“We love forever.” Or at least Lune did. Irrith had never given her heart, and had no intention of ever doing so. “But how does that help London?”
“How does water help, or air, or the downward pull of gravity? Those things simply are, and without them, there is no London.”
Irrith shook her head impatiently, hopping off her own chair. “There was a London, though, before there was an Onyx Court. It hasn’t always been here, you know. I never saw the city until a hundred years ago, but I can’t imagine it was somehow less real, less full of life, back when they didn’t have a bunch of mischievous, meddlesome faeries being friendly and ugly and all the rest of it beneath their feet.”
“A hundred years,” Galen said, on a breath of startled laughter. “The charms and enchantments, you know—those I can accept, without much trouble. It’s the immortality my mind can’t encompass. You don’t look a hundred years old.”
She was far older than that. She suspected, though, that Galen didn’t need to hear her talk about the Black Death, or any of the other fragments she remembered from humanity’s long-distant past. Instead she went back to the original point. “What would happen, if we all left? Not just London—all of Wayland’s court, and Herne’s, and every other faerie realm in England. No more faeries. What would you lose?”
Galen looked as if the mere thought was enough to break him into splinters. “I—”
He would lose Lune. A more thoughtless young man might have said it; Irrith had known many mortals who scarcely past their own desires. Galen, for all his youth and uncertainty, had a larger heart than that. But why? It frustrated her, that she could not understand. What made him care so much about the fae?
At some point his hands had curled into helpless fists; now they relaxed, one joint at a time. Galen’s eyes—nearly the same blue as the walls—were unfocused, gazing off into the distance, and in them was a well of feeling deep enough for Irrith to drown in. Then he blinked, and so did she; the spell was broken. Galen said ruefully, “You want a single answer, one thing I can name that will account for all the fae at once. I don’t know if it’s that simple—if it can be that simple. The good comes in many diverse ways. Some of it is grand, like the saving of England from the Spanish Armada; some of it is slight, like the rescue of a single child from starvation in a gutter. If I must name a single thing…” He turned to her, and the longing in his eyes made Irrith shiver down to her toes. “You are our bridge to Faerie. If you leave, then it goes beyond our reach. And that would be a terrible loss.”
He believed it. He really did. Irrith was used to fae hungering for the brightness of mortals, but to see that hunger reflected back in his eyes…
“I’m not leaving.”
Her own voice, speaking without instructions. But the words, Irrith realised, were true. She repeated them. “I’m not leaving. Others probably will, because it’s easier than fighting. But I’ll stay. If nothing else, London deserves this much good of us: that we mend the things we broke.”
That sounded good. And it was easier than saying the other thing in her mind, the one called forth by Galen’s eyes. I cannot refuse you.
Odd as it was, a mortal wanted something from her—and she wanted to give it, if she could.
Galen caught up her hand and kissed it, then gripped her fingers as if holding fast to a rope. “Thank you, Dame Irrith.”
Common words, a courtesy tossed back and forth a thousand times a day. But the words, and the touch of his hands, stayed with her long after she departed.
PART THREE
FERMENTATIO
Spring 1758
In certain lights, there might almost be a face within the dark mass. A long snout here; two indentations there, that might be eyes, set predatorlike in the dust and ice. Hunger stirs within the dream. The sun’s radiance is warming the comet: heat, light, fire. Things the sleeper remembers. Like calls to like, and it is kindred to the sun, a wayward child sent farther than it was ever meant to go. There is nothing to burn, out here in the black; even the strongest spirit is vanquished by this absolute cold. They crafted better than they knew, those enemies, those jailers, when they banished their foe; this prison is a torture beyond any it has ever known.
But release is coming. Heat, light, fire. Things the sleeper remembers.
Things it will know again, and soon.
Niklas von das Ticken glared at Irrith as she came through the pillars into the antechamber of the Calendar Room. She could never tell whether he hated her particularly, or whether he turned that expression on the world as a whole. Even his conversations with his brother sounded like arguments—though admittedly, everything sounded like an argument in German. Either way, the red-bearded dwarf soon turned his scowl back to the half-built contraption on his worktable, ignoring Irrith as if she weren’t there.
That suited her just fine. Wilhas was far more pleasant to talk to anyway. “What’s he building, a birdcage?” Irrith asked, not caring if the other dwarf overheard.
“Drachenkäfig. A Dragon-cage,” Wilhas said. His fierce and bloodthirsty grin faded a moment later. “That is the idea. So far, though…”
“It doesn’t work.” Irrith didn’t ask why he wasn’t working on it inside the Calendar Room. She’d made that mistake precisely once, and gotten as her reward a half-hour diatribe from Niklas—she’d timed it by the assorted clocks—all throat-hacking consonants and spittle, the gist of which was that the chamber’s time out of time was only useful if you didn’t need to keep coming out to fetch things or question someone or test your results. And apparently that happened often.
Someone was in the Calendar Room right now, to judge by the closed door. Or more than one someone, perhaps. Wilhas talked endlessly about Körpertage, which Irrith didn’t fully understand; it had something to do with each person inside using up one day for every day the group remained in the room—but the sum of the collected time was great enough that no one other than Wilhas was overly concerned about how many they might be using.
If they didn’t find a solution, they’d never get a chance to use the remaining days anyway.
Irrith gave the Dragon-cage a dubious look. So far it was little more than a haphazard assortment of metal strips, like a barrel that had sprung all its staves, then lost about two-thirds of them. Whatever metal Niklas was using, it didn’t seem like much of a prison.
“That isn’t iron, is it?” she asked. Ktistes had made a passing comment about the dwarves trying to find a way to forge iron so it wouldn’t bother fae, but so far as she knew, nothing had come of it.