In Ashes Lie (57 page)

“Do you suppose that might kill it?”

Wrapped up in her dismal thoughts, Lune did not understand him at first.
Concentrate. You cannot afford to be distracted.
Following Jack’s nod, she glanced down at the staff. The Cailleach was powerful—perhaps even more so than the Dragon—but only the weapon was here, not the Hag herself. “I do not know.”

He shrugged, as if it did not especially matter. “If it does, splendid—we shall go and get drunk. If not, we still have this.” Jack patted the empty box cradled in his arms. He carried it as if the iron sides were as fragile as the shell of a blown egg, as if too much pressure from his hands might shatter their one real hope. Lune had spent bread with a prodigal hand, armoring herself and everyone else coming above until their coffers were all but bankrupt, but she remembered what happened the last time she touched iron.

So instead I have the weapon, which I scarcely know how to use.

The gloves on her hands did no good at all. The burned flesh on the left ached from the cold, and the unhealed wound in her shoulder throbbed in response. But the staff was hope, and so she clung to it.

Through the drifting ashes, she heard the whispers. “Do you see it?” “No.” “Perhaps it’s moved on...”

It could be anywhere. The Onyx Guard had glimpsed it near Newgate, but the Dragon might have gone across the City since then. It could be at the Stone. Or in the liberties, where the fire still raged. Or planning some assault against the Tower.

In this, the City she knew so well, Lune was lost. The streets had vanished beneath fallen timbers and tile; only occasionally did one stumble across a clear patch of cobbles, even that dusted with a layer of cinders and ash. But up ahead she saw the remnants of an arch across the street, and beyond it the corner where the wall turned north from its eastward path. They must be on Foster Lane—such as it was—and the blackened, smoldering wreck on the right was the Goldsmiths’ Hall, where generations of the Ware family had learned their craft, and generations more, members by patrimony, had exercised their influence on London life. Lune’s throat closed at the sight.
I have tried to fulfill my promise—but without much success.

The charred timbers shifted, sending sparks into the air.

Jack halted her with one hand on her arm. The tottering chimneys might yet crumble into their path. But by the tightening of his fingers, he realized at the same instant she did that the debris was not collapsing.

It was rising.

The black, searing bulk of the Dragon rose from its lair.

Liquid gold and silver, the lost treasures of the company hall, dripped from its sides like blood. The jagged head swung around, skin cracking where it bent, exposing the fiery substance beneath. Hellish wind blasted them both as the beast exhaled, and then it opened its eyes.

Pinned beneath that gaze like mice beneath a hawk, neither of them found the voice to speak. They needed no words: the instant their muscles could respond, they fled.

But the flight Lune had imagined was nothing like what they faced. There were no streets to run down; instead they staggered across a treacherous plain, twisting their ankles with every third stride. Lune planted the staff for footing, and the ground cracked beneath the sudden frost. Jack clutched her shoulder to save his own balance. They swerved around a chimney, then heard the bricks crash down behind them a moment later. Bereft of all their landmarks and paths, Jack and Lune sought the gate by instinct, and behind them the Dragon gained.

Shouts in the choking air. The others had noticed their flight, and harried the beast’s flanks, as if it needed encouragement to follow. A scream: someone perhaps had come too close. Lune dared not turn to look. They’d passed Aldersgate in their terror, but the unburned houses lay too near outside that wall; Newgate would be safer.

If they could reach it in time.

The shattered bulk stood up ahead, all the prisoners of its jail fled. Gasping for want of clean air, Lune flung herself at it; Jack coughed out something that might have been an oath. They passed through the shadow of its arch, and she thought,
We made it.

A snarl came from above.

The Dragon coiled atop the scorched and crumbling structure of the gate. Its long neck thrust downward, maw wide to reveal the inferno within. Lune screamed, and then Jack had her sleeve and jerked her to the side. The serrate teeth snapped shut where they had been.

They had meant to go down Snow Hill, and make their stand at Holborn Bridge over the Fleet, where Blacktooth Meg might still lurk. But in their panic, they were running north, along the line of the wall, while the Dragon’s bulk thundered down from the gate, shaking the earth with its landing. Up ahead—far too close—sat an unbroken line of houses, preserved with terrible effort from the calamity that even now pursued Lune and Jack.

She dragged him to a halt in the embers. “We cannot go farther! It must be here!”

Jack spun to face the oncoming worm. Lune wrapped her aching hands around the staff and did the same. But not quickly enough, for the Dragon was upon them, and a claw of black heat snapped tight around her body.

Jack leapt without thinking, grabbing hold of Lune’s leg. The iron box clanked into the ashes, and for a moment Queen and Prince alike swung in the air, dangling from the Dragon’s claw. Then something ripped and they fell. Jack slammed his hip badly against the box, but worse, he heard the staff clatter away.

He inhaled, caught a lungful of dust, and spasmed in a cough. Only instinct made him roll, and an instant later something crushed the ground where he had been. Blind and choking, he scrabbled away, repeating to himself,
This is not the death I saw. This is not the death I saw.
But was the vision he’d seen when he touched the Cailleach’s staff prophecy, or merely one possibility out of many?

Through his own coughing he heard other voices. They were not alone. As his streaming eyes cleared, though, he saw that no one could get past the Dragon’s lashing tail; he and Lune were the sole prey for its claws and teeth.
Lucky us.

His back hit some fragment of wall, and Jack reached for a hold that could help him to his feet. But before he found anything, his body locked in new paralysis.

Above him, the seething face of the Dragon rose.

It was a horror beyond fire, beyond plague, beyond war.
Those
did not have eyes that transfixed a man, that blazed down upon him and hungered for the power his flesh bore. Jack could not breathe; his lungs convulsed, unable to draw air past the constriction in his throat.

Then came a scream unlike any he had heard. Lune—the elegant faerie Queen of the Onyx Court, the silver statue who played politics like chess but knew nothing of battle—had the staff in her hands once more, and she swung it full-armed at the Dragon, fury taking the place of skill. “I shall
not
lose two!”

The Dragon hissed when the staff struck its leg, not from its throat, but from the steaming flesh itself. The Cailleach’s winter chill blackened the surface and stiffened the joint. But it didn’t slow the beast’s other limbs; the undamaged claw slapped Lune down, sending her sprawling across the ground, before seizing her once more in an unbreakable grip.

The staff, knocked from her hands, skidded within Jack’s reach.

For one horrific instant, his arms would not move. They refused, knowing the pain that awaited them. But Lune screamed from above, and it turned out that loyalty trumped self-preservation.

Clenching his jaw so hard a tooth split, he grabbed the staff of the Cailleach Bheur.

I know how I will die.

Roaring, Jack thrust the end of the staff at the underbelly of the Dragon, at the place where the heart might be if this were an ordinary creature. The impact made no mark on his numb, insensate hands, but the force traveled through his arms and into his spine, staggering him back a step.

And this time the Dragon screamed.

A crack opened through the chest and belly of the Dragon, like stone contracting beneath a harder frost than the world had ever known. At the very root of that fissure burned a tiny sun, light and heat beyond the ability of the human eye to bear. The Dragon’s heart was there for the taking—but it would annihilate mortal flesh at a touch.

He had seen his death twice, and this was not it.

A shadow eclipsed that terrible light. Lune plunged her left hand into the fissure, sinking her arm in up to the shoulder, and when she pulled out again, the sun was in her hand.

The box!

Jack dove into the ashes. He felt but didn’t hear his body strike the ground; he couldn’t tell whether all the world had gone to clamor or silence, in the dreadful inaudible sound of the Dragon’s agonized bellow.
The box, where is the box—Lune will have no hand left at all—

His fingers stubbed themselves against the iron, then found a corner and pulled.

More ashes flew to choke him as he lurched to his feet, snatching the lid open as he went. Above them, the black mass of the Dragon writhed. Wounded, but not dead. It could live without its heart. He ducked as a claw snatched blindly above his head, and ran for the Queen.

Lune blazed as if the sun had lent the moon all its glory. No time for transmutation now. Jack shoved the iron prison at her.
Christ Almighty, I can see the bones of her hand.
They spasmed just above the black opening, as if Lune could not make her fingers release. Her face was a rictus of agony.

Forgive me—

Jack drove the iron edge against her wrist.

Blackness swallowed the sun. So great was the light of the heart, Jack thought for a moment the light in the sky had gone out. But he didn’t need his eyes to feel the metal in his hands, and he slammed the lid shut.

Silence.

His ears popped with it. Squinting in the now dim light, Jack realized that nothing stirred up the dust about them. He could see the wall, and the unburnt houses nearby, and the fae regaining their feet some distance away, but where the black bulk of the Dragon had been, there was nothing. Just a swirl of ash, now settling once more to the ground.

The iron was warm in his hands. The shield on top, he saw, bore a tongue of flame.

Lune swayed. He almost dropped the box again, but caught himself in time to set it down with hasty care. Her hand still hovered in the air; where blistered flesh had been, now there was nothing more than a blackened claw, and a charred ring of leather that was all that remained of the cuff of her glove. Her eyes were wide and staring, as if she could not believe he stood before her.

Jack managed a smile, though when he spoke he discovered he must have been screaming a good deal, for his voice almost did not answer. “You needn’t have feared,” he said. “This is not how I die.”

Then they both sagged down into the ashes, and waited for the others to come help them home.

She woke so soon only because she must, because she had yet to face the Gyre-Carling.

Lune, who scarcely needed sleep at all, could have remained in her bed for a month. She was still half-blind from the light of the Dragon’s heart, her eyes adjusting only slowly to the dimness of her home, and as for her hand...

I thought it ruined
before.
Perhaps I shall ask Nuada of Temair who made his silver hand.

But had Jack touched the heart, he would be dead. She had feared it too much to say; the thought of losing another Prince so soon after the last was more than she could bear. Jack would not tell her what death he saw in the black wooden staff. She had been so certain it was in battle with the Dragon.

Michael Deven. Antony Ware. Jack Ellin would follow them someday—but not yet.

Amadea helped her sit upright, supporting her left side where her hand no longer could. Once Lune was well propped with pillows, the Lady Chamberlain handed her a cup filled to the brim with the Goodemeades’ best brew. “We have taken a cup to the Prince as well,” Amadea told her. “For when he wakes.”

“Wake him now.” Lune’s voice was a rasping ghost of its normal quality. “He must be at my side when we face Nicneven.”

With help, she struggled into clothing, and pulled a new glove over her hand. It was difficult, the fingers now incapable of bending. Lune saw the delicate bones had fused together, before she concealed the black skeleton from her sight. The glove sat poorly, without skin and flesh to fill it out. But it would have to do.

Sun and Moon. We must return the Cailleach’s staff.

She had not asked how Cerenel got it. She was afraid to know. But for the use they had of it, she would pay almost any price; it had saved them all. Irrith brought a report as Lune dressed, with news of fires everywhere beaten down; some few still burned here and there, but the great danger was past. Tomorrow the King would address the people in Moor Fields, and commence the work of rebuilding his great City.

She scarce believed it could be done, despite all Jack’s bold words. To hear of the destruction was one thing, to feel its progress above her another; to walk the blowing ashes in person was yet another entirely. When the breeze cleared gaps in the dust, she had looked from Aldersgate down to the river, past the shattered ruin of St. Paul’s. And the wasteland to either side stretched farther than she could see.

Enough. Nicneven waits.

As did Jack Ellin. Lune met him outside her bedchamber. The man was haggard, but hale; she wondered how much mead his attendant had poured down his throat. Well, when it wore off, he could sleep for a year, if he wished. “Shall we?” he asked, and offered her his arm. Lune wrapped the paralyzed claw of her hand around it, and together they went above, into the ashes of London.

The Goodemeades had offered Rose House for the parley, perhaps in a clever scheme to soften Nicneven with hospitality while they awaited the outcome of the battle. Certainly the sisters did not seem hostages when Lune and Jack joined them—though it seemed, by Gertrude’s petulance, that she had not convinced the Gyre-Carling to accept any food. The two Queens sat in comfortable chairs, facing one another, both attended by guards, with Jack at Lune’s side, and Cerenel at Nicneven’s.