Marie Brennan - In Ashes Lie

“I miss you, my heart,” she whispered to the stone—a refrain repeated far too many times. “There are nights I think I might give anything to see you again…to hear your voice. To feel your touch.”

Her skin ached with the loss. No more to have his arms around her, his warmth at her side. And he could never be replaced: Antony was not and never would be Michael Deven. She had known it, when she first vowed always to keep a mortal at her side, ruling the Onyx Court with her. She created the title Prince of the Stone to cushion the blow of change, so that she might think of it as a political position, an office any man might fill. Not her consort, with all that implied.

Antony understood. As had Michael; he knew he could not live forever. Dwelling too long among the fae would break even the strongest mind. The time her Princes spent in the Onyx Hall, the touch of enchantment they bore, slowed life for them; Antony, at forty, looked a decade younger. But despite that, inevitably, they aged and died.

The grass pricked through the fabric of her gown, and she dug her fingers into the cool soil. “We needed more time,” she murmured. “Time to map the path I stumble blindly down now. ’Tis a fine thing, to say this place stands for the harmony of mortals and fae, the possibility of bridging those worlds. But how ? How may I aid them, without taking from them their choices? How may they aid us, when they do not even know we are here?”

It had been easier, when couched in terms of use instead of aid. That notion still thrived too strongly in her court, and not only because of Nicneven’s interference. Lune herself still struggled to effect change, without crossing that line.

And she had failed.

Six years of civil war. Royalist Cavaliers against Parliamentarian Roundheads, conflict reaching into every corner of the realm. Brother against brother. Father against son. Scotland at war with England, Ireland in raging revolt. The King imprisoned, sold by his own subjects to the Parliamentary armies for thirty pieces of silver. The land she had sworn to defend had torn itself apart…and she was powerless to heal it.

“We took Mary Stuart from them,” she said, tasting the bitterness in the words. “So they have taken her grandson from us.”

Nicneven’s grudge, given scope and power by Ifarren Vidar: an old enemy, and one Lune should have suspected from the start. But intelligence had put him in France, at the Cour du Lys, after he found no faerie kingdom in England would welcome him. Lune thought him safely gone. Nicneven, however, had given him a home. There was bitter irony in that; Vidar, at Invidiana’s command, had helped the Queen of Scots along her path to the headsman. Lune had no proof, though, and Nicneven would not believe her without it.

So now Lune reaped the consequences of letting him escape when she ascended her throne.

The years pressed down upon her, a weight she rarely felt. But by her bond of love, she tasted mortality, and at moments like this it threatened to crush her. The weariness of ages sapped her strength, and yet her mind would not rest; even now, here, she dragged the chains of her duty and her failures.

She had to lay it aside. For this one night, every year, she was not the Queen of the Onyx Court; she was simply Lune, and free to grieve, not for England, but for a single man.

Curling her legs underneath her, she leaned against the stone that marked Michael Deven’s grave, and gave herself over to sorrow.

LOMBARD STREET, LONDON: October 4, 1648

The house showed no physical scars of six long years of struggle. The defenses built for London had faced no army, let alone been breached. But the marks were there, albeit more subtly: in the absence of tapestries, candlesticks, much of the silver plate. The continual levies for the maintenance of the Parliamentary armies, the repeated loans from the City, had stripped Antony of funds, while the Royalist forces in Oxfordshire had so beggared his estate there that he was forced to sell it.

This is the price of moderation.

It could have been worse. Rightly suspecting his dedication to the Parliamentary cause, the commissioners appointed to gather the money had assessed him more highly than most, but at least they had not driven him from his home. And when things were at their tightest, carefully managed gifts of faerie gold had kept him from losing all.

Antony sat at the table, hands flat on its surface, gazing sightlessly at the wood between his fingers. The house was quiet. His sons and daughter had been sent to live with a cousin of Kate’s in Norfolk—a man of neutrality so inoffensive that he had managed to preserve himself relatively unscathed through a conflict that had brought not only all of England, but Scotland and Ireland, too, into battle. Antony’s manservant, inspired by sectarian zeal, had joined Fairfax’s New Model Army, fighting for Parliament against the King, and had not come back. The cook, finding herself with much less work to do, drank—but at least she was quiet about it.

He heard a door open, footsteps on the stairs. A light step, and so Antony did not bestir himself. Soon enough Kate came into the room, and stopped when she saw him.

She finished unwinding the scarf that had protected her against the chilly air, and laid it at the other end of the table. “Coal is dear,” she said, “but not so bad as it has been. We shall have more tomorrow.”

“Thank you,” Antony said, rising to take his wife’s hands. She had suffered more than he through the bitter winters of the war, when the King or the Scots controlled Newcastle and little coal came to London. That had been the other reason for sending the children away: the cousin had wood and turf to burn for warming his house.

She gripped his fingers, chin sunk down; then made an unreadable noise and turned away. “What is it?” he asked, baffled by her sudden aversion.

Kate pulled off the modest linen cap that covered her hair and twisted it before facing him, as abruptly as she had fled. “Do you think I don’t see the inkstains on your fingers? Do you think I don’t know what they mean?”

Antony stared at his hands. He had not given it much thought. His attention was elsewhere—a thousand other elsewheres. More than he could handle.

“Tell me,” she said bitterly, “do you work with Lilburne? Or someone else? What ideas do you put about, that are so subversive they must be printed in secret? Do not tell me those are from a quill; I know those marks from these.”

Her tirade left him speechless. Could she honestly believe he sided with Lilburne’s outrageous Levellers, those men who wished England to be ruled by the common mob? Lilburne spoke honestly about the corruption of Parliament, its leaders gone mad with their newfound power, but Antony’s agreement with the man ended there.

Except that was not Kate’s point. If she objected to the ideas he championed, she would argue them with him. This was something else.

She objected to secrets.

“Not Lilburne,” he admitted quietly, lowering his hands. “But yes—there is a printing press.”

Kate’s jaw tensed before she replied. “And what is it you deem so important, that you would risk being dragged to the Tower, or pilloried in the street?”

Antony sighed and went back to his chair. After a stiff hesitation, she joined him. “What else have you known me to promote? Moderation, and the hope of peace. Revelations of what goes on inside the House of Commons, what the Army plans, that their leaders would prefer the people not to know.”

The words came easily, hiding a world of confusion beneath. Moderation, yes—but how? There were not two sides, and a clear course between them; the world had come to such a disordered pass that he could see no sure path back to sanity, let alone herd anyone else down it.