Shaking his head to clear it of bleak thoughts, Antony rose to answer the door.
The faerie outside was one of Valentin Aspell’s minions, though Antony could not remember his name. He bowed as best he could, despite the burden he carried, and said, “M’lord Prince, if I might beg a moment of your time.”
Antony gestured him in, curious. The box in the fellow’s hands was a simple thing, built from unfinished hawthorn wood, but it seemed very heavy for its size. “I presume your request has to do with this?”
The faerie nodded. He was a broad-shouldered hob, taller than most, but ugly as male hobs usually were. He carried himself stiffly—though perhaps that was merely his scrupulous care as he laid the box on Antony’s table, covering two Bills of Mortality. “Begging your pardon, but—I’m told you look for a way to help those above.”
He had all of Antony’s attention. “Have you found something?”
“In the treasury. Many things in there, and half of them we don’t know what they do, so m’lord Valentin, he laid this aside at first. But I have a notion.” The hob removed the lid, and beckoned Antony closer. He reached inside as the Prince approached, shifting something, and it seemed to Antony that chill air breathed outward, raising the hairs on the back of his neck. Shivering, he reached the table and looked inside—
A squat iron box sat within, its interior black and deep beyond all nature, as if leading to oblivion itself.
The sight shocked him so badly that he didn’t see the hob move. And he was an old man now, slow, while fae were unaging; before he knew what was happening, the hob had his wrist in a crushing grip, and was slashing at his hand with a knife.
Pain tore across his fingers, and blood sprang free. Not much—the cut was not deep—but a drop fell into the blackness, and something seized Antony at the core of his soul, dragging him toward that abyss.
It paralyzed his tongue, locking all his muscles tight. Antony fought to speak, but his throat would give forth no sound, not even Christ’s name. And could that save him from whatever enchantment might reside in iron?
A second drop slid down his fingers. As he tried to pull loose, it too fell, and the terrible pressure increased.
A third drop gathered, hovering at the edge of his palm—
Through the roaring in his ears, he heard a higher-pitched scream, and then the hob was slammed off balance. The third drop of Antony’s blood spattered against the hawthorn. The hob’s grip broke, and half-blind, Antony found the discarded lid and clapped it down atop the wooden casing. All at once he could breathe again, and see the chaos before him.
Irrith straightened with renewed vigor and plowed into the hob a second time, clawing and biting, tangling his feet with her own so he fell to the ground, where she kicked him until his own flailing defense upset her balance. But she collapsed with intent, her knee colliding with his head, and he went suddenly limp.
She stumbled to her feet almost immediately, recoiling from the table, although the hawthorn shielded her from the iron within. Antony’s candleholder had been upset by the struggle; he righted it, and beat out the flaming papers with his hat.
Then, and only then, did he look at the figure on the floor.
Ifarren Vidar.
We should have known.
The accusation would not leave Lune’s mind. Yet how could they? Who would have dreamt that Ifarren Vidar would find his refuge beneath their very eyes?
They found evidence enough of it in the Billingsgate warren. Vidar lived there like a rat—the sight afforded her some vindictive satisfaction—but he had been there for a long time. Perhaps years. There was no safety for him in Scotland, or elsewhere in England, and so he had concealed himself in the one place no one would think to look for him. Lune had not sought him there since the battle ended, and to know who was in the Onyx Hall required effort she no longer had reason to exert. He could have returned to the palace the very next day.
And somewhere in that chaos, he had stolen the iron box and its protective shell from the treasury. Lune should have paid heed to the things there far sooner, but too many of them had been gifts to Invidiana; she was loath to see what the old Queen had kept. From Antony’s description, the thing was obviously a prison—one that would hold even a faerie.
“I expect I was to be a peace offering to Nicneven,” the Prince said, with more equanimity than Lune thought the situation deserved. “She has threatened to kill me before.”
“Perhaps.” Lune tried to think past her instinctive revulsion, and the throbbing of the old wound in her shoulder. Irrith had been green, and understandably so, when a few brave souls came running to see why there was iron in the Prince’s chambers. The sprite was abed now, with a draught from the Goodemeades to restore her, and Lune had every intention of rewarding her with a knighthood. Irrith would likely not see the point of such a title, but Lune meant to acknowledge her valor. “Or perhaps Vidar meant something worse.”
Antony paled, showing he was not so sanguine about his close escape as he had seemed. “Worse?”
She paced across the chamber, stabbing the heels of her shoes into the Turkish carpet. She wanted stone beneath her feet, the hard impact and ringing noise. “It is no secret any longer that you are an integral part of my connection to my realm. What if you were severed from me by iron?” Despite her control, her voice wavered on the last word.
He did not answer. Like her, he could only imagine—but the possibilities ranged from bad to horrific. Lune doubted it would destroy the palace on the spot, but it might vitally weaken the enchantments, and at the very least it would leave her vulnerable, lacking half her power.
She had been one drop of blood away from finding out.
Vidar was locked beneath the Tower now, and the hawthorn box with its dreadful contents secured. But too many fae knew what had happened; they knew Vidar had been found.
Sooner or later, Nicneven would hear.
Antony knew that as well as she did. Leaving aside the question of the traitor’s purpose, he asked, “What do you intend to do?”
It was not a safer or more cheerful direction of thought. Lune was no faerie philosopher, but she had spoken to a few, in roundabout fashion, of Nicneven’s threat. She began with the death of mortal sovereignty in England, reborn when Charles the Second reclaimed his throne, and the philosophers found much of interest in that. But when she asked them to consider faerie sovereignty, their speculation had turned much grimmer.
Her instinct was correct. If she permitted Nicneven to hold the Onyx Hall to ransom—if Lune, a sovereign Queen, bent to the will of another—then she surrendered her realm. To give in to the threat would be to recognize the Gyre-Carling as a greater authority than Lune herself, one with power over the Onyx Hall she could not contest.
And if she did that, she would be Queen no more.
What came after that, even the philosophers could not say. Either Nicneven would be Queen in London, or no one would—but neither fate was acceptable.
She had shared this with Antony, reluctantly, and even begun to hope in the privacy of her heart that the Gyre-Carling would find Vidar before she did. It didn’t matter whether the Queen of Fife got what she desired; it only mattered that Lune not let her realm be used to force her into surrendering him.
But Vidar’s attempt on Antony, and Irrith’s valor in stopping him, had left her with only one option. “I must execute him,” Lune said.
Antony nodded. “So I presumed. I meant something more, though. What will you do before that?”