In Ashes Lie (28 page)

For he had woken in a narrow alley between two houses, both of them alight. When Jack made it to the dubious safety of the street, he found that much of Lombard was in flames, its defenders fled. The signs marking the houses of the wealthy burnt like witches on their pyres: the Golden Fleece, the Fox, the White Hart. Jack might have been in a painting of Judgment Day, showing the fate of worldly riches.

A fate that would soon be his, if he didn’t move. Fear and the occasional gust of cooler air helped him gain his feet, and he staggered at a half-run toward the untouched part of the street. How had he come to be in that alley? His searching fingers found a lump on his head. Attacked? No—he had fallen, he remembered his knees giving out...

Despite the fire all around, he found himself shivering. Plague-high fever gripped his body; he had just enough wit left to recognize that. His vision swam. Exhaustion from the heat—Craven was right, he overreached himself. To the point of collapse. He had to reach a fire-post—Cripplegate was nearest—take some rest, away from the battle. He hadn’t slept the previous night, and unconsciousness didn’t count.

A flicker of movement. A slender body arrowed through the smoke, ghostlike and low. Jack recognized Lune’s hound by its red ears. A faerie hound, here in the City, and undisguised; and judging by its behavior, looking for him.

The dog ran a swift circuit around the Prince. Turning to follow its path, Jack almost collapsed again.
I’m delirious. Or dead, and the hound has come to take me to Hell.
Then it was gone, leaving him sure it had never been there at all.

“My lord!” The cry came from ahead. That, he did not imagine; a lithe figure darted his way, shouting his fae title for all the world to hear. Irrith made a strange-looking boy, but she could hardly run about as a girl, and God in Heaven, the hound was leading her.

Can’t even think straight.
Jack tried to clear his mind, and the effort distracted him from his feet. He would have measured his length on the cobbles if Irrith hadn’t caught him.

“Where have you
been
?” the sprite demanded, still shouting, as if she were not six inches from his ear. “I’ve been searching—”

The fever wracked his whole body in a shudder.
More than exhaustion. I cannot have the plague, can I?
The thought terrified him. But surely he would have noticed the other signs—would he not? Some other illness, perhaps, though few came on so quickly...

“Jack!” His name brought him back to his senses. Irrith gripped him by the jaw, forcing him to look at her. “You have to come. It may already be too late.”

“Too late?” Barely even a whisper. How long had he lain there, while the Fire drew ever closer?

“It’s the Queen,” Irrith said. “She needs you.
Now.
”

The well in Threadneedle Street was mobbed, walled in by carts and constantly in use by the men fighting the fire; Jack and Irrith had to fight their way to Ketton Street instead, and the entrance there. The cold hit him like a hammer as he passed below, and for the first time he grasped some measure of its horror for the fae. The Cailleach’s merest touch reminded him how close he’d come to death, and it set off a paroxysm of shivering that nearly dropped him. “No
time
for that!” Irrith insisted, dragging him along bodily. Now they were once more within the Hag’s reach, she avoided touching his skin, but she was no less effective for that. “It’s already been too long—I couldn’t find you; if it weren’t for the Queen’s hound—”

“Lune,” Jack managed, through his chattering teeth. “What?”

“I don’t know. But she told me to get you.”

The sprite pulled him into the great presence chamber. Jack guessed where they were going even before he saw the throne knocked from its place; Cannon Street had fallen to the Fire hours ago. And now that he turned his thoughts to the London Stone—

“Up!”
Irrith screamed at him. Ice seared his cheek with cold; he’d collapsed to the floor.
Not a fever. Not from illness.
It was Lune. They were bound to one another, through the Stone, and though she held back everything she could to protect his fragile mortality, it spilled over. Even as the Dragon forced itself downward, it also was draining her, draining the Onyx Hall itself, feeding on the power it found there, and her strength to battle it was fading fast.

Irrith didn’t have to pull him up. Jack sought Lune as unerringly as the hound sought him—and what he found stopped him dead on the threshold.

The very air crackled and spat sparks. Her hair floated in a radiant nimbus about her body, drifting on the heated currents, its silver burning gold. Flames danced along the hem of her skirts, up the panes of her sleeves. He could not approach within two steps; the inferno she contained drove him back.

“Lune,” he whispered, and her head snapped up.

The silver eyes were molten flame, windows to the fire within. Any mortal creature would have been annihilated by the power she held; even immortal flesh could not withstand it forever. “Jack,” she answered him, and her mouth might have been the entrance to a forge, with Hell’s coals inside.

He almost prayed, and choked it down in time.

“The power,” she said, her voice cracking and spitting. Each gust of air tried to drive him back, out of the alcove containing the Stone. He couldn’t even see her hand, buried in incandescent light surrounding the rock above. “The Dragon’s. In me. It must... be sent...elsewhere.”

God Almighty,
yes.
Before it destroyed her. Jack didn’t let himself consider the possibility that he was already too late for that.

But where? Not the City above; that was where it
came
from. He didn’t think they could force the power into the areas already consumed, and if they tried, it might just explode outward to the parts still untouched. And with the Tower so close—they hadn’t yet cleared all the gunpowder out. That
would
destroy the City.

Nowhere that people lived. The Thames? The river’s spirit was already exhausted. Throwing the power there could well boil all the waters away, and once again it would make their situation worse, rather than better.

He wished it were possible to fling the Fire’s heat all the way to the sea, where English ships still battled the Dutch, ignorant of the disaster at home. But even if he could, he would not; the Dutch didn’t deserve to be obliterated without warning, simply for the crime of contending with the English over shipping.

Lune cried out, and the air blazed white. The tendons stood out in her neck as she clenched her jaw and fought it down. The very sight hurt Jack, his own fevered body aching in response.

“Hurry,” Irrith breathed, from where she crouched by his feet.

Think!
Jack pressed his hands against his head, as if they could hold his mind together through the delirium that crippled it. Fire. Heat. Destruction. There was no safe outlet for such a thing.

But fire is more than that.

The fever carried him onward. Fire. Promethean, illuminative. Generative. Fire was the spark of life, as well as the immolation of death.
There is something there, I know it—

If we could just transmute it.

Jack had never been more than a brief dabbler in alchemy. And this was no place nor time for arcane experiments with
prima materia
and alembics; he needed something simpler. Some way to transform the fire in Lune to a safer form.

He couldn’t even come near her. If he touched her, he might well go up in flames on the spot.

But he had only the one idea, and doubted he had time to think of another. The tips of Lune’s hair were smoldering. It was either try his idea and die, or stand around a moment longer and die.

“I hope this works,” Jack muttered, and leapt up onto the platform with Lune.

 

Fire went out of Lune in a rush, draining away with terrifying speed to someone else, then reflecting back into her like the sudden inflow of the tide. As if lightning-struck, her body went rigid.

Sun and Moon—

Passion the likes of which Lune had not known for decades flared through her body, making her gasp. Pain receded, and in its wake came desire.

Her skin ached with it, flooding all her senses. No lover had woken her so strongly, not since Michael Deven had died. Lune wept, remembering the treasured hands, lost to her forever. Her sense of self threatened to dissolve into the drowning wave of grief. So easy to let go, to release herself into oblivion...and that was what the Cailleach and the Dragon wanted her to do. To die. To end at last the long immortality of her existence, and let herself be destroyed.

But no. Forced down into the core of her soul by the twin assaults, she found a cool stillness there, free from fire and the Hag’s wintry cold.
This is who I am.
Child of the moon, timeless and serene. She lost that serenity so easily now, caught up in politics, imitating humans so fervently in their intrigues. But she was more than that—more than just spying and plotting and passing the time in frivolous pursuits.

Leslic’s Ascendants were right. Fae
had
once been more, but those who dwelt in the cracks of the mortal world forgot it in their fascination with humans. For this one eternal moment, Lune was as she had been.

Then, rising with newfound strength, she surfaced to find herself answered by the brief, bright heat of another. Not the Fire: a mortal flicker. A lively mind, an intellect driven by curiosity and compassion, the desire to gain knowledge and then turn it to useful ends.
This is who he is.
Sun to her Moon. Opposite, but not opposed. Alchemical complements, joined into a single, transcendent whole, burning with the fire of life instead of death.

Thought vanished into ecstasy that went beyond mere flesh.

They came to their senses once more to find the power transformed, obedient to their shaping wills. Still too strong, too much for safety; it would crush them if they held on. It had to go somewhere else.

Together, they reached out into their second body. The Onyx Hall, frozen under the cold of the Cailleach Bheur. Most parts lay empty, but there—in the amphitheater, crouching together on the white sand, the withering remnants of their court.

Gently,
Lune whispered, and she and Jack breathed life into the fae.

Heads rose from their exhausted droops. Eyes brightened. Shoulders straightened. Slowly, carefully, the Queen and the Prince filled their people with life-giving fire, armoring them against the Cailleach’s chill. A glow spread through the amphitheater, casting sharp-edged shadows from the stone seats. The sand baked as if warmed by the sun it had not seen for centuries. Still haggard, but with newfound strength, the fae of the Onyx Court rose to their feet, ready to fight for their home.

For the Dragon’s power was all stolen. From the flames’ humble origins in Thomas Farynor’s bakery to the birth of the Dragon in the mighty conflagration of the wharves, the Fire was composed of stolen London, timber and plaster rendered into flame. Now that essence, safely transmuted, brought the faerie folk of the City alive—and ready to face their enemy above.

The inferno that would scour the Onyx Hall to its farthest corners had vanished, but the Dragon was still there, draining power from the palace to feed its raging flames. The Hall was a fathomless well, from which it had drunk only the first drops. Already it was stronger.

Lune had not been able to close the portal against it, for the Stone did not answer to faerie touch alone. But now Jack’s hand joined hers on the rough surface, and together they gathered the last of the fire, that they had kept for themselves.

Not here,
they said, and sealed the London Stone, leaving the Dragon to roar its frustration in the street above.

 

Sensation returned to Lune’s flesh, and for the first time in who knew how long, it was all her own.

The cool stillness in her heart was fading, that perfect sense of who she was. Not gone—but she had made her choice, ages past, to forgo what she had been, what she might still be if she left the mortal world behind, instead of dwelling in this place. She made that choice when she first came to London, and again when she became Queen; she made it every day she remained here, living an imitation of mortal life.

It was not a choice Lune regretted. And the time had come to return.

Her eyes blinked open, and she found herself staring at Jack’s ear.

The Prince of the Stone startled and pulled back from the kiss. His free arm was still around her waist; the platform beneath the Stone was small enough that they could barely fit, otherwise. “I,” he said, and stopped as if he had no idea what he was going to say. “Er.”

The memory of passion still warmed Lune’s body, the incandescent pleasure that had inundated them both. It was a strange thing, a catalyst to transmute the Dragon’s power from death to life, but now the purpose for which it had been created was done.
Do I desire him still?

No. What they had shared—the power they had tamed—did not constrain her heart. Lune no more loved the man before her now than she had yesterday. But she would carry the remembrance of that transforming fire for ages to come.

As would he, she suspected. He was actually
blushing.
Jack disentangled his arm and stepped back, not meeting her eyes. Lune caught his sleeve with her own free hand and said, “You saved my life. You have nothing to apologize for.”

Jack met her gaze sheepishly—a look that flashed to instant concern as she brought her other hand down.

The skin of Lune’s palm and fingers was blistered and charred. Her hand had cramped into the position it held on the Stone, but she felt no pain; she felt nothing at all, as Jack took it in his own, cradling it with a physician’s delicacy. The flesh might have belonged to another.