Blood and Iron (11 page)

Despite the deliberate footsteps on the bank, Seeker did not turn her head. The aroma of salt sea air would have given her the newcomer's identity a moment before his hand fell on her neck, even if she hadn't seen him coming from the shadows.

Her hair was twisted up with a plastic clip, but a few strands escaped. Whiskey twined them around his fingers. She lifted her head to regard him, clad in his ragged white.

“Seduction now, little treachery?”

He smiled, showing even white teeth. “There is an art to it, mistress. An art I can teach you. Besides, I'd hate to lose my touch. Someday you'll be gone, and I mean to be in at the kill.” He didn't move his hand, and she didn't quite pull away. “In the meantime, let me tend your aches. The stronger you are, the less likely you are to die at anyone's hand but mine.”

“A nice justification. Why would I let you put your hands around my throat?”

“Because I'll offer you my oath that you will come to no harm this hour if it be in my power to prevent it.”

Seeker chewed her lip a moment before she bowed her head. Whiskey slid both thumbs the length of her neck. “Does it hurt?”

“Yes. Keep going.”

He was strong, thumbnails thick as scallop shells and the dark pads of his fingers soft as crushed velvet. A thick silver band encircled each of his thumbs: horseshoes, transformed by the Weyland Smith's magic and his own.

The network of old pain beneath her skin loosened ever so slowly as his hands slid under the collar of her knotted blouse. He unclipped her hair and combed his fingers through it, pressing her temples. His fingers snarled on a braid, and he disentangled them carefully. “Unbind me, Seeker. Better to have me gone than always at your back waiting for the weakness.”

She sighed against the rope. “And I could trust you then?”

He chuckled, a sound like a nicker. She felt his breath on her hair, scented of seaweed and new-mown grass. “Mistress, I would go into the ocean and never trouble you again. I would promise to do your bidding three times without fail, in exchange for my freedom. I'd help you with this task you're given.”

She hung silent, swaying.

“Why came you to this place, mistress?”

“I went to school here. It looked different then.”

“You could show me the college. I think you loved it here.”

Keith,
she thought. “I do not trust you, little treachery.”

“I could make it worth your while in so many ways.” His hands were gentle, his voice very close to her ear. “Surely, you don't think I borrowed all those lovely young girls only to
drown
them. Horses are . . . very symbolic, and I know many tricks.”

“I'm sure you know tricks I've never even heard of. You're all about trickery, aren't you?” She laughed bitterly. His hands slid along her arms.

“Yes. And I've heard you're fond of shapeshifters too.”

She yanked free, spinning to place the heavy rope between them. “Whiskey.”

“Aye, mistress?”

“You're not to mention that individual in my presence again. Are we understood?”

His eyes darkened, a storm-shadowed ocean. “Aye, mistress. ”

“Go, then. Find Kadiska, and play your little tricks on her. Keep her away from the Merlin for seven days. I'm sure you have the
tricks
to do it.”

“Aye. Mistress.”

She waved him away, and he went.

Once Whiskey departed, the smaller spirits of dale and streambed peered tentatively out of ferns and willow roots. They scampered free of their hiding places, some of them limping, some raw-skinned and welted. Seeker kicked off the raised, bare-scuffed bank and let her feet swing over chortling water, closing her eyes again to submerge herself in shadows.

It seemed strange to her, strange as if fated, that the course of time and this hunt had brought her back to the very doorstep where she'd met Keith: a venerable state university, modern brick and steel buildings interspersed with gray granite and hewn red stone, to a campus dotted with trees as old as the young American nation. There were new buildings since the seventies, but the soul of the place remained. The shadows teemed with haunts.

She had Carel's scent now, so it was the work of moments to find the Merlin's shadow among many. She picked up a trace of Kadiska, also watching, and pressed a smile against the rough-spun manila rope. Old magics and petty specters saturated the campus and its environs. Eerie things moved through Connecticut hills flame-and-ash-kissed with autumn, but Seeker knew them for what they were, touched them and let them pass. Something antique and dark—a cracked, leonine form—inhabited the woods east of the campus' hilltop graveyard. Seeker felt as well the ghosts of colicked horses haunting the stables a half-mile farther north, beyond the curve of a great, smooth-scraped teardrop of a hill, legacy of a long-forgotten glacier. Sprites and boggans explored the steam tunnels under the School of Engineering and the ether-scented hallways of the old chemistry building with its precipitous lecture halls. Spirits of chalk and dust, spirits of the greenhouses scented of loam and chlorophyll. And through it, a silver wire twisted through a tapestry woven in russet and bronze, the presence of the Merlin.

Seeker drew her shadows around her and, half a mile distant, watched Dr. Carel Bierce, Merlin, Dragonborn, stand before her dusty green chalkboard and teach a fresh-man lecture on geology, pointing out the classroom window to the curved silhouette of that hill. Seeker slid
otherwise
carefully, afraid the Merlin or Kadiska would sense her presence. But the elder Seeker showed no concern, watching boldly, though Seeker saw the Merlin's attention drift more than once to the shadows.

Seeker sighed and settled herself to relearn the wonders of pyroxene and potassium feldspar.
Dammit, Mist. Why couldn't you just tell me what you wanted me to do? Riddles within riddles, and oh.
And then her eyes opened wide and she tilted her head back, looking at a sky of thin-sliced sapphire set in the beaten gold and copper of the leaves.
And since when is the werewolf running errands for the Mother of Dragons? I should have thought of that right away.

Seeker squinted into the brightness of the sky, most of her awareness stretched out
otherwise
. The Merlin wore a crimson silk blouse with a black velvet vest picked out in bugle beads, and Seeker watched her through the dance of shadows as she raised her left arm and marked a big, arcing curve on the chalkboard. The wooden frame rattled as she got her chalk-stained fingers under it and heaved upward, revealing a clean board behind.
Scientist, musician, dancer, wizard.

Seeker's shadow swayed on the surface of the stream over which she swung, a suggestion of soft-feathered wings melting into a lashing tail and then just the rippled shape of a woman.
Why is Keith running errands for dragons?

The waves wet Keith's paws as he trotted along their ragged margin, and swept his footprints into the sea. He could not have outrun the dreams and the dragons that pursued him, and he frankly didn't try; he just paced beside the cold, cold sea and felt its spray soak his coat and hiss between the stones.

Something pale, elevated on a wet stone, caught his eye; Keith slowed to an amble. He knew the silhouette and the scent, even over the salt-rich, half-rotten scent of the sea. He stood upright, wolf melding into man, stones that were nothing to callused pads sharp on bare feet.

The woman in the white gown watched him amusedly, seeming impervious to the wind that pinned the cloth against her wiry body and raised her coarse gray hair like a ragged banner. He wasn't surprised. He didn't feel the cold, either. “Fionnghuala.”

“Keith,” she said, and slithered off her rocky perch with a smile and an outstretched hand, unfazed by his nakedness. He caught her hand, a steadying grasp she did not need, and squeezed her long fingers lightly. Her skin was translucent as silk in the moonlight, and the bones underneath delicate as reed flutes. She winced when her bare feet touched the stones. “Welcome home. Where have you been?”

“Did you walk all this way in bare feet, Nuala?” An odd fey-seeming woman: a mortal who clambered about like a child, who bled red when she scraped her shins or elbows on the stones. The name was Irish—and ancient—and the accent was American, and she lived in a little cottage up the clifftop and was rarely at home.

“You walked farther on your bare feet, wolfling,” she answered, leaning on his arm.

“My feet are suited to it.” He winced as he stubbed his toe on a stone. “When I'm a wolf, in any case. How is it that you never feel the cold, Nuala?”

“My heart froze long ago,” she answered, giving him a smile that said it was a lie. Her voice was a little too casual when she leaned close and continued, “When my husband died. Have you spoken with your father yet?”

“Yes,” Keith said, a hand on the old woman's waist to lift her over a ridge of jagged stones. “He says he's dying.”

“He's right. Does this mean you'll be putting some thought into marrying?”

“Nuala!” He glanced down quickly, caught the twinkle in her eye as she regained her feet. “Not you too.”

“I merely meant that I have a granddaughter or three.” That roguish grin, and so roguishly delivered. “And some likely nieces, come to think of it.”

“How do you come to know so much about the pack?”

“Who do I have to have tea with but Morag, and your father when he's at home? It's a lonely coast, Keith.” She gestured across the ocean, a dark ring glinting on her slender finger. They came to the foot of the stairs hewn in the cliff face, and Keith fell in behind her as she began to climb. “What are you going to do, young master? About your father dying?”

“Not so young anymore,” he answered. “I've never been much of a Prince.”

“Neither was Hal.” She didn't turn back to see his expression, but climbed, holding her hair out of her eyes with her hand. “I understand that turned out all right. In the end.”

Keith shrugged, letting his hand trail along the stones they climbed beside. “My sympathy was always with Falstaff. ”

“He did sort of get the thin end of the stick, didn't he?”

“My father thinks there's something I can do to reconcile with the mother of my son.”

The old woman stepped aside at the top, and then paused, her hands on her hips as she drew a deep breath. “Then you'd have the issue of the heir sorted out, at least—”

“It's not quite so simple as that, Nuala.”

She chuckled, low and rich. “No. It never is, is it? You
do
know Fyodor means to challenge you.”

“I did not know until recently that there was anything to challenge for,” Keith replied, taking her arm again. She patted his hand with paper-soft fingers. “Fyodor Stephanovich Danilov. A Russian wolf, here?”

“Is that any stranger than an American woman?” She held the door to her cottage open for him.

Keith shook his head and stepped back. “No,” he said. “I don't suppose it is. Are you really an American?”

“I became one. You should meet him,” Fionnghuala said, through the crack in the closing door. “Fyodor, I mean. While Eoghan is still alive. Because you're going to have to kill him when Eoghan dies.”

“Nuala—” Keith said, but the door was already shut, and with a finality that precluded knocking. He shivered and collapsed into the warm familiarity of his wolf form.

He had forgotten to ask her about his dreams.

Three days later, Seeker contacted the Merlin again. A park bench rested under a big magnolia tree by the rear door of the geology building, and Seeker spread her lunch out there and waited, entertaining herself with comics in the student paper. They were not significantly more puerile than the ones she'd read as an undergraduate, thirty years before. There hadn't been a truck serving gyros on campus then, however, or anyplace to get cold vinegary dolmas.

The Merlin almost danced past her, cobalt and ruby-glass beads clattering with every balanced stride, but Seeker looked up and caught the other woman's eye. “I'm not going to believe this is an accident,” the Merlin said, but she stopped on the walk and turned back around, half-unwilling. A canvas bag drooped heavily from her hand; she was obviously thinking of swinging it at Seeker's head.

“No,” Seeker said. “I'm stalking you. You could come and eat with me. I have too much food. And I'll try to explain. ”

“I know better than to eat fairy food.”

“It's from the roach coach,” Seeker replied. She held a scrap of paper out in grease-stained fingers, sucking yogurt and cucumber off her other thumb. “There's the receipt.”

The Merlin glanced at it, chuckled, and sat—stiffly—on the corner of the bench. “I shouldn't be talking to you.”

Seeker nodded. “But the curiosity is driving you crazy, isn't it? That's part of what makes you what you are. Driven to learn things. Master them. Are you a risk taker, Carel?”

“Most geologists like adventure. We spend a good deal of time peering into volcanoes and spelunking in dark caverns. ” The Merlin smiled, cautious. “How did you find me? Web search?”

“Magic,” Seeker answered. “Do you want proof?”

The Merlin, whose ripe-berry mouth was half-open to demand just that, simply nodded. “My second sight—if that's what it is. It would be so easy to explain it away. Borderline schizophrenia. Hallucinations. Synesthesia.”

“And you have.”

“All part of justifying my existence.”