Midnight Never Come by Marie Brennan

overlooked in her fright.
    Moving slowly, so as not to startle him, Lune approached Tiresias’s back. He would always have been a slender man, even had he lived as a normal human, but life among the fae had made him insubstantial, wraithlike. She wondered how much longer he would last. Mortals could survive a hundred years and more among the fae — but not in the Onyx Hall. Not under Invidiana.
    He was fingering the edge of a tapestry, peering at it as if he saw something other than the flooded shores of lost Lyonesse. Lune said, “You spoke a name, bade me find someone.”
    One pale finger traced a line of stitchery, moonlight shining down upon a submerged tower. “Someone erred, and thus it sank. Is that not what you believe? But no — the errors came after. Because they misunderstood.”
    “Lyonesse is ages gone,” Lune replied, with tired patience. She might not have even been there, for all the attention he paid to her. “The name, Tiresias. Who was it you bade me find? Francis Merriman?”
    He turned and fixed his sapphire gaze on her. The pupils of his eyes were tiny, as if he stared into a bright light; then they expanded, until the blue all but vanished. “Who is he?”
    The innocence of the question infuriated her, and in her distraction, she let him slip past. But he did not go far, halting in the center of the room, reaching for some imagined shape in the air before him. Lune let her breath out slowly. Francis Merriman: a mortal name. A courtier? A likely chance, given the political games Invidiana played. No one Lune knew of, but they came and went so quickly.
    “Where can I find him?” she asked, trying to keep her voice gentle. “Where did you see him? In a dream?”
    Tiresias shook his head violently, hands scrabbling through his black hair, disarranging it. “I do not dream. I do not dream. Please, do not ask me to dream.”
    Lune could imagine the nightmares Invidiana sent him for her own entertainment. “I will do nothing to you. But why should I seek him?”
    “He knows.” The words came out in a hoarse whisper. “What she did.”
    Her heart picked up its pace. Secrets — they were worth more than gold. Lune tried to think who Tiresias might mean. “She. One of the ladies? Or —” Her breath caught. “Invidiana?”
    Bitter, mocking laughter greeted the suggestion. “No. Not Invidiana; that is not the point. Have you not been listening?”
    Lune swallowed the desire to tell him she would start listening when he said something of comprehensible substance. Staring at the seer’s tense face, she tried a different tack. “I will search for this Francis Merriman. But if I should find him, what then?”
    Slowly, one muscle at a time, his body eased, until his hands hung limp at his sides. When he spoke at last, his voice was so clear she thought for a heartbeat that he was in one of his rare lucid periods — -before she listened to his words. “Stand still, you ever-moving spheres of Heaven. . . .” A painful smile curved his lips. “Time has stopped. Frozen, cold, no heart’s blood to quicken it to life once more. I told you, we are all in Hell.”
    Perhaps there had never been any substance in it to begin with. Lune might be chasing an illusion, pinning too much hope on the ramblings of a madman. Not everything he said came from a vision.
    But it was the one possibility anyone had offered her, and the only one she was likely to receive. Her best hope otherwise was to bargain her bread for information that might be of aid. There were plenty of courtiers who would have use for it, playing their games in the world above.
    When she made her bargains, she would ask after this Francis Merriman. But secretly, so she did not betray her hand to the Queen. Surprise might count for a great deal.
    “You should go,” she murmured, and the seer nodded absently, as if he had forgotten where he was, and why. He turned away, and when the door closed behind him, Lune returned to her table and