It will ride the wind to that place, and make its conquest complete.
PART THREE
When the King Enjoys His Own Again
1658–1660
“I wonder indeed, how the major part of the Council of Officers can take themselves to be honest, who first
Declared against
A Single Person: Then routed the Parliament:
Then set up a Mock-Parliament;
Then pulled it down:
Then made their General Protector for life;
Then made him to beget a Protector:
Then broke this Government:
Then suffered the Parliament to sit again:
Now have broke them again.
What comes next?
That which they will break again ere long.”
VALE OF THE WHITE HORSE, BERKSHIRE: June 23, 1658
The night wind whipping across the crest of the hill was fierce enough to make even the tall Midsummer bonfire bow, twist, and then fight back. The earthworks, known to the locals as Uffington Castle even though no castle stood there, gave only a suggestion of shelter, but the fae dancing about the flames paid the wind little heed. Most of them had lived in Berkshire since before they could remember, and to them, the gusts were old friends.
For the few strangers, the wind was merely one more reminder that this place was not their home. Nine years since they were driven from London; as much as seven, for some of them, since they came here to the Vale, where at last they found a faerie court that would give them shelter. Others had followed later, falling once more into the orbit of their exiled star.
Tonight, however, that star had slipped their watch, and now stood a small distance away, atop a second hill. Less impressive than its earthwork-crowned sibling, the hill’s suspiciously flat crest was marked by a bare patch of chalk that gleamed in the waning moonlight. Legend said a dragon had been slain there, its blood poisoning the ground so that nothing would grow. It suited Lune’s melancholy mood.
They would have been dancing in Moor Fields that night, had they been in London, luring mortals out to join their revelry. Lune wondered if Vidar bothered, and what welcome those mortals might find if he did. Fae were not always kind. Those serving him, rarely so.
The wind wrapped her skirts around her legs and carried them off to one side, tugging constantly at her, so that she had to brace her feet apart or risk being knocked off balance. Behind her, the ground fell into a broad valley patchworked with forest and fields; before her lay the slope leading up to Uffington Castle, and the celebration she had no heart to join.
From below came a voice, casually breaking into the privacy she sought. “Poor wretch—he’s become a sorry sight nowadays.”
Blinking, Lune glanced down. A lithe sprite named Irrith climbed the side of Dragon Hill with the ease of one who has done it many times. The faerie nodded her head to the opposite slope, where lines were faintly visible in the long summer grass. The narrow trenches had been carved into the hillside, but their smooth curves were marred by greenery that stubbornly claimed a foothold in the chalk. The figure could not be made out well even from this, its best vantage point; it stretched itself out along the slope such that only the birds in the sky grasped its entirety. But Lune knew its shape. She had been there when the White Horse rose from the ground and descended to feed in the thick grass of the Manger below.
“Can you not clear the weeds yourself?” she asked, pushing her silver hair from her face with a futile gesture. The wind flung it back again the moment her hand left.
Irrith dropped casually onto the bare chalk at her feet. “Not our responsibility. There are families in this Vale whose task it is to scour the Horse—but with the Puritans watching over their shoulders, they fear to come up here.”
Music came from around the bonfire, high above them, dancing on the summer wind. Puritans did not much approve of Midsummer fires, either, but that did not stop the fae—nor some mortals in the region. Not everyone agreed with the godly reformers. Fewer and fewer, as the years passed under their austere rule: first as the Commonwealth of England, and when that failed, the Protectorate, ruled over by the great General Oliver Cromwell. The Kingdom of England was no more.
The King is dead. There is no King.
Irrith said, “You are looking the wrong way.”
“What?”
“London is that way.” The sprite pointed left, toward the eastern horizon.
“I was not thinking of London.”
A grin answered her. “Bollocks.”
Irrith wasn’t one of the ladies who followed Lune from the Onyx Hall nine years ago, when Ifarren Vidar drove her out. She wasn’t a lady at all, as her insolent manner demonstrated. The sprite meant nothing by her discourtesy; she was simply wild as the city fae were not. Tonight, for the Midsummer celebrations, she wore tunic and hose that had not been fashionable for centuries, and then only for men, and not woven from moss. Living moss, pricked here and there with tiny white flowers. In these parts, it counted as fine court clothing.
Lune still wore the bodice and skirts of the Onyx Court, impractical as they sometimes were. It was, she admitted, a matter of principle: if she dressed herself as the Berkshire fae did, she would lose one of the ties that bound her to her realm.
I still consider it my realm, despite these long years.
How could she not? She didn’t need Irrith’s reminder to tell her in which direction London lay; it called to her bones, a subtle, lodestone pull. She had crossed and recrossed England in the early days of her exile, visiting the courts of other faerie monarchs, and at any moment could have pointed without hesitation or error toward the very heart of the City. So long as that sense remained, she was bound to her land. So long as she was bound to her land, she was its Queen. That was the very essence of faerie sovereignty.
But sovereignty was not politics, and she had not seen her realm in nine long years—nine years, four months, and twenty-three days, to be precise. I count the time as if I were human.
Vidar occupied her palace, and although every faerie monarch of England owed Lune for her aid to them ages ago, none would give her the army she needed to retake it. They sheltered her briefly, then encouraged her onward, until at last she came to rest here, in the Vale of the White Horse, where she did not and would never belong.
Lune became aware of Irrith looking up at her. Rising, the sprite said, “May I ask you a question?”
Lune wanted to say no. She had retreated from the festivities for a reason. But she knew all too well how dependent she was on the goodwill of those who had taken her in, and so she said, “Of course.”
“Is it true you love a mortal?”
Love, not loved. Irrith understood that much, at least. “Yes.”
“Why?”
Startled, Lune turned to look at her. Irrith’s auburn hair, a careless tangle of loose strands and small braids, whipped back from her delicate features; she, unlike Lune, had the sense to face into the wind. In her eyes was honest confusion and perplexity. “He died ages ago, they tell me, and you’ll grieve for him until the end of time. I don’t understand why anyone would choose that.”