Favouring his gashed palm, Galen pulled her awkwardly forward, dragging her off the roof. The contents of her pockets rained down, making hazards for his feet, but he managed to lift her onto his shoulder and carry her to the ground. Had the Sanists attacked her? But if so, why had they left her alive?
The flapping of wings gave him half a second of warning. Galen had just enough time to lay Irrith down before the approaching faerie transformed in midair, falling out of the sky to land in humanlike form. She was a sharp-faced creature, none Galen knew by name, but her predatory leer told her intent clearly enough. And she stood between him and the relative safety of the street.
Ever since fleeing Red Lion Square, the shame of having abandoned Lune had burnt Galen alive. Now Irrith lay helpless in the mud at his feet. Once the goblin woman finished with him, the sprite would not last long.
No.
That single word was the only clear thought in Galen’s head as he lunged for the fallen contents of Irrith’s pockets. It gave him speed: he came up with the pistol in his hands just before the goblin reached him, and fired from a mere foot away.
The hammer of the gun snapped down—and nothing happened.
She’d slid to a halt in a vain attempt to dodge. Now she laughed and raised her claws.
Galen struck her in the head with the empty pistol. The goblin staggered. He struck her again, a third time, a fourth, beating her down into the mud, until his sweaty grip failed and the gun flew from his grip. But by then the goblin wasn’t moving.
He didn’t trust it. Any moment now she would rise again, and then he would be doomed, because he was no soldier or brawler; he was a gentleman, and had never come closer to battle than his fencing lessons as a youth.
Galen dragged Irrith out of the mud. How he fit both of them into the cramped alcove of the entrance, he would never know; but a moment later they were in the relative safety of the Onyx Hall, and then he began shouting for help.
His cries seemed to have summoned fae out of every crevice of the Hall, and half of them were now crowding into the room. Galen didn’t even know where they were; it was some courtier’s chambers, he thought. Whatever had been nearest when help came running. But the result was chaos, and they were wasting time.
He bellowed loud enough to make Gertrude drop the bandage she was wrapping around his hand, and was rewarded with a ragged fall into silence. “Out,” he snarled. “I need Sir Peregrin and Sir Cerenel—the Goodemeades can stay—and the scholars, get me Lady Feidelm, Abd ar-Rashid, any of them you can find. Everyone else, get out.”
Sir Adenant took up his orders and repeated them, herding almost everyone from the room. Now Galen could see Rosamund, crouching over Irrith, trying to chafe warmth back into the sprite’s limp hands. “What’s wrong with her?”
“Iron,” the brownie said, not looking up. “And holy things, and everything else. She was up there without bread, Galen, I don’t know for how long.”
Would she recover? He couldn’t spare the time for that worry, not right now. Gertrude tied off the bandage as Sir Peregrin came in with his lieutenant. Abd ar-Rashid was not far behind. Good enough to start with.
Galen told them of Red Lion Square. He wanted to be concise, but every word made his face ache, and his thoughts kept scattering to the four winds; Gertrude pressed a cup of mead into his good hand, and he drank it down, shaking almost badly enough to choke. Where were the rest of the scholars? Abd ar-Rashid shook his head when Galen asked. “Lady Feidelm and Wrain are in the Calendar Room. I cannot find Savennis.”
“He’s dead.”
The paper-thin whisper came from Irrith. Rosamund had tucked her into the bed of the courtier whose chambers they’d usurped, where she looked like a small child, wasted by illness. Her shifting eyes had dulled to a flat, muddy green. “In the cellar. Andrews was experimenting. They’re all dead.”
I tried, Mr. St. Clair, but they all died.
The doctor’s words echoed in his head. The vivisected salamander, the laboratory beneath Andrews’s house—the questions about what happened when a faerie died. Christ. Lune.
Galen stumbled blindly toward the door. “We have to go now. She—she may already be dead…”
Cerenel caught him before he could get far. Rosamund hurried to his side, with hasty words of comfort. “She isn’t, lad; you’d know if she were. The Hall would tell you. But you have to plan before you go rushing in, because of a surety they’ll be waiting for you.”
“We don’t have the time!”
Abd ar-Rashid’s accented voice brought him down to earth, unreasonably calm in the face of his own panic. “I think perhaps we do. If I understand Dr. Andrews well enough.”
Galen stopped fighting Cerenel’s hands. “What do you mean?”
The genie folded his arms, frowning. “He seeks the moon queen, yes? Then he will want the moon. Full would be best, but he has missed that; he will not wait for it to come again. But the… extraction will be tonight.”
“Then why snatch her now?” Peregrin demanded. “When it gives us time to respond?”
“Because he needs time to prepare.”
Cerenel allowed Galen to step back. The pause had checked the fire in his veins; now, at last, he began to feel the beating he’d taken, the throbbing heat of his hand, the protests of his right ankle when he put weight on it. But the mead gave him the strength to keep going.
Everyone was looking at him. Prince of the Stone, and in Lune’s absence, the voice of authority in the Onyx Hall.
He tried to focus, past the unpleasant pulsating of his bruised face. Abd ar-Rashid’s calm response to Peregrin sounded plausible, but he suspected it was more of a guess than the genie admitted. If the extraction was now…
“Lune was supposed to go alone,” he mumbled, mostly to himself. “Not with me.”
“Aspell must know she’s been sneaking out of the Hall,” Irrith said, struggling to sit up, against Gertrude’s insistence.
“Aspell? The Lord Keeper?”
Peregrin’s teeth bared in a snarl. “The Sanist. Dame Irrith told us, while you were away.”
The knight likely didn’t mean it as an accusation, but it cut Galen nonetheless. Irrith brushed lank hair from her face and said, “I followed him to Dr. Andrews’s house. I didn’t know what they were planning, but I was trying to get back here to warn the Queen.”
They shared the same shame, the same failure. He saw it in her face, as no doubt she saw it in his.
So the intent had been for the Queen to go in secret, by herself, or at most with one attendant. There was no reason to suspect Dr. Andrews, and no reason to take a guard. By the time her absence was remarked, and her location determined, it would be too late.
“But they know now that we know,” Galen said. He lowered himself stiffly into the nearest chair. “Andrews won’t use his cellar laboratory. By now they’ll be gone. But to where?”
Silence. The assembled fae looked from one to another, seeking answers, finding none.
Andrews had nowhere else to go, not that Galen knew of. He could not kill a faerie woman inside the house of the Royal Society. “Does Aspell have any familiar haunts, outside the Hall?”
More silence, shaking heads. It sparked Galen’s anger. “Come on! There must be something. Where can they be safe? Abd ar-Rashid, give me the alchemical answer. What place is best for the work he intends to do?”
The genie closed his eyes and began to murmur to himself in rapid Arabic, unintelligible to them all. Then, still without looking, he changed to English. “Ablution. Washing the material in mercurial waters to reach albedo, the white stage before the creation of the stone. He will need to purify her… he would not have done this in his house, I think, even without being found. He needs a source of water, away from iron or other things that will harm her.”