“I hope you are right,” Antony replied. “But I will not trust only to hope.”
Then he descended from the carriage and turned to face his house. Kate stood in the door, well-muffled in a cloak, but she threw its edges wide to envelop him in a tight embrace. “Welcome home,” she said into his shoulder, “and merry Christmas.”
THE ONYX HALL, LONDON: January 9, 1649
“Six trumpeters,” Antony said through his teeth, “and two troops of horse to keep Dendy safe while he read the proclamation. The Act they passed three days ago was no bluff.” He spat the word out, contemptuous of its pretended authority. Acts were things passed by King, Lords, and Commons—not Commons in the absence of Lords or King.
Not Commons against the King.
“So they will do it,” Lune murmured, warming her hands at the fire. “They will put him on trial.”
“They will play at it, like mummers. This so-called High Court of Justice is nothing more than a pack of rogues and self-interested knaves. None of their original Chief Justices would have anything to do with it—a tiny show of principles and reason. The Commons has no jurisdiction to try the King.”
No one did. Lune knew little of the common law of England, but she knew that much. A sovereign monarch was authority. Mortals derived it from the Almighty; fae based it in the very realm itself, which answered only to its rightful master. Neither source allowed for subjects to declare their own preeminence, then use it against those set to rule them.
She recognized the touch of hypocrisy in her own thoughts. Invidiana had not designated Lune her heir and passed the crown to her; the change of Queens was born of rebellion. An accidental one, in some ways—Lune had not meant to claim the throne—and one could argue the illegitimacy of Invidiana’s own power. But in a very real sense, Lune was more guilty of treason than the fae now imprisoned beneath the Tower.
Perhaps that made her, of all people, qualified to recognize it in others.
Turning from the fire, she lowered herself into a chair. Antony needed no permission to sit, but he stood by choice, caged fury driving him to pace before he checked himself into stillness. This anger had burned brightly in him ever since Hipley confirmed his suspicion: there had been troublemakers at St. Albans, particularly around Edmund Ludlow, who argued for the purge. Lune had no messages from Cerenel since he fulfilled her final command, discovering Vidar’s presence in Fife, but it was easy enough to imagine what Nicneven had commanded her Lord of Shadows to do. Charles was humiliated; now he must be deposed.
Lune wondered how long it had been since Antony slept a full night through. But she could not reassure him into resting; there was no reassurance to be had. “Jurisdiction or not, they will do it,” she said. “I think you are right: this is no bluff. And they will find him guilty.”
“No, they will not.” Antony ground the words out. “We will stop them.”
“How?” She could not but pity the frustration that raged in him. “We have tried to move the people of London, to no avail. Their fear is too great, and their exhaustion.”
“Then we’ll try something else!” he shouted, whirling on her as if on an enemy. “You’re a faerie, God damn it; use your arts!”
The oath hit her like a blow to the gut, driving the wind from her lungs, the light from her eyes. The fire flickered low, and a tremor rocked the walls. Only a faint one; it was but a single word, and spoken in blasphemous anger, not prayer.
But it shook her to the bone.
When Lune’s vision cleared, she saw Antony’s white face mere inches away. He had her by the shoulders, steadying her. The iron wound throbbed under his hand. Then the door slammed open and a pair of attendants rushed in, wild and ready to fight off some assailant. Finding only the Prince, they faltered.
Marshaling her wits, Lune held up a shaking hand. “Be at ease—it was a slip of the tongue only. You need not be alarmed.”
They retired, uncertainly, and left her with Antony. “Forgive me,” he breathed. “I forgot myself.”
That he had done so showed the depth of his distress. Lune took his hands from her shoulders and held them in her own, looking down at him where he crouched on the carpet before her. “You are right,” she said, her voice coming to her ears as from a great distance. “I could save the King.”
His eyes widened. The velvet across his shoulders tightened, and he gripped her fingers hard. “I could,” Lune went on, “claim every piece of bread in the Onyx Hall, and arm a force of fae against the world above. I could send them to the King’s prison at Windsor Castle. They could mask themselves, beguile the guards, and spirit Charles away. With a friendly captain, we might get him to France. And then more charms might end the current chaos there and help Henrietta Maria persuade the French court to grant him the soldiers they refused before, which—with sufficient help at sea—might get through to England and make a third rising, more successful than his first two. And so the Army and this false Commons would be overthrown, and Charles restored to his throne.
“And if you ask it of me, I will do it.”
Her words hung in the quiet air.
Antony was staring, lips parted in shock. This was not how it went: they argued, each advocating for their own kind, resisting compromise but eventually finding it. That was how they ruled, as Queen and Prince.
Never had she offered him such a choice.
“It is not mine to decide,” Antony said, barely audible.
“It is,” Lune told him. “You are the Prince of the Stone. Yours is to say when the fae of this land can be of aid. Such things are, and always should be, your decision. I have forgotten that on occasion, but not now. If you wish the King rescued, then say so.”
She spoke it more easily than it came. Even as the possibilities rolled out, her mind filled in the consequences. But principles adhered to only when they were easy were no principles at all.
If the well-being of mortal England depended on this, then she would do it.
Antony rose, pulling his hands from her grasp, and moved back a few steps, the toes of his boots feeling for the floor as if leading a blind man. “If we had acted but a little more strongly, years ago,” he said, “we might have averted this by less extreme measures.”
Lune nodded, gut twisting with regret. “Had we foreseen where it would end. But I do not think anyone—perhaps not even a seer—could have predicted then that the innumerable branching paths of our choices would lead us to this pass.”
Our choices in the broadest sense. She and Antony were hardly the only ones who mattered, or even the most important. Pym had not anticipated this end, when he began his troublemaking in Parliament years ago. Nor had Charles, when he belittled the threat so posed; nor the Army officers who now roared for a trial. No one person, mortal or fae, had created the disaster that faced them now. They had done it together. And now only violent action would end it.
Her consort had closed his eyes in thought. “Your subjects,” Antony began, then corrected himself. “Our subjects would resent the forcible taxation of their scarce bread. And the Cour du Lys would scream in outrage at such trespass in France.”