Then his horse part swung around sharply, so that he faced his pavilion. A dazzling smile split his face. “There is your answer, Dame Irrith.”
She stared. “Your… pavilion?”
“Buildings! Towns. Houses, and churches, and all the things mortal kind has built upon the face of the land. Do they not clothe its nakedness?”
Irrith blinked once, then a second time. Her voice seemed to have gone missing. When she found it again, it came bearing words. “You want… to turn London… inside out.”
Ktistes paused, hands in midair, where he had swept them in a grand gesture. “How would that be done?” he mused. The note in his voice was pure curiosity, a clever mind given something to play with. “The Onyx Hall—but no, this place is not the inside of London, and to put it ‘outside’ would only deepen our problems. Perhaps an earthquake, though, to open the buildings themselves? We caused two some years ago, quite by accident, but if we arranged one deliberately—”
“Then it would destroy London,” Irrith said. “And every other town you want to hide. Ktistes, the idea is to prevent destruction.”
His face fell. After a moment, so did his hands. “True,” he admitted. The powerful centaur briefly sounded like nothing so much as a little boy, chastised by his mother. “I did not think of that.”
This is why Lune has a Prince. The thought flew out of nowhere and lodged in Irrith’s mind like an arrow. Ktistes was Greek, and had spent most of his life somewhere in that Mediterranean land; the differences between him and the English fae were many. In the final weighing, however, he had more in common with Irrith than Galen. They might hover on the fringes of mortal places, drinking the intoxicating wine of mortal passions, but that was not the centre of their world, the first thing their minds went to; human life, human society, was an afterthought.
That was why Lune kept at her side a man for whom it was the first thought. However much effort she devoted to considering mortal needs, there would always be these moments, when they slipped from her mind. As they had slipped from Ktistes’s. And only a mortal could be trusted to always do as Irrith had done this once, and catch the Queen when she slipped.
The centaur was still thinking, oblivious to Irrith’s distraction. One front hoof tapped a restless beat against the ground. Does he miss galloping? Irrith wondered. The night garden was large, but nothing like the open grass of Ktistes’s land. Or did he, as a learned centaur, live so much in his own mind that it hardly mattered where he made his home?
Maybe that was why she’d thought to stop him, when he spoke of earthquakes in London. The prospect of losing her home—either of them—horrified her to the depths of her faerie soul.
“We’ll think of something,” she said. Perhaps she should take Galen up on his offer of the Calendar Room? The thorough shudder that followed the possibility was answer enough. Locking herself in the same room as that clock, for days on end… fae were capable of madness, in their own way. She had no desire to experience it herself.
“I will continue to ponder,” Ktistes said, still repentant.
So would Irrith. But not here, with all these black shadows stifling her spirit. The Queen had commanded her to find a solution to this puzzle; surely that would be good for squeezing a bit of bread out of the royal stone.
If she was to turn London inside out, she would have to go study it in person.
Irrith could not quite believe her ears when the Queen told her to go ask the Lord Treasurer.
She had enough experience of the Onyx Court to know that Lune, like England’s mortal rulers, surrounded herself with a circle of people who were both advisers and deputies, dealing with various matters so the Queen herself didn’t have to. Wayland did the same thing, though without the fancy titles and so on. But Irrith thought she’d heard of them all, and the Lord Treasurer had been nowhere on the list.
It seemed, however, that the problem of tithed bread was serious enough that Lune had taken the precaution of appointing someone to oversee it: what came in through the Onyx Court’s trade with other lands, who it was paid out to, and—as much as anyone could track this—what happened to it after that. Trade wasn’t the only source of bread, of course; some fae kept mortals on a string just to provide them with a regular tithe. And all of it, regardless of source, was hoarded, wagered, gifted, stolen, used as bribes, and given over in underhand deals, before eventually being eaten; attempting to record those transactions was nothing short of madness.
“Come to think of it,” Irrith said to the clerk behind the desk, “Ktistes told me a story once, of a fellow damned to roll a stone forever up a hill… have you heard it?”
The clerk, an officious little wisp of a thing, was unimpressed. “I do as her Grace and the Lord Treasurer bid me. At the moment, they have given me no orders concerning the disbursement of bread to you. But if you would like to present your case to my master—”
“I would.” It came out through Irrith’s teeth. Mab have mercy: they’re treating it like coin. Irrith had always thought secrets the most valuable currency in the Onyx Hall, but it seemed that was changing, as the mortal world did its best to shake off the faerie superstitions of its past.
She presented her case to the Lord Treasurer, who surprised her by being a stolid, methodical dobie named Hairy How. Most of the officers of Lune’s court were elfin types, but she supposed that when it came to careful bookkeeping, a hob was ideal. This one seemed more sensible than your common dobie—too sensible, in fact. Convincing him was none too easy. But the magic key word of Dragon, combined with a believable explanation for how her use of bread could benefit the court, finally talked him around, and he commanded the clerk to give her a week’s worth.
Irrith would have liked more; she owed more than seven pieces to various fae already. Segraine might be willing to let the debt go for a century, but others would not. Unfortunately, this was obviously as much as she would get today. She watched, bemused, as the clerk counted out the seven pieces with excessive care, then counted them a second time before making his tally and wrapping them in a handkerchief. When Irrith tried to pick it up, he swatted her hand. “All disbursements from the royal treasury must be recorded,” he said, getting out a pot of ink and a moth-eaten griffin feather for a quill. “It’s the law.”
“Law!” The clerk, by his glare, didn’t appreciate her scornful laughter. “That’s a mortal thing.”
“And a faerie one, too, Dame Irrith. By order of the Queen and Lord Alan.”
One of the old Princes. Irrith waited, not attempting to hide her impatience, as the clerk made a note in his ledger, then wrote out a receipt, which he handed to her.
The slip read, Seven (7) pieces from the Treasury, as follows: three (3) rye, two (2) barley, one (1) brown wheat, one (1) white wheat. Disbursed to Dame Irrith by Rodge, Clerk of the Treasury, on 4 October 1757.
Irrith threw it away in disgust. “You might as well be a mortal clerk, with your dates and numbers.” A small clock sat on the desk in front of him: probably the work of the von das Tickens, and the reason why the clerk could date the receipt. The Onyx Hall wasn’t detached from human time as the deeper realms of Faerie were; it would render interactions with the mortal world too difficult. But in the unchanging darkness of those stone halls, most fae lost count of the date. And few of them cared.
Rodge apparently saved his lack of care for the fae he dealt with. He didn’t even look up as Irrith took the bread and departed.