Fire went out of Lune in a rush, draining away with terrifying speed to someone else, then reflecting back into her like the sudden inflow of the tide. As if lightning-struck, her body went rigid.
Sun and Moon—
Passion the likes of which Lune had not known for decades flared through her body, making her gasp. Pain receded, and in its wake came desire.
Her skin ached with it, flooding all her senses. No lover had woken her so strongly, not since Michael Deven had died. Lune wept, remembering the treasured hands, lost to her forever. Her sense of self threatened to dissolve into the drowning wave of grief. So easy to let go, to release herself into oblivion…and that was what the Cailleach and the Dragon wanted her to do. To die. To end at last the long immortality of her existence, and let herself be destroyed.
But no. Forced down into the core of her soul by the twin assaults, she found a cool stillness there, free from fire and the Hag’s wintry cold. This is who I am. Child of the moon, timeless and serene. She lost that serenity so easily now, caught up in politics, imitating humans so fervently in their intrigues. But she was more than that—more than just spying and plotting and passing the time in frivolous pursuits.
Leslic’s Ascendants were right. Fae had once been more, but those who dwelt in the cracks of the mortal world forgot it in their fascination with humans. For this one eternal moment, Lune was as she had been.
Then, rising with newfound strength, she surfaced to find herself answered by the brief, bright heat of another. Not the Fire: a mortal flicker. A lively mind, an intellect driven by curiosity and compassion, the desire to gain knowledge and then turn it to useful ends. This is who he is. Sun to her Moon. Opposite, but not opposed. Alchemical complements, joined into a single, transcendent whole, burning with the fire of life instead of death.
Thought vanished into ecstasy that went beyond mere flesh.
They came to their senses once more to find the power transformed, obedient to their shaping wills. Still too strong, too much for safety; it would crush them if they held on. It had to go somewhere else.
Together, they reached out into their second body. The Onyx Hall, frozen under the cold of the Cailleach Bheur. Most parts lay empty, but there—in the amphitheater, crouching together on the white sand, the withering remnants of their court.
Gently, Lune whispered, and she and Jack breathed life into the fae.
Heads rose from their exhausted droops. Eyes brightened. Shoulders straightened. Slowly, carefully, the Queen and the Prince filled their people with life-giving fire, armoring them against the Cailleach’s chill. A glow spread through the amphitheater, casting sharp-edged shadows from the stone seats. The sand baked as if warmed by the sun it had not seen for centuries. Still haggard, but with newfound strength, the fae of the Onyx Court rose to their feet, ready to fight for their home.
For the Dragon’s power was all stolen. From the flames’ humble origins in Thomas Farynor’s bakery to the birth of the Dragon in the mighty conflagration of the wharves, the Fire was composed of stolen London, timber and plaster rendered into flame. Now that essence, safely transmuted, brought the faerie folk of the City alive—and ready to face their enemy above.
The inferno that would scour the Onyx Hall to its farthest corners had vanished, but the Dragon was still there, draining power from the palace to feed its raging flames. The Hall was a fathomless well, from which it had drunk only the first drops. Already it was stronger.
Lune had not been able to close the portal against it, for the Stone did not answer to faerie touch alone. But now Jack’s hand joined hers on the rough surface, and together they gathered the last of the fire, that they had kept for themselves.
Not here, they said, and sealed the London Stone, leaving the Dragon to roar its frustration in the street above.
Sensation returned to Lune’s flesh, and for the first time in who knew how long, it was all her own.
The cool stillness in her heart was fading, that perfect sense of who she was. Not gone—but she had made her choice, ages past, to forgo what she had been, what she might still be if she left the mortal world behind, instead of dwelling in this place. She made that choice when she first came to London, and again when she became Queen; she made it every day she remained here, living an imitation of mortal life.
It was not a choice Lune regretted. And the time had come to return.
Her eyes blinked open, and she found herself staring at Jack’s ear.
The Prince of the Stone startled and pulled back from the kiss. His free arm was still around her waist; the platform beneath the Stone was small enough that they could barely fit, otherwise. “I,” he said, and stopped as if he had no idea what he was going to say. “Er.”
The memory of passion still warmed Lune’s body, the incandescent pleasure that had inundated them both. It was a strange thing, a catalyst to transmute the Dragon’s power from death to life, but now the purpose for which it had been created was done. Do I desire him still?
No. What they had shared—the power they had tamed—did not constrain her heart. Lune no more loved the man before her now than she had yesterday. But she would carry the remembrance of that transforming fire for ages to come.
As would he, she suspected. He was actually blushing. Jack disentangled his arm and stepped back, not meeting her eyes. Lune caught his sleeve with her own free hand and said, “You saved my life. You have nothing to apologize for.”
Jack met her gaze sheepishly—a look that flashed to instant concern as she brought her other hand down.
The skin of Lune’s palm and fingers was blistered and charred. Her hand had cramped into the position it held on the Stone, but she felt no pain; she felt nothing at all, as Jack took it in his own, cradling it with a physician’s delicacy. The flesh might have belonged to another.
“Lune,” he whispered, but she cut him off.
“Bind it if you must; it will make little difference. The scars will remain.” An ordinary burn might answer to treatment, but not one inflicted by the Dragon.
He gave her a horrified look. Lune pulled her numb hand from his grasp and descended toward the door, where Irrith gaped at them both. The Cailleach had begun as a threat to the world below, and the Dragon to that above, but both now breached those bounds. What touched one world touched the other, and it would take mortals and fae to answer them both.
“Come,” Lune said. “We have a City to defend.”
At Leadenhall, they have their first victory.
The day has been one of mounting losses. The statues of England’s sovereigns that lined the Royal Exchange have toppled to the ground; the pepper and spices stored below now cloy the smoke. The grocers and apothecaries along Bucklersbury have added their drugs to the choking air. Baynard’s Castle has caught, the City’s old fortress burning like a torch in the night sky, the western foot of a blazing arch stretching from Blackfriars to Threadneedle, and down again to Billingsgate.
But at Leadenhall, the Fire is stopped. Someone with the appearance of an alderman throws coins in the street, promising them to any man who stays to fight. The western front is damaged, but the interior, holding the fabulous wealth of the East India Company, survives unscathed.
The Dragon snarls, robbed of its prey.
But now it has sampled the riches below. The power stolen from London’s shadow fuels its flames, and it craves more. The little openings it consumes are too strait and narrow to grant more than the most tantalizing taste, but it senses two others, both great and vulnerable. One lies to the west.