Marie Brennan - A Star Shall Fall

Irrith raised her eyebrows. “Do you want to gamble London’s future on ‘surely’? Maybe the best way to perfect things is to destroy them, so something better can be built in their place.”

Alarm filled the genie’s dark eyes. “I had not thought of that.”

None of you did. That was the problem with bringing scholars together. Clever as they were, sometimes they forgot their ideas were more than pretty shapes in their minds.

He sipped his drink, frowning once more. “No, we do not want a perfect Dragon. Even supposing we had the mercury with which to make one.”

They wanted the opposite. And that gave Irrith an idea so startling, she spilled her own coffee. It scalded her hands, but she hardly noticed. “What if we went the other way?”

“What do you mean?”

“Alchemy perfects things, right?” She put down her cup before she could lose the rest of its contents. “What if you went the other way? Reverse alchemy. Use it to make something im perfect. We’ve said all along that the Dragon is too powerful to be killed. But if we can weaken it, make it vulnerable—”

It was wild speculation, and maybe complete nonsense. The genie’s eyes widened, though, and he fair floated up from the cushion on which he sat. His mind had gone elsewhere, and his body only followed. “Combine it with something that is not pure. The alchemists combined many impure things, misunderstanding their own work, and achieved no particular result—but they were working with mute substances, not things of faerie.” His gaze sharpened, as if his mind had come back from a voyage into possibility. “I do not know if it would work.”

Irrith bit her lip so hard it almost bled. “It must.” The alternative was too dreadful to think of. Lune dead, or Galen, or both. We have to try.

Galen came through the front door of his chambers and stood blankly for a moment. The hearth was cold and black; the only illumination came from a faerie light, that whisked back to its sconce when its limited awareness realised someone had entered. Beyond that, the room lay still.

Of course. Edward was at Sothings Park. Podder was dead, and the knights who guarded Galen below didn’t know he’d returned. In his absence, charms were enough to protect his chambers, while the knights prepared for battle.

He should light a fire. The Onyx Hall was a chilly place, and the gloom pressed in on him. But he was still standing there when he felt eyes upon him.

Galen turned and found Irrith in the open doorway. His heart skipped a beat at the sight of her. She’d discarded the civilised fashions of the Onyx Hall for rougher garb—perhaps what she wore in the Vale. A short tunic over hose, displaying a figure that, while slender, was not boyish. She shifted from one foot to the other, hands tugging at the hem of the tunic, and said, “I… was looking for you.”

Waiting for him, judging by how quickly she’d appeared. Galen reached the obvious conclusion. “Are you leaving?”

Startlement pulled her straight. “What? No! Is that how you think of me, as someone who runs away?”

He remembered her charging across the ice, pistol in hand, to free Lune. The marks of her exposure in the world above had largely faded now, but there was still a hollowness to her, shadows in her cheeks and along the line of her collarbone. No, she was not the sort to run away.

“I’m sorry,” Galen said, turning back toward the hearth. It was easy enough to do his servants’ work, here in this faerie palace; all it took was a whispered request, and fire bloomed in the empty grate. “I’ve been with the von das Tickens. The news isn’t good. Niklas says gold would only hold the Dragon a little while, before it melted.”

Irrith closed the door behind her. “Abd ar-Rashid said the same thing. But he suggested—well, I did, but he agreed—that we might be able to weaken the Dragon by doing the alchemical thing badly. On purpose. Combining it with something impure, to make it imperfect. And therefore vulnerable.”

Silence followed, in which Galen fancied he could hear the beating of both their hearts. The pieces hovered in his mind, not quite coming together. A vessel of sun-gold. Filled with something lacking in phlogiston, that would draw the Dragon in, as air was drawn into a vessel from which it had been pumped. Something impure, so they could enact the “chemical wedding” of the philosophers, with opposite intent.

But what thing?

“Water and earth,” Irrith said, like a schoolboy recalling his—her—lessons. “Cold and wet. It has to have no fire in it, but it also has to be flawed. Not Lune. Something that’s vulnerable.”

“Something,” Galen whispered, “that is mortal.”

Her mouth fell open by degrees, as if all the world had slowed. Irrith stood perfectly still at the edge of the carpet, not breathing. Any more than Galen was.

“Mortal,” he repeated, more strongly. “Bind the Dragon’s spirit into a vessel that can be destroyed—that can be killed . You might not even have to do anything; the mere presence of such power might annihilate the vessel, and by doing so, take the Dragon with it.” How could the words be so steady, so calm, as if he were speaking of philosophy only, with no application to life?

Irrith’s voice was not so steady. “There are plenty of stray dogs in Lo…”

She couldn’t even finish it. Galen was shaking his head. “No. It needs more than a dog.”

“Then a beggar. Plenty of those, too. Snatch one off any street corner—”

“An innocent?” he demanded. His own calm slipped. “Someone ignorant of this world, this war, tied down for the slaughter without even knowing why? I’ll be damned first! It must be someone willing, Irrith.”

His declaration hung in the air. She could make the tally as well as he could. Edward Thorne was half-faerie. Mrs. Vesey? Delphia? There were others in the Hall or associated with it, various lovers and pets of faerie courtiers, many of them with no awareness of the larger faerie world, its politics and dangers. It would be his duty as Prince to go among them, to question one after another, asking who would lay down his life for the good of London.

And perhaps one might agree. Perhaps.

But he could never bring himself to ask.

She shook her head, a tiny movement at first, then a more vehement one. “No, Galen.”

“I am willing,” he said, and if it was ragged, it was also true.

“No, no, no —” Irrith spun and crossed the room, hands in the air as if to ward off his statement, and then without warning she seized the nearest thing that came to hand and hurled it across the room. Porcelain shattered against the far wall. “No! You aren’t going to do it!”

“Yes. I am.” Peculiar joy was filling the hole inside him, driving back the fear. “Who better, Irrith? If the Prince will not sacrifice himself for the good of his people, who will? I’ll renounce my connection to the Hall—”

The firelight caught Irrith’s face, revealing fury. “Do you think this will make her love you?”

The chain of her question dragged him back to earth. “What?”

“Lune. That’s why you’re doing this, isn’t it? Because you love her, and you want some grand gesture to show it, saving the Onyx Court single-handed. You think she’ll finally love you, then. You’re an idiot , Galen. Her heart was given centuries ago, and not to you.”

He flinched. It struck too near the mark. He had dreamt like that, too many times, but such dreams could not survive the light of day. “No. I—I know she will never love me.”