Unless she was interrupted. When a knock came at her door, she closed the panels of her cabinet, sighing, and went to see who it was.
She would have been less stunned if a poleax had been waiting outside to fall on her head. Valentin Aspell said, “Dame Irrith. If I might have a moment of your time?”
What in Mab’s name is the Lord Keeper doing here? Her immediate, suspicious answer was, nothing good. Irrith had never liked Valentin Aspell. As far as she was concerned, he was an oily, untrustworthy snake. But he’d served the Queen for a long time, and might be here on her business. Grudgingly, Irrith opened the door wider and let him in.
He surveyed the room as he entered. It wasn’t as nice as the chamber Irrith had lost; this one was plain black stone, with only her scant furnishings for contrast. The cabinet was nice, though. It, too, was a mortal thing, built of lacquered wood, with brass fittings on its many drawers and doors, and Irrith had long ago fitted it with a detector lock. Fae had ways around charms, but few of them knew how to defeat the complicated mechanism—and if they tried, the lock would tell her.
Aspell said, “I am sorry for the loss of your previous chamber. It was one of the more unusual in the Onyx Hall, and the Queen had shown you great kindness in bestowing it.”
Now she definitely didn’t trust him. Irrith had never once seen Aspell use compliments or sympathy without intending to get something in return. But he was used to people who played the same game, dancing around the target before finally stabbing it. Not people like her. “Why are you here?”
It didn’t discomfit him as much as she’d hoped. “To ask you a question,” the Lord Keeper said. “May I sit?”
Irrith wanted to refuse, but that would be petty. She waved him to one of her two chairs—both of them old and uncomfortable, since she didn’t entertain guests often. He flicked his coat clear with a smooth gesture and coiled onto the more battered of the two. “Thank you. Dame Irrith, you absented yourself from the Onyx Hall for about fifty years, and that gives you a certain perspective that we who dwell here lack. You also know the Queen moderately well.”
“Not so well,” she said warily. “I’m not one of her ladies.”
“Well enough for my purposes. Tell me: do you find her as she once was?”
The question was both perplexing and worrying—the latter mostly because it was Aspell who asked it, and Irrith distrusted everything he said. “What do you mean?”
He shook his head. “I would prefer not to prompt you. Your uninfluenced opinion is what I need right now.”
Irrith bit her lip and perched on the edge of the other chair. Had Lune changed?
“Lots of people are different,” she said, after some consideration. “That’s one of the odd things about this place. Fae don’t often change, not in so short a time as fifty years, but the folk here do.” She gestured toward Aspell. “When I left, you were wearing one of those enormous long wigs with all the curls. Now it’s—I think they call that kind a Ramillies? Which, by the way, looks less ridiculous. Guns and cricket and backgammon…”
Despite his assertion that he wouldn’t prompt her, Aspell said, “I do not mean our activities or dress.”
“Ways of thinking, too,” Irrith said. She suspected what he was after, and didn’t want to say it. “This business of having a treasury—who ever heard of something like that in a faerie court? It’s so orderly. And—”
“Dame Irrith,” Aspell said, and it was enough.
She stared down, biting her lip, digging one bare toe into the ragged rush mat that might have covered this floor for the last two hundred years. “I suppose she’s tired.”
“Tired,” he repeated.
“With all that’s going on—trying to make arrangements with someone in Greece so we can hide ourselves with the clouds, and I know she’s still searching for a weapon against the Dragon; and then of course there’s all the usual affairs of the court, people scheming against one another and causing mischief above, and it’s a good thing we don’t always have to sleep, because when would she find the time?”
The Lord Keeper let out a slow sigh. “Dame Irrith… I do not ask out of malice. I am concerned for the Queen, and for the Onyx Court. If you think it simple weariness, then that is one matter; within a year, one way or another, the threat of the comet will be ended, and her Majesty can rest. But if you think it something more, then for the good of the Onyx Court, I beg you to tell me.”
All the suspicion that had been wafting through her mind since he asked that first question hardened into a leaden ball. “Why do you want to know?”
Aspell lifted one elegant hand. “I mean no trap, Dame Irrith. Yes, I have some spies in my keeping, but I haven’t come to lure you into indiscreet speech, which I can then clap you in prison for. Her Majesty knows that not all fae who speak of such things would call themselves Sanists, and not all who call themselves Sanists are treasonous. There can be loyalty in opposition. The ultimate concern of most on both sides is the preservation of our shared home, though they differ on how.”
She’d been on the verge of throwing him out. His mention of loyalty, though, loosened the knot around her heart. I don’t mean any harm to Lune, or the Onyx Hall. But the situation… it does worry me. She’d been carefully avoiding such thoughts ever since talking to Magrat in the Crow’s Head, for fear they would make her a Sanist.
And maybe she was. But that didn’t have to be treason.
“Maybe,” she said, the admission as grudging as any she’d ever made. “It might be affecting her. The palace. With the wall going away. They’re connected, after all, and she’s used that in the past—against the Dragon, for example. The damage might be sapping her strength.”
The Lord Keeper’s mouth had thinned into a frown when she began speaking; now the frown deepened. “Or she is giving her strength, in an effort to slow the damage. She might even be doing it unconsciously.”
That sounded like Lune. The question slipped out of Irrith’s mouth. “What happens when her strength runs out?”
He said nothing, merely lifted his narrow brows.
She scowled at him as if it had been a trap. “It won’t. She’s strong. Fifty years of this has barely made a mark on her; she could go for a hundred more. And Ktistes is working to mend the palace, anyway.”
“I wish him all the good fortune in the world.” Aspell sighed again, looking melancholy. “I could also wish her Grace had better support to sustain her in these crises.”
“Support?”
He opened his mouth, then hesitated. “It isn’t my place to question the Queen’s choices. The selection of the Prince is and always has been her prerogative.”
Galen. In some respects, he was the best support Lune could hope for; the young man worshipped her, and would do without hesitation anything she asked of him.
But that wasn’t enough, was it? Lune needed someone who wouldn’t just react, but act. Someone who thought ahead, or sideways, and came up with ideas she never would have dreamt of. Someone she could trust to address problems on his own, so that she didn’t need to handle it all herself.
And Galen was not that man.
He wanted to be. Perhaps someday he would be. He’d shown signs of it already; this notion of Dr. Andrews and the Royal Society was different, at least, and might bear fruit. But he was more a Prince-in-training than an actual Prince.
Irrith remembered the obelisk in the night garden, with its names and dates. “Lune didn’t expect to lose the last Prince so soon, did she?”