Marie Brennan - In Ashes Lie

Lune could not be here, not as he saw her, wearing her own face. But then a bell tolled, black herald of yet another death, and she shuddered; and that convinced him. This was no fancy of his fevered brain. She truly was here, without glamour, without protection, comforting him in his extremity.

“You are awake,” she said: an inanity to fill a void that could not be filled.

Somehow, a smile found its way to his face, though he suspected it looked more like a rictus. “Jack found you.”

She nodded. “And he is here now, brewing some strange concoction for you. I have never seen the like.”

Antony began to laugh, as if the notion were surpassingly funny. God above—had he at last driven Jack into the arms of the chymical physicians, with their inexplicable remedies for bolstering the body’s vital spirit? Salts and mercury and Heaven knew what else. Lune smiled at first, but it faded to concern as he continued to laugh, long after he should have stopped. Once he subsided to wheezing, she said, “You must be feeling better, to show such humor.”

His breath caught in his throat, and he coughed, rackingly, on his own spit. When he could speak at last, he answered her bluntly. “I am dying.”

So he had told Jack, and the doctor denied it. Lune was not so practiced at a physician’s politic lies. Her eyes told the truth.

“Forgive me,” she whispered. Her hands sought out his own and clutched them tight. “I would save you, if only I could.”

Antony hissed, almost crushing her fingers. The swellings were excruciating, enough to drive a man mad; he wanted to run, scream, do anything to distract himself from the pain. Fling himself into a plague pit, perhaps, and wait for the dirt to blot out the sun. “You cannot. I understand that. And I—I forgive you.”

The words cost him. So many years he had stood at her side, always knowing that he would die, and she would go on. But it was bitter indeed when it came. I will be forgotten, soon enough. A single name, in a litany that will stretch far beyond my time.

But he did not want his name remembered, if the cause to which he had dedicated his life fell into ruin. “Lune,” he whispered, half-strangled, but determined to get it out. “I am lost. Do not let London be lost with me.” What remained of it, after death’s scythe had swept across it these long months.

“I will not,” Lune promised. Anything, no doubt, to give him peace.

His hands were slick with sweat, although thirst parched his body dry. “The people are what matters. Yours and mine both. They need you. They need all who love this City, to preserve it against its fall.”

Her silver eyes wavered with shame. He did not hate her for her weakness, the terror that paralyzed her—but she hated it in herself. And abruptly, in a voice made strong by wild determination, Lune spoke. “In Mab’s name, I swear to you that I will do everything I can to preserve London and its people from disaster—and let fear hinder me no more.”

He inhaled sharply. Not the empty assurances she gave before: an oath. Still binding to fae, though mortals broke their sworn word with impunity.

This, then, would be his legacy to the Onyx Court: that he had shamed their Queen into making fast her commitment to the mortal world. Not just the one mortal at her side, but all the ones above.

His time among the fae was one of success and failure so closely interwoven that few strands could be picked out, but this, the last thread, shone gold among them all.

It did nothing to abate the agony of his swollen body, the delirious heat of his fever. It did not make Jack’s treatments hurt any less, as the physician lanced the pustules and fed him medicines that burned his throat. Nothing, in the end, could make the remaining span of his life any less of a torture—not even God. He almost asked Lune to end it for him; there would be no stain upon her inhuman soul, and one more could not blacken his by much.

But he had always fought before, and so he fought now, until the last of his strength gave out, and blackness took the pain away forever.

LOMBARD STREET, LONDON: September 18, 1665

The silence had lasted for over an hour, and it told Jack everything. He waited in the deserted kitchen, mortar and pestle forgotten in his hands, and stared unseeing at the floor, while periodically his vision blurred with tears.

Guilt gnawed at his insides, inescapable and cruel. Not only had he failed here; how many others had he neglected, in trying to save Antony? What would be the death toll this week? Could he have preserved any of them, if he left this place and went to their aid?

A question not worth asking, for no force in the world could have pried him from this house.

But the footsteps on the stair confirmed what he already knew: that his use here had ended. He put down the mortar and pestle, scrubbed his face dry with one sleeve, and stood to face the door.

The faerie woman looked as haggard as he, as if every vital drop had been drained from her. She met his gaze without flinching and nodded once.

He clenched his teeth and looked down. Not so ready for it, after all. And how would he tell Kate?

Lune, it seemed, was thinking of matters even more immediate. “His parish was St. Nicholas, was it not?”

The reminder stung Jack. Antony had refused a priest at the end, with bitter words that horrified the physician and put Lune whimpering on the floor. But whatever the man’s anger at God, he must be buried. “The churchyard at St. Nicholas is full. As they are everywhere.”

Her eyes might have been steel instead of silver. “I will not see him flung into a plague pit outside the walls. Antony will rest in sanctified ground.”

Her concern for such matters surprised him. Jack sighed wearily. The wealthy could afford to buy such concessions, and despite his charity these past months, Antony no doubt still had enough. “I’ll see to it.”

“Thank you, Dr. Ellin.” Raggedly spoken, but gracious. Lune sounded far too serene. Was she even capable of grief? Something had torn at her during those long hours at the dying man’s side, but he did not think she wept.

He began cleaning away the scattered remnants of his ineffective medicines. “I did little enough.”

“You stayed with him,” Lune said. “Which is all anyone can do.”

It made his hands pause in their task. Another bedside, with Antony lying insensate. Another woman who aided him then. Jack had given his name to the sisters, but not to this woman, and yet she spoke as if she knew him—as if they’d met before.

“You were Mistress Montrose,” he said.

A slight intake of breath, audible in the perfect silence of the house. “You have a good eye.”

A host of other questions followed on the heels of that one, but he had not the heart to ask them. Antony had spoken of secrets; it seemed Jack had found them. He emptied the mortar into a bucket, wondering what he would do now.

Lune shifted her weight. “Dr. Ellin. You’ve seen a great deal that few others have. I know you have little enough reason to hear me—but I would propose an exchange between us.”

His fingers tightened on the stone bowl. Facing her was hard; her inhuman presence unsettled him too much, at a time when he had not much stability to spare. But her words put all his nerves on edge, and he could not stand with her at his back. “What could I give you, that you would desire?”

The sculpted lips tightened in a painful, ironic smile. “Not your soul, Dr. Ellin. Tell me: how large is a penny loaf of bread these days?”

“Nine and a half ounces.” What did that have to do with anything?

“Could you afford an extra one each day?”