In Ashes Lie (13 page)

“Where is the King and his Cavaliers?”

Holding on to his smile for his life, Antony thought,
They are gone to prepare for war.

SUNDAY SEPTEMBER 2, 1666

The Battle for the River

T
he baker’s house burns like a candle, a pillar of flame in the narrow, night-dark street. The people of Pudding Lane have awakened, roused from their beds by the muffled peal of the parish bell, signaling fire. The leather buckets have been fetched from the church, their contents flung in useless doses: water, ale, even urine or sand—anything that might quench the blaze.

But onward it burns, stubbornly fed by a strange wind blowing from the east. Sparks dance in the breeze, a graceful courante in the dark, until one adventures westward, to the Star Inn on Fish Street Hill. The galleried inn, backing onto the baker’s own property, keeps hay in its yard.

A single spark is enough.

Men shout in the street, their neighbors’ rest be damned. Anyone still sleeping
ought
to be woken. While those nearest take the precaution of hurrying their possessions out-of-doors, north or south to safety, the more charitable bellow for the fire-hooks, to pull the adjoining buildings down before they too can catch.

But the landlords who own those buildings are not here. Those who live on Pudding Lane are poorer sorts, renting from their betters. And so, fearing the consequences should he destroy such property, the Lord Mayor of London, hauled from his bed to answer this threat, dismisses it before going back home.

“Pish—a woman might piss it out.”

London has survived fires before.

The breath of the Cailleach Bheur howled through the stone galleries, the high-vaulting latticework of the chamber ceilings, leaving no corner in peace. Three days it had blown, above ground and below, the latest assault from the Gyre-Carling of Fife—and the worst. Spies could be driven out; warriors could be fought. The Cailleach was unstoppable.

And the fae of the Onyx Court were wild-eyed and hollow-cheeked beneath her touch. For the wind brought more than the Blue Hag’s icy chill: ghosting on its wings were voices, inaudible whispers of winter’s promise. Age. Mortality. Death.

Small wonder we are going mad.

Lune shivered inside her fur-lined cloak. Years of struggle against Nicneven—decades, since that first attempt to burn the alder tree—and all she had to show for it was war.

No. This was not war. Lune had fought wars, on her journey to this point. This was something different: not clean confrontation in battle, nor even the underhand knife-work of spying and betrayal. The Cailleach could kill them all, without ever exposing herself to attack. What Nicneven had done to gain such aid, Lune could not even guess; the Blue Hag was something older and more powerful than any of them. But after all her attempts and all her failures, the Unseely Queen of Fife had finally found something powerful enough to truly threaten the Onyx Court.

Such fears only played into the Cailleach’s power. Lune gritted her teeth and bent over the rough map she had constructed from the objects to hand. Lady Amadea’s fan served as a model for London, its sweeping edge representing the City wall, its outside sticks marking the line of the river in the south. On the left sat a silver tobacco box—St. Paul’s Cathedral—and on the right, a jet brooch, for the Tower of London. A long pin fixed the fan to the table below, in approximation of the London Stone.

She tapped her gloved finger on the fan’s top edge. “The Cailleach Bheur is the Hag of Winter; her power therefore comes from the north. But here we are protected; the wall guards us not just above, but also below. It blocks entry into our realm. And so she veers east.”

“Why not west?” Sir Peregrin Thorne asked. The Captain of the Onyx Guard did not have too much dignity to stuff his hands beneath his arms, warming his fingers and hiding their tremble. Lune had sent him above earlier in the night; the wind blew outside as well, but in the mortal realm it became nothing more than air. That brief respite was already failing him, though, and his haunted eyes flicked restlessly over the map. “West is death—also the Cailleach’s domain.”

“Because of this.” Lune’s finger moved southeast, to the jet brooch. “The Tower is our weak point. The entrance to our realm lies in the keep at the center, true—but you must consider the fortress as a whole. With the City wall joining its eastern defenses, that entrance may be said to lie on a border. And that renders it vulnerable.”

“You
have
closed that pit, yes?”

The question came from Irrith, and so Lune forgave its insolent lack of deference. The slender sprite had done her many a good service these past years, and had been rewarded for it with knighthood, but she was ill-practiced in her courtesies; the court of her Berkshire home was a far rougher one, with less ceremony, and Irrith had not been among Lune’s people long. Besides, she was more ignorant of mortality than any of them, and held up poorly under the insidious terrors of the wind.

Not that Lune herself fared much better. She suffered not just on her own behalf, but that of the faerie palace, which grew colder and more brittle with every passing hour. “Of course,” she said, struggling not to betray the frayed state of her own nerves.
How do mortals
live
like this—knowing every moment brings death one step closer?
“It is closed, and as sealed as I can make it—but that is not enough.”

“What about—” Irrith persisted, but the question ended in a yelp as the door to the council chamber slammed open. They could not keep doors closed anymore; everything blew open, sooner or later, scaring everyone out of their wits.

But this time the movement had a human cause. Jack Ellin hauled at the door’s edge, struggling futilely to close it, before swearing and giving up. Lune’s councillors flinched away from the tall man as he came up to the table; the presence of a mortal echoed the wind’s promises. Lune had to hold herself still as he reached out and laid one hand on her cheek.

The gesture was dispassionate, a physician’s touch. They had discovered this by accident, when a chance brush of his fingers lifted some of the darkness from Lune’s spirit. For Jack Ellin, as for any mortal, the promises of the Cailleach were inevitable nature. He bore without thinking a weight that threatened to crush Lune. And thanks to the bond that connected them, she could share that weight with him, and gain some measure of clarity for herself.

She allowed herself a grateful look but no smile as the Prince of the Stone dropped his hand, leaving her to stand on her own. It was a temporary reprieve, nothing more. But it gave her hope.

Then Jack said, in a deceptively light tone, “Madam—were you aware that your roof is on fire?”

Lune’s attention went upward before she could stop it, accompanied by the shameful thought that she might almost welcome the Onyx Hall bursting into flame, if only to end the unbearable cold. But the stone was frost-rimed and black.

“Pudding Lane,” Jack said, kindly ignoring her foolish impulse. “And now Fish Street Hill as well.”

Warmth. Light. She had to work to remind herself that he was speaking of destruction, not salvation. “Fires happen, Jack.” And she had an abundance of other matters to concern her.

“So you will let it burn?”

His expression said everything his voice left unspoken. The wry eyebrows had risen in surprise, and a cynical twist shaped his lips.
He came here expecting us to help.

As he had every right to. And Lune had an obligation to answer the Prince’s call.

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.

Her own words echoed in her ears, spoken a bare year before. This was the very purpose for which she had chosen Jack; the physician was no courtier, but he was devoted to the safety and well-being of London. She could hardly ask him to champion that cause, then ignore him when he did so. Even
without
an oath to bind her.

The part of her mind that cowered like a mouse before a hawk protested shrilly that it was not fear hindering her, but cold calculation; what help could she spare Jack, with the Cailleach howling death in their ears?

A great deal.
Lune had already confiscated all the bread in the Onyx Hall, once she realized her people were likely to flee before the onslaught. That was what Nicneven wanted, why she had sent the Blue Hag against them: to empty the palace, leaving it unguarded against a physical assault. But Lune could give some of her people a respite, and send them to aid Jack.

She extended her senses upward, feeling the heat scorching the stone and earth of those two streets. No comfort there; her whole body shuddered, caught between fire and ice. But now she had the shape of it, and the direction.

“Billingsgate is clear,” she said. “Take any half-dozen you feel will be useful—any you can trust not to leave. More if you need them. You have the bread.” Casting her eye around the table, she settled on Irrith. The Berkshire sprite did not know London well at all, but much more of this wind and she would break. “Go with the Prince. Be our messenger, in case he needs aught else.”

Irrith bowed to her and to Jack. He smiled reassuringly at the sprite, but did not reach out; without the tie that bound him to Lune, Prince to Queen, his touch did more harm than good. Amadea had screamed when he tried before, weeping that she felt the decay in his flesh.

“I’ll do what I can,” he promised, before hurrying out the door. “Perhaps we can turn this to our advantage against the Hag.”

Jack Ellin was no graybeard doctor, but he had worked through fever and plague, in the face of fell death itself. He knew the value of a comforting lie. Belief in a hopeful future, no matter how unfounded, could give a patient strength, and Lune needed strength right now.

But the truth was that he had no idea how to turn the heat above to combat the cold below. Jack was a curious man, always hungry for knowledge; when it became apparent that the unnatural wind was the breath of the Cailleach Bheur, he began asking questions about the Scottish hag. His curiosity went mostly unfed: the London fae knew hardly anything of her, and were too distracted by unfamiliar thoughts of death. It gave him little to work with.

I’m more inclined to take it the other way,
he admitted ruefully as he hoisted himself out of a shaft into the tiny courtyard of a Billingsgate house. If he could strangle the fire with cold, he would; conflagrations were terrifying things, in a City built so largely of timber. And with the summer so dry...

Up here, however, the wind bore no particular chill, for all that it blew from the east, against the habit of the region.
All those fine gentlemen in their Covent Garden houses will be smelling the City’s stink,
he thought, blinking in the morning twilight. It did not amuse him as much as he hoped.

Behind him, his troop of faerie helpers followed him out of the entrance. Jack hoped they would do some good; he still was not entirely certain what fae were capable of. Surely their arts would have use, though. And he had bypassed the courtiers, seeking out Lune’s humbler subjects; the goblins and hobs he chose were tougher and more used to physical labor. Fighting fires was hard, grinding, filthy physical labor indeed—even, he imagined, with magic to help.

Three goblins, two hobs, and one sprite, all covered by concealing glamours. They did not have to look hard to spot the fire; its sullen glow made a false dawn above the rooftops to the northwest, not far away at all. “To the river,” Jack told his companions, after a moment’s consideration.

“We can’t go that way?” Mungle demanded, pointing toward the smoke. Judging by the filth that caked his body, the bogle had not gone within arm’s-length of water for longer than Jack had been alive. “My lord,” he added, as an afterthought.

“Not quickly,” Jack answered the goblin. “And I’m not ‘my lord’ here, nor Prince of the Stone. We shall have enough to do without someone asking when I was ennobled, and whether I can help them at court. As to your question: the fire is tending south and west; we’ll be more use on the other side. But the streets are packed with people moving their belongings out of harm’s way, so we shall get a wherry and come at it from the river.”

With only a little grumbling—Mungle wanted a fight, and did not seem to understand that his opponent was not one to be met with fists—they sought out the nearest river stair. Plenty of wherry-men floated within hailing distance; most were gaping at the smoke, and the rest were rowing passengers who gaped on their behalf. Jack got a boat large enough for them all, and gave instructions for their man to take them through the races of the bridge, landing them on the other side.

Where they would do...something.
Firefighting was not what I expected, when I joined a faerie court.
But it would be a fine opportunity to see what fae were capable of.

The tide was low, and at slack water, so the wherry ventured forth into the river. The oarsman had to thread his way through the other boats, though, so their progress was slow. And before they reached the stone piers of the bridge, a sudden flare of light brought all their heads around as one.

With a roar like a terrible beast, one of the many warehouses lining the river’s bank burst into orange and gold. Heat seared their faces, and Irrith flinched hard enough to almost go over the gunwale. The wherryman, a member of the London class most renowned for its command of profanity, put all his foul words to use, staring at the sudden expansion of the fire.