Lune smiled, with rueful amusement, and closed the door behind her. “I am. After so many years, even I forget there was a time I walked this realm alone, without ladies and footmen and all the other pomp that attends a Queen. I wanted to speak to Dr. Andrews privately—but it seems he’s not here.”
“I think he went home.”
“Good.” Lune picked up a mortar and pestle, studied its contents, set it down again. “Galen said he was having difficulty persuading him to do so.”
“He’s dying,” Irrith said bluntly. “And he thinks being here can save him, at least for a while. But I think it’s sending him a little mad.”
The silver eyes darkened. “Gertrude is very apprehensive of that danger. But Galen argued, and I agreed, that Dr. Andrews’s condition made it worth the risk; we needed his mind, and he would not have long to run mad.”
Needed. Lune spoke as if the matter were done. “Are we ready, then? I know about the Monument plan, but have they found their mercury?”
“They found it long ago,” Lune murmured, and her lips tightened. On most fae, it would have been nothing, but on her it was a like a banner, advertising her distress. “But there is… a problem.”
They had a source for the sophic mercury? This was the first Irrith had heard of it—though admittedly, she hardly understood the scholars’ debates. She knew they wanted to draw it out of some water-dwelling faeries, but there was, as Lune said, some problem. Irrith furrowed her brow, trying to remember.
Then she succeeded, and wished she hadn’t. “They’re afraid it would kill the river fae.”
Lune’s lips tightened again. For a moment she was like a statue, frozen and mute; then she inhaled and answered with a simple truth. “Not the river fae. Me.”
Irrith gaped. No one had breathed a word of this, not in all the time she’d spent in the laboratory—well, of course they hadn’t. Who would say such a thing, any more than they had to? But a thousand things made more sense now, that she hadn’t understood when Wrain muttered them, or Feidelm lapsed into language so abstract she could have been talking about anything at all.
A thousand things—and chief among them, the desperation in Galen’s eyes. He wanted to save the Onyx Hall, of course, but sometimes it took on a sharper edge, and now Irrith knew why.
She studied Lune, marking the hollows under her high cheekbones, the sharp line of the muscles in her neck. Fading, yes—but slowly. She could hold on for a very long time. If there was good reason to. “Galen would die to save this place,” Irrith said, and then corrected herself. “To save you. I don’t think you would die for him… but would you do it for London, and the Onyx Hall?”
Lune stood silent, head bowed, long-fingered hands folded across the stomacher of her simple dress. Irrith could never have asked her this if there were servants present, or even waiting outside the door, but it was just the two of them, and for this brief span she could speak to the elfin woman, rather than the sovereign. The distinction was important to her, though she could not have said why.
“There have been times when I almost did,” Lune said finally, not lifting her head. “I held back because in the end, I believed my death—or even my abdication—would create more problems than it would solve. There are fae here who share my ideals, but none of them, I think, could manage this court. And those who could rule effectively would not do so in a manner I can accept.
“So when it was merely the arguments of the Sanists, it was easy to say no. But now there is the Dragon. And now… I do not know.”
Irrith’s hands curled into fists. She was vividly aware of her fingers, bones, joints—her body. Her self. No separation between the two. “Maybe you wouldn’t die, though. I don’t really understand what they’ve been talking about, but it sounds like what they’re after is just you in a different form, your soul separated from the aether that makes you solid. So you wouldn’t really be dead, would you? You’d just be… different.”
The two of them stared at each other, neither one moving, as if both were struck by the same thought. Lune said, “The philosopher’s stone—”
“Would it be a stone?” Irrith asked, still not blinking. “Galen told me the alchemists thought it would be some kind of powder, red or shining or whatever—but how would they know? None of them ever made it, not truly. And we aren’t working with metals, are we?” They were working with spirits. The Dragon’s, and Lune’s.
Wouldn’t the result be a spirit, too?
The words seemed to float up out of Lune, without any effort on her part. “I want to save the Onyx Hall.”
“And the Dragon wants to destroy it,” Irrith finished. “Which one of you wins?”
Her answer was the fear in those silver eyes. Lune was strong and determined, yes. But strong enough to defeat the Dragon?
“We could be wrong,” Lune said carefully. “This is mere speculation, and neither of us is a scholar. Nevertheless…” Her shoulders went back, and the elfin woman was gone; in her place stood the Queen. “I hardly need tell you not to speak of this to anyone. I will consult with Galen—no, he is occupied. Another, then. I thank you, Irrith; you’ve given me much to think about.”
She swept out the door, leaving Irrith alone once more in the laboratory. Staring blindly at the far wall, she sank into a cross-legged position on the floor.
The philosopher’s stone might not be their salvation after all. Which left them with what? Aspell’s plan of sacrifice?
A chill sank into Irrith’s bones. Until Lune brought it up, she hadn’t given much thought to the question of what would happen to the Onyx Court if its Queen… went away. The Hall, yes; but not the court itself, the fae and mortals, with all their conflicting desires. Who would hold them together in Lune’s absence? Who could?
Aspell, maybe. But he showed no sign of wanting it; from what Irrith had seen, he was a Sanist only with reluctance, because the situation forced him to it. So who, then? One of the others in the coffeehouse that day?
She didn’t even know who they were—much less what ambition hid beneath their masks. And the more she thought about it, the more fear tightened her muscles. The Lord Keeper might insist he would do nothing against the Queen’s will, but those unknown others….
Irrith paced with small, tight strides, thinking. If she tried to ask Aspell for their names, he wouldn’t tell her; he’d think she was preparing to betray them. And maybe she was. But there was someone else she could ask—someone who might know, who could be intimidated into telling, and who wouldn’t much care what happened afterward.
Irrith went to hunt Carline.
Feidelm sat in perfect silence for a full minute after Lune shared what she and Irrith had discussed. The sidhe’s vivid eyes grew distant; when they sharpened once more, frustrated regret filled them. “Now of all times, I wish I still had my prophetic gift. I could look to the future and tell you if that danger is real.”
Such favours had been precisely what lost her that gift. Tensions between mortal England and Ireland rose and fell, but never subsided entirely, and that colored relations between their faerie courts, as well. The King and Queen of Connacht did not want one of their seers constantly lending aid to Lune, even if the Onyx Court no longer meddled in national politics as it once did.
Reminding Feidelm of that would do no good at all. “You have more gifts than just foresight,” Lune said. “What does your wisdom tell you?”
The Irish faerie bent her head, gripping her hands together. “That you and Dame Irrith are right—and even if it’s unsure, we cannot risk it.” She sighed, knuckles tensing. “We struggled so hard with the question of how to do this thing that we could not spare thought for what would happen afterward. But we should have done.”