For now.
“Do you expect,” Ware spat, “that finding the murderer will absolve you of your guilt?”
“No. But I will do it—I must—and will not rest until I do. After that…” Deven’s shoulders sagged. He could not offer this young man full satisfaction; he was Prince of the Stone, and staying alive was among his obligations. A duel would be too risky. “I will absent myself from here forevermore, and go into exile.” Into the world below. He had already seen one king come and go; he lacked the will to face another. Someone else could find his successor.
The tension did not leave Ware’s body, but it abated. “How will you catch him?”
I have no idea. But it wasn’t true, and that slender thread of inspiration—and an even more slender thread of hope—made Deven say, “With your aid, if you will give it.”
He did not expect any cooperation between them to erase Ware’s hatred. It might not do any good at all. But if Deven could make even the smallest conciliation on behalf of the fae—if he could heal that wound to a scar, and lessen the chance that Ware would finish his vengeance by betraying them to the world—then he had to try.
Ware’s jaw tightened, then released. For the first time, he looked uncertain. “I do not know what I could do.”
“Follow me,” Deven said.
London above and below: 26 April, 1623
“You’re being exceedingly mysterious,” Henry said, not quite succeeding at making it sound like a complaint.
Deven smiled. “You would sail halfway around the world to discover the mystic riches of the Orient…but begrudge me a little mystery?”
“We are standing in a dank and filthy alley, with a fine English spring about to gift us with cold rain on our heads. I have yet to see any riches justifying you drawing me away from Robin Penshaw’s cards, let alone his excellent wine.”
“If ’tis more drinking you’d prefer, we can abandon this and find a tavern—” Deven made as if to go.
Henry’s undignified yelp of protest turned his smile into a laugh. “No?” Deven asked, with a solicitous bow. “Then bind your eyes, and let me guide you on to wonder.”
The young man accepted the kerchief Deven offered him. The alley they stood in was indeed both dank and filthy, and moreover well-cloaked in night; a mind more fearful than Henry’s could easily populate the shadows with cutpurses and goblins. But there was no risk of the former, and no need to imagine the latter: a goblin did lurk in concealment, both to defend the Prince of the Stone, and to help with Henry Ware should all not go as planned.
Deven hoped the watching goblin would not have to earn his keep. Henry had proven a ready audience for tales of faeries and enchantment—though Lune had sighed in disgust when she learned Deven had given the young man both Spenser’s poem and Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Neither was anything like a faithful model for the court below—in fact, Lune had encouraged the Dream’s frivolity, as an antidote to the cruelty of her predecessor’s rule—but they were useful for what they showed him of Henry. And what Deven saw in the young man was exactly what that first encounter suggested. He would not run, nor lash out in fear, when he saw the truth Deven had hinted at all this time.
Or so Deven hoped.
Henry had covered his eyes. Taking him by the elbow, Deven led his friend around a corner, the goblin following silently. Ahead lay a steep set of steps, and at their base a door, which let onto a dark cellar. Henry, unsteady and blind, relied on Deven’s grip. And then the cellar was a cellar no more, and they stood in an antechamber of the Onyx Hall.
It might be better to unbind Henry’s eyes there, allowing him to take in the strangeness of the faerie palace before he saw anything more—especially with the wine in him. But Deven, thinking of poetry, and of his friend’s character, held to the plan he had developed with Lune: he led Henry onward, still blindfold, and let the goblin go before them to clear their path.
Henry knew something had changed. Deven heard it in the way his breath caught, in the wary caution of his footfalls. The man could hardly overlook it; the very air felt different here, cool and dark, without the damp mustiness of the cellar. Soon enough they were in a narrow passage—not one of the public ways of the Onyx Hall, but a hidden corridor, one of many he and Lune had discovered in their realm. It terminated in a bronze-bound door, which the goblin opened for them, and beyond lay the chamber where Lune waited.
She smiled at Deven, easing his nerves a little. There was wonder aplenty in this chamber, with the silver-and-midnight figure of Lune and the ceiling showing the alignment of the hidden stars above. Enough, or too much?
The time had come to find out. And if Deven had chosen poorly, then they must fog Henry’s memory and return him to the mortal world, and hope they had not jeopardised the security of this realm.
Deven steeled his nerves and unbound Henry’s eyes.
From her seat beneath a small canopy of estate, the faerie Queen of the Onyx Court said, “Be welcome to our halls, Henry Ware. May you find what you seek here.”
Henry stared at her for ten drunken, agonising heartbeats, without making a single sound—then collapsed in a faint.
London above and below: 6 June, 1625
With Henry, he had taken every precaution he could; with Antony, he took almost none.
There seemed little point. Deven did not know, and feared to ask, exactly what Henry had disclosed to his brother—the location of the Onyx Hall? Its entrances? But Antony Ware would never abide the kind of secrecies employed before, and from his brief dealings with the young man, Deven suspected honesty would serve him better than any amount of hedging.
He said only, “You have my oath to God that those I am about to lead you among intend you no harm, and that furthermore, should they offer any, I will hazard my own life to protect yours. In exchange, I would ask—but ask only—that you offer no violence in return. We do not go against your brother’s murderer, for we do not yet know who he is; those you will see are allies, who may be able to aid us in our search.”
Ware’s lip curled in disgust. “What value lies in the sworn word of one such as you?”
Henry had said once that his brother was not a passionately religious man. Deven still believed it; the question did not sound like the doubt of a godly Puritan, but rather the distrust of a grieving soul. Nor was it surprising: given the antipathy Christian things held for the fae, Ware might well doubt Deven’s oath.
As security, all he could offer was his own grief. “I have already lost Henry. If only for his sake, I would not endanger you.”
The young man gritted his teeth, but nodded at last.
Deven took him to the St. Nicholas Shambles by Newgate, for it was among the least alarming choices; he did not want to see Ware’s reaction to being swallowed by the alder tree entrance. It was the same route by which Henry had come, two years before, and if any sympathy could attach to Antony by following in his brother’s footsteps, Deven welcomed it.