Aspell said quietly, “There is another issue.”
The grumbling and argumentation quieted. The Lord Keeper waited until he had perfect silence, apart from the noise of the coffeehouse downstairs, before he spoke again. “The Dragon.”
“We’re hidden from it,” someone said immediately. “Aren’t we?”
Irrith bit back her answer; that really would betray her identity. Aspell gave a sinuous shrug. “We’re hidden, yes. And the Dragon was imprisoned; and the Dragon was exiled.”
And all of it, ultimately, had failed. Irrith wished she could argue, but the concealment had been her own idea in the first place. She, of all people, was aware that it might not last.
She asked, “What does that have to do with the Queen?”
He placed his hands carefully on the table, bowing his head. The tallow dips around the room didn’t give off much better light than the smoky fire, but despite the gloom, he looked more weary than sinister. Irrith just wished she could tell whether that was a pose. “An unwelcome thought has come to me,” Aspell said. “One I have labored mightily to dismiss, but it will not go. It is my great hope that we find some other defence against this threat; I want no one here to doubt that. If, however, we do not find another answer, then we must consider this, our last, most desperate resort.”
Irrith’s heart sped up with every word out of his mouth. Whether he meant malice or not, his need for such a preface could not bode well.
The Lord Keeper sighed heavily and went on. “While the Queen hunts answers in the world above, we cannot afford to lose sight of our own world, and the lessons it teaches us. She spent a great deal of time some years ago soliciting advice from other lands, asking after great dragons in their past, and what had been done to address them. In this, I believe, is an answer we must consider.”
“Just say it already,” Irrith snapped, unable to bear the delay any longer.
He lifted his head and met her gaze. “The sacrifice of a woman to the dragon.”
No one said anything. A fellow somewhere beneath Irrith’s feet shouted merrily to one of his companions, until she wanted to run downstairs and bid him be silent. A strange day, this is, with faeries above and mortals below.
And a far stranger day, Irrith of the Vale, when you stand here and listen to Valentin Aspell propose feeding Lune to the Dragon.
Because that had to be what he meant. “You cannot be serious,” Irrith said, through numb lips.
“She’ll take the whole damn Hall with her!” someone else exclaimed.
The Lord Keeper straightened swiftly, hands raised. “Hear me out. First and foremost, I tell you this: I intend nothing against the Queen’s will.”
It broke through the shell of horror that had encased Irrith’s body. Her heart, which seemed to have stopped, leapt back into action with a bone-jarring thud. “I am not advocating regicide,” Aspell went on, distinctly enough that Irrith spared a moment to hope someone had done something to keep their voices from escaping the room. Regicide was not a word to toss around lightly in either world. “But let me explain my reasoning to you, and the course of action I see before us.”
Again he waited for his audience to quiet. When they had done so, he spoke in a softer tone. “The Dragon has had a taste of her Majesty. It knows her scent, if you will.”
Irrith shook her head. “It knows the scent of the Onyx Hall.”
“Both, then—but in such circumstances, as I understand it, as to make the Dragon connect the two. And certainly, as matters stand now, they are connected. The loss of her Grace would almost certainly mean the loss of the Hall.”
Loss. A delicate word, much less ugly than the two it replaced. Death. Destruction.
“However,” Aspell went on, “were the Queen to be separated from her realm—to be no longer the Queen—then I believe she would still attract the Dragon’s interest, without endangering the palace. And in that manner, we might divert the beast from its purpose.”
Some of the gathered eight were shifting uncomfortably in their seats. Others had an avid gleam Irrith did not like at all. One of the shifters said, “What’s to stop it from devouring her, then moving on to the rest of us?”
The man next to him nodded. “I’ve heard those stories, too. A maiden a year, or some such. Appeasement isn’t safety; it’s just a bit of breathing space.”
“We could use it to bind the Dragon, though,” another said. “Not just one year, but seventy-five years of safety—or seventy-six, or however long it is.”
“And how much good has more time done us? The Queen’s got that Calendar Room of hers, but it hasn’t given her an answer, has it?”
More voices rose, the entire thing degenerating into just the kind of squabbling that Irrith most hated. But arguments aside, she realised, this was the closest thing to an actual plan she’d heard anyone offer. It was already autumn. The comet would reach its closest point to the sun in March. That meant that even now it drew near, and only a thin veil of clouds protected them. It was all well and good to say that natural philosophy would save them, but so far it didn’t seem to have provided any real proposal for how to do that.
The sacrifice of the Queen might be the only option.
And Lune would do it, too, Irrith thought. The Sanists’ ordinary arguments might fall on deaf royal ears, but the Dragon could well be a different matter. Aspell didn’t have to intend anything against the Queen’s wilclass="underline" if the beast stood before them, and no other option presented itself, then Lune might sacrifice herself freely, for the sake of her people.
Which was the thing Carline had never understood. Whatever mistakes Lune had made, she always put the interests of her court ahead of her own. That was a rare thing in a ruler, faerie or mortal. Who else could be trusted to do the same?
“We will decide nothing here today,” Aspell said at last, cutting through the general clamor. “As I said, this is a matter of final resort. But we must bear in mind the possibility.”
He looked at each of them in turn as he said it, and last of all at Irrith. She nodded, awkwardly, as if her head were on a string held by some careless puppeteer. A strong part of her wished she had never come to this place, to hear the possibility that Lune’s death was the only thing that could save them.
The rest of her was glad she had. Because if it came to that desperate pass, Irrith would throw herself at the Queen’s feet and beg. If Lune could save them, then she must.
For mortals, Sunday was a day of rest—or at least it was supposed to be. Lune knew quite well that many of them nowadays went walking outside of London, or enjoyed less respectable diversions. Galen was required to attend church with his family more often than not, though, as many Princes before him had done, and so she’d formed the habit of spending her Sundays on work that did not involve the mortal world.
This week, that meant efforts to keep her court from disintegrating. Only a few had left so far, but many more were planning to do so; Lune didn’t need spies to learn that. The prudent ones had chosen dates for their departure, based on their assumptions of when the Dragon would appear. The more reckless—which was most of them—thought they could run when it did.
She intended to consult Rosamund and Gertrude, possibly even to slip away in secret and go to Rose House. Keeping below, for the comfort of her court, was threatening to drive her mad. Before she could make plans, though, a knock sounded at the door. “Come in,” Lune called.