Henry nodded, unwontedly sad. “Let me find out what has happened to that wine,” Deven said, rising to give him a moment of privacy. “Unless my man is picking the grapes himself, it should have been here by now.”
Dover, Kent: 13 June, 1625
In the privacy of his mind, where the words could not offend the fae accompanying him, Deven thanked the Lord God that Robert Penshaw had a sense of pageantry about Henrietta Maria’s death.
Had he not, they might never have had a chance to stop him. While faerie agents were seeking proof of Penshaw’s intentions, Quijada slipped their net; the Spaniard was on his way to Dover by the time they discovered his departure. The storms that kept Charles’ bride delayed in Boulogne had blown clear, and she had landed in England. Had Quijada shot her on the docks—or worse, had Penshaw smuggled him to France, ere she ever set sail—he might have done it cleanly.
But there was the pageantry to consider. Henrietta Maria slept in Dover Castle, her first night on English soil. The King was on his way; together they would journey to Canterbury, there to consummate their marriage, and to crown Henrietta Maria as Queen.
It would be easier to reach her later, when confidence and use had slackened the guard about her, but it seemed that was a delay Penshaw could not stomach. Or perhaps it was the thought of a Catholic Queen of England that he could not endure.
Either way, Henrietta Maria would die just as her husband came to claim her.
No, Deven vowed, she will not.
He could have left the task to Lune’s hand-picked group of fae: two elf-knights, three goblins, and more than enough to take care of one murderous Spaniard. But no power under Heaven could stop Antony Ware from riding to Dover, and so Deven went as well, to watch over him and keep him from folly—assuming he could keep the young man from anything.
They rode faster than the Spaniard could, on faerie steeds that knew no weariness, and arrived in Dover in the small hours of the morning on the thirteenth. Deven, unlike Penshaw, had no need for pageantry; to rescue the French princess publicly would cause more trouble than it was worth. They would stop Quijada without delay. “Track him,” he said to Dead Rick, the black dog that ran at their heels, and threw down a scrap of cloth from Quijada’s bed in Coldharbour. The skriker sniffed it, growled softly, and ran off into the night.
Speaking for the first time since they had departed London, Antony Ware asked, “Once we find him—what then?”
“My first concern,” Deven murmured back, “is preventing this murder. After that…what would you see done?”
The moon was a bare sliver in the sky, often hidden by clouds; Antony was all but invisible in the darkness, and his voice gave little hint of what was in his mind. “We have no proof we could bring before a judge, to convict Quijada of murder.”
“A knight and a baronet’s son, against a Spaniard? We would not need much in the way of proof.”
Antony did not answer that, but sat waiting for the skriker’s return.
Dead Rick was gone for some time, though, while the moon played chase with the clouds. Deven kept himself occupied by trying to guess Quijada’s plan. Tomorrow the royal party would ride out from Dover Castle to Canterbury, along the same road that had brought the fae from London. Deven and his companions had paused outside the port town, close enough to smell the salt air, but not to catch the attention of the constables. They might be in the very spot from which Quijada intended to shoot.
No sound warned of the skriker’s approach. A blackness simply melted out of the shadows and writhed upward into the form of a man. “By the docks,” Dead Rick said, and Deven nodded. Where a Spaniard would excite less comment. “I’ll lead you.”
A mounted company of armed men descending upon a dockside inn ran too much risk of alerting Quijada; they left their horses outside town and proceeded on foot. Soon the buildings closed about them, warehouses and forges and carpenters’ shops, all the attendant facilities of a major port. These were dark in the night, but up ahead was light, for the docks did not sleep with the sun.
No more did the men who worked them. Sailors and labourers were in the streets, some working, some drinking away their pay. After the clean air of the Kentish countryside, the reek was like a physical assault. Deven hoped they could subdue Quijada quietly. It was a coin-toss whether the Dover constables would ignore the sounds of a brawl, or wade in to arrest them all.
“In there,” Dead Rick said, nodding toward a three-storey inn that leaned dangerously over the street. The sign was too battered to read in the lantern light. “Don’t know what room; I came back for you first.”
Deven set his jaw. Sixty-two years old, and charging into a Dover hell in the middle of the night. This was a game for younger men.
He turned to say as much to his companion—and found Antony gone.
For one blank heartbeat, his mind would not work. Then it jerked into motion once more. What had waylaid Antony did not matter; none of the possibilities were good. Whirling, Deven saw his companions had arrived at the same conclusion. “Find him,” he snapped, and Dead Rick went, not even pausing to conceal himself. Between one stride and the next, the faerie man dropped to all fours, and then the black dog ran back the way they’d come, the others at his heels.
Scarce two houses down, the skriker’s keen nose led them off the street into an alley, into the warren of Dover’s dockside. It was black as pitch in those back ways, and Deven could not see in the dark as the goblins did; he slipped in the mud, stumbled over things invisible to him, falling further behind.
But suddenly the buildings gave way to open grass. Deven, after an instant’s disorientation, realised the shadowed hulk in the middle distance was Dover Castle. Dead Rick had led them eastward, parallel to the docks and past the town’s edge. And in the scant light of the moon, he saw why.
Two figures struggled on the slope leading up to the castle, dancing to the music of steel. Gritting his teeth, Deven trusted the ground and ran, wrenching his sword free as he went, knowing the fae would beat him there and that none of them would be in time.
For he recognised Antony, even in the darkness, even at this distance—and the young man was losing.
Retreating hastily from the other’s blade, Antony’s heel caught against something and betrayed him to the ground. He parried one thrust, rolling desperately, but lost his sword to the second, and as his opponent struck for the third time—
Dead Rick’s flying leap carried him clear across Antony’s body, and his jaws closed on the other man’s throat.
Deven arrived last of them all, gasping as he had not for years. His pretence of age and infirmity had robbed him of his wind in truth. “Are you hurt?” he asked. One elf-knight stood over Antony, while the other had followed the goblins to Dead Rick.
“N-no,” Antony stammered, sitting up. Even allowing for the light, he looked deathly pale. “My ankle twinges a bit, is all.” He flexed it in his boot, but refused help in standing.
They both looked down the slope to where the skriker and his victim had rolled. Dead Rick shifted back, spat into the grass, and said, “Spaniards taste like shit.”