The Fire could not pass the river—but north lay all the City, that Father Thames could not defend.
As night falls, men watching from the walls of the Tower see the shape of the beast they battle. In the east it moves but slowly, fighting for every inch of ground it takes. In the west, it has claimed half the bank already. But the wind, veering first north, then south, has driven the flames up from the wharves, into virgin territory far from the water.
A great arch of fire reaches across the City, eclipsing the moon with its brightness. Behind its advancing front, a glowing, malevolent heart: the shattered ruins of churches, houses, company halls. Hundreds burnt, and thousands displaced.
And no sign of ending.
The Dragon snarls its pleasure, flexing across the darkened lanes. In the untouched parts of the City, candles and lanterns yet burn, obedient to laws that decree certain streets should be lit at night, for the safety and comfort of citizens. Those tiny flames speak a promise to the beast, that soon they, too, shall join its power, and feed its fury onward.
For the more it consumes, the more it hungers—and the stronger it ever grows.
PART TWO
That Man of Blood
1648–1649
The King. Shew me that Jurisdiction where Reason is not to be heard.
Lord President. Sir, we shew it you here, the Commons of England.
THE ONYX HALL, LONDON: October 3, 1648
Throughout the night garden, the only sound was the quiet trickle of the Walbrook—a river long buried and half-forgotten by the City of London, now a part of the Onyx Hall.
No lords and ladies walked the path, conversing quietly. No musicians played. The faerie lights that lit the garden formed a river of stars above, as if guiding Lune to her destination.
She needed no guide. This was a path she had walked many times before, every year upon this day.
She wore a simple, loose gown, a relic of an earlier age. The white fabric was rich samite, but unadorned by jewels or embroidery, and she stepped barefoot on the grassy paths. Tonight, the garden was hers alone. No one would disturb her.
The place she sought stood, not in the center of the garden, but in a sheltered corner. Lune had no illusions. No one in her court mourned as she did, for faerie hearts were fickle things—most of the time.
Once given, though, their passion never faded.
The obelisk stood beneath a canopy of ever-blooming apple trees, their petals carpeting the grass around its base. She could have had a statue carved, but it would have been one knife too many. His face would never fade from her memory.
Lune knelt at the grave of Michael Deven, the mortal man she had once loved—and did still.
She kissed her fingertips, then laid them against the cool marble. Pain rose up from a well deep inside. She rarely dipped into it, or let herself think of its existence; to do otherwise was to reduce herself to this, a shell containing nothing but sorrow. Her grief was as sharp now as the night he died. It was the price she paid for choosing to love him.
“I miss you, my heart,” she whispered to the stone—a refrain repeated far too many times. “There are nights I think I might give anything to see you again…to hear your voice. To feel your touch.”
Her skin ached with the loss. No more to have his arms around her, his warmth at her side. And he could never be replaced: Antony was not and never would be Michael Deven. She had known it, when she first vowed always to keep a mortal at her side, ruling the Onyx Court with her. She created the title Prince of the Stone to cushion the blow of change, so that she might think of it as a political position, an office any man might fill. Not her consort, with all that implied.
Antony understood. As had Michael; he knew he could not live forever. Dwelling too long among the fae would break even the strongest mind. The time her Princes spent in the Onyx Hall, the touch of enchantment they bore, slowed life for them; Antony, at forty, looked a decade younger. But despite that, inevitably, they aged and died.
The grass pricked through the fabric of her gown, and she dug her fingers into the cool soil. “We needed more time,” she murmured. “Time to map the path I stumble blindly down now. ’Tis a fine thing, to say this place stands for the harmony of mortals and fae, the possibility of bridging those worlds. But how? How may I aid them, without taking from them their choices? How may they aid us, when they do not even know we are here?”
It had been easier, when couched in terms of use instead of aid. That notion still thrived too strongly in her court, and not only because of Nicneven’s interference. Lune herself still struggled to effect change, without crossing that line.
And she had failed.
Six years of civil war. Royalist Cavaliers against Parliamentarian Roundheads, conflict reaching into every corner of the realm. Brother against brother. Father against son. Scotland at war with England, Ireland in raging revolt. The King imprisoned, sold by his own subjects to the Parliamentary armies for thirty pieces of silver. The land she had sworn to defend had torn itself apart…and she was powerless to heal it.
“We took Mary Stuart from them,” she said, tasting the bitterness in the words. “So they have taken her grandson from us.”
Nicneven’s grudge, given scope and power by Ifarren Vidar: an old enemy, and one Lune should have suspected from the start. But intelligence had put him in France, at the Cour du Lys, after he found no faerie kingdom in England would welcome him. Lune thought him safely gone. Nicneven, however, had given him a home. There was bitter irony in that; Vidar, at Invidiana’s command, had helped the Queen of Scots along her path to the headsman. Lune had no proof, though, and Nicneven would not believe her without it.
So now Lune reaped the consequences of letting him escape when she ascended her throne.
The years pressed down upon her, a weight she rarely felt. But by her bond of love, she tasted mortality, and at moments like this it threatened to crush her. The weariness of ages sapped her strength, and yet her mind would not rest; even now, here, she dragged the chains of her duty and her failures.
She had to lay it aside. For this one night, every year, she was not the Queen of the Onyx Court; she was simply Lune, and free to grieve, not for England, but for a single man.
Curling her legs underneath her, she leaned against the stone that marked Michael Deven’s grave, and gave herself over to sorrow.
LOMBARD STREET, LONDON: October 4, 1648
The house showed no physical scars of six long years of struggle. The defenses built for London had faced no army, let alone been breached. But the marks were there, albeit more subtly: in the absence of tapestries, candlesticks, much of the silver plate. The continual levies for the maintenance of the Parliamentary armies, the repeated loans from the City, had stripped Antony of funds, while the Royalist forces in Oxfordshire had so beggared his estate there that he was forced to sell it.
This is the price of moderation.
It could have been worse. Rightly suspecting his dedication to the Parliamentary cause, the commissioners appointed to gather the money had assessed him more highly than most, but at least they had not driven him from his home. And when things were at their tightest, carefully managed gifts of faerie gold had kept him from losing all.