“The chieftain’s son loved you. But you disdained mortality, did you not? You could not bear to join yourself to it. And so you cast him aside, cast his love aside, as a thing without value, for what can it be worth, when it dies so soon? But the ages you endured after that must have taught you something, as they were intended to do; else you would not have made this great hall. And you would not have loved Francis Merriman.”
He could feel the presence still. The ghost was gone, but Francis was not. The man had said it himself. He would never leave her. The love he felt joined them still.
And he had restored her ability to love.
“You did everything right,” Deven said. “Your mistake came when you did not trust it. Faced with a future alongside the man you loved — suffering a sort of mortality, yes, aging while you watched him stay eternally young — you let your fear, your disdain, triumph again. You cast aside his love, and the love you felt for him. You failed to understand its worth.”
A heart, traded for what she had lost. Youth. Beauty. Immortality. The answer had been in her hands, had she but accepted it.
Do not leave me, Francis had said.
“You face that decision again,” Deven whispered. “Your true love waits for you. Honor that love as it deserves. Do not cast it aside a third time.” This world operated by certain rules he did not have to explain to her or Lune. What was done a third time, was done forever.
For the first time since she bargained with Invidiana, Lune spoke. “Once we love, we cannot revoke it,” she said. “We can only glory in what it brings — pain as well as joy, grief as well as hope. He is as much a fae creature now as a mortal. Where you will go, I do not know. But you can go with him.”
Suspiria lifted her wasted face, lowering the clawlike hands that had risen to hide it. Only after a moment did Deven realize she was crying, the tears running down the deep gullies of her wrinkles, almost hidden from sight.
Invidiana had been evil. Suspiria was not. His heart gave a sharp ache, and a moment later, he felt Lune’s hand slip into his own.
The change happened too subtly to watch. Without him ever seeing how, the wrinkles grew shallower, the liver spots began to fade. As age had shriveled her a moment ago, now it acted in reverse, all the years lifting away, revealing the face of the woman Francis had loved.
She had the pale skin, the inky hair, the black eyes and red lips. But what had been unnerving in its perfection was now mere faerie beauty: a step sideways from mortality, enough to take the breath away, but bearable. And right.
A last, a crystalline tear hovered at the edge of her lashes, then fell.
“Thank you,” Suspiria whispered.
Then, like Francis Merriman, she faded from view, and when the throne was empty Deven knew they were both gone forever.
For a moment they stood silently in the presence chamber, with the corpse of Achilles, the huddled forms of Eurydice and the two elf knights, while Lune absorbed what she had just seen and done.
Then a pillar cracked and split in two, and Lune realized the thunder had not stopped. It had drawn nearer.
And Suspiria was gone.
Deven saw the sudden panic in her face. “What is it?”
“The Hunt,” she said, unnecessarily. “I was to ask Suspiria — the Stone — they think the kings might relent, if she relinquished her sovereignty — but what will happen, now that she is gone?”
He took off before she even finished speaking, flying the length of the presence chamber at a dead run, heading directly for the throne. No, not directly; he went to one side of it, and laid hold of the edge of the great silver arch. “Help me!”
“With what?” She came forward regardless. “The throne does not matter; we have to find the London Stone—”
“’Tis here!” Tendons ridged the backs of his hands as he dragged ineffectually at the throne. “A hidden chamber — I saw it before—”
Lune stood frozen for only a moment; then she threw herself forward and began to pull at the other side of the seat.
It moved reluctantly, protecting its treasure. “Help us!” Lune snapped, and whether out of reflexive obedience or a simple desire not to die at the hands of the Hunt, first Sir Cerenel and then Eurydice picked themselves up and came to lend their aid. Together the four of them forced it away from the wall, until there was a gap just wide enough for Lune and Deven to slip through.
The chamber beyond was no more than an alcove, scarcely large enough for the two of them and the stone that projected from the ceiling. A sword was buried halfway to the hilt in the pitted surface of the limestone, its grip just where an extremely tall woman’s hand might reach.
Lune did not know what effect the sword had, now that one half of its pact had passed out of the world, but if they could take it to the Hunt, as proof of Invidiana’s downfall… a slim hope, but she could not think of anything else to try.
Her own fingers came well short of the hilt. She looked at Deven, and he shook his head; Invidiana had been even taller than he, and he looked reluctant to touch a faerie sword regardless.
“Lift me,” Lune said. Deven wrapped his bloodstained hands about her waist, gathered his strength, and sent her into the air, as high as he could.
Her hand closed around the hilt, but the sword did not pull free.
Instead, it pulled her upward, with Deven at her side.
CANDLEWICK STREET, LONDON: May 9, 1590
She understood the truth, as they passed with a stomach-twisting surge from the alcove to the street above. The London Stone, half-buried, did not extend downward into the Onyx Hall. The Stone below was simply a reflection of the Stone above, the central axis of the entire edifice Suspiria and Francis had constructed. In that brief, wrenching instant, she felt herself not only to be at the London Stone, but at St. Paul’s and the Tower, at the city wall and the bank of the Thames.
Then she stood on Candlewick Street, with Deven at her side, the sword still in her hand.
All around them was war. Some still fought in the sky; others had dragged the battle down into the streets, so that the clash of weapons came from Bush Lane and St. Mary Botolph and St. Swithins, converging on where they stood. Hounds yelped, a sound that made her skin crawl, and someone was winding a horn, its call echoing over the city rooftops. But she had eyes only for a set of figures mounted on horseback that stood scant paces from the two of them.
She thrust the sword skyward and screamed, “Enough!”
And her voice, which should not have begun to cut through the roar of battle, rang out louder than the horn, and brought near-instant silence.
They stared at her, from all around where the fighting had raged. She did not see Sir Kentigern, but Prigurd stood astraddle the unmoving body of their sister, a bloody two-handed blade in his grip. Vidar was missing, too. Which side did he fight on? Or had he fled?
It was a question to answer later. In the sudden hush, she lowered the tip of the sword until it pointed at the riders — the ancient kings of Faerie England.
“You have brought war to my city,” Lune said in a forbidding voice, a muted echo of the command that had halted the fighting. “You will take it away again.”
Their faces and forms were dimly familiar, half-remembered shades from scarcely forty years before. Had one of them once been her own king? Perhaps the one who moved forward now, a stag-horned man with eyes as cruel as the wild. “Who are you, to thus command us?”
“I am the Queen of the Onyx Court,” Lune said.