And to hope, for one awful moment, that he was dead already, and free of this suffering.
The physician was behind her. Lune forced herself forward, one unwilling step at a time. “Is he—”
The man knelt at Antony’s side. John Ellin; that was his name. Jack. The memory swam up through her horror. Ellin covered his hand with a kerchief and pressed his fingers into Antony’s neck. “His pulse is weak, but he lives.”
Her breath rushed out in a gasp. Ellin examined Antony with gentle care, then paused. Not looking at her, he said, “He told me you would save him.”
The gasp became almost a sob. It is the war, all over again. Had I acted more decisively, and sooner—
She could not have stopped the spread of this plague. The mortals believed it was God’s punishment, for the licentious behavior of the City and its King; whether that was true or not, she had no power to halt it. But I could have kept him below.
He would never have stayed there, not when London needed him. If he sheltered in the Onyx Hall, though, where the air was unfouled, where there was no filth to breed disease…or if she had done as he asked, aiding in the mortals’ plight, so he did not exhaust himself in a battle he could not win.
Ellin pivoted on his knee, his pale face desperate. “If you have some charm that can save him, use it. I don’t know how long he has.”
Lune forced away her anguished thoughts; there would be time enough for those, later. The reply hurt her throat. “I—disease is not something we know. I cannot make him well.”
She watched the light in his eyes die. “But he believed—”
“He hoped.” Lune came forward, standing over Ellin’s shoulder, unable to look away from her dying Prince. “Had we any charm to dismiss the plague from a man’s body, I would have used it ere now. But we do not. The best I can give him…”
She trailed off, lost. Ellin shot upright and seized her by the shoulders. “What?”
The sheer affront of his conduct tore her attention away from Antony at last. “We might strengthen him,” she said. “A draught—something to aid him in the fight.” Whether it would do any good, she did not know.
“Then fetch it,” Ellin said. “At this point, nothing can hurt.”
LOMBARD STREET, LONDON: September 16, 1665
Cramps bent Antony’s legs up to his chest, setting off an agonizing fire through his hips and thighs. He cried out, driven from hazy, tormented unconsciousness into a waking state he had not thought he would see again.
Delicate hands touched his face, bathing his brow with blessedly cool water. He wept at the pain, and a voice soothed him, whispering reassurance it did not believe. I am dreaming, he thought. The fever has sent me mad.
If so, his madness was cruel. It should have brought him both Kate and Lune—though it was not safe for Kate to be here. He did not want her shut in with him.
Lune could not be here, not as he saw her, wearing her own face. But then a bell tolled, black herald of yet another death, and she shuddered; and that convinced him. This was no fancy of his fevered brain. She truly was here, without glamour, without protection, comforting him in his extremity.
“You are awake,” she said: an inanity to fill a void that could not be filled.
Somehow, a smile found its way to his face, though he suspected it looked more like a rictus. “Jack found you.”
She nodded. “And he is here now, brewing some strange concoction for you. I have never seen the like.”
Antony began to laugh, as if the notion were surpassingly funny. God above—had he at last driven Jack into the arms of the chymical physicians, with their inexplicable remedies for bolstering the body’s vital spirit? Salts and mercury and Heaven knew what else. Lune smiled at first, but it faded to concern as he continued to laugh, long after he should have stopped. Once he subsided to wheezing, she said, “You must be feeling better, to show such humor.”
His breath caught in his throat, and he coughed, rackingly, on his own spit. When he could speak at last, he answered her bluntly. “I am dying.”
So he had told Jack, and the doctor denied it. Lune was not so practiced at a physician’s politic lies. Her eyes told the truth.
“Forgive me,” she whispered. Her hands sought out his own and clutched them tight. “I would save you, if only I could.”
Antony hissed, almost crushing her fingers. The swellings were excruciating, enough to drive a man mad; he wanted to run, scream, do anything to distract himself from the pain. Fling himself into a plague pit, perhaps, and wait for the dirt to blot out the sun. “You cannot. I understand that. And I—I forgive you.”
The words cost him. So many years he had stood at her side, always knowing that he would die, and she would go on. But it was bitter indeed when it came. I will be forgotten, soon enough. A single name, in a litany that will stretch far beyond my time.
But he did not want his name remembered, if the cause to which he had dedicated his life fell into ruin. “Lune,” he whispered, half-strangled, but determined to get it out. “I am lost. Do not let London be lost with me.” What remained of it, after death’s scythe had swept across it these long months.
“I will not,” Lune promised. Anything, no doubt, to give him peace.
His hands were slick with sweat, although thirst parched his body dry. “The people are what matters. Yours and mine both. They need you. They need all who love this City, to preserve it against its fall.”
Her silver eyes wavered with shame. He did not hate her for her weakness, the terror that paralyzed her—but she hated it in herself. And abruptly, in a voice made strong by wild determination, Lune spoke. “In Mab’s name, I swear to you that I will do everything I can to preserve London and its people from disaster—and let fear hinder me no more.”
He inhaled sharply. Not the empty assurances she gave before: an oath. Still binding to fae, though mortals broke their sworn word with impunity.
This, then, would be his legacy to the Onyx Court: that he had shamed their Queen into making fast her commitment to the mortal world. Not just the one mortal at her side, but all the ones above.
His time among the fae was one of success and failure so closely interwoven that few strands could be picked out, but this, the last thread, shone gold among them all.
It did nothing to abate the agony of his swollen body, the delirious heat of his fever. It did not make Jack’s treatments hurt any less, as the physician lanced the pustules and fed him medicines that burned his throat. Nothing, in the end, could make the remaining span of his life any less of a torture—not even God. He almost asked Lune to end it for him; there would be no stain upon her inhuman soul, and one more could not blacken his by much.
But he had always fought before, and so he fought now, until the last of his strength gave out, and blackness took the pain away forever.
LOMBARD STREET, LONDON: September 18, 1665
The silence had lasted for over an hour, and it told Jack everything. He waited in the deserted kitchen, mortar and pestle forgotten in his hands, and stared unseeing at the floor, while periodically his vision blurred with tears.