A Star Shall Fall

Well, if he didn’t like her, she might as well go directly to the question she really wanted answered. Pointing at the door with the sundial on it, Irrith said, “So what’s that?”

Galen cleared his throat and said, “Er, yes. Dame Irrith—I don’t know what news reaches you out in the Vale, but perhaps you recall the measures taken a few years ago, to correct the calendar?” Irrith nodded. Berkshire mortals were still confused by it, checking their almanacs to see which fairs and festivals were being held on the same date as before, and which ones on the same day, regardless of the calendar. “Parliament took great pains to make sure everyone understood that this was merely a change of style, to correct for the inaccuracies that had accumulated through the centuries, and that although September second, 1752, would be followed by September fourteenth, they would not lose any genuine time.”

Wilhas snickered quietly into his beard.

Grinning a little himself, Galen said, “That… wasn’t entirely true.”

Irrith’s eyes went to the heavy door, with the sundial nailed to its surface. “So that…”

“Is the Calendar Room,” the Prince said. “It contains within it the eleven days skipped over when the adjustment occurred. All of the eleven days: those lost by every man, woman, and child in the whole of Great Britain.”

The sprite hadn’t the faintest clue how many mortals dwelt in the kingdom, but even her most inadequate guess was staggering. “How much time is in there?”

“The von das Tickens could tell you,” Galen said. “I don’t bother to keep count. More than the Onyx Court is ever likely to use, even given the way the room operates. Once the door is closed, it won’t open again until eleven days later—from the perspective of one standing outside. Within the chamber, however, it’s a different matter. If you spend one day inside, you will come out eleven days later. If you spend fourteen years inside, you will still come out eleven days later.”

When Irrith stared at him, he shrugged, with an embarrassed grin. “No, I can’t tell you how it works. This was made before I came to the Onyx Hall. You can ask Wilhas if you like, but I fear the explanation would make your head spin.”

The dwarf answered with his own cheerful shrug. “Ve could go inside and shut the door. I am sure that vith enough time, I could make her understand.”

By the time Irrith realised she was moving, she’d already drifted several paces toward the door. “May—may I see?”

Galen bowed and swung the door open. One half-eager, half-reluctant step at a time, Irrith rounded the obstacle of his body and looked into the room.

And saw the clock.

Movement and stillness: somehow both at once. Irrith knew without question that the pendulum was swinging in a broad arc across the floor, though its motion was so slow as to be imperceptible. She stared at it, unblinking, incapable of blinking, because the stone describing that arc was too large to look away from, inescapable, oppressive in its weight, as if she faced a rough-hewn chunk of Time itself—

Then something else filled her vision, because Galen had taken her by the shoulders and wrenched her around, putting the clock behind her. His face was so young—his whole life less than an eyeblink in the great duration of the universe, less than the thought of an eyeblink. Mortal. Ephemeral. That was how Irrith felt, and if she was ephemeral, then what did that make him?

The Prince was talking. Words. She focused on them. “—strikes most people like that, at first,” he was saying. “You become accustomed, eventually. As much as anyone can. I cannot say I have. Not entirely.”

Words. Tongue, and lips, and air. “That weight—”

“Twenty-five tons, or so they tell me. But it isn’t the physical burden you feel. The clock ticks once a day, and when it does… it’s like hearing the heartbeat of the Earth itself.”

She’d heard it, when they opened the door and the puck came out. Irrith might be a faerie, and immortal, but the Earth was far older than she. No wonder that sight, that sound, made her feel like a mayfly.

“Now you understand one of the limitations of the room,” Galen said ruefully. “Even faeries don’t find it comfortable. Mortals…” His eyes darkened with something deeper than fear. “But it gives us more time, and so we use it.”

His hands were still on her shoulders. Irrith suspected Galen was, in the ordinary way of things, a gentleman much concerned with propriety, but he seemed to have forgotten such things in the urgency of distracting her from the clock. The two points of warmth, seeping through her coat and shirt, were comforting against the chill that had sunk into her bones.

It would be easy to stay turned away, to go out through the pillars and never look back. But that would mean letting her fear win. And if this boy of a Prince could face the clock, then so could she.

Irrith disengaged gently, squared her shoulders, and turned back to the doorway.