The pointed chin lifted a fraction. Her voice equally soft, Lune said, “She was always thus, beneath the mask.”
He turned away, realized the sword was still in his hand, sheathed it. And then they waited for the sisters to return.
“Dame Halgresta’s gone,” Rosamund said to Lune, when they came downstairs again. “I presume you listened? They know nothing of Francis’s death; someone saw you flee the palace, is all. Be careful, my lady. She very much wishes to kill you.”
Gertrude nudged her sister in the ribs while tying her daisy-flowered apron back on. “Manners, Rosamund. Now that we haven’t got that awful giantess breathing down our necks, we should take care of our guest.”
“Oh! Of course!” Rosamund made a proper curtsy to Deven. “Welcome to our house, Master Deven. I am Rosamund Goodemeade, and this is my sister Gertrude. And this is the Lady Lune.”
Ever since she and Deven had lapsed into silence, Lune’s attention had been fixed on the fireplace, the safest target she could find. Now she said wearily, “He knows.” She turned to find the brownies wide-eyed and a little nervous. Relaxing her arms from their tight positions across her body, she added, “He drove the glamour from me when I was on my way here.”
His blue eyes might have been shuttered against a storm, so little could she read out of them. Walsingham’s service had taught him well — but he had never used such defenses against her before. Well, she could not blame him. “So there you have it, Master Deven,” Lune said to him, hearing her own voice as if it belonged to a stranger. “There are faeries at the mortal court. Though most of them come in secret, and do not disguise themselves as I did.”
A muscle worked in his jaw. When Deven spoke, it sounded almost nothing like his natural voice, either. “So ’twas you all along. I suspected Dee.”
Gertrude said in confusion, “She was what all along?”
“The hidden player,” Lune said, still looking at Deven. “The secret influence on English politics that his master Walsingham has begun to suspect.”
Bitterness twisted the corner of his mouth. “You were under my eyes, the entire time.”
Lune matched him with her own sour laugh. “’Tis a night for such things, it seems. You are both right and wrong, Master Deven. I was a lead to your hidden player — not the player herself. There are two Queens in England. You serve one; you seek the other.”
Her words broke through the stoic facade he had constructed while they waited, revealing startlement beneath. “Two Queens…”
“Aye,” Rosamund said. “And that may be the answer to the question you asked us, Lady Lune, before we were interrupted.”
It was enough to distract her from Deven. “What?”
Gertrude had scurried off to the far end of the room while they spoke. Something bumped the back of Lune’s farthingale; she looked down to see the brownie pushing a stool almost as tall as she was. “If we’re going to have this conversation,” Gertrude said, with great firmness, “then we will sit while we do so. I’ve been on my feet all day, baking and cleaning, and you two look about done in.”
“I have not said I will stay,” Deven said, with another glance over his shoulder to the sealed top of the staircase.
Lune smiled ironically at him. “But you will. You want answers — you and your master.”
“Walsingham is dead.” In the time it took him to say that, two strides ate up the distance between them and Deven was in her face, his anger beating at her like the heat from the fire. “I suppose I have you to thank for that.”
Her knees gave out; she dropped without grace onto the stool Gertrude had put behind her. “-He — what? Dead? When?”
“Do not pretend to be innocent,” he spat. “You knew he was looking for you, for evidence of your Queen’s hand. He was a threat, and now he’s dead. I may be the world’s greatest fool — you certainly played me as such — but not so great a fool as that.”
Rosamund’s hand closed over the silk of his right sleeve, drawing his fingers back from the sword hilt they had unconsciously sought. “Master Deven,” the brownie said. The man did not look down at her. The uneven shadows of firelight turned his face monstrous, warping the clean lines of his features. “Lady Lune was imprisoned when your master died. She could not have killed him.”
“Then she gave the order for it to be done.”
Lune shook her head. She could not hold Deven’s gaze; she felt naked, exposed, confronting him while wearing her true face. He would not have glared at Anne with such anger and hate. “I did not. But if he’s dead… how?”
“Illness,” Deven said. “Or so it was made to seem.”
Walsingham had often been sick. He might have died by natural means. Or not. “My task,” she said, staring fixedly at the battered feathers of her skirt, “was to watch over Walsingham, to know what he was about. And, if I could, to find a means of influencing him.”
Deven met this with flat disgust. “Me.”
“He is — was — an astute man,” Lune said, dodging Deven’s implicit question. She could not explain her choice, not now. “I believe my Queen feared he was coming near the truth. You may be right to blame me, Master Deven, for I told Vidar — a fae lord — what the Principal Secretary was about. After I was taken from Oatlands, he may have taken steps to remove that threat. But I never ordered it.”
Gertrude had Deven’s other sleeve now, and the gentle but insistent tugging from the brownies got him to back up a step, so that he no longer towered over Lune on the stool. “Why?” Deven asked at last. Some of the anger had gone from his voice, replaced by bewilderment. “Why should a faerie Queen care what happens in Ireland, or what became of Mary Stewart?”
“If you will sit,” Gertrude said, returning with patient determination to her point of a moment before, “we may be able to answer that question.”
When they were all seated, with mugs of mead in their hands — the brownies’ family name, Deven realized, was more than mere words — the rose-flowered woman, Rosamund, began to speak.
“My lady,” she said, bobbing her curly head at Lune. “How long have you been at the Onyx Court?”
Lune had straightened the remnants of her feathered gown and smoothed her silver hair, but her bare feet were still an incongruous note, the slender arches freckled with mud. “A long time,” she said. “Not so long as Vidar, I suppose, but Lady Nianna and Lady Carline are more recently come than I. Let me see — Y Law Carreg was the ambassador from the Tylwyth Teg then….”
It reminded Deven powerfully of his early days at Elizabeth’s court. A flood of names unknown to him, currents of alliance and tension he could not read. Somehow it made the notion more real, that there truly was another court in England.
When Lune’s recitation wound down, Rosamund said, “And how long has Invidiana been on the throne?”
The elfin woman blinked in astonishment. “What manner of question is that?” she said. “An age and a day; I do not know. We are not mortals, to come and go in measured time.” And indeed, Deven realized, in all her explanation of her tenure at court, she had not once named a date or span of years.
The sisters looked at each other, and Gertrude nodded. Rosamund said, with simple precision, “Invidiana became the Queen of faerie England on the fifteenth day of January, in the mortal year fifteen hundred and fifty-nine.”
Lune stared at her, then laughed in disbelief. “Impossible. That is scarcely thirty years! I myself have been at the Onyx Court longer than that.”
“Have you?” Gertrude said, over the top of her mead.
The elfin woman’s lips parted, at a loss for words. Deven had been quiet since they sat down, but now he spoke. “That is the day Elizabeth was crowned Queen.”