“Are you following me?”
It came out hard and suspicious, and her eyebrows went up. “No. I came here because—”
She looked away suddenly, but that did little good against a skriker who sensed the world as much through his ears and nose as his eyes. He heard the catch in her voice, the choked noise after she stopped speaking. He smelled a hint of salt, over the dirt and half-rotted leaves, even if her face hadn’t shown any sign of tears.
Nobody in the Goblin Market cried. Nobody who let herself be that weak lasted long there.
Dead Rick didn’t know what to do or say. He just stood there, wondering if he should go away, until Irrith spoke again. “I used to love this place,” she said quietly, still looking anywhere but at him, across the overgrown tangles of the night garden. “It reminded me of the Vale. I love London, understand—I wouldn’t stay here if I didn’t. But I needed a bit of green, some grass and trees and flowers, to keep from going mad.”
He didn’t know what the Vale was—her original home?—but he heard the ache in her voice, and answered with the only words he had, pathetic and useless as they were. “I’m sorry.”
“So am I.” Irrith hung her head, hands braced against the fountain’s edge so her shoulders hunched up like a hawk’s. Then he heard another laugh, short and hard. “And I keep thinking about Lune.”
The vanished Queen. “What about ’er?”
The sprite gestured with one hand; he couldn’t tell what she meant by it, and maybe she couldn’t, either. “Those speeches she used to make. She would have stood up in front of the court—not just the lords and ladies, but common fae like you or me—and said something about how London is our home, all of us who came here from somewhere else, and we weren’t going to give up on it. People would stay, instead of flitting. And we’d find a way around this problem.”
This problem. As if it were a simple thing, an overturned cart in the road, and all they had to do was figure out which narrow side lane would lead them past it. Harshly, Dead Rick said, “Too bad she’s gone and pushed off with the rest of ’em, and left us behind.”
Irrith’s head came up so fast, he twitched back. “What? Lune isn’t gone!”
“Oh, is that so? Then where is she, eh? You tell me that.”
“I don’t know.”
He snorted in disgust. “Of course you don’t.”
Irrith glared at him, expression darkening. “She’s still here, though. Somewhere in the Hall. Hodge talks to her sometimes; he says—”
“Oh, the Prince, the fucking Prince. Of course ’e’d say; without the Queen, ’e’s nothing but a jumped-up cockney bastard, playing at being King of the Faeries. She’s gone, Irrith.”
“No, she isn’t!” Irrith shot to her feet. “Dead Rick—just who do you think is holding this place together?”
He frowned, not following her. “It ain’t ’olding together. That’s the problem.”
The energy possessing the sprite seemed far larger than her slender body. “You must have felt it. When the tremors hit. Like a body in pain, but trying so hard to hold still, until it gets too bad; then the whole thing thrashes, like it’s screaming—like she’s screaming. I think Hodge hears that, too, though he’ll never say so. She keeps as much of it from us as she can, but even Lune has limits. And she’s being pushed past them more and more often.”
Dead Rick’s skin crawled, thinking of the moment when he woke inside his refuge. That sense of the Onyx Hall as a prisoner chained to a post, writhing beneath the whip.
It’s the Queen.
Irrith nodded. Her cheeks hollowed briefly, as if she were biting the insides of them to keep from crying. “When they laid the rails… sometimes I think it would be better to just pull her away. Let us all move on to something else, rather than hanging on here like the desperate things we are; let the Hall have a clean death, instead of this horrible torture. If I knew where she was, I might try to do it. But I don’t.”
With the railway so fresh in his mind, the answer was obvious. “The London Stone. Ain’t it the ’eart of this place?”
“Yes,” Irrith said grimly. “But where’s the Stone? The part below, I mean; not the part above. Hodge is the only one who knows, and he swore an oath not to tell.”
Human oaths meant nothing. But fae had ways of binding men to keep their word; Hodge’s promise would certainly be of that sort. A secret like that, they couldn’t risk getting out. Even now, control of the London Stone might be a valuable thing.
“Speaking of the Prince…” Irrith sidled closer. “I’ve been thinking about what you told me before. About Nadrett? I was wondering if you knew anything more, or had any proof—”
With a jolt like his brain popping back into place, Dead Rick realized what he was doing: carrying on a friendly conversation with the sprite who recently helped the Prince’s minions carry out a raid on the Goblin Market. In the middle of the night garden. In easy view of any number of Goblin Market refugees, who would be only too happy to sell news of this event in exchange for a place in the warren.
He drew a slow, deep breath through his nose, and spat the last of it back out as a near-silent curse. We’re being watched, all right. By at least one person, and maybe more, if his nose was any judge.
Irrith raised her eyebrows, waiting for his answer. Dead Rick had to end this, before she said anything else that could get him killed. Hoping the sprite’s hearing was good, he whispered, “What I’m about to do—sorry.”
Then he backhanded her across the face.
His knuckles only clipped her cheek; the sprite was fast, and his vague warning had at least put her on alert. She stumbled back out of his reach, staring, halfway to angry. He had to stop her before she could say anything loudly enough to be overheard. “Is that why you came ’ere? Looking for me, thinking you could get me to talk? Went after Aspell, now you’re going after my master—well, you’d better know, you set foot in ’is part of the Market, you won’t get that foot back. And you tell your cockney Prince: Nadrett could kill ’im any time ’e wanted to. And what do you think that would do?”
Every bit of color drained out of Irrith’s face, freezing her anger into sudden horror. Dead Rick cursed his choice of threat. Killing the Prince—if it wouldn’t destroy the Hall outright, it certainly wouldn’t help the Queen any. There were some crazy fae around; he prayed he hadn’t put that idea into anybody’s head. They may not know where she is, but they can sure as ’ell find ’im.
Her jaw clenched hard, and then she drew herself up with contempt worthy of the elf-knights she’d joined for that raid. “Iron rot your soul, Dead Rick,” she spat, and strode off in rigid fury.
He shut his eyes and went through every profane oath he knew. Stupid fucking whelp. Should never ’ave said nothing to ’er. That’s what you get for trusting somebody you don’t even remember.
This was why he’d spent seven years under Nadrett’s thumb. Because he wasn’t clever enough to scheme and lie and trick his way out. The moment he tried, he nearly got himself killed.
But he couldn’t give up. The voice had cracked the shell of despair that had hardened around him, these past seven years; there might be something like hope, if Nadrett’s scheme was real. And Dead Rick could barter that hope for aid in getting his memories back.
If you can get your paws on it.
He couldn’t wait forever for his ally to come back. Stupid whelp though he was, Dead Rick would have to keep going on his own.