“There’s more,” Rosamund said. “His manservant Colsey was following him, it seems. I do not know why, or what happened… but he’s dead.”
Colsey. Lune had met him, back when they were all at court, and her greatest concern had been how to evade Deven’s offer of marriage without losing his usefulness to her. She had liked him, and his close-mouthed loyalty to his master.
Gone, that easily. And Deven…
Lune turned away and walked two paces. She could go no farther; the room she had rented was scarcely larger than a horse’s stall.
The lure was plain. The question was whether she would take it.
It hardly mattered whether Invidiana had Francis Merriman’s ghost. The Queen knew enough. Would Lune now walk into her trap?
Without thinking, one hand dropped to touch the purse that held the last of the loaf Deven had given her. Mortal bread. She had consumed so much of it, since she met him. Not enough to make her human, but enough to change her.
Michael Deven loved her. Not Anne Montrose, but Lune. She knew it the night he led her to his house. What did that love mean to her?
Would she spurn it, and flee to save herself?
Or would she accept it — return it — despite the cost?
She had never felt that choice within her before. Too much mortal bread; it brought her to an unfamiliar precipice. Her mind moved in strange ways, wavering, uncertain.
“My lady?” Gertrude whispered from behind her.
Lune’s hands stilled on her skirt. She turned to find the two brownies watching her with hesitant expressions. It was the first time she had seen them show fear. They had spent years opposing Invidiana; now, at long last, their game might be at an end.
“The London Stone lies within the Onyx Hall,” Lune said. “So does Invidiana, who made a pact with Hell. And so does Michael Deven.
“I will do what we had intended. I will seek out Doctor Dee.”
MEMORY: Long and long ago…
There was a beauty of night, pale as the moon, dark as her shadow, slender and graceful as running water. A young man saw her dancing under the stars, and loved her; he pined and sighed for her, until his mother feared he would waste away, lost in dreams of love. For that happened at times, that folk should die for love of the strangers under the hills.
Such was not this young man’s lot. A plan was formed, wherein he would have the beautiful stranger to wife. Great preparations were made by his people and by hers, a glorious midsummer wedding on the banks of the river, a little distance from the village where the young man’s father ruled. There would be music and dancing, good food and drink, and if the maidens and youths of the village fell in love with their guests from the other side, perhaps this wedding would be only the first of many. And when it was done, the young man would have a fine house to share with his wife, in time succeeding his father as chieftain and ruling in his place.
So it was planned. But it did not come to pass.
The guests gathered beneath the twilit summer sky. On the one side, the weathered faces of the villagers, tanned by the sun in their labors, the old ones wrinkled, the young ones round-cheeked and staring at the folk across the field. There stood creatures tall and tiny, wide-shouldered and slender, some with feathers, hooves, tails, wings.
The one the young man loved looked at her people, in all their wild glory, and even their ugliness was more beautiful to her, because it was what they were and always would be.
Then she looked at the people of the village, and she saw how accidents marked their bodies, how they soon crumbled and fell, how their houses stood on bare dirt and they scratched out their living with toil.
And she asked herself: Am I to go from this to that?
So she fled, leaving the young man alone beneath the rising moon, with his heart broken into pieces.
He sickened and died, but not for love. Yet he took strange pride in his illness, laughing a mad laugh that grieved his mother unbearably. You see, we prove her right. We die so soon, so easily; she will remain long after I am gone. I do not mourn the mayfly, nor yoke my heart to its; why should it be different with her?
Bitterness poisoned the words, the terrible knowledge that his love was as nothing to the immortal creature upon whom it had fixed.
The moon waned and waxed, and when it was full once more, the young man died. On his deathbed he spoke his last words, not to his family, but to the absent creature that had been the end of him. May you suffer as we suffer, in sickness and age, so that you find no escape from that which you fled. May you feel all the weight of mortality, and cry out beneath your burden, until you atone for the harm you have done and understand what you have spurned.
Then he died, and was buried, and never more did the villagers gather in harmony with the strangers under the hills.
MORTLAKE, SURREY: May 7, 1590
The house, with all its additions and extensions, was like an old man dreaming in the afternoon sunlight, relaxed into a sprawling doze. Yet to Lune it seemed more foreboding than the Onyx Halclass="underline" a lair of unknown dangers.
Be it angels or devils he summoned inside, it was not a place a faerie should go.
Lune put her shoulders back and approached the door with a stride more resolute than she felt.
She was a woman on her own, with no letter of introduction to smooth her way. But the maidservant was easy enough to charm, and Dee’s wife proved sympathetic. “He’s at his studies,” the woman said, shifting the infant she held onto her other hip. The small creature stared frankly at Lune, as if it could see through the glamour. “But if ’tis urgent…”
“I would be most grateful,” Lune said.
Her reception was warmer than expected. “You will forgive my frankness in asking,” Dee said, once the formalities were dispensed with, “but has this anything to do with Michael Deven?”
This was not in the mental script Lune had prepared on her journey to Mortlake. “I beg your pardon?”
A surprising twinkle lightened the astrologer’s tired eyes. “I am not unaware of you, Mistress Montrose. Your lady the Countess of Warwick has been kind to me since my return, and I had the honor of friendship with Sir Francis Walsingham. When Master Deven came to my door, asking for aid in the matter of a young gentlewoman, ’twas not difficult to surmise whom he meant.”
No magic, just an observant mind. Lune began to breathe again. “Indeed, Doctor Dee — it has everything to do with him. Will you aid me?”
“If I can,” Dee said. “But some things are beyond my influence. If he is in some political difficulty—”
Not of the sort he thought. Lune clasped her hands in her lap and met the old man’s gaze, putting all the sincerity she could muster into it. “He is in great peril, and for reasons I fear must be laid at my feet. And it may be, Doctor Dee, that you are the only man in England who could help us.”
His face stilled behind its snowy beard. “And why would that be?”
“They say you speak with angels.”
All pleasantness fell away, but his eyes were as bright and unblinking as a hawk’s. “I fear, Mistress Montrose, that you may have an overly dramatic sense of his danger, my abilities, or both. Angels—”
“I am not overly dramatic,” she snapped, forgetting in her distress to be polite. “I assure you. The tale is a complex one, Doctor Dee, and I have not the time to waste on it if at the end you will tell me you can be of no aid. Do you hold conference with angels, or not?”
Dee rose from his seat, ink-stained fingers twitching his long robe straight. Turning away to pace across the room, he spoke very deliberately. “I see that you are distraught, Mistress Montrose, and so I will lay two things before you. The first is that angelic actions are no trivial matter, no miracle that can be summoned at a whim to solve worldly ills.