A fate that would soon be his, if he didn’t move. Fear and the occasional gust of cooler air helped him gain his feet, and he staggered at a half-run toward the untouched part of the street. How had he come to be in that alley? His searching fingers found a lump on his head. Attacked? No—he had fallen, he remembered his knees giving out…
Despite the fire all around, he found himself shivering. Plague-high fever gripped his body; he had just enough wit left to recognize that. His vision swam. Exhaustion from the heat—Craven was right, he overreached himself. To the point of collapse. He had to reach a fire-post—Cripplegate was nearest—take some rest, away from the battle. He hadn’t slept the previous night, and unconsciousness didn’t count.
A flicker of movement. A slender body arrowed through the smoke, ghostlike and low. Jack recognized Lune’s hound by its red ears. A faerie hound, here in the City, and undisguised; and judging by its behavior, looking for him.
The dog ran a swift circuit around the Prince. Turning to follow its path, Jack almost collapsed again. I’m delirious. Or dead, and the hound has come to take me to Hell. Then it was gone, leaving him sure it had never been there at all.
“My lord!” The cry came from ahead. That, he did not imagine; a lithe figure darted his way, shouting his fae title for all the world to hear. Irrith made a strange-looking boy, but she could hardly run about as a girl, and God in Heaven, the hound was leading her.
Can’t even think straight. Jack tried to clear his mind, and the effort distracted him from his feet. He would have measured his length on the cobbles if Irrith hadn’t caught him.
“Where have you been ?” the sprite demanded, still shouting, as if she were not six inches from his ear. “I’ve been searching—”
The fever wracked his whole body in a shudder. More than exhaustion. I cannot have the plague, can I? The thought terrified him. But surely he would have noticed the other signs—would he not? Some other illness, perhaps, though few came on so quickly…
“Jack!” His name brought him back to his senses. Irrith gripped him by the jaw, forcing him to look at her. “You have to come. It may already be too late.”
“Too late?” Barely even a whisper. How long had he lain there, while the Fire drew ever closer?
“It’s the Queen,” Irrith said. “She needs you. Now.”
THE ONYX HALL, LONDON: two o’clock in the afternoon
The well in Threadneedle Street was mobbed, walled in by carts and constantly in use by the men fighting the fire; Jack and Irrith had to fight their way to Ketton Street instead, and the entrance there. The cold hit him like a hammer as he passed below, and for the first time he grasped some measure of its horror for the fae. The Cailleach’s merest touch reminded him how close he’d come to death, and it set off a paroxysm of shivering that nearly dropped him. “No time for that!” Irrith insisted, dragging him along bodily. Now they were once more within the Hag’s reach, she avoided touching his skin, but she was no less effective for that. “It’s already been too long—I couldn’t find you; if it weren’t for the Queen’s hound—”
“Lune,” Jack managed, through his chattering teeth. “What?”
“I don’t know. But she told me to get you.”
The sprite pulled him into the great presence chamber. Jack guessed where they were going even before he saw the throne knocked from its place; Cannon Street had fallen to the Fire hours ago. And now that he turned his thoughts to the London Stone—
“Up!” Irrith screamed at him. Ice seared his cheek with cold; he’d collapsed to the floor. Not a fever. Not from illness. It was Lune. They were bound to one another, through the Stone, and though she held back everything she could to protect his fragile mortality, it spilled over. Even as the Dragon forced itself downward, it also was draining her, draining the Onyx Hall itself, feeding on the power it found there, and her strength to battle it was fading fast.
Irrith didn’t have to pull him up. Jack sought Lune as unerringly as the hound sought him—and what he found stopped him dead on the threshold.
The very air crackled and spat sparks. Her hair floated in a radiant nimbus about her body, drifting on the heated currents, its silver burning gold. Flames danced along the hem of her skirts, up the panes of her sleeves. He could not approach within two steps; the inferno she contained drove him back.
“Lune,” he whispered, and her head snapped up.
The silver eyes were molten flame, windows to the fire within. Any mortal creature would have been annihilated by the power she held; even immortal flesh could not withstand it forever. “Jack,” she answered him, and her mouth might have been the entrance to a forge, with Hell’s coals inside.
He almost prayed, and choked it down in time.
“The power,” she said, her voice cracking and spitting. Each gust of air tried to drive him back, out of the alcove containing the Stone. He couldn’t even see her hand, buried in incandescent light surrounding the rock above. “The Dragon’s. In me. It must… be sent…elsewhere.”
God Almighty, yes. Before it destroyed her. Jack didn’t let himself consider the possibility that he was already too late for that.
But where? Not the City above; that was where it came from. He didn’t think they could force the power into the areas already consumed, and if they tried, it might just explode outward to the parts still untouched. And with the Tower so close—they hadn’t yet cleared all the gunpowder out. That would destroy the City.
Nowhere that people lived. The Thames? The river’s spirit was already exhausted. Throwing the power there could well boil all the waters away, and once again it would make their situation worse, rather than better.
He wished it were possible to fling the Fire’s heat all the way to the sea, where English ships still battled the Dutch, ignorant of the disaster at home. But even if he could, he would not; the Dutch didn’t deserve to be obliterated without warning, simply for the crime of contending with the English over shipping.
Lune cried out, and the air blazed white. The tendons stood out in her neck as she clenched her jaw and fought it down. The very sight hurt Jack, his own fevered body aching in response.
“Hurry,” Irrith breathed, from where she crouched by his feet.
Think! Jack pressed his hands against his head, as if they could hold his mind together through the delirium that crippled it. Fire. Heat. Destruction. There was no safe outlet for such a thing.
But fire is more than that.
The fever carried him onward. Fire. Promethean, illuminative. Generative. Fire was the spark of life, as well as the immolation of death. There is something there, I know it—
If we could just transmute it.
Jack had never been more than a brief dabbler in alchemy. And this was no place nor time for arcane experiments with prima materia and alembics; he needed something simpler. Some way to transform the fire in Lune to a safer form.
He couldn’t even come near her. If he touched her, he might well go up in flames on the spot.
But he had only the one idea, and doubted he had time to think of another. The tips of Lune’s hair were smoldering. It was either try his idea and die, or stand around a moment longer and die.
“I hope this works,” Jack muttered, and leapt up onto the platform with Lune.