A Star Shall Fall by Marie Brennan Read Free Book Online

the hawthorn crate.
    Inside that shielding wood lay a small box of black iron, unadorned save for a flame-marked shield on its lid. It had been cold the first time he touched it, sixteen years ago. Now gloves barely protected his hands from the heat. The prison into which they had forced the spirit of the Great Fire of London could not hold it forever. The strange enchantments of the iron were weakening under its power.
    He prayed—silently, so the fae would not hear—that this would work. Even if Lune sacrificed her other hand to trap the Dragon once more, it would leave them in hopeless straits. They could not kill the beast, and it seemed they could not imprison it, either. Exile was their only remaining option.
    Jack lifted the box free and climbed up to join Lune next to the eyepiece. “Let us hope,” she said, “that Isaac Newton is as great a mind as you say.”
    “He is,” Jack promised her, and opened the box.
    A radiance like the heart of the sun blazed forth, into the waiting eyepiece. An ordinary telescope gathered up the faint light of space and brought it in small to the human eye; this one, adapted from the reflective design of Professor Newton, took the intense light of the Dragon’s spirit and sent it out into the void. That unbearable blaze struck the flawless craftsmanship of the mirrors and ricocheted outward, in an unerring line, straight to the bearded star Flamsteed had been observing these many months.
    Jack could hear nothing past the silent roar of the Dragon. Lune might have been screaming; so might he. But then the light was gone, and the box crumbled to rust in his hands, blistered even beneath the leather of his gloves.
    And Lune swung the London Sword, cutting the ropes that held the telescope in position. It fell to the ground, severing the last link between the Dragon and this place.
    In the aftermath, the only sound was the steady wind off the Thames.
    Lune whispered, “It worked.”
    Jack looked upward. He thought he could discern something in the sky, that had not been visible before: the departing comet, glowing unnaturally bright. Then it faded, and was lost to his eye.
    The Dragon of the Fire was gone.
    The Onyx Hall, London: October 1, 1757
    When she first came to the Onyx Hall, Irrith had found the subterranean palace an incomprehensible maze, through which she could follow only a few memorized paths.
    In the century since, that opinion had not changed much.
    But there was one chamber to which she could find her way blindfolded, for she’d fallen in love with it the first time she stepped through one of its arching entrances. There were many small gardens tucked into odd corners of the Onyx Hall; this, the night garden, was the grandest by far. Here the Walbrook, London’s long-forgotten stream, wound through grassy plots and shadowing trees. Here flowers bloomed, in changeless defiance of the seasons above, blossoms drawn from both the mortal world and the deeper reaches of Faerie. It wasn’t pure nature—with its fountains and charming pathways, the night garden was more like a poet’s notion of the countryside—but Irrith loved it nonetheless.
    And so when she left her chamber after a fitful rest, it was to the night garden that her disconsolate steps took her.
    She glanced up as she entered the green, breathing space, to see the faerie lights twinkling in artificial night above. Sometimes they shaped themselves into patterns that reflected the current mood of the court, but at present they drifted aimlessly, forming no identifiable shape.
    Irrith sighed and walked on. Then she saw something ahead that lifted her spirit, and provoked her into a run.
    A pavilion stood near one end of the night garden, surrounded by a wide swath of grass, and a figure moved within that should be—was—utterly out of place in the airless stone galleries of the Onyx Hall. Hooves clopped a startled tattoo against the polished boards of the pavilion floor as Irrith vaulted the ramp, and