Irrith glanced past him, to the canopy of ever-blooming apple trees on the other side of the path. The greenery in between hid the second obelisk—the one that marked Sir Michael Deven’s grave. “Yes.”
Galen let out his breath as if trying, and failing, to banish his gloom with it, and sank back down upon the bench. There being nowhere else to sit but next to him or on the grass, Irrith stayed where she was. She could almost taste the sentiment churning in his heart, and perhaps it was that which led her to speak recklessly. “She won’t stop you from marrying, you know. Even if you are in love with her.”
The transformation to shock, horror, and embarrasment was instantaneous. Galen sputtered out several half-finished words before he managed a coherent sentence: “I’m not in love with her!”
“Ah.” Irrith nodded wisely. “Then I misunderstood. I thought the fact that you watch every move she makes, light up when she smiles, grovel like a kicked dog when she’s disappointed, and would do absolutely anything she asks in a heartbeat meant you were in love with her. But I’m a faerie; I know little about such things.”
She managed not to laugh at Galen, even though he was staring at her like the very spirit of the word aghast. It was funny, but she also felt a pang of sympathy for him. It could not possibly be pleasant, tying your heart to someone else’s heels like that.
Sunset still flamed in his cheeks when the strangled whisper emerged from his frozen mouth. “Please tell me she doesn’t know.”
“She doesn’t,” Irrith agreed. After all, he was the Prince; she had to do what he told her. Also, he wouldn’t be able to help Lune with the mermen if he went and buried himself under a rock to die of shame.
“You cannot tell her,” Galen said. For the first time since she met him, he sounded authoritative—if a little desperate. “My… sentiment is my own concern. Her Majesty will not be burdened with the knowledge of it.”
Irrith hardly listened to the last of that; she was distracted by something else. “No wonder you almost never use her name. Other Princes have, you know. She doesn’t require formality of them. Are you afraid she’ll guess, if she hears you say it?” It would be hard, she supposed, to sound like an ardent lover while wrestling with cumbersome forms of address.
Galen said stiffly, “Until such time as I can show her the proper respect in my heart, I must rely on the respect of speech.”
Good luck, Irrith thought. “How did it happen, anyway?” She wrapped her arms around her knees, like a child awaiting a story. She’d once spent a few years spying on such children, trying to understand the nature of family. It still escaped her, but she’d learned some entertaining tales.
His teeth caught his lower lip, a charming bit of off-centre uncertainty. “I caught a glimpse of her one night, returning from a journey outside of London. She shone like the moon…”
Irrith shivered. That was it, right there: the sound of adoration. It thrummed in his voice like a low string, plucked once.
Galen took sudden and intense interest in his fingernails. Seated below him, Irrith could still see a little of his face: the wings of his brows, the clean slope of his jaw. Not his eyes. “I knew nothing of the Onyx Court, and scarcely more of faeries; our nursemaid told other kinds of stories. But I searched London high and low, seeking hints of my vision, and ended up following Dame Segraine to an entrance.” He laughed quietly. “Which wasn’t my cleverest decision ever. But it worked out in the end.”
“You must have been terribly young.”
“Nineteen,” Galen said defensively.
Irrith blinked. “And you’re how old now?”
“Twenty-two.”
There was a profoundly tactless response to that, and Irrith might have made it had a puck not come running down the path just then. He ran past the two of them, slid to a halt, and came leaping back almost before he’d gotten his body turned around. “Lord Galen. The Queen needs your presence urgently—the masquerade—”
Galen was already on his feet. Despite the messenger’s obvious hurry, the Prince offered a hand to Irrith, and helped her up from the grass. “Are you attending the ball, Dame Irrith?”
It would almost be worth it, just to watch Galen try not to sigh over Lune, but even that could not drag her into so elegant an event. “No, I must talk to Ktistes. But I hope it goes well.”
He bowed, and then followed the twitching messenger out a nearby arch.
Left alone, Irrith knelt again and touched the plaque. Dr. Hamilton Birch: 1750–1756. It was… 1758 now, she thought. Galen was twenty-two. Nineteen when he came to the Onyx Hall.
She didn’t know when his birthday was, nor when in 1756 he’d succeeded Lord Hamilton, but he couldn’t have been in the Onyx Hall for more than a year or two before he became Prince of the Stone.
Quick elevations had happened before. Usually it was because something had happened to the previous Prince. And Hamilton Birch had reigned for only six years.
Then gave way to an uncertain young man whose chief qualification seemed to be adoration of the Queen.
Irrith liked Galen well enough. He clearly had a generous heart and an overwhelming desire to serve Lune faithfully. He was, however, also naïve enough to make Irrith feel like a jaded politician. Why had the Queen chosen him? Especially at so crucial a moment, with the Onyx Hall itself in mounting danger. Lune must have her reasons, but Irrith could not fathom what they were.
But then, Irrith didn’t know Galen all that well. She’d managed to accumulate a little bread, though—enough that she could spend some time sniffing around in the world above.
The time had come, she decided, to take a closer look at this new Prince.
Leaving behind the seventh draft of a note explaining the necessity of his decision, Galen St. Clair rode south out of London.
Darkness and the threat of tears obscured his vision as he crossed the new Westminster Bridge, descending into the open fields of Lambeth. Galen tried to force the latter down. He’d wept enough already; all of them had, from his mother down to little Irene.
All except his father.
Fury made his best guard against misery. Charles St. Clair had refused to share the details of the disaster, but Galen had gotten them from Laurence Byrd; he now knew to an excruciating degree of fineness how his father had gambled his fortune on a series of dubious investments, and lost it through the same. They were not penniless—his father kept saying so, louder every time, as if that made the situation more palatable. Not penniless, but they would have to practice a great deal of economy, and even that would not save the three St. Clair daughters. Their marriage portions would be small indeed.
Unless money was found, somehow. And so Galen wrote a letter, sealed it, and left it on his father’s desk, then took horse for Portsmouth and the Royal Navy. Britain was fighting France in the Ohio Country; there was hope of proper war, and with it, prize money.
In the madness of his desperation, this was the life Galen had chosen for himself.
He pulled his horse to a stop in the middle of a narrow lane, bracketed by hedgerows. His breath came hard in his chest, almost crossing the line into sobs. Could he do this? Abandon his mother, and his sisters, and the soil of England itself, to go to sea and court death in hopes of a brighter future?
It seemed to him that the darkness lifted a bit, as if the clouds had cleared, uncovering the moon. Galen’s breathing slowed when he realised two things: first, that the night was already clear, and second, that the moon was new.