Midnight Never Come (31 page)

“Consider yourself fortunate, Master Deven.” The line of her jaw was sagging with age, but steel yet underlay it. “What do you know of this pact?”

Deven chose his words with care. “Little to nothing, I fear. Only that on your Majesty’s coronation day, Invidiana claimed her own throne.”

Elizabeth shook her head. “It began well before that.”

The assertion startled him, but he held back his instinctive questions, letting the Queen tell it in her own time.

“She came to me,” Elizabeth said softly, “when I was in the Tower.” Her eyes were focused on something in the distance, and she controlled her horse with unconscious ease. Deven, watching her out of the corner of his eye, saw grimness in her expression. “My sister might have executed me. Then a stranger came, and offered me aid.”

The Queen fell silent. Deven wanted to speak, to tell her that anyone might have made the same choice. Years later, there was still doubt in her, uncertainty about her actions. But he dared not presume to offer her forgiveness.

Elizabeth pressed her lips together, then went on. “She arranged my release from the Tower, and a variety of events that helped secure my accession. I do not know how much of that was her doing. Not all, certainly — even now, she does not have that much control. But some of it was hers. And in exchange, when I was crowned, I aided her. My coronation was hers as well.” The Queen paused. “I did not know that it deposed others. But I would be false if I said that surprised me.”

She hesitated again. At last, Deven prodded her onward. “And since then, your Grace?”

“Since then . . . it has continued. She has helped remove threats to my person, my throne, my people.” Elizabeth’s hands, encased in gray doeskin, tightened on her reins. “And in exchange, she has received concessions from me. Political decisions that suit some purpose of hers. The assistance of — mortals, to manipulate something of importance to her.” Her stumble over the word was barely perceptible.

Deven ventured a reminder. “The man who spoke of this claimed, before he died, that it was causing harm to both sides.”

For the first time since they rode out, Elizabeth turned her head to face him. The strength of her gaze shook him. It was easy to forget, when one saw her laughing with her courtiers, or smiling coquettishly at some outrageous compliment, that she was her father’s daughter. But in that gaze lay all the fabled personality and will of Henry, eighth of that name, King of England. They had stores of rage within them, the Tudors did, and Elizabeth’s was closer to the surface than he had realized.

“I do not know,” Elizabeth said, “what this pact has cost her side. I do not care. She has often manipulated me, managed me, coerced me into positions I would not otherwise have occupied. Even that, I might have endured, if it meant the well-being of my people. But she went too far with our cousin Mary. I do not know how far back her interference extended, but I know this: were it not for that interference, I might never have been forced to sign that order of execution.”

Deven saw, in his mind’s eye, the chess pieces with which Walsingham had led him through the story of the Queen of Scots — and the white queen, standing on her own, caught halfway between the two sides.

“Then tell me the terms of your pact,” he said quietly, “and I will see it ended.”

She turned her gaze back to the landscape ahead, where the ground rose upward in a rocky slope. The men-at-arms were still all around, maintaining a respectful distance, and Deven was glad for them. He could not both navigate this conversation and keep watch for threats. How easy must it be, for fae to conceal themselves among the green?

“ ’Twas simple enough,” the Queen said. “Do you know the London Stone?”

“On Candlewick Street?”

“The same. ’Tis an ancient symbol of the city, and a stone of oaths; the rebel Jack Cade once struck it to declare himself master of London. At the moment I was crowned, she thrust a sword into that stone, to claim her own sovereignty.”

That was most promising; it gave him a physical target to attack. “Will it threaten your own position, if . . . ?”

Elizabeth shook her head. “My throne came to me by politics, and the blessing of a bishop, speaking in God’s name. What she has stolen is mine by right.”

She spoke with certainty, but he had heard her at court, declaring with swaggering confidence that Spain would not dare attempt another invasion, or that some lord or other would never defy her will. She could feign confidence she did not feel. It felt like a sharp rock had lodged in Deven’s throat when he swallowed. Would he help the fae depose Invidiana, only to find his own Queen overthrown?

Elizabeth was willing to risk it, to free herself from the snare that trapped her. His was not to question it.

“If you bring her low,” Elizabeth said in a hard, blazing voice, “then I will reward you well for it. She is a cold thing, and cruel in her pleasure. Princes must often be ruthless; this I knew, before I even ascended to my throne. But she has forced matters too far, more than once. There is no warmth in her, no love. And I despise her for it.”

Deven thought of the Goodemeades — of Rosamund’s story, and the conversation he had with Gertrude — and responded gently. “They tell me she was different once. Before her coronation. When she was still known as Suspiria.”

Elizabeth spat, not caring if the gesture was coarse. “I would not know. I never knew this Suspiria.”

They had ridden on several paces farther before Deven’s hands jerked convulsively on the reins. His gelding short-stepped, then recovered. “Not even when first you met? Not even in the Tower?”

He had drawn level with the Queen again, and she was studying him in wary confusion. “The name she gave me was Invidiana. And I have never known her to show any kindness or human warmth, not since the moment she appeared.”

“-But —” Deven realized belatedly that he was forgetting to use titles, polite address, anything befitting a gentleman speaking to his Queen. “By the story I was told, madam, she was known as Suspiria until the moment of her coronation, and that while she bore that name, she was not so cold and cruel.”

“Your friends are mistaken, or they have lied to you. Although . . .” Elizabeth’s dark eyes went distant, seeing once more into the past. “When I asked her name, she told me ’twas Invidiana. But the manner in which she said it . . .” The Queen focused on him once more. “It might have been the first time she claimed that name.”

Deven was silent, trying to work through the implications of this. His mind felt overfull, too many fragments of information jostling each other, too few of them fitting together.

“I will bear this news to those who work against her,” he said at last. If the Goodemeades had lied to him — trustworthy as they seemed, he had to consider it — then perhaps he could provoke some sign out of them. And if not . . .

If not, then nothing was quite what they had thought.

“You will keep us apprised of your work,” Elizabeth said. The familiarity that had overtaken her during the ride, while she spoke of things he was certain she had divulged to no other, was gone without a trace, and in its place was the Queen of England.

Deven bowed in his saddle. “I will, your Majesty, and with all speed.”

M
EMORY
:
January 31, 1587

T
he chamber was dim and quiet, all those who normally attended within it having been banished to other tasks. Guards still stood outside the door — in times as parlous as these, dismissing them was out of the question — but the woman inside was as alone as she could ever be.

The cosmetics that normally armored her face were gone, exposing the ravages wrought by fifty-three years of fear and anger, care and concern, and the simple burden of life. Her beauty had been an ephemeral thing, gone as her youth faded; what remained was character, that would bow but never break, under even such pressure as she struggled with tonight.

Her eyes shut and her jaw clenched as the fire flickered and she heard a voice speak out from behind her. Unannounced, but not unexpected.

“You know that you must execute her.”

Elizabeth did not ask how her visitor had penetrated the defenses that ringed her chamber. How had it happened the first time? Asking would but waste breath. She gathered her composure, then turned to face the woman who stood on the far side of the room.

Frustrated rage welled within her at the sight. Elaborate gowns, brilliant jewels, and a mask of cosmetics could create the illusion of unchanging beauty, but it was an illusion, nothing more, and one that failed worse with every passing year. The creature that stood before her was truly ageless. Invidiana’s face and figure were as perfect now as they had been in the Tower, untouched by the scarring hand of time.

Elizabeth had many reasons to hate her, but this one was never far from her mind.

“Do not,” she said in frigid reply, “presume to instruct me on what I must do.”

Invidiana glittered, as always, in silver and black gems. “Would you rather be seen as weak? Her guilt cannot be denied —”

“She was
lured into it
!”

The faerie woman met her rage without flinching. “By your own secretary.”

“With aid.” Elizabeth spat the words. No one ever seemed to hear them, on the infrequent occasions that the two queens came face-to-face; she could shout all she wanted. “How much assistance did you provide? How much rope, that my cousin might hang herself? Or perhaps that was too inconvenient; perhaps ’twas simpler to falsify the letters directly. You have done it before, implicating her in her husband’s murder. Had matters gone your way, she would have been dead ere she ever left Scotland.”

The black eyes glimmered with cold amusement. “Or dead in the leaving, save that the nucklavee showed unexpected loyalty. I would the monster had drowned her; ’twould have saved much tedious effort on my part. And then your precious hands would be clean.”

Words hovered behind Elizabeth’s lips, all her customary oaths, swearing by God’s death and his body and countless other religious terms. How fitting it would be, to hurl them now: proof that although Protestant rites might lack the power of Catholic tradition, words of faith yet held some force.

But again, what purpose would it serve? Nothing she said now would save Mary. The Queen of Scots had been proven complicit in a scheme against Elizabeth and England; there was no concealing it. Invidiana had seen to that. Elizabeth’s councillors, her parliament, her people — all wished to see Mary gone. Even James of Scotland had bowed to circumstances. His last letter, sitting open on a table nearby, offered no more trouble than the weak protest that his subjects would think less of him if he made no reprisal for his mother’s execution.

“And what if I will not do it?” Elizabeth said. “ ’Tis plain you wish her gone for your own purposes. What if I refuse you? What if, this once, I refused to play a puppet’s part?”

Invidiana’s lips thinned in icy displeasure. “Would it please you more if I removed my hand from your affairs? Your end would surely then be swift.”

Elizabeth almost told her to do it and be damned. The threats to English sovereignty were manifold — they were at war with Spain, and Leicester had bungled the campaign in the Low Countries — but she refused to believe herself dependent upon the faerie queen for her survival.
She
was Queen of England, by God, and needed no shadowy puppeteer to pull her strings.

Yet she could not deny the strings existed. Some of the demands Invidiana made of her seemed innocuous; some were not. The faerie woman had required no devilish rites, no documents signed in blood, but she had imposed a real cost — if a subtle one. A certain ruthless cast to particular affairs, colder and harder than it would otherwise have been. The persistent reminder of her own mortality, more unbearable because of its contrast with the faerie’s eternal youth. And, in a blending of the personal and political, solitude.

Once, there had been many suitors for her hand. Leicester, Alençon, even the King of Sweden. None without complications of religion or faction, none without the threat of losing her independence as a ruling queen . . . but there might have been happiness with one of them. There might have been hope of marriage.

None of it had come to anything. And that, Elizabeth was certain, she could lay at the feet of her dark twin, the loveless, heartless, solitary faerie Queen.

She did not ordinarily resent the price she had been forced to pay, for security on her throne. What Elizabeth resented was the creature to whom she had been forced to pay it.

“You must execute her,” Invidiana said again. “However you have come to this pass, no other road lies before you.”

True, and inescapable. Elizabeth hated the elfin woman for it.

“Leave me be,” she snarled. Invidiana smiled — beautiful, and ever so faintly mocking — and faded back into the shadows, returning whence she had come.

Alone in her bedchamber, Elizabeth closed her eyes and prayed. On the morrow, she would sign the order, and execute her cousin and fellow Queen.

B
EER
H
OUSE
, S
OUTHWARK
:
May 5, 1590

“The thing to remember,” Rosamund said, “is that she’s not all-knowing or all-powerful.”

The words hardly reassured Lune. All around them the alehouse was bustling, with voices clamoring in half a dozen languages; the river thronged with travelers, merchants, and sailors from all over Europe, and the Beer House on the south bank attracted its fair share. The noise served as cover, but also made her nervous. Who might come upon them, without her ever knowing?

Rosamund clicked her tongue in exasperation. “She cannot have eyes and ears everywhere, my lady. Even if she has somehow trapped his ghost. . . .” The prospect shadowed her face. “I know we haven’t the rose here to protect us, but this will serve just as well. Her attention is bent where ’twill matter, and that is elsewhere.”

The brownie was probably right. The greatest threat they faced here was from uncouth men who targeted them with bawdy jests. Lune and the Goodemeades had made certain they were not followed, and with glamours covering their true appearances, there was nothing to draw Invidiana’s attention here.