He never finished the sentence. Aspell had one more twisty trick prepared. What he pulled from his pocket, Dead Rick never saw; but it exploded into light and smoke. He staggered again, this time into his captor, and on instinct he sank his teeth into whatever part of the fellow was closest to his mouth. He was rewarded with a howl of pain and freedom from the other’s grip.
For half an instant, his mind tossed out images. Putting down the box. Leaping on Nadrett. Helping the wounded Aspell escape.
Instead he ran. Away from the chaos, toward the Onyx Hall, nothing in the world but feet and lungs, his hands and his back holding his memories secure, and a devout hope that he could find safety in the Academy.
The Galenic Academy, Onyx Halclass="underline" August 6, 1884
The strangest thing was the familiarity.
Eliza knew well the look of a formerly decent neighborhood fallen to decay; that described many portions of the East End. She hadn’t expected to find it echoed in a faerie realm—even one that seemed to lie below London.
This is where they’ve been, all this time. Beneath my feet. And I never knew it.
Now they were all around her. She saw one, two, a cluster of four, all before she and her guides reached the arch of silver and gold that shone in the otherwise gloomy air. Even the most human-looking creature was nothing of the sort, and could never be mistaken for it. Yet she knew from experience how well they could change to look like humans. Here, in their home, they had no need to hide.
Their home: some kind of grand, crumbling palace, both timeless and very old. Eliza hunched her shoulders inward and wrapped her hands around her elbows, afraid to touch the stone. Mrs. Chase stayed by her side, but the Goodemeades walked as if they knew the way blindfolded.
Past the arch, familiarity vanished, and strangeness multipled a hundredfold. She’d been prepared for green fields, or hollow hills, or castles of crystal—not machines. They weren’t even human things, dragged down here like a crow would drag a shiny bit of metal; they had to be faerie inventions. Even the notion of faeries bombing railways paled into sensibility, next to that.
Owen, Eliza told herself, trying not to stare at everything around her. Owen is the only thing that matters. If she held on to that, she might keep her sanity.
Her escorts hurried her onward, past the knot of folk clustered around something like an enormous loom. One of them greeted her companions, and Gertrude stayed back, asking after someone named Feidelm. “They’ll fetch your friend,” Rosamund said, leading her through into a library. “If you’d like to sit down…?”
She couldn’t. Eliza paced the room, up and down the length of the polished table, past shelves of books containing unknown wonders. Oddly, the two statues dominating the far end of the room seemed to be of a mortal man and woman, in old-fashioned clothing. The plaques at the base named them as Galen and Delphia St. Clair. She wondered who they’d been, and what importance they could possibly hold for faeries, that they would be memorialized here.
The click of a door’s latch drove all such thoughts from her head. Eliza turned, and saw Owen.
The sight of him drove all the breath from her body. Owen, exactly as she remembered him—Owen from seven years ago, as if not a day had passed since they parted.
He’d been among the faeries. For him, time had stopped.
The fourteen-year-old boy shuffled forward, guided by the gentle hands of Gertrude and a tall, elegant faerie with ginger hair. He seemed nervous, uncertain, and he didn’t look at her. Eliza had to force the syllables past her lips, a desperate whisper. “Owen.”
He didn’t react. She might have spoken another name entirely. And that was when Eliza knew the appearance was a lie; his face might be unchanged, but inside, he was not at all the boy she remembered.
They had warned her. But warnings didn’t come close to preparing her for the horror of seeing him like this, fourteen years old and shattered.
By this place.
She made herself walk forward, slowly, hands outstretched. The others hung back, giving her the space she needed. For more reasons than one. The boy looked up at her, confused, wary, but he let her take his hand—
“Ave Maria, gratia plena, Dominus tecum. Benedicta tu in mulieribus, et benedictus fructus ventris tui, Iesus. Sancta Maria, Mater Dei, ora pro nobis peccatoribus, nunc et in hora mortis nostrae!”
The prayer spilled from her lips, as fast as she’d ever recited it. Only years of repetition, though, kept Eliza from faltering as it took effect.
She’d thought the faeries would flinch back, as the changeling had, but stronger. And so they did—but everything else flinched, too.
The walls, the shelves, the floor. The entire world shuddered, like a candle flame in the wind. Cries of utter horror came from within the room and without; machinery ground to a shrieking halt; an ominous rumble filled the air.
And Owen, with whom Eliza had intended to run for freedom—through the door, past the distracted faeries, out into the world above—howled and tore himself away.
The shock of it paralyzed her. Eliza was still standing there, gaping, when the door slammed open so hard it bounced off the wall, and a short, stocky figure charged through, swearing in German. His gaze swept the room, then fixed on Eliza with murderous rage. The ginger-haired faerie caught him as he tried to rush at Eliza, and she began speaking in a rapid Irish voice. “She didn’t know, Niklas; she was trying to help her friend—”
“She is going to kill the Queen and bring this verdammte place down upon our heads!”
Rosamund was at Eliza’s side, clutching her sleeve, babbling away beneath the dwarf’s furious tirade. “You mustn’t do that, oh please, you mustn’t—I know you want to help him, and so do we, but if you pray again you’ll only hurt us all…”
Eliza staggered. It was too much, all of it: the shouting, that disorienting lurch, the peculiar and unsettling feeling that the stone itself had been screaming.
And Owen, huddled in a corner. Terrified of her. Of the words she had spoken, that did not belong to this world.
Vision blurred, slid, vanished into a cascade of tears. Eliza cried, the sobs wracking her body, bending her over until she fell to her knees on the carpet. Oh Jesus, Owen. I’m too late. Seven years too late. God help me—Owen, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry…
Gentle hands stroked her hair, the Irish voice spoke to her soothingly with words she couldn’t understand, and none of it did any good. All of it had been in vain. She had lost Owen forever.
PART THREE
August–October 1884
They say that “coming events cast their shadows before.” May they not sometimes cast their lights before?
Do not let us talk then of restoration. The thing is a Lie from beginning to end. You may make a model of a building as you may of a corpse, and your model may have the shell of the old walls within it as your cast might have the skeleton, with what advantage I neither see nor care […] But, it is said, there may come a necessity for restoration! Granted. Look the necessity full in the face, and understand it on its own terms. It is a necessity for destruction.