She stowed six pieces with Ktistes; the centaur was always near his pavilion, and few would risk stealing from him. But the safest place in the world was her stomach, where it could do its inexplicable work, shielding her from threats. Irrith ate the white bread, grimacing at its chalky taste, and went into the streets above.
Darkness greeted her, but this time it wasn’t the strange murk of last fall; just ordinary nighttime. The sky was overcast enough that she couldn’t guess the hour, though. Irrith had chosen the Billingsgate door, which put her in a less-than-savory part of the City; after a moment’s consideration, she cloaked herself in a charm that would encourage strangers to look past her. Cutpurses and other criminals were as fascinating as any other part of mortal society, but not one she wanted to experience right now.
Voices from the direction of the fish market told her it must not be long until dawn. Soon boats would crowd the little harbor, unloading the day’s catch; then the fishwives would go to work, with their powerful arms and vivid profanity, hawking their wares to the cooks and cooks’ servants, laboring housewives, and finally the poor on the edge of starvation, who would buy what no one else wanted, after it had begun to smell.
She drifted, silent and invisible as a ghost, in the direction of the wharves, for they showed more life than the predawn streets. The river was little more than a black sloshing sound, wavelets receding from the mudflats of its banks, their tops gilded by the occasional bit of torchlight. Here, in the darkness, it was easy to forget about all the changes that entranced her; Irrith could half-convince herself she’d stepped out into the London she first saw a hundred years ago. Many things stayed the same.
Indeed, that was what made the changes so entrancing.
The sun gradually emerged as a flat gray disk on the eastern horizon, barely penetrating the clouds. It allowed Irrith to see the buildings around her, the eighteenth century replacing that fleeting illusion of the seventeenth. Brick and stone, not the timber and plaster of the past, which had burnt in the Fire. But some places were familiar, beneath their new clothes; rich men still gossiped in the Exchange, the Bow Bells still rang out over Cheapside, and a cathedral still crowned the City’s western half.
How was she supposed to turn all this inside out?
The streets slowly filled with people. At this hour, London belonged to its lower classes: the servants and labourers, porters and beggars. Men thick with muscle, and men wasted down to skeletons from illness and starvation. Women in the drab clothes of maids, hurrying to buy for the day’s meals. Yawning apprentices, surly cart drivers, a half-grown girl with a flock of chickens. Watching them go by, Irrith thought of her words to Ktistes. The buildings didn’t matter so much, but the people… they were the ones Lune, and Galen, and all their allies were trying to protect.
Ktistes thought like an architect. He saw the land, whether he was on top of it or inside it, and the structures that could be shaped to it. People mattered because they would use what he built, but that was the only point at which they entered into his plans. When it came to hiding England, he didn’t think of them. He thought only of the land.
It won’t be enough, Irrith realised. London wasn’t its fabric; it was its people. Lune had taught her that. And surely it was true for other places, be they Berkshire or Yorkshire or Scotland.
She had to hide all of it: the ground, the trees, the houses and shops and churches, and most especially the people.
If the buildings weren’t the clothing, then what was?
Something smacked her shoulder hard, and knocked Irrith sprawling into the chilly mud.
“Blood and Bone!” she swore, and got baffled stares from the porters carrying kegs into a nearby tavern. Irrith swore again, then threw a hasty glamour over her faerie face, so that they blinked in confusion and went back to their work. A charm of concealment could make people look away from her, but it did nothing to protect her from collision, and the attention that brought.
Time to get below, or to find a quiet place where she could improve her glamour and continue her wanderings.
But before she could climb to her feet, something caught her eye—and then she began to laugh.
Flat on her back in the mud, with the porters staring again and carts rumbling past her unprotected toes, Irrith laughed and laughed, because the answer was right there, wrapping England in a gray and frequently rainy cloak.
Clouds.
Lune laid her head against the back of her chair in a rare gesture of frustration. “I don’t suppose any clever mortal has designed a scheme for influencing the weather?”
“Designed one?” Galen said. “Almost certainly. Executed it successfully? That, I fear, is another matter.”
She sighed in acknowledgment. “Then it must be faerie magic.” One pale hand rose to rub at her eyes. “We have some ability to call rain when we need it, but nothing of sufficient force, nor duration—not to hide this entire island, certainly not for months on end.”
Silence ruled the chamber for a few minutes. They were not alone; Lune had called a small convocation of her closest companions: Amadea, the Irish lady Feidelm, and Rosamund Goodemeade, whose sister was occupied elsewhere. With an air that suggested she knew her words would be unwelcome, the little brownie offered, “We do know folk who might manage it.”
Lune winced. Rosamund, upon Galen’s quizzical look, said, “Those who live in the sea.”
“Mermaids?”
“And stranger things,” Lune replied, lifting her head. “You’re right, Rosamund, and if we must, we will ask them. But I would very much like to find another way. For aid of this kind, we’d be heavily in debt to them, and the folk of the sea are strange enough that I cannot begin to predict what they would demand in return.”
A faerie was calling someone else strange? Galen bit down on the urge to ask whether that meant they were of surpassing normality. The unease Lune showed at the thought of dealing with them told him now wasn’t the time for such a jest.
The chamber door opened, and Lewan Erle slipped through. The foppish lord bowed in meticulous apology before approaching the Queen, a sealed letter in his hands.
She broke the seal and perused it, first with a disinterested eye, then with a very interested one indeed. Upon finishing her second reading, she turned to the waiting lord. “He’s in the Onyx Hall?”
“Yes, madam. But he waited at the Crutched Friars entrance until Greymalkin found him—I believe he was there at least an hour.”
“Very courteous.” Lune folded the paper again and turned to Galen. “This is a letter of introduction from Madame Malline le Sainfoin de Veilée, formerly the ambassadress of the Cour du Lys. It recommends to our attention a certain foreigner now waiting—”
“Still at Crutched Friars, madam,” Lewan Erle supplied, when Lune paused.
She passed the folded letter to Amadea and rose. “We shall receive him in the lesser—no, the greater presence chamber. And Lord Galen and myself will take the time to dress more formally. If he is the first faerie of his land to set foot in England, then we can at least make his initial impression a grand one.”
Bewildered, Galen likewise rose from his chair. “What land is that, madam?”
He heard an echo of his bewilderment in Lune’s answer. “Araby.”
Galen couldn’t help but wonder whether Lune, like him, drew some strength from elegance of dress, and for that reason had ordered a delay while they both changed into more suitable clothing. Whether she did or not, he was grateful for the deep-cuffed coat and powdered wig Edward put him into; they helped him stand proud as the massive bronze doors of the greater presence chamber swung open to admit the traveller.