She needed this. But so did the Goodemeades, with their guests to take care of.
“Go on, take it,” Gertrude said in a soft voice, folding her hands around the bread. “I’m sure you’ll find a good use for it.”
Lune put her guilt aside. “Thank you. I will not forget your generosity.”
Memory: May–August 1588
In villages and towns all along the coast of England, piles of wood awaited the torch, and men awaited the first sight of the doom that was coming to devour them.
In the crowded harbor of Lisbon, the ships of the Grande y Felicícisma Armada awaited the order that would send them forth, for God and King Philip, to bring down the heretic queen.
In the waters that separated them, storms brewed, sending rain and heavy winds to lash the lands on both sides of the English Channel.
The Armada was a greater thing in story than it was in reality. The five hundred mighty ships that would bear an unstoppable army to England’s shores, their holds crammed with implements of torture and thousands of Catholic wet nurses for the English babies who would be orphaned by the wholesale slaughter of their parents, were in truth a hundred and thirty ships of varying degrees of seaworthiness, crewed by the dregs of Lisbon, some of whom had never been to sea before, and commanded by a landsman given his posting only a few months gone. Disease and the depredations of the English scourge Sir Francis Drake had taken their toll on God’s weapon against the heretics.
But the worst was yet to come.
In this, the quietest month of the year, when all the experienced seamen had assured the Duke of Medina-Sidonia that the waters would be calm and the winds fair for England, the storms did not subside; instead, they grew in strength. Gales drove the ships back when they tried to progress, and scattered the weaker, less seaworthy vessels. Fat-bottomed merchantmen, Mediterranean galleys unsuited to the blasts of the open sea, lumbering supply ships that slowed the pace of the entire fleet: the Great and Most Fortunate Armada was a sorry sight indeed.
Delays had slain what remained of May; June rotted away in the harbor of La Coruña, while sailors sickened and starved, their victuals fouled by the green wood of the barrels they were kept in. The commanders of the fleet found new terms by which to damn Drake, who had burned the seasoned barrel-staves the previous year.
In July they sailed again, obedient to God’s mission.
Red crosses waved on white flags. The banner of Medina-Sidonia’s ship carried the Virgin and a crucified Christ, and the motto Exsurge, Domine, et judica causam tuam! Monks prayed daily, and even sailors were forbidden to take the Lord’s name in vain.
Yet none of it availed.
Beacon fires flared along the coast of England: the Spanish had been sighted. The wind favored the English, and so did the guns; the trim English ships refused boarding engagements, dancing around their ungainly enemy, battering away with their longer guns while staying out of Spanish range. Like dogs tearing at a chained bear, they harried the Spanish up the coast to Scotland, while the storms kept up their merciless assault.
Storms, always storms, every step of the way.
Storms struck them in the Orkneys, and again off the Irish coast, as the Armada fought to crawl home. From Lisbon into the Channel, around all the islands of England, Scotland, and Ireland — everywhere the fleet went, the wrath of sky and sea pursued.
Sick unto death with scurvy and typhus, maddened by starvation and thirst, the sailors screamed of faces in the water, voices in the sky. God was on their side, but the sea was not. Ever fickle, she had turned an implacable face to them, and all the prayers of the monks could not win her goodwill.
For a deal had been struck, in underwater palaces spoken of only in sailors’ drunken tales. The sea answered to powers other than man’s, and those powers — ever callous to human suffering — had been persuaded to act in favor of the English cause, against their usual disinterested neutrality.
So it was that the skies raged on command and alien figures slipped through the water, dancing effortlessly around the foundering vessels, luring men overboard and dragging them under, discarding many to wash up, bloated and rotting, on the Irish shore, but keeping a few for future amusement. It was difficult to say who had the more unfortunate fate: those who died, or those who lived.
In Spain, bells rang out in premature celebration, while his most Catholic Majesty awaited news of his most holy mission.
In England, the heretic queen rallied her people, while reports trickled in from Drake and the Lord Admiral, speaking of English heroism.
In the turbulent waters of the Atlantic, the remnants of the Armada, half their number lost, captured, or sunk, limped homeward, and took with them the hopes of a Spanish conquest of England.
THE ONYX HALL, LONDON: September 18, 1588
The mortal guise fell away from Lune like a discarded cloak the moment the alder tree grew shut around her, and she concealed the bread within the deep folds of her skirts. Those who wished to, would find out soon enough that she had it, and where she had obtained it, but she would hide it as best she could. Plenty of lesser courtiers would come begging for a crumb if they knew.
Some of them might smell it on her; certain fae had a nose for mortality. Lune hurried through the Onyx Hall to her chambers, and tucked the heel of bread into her coffer as the door closed behind her.
With it safely stowed, she rested her hands upon the inlaid surface of the table, tracing with one fingertip the outline of its design. A mortal man knelt at the foot of a tower; the artisan had chosen to show only the base of the structure, leaving to the imagination which faerie lady had caught his heart, and whether she returned his love.
It happened, sometimes. Not everyone played with mortals as toys. Some, like hobs, served them faithfully. Others gave inspiration to poets and musicians. A few loved them, with the deathless passion of a faerie heart, all the stronger for being given so rarely.
But mortals were not Lune’s concern, except insofar as they might provide her with a route to Invidiana’s favor.
She lowered herself onto the embroidered cushion of a stool. With deliberate, thoughtful motions, Lune began to remove the jeweled pins from her hair, and laid each one on the table to represent her thoughts.
The first she laid down glimmered with fragments of starlight, pushing the boundaries of what she, as a courtier in disgrace, might be permitted to adorn herself with. A gift, Lune thought. A rare faerie treasure, or a mortal pet, or information. Something Invidiana would value. It was the commonest path to favor, not just for fae but for humans as well. The difficulty was, with so many gifts being showered at the Queen’s feet, few stood out enough to attract her attention.
A second pin. The knob at the end of this one held the indigo gems known as the sea’s heart. Lune’s fingers clenched around it; she had dressed for court in a rush, and had not attended to which pins she chose. Had Vidar seen it? She prayed not. Bad enough to have lost the Queen’s goodwill by that disastrous bargain with the folk of the sea; worse yet to wear in her hair their gift to the ambassador of the Onyx Court.
Dame Halgresta certainly had not seen it; of that, Lune could be sure, because she was not bleeding, or dead.
She set it down on the table, forcing her thoughts back to their task. If not a gift, then what? A removal of an obstacle, perhaps. The downfall of an enemy. But who? The ambassador from the Courts of the North had quit the Onyx Hall in rage after the execution of the mortal Queen of Scots, accusing Invidiana of having engineered her death. There were enemies aplenty in that coalition of Seely and Unseely monarchs, the courts of Thistle and Heather and Gorse. To move against them, however, Lune would have to go there herself: a tedious journey, with no assets or allies waiting for her at the end.