Almost. Almost. But the promise of power is enough to hold it in check.
Not for much longer, though. Its instinct to destroy is too intense. If it cannot have the city, and the shadow, and the ones who banished it to the cold black sky, it will take something else instead. Grow strong once more, stronger than it ever was, until it consumes everything.
Then it will have power, and all the world besides.
Valentin Aspell seemed far more serene than he had any right to be. The treasonous Lord Keeper was sitting at his ease in a chair when the jailer unlocked the door to his cell; they had permitted him that much comfort, though there was little else in this bare stone room, beneath the Tower of London. Upon seeing Lune and her escort, he rose and sank to one elegant knee. “Your Majesty.”
The Queen stopped a little way into the room, letting Sir Peregrin and Sir Cerenel keep between her and the prisoner. Irrith was glad to remain at her side. Aspell’s eyes did no more than flicker briefly in her direction, but it was more than enough; Irrith shivered, and wished she hadn’t come. Lune needed her, though. Whatever Dr. Andrews had done, she’d been days in recovering from it; he hadn’t weakened her so much as… detached her. The effort of will had been visible, every time Lune concentrated on their words, moved her body, spoke. Irrith wondered privately—and would never ask anyone—whether it was true that too much mortal bread, even of the safe, tithed kind, could tinct a faerie, and whether Andrews had washed that from her. What human qualities Lune had taken on might be gone from her now.
She certainly did not look human as she regarded the kneeling Aspell. She let the silence grow, heartbeat by heartbeat, until Irrith herself wanted to say something just to break it; and then she said, “Tell me why I should not execute you.”
There were many answers Aspell could have made. It wasn’t Lune’s customary way; it would anger the Sanists; he held some last weapon or offer that made it wiser—or at least more useful—to keep him alive.
Instead he replied, “Because everything I have done, I have done for the good of the Onyx Hall.”
Irrith couldn’t prevent herself from making a startled and disbelieving noise. Aspell’s courtesy was too good for him to lift his head; he remained kneeling, eyes on the cold black floor of his cell. Lune waited until the sound faded before saying, “If your crimes consisted only of my abduction and intended murder for Andrews’s scheme, I might believe you. If they extended no further than to what Dame Irrith has told me, your plan to sacrifice me to the Dragon, your current involvement with the Sanist conspiracy, I might still believe you. But your guilt is older than that, Aspell. You plotted with Carline even before the Hall began to fray.” She paused, then asked, “Do you deny it?”
“No, your Grace. But I maintain my defence.”
“Putting Carline on the throne would be good for the Onyx Hall?” The question burst out of Irrith before she could stop it. Lune made no attempt to stop her. “She would have been a terrible queen! And you know it!”
Aspell hesitated. His calmness was no act, Irrith realised; this wasn’t some political game. He truly meant what he said. “Madam, with your permission, I would answer Dame Irrith’s accusation.”
Lune only moved one hand, but Aspell must have seen it, for he went on. “Carline was… not ideal, it’s true. But she had this virtue over others who might have been more suitable: she could have been controlled. So long as she had her entertainments, she would have been willing to give me free rein in the Onyx Hall.”
“And that was what you wanted, wasn’t it.”
“Not at all—not if I could have the world according to my preferences. The power I have now—had—pleased me very well. But others who might have taken the throne would have been equally flawed, and far less biddable.”
Irrith wanted to shove past Cerenel and strangle him. This is what I hate the most—forked tongues speaking treason and patriotism at the same time. All the twists, all the lies, until even the liar believes his own words. “Is that how you see your Queen? Unbiddable and flawed?”
“Yes.” The word was cold and uncompromising. “Your Grace… you have been flawed since the iron knife first entered your shoulder.”
Before the Dragon burnt her hand, before the first bit of the Onyx Hall began to crumble away. Before Irrith had ever met London’s Queen. Lune said, “And yet you served me, even though I was wounded, never to heal.”
A ripple in Aspell’s shoulders, a serpentine shrug. “At first it didn’t seem to matter. This place is an exception to many rules of faerie-kind; you could have been another. But then Lady Feidelm warned us of the comet’s return, and I foresaw a second destruction. To speak bluntly, madam—for I think I have nothing to lose by doing so—had you done as you should, you would have sought out and prepared a successor, to give the Onyx Hall a monarch who is whole. Your continuing refusal to do so, and your failure to dispose of either of the threats that imperils this realm, convinced me there was no other choice.”
“No other choice than regicide.” Irrith spat the word like the poison it was.
He lifted his head to regard her. As he said, he had nothing to lose by the discourtesy. “When it offers the one plausible chance to save the Hall—yes. With regret. Time forced my hand, you see. Dr. Andrews’s plan struck me as far more likely to succeed than my own, but he hovered at the edge of his own grave; if it were to be done, it had to be done then, without time to persuade her Majesty into cooperation.” He sighed. “I threw the dice, and failed.”
With a soul-deep chill, Irrith realised what lay beneath his calm. He has nothing to lose—not just because Lune may execute him, but because he believes this whole realm is now doomed.
And what did the Queen believe? Only Lune herself knew; the silver eyes gave nothing away. Irrith couldn’t decide which was worse: naked ambition, or this double-knotted rhetoric, laying a road that led sanely and inevitably to horrifying treason.
Aspell bowed his head once more, dismissing Irrith. “You asked, your Grace, why you should not execute me. That is the defence I offer. The preservation of the Onyx Hall requires your removal, and so I pursued it. I renounce nothing I have done, though I regret the clumsy and ineffective manner of its doing. I await your sentence.”
Irrith would have killed him, without hesitation. Yes, fae bred rarely, and yes, killing Aspell would likely obliterate his spirit forever—she didn’t care. He was a traitor, and if lopping his head off angered the Sanists, so be it; they could handle the rebellion once they’d disposed of the Dragon.
Unless it destroyed them all, in which case, no sense wasting effort on the Sanists now.
But Irrith wasn’t Lune, with her responsibilities and knowledge of politics and, perhaps, queerly human notions. If she still had them.
The Queen said, “You will face a formal trial, so that all my subjects may know that the Sanist conspiracy, in its extremity, resorted to attempted regicide. But the sentence will be mine to pronounce—and I will not kill you, Aspell.”
His shoulders trembled. This might not be mercy; there were fates less pleasant than death.