“That is not what I asked. I do not know the arrangements of your court, but two things I can presume: first, that your Queen would not want you to interfere with this matter, and second, that you are out of favor with her. Else you would not be here, barefoot and in hiding, with her soldiers hunting you out of the city. So will you defy her? Will you try to break this pact?”
Lune looked to the Goodemeades. The brownies’ faces showed identical resolution; it was not hard to guess what they thought should be done.
But what he was asking of her was treason.
Deven wondered if Walsingham had ever felt such compunctions, asking his agents to betray those they professed to serve.
Lune closed her eyes and said, “I will.”
MEMORY: January 14–15, 1559
Despite the cold, people packed the streets of London. In the southwestern portions of the city, in the northeast — in all those areas removed from the center — men wandered drunkenly and women sang songs, while bonfires burned on street corners, creating islands of light and heat in the frozen air, banners and the clothing of the wealthy providing points of rich color. Everywhere in the city was music and celebration, and if underneath it all many worried or schemed, no such matters were permitted to stain the appearance of universal rejoicing.
The press was greatest in the heart of the city, the great artery that ran from west to east. Crowds packed so tightly along the route that hardly anyone could move, save a few lithe child thieves who took advantage of the bounty. Petty Wales, Tower Street, Mark Lane, Fenchurch, and up Gracechurch Street; then the course straightened westward, running down Cornhill, past Leadenhall, and into the broad thoroughfare of Cheapside. The cathedral of St. Paul awaited its moment, and then the great portal of Ludgate, all bedecked with finery. From there, Fleet Street, the Strand, and so down into Westminster, and every step of the way, the citizens of London thronged to see their Queen.
A roar went up as the first members of the procession exited the Tower, temporarily in use once more as a royal residence. By the time the slender figure in cloth of gold and silver came into view, riding in an open-sided litter and waving to her people, the noise was deafening.
The procession made its slow way along the designated route, stopping at predetermined points for pageants that demonstrated for all the glory and virtue of the new sovereign. No passive spectator she, nor afraid of the chill; when she could not hear over the noise of the crowd, she bid the pageant be performed again. She called responses to her loyal subjects, touching strangers for a moment with the honor and privilege of royal attention. And they loved her for that, for the promise of change she brought, for the evanescent beauty that would all too soon fade back to show an architecture of steel beneath.
She reached Westminster late in the day, exhausted but radiant from her ordeal. The night passed: in drunkenness for the people of London, in busy preparation for the great officials in Westminster.
Come the following morning, when she set forth again, a shadow mirrored her elsewhere.
In crimson robes, treading upon a path of blue cloth, one uncrowned woman passed from Westminster Hall to the Abbey.
In deepest black, moving through subterranean halls, a second uncrowned woman passed from the Tower of London to a chamber that stood beneath Candlewick Street.
Westminster Abbey rang with the sonorous speeches and ceremony of coronation. Step by step, a woman was transformed into a Queen. And a few miles away, the passages and chambers of the Onyx Hall, emptied for this day, echoed back the ghostlike voice of a fae, as she stripped herself of one name and donned another.
A sword glimmered in her hand.
The presiding bishop spoke traditional words as the emblems of sovereignty were bestowed upon the red-haired woman. The sound should not have reached the Onyx Hall, any more than the shouts of the crowd should have, but it was not a matter of loudness. For today, the two spaces resounded as one.
Then the fanfares began, as one by one, a succession of three crowns were placed upon an auburn head.
As the Onyx Hall rang with the trumpet’s blast, the sword flashed through the air and struck a stone that descended from the ceiling of the chamber.
Drunken revelers in London heard the sound, and thought it a part of the celebrations: the tolling of a terrible, triumphant bell, marking the coronation of their Queen. And soon enough the bells would come, ringing out in Westminster and spreading east to the city, but this sound reached them first, and resonated the most deeply. Sovereignty was in that sound.
Those citizens who were on Candlewick Street at the time fell silent, and dropped to their knees in reverence, not caring that the object they bowed to was a half-buried stone along the street’s south edge, its limestone surface weathered and scarred, unremarkable to any who did not know its tale.
Three times the stone tolled its note, as three times the sword struck it from below, as three times the crowns were placed. And on the third, the sword plunged into the heart of the stone.
All mortal England hailed the coronation of Elizabeth, first of her name, by the Grace of God, Queen of England, France, and Ireland, Defender of the Faith, et cetera; and all faerie England trembled at the coronation of Invidiana, Queen of the Onyx Court, Mistress of the Glens and Hollow Hills.
And a dozen faerie kings and queens cried out in rage as their sovereignty was stripped from them.
-Half-buried in the soil of Candlewick Street, the London Stone, the ancient marker said to have been placed there by the Trojan Brutus, the mythical founder of Britain; the stone upon which sacred oaths were sworn; the half-forgotten symbol of authority, against which the rebel Jack Cade had struck his sword a century before, in validation of his claim to London, made fast the bargain between two women.
Elizabeth, and Invidiana.
A great light and her great shadow.
Act Four
Sunlight caresses his face with warmth, and grass pricks through the linen of his shirt to tickle the skin inside. He smiles, eyes closed, and lets his thoughts drift on the breeze. Insects sing a gentle chorus, with birds supplying the melody. He can hear leaves rustling, and over the crest of the hill, her laughter, light and sweet as bells.
The damp soil yields softly beneath his bare feet as he runs through the wood. She is not far ahead — he can almost glimpse her through the shifting, dappled emerald of the shadows — but branches keep hindering him. A silly game. She must have asked the trees to help her. But they play too roughly, twigs snagging, even tearing his shirt, leaf edges turning sharp and scoring his face, while acorns and rocks batter the soles of his feet. He leaves a trail of footprints that fill with blood. He does not like this game anymore.
And then he teeters on the edge of a pit, almost falling in.
Below, so far below…
She might be sleeping. Her face is peaceful, almost smiling.
But then the rot comes, and her skin decays, turning mushroom-colored, wrinkling, swelling, bloating, sinking in at the hollows of her face, and he cries out but he cannot go to her — the serpent has him fast in its coils, and as he fights to free himself it rears back and strikes, sinking its fangs into his brow, six stabbing wounds that paralyze him, steal his voice, and she is lost to him.