His flat declaration produced an awkward pause. Good humor had been running high among Lune’s advisers, gathered for this urgent war council, but it faltered badly under Peregrin’s words. Jack finished taking off his doublet and laid it over the back of a chair, less confident than he had been.
“Guns?” Bonecruncher suggested, hopefully. The barguest liked the weapons rather too well. But Peregrin shook his head.
“If we had iron shot, perhaps,” Segraine said, lowering herself into a chair. No one grudged her the comfort—or Peregrin either, though he refused to take it. “It’s a mystical being, as we are. But by the time we arm ourselves thus, it will be too late.”
Lune laid her hands flat on the surface of the council table, aligning them with exaggerated care along the floral pattern outlined in bright commesso. “Iron,” she said.
Everyone except Jack shivered.
She lifted her head, and smiled without mirth. “Not iron shot. It seems Nicneven has done us a favor after all.”
By forcing her to give up Vidar. Jack said, “That iron box you locked him in.”
The Queen nodded.
“Will it hold the thing?” he asked doubtfully. “You’ve not seen the Dragon, Lune; it’s huge.”
“The box does not work that way. It is small; what it entraps is the spirit. But yes, it will hold the Dragon.”
You think it will. Jack would not voice the doubts she kept silent, though. Rolling back the cuffs of his sleeves, he said, “Then once we take Vidar out again, we need two things: a way to force the Dragon inside, and bait to draw it near.”
Bonecruncher snorted. “Just offer it what’s left of the City.”
Jack glared at the goblin. Fortunately, Lune answered before he could speak his mind. “The Dragon does not want the City. Rather, it does—but more than that, it craves the power we have here. The Onyx Hall. It has tried for us twice already.”
Her mind was on tactics. Jack saw, as she did not, the shudder that rippled through the room. They knew of the battle in the cathedral, and rumors had spread of Lune’s defense at the Stone; they saw her crippled hand, and understood what it betokened. Now she wished to bait the Dragon again?
But they had barred the Stone against their enemy, and Prigurd had closed the cathedral door himself. “We need some new lure,” the Queen said.
Jack hated to suggest it, but she would think of it regardless. “The Tower?”
He was both relieved and dismayed to see her shake her head. “They’ve blown up all the houses nearby; the Fire cannot approach. And while a beast of flames might be overlooked in a great inferno, we cannot battle it inside the Tower of London without drawing far too many eyes.”
Segraine’s head had sagged, until Jack thought her asleep; now she raised it and said, “It is flame no more. Black cinders, like char crusting meat—but beneath is molten flesh.”
“We saw it,” Peregrin said, though no one had forgotten. “Prowling in the vicinity of Newgate.”
Which only lent more weight to Lune’s point. Men might convince themselves they saw no shape in the flames, but a giant black beast was rather much to overlook. Jack pressed the heels of his hands against his eyes and thought. We cannot bring it below. Two of the key points are barred to it, the third unusable—the Thames and the wall will not work—
But there was one more element of the Onyx Hall the Dragon might hunger after.
“We offer it ourselves,” Jack said quietly.
His hands were still blindfolding his eyes; hearing only dead silence, he lowered them and managed an off-balance grin. “I know. In a moment someone will find his tongue and remind me that a Queen is not to be used as bait. But if what the Dragon desires is a conduit to the Onyx Hall…well, at least these conduits can fight back.”
The faces surrounding him might have been a painter’s study in seventeen kinds of horror. Seventeen of horror, and one of calm understanding. Lune knew as well as he did that they were the tastiest morsels they could dangle before their enemy—and that it had to be both of them, together.
She let her advisers argue it for a moment; then she diverted them down a secondary path, leaving the idea to stew in their minds. By the time she came back to it, they would be more resigned to the notion. Or at least Jack assumed that was her plan. In the meantime—“We must get it outside London, I think,” she said. “Outside the wall. Who knows what will happen when we trap it, both above and below. But nowhere that has not burnt already.”
“The liberties to the west, then,” Jack said. “We find the Dragon, draw its attention, then run for Ludgate or Newgate as if the Devil himself were on our tails.” On the whole, I might prefer the Devil.
But that left unanswered the question of how to force it into the trap they hoped would hold it. Lune put it very plainly. “We need some piece of the one to be trapped. With Vidar, it was blood, but the Dragon has none. I think it must be flesh—such as it has. And for a being as powerful as this, I would not trust anything less than its heart to suffice.”
“Does it have a heart?” Irrith asked.
For some reason everyone looked to Jack, as if a mortal physician knew anything about the organs of elemental beasts. “It has something at its core,” he said, “that we may as well call the heart.” It sounded good, and he prayed it was true.
As for how to get at it…“How did George slay his dragon?” Amadea asked.
Jack’s breath huffed out in a voiceless laugh. “The princess he was rescuing threw him her girdle, which, placed around the neck of the beast, made it docile as a lamb. Then he led it about for a time before slaying it.”
“I do not think we will try that,” Lune said dryly. “We need some means to split its breast.”
Jack tapped his lip in thought. “It’s molten within, you say. Hot glass shatters if swiftly cooled. Might that not work here?”
“Do you have a boulder of ice to throw at it?” Bonecruncher growled.
“I can offer you something better.”
That voice came from near the door. When had that ambassador of Nicneven’s joined them? Cerenel made the briefest of bows, shoulders stiff under the disapproving stares around him. Yes—he used to be a knight of this court. Is that why he comes among us now?
“Your Grace, my lord,” the violet-eyed knight said, turning from Lune to Jack, “what you need is the staff of the Cailleach Bheur.”
After suffering under her touch for days, no one looked happy at the suggestion. The Cailleach was winter, though, and for once that might work to their purpose. “Her staff hardens the ground with frost,” Lune murmured, considering. “It would do very well indeed. But we do not have it.”
“I shall get it for you.”
He spoke with perfect confidence, enough to make Bonecruncher snort again. “Nicneven will just hand it over, will she?”
Jack would not have thought a slender elf-knight could glare down a barguest, but Cerenel managed. “I shall get it,” he repeated. “Her Majesty knows my word is good.”
For some reason that made Lune flinch. But the tight line of her jaw softened when Cerenel turned back to her; she even offered him a painful, grateful smile. “So it is. If you can bring us the staff of the Cailleach Bheur, then we shall face our enemy at last.”