly believed it: that the rich gentlemen and their ladies came to see her, rather than the splendid Mrs. Pritchard. “I enjoyed it,” Irrith said grudgingly. “But what did this have to do with anything?”
She jumped back when Carline tried to grab her arm. “Stop that,” the lady said through her teeth. “We’ve drawn attention, Irrith, and unless you want to make new friends, you’ll come with me, quickly.”
Glancing around, Irrith saw they were almost alone in the alley, save for two pipe-smoking actors, one prostitute trying to drum up a bit of business, and a rough-looking fellow taking far too much interest in herself and Carline. They went swiftly around a corner, then another, then a third; the elf-lady clearly knew her way through this warren. They emerged without warning into an open space, edged with taverns doing roaring business: Covent Garden Market, Irrith realised, much seedier than when she last saw it.
There were prostitutes and thieves here, too, but being out in the open gave them a measure of safety from the latter, and Carline’s company deterred many of the former. Not all, though; one half-fed wretch asked through bruised lips if the gentleman might perhaps like the company of two ladies. “No, thank you,” Irrith said, and hastened past.
Carline breathed deep of the reeking air, then let it out in a gusty sigh. “I brought you here so you could see the truth. This is what I’m doing these days—not scheming, or plotting, or egging on the Sanists. You’ve no reason to believe me, Irrith, but I swear to you: I don’t want Lune’s crown.”
She was right; Irrith had no reason to believe her. “You wanted it before.”
“That’s true.” She looked thoughtfully across the riotous square. “But with Lune’s crown come Lune’s problems, don’t they? It was one thing fifty years ago: the Dragon’s return just announced, and all that time in which to figure out how to get rid of it. Now we’ve scarcely a year left. The Queen can say what she likes about that Calendar Room, but I know the truth; she hasn’t got a plan. The Onyx Hall will burn, and maybe London, too. Why should I make that my fault, instead of hers?”
Irrith tasted bile. “So you’ll wait until afterward. Until it’s all been destroyed.”
Carline gave her a pitying look. “And how would that profit me? I have no desire to rule over ashes. No, little sprite: my political ambitions are finished. My intention is to spend this last year doing everything I’ve always wanted to, everything that can only be done in London, and then when that bearded star appears in the sky, I will go someplace where it is not.” Now her eyes fixed on a distant point—a point, Irrith suspected, not in this world. “Faerie, I think. I have no desire to exile myself to some rustic hovel like your Vale. But I haven’t decided; it may be France instead.”
Her words cut close to the bone. Hadn’t Irrith thought almost the same thing, when she arrived in the autumn? Enjoy the Onyx Court while it lasted, then abandon it to its doom.
Now the bile in her throat was for herself. She’d never thought to feel kinship with Carline.
As if hearing those thoughts, the elf-lady laughed softly. “I’m not the only one, either. It was different when the Dragon took us by surprise, birthing itself out of the Great Fire; we were trapped, with little choice but to fight. Now we know it’s coming. Only the foolhardy wish to stand in its path.”
Despite the evidence of the past, Irrith found that she believed Carline. The lady really was done. “So what do the Sanists want?”
She got a shrug in reply. “Precisely what they say they want, I imagine. A new sovereign—presumably one who has both health and a plan for defeating the Dragon. But it won’t be me. In truth, I think they’ll get only half of what they want, and they know it; they can build whatever court they please after this one is gone.”
If that was true, Irrith despised them. Lune was wounded, yes, and that was a problem in need of an answer. Letting the Dragon destroy the court, though, was no answer at all. “What about the mortals?”
“What of them?”
That sounded like honest confusion, not artful innocence. Irrith said, “If the Dragon destroys the Onyx Hall, and the court is broken—what will become of mortal London?”
“It will continue on, as it always has,” Carline said dismissively. “Even if their city is destroyed again, they’ll simply rebuild; they’ve done it before. But you don’t mean that, do you?” Her eyes regarded Irrith with cool irony. “What you mean is, however will they cope, without faeries beneath their feet?”
They were speaking far too frankly, in far too public of a place; even if nobody nearby had reason to understand or care, it still made Irrith twitch. Back in the Vale, fae did not stand in the village square discussing Wayland’s affairs. But Carline’s sardonic question demanded an answer. “We’ve done so much for them.”
The twist of Carline’s lips mocked her assertion. “Have we?”
“We stopped the Dragon. Without us, it would have burnt down the rest of London.”
“And with us, it only burnt down most of London. Such a gift to the people of this city! It isn’t just that we failed to stop it sooner; we fed it. With our wars and our magics. Without us, would it even have become a Dragon? Or would it have stayed a simple fire, the kind London has seen before? Consider that, Irrith, before you speak so righteously of what we’ve done: it may be that our very presence in this city, the enchantments that bind the world above to the world below, transform London’s troubles into something more than they can handle alone… or create trouble where none was before.” Carline’s smile was poisonous. “Without us, the comet would be nothing more than a light in the sky.”