She dragged him to a halt in the embers. “We cannot go farther! It must be here!”
Jack spun to face the oncoming worm. Lune wrapped her aching hands around the staff and did the same. But not quickly enough, for the Dragon was upon them, and a claw of black heat snapped tight around her body.
PIE CORNER, LONDON: seven o’clock in the morning
Jack leapt without thinking, grabbing hold of Lune’s leg. The iron box clanked into the ashes, and for a moment Queen and Prince alike swung in the air, dangling from the Dragon’s claw. Then something ripped and they fell. Jack slammed his hip badly against the box, but worse, he heard the staff clatter away.
He inhaled, caught a lungful of dust, and spasmed in a cough. Only instinct made him roll, and an instant later something crushed the ground where he had been. Blind and choking, he scrabbled away, repeating to himself, This is not the death I saw. This is not the death I saw. But was the vision he’d seen when he touched the Cailleach’s staff prophecy, or merely one possibility out of many?
Through his own coughing he heard other voices. They were not alone. As his streaming eyes cleared, though, he saw that no one could get past the Dragon’s lashing tail; he and Lune were the sole prey for its claws and teeth. Lucky us.
His back hit some fragment of wall, and Jack reached for a hold that could help him to his feet. But before he found anything, his body locked in new paralysis.
Above him, the seething face of the Dragon rose.
It was a horror beyond fire, beyond plague, beyond war. Those did not have eyes that transfixed a man, that blazed down upon him and hungered for the power his flesh bore. Jack could not breathe; his lungs convulsed, unable to draw air past the constriction in his throat.
Then came a scream unlike any he had heard. Lune—the elegant faerie Queen of the Onyx Court, the silver statue who played politics like chess but knew nothing of battle—had the staff in her hands once more, and she swung it full-armed at the Dragon, fury taking the place of skill. “I shall not lose two!”
The Dragon hissed when the staff struck its leg, not from its throat, but from the steaming flesh itself. The Cailleach’s winter chill blackened the surface and stiffened the joint. But it didn’t slow the beast’s other limbs; the undamaged claw slapped Lune down, sending her sprawling across the ground, before seizing her once more in an unbreakable grip.
The staff, knocked from her hands, skidded within Jack’s reach.
For one horrific instant, his arms would not move. They refused, knowing the pain that awaited them. But Lune screamed from above, and it turned out that loyalty trumped self-preservation.
Clenching his jaw so hard a tooth split, he grabbed the staff of the Cailleach Bheur.
I know how I will die.
Roaring, Jack thrust the end of the staff at the underbelly of the Dragon, at the place where the heart might be if this were an ordinary creature. The impact made no mark on his numb, insensate hands, but the force traveled through his arms and into his spine, staggering him back a step.
And this time the Dragon screamed.
A crack opened through the chest and belly of the Dragon, like stone contracting beneath a harder frost than the world had ever known. At the very root of that fissure burned a tiny sun, light and heat beyond the ability of the human eye to bear. The Dragon’s heart was there for the taking—but it would annihilate mortal flesh at a touch.
He had seen his death twice, and this was not it.
A shadow eclipsed that terrible light. Lune plunged her left hand into the fissure, sinking her arm in up to the shoulder, and when she pulled out again, the sun was in her hand.
The box!
Jack dove into the ashes. He felt but didn’t hear his body strike the ground; he couldn’t tell whether all the world had gone to clamor or silence, in the dreadful inaudible sound of the Dragon’s agonized bellow. The box, where is the box—Lune will have no hand left at all—
His fingers stubbed themselves against the iron, then found a corner and pulled.
More ashes flew to choke him as he lurched to his feet, snatching the lid open as he went. Above them, the black mass of the Dragon writhed. Wounded, but not dead. It could live without its heart. He ducked as a claw snatched blindly above his head, and ran for the Queen.
Lune blazed as if the sun had lent the moon all its glory. No time for transmutation now. Jack shoved the iron prison at her. Christ Almighty, I can see the bones of her hand. They spasmed just above the black opening, as if Lune could not make her fingers release. Her face was a rictus of agony.
Forgive me—
Jack drove the iron edge against her wrist.
Blackness swallowed the sun. So great was the light of the heart, Jack thought for a moment the light in the sky had gone out. But he didn’t need his eyes to feel the metal in his hands, and he slammed the lid shut.
Silence.
His ears popped with it. Squinting in the now dim light, Jack realized that nothing stirred up the dust about them. He could see the wall, and the unburnt houses nearby, and the fae regaining their feet some distance away, but where the black bulk of the Dragon had been, there was nothing. Just a swirl of ash, now settling once more to the ground.
The iron was warm in his hands. The shield on top, he saw, bore a tongue of flame.
Lune swayed. He almost dropped the box again, but caught himself in time to set it down with hasty care. Her hand still hovered in the air; where blistered flesh had been, now there was nothing more than a blackened claw, and a charred ring of leather that was all that remained of the cuff of her glove. Her eyes were wide and staring, as if she could not believe he stood before her.
Jack managed a smile, though when he spoke he discovered he must have been screaming a good deal, for his voice almost did not answer. “You needn’t have feared,” he said. “This is not how I die.”
Then they both sagged down into the ashes, and waited for the others to come help them home.
LONDON AND ISLINGTON: ten o’clock in the evening
She woke so soon only because she must, because she had yet to face the Gyre-Carling.
Lune, who scarcely needed sleep at all, could have remained in her bed for a month. She was still half-blind from the light of the Dragon’s heart, her eyes adjusting only slowly to the dimness of her home, and as for her hand…
I thought it ruined before. Perhaps I shall ask Nuada of Temair who made his silver hand.
But had Jack touched the heart, he would be dead. She had feared it too much to say; the thought of losing another Prince so soon after the last was more than she could bear. Jack would not tell her what death he saw in the black wooden staff. She had been so certain it was in battle with the Dragon.
Michael Deven. Antony Ware. Jack Ellin would follow them someday—but not yet.
Amadea helped her sit upright, supporting her left side where her hand no longer could. Once Lune was well propped with pillows, the Lady Chamberlain handed her a cup filled to the brim with the Goodemeades’ best brew. “We have taken a cup to the Prince as well,” Amadea told her. “For when he wakes.”
“Wake him now.” Lune’s voice was a rasping ghost of its normal quality. “He must be at my side when we face Nicneven.”
With help, she struggled into clothing, and pulled a new glove over her hand. It was difficult, the fingers now incapable of bending. Lune saw the delicate bones had fused together, before she concealed the black skeleton from her sight. The glove sat poorly, without skin and flesh to fill it out. But it would have to do.