Marie Brennan - Midnight Never Come

The metal was cool against his skin, and did not warm at the contact. An instant later Deven shuddered again, as six sharp points dug into his skin, just short of drawing blood.

“This ban I lay upon thee, Michael Deven,” Invidiana murmured, the melody of her voice lending horror to her words. “Thou wilt not depart from this chamber by any portal that exists or might be made, nor send messages out by any means; nor wilt move in violence against me, lest thou die.”

Every vein in his body ran with ice. Deven’s teeth clenched shut, his jaw aching with sudden strain, while six points of fire fixed into the skin of his brow.

Then it was gone.

Invidiana replaced the gem, smiling, and the bonds holding him fell away.

“Welcome, Master Deven, to the Onyx Hall.”

DEAD MAN’S PLACE, SOUTHWARK: May 7, 1590

There was something grimly appropriate, Lune thought, about hiding a stone’s throw from an Episcopal prison full of heretics.

But Southwark was a good place for hiding; with its stews and bear-baiting, its prisons and general licentiousness, a woman on her own, renting out a room for a short and indefinite period of time, was nothing out of the ordinary way. Lune would simply have to be gone before her faerie gold — or rather, silver — turned back to leaves.

Had the jay in truth belonged to the Goodemeades? Or had it taken her message to another? Would the Goodmeades come? What had happened, that they were so determined to keep her from the Onyx Hall?

Footsteps on the stair; she tensed, hands reaching for weapons she did not have or know how to use. Then a soft voice outside: “My lady? Let us in.”

Trying not to shake with relief, Lune unbarred the door.

The Goodemeades slipped inside and shut it behind them. “Oh, my lady,” Gertrude said, rushing forward to clasp her hands, “I am so sorry. We did not know until too late!”

“About the pact?” Lune asked. She knew even as she said the words that wasn’t it, but her mind had so fixated on it, she could not think what Gertrude meant.

Rosamund laid a gentle hand on her arm. The touch alone said too much. “Master Deven,” the brownie said. “She has taken him.”

There was no refuge in confusion, no stay of understanding while Lune asked what she meant. Fury began instantly, a slow boil in her heart. “I trusted you to warn him. He’s as much in danger as I; why did you warn only me?”

The sisters exchanged confused looks. Then Rosamund said, “My lady… the birds stopped you of their own accord. Her people ambushed him on the street yesterday. We did not even know of it until later. We sent birds some time ago, to watch you both. They had lost you, but when one saw him taken, they chose to watch the entrances and stop you if they could.”

Lost her. Because she had tried so very hard to keep anyone from following her when she went to meet Vidar. Where had she been, when they attacked him? Had Vidar distracted her on purpose?

“Tell me,” Lune said, harsh and cold.

Gertrude described it softly, as if that lessened the dreadfulness of what she said. “A will-o’-the-wisp to lead him astray. A tatterfoal, to replace his own horse and carry him into the trap.” She hesitated before supplying the last part. “And Achilles, to bring him down.”

One tiny comfort Lune could take from that: Invidiana must not mean to have Deven battle to the death, or she would have saved Achilles for later, and sent Kentigern instead.

“There’s more,” Rosamund said. “His manservant Colsey was following him, it seems. I do not know why, or what happened… but he’s dead.”

Colsey. Lune had met him, back when they were all at court, and her greatest concern had been how to evade Deven’s offer of marriage without losing his usefulness to her. She had liked him, and his close-mouthed loyalty to his master.

Gone, that easily. And Deven…

Lune turned away and walked two paces. She could go no farther; the room she had rented was scarcely larger than a horse’s stall.

The lure was plain. The question was whether she would take it.

It hardly mattered whether Invidiana had Francis Merriman’s ghost. The Queen knew enough. Would Lune now walk into her trap?

Without thinking, one hand dropped to touch the purse that held the last of the loaf Deven had given her. Mortal bread. She had consumed so much of it, since she met him. Not enough to make her human, but enough to change her.

Michael Deven loved her. Not Anne Montrose, but Lune. She knew it the night he led her to his house. What did that love mean to her?

Would she spurn it, and flee to save herself?

Or would she accept it — return it — despite the cost?

She had never felt that choice within her before. Too much mortal bread; it brought her to an unfamiliar precipice. Her mind moved in strange ways, wavering, uncertain.

“My lady?” Gertrude whispered from behind her.

Lune’s hands stilled on her skirt. She turned to find the two brownies watching her with hesitant expressions. It was the first time she had seen them show fear. They had spent years opposing Invidiana; now, at long last, their game might be at an end.

“The London Stone lies within the Onyx Hall,” Lune said. “So does Invidiana, who made a pact with Hell. And so does Michael Deven.

“I will do what we had intended. I will seek out Doctor Dee.”

MEMORY: Long and long ago…

There was a beauty of night, pale as the moon, dark as her shadow, slender and graceful as running water. A young man saw her dancing under the stars, and loved her; he pined and sighed for her, until his mother feared he would waste away, lost in dreams of love. For that happened at times, that folk should die for love of the strangers under the hills.

Such was not this young man’s lot. A plan was formed, wherein he would have the beautiful stranger to wife. Great preparations were made by his people and by hers, a glorious midsummer wedding on the banks of the river, a little distance from the village where the young man’s father ruled. There would be music and dancing, good food and drink, and if the maidens and youths of the village fell in love with their guests from the other side, perhaps this wedding would be only the first of many. And when it was done, the young man would have a fine house to share with his wife, in time succeeding his father as chieftain and ruling in his place.

So it was planned. But it did not come to pass.

The guests gathered beneath the twilit summer sky. On the one side, the weathered faces of the villagers, tanned by the sun in their labors, the old ones wrinkled, the young ones round-cheeked and staring at the folk across the field. There stood creatures tall and tiny, wide-shouldered and slender, some with feathers, hooves, tails, wings.

The one the young man loved looked at her people, in all their wild glory, and even their ugliness was more beautiful to her, because it was what they were and always would be.

Then she looked at the people of the village, and she saw how accidents marked their bodies, how they soon crumbled and fell, how their houses stood on bare dirt and they scratched out their living with toil.

And she asked herself: Am I to go from this to that?

So she fled, leaving the young man alone beneath the rising moon, with his heart broken into pieces.

He sickened and died, but not for love. Yet he took strange pride in his illness, laughing a mad laugh that grieved his mother unbearably. You see, we prove her right. We die so soon, so easily; she will remain long after I am gone. I do not mourn the mayfly, nor yoke my heart to its; why should it be different with her?