In Ashes Lie (56 page)

They were mad, every last one of them. Lune did not know if it was the strain of living under the Cailleach’s assault, or the transmuted fire she and Jack had poured into them, the radiant heart of London. But their madness gave
her
heart, because it meant they stood behind her, even in the face of a Dragon.

Without them, she was Queen of nothing. With them, there was no distance she could fall that she could not climb back up again.

Fierce pride swelled in her heart. Lune waited, letting her subjects have their say, and then when the shouts subsided she spoke once more to the dumbfounded and furious Nicneven.

“You can destroy the Onyx Hall,” she admitted, mimicking Jack’s casual tone. “But not the Onyx Court. So long as these people call London their home, you cannot destroy us. Not without killing every last fae who chooses to dwell in this city, and every mortal who stands beside us. And that will start a war you
cannot
win.

“So this is
your
choice, Gyre-Carling. You can raise the Cailleach once more and hope the Dragon burns us out. If it does, you lose Ifarren Vidar, for he will be destroyed with the palace. In the aftermath, we will rebuild our home, and you will have nothing but the vindictive satisfaction of putting us to that work.

“Or you can stand aside and let us destroy this beast. When we are done, you shall have Ifarren Vidar—but in exchange, you will return to Fife, and make no further war against us.”

Nothing shivered within. Her realm was more than stone; it was her people. And they were outside Nicneven’s control; they could not—
would
not—be used to make Lune kneel.

Nicneven did not understand. Lune doubted she was capable of it. That fae should find mortals interesting,
that
was comprehensible. Faerie-kind had always been drawn to their endless passion and capacity for change. But to live so close beside them, and stand so proudly in defense of such a home...

The Gyre-Carling would never understand that choice. But neither could she win against it. No victory was possible, against those who would not admit defeat.

She stood frozen in the center of the floor, balked of her prey. She could still drive them out, destroy the Onyx Hall, and retire to Fife with her empty triumph. But it would cost her Ifarren Vidar.

Passions, not politics, Cerenel had said. Vidar’s treachery had hurt her far more deeply than the Onyx Hall ever could.

Through teeth clenched hard, the Gyre-Carling said, “How do I know you will give him to me?”

An oath was the easy answer. But Lune was tired of those, tired of cheapening Mab’s name by swearing to this and that. She cast about for another solution, and then Rosamund stepped forward. “Madam, if it would be acceptable to you, Gertrude and I will stand surety for your word.”

Hostages. Fear stirred in Lune’s heart, but Cerenel bowed to her, and to the Goodemeades. “And I will vouch for their safety, if the Gyre-Carling pleases.”

The Gyre-Carling did not please much at all, by the look on her face, but to say so would gain her nothing. “Go kill your Dragon,” she spat at last. “If you can.”

“Madam—it cannot be done.”

Jack paused, halfway through shrugging out of his stiff doublet, and stared at Sir Peregrin Thorne. The knight was weary, and covered head-to-toe with filth; he hadn’t spoken up during the pretty little show out in the presence chamber, when the fae of the Onyx Court defied Nicneven. Standing closer to him now, Jack saw the despair in his eyes. “If anyone could kill the Dragon, Prigurd would have done. I have never seen such strength. But it has devoured so much...” Matted hair swung as he shook his head, except where it had been scorched from one side. “It has grown too great. Not all your knights together could kill it now.”

His flat declaration produced an awkward pause. Good humor had been running high among Lune’s advisers, gathered for this urgent war council, but it faltered badly under Peregrin’s words. Jack finished taking off his doublet and laid it over the back of a chair, less confident than he had been.

“Guns?” Bonecruncher suggested, hopefully. The barguest liked the weapons rather too well. But Peregrin shook his head.

“If we had iron shot, perhaps,” Segraine said, lowering herself into a chair. No one grudged her the comfort—or Peregrin either, though he refused to take it. “It’s a mystical being, as we are. But by the time we arm ourselves thus, it will be too late.”

Lune laid her hands flat on the surface of the council table, aligning them with exaggerated care along the floral pattern outlined in bright commesso. “Iron,” she said.

Everyone except Jack shivered.

She lifted her head, and smiled without mirth. “Not iron shot. It seems Nicneven has done us a favor after all.”

By forcing her to give up Vidar. Jack said, “That iron box you locked him in.”

The Queen nodded.

“Will it
hold
the thing?” he asked doubtfully. “You’ve not seen the Dragon, Lune; it’s huge.”

“The box does not work that way. It is small; what it entraps is the spirit. But yes, it will hold the Dragon.”

You
think
it will.
Jack would not voice the doubts she kept silent, though. Rolling back the cuffs of his sleeves, he said, “Then once we take Vidar out again, we need two things: a way to force the Dragon inside, and bait to draw it near.”

Bonecruncher snorted. “Just offer it what’s left of the City.”

Jack glared at the goblin. Fortunately, Lune answered before he could speak his mind. “The Dragon does not want the City. Rather, it
does
—but more than that, it craves the power we have here. The Onyx Hall. It has tried for us twice already.”

Her mind was on tactics. Jack saw, as she did not, the shudder that rippled through the room. They knew of the battle in the cathedral, and rumors had spread of Lune’s defense at the Stone; they saw her crippled hand, and understood what it betokened. Now she wished to bait the Dragon again?

But they had barred the Stone against their enemy, and Prigurd had closed the cathedral door himself. “We need some new lure,” the Queen said.

Jack hated to suggest it, but she would think of it regardless. “The Tower?”

He was both relieved and dismayed to see her shake her head. “They’ve blown up all the houses nearby; the Fire cannot approach. And while a beast of flames might be overlooked in a great inferno, we cannot battle it inside the Tower of London without drawing far too many eyes.”

Segraine’s head had sagged, until Jack thought her asleep; now she raised it and said, “It is flame no more. Black cinders, like char crusting meat—but beneath is molten flesh.”

“We saw it,” Peregrin said, though no one had forgotten. “Prowling in the vicinity of Newgate.”

Which only lent more weight to Lune’s point. Men might convince themselves they saw no shape in the flames, but a giant black beast was rather much to overlook. Jack pressed the heels of his hands against his eyes and thought.
We cannot bring it below. Two of the key points are barred to it, the third unusable—the Thames and the wall will not work—

But there was one more element of the Onyx Hall the Dragon might hunger after.

“We offer it ourselves,” Jack said quietly.

His hands were still blindfolding his eyes; hearing only dead silence, he lowered them and managed an off-balance grin. “I know. In a moment someone will find his tongue and remind me that a Queen is not to be used as bait. But if what the Dragon desires is a conduit to the Onyx Hall...well, at least these conduits can fight back.”

The faces surrounding him might have been a painter’s study in seventeen kinds of horror. Seventeen of horror, and one of calm understanding. Lune knew as well as he did that they were the tastiest morsels they could dangle before their enemy—and that it had to be both of them, together.

She let her advisers argue it for a moment; then she diverted them down a secondary path, leaving the idea to stew in their minds. By the time she came back to it, they would be more resigned to the notion. Or at least Jack assumed that was her plan. In the meantime—“We must get it outside London, I think,” she said. “Outside the wall. Who knows what will happen when we trap it, both above and below. But nowhere that has not burnt already.”

“The liberties to the west, then,” Jack said. “We find the Dragon, draw its attention, then run for Ludgate or Newgate as if the Devil himself were on our tails.”
On the whole, I might prefer the Devil.

But that left unanswered the question of how to force it into the trap they hoped would hold it. Lune put it very plainly. “We need some piece of the one to be trapped. With Vidar, it was blood, but the Dragon has none. I think it must be flesh—such as it has. And for a being as powerful as this, I would not trust anything less than its heart to suffice.”

“Does it
have
a heart?” Irrith asked.

For some reason everyone looked to Jack, as if a mortal physician knew anything about the organs of elemental beasts. “It has
something
at its core,” he said, “that we may as well call the heart.” It sounded good, and he prayed it was true.

As for how to get at it...“How did George slay
his
dragon?” Amadea asked.

Jack’s breath huffed out in a voiceless laugh. “The princess he was rescuing threw him her girdle, which, placed around the neck of the beast, made it docile as a lamb. Then he led it about for a time before slaying it.”

“I do not think we will try that,” Lune said dryly. “We need some means to split its breast.”

Jack tapped his lip in thought. “It’s molten within, you say. Hot glass shatters if swiftly cooled. Might that not work here?”

“Do you have a boulder of ice to throw at it?” Bonecruncher growled.

“I can offer you something better.”

That voice came from near the door. When had that ambassador of Nicneven’s joined them? Cerenel made the briefest of bows, shoulders stiff under the disapproving stares around him.
Yes—he used to be a knight of this court. Is that why he comes among us now?

“Your Grace, my lord,” the violet-eyed knight said, turning from Lune to Jack, “what you need is the staff of the Cailleach Bheur.”

After suffering under her touch for days, no one looked happy at the suggestion. The Cailleach
was
winter, though, and for once that might work to their purpose. “Her staff hardens the ground with frost,” Lune murmured, considering. “It would do very well indeed. But we do not have it.”

“I shall get it for you.”

He spoke with perfect confidence, enough to make Bonecruncher snort again. “Nicneven will just hand it over, will she?”

Jack would not have thought a slender elf-knight could glare down a barguest, but Cerenel managed. “I shall get it,” he repeated. “Her Majesty knows my word is good.”

For some reason that made Lune flinch. But the tight line of her jaw softened when Cerenel turned back to her; she even offered him a painful, grateful smile. “So it is. If you can bring us the staff of the Cailleach Bheur, then we shall face our enemy at last.”

Swirling ashes choked the dawn air, giving all the light a sullen red glow, as if cast by the fire. The rising sun was a flat disk through the haze, comfortable to the naked eye, though Lune had precious little attention to spare for it. She had to pick her way carefully across the smoking debris, the embers roasting the soles of her boots until she wondered how Jack could stand it. He kept close by her side, one hand always prepared to steady her elbow, though she had dressed herself once more in the clothes she’d worn in retaking the Onyx Hall.

Not the armor, though. It would do her no good against the Dragon, and make running much, much harder.

Running, they would likely have to do. She had never felt so physically vulnerable in her life. Not even when making her stand at the Stone—perhaps because she had thrown herself into that confrontation before she had time to think. Now, wandering the ruin of her City, she felt the Hall’s power breathing in her flesh. Hers, and Jack’s, and the two of them out here, offering themselves to the Dragon.

Not alone, at least. All around them, slipping like ghosts through the gray air, their companions spread out in search of their enemy. Prey sighted, they would give the cry, and then all would try to harry the beast toward the nearest gate. Fire still raged in the liberties and elsewhere, but on this side of the Fleet it was mostly burnt out. They hoped to make their stand on the near side of the river.

“What sort of sound does one make to call a Dragon?” Jack muttered at her side. “I hear tell there are different calls for cattle, and pigs, and sheep...”

Lune’s hands tightened around the staff. She often enjoyed his levity, but not now. Not with winter itself sending lances of cold through her bones.

The Cailleach’s staff was knotted black wood, cold and hard enough to be mistaken for iron. Nor was it much less unpleasant to Lune: all the effects of the wind were nothing compared to this. Jack could not carry it for her; one touch, and he had dropped it screaming. “I saw my death,” he whispered, eyes raw, and would not tell her what it was.

So Lune had to bear the staff, and with it, a thousand dreams of what her own death might be. One might expect nineteen of twenty to give the Dragon a prominent role, but in truth they were of all kinds, which was almost a comfort. Every time she imagined drowning or being stabbed through the heart, it distracted her from the very real death that might be just moments away.

For as right as Jack was to suggest the two of them as bait, Lune knew very well the risk they embraced. One or both of them might not survive this encounter.

Her own death was not the only one dancing before her eyes.