Marie Brennan - A Star Shall Fall

She’d given him her most heartfelt thanks before he went in, and would do so again when he came out. To be locked inside, alone, with only the great clock for company… Cuddy’s jest aside, even the work could not be enough to distract a man from that dread presence. She hoped Hamilton would not come stumbling out in a few moments to say he could not do it, that he’d only lasted three days and accomplished nothing at all.

The time had come to find out. Wilhas took hold of the sundial on the door and dragged the portal open.

At first she thought Hamilton’s slow, shuffling steps a sign of mere exhaustion. He could not have slept well, inside the Calendar Room. But then he came forward, into the illumination of the workshop’s faerie lights, and she saw his head. Not a wig; he’d taken none into the room. Those long, ragged locks were his own hair—and snow-white.

The Prince of the Stone lifted his head, revealing his time-worn face to the world.

Lune’s breath withered in her throat. Mortal. He is mortal. Time outside of time—we knew he wouldn’t need food, but we did not think of aging.

How long was he in there?

Hamilton extended one wrinkled hand. The papers in it trembled, until Lune took them. “Perihelion on March thirteenth, 1759,” he said, in a reed-thin voice that had spoken only to the walls for years. “The French will need more than one mathematician if they want their answer before the comet has come and gone; the work is enormous. I fear I took too long learning the calculus—it was hard to concentrate in there—”

He staggered. Everyone had been standing like stone, but now Wilhas leapt into the chamber and came back with a chair. Its cushion was worn beyond threadbare, its padding flattened until it was almost as hard as the wood. Hamilton collapsed into it with a motion that spoke of endless, horrifying habit.

Lune sank into a crouch before him, papers forgotten in her hand. A single glance had shown her the unsteady scrawl, replacing his old, meticulous writing. “Hamilton—did you not realise ?”

His gaze fixed on her. With a chill she had not felt since she took the throne, Lune saw a familiar madness in his eyes. He had aged as if in the mortal world, but his mind suffered the effects of too long in a faerie realm. Or perhaps it was only the isolation, and the inevitable ticking of the clock.

“I did,” he said gently, as if speaking to a child. “But by the time I did… it was already too late to go back to my old life. Years had passed. People would wonder. So I decided to finish the work. But it was hard, and sometimes I forgot what I was doing…”

Cuddy’s feet scuffed against the floor as he shifted his weight. Hamilton glared at him. “The numbers are right, though,” the Prince insisted, with something like his old strength. “I made sure of that. Only when I had the same result three times in a row did I come out.”

Lune tasted ashes. Hamilton had not been the youngest Prince she ever chose, but even accounting for the effect of his broken health, he must have been inside for at least twenty years. Probably more. Six years her Prince, and he would not live to see a seventh. She’d feared losing a consort to the Dragon, but she’d never imagined it would happen like this.

He laid his shaking hand atop hers, where it rested on one skirt-shrouded knee. “I’ll help you look,” he promised, with sincerity that brought tears to her eyes. “There were some likely lads in the court. They’re still here, yes? They haven’t gone away?”

“No, Hamilton,” she whispered. “They haven’t gone away.”

The old Prince nodded, white hair falling in a curtain around his face. “One of them will do well, I’m sure. One of them will do very well indeed.”

The workshop was silent, the tools cleared away. Even the clocks had been allowed to run down, their hands stopped at odd hours. Most of the Onyx Court waited in the great presence chamber, filling the space before the Queen’s silver throne and the Prince’s chair of estate, gathered to hear their rulers speak. And soon enough that time would come.

Once the door to the Calendar Room opened.

The escort waited in silence: dwarves, scholars, an honour guard of knights, and three women. Irrith and Delphia St. Clair flanked Lune on either side, and none of the three met the others’ eyes. Once we divided him among us , Irrith thought, bones aching with tension. Now he belongs to none of us.

Lune was, or at least seemed, her usual self: serene as the moon, and as cool. Delphia presented a stony mask to the world. Surely she hadn’t expected to be widowed scarcely a month after marriage. It won’t end , Irrith had said to her, the night they went to rescue the Queen. He’ll always be running off, and leaving you behind. Where he ran to now, no man returned.

A hard knot lodged in her own throat, hurting every time she swallowed. Often as she reminded herself that Galen was mortal, and mortals died, the knot refused to go away. It was fury, and betrayal, and fear; and it was grief, too, which made her angriest of all. She shouldn’t have to suffer that when she hadn’t chosen to love him. He should mean nothing to her, one more broken doll, gone a bit too soon.

She knew it was a lie, though. Lune mourned all her Princes, not just the one she loved. Not as deeply, and as time passed they would fade from her mind; but any faerie who lived closely with mortals, mimicked their ways, ate their bread, felt at least a touch of loss when the close ones passed on. Next year Irrith’s grief would be forgotten.

But it hurt now , and she hated it.

The sundial began to spin. Cuddy stepped forward and grasped its angled style, throwing his slender weight backward to help drag the door open.

Only one other mortal had ever gone inside that chamber and closed the door behind him. Irrith had heard the story of Hamilton Birch in gruesome detail, since Galen went into the room; her mind had conjured up plenty of possibilities for what would emerge today.

Abd ar-Rashid stepped through the portal first. If the strain of the chamber had told upon him, he gave no sign. But he nodded to Lune, and then Galen came out.

The Prince looked almost unchanged. No lines in his face, no white in his hair. It would be easy to imagine the Calendar Room had no effect upon him—easy, until one looked in his eyes. There Irrith saw changes for which there were no words. He was older in mind, if not in body, and he’d left part of himself in the Calendar Room. Everything in him that was fire.

Galen bowed to the Queen and said, “I am ready.”

Both rigidity and nervous fidgeting were gone from his body. He stood with his hands loose at his sides, his breathing slow and measured. Like a man ready for battle—

No. There would be no battle; only surrender and death. He stood like a martyr, ready for the lions.

Lune asked quietly, “Do you wish the services of a priest?”

Irrith choked. Had Galen told her? The horrific words she’d flung at him, telling him he was damned to Hell—the Prince was shaking his head. “No,” he said, equally quiet. “I have been in meditation for days now, preparing. I must not lose this. Let us speak to the court, and be done.”

The Queen did not press the question again. Throat aching with unsaid words, Irrith followed the small procession out of the workshop, toward the great presence chamber, where Galen would be made Prince no more.

It had been done once before, Irrith knew, divesting a Prince of his title. Michael Deven gave over the position before his own death, so that “Prince of the Stone” would be an office passed from man to man, rather than a privilege belonging to him alone.