Galen’s mind offered up an enormous list of water sources in London. “The ponds in St. James’ Park. The Chelsea Reservoirs. The Serpentine. Not Holywell—the New River Head—”
“No,” Rosamund murmured, cutting him short. “Think, Galen. The Thames.”
The answer so obvious, he overlooked it. Abd ar-Rashid’s lip curled delicately. “It is an open sewer. Not clean at all.”
“But the heart of London, and connected to the Onyx Hall,” Galen said. “Which is part of what Andrews is relying upon. Rosamund is right: he will use the Thames.”
Abd ar-Rashid was right, though, about the state of the waters. Somewhere upriver, then, where they were less fouled. Galen thought back to his Vauxhall visits, what he had seen from the barge. Westminster—no, too many wharves. The swampy banks of Lambeth, perhaps. Or Vauxhall itself? But while all of that, strictly speaking, fell under Lune’s authority—which extended to more than just the Onyx Hall itself—the farther he went, the farther he took her from the London Stone, and the heart of her realm. And Aspell knew about the Stone. Surely he would have told Andrews.
Galen stared blankly at the far wall, seeing in his mind’s eye the journey upriver. The wharves floating by, the fine houses along the Strand, the Palace of Westminster.
Upriver and down. Cleansing before the extraction. No one place would serve, but…
“What about a barge?”
A gleam came into Abd ar-Rashid’s dark eyes. He shared a little bit of Dr. Andrews’s flaw, Galen thought, the willingness to love an idea for its own beauty, without concern for its consequences. “A moving laboratory, for the volatile principle. Yes, it would do well.”
Very well indeed—if they weren’t speaking of Lune’s death. “Starting upriver, where the waters are cleaner, and floating down. If it’s her connection to the Onyx Hall he wants, then the—the extraction will happen in the City. Beneath the moon, I suppose.” Galen swallowed down bile.
Peregrin said, “Assuming all this speculation is correct. We have nothing but logic to support it.”
Gertrude had convinced Irrith to lie down again, or perhaps simple exhaustion had done it for her. The brownie said, “Might be we have a way to tell. I don’t know how far it goes, but—the Thames is connected to the Onyx Hall, and so are the Prince and Queen. If she’s on the river, he might be able to tell. Once she’s close enough, anyway.”
The Onyx Hall. A quiet presence in the back of Galen’s mind, grown familiar enough that he rarely thought of it. Could he use it to find the Queen?
He could certainly try. “In the meanwhile,” Galen said, “we assume nothing. Sir Peregrin, I’ll tell the Lord Treasurer to provide whatever’s needed. Search this city from one end to the other. If Lune is anywhere within London, find her—before tonight.”
“I’d bring you with me, but you need to rest.”
Irrith shook her head—or at least rolled it on her pillow, the best she could do. “Not even if I could, Galen. Carline almost tricked me once into telling her where the London Stone lay. I’m happier not knowing where it is now.” So long as there were vipers like Aspell in the Hall, she wanted to know nothing that could betray it.
He squeezed her limp hand. Even that light pressure forced her bones together—as it had always done, no doubt, but now she was aware of it, as she was aware of the fragility of her entire body. Irrith felt as if she’d been pounded, head to toe, with an iron club, and one more blow could break her. “I’m sorry,” he said.
She wasn’t sure either of them knew what precisely he was apologizing for. An unaccustomed prickling stung her eyes. “Galen—I think Podder was in that cellar. He didn’t run away.”
It barely touched him; his fear and rage for Lune left little room for anything else. But Galen nodded. Then, when neither of them could think of anything further to say, he turned to go.
When he was halfway to the door, his wife came into the room.
Delphia Northwood—no, Delphia St. Clair—gasped at the sight of her new husband. Irrith had no idea what Galen had been up to while she lay unconscious in Newgate, but his shirt was filthy, the back of his coat was slashed to ribbons, and his face was beginning to bruise beneath the blood. Small wonder the woman was horrified. “What in Heaven’s—”
He held up his left hand, seemed to notice the bandage on it, and replaced it with his right. “Delphia, I’m sorry; I don’t have time to explain. I have to find Lune. Something terrible has happened, and I… I need to be Prince right now.”
Irrith watched the words settle over Delphia St. Clair. Did the woman see the difference in Galen, beneath the blood and the bandages? I need to be Prince right now. He was the Prince, maybe for the first time ever. Not merely standing at Lune’s side, fulfilling his duties as required, but making decisions, giving orders. The change showed in his posture, the set of his jaw. The challenge had come—the crisis, not just the creeping threat of the comet—and he had stepped up to meet it.
As a Prince of the Stone should.
Delphia let him go, with only a brief touch of her hand on his shoulder. Then she stood, eyes cast down, in silence, and Irrith would have wagered all her remaining bread that the woman thought she was alone in the room.
But Gertrude would come back in a moment with mead for Irrith, and then it would be embarrassing to admit she’d listened to that exchange without saying anything. I could pretend to be asleep.
Instead she cleared her throat, and watched Delphia try to jump out of her skin. “It won’t end, you know,” Irrith said. “This fight, yes—one way or another, it will be over tonight. But it will always be true that Galen has to be Prince. He’ll always be running off, and leaving you behind.” Not just for Lune’s sake, but for the entire Onyx Court.
The mortal woman came forward one slow step at a time, hands clasped over her skirts. She studied Irrith with curious eyes, and a hint of compassion. But only a hint; the rest was steel.
“I am not left behind,” Delphia St. Clair said. “I’m a lady of the bedchamber to the Queen. I’ll make my own place here in this court, and when my husband goes to do his duty, I will not resent him for it.”
Irrith managed a weak smile. She did like this woman, who commanded admiration instead of pity. “Well said. If you really do mean it, then I suggest you go above, where your words won’t hurt us… and pray you still have a queen to serve tomorrow.”
In a tiny alcove well concealed in the Onyx Hall, Galen stood with both hands upraised, clutching the rough surface of the London Stone.
It looked like nothing: a rounded stub of a crude pillar, protruding from the ceiling above, its tip deeply grooved by the abuse of centuries. Its significance to London above was half-forgotten, even as the Stone itself was half worn away.
But in the shadowy reflection that was the Onyx Hall, there was no place of greater significance. This was the axis, the point where the two worlds fused into one, and Galen could touch his entire realm with his mind.
The Hall, fraying and fading in scattered patches. The wall, fragmented more with every passing year. The hill of St. Paul’s Cathedral in the west; the hill of the Tower in the east. The Walbrook, running buried beneath the City, from the north down to the greater waters of the Thames in the south.