Midnight Never Come (24 page)

His blue eyes might have been shuttered against a storm, so little could she read out of them. Walsingham’s service had taught him well — but he had never used such defenses against her before. Well, she could not blame him. “So there you have it, Master Deven,” Lune said to him, hearing her own voice as if it belonged to a stranger. “There are faeries at the mortal court. Though most of them come in secret, and do not disguise themselves as I did.”

A muscle worked in his jaw. When Deven spoke, it sounded almost nothing like his natural voice, either. “So ’twas you all along. I suspected Dee.”

Gertrude said in confusion, “She was what all along?”

“The hidden player,” Lune said, still looking at Deven. “The secret influence on English politics that his master Walsingham has begun to suspect.”

Bitterness twisted the corner of his mouth. “You were under my eyes, the entire time.”

Lune matched him with her own sour laugh. “’Tis a night for such things, it seems. You are both right and wrong, Master Deven. I was a lead to your hidden player — not the player herself. There are two Queens in England. You serve one; you seek the other.”

Her words broke through the stoic facade he had constructed while they waited, revealing startlement beneath. “
Two
Queens . . .”

“Aye,” Rosamund said. “And that may be the answer to the question you asked us, Lady Lune, before we were interrupted.”

It was enough to distract her from Deven. “What?”

Gertrude had scurried off to the far end of the room while they spoke. Something bumped the back of Lune’s farthingale; she looked down to see the brownie pushing a stool almost as tall as she was. “If we’re going to have this conversation,” Gertrude said, with great firmness, “then we will sit while we do so. I’ve been on my feet all day, baking and cleaning, and you two look about done in.”

“I have not said I will stay,” Deven said, with another glance over his shoulder to the sealed top of the staircase.

Lune smiled ironically at him. “But you will. You want answers — you and your master.”

“Walsingham is
dead.
” In the time it took him to say that, two strides ate up the distance between them and Deven was in her face, his anger beating at her like the heat from the fire. “I suppose I have you to thank for that.”

Her knees gave out; she dropped without grace onto the stool Gertrude had put behind her. “-He — what? Dead? When?”

“Do not pretend to be innocent,” he spat. “You knew he was looking for you, for evidence of your Queen’s hand. He was a threat, and now he’s dead. I may be the world’s greatest fool — you certainly played me as such — but not so great a fool as that.”

Rosamund’s hand closed over the silk of his right sleeve, drawing his fingers back from the sword hilt they had unconsciously sought. “Master Deven,” the brownie said. The man did not look down at her. The uneven shadows of firelight turned his face monstrous, warping the clean lines of his features. “Lady Lune was imprisoned when your master died. She could not have killed him.”

“Then she gave the order for it to be done.”

Lune shook her head. She could not hold Deven’s gaze; she felt naked, exposed, confronting him while wearing her true face. He would not have glared at Anne with such anger and hate. “I did not. But if he’s dead . . . how?”

“Illness,” Deven said. “Or so it was made to seem.”

Walsingham had often been sick. He might have died by natural means. Or not. “My task,” she said, staring fixedly at the battered feathers of her skirt, “was to watch over Walsingham, to know what he was about. And, if I could, to find a means of influencing him.”

Deven met this with flat disgust. “Me.”

“He is — was — an astute man,” Lune said, dodging Deven’s implicit question. She could not explain her choice, not now. “I believe my Queen feared he was coming near the truth. You may be right to blame me, Master Deven, for I told Vidar — a fae lord — what the Principal Secretary was about. After I was taken from Oatlands, he may have taken steps to remove that threat. But I never ordered it.”

Gertrude had Deven’s other sleeve now, and the gentle but insistent tugging from the brownies got him to back up a step, so that he no longer towered over Lune on the stool. “Why?” Deven asked at last. Some of the anger had gone from his voice, replaced by bewilderment. “Why should a faerie Queen care what happens in Ireland, or what became of Mary Stewart?”

“If you will sit,” Gertrude said, returning with patient determination to her point of a moment before, “we may be able to answer that question.”

When they were all seated, with mugs of mead in their hands — the brownies’ family name, Deven realized, was more than mere words — the rose-flowered woman, Rosamund, began to speak.

“My lady,” she said, bobbing her curly head at Lune. “How long have you been at the Onyx Court?”

Lune had straightened the remnants of her feathered gown and smoothed her silver hair, but her bare feet were still an incongruous note, the slender arches freckled with mud. “A long time,” she said. “Not so long as Vidar, I suppose, but Lady Nianna and Lady Carline are more recently come than I. Let me see — Y Law Carreg was the ambassador from the Tylwyth Teg then. . . .”

It reminded Deven powerfully of his early days at Elizabeth’s court. A flood of names unknown to him, currents of alliance and tension he could not read. Somehow it made the notion more real, that there truly was another court in England.

When Lune’s recitation wound down, Rosamund said, “And how long has Invidiana been on the throne?”

The elfin woman blinked in astonishment. “What manner of question is that?” she said. “An age and a day; I do not know. We are not mortals, to come and go in measured time.” And indeed, Deven realized, in all her explanation of her tenure at court, she had not once named a date or span of years.

The sisters looked at each other, and Gertrude nodded. Rosamund said, with simple precision, “Invidiana became the Queen of faerie England on the fifteenth day of January, in the mortal year fifteen hundred and fifty-nine.”

Lune stared at her, then laughed in disbelief. “Impossible. That is scarcely thirty years! I myself have been at the Onyx Court longer than that.”

“Have you?” Gertrude said, over the top of her mead.

The elfin woman’s lips parted, at a loss for words. Deven had been quiet since they sat down, but now he spoke. “That is the day Elizabeth was crowned Queen.”

“Just so,” Rosamund answered.

Now he was included in Lune’s disbelieving stare. “That is not possible. I
remember
—”

“Most people do,” Gertrude said. “Not specific memories, tied to specific mortal years — no, you’re quite right, we do not measure time so closely. Perhaps if we did, more fae would notice the change. The Onyx Court as such has only existed for thirty-one years, perhaps a bit longer, depending on how one considers it. Vidar has been there longer. But all your memories of Invidiana’s reign do not go further back than that. You just believe they do, and forget what came before.”

Rosamund nodded. “My sister and I are some of the only ones who remember what came before. Francis was another. She let him remember on purpose, I believe, and we were with him when it happened; he kept us from forgetting. Of the others who know, every last one now rides with the Wild Hunt.”

Lune’s silver eyes widened, and she set her mug down with careful hands. “They claim to be kings.”

“And they were,” Gertrude confirmed. “Kings of faerie England, one corner of it or another. Until Elizabeth became Queen, and Invidiana with her. In one day — one moment — she deposed them all.”

Deven had not forgotten where the conversation began. “But why? This cannot be usual for your kind.” It was not usual for
his
kind, to be sitting in a hidden cellar of a faerie house, speaking with two brownies and an elf. His mead sat untouched on the table before him; he knew better than to drink it. “Why the connection?”

“We are creatures of magic,” Rosamund said, as casually as if she were reminding him they were English. “And in its own way, a coronation ceremony
is
magic; it makes a king — or a queen — out of an ordinary mortal. Gertrude and I have always assumed Invidiana took advantage of that ritual to establish her own power.”

Lune’s voice came from his right, unsteady and faint. “But she did more than that, didn’t she? Because there was a pact.”

“ ‘Pact?’ ” The word chilled Deven. “What do you mean?”

For a moment, he thought he perceived both sorrow and horror in her expression. “Do you recall me asking after a mortal named Francis Merriman?” Deven nodded warily. “He was under my eyes, as I was under yours. He . . . died tonight. He told me of a pact formed by Invidiana, my Queen, that he said was harming mortals and fae alike. And he begged me to break it.”

Deven said, “But a pact . . .”

“Must be known to both parties,” Rosamund finished for him. “Any fae with an ounce of political sense knows that Invidiana regularly interferes with the mortal court, and uses that court to control her own people. And from time to time a mortal learns that he or she has dealings with fae — usually someone enough in thrall that they will not betray it. But if what Francis said is correct . . . then someone on the other side knows precisely what is going on.”

The words were trembling in Deven’s throat. He let them out one by one, fearing what they meant. “The Principal Secretary . . . he told me of a hidden player. And he believed that player did — not often, but at times — have direct access to her Majesty.”

He missed their reactions; he could not bring himself to look up from his clenched fists. The suggestion was incredible, even coming from his own mouth. That Elizabeth might know of faeries — not simply know of them, but traffic with them. . . .

“I believe it,” Lune whispered. “Indeed, it makes more sense than I like.”

“But
why
?” Frustrated fear and confusion boiled out of Deven. “Why should such a pact be formed? What would Elizabeth stand to gain?”

An ironic smile touched Lune’s thin, sculpted lips. “The keeping of her throne. We have worked hard to ensure it, at Invidiana’s command. The Queen of Scots you have already named; Invidiana took great care to remove her as a threat. Likewise with other political complications. And the Armada . . .”

Her sentence trailed off, but Gertrude finished it, quite cheerfully. “You have Lady Lune to thank for those storms that kept the Spanish from our shores.”

The bottom dropped out of Deven’s stomach. Lune said, “I negotiated the treaty only. I have no power to summon storms myself.”

He desperately floundered his way back to politics, away from magic. “And your Queen gained her own throne in return.”

The black feathers he’d collected along the way had fallen from his hand at some point after he came downstairs. Lune had the broken tip of one in her fingers, and with it was tracing invisible patterns on the tabletop, her gaze unfocused. “More than that,” she said, distant with thought. “Elizabeth is a Protestant.”

Rosamund nodded. “Whereas Mary Tudor and Mary Stewart were both Catholics.”

“What means that to you? Surely you cannot be Christian.”

“Indeed, we are not,” Lune said. “But Christianity can be a weapon against us — as you yourself have seen.” Nor had Deven forgotten; he would use it again, if necessary. “Catholics have rites against us — prayers, exorcisms, and the like.”

“As does the Church of England. And many puritan-minded folk call your kind all devils; surely that cannot be to your advantage.”

“But the puritans are few in number, and the Church of England is a new-formed thing, which few follow with any ardor. ’Tis a compromise, designed to offend as few as possible as little as possible, and it has not existed long enough for its rites to acquire true power. The Book of Common Prayer is an empty litany to most people, form without the passionate substance of faith.” Lune laid the feather tip down on the table and turned her attention to him. “This might change, in years to come. But for now, the ascendancy of your Protestant Queen is a boon to us.”

He could taste his pulse, so hard was his heart beating. The chessboard in his mind rearranged itself, pieces of new colors adding themselves to the fray. Walsingham had surely never dreamed of this. And when Beale heard . . .

If
Beale heard.

In personal beliefs, Walsingham had been a Protestant reformer, a “puritan” as their opponents called them; he would have loved to see the Church of England stripped of its many remaining papist trappings. But Walsingham was also a political realist, who knew well that any attempt at sweeping reformation would provoke rebellion Elizabeth could not survive. Beale, on the other hand, was outspoken about his beliefs, and often agitated for puritan causes at court.

Should Beale ever hear that Elizabeth, the great compromiser of religion, had formed a pact with a
faerie queen
—

England was already at war with Catholic powers. She could not fight another one within her own borders.

Deven looked from Rosamund, to Gertrude, to Lune. “You said this Francis Merriman of yours begged you to break the pact.”

Lune nodded. “He said it was a mistake, that both sides had suffered for it.” Her hesitation was difficult to read; the silver eyes were alien to him. “I do not know the effects of this pact, but I know Invidiana. I can imagine why he wanted me to break it.”

“Do you intend to do so?”

The question hung in the air. This deep underground, there was no sound except their breathing, and the soft crackling of the fire. The Goodemeade sisters had their lips pressed together in matching expressions; both of them were watching Lune, whose gaze lay on the broken feather tip before her.

Deven had known Anne Montrose — or thought he had. This silver-haired faerie woman, he did not know at all. He would have given a great deal to hear her thoughts just then.

“I do not know how to,” Lune said, very controlled.

“That is not what I asked. I do not know the arrangements of your court, but two things I can presume: first, that your Queen would not want you to interfere with this matter, and second, that you are out of favor with her. Else you would not be here, barefoot and in hiding, with her soldiers hunting you out of the city. So will you defy her? Will you try to break this pact?”