Edmond Halley’s calculations that propose comets travel elliptical orbits and that the comet will return in 1759 suggests that the previous problem may not have disappeared. A comet is traditionally often seen as a bad omen: and it so proves here. Facing both the return of the great dragon and the difficulties created by science upon faerie magic may just be too much for Lune and the fae this time.

This would all be well and good, but the memory bits often came after Deven and Lune had themselves discovered those bits of the story. So it's like we get the story of what happened, and then we see it again from a different perspective. The main reason I didn't care for this book was Lune. I thought she was very passive. She spends the entire book in pain, meditating, just to keep the Onyx Court in existence, but never really acting. At the very end she sacrifices her life for something that isn't even the Onyx Court anymore. Lune is the main character of the first three books, and I didn't understand why she was relegated to such a passive role in this last book. Further, I was disappointed by the ending, as it entirely changed the Onyx Court to something else entirely.

The Onyx Court series contains examples of:

In the mid 1600s England stands in peril. Above ground King Charles and Parliament fight for power. Below ground the faerie queen, Lune, struggles against dangerous adversaries. Together with Anthony, her human consort and The Prince of Stone, both hope to find peace for both the human and faerie England. But what will both sides be able to do when London is is suddenly set ablaze by a deadly and magical fire that consumes the city? Sir Antony Ware, an alderman with a seat in the Commons, toes a fine line between Royalists and Puritans, trying to keep his seat long enough to do some good. For it's not just the mortals of London who are affected, but the fae of the Onyx Hall beneath the city feel the pain and upheaval of the world above. I was also a bit distracted by the metaphysics in the book, as it doesn't make sense to me that faeries' souls and bodies are the same thing, and composed of aether. I don't think it makes logical sense, even within the world that Brennan has created. The one novella, Deeds of Men, bridges Midnight and Ashes, and details Deven's efforts to solve a murder and ensure that his position in the Onyx Court is filled upon his death. In Ashes Lie is set within this tumultuous time. Two stories are deftly woven together. The first is the political battles between what passed for Parliament and Charles I, the revolt and reformation of the army into a political force that eventually overthrew and then executed Charles, leading to the Protectorate. The second is the plague which tore through London from the summer of 1665 through the Winter of 1666, and then the great Fire of September, 1666. Antony Ware, a businessman, baronet and politician in London, is also the mortal Prince of the Stone, who sits alongside Queen Lune of the Onyx Court, advising the Court on Human concerns as they affect the fae realm.

In 1666, a Great Fire burned four-fifths of London to the ground. The calamity was caused by a great Dragon, an elemental beast of flame. Incapable of destroying something so powerful, the fae of London banished it to a comet moments before the comet's light disappeared from the sky. Now the calculations of Sir Edmond Halley have predicted its return in 1759. Disclaimer: I happen to know the author of this book. I don't think that this much changes my opinion of the book, and I don't think any of my readers are expecting journalistic standards of objectivity from me anyway, but I feel like I should note it. I really enjoyed this third installment of Marie Brennan's Onyx Court series. Though I love the eighteenth century enough to have wished for a bit more of the vocabulary of the time, I suspect I am pretty much alone in that (I have a weakness for the 'prodigious' idiom of the time) but the prose is clear and there are passages of real beauty. In 1666, the Great London Fire is started by an errant spark from a baker's oven and goes on to completely destroy the old city as well as more beyond its walls. In the Onyx Hall, the Winter Hag breathes the cold wind of death through the palace at the behest of Nicneven. As a great Fire Dragon is born of the ever-increasing flames, so the threat from all sides increases and Lune is put in the untenable position of having to consider the sacrifice of her home, or her throne.This is a book that invites you to slow down and savor. Broken into five acts, each act builds more tension, moving from a relatively leisurely introduction toward a much more focused struggle in the final act. By the end, I had a hard time closing the book, and lost quite a bit of sleep as things came to a climax.

I confess to being a poor historian, but even to my eye it's clear Brennan has done a great deal of research for this book. Every detail is meticulous and precise, evoking not a generic English fantasy setting but a very real and concrete place and time. Brennan blends historical detail with the fantastic so smoothly I barely noticed the seams. Readers looking for romance will not find it here. If In Ashes Lie is a love story, it's a love story between Lune and her kingdom, and between her mortal friends and the city of London. It's a beautiful and touching story, too. It's just not what you may be expecting if you seek another Lune/Deven plotline. This was a sad one, ok now you think omg am I gonna cry? Haha, no, I do not mean SAD, just you know melancholic. The Fae have lived and loved London, but the iron has poisoned Father Thames. The railway is destroying more and more. The Onyx court is dying, iron is everywhere. And I do like the Fae, even if they have their share of rotten eggs too. And the Court is desperately trying to find a way to survive.... Brennan makes the wise decision of stepping a little away from Lune in terms of point-of-view. This enables Brennan to play a few cards close to her chest, plus there’s the fact that Lune has steadily become an emotionally remote character. These books already have a certain “coolness” or “distance” about them, and narrating this one through Lune’s eyes would probably exacerbate that. Instead, we focus primarily on the tomboyish sprite Dame Irrith and on the current Prince of the Stone, Galen St. Clair. Irrith snoops into the doings of the rebels against the Queen and starts to wonder whether some of their theories might be correct. Galen has an unrequited love for the Queen but is being pressured to marry by his father. The two of them eventually become allies and more.The second and third tragedies of that sad century in England were the fire that devastated almost all of London, killing some 13,000 people--and, of course, the resurrection of bubonic plague. These, too, are both topics that also touch upon the present, with western states uncontrollably ablaze amidst an ever mutating, seemingly unstoppable virus. (To date, there has never been a vaccine successful against any coronavirus.) Marie Brennan's understanding of these topics is both perspicuous and perspicacious, and she might even have chosen them for their specific relevance to the present, except that this novel was published in 2009. Call her prescient, then--just to get in all those "p" words.

Overall, the tone is different from Midnight Never Come but Brennen takes that foundation and expands on it focusing in on historical events but also fleshing out on earlier characters and new challenges. It does require you to be paying a bit of attention, especially during the leaps in time but they are all flagged if you take a little bit of time. Set a hundred years after Midnight Never Come in seventeenth century England, book two follows Lune, now queen of the Onyx Court, and Antony Ware, the human who rules at her side as Prince of the Stone. At first, it all seemed to be meandering along without much of a point. There's a tingle of mystery with the mostly-nonsense-but-sometimes-lucid babbling of Tiresias, the fae court's local mortal-turned-nutjob-from-overexposure, but aside from that, the plot itself wasn't particularly evident. That the faerie perspective is more compelling than the mortal one probably should not be a surprise. The Onyx Court is the primary constant throughout the (surprise surprise) Onyx Court series - which in and of itself is an interesting structural feature. Most contemporary fantasies that deal with the world of faerie tend to be either portal or intrusion stories where the focal lens is a human who finds themselves caught up in the magical world. In those stories where a human isn’t our lens, we often see through the eyes of a faery who – for all intents and purposes – tends to be indistinguishable from a super-powered mortal. England flourishes under the hand of its Virgin Queen: Elizabeth, Gloriana, last and most powerful of the Tudor monarchs.This is a very beautiful book. I say that meaning the literal aesthetic. The cover is super pretty, and the idea just appeals to me so much. Faeries and Tudors! This book sounds like it was made for me. And the faeries themselves were pretty cool - twisty and magical and dark and interesting. I loved reading about them! I wanted to know more about the hidden courts and the faeries that lived far from the mortal world. I wanted there to be some more rich world building and for this to be a big, beautiful, sprawling fantasy novel. Unfortunately, we didn't quite get there. The middle of the 17th Century was not kind to England. Charles I Stuart was a poor king; Scotland was in turmoil; Ireland threatened to revolt; Civil War tore the country to shreds over (mostly) religious differences, leading to the execution of Charles and the fleeing of his son to the Continent; The Cromwellian Protectorate led the country further into ruin; the Plague killed thousands in 1665/6; wars with the Dutch waxed and waned; and then the Great Fire of 1666 destroyed 80% of "inner" London (that portion within the old Roman walls) as well as a large chunk to the west of the wall.