Blood and Iron (46 page)

“And?” I knew what Robin would tell me before he shaped the words. I saw their bright eyes, their laughing grins. Human, all of them, in deference to the waning moon—but there was no way any of them could be mistaken for anything but wolves.

“He brought the pack.”

Chapter Twenty-two

Clean and garbed, I sat upright in a carven-backed chair while Puck wound a strand of silver-gray pearls through my plait. He stroked the last strand into place and placed a kiss on the top of my head. "You're worn out,” he said. “Those are some nasty bruises.”

“I bet you have a few of your own,” I answered. He helped me cover them with makeup and glamourie, and dusted my shoulders with perfumed powder. “Planning to wrap me up in a bow?”

“I think not,” he said soberly. “My lady, I think I know what you're planning.”

“Good, because I don't.” I placed my hands on the warm, weighty arms of the chair and pushed myself to my feet. Fortunately or not, the injured knee was on the same side as the broken toe. I had one good foot for standing on. The gown Robin had chosen wasn't mine; it was green and silver, with heavy panels of lace and brocade as soft as brushed cotton. Elsewhere, Keith's conversation with our son continued mostly futile, and predictable. Hope had not glanced away from her window.

The breath I drew tasted cold and chill.
I could go now,
I thought,
and sit on the throne.
With the thought came the conviction, and a distant sort of fear. “Robin,” I said, making my face a mask, “Find K—my lord husband for me, please? I believe he will be in the Prince's chamber. And have him meet me in the throne room.”

“Yes, my lady,” he answered, and I garbed myself in a placid smile and took myself before the court.

The hallways seemed different. No, not the hallways. The very stone of the flags and walls itself seemed . . . more solid, and yet more translucent. The stones hushed my footsteps instead of ringing with them, and yet the sun from without shone through them, golden as the walls. Torches guttered and cast dancing shadows here and there, a confusion of greater and lesser lights, for there was really no darkness in any corner now. The moving air through the corridors was heavy with the scents of lily and rose, the rot-sweet aroma of honeysuckle and jasmine, the lighter crispness of an early-summer day. There was an electric smell too, as if a thunderstorm crackled just over the horizon.

Hope.
Morgan must still be holding her in check. I wondered how long she could manage. I pushed open the carving-gnarled doors to the Mebd's throne room and entered across the azurite-and-malachite tesserae, admitting of no limp for all it pained me. Here my bootheels clicked softly, and that same breeze ruffled the velvet draped alongside the windows, letting shafts of sun dapple the floor—and move across the bier laid in the center of the hall, and the figures gathered around it, low voices whispering across the echoing hall as little more than the sound of the surf. The whole gave the impression of a cool forest glade: the pillars between arched windows like tree trunks, the frescoed vaults overhead and the sunlight flickering through the translucent places in the burned-velvet draperies as if it fell through wind-stirred leaves.

There were some half-dozen mourners, and each of them looked up as I came closer.
Of course.
I hadn't even paused to think on it; I frowned in irritation at my own shortsightedness and went to join Cairbre and Cliodhna, Arthur and Morgan with her black bird on her shoulder, Whiskey and Keith, and Carel, who was the first to turn to me and step forward, still wearing the clothes I'd brought her back to Faerie in, a maroon sweater I knew as the product of Morgan's needles pulled over her jeans.

The Merlin grasped my forearm when I hesitated and tugged me toward the rest, but she didn't say anything. Cairbre's eyes were a challenge when they found my face. “Queen Elaine,” he said in complicated tones, “I understand you've placed your son under a compulsion.”

I let the smile touch my mouth but not my eyes, brushing past him to stand beside the Mebd's alabaster bier. I almost chuckled when I recognized it. I'd last seen it in a pavilion in the garden, the resting place of another King.

Arthur bowed over my hand as I came up beside him. Keith laid a hand on my shoulder as well, and I gave him as reassuring a glance as I could. “I understand,” he muttered, and I remembered what I had said to Robin. On my other side, Arthur, King of Britain, squeezed my hand.

I bent over the body of the Queen.

She lay shrouded in an emerald wrapper, her face pale within its folds. I couldn't see her hair. Her hands were crossed over her bosom, the right one pierced in two places by narrow wounds, washed white and bloodless before the body had been bound. I didn't want to see the rest of her.

I never understood her. Never gave much thought, I realized, to anybody's pain but my own. I leaned closer to Keith, and murmured by his chin, “The funeral? How are you?”

“I won,” he answered.

I brushed his mouth with my fingertips. “I'm glad you're back. I hear you brought the pack with you. How many?”

“Twenty dozen or so. All of us.”

“That's all of you?” I almost forgot to keep my voice low.

“We were never many. And that's two more than you might have got.”

“All are welcome.” I laid my hand over the Mebd's hand. It felt like wax, and I drew mine back, the chill seeping into my bones. Morgan had drawn away from the crowd and stood close beside the dais, where the terrible throne still stood under its pall of rust-colored velvet.

“Queen Elaine,” Cairbre said again, from across the bier. “I demand an explanation of why you have done what you have done to your son. Do you intend to usurp his throne?” I heard the rattle of Whiskey's silver on the stone behind them, and I knew he meant them to hear it as well.

Arthur rocked on his toes. He and Keith made a comforting pressure at either shoulder, and I could read support in the glance they passed. I stepped back, away from the bier, from the body, out from between them. “Actually, master bard,” I said, “I mean to do exactly that. He's unfit to rule, and I'll detail why in private if you like.”

Keith pinned me on a look. I swallowed hard and gathered myself. It was easier than I had imagined to draw up a veil of imperious attitude and smile. I imagined myself taller, imagined myself angry, and pulled the subtlest glamour I could around me. I let the darkness and the cold within show in my eyes.

I pushed past Arthur Pendragon, and Arthur Pendragon got the hell out of my way. I came around the bier smoothly, feeling electricity flowing up my calves, my thighs, with every step. The pain lingered, but I did not show it. Energy pooled at the base of my spine, pushed upward, as if the palace itself fed me.
The Mebd,
I thought.
Her doing.

I rounded on Cairbre, and he fell back too—two steps, three, swept to one side as if by a wave. Whiskey gave ground too, and I strode between them and up the broad, shallow steps of the dais where a Queen awaited.

I thought Morgan might reach out and catch my hand to stop me. Instead, she moved aside, her hair running like water over the blackness of her gown. The gouge in the palm of my hand ached, and I closed my eyes, thinking of the bloodless wounds piercing the Mebd's white skin. I reached out and grasped the edge of the velvet pall.

“Elaine,” Morgan said into my ear. I looked over at her. Her eyes were identical to the eyes of the raven.

“Were you ever Queen of Cornwall and Gore, Storm-crow? ” I asked. “I mean, really.”

She chuckled. “That too,” she said. “At least, I was, now. So say the stories.”

“I see.”

Thunder rattled the roof. Morgan le Fey raised her eyes to the frescoed ceiling and shrugged. “She's strong.”

And then a silence, which I did not fill.

“Yes, I see that you do understand,” Morgan said, a Queen in every gesture. “ ‘I see it crimson. I see it red.' ” She smiled, the echo of my own, and stepped away, unblinking as her raven.

A hand fell on my shoulder. I turned to it and was stopped by the panorama of the throne room spread before me. Every eye in the room followed the train of my gown up the stairs. Every eye in the room saw Cliodhna's white, white fingers, sharp nails crimson as wet berries, catch my sleeve, saw me turn about and duck my head to speak into her ear. “What is it?”

“Ian's heart,” she murmured. Her breath was cool and moist as the skin of worms—fat, healthy night crawlers, the kind that turn up in plow furrows on dewy mornings. “I'll sell it to you.”

“For what?” My voice fell so low I couldn't hear my words, but she did. “Fealty to your Queen?”

“Aye,” she answered, and I leaned back just a little and smiled. She smelled of clotted blood: iron and salt. I thought about iron, and salt, and bindings and chains.

I shook my head. “You let her know I'll be coming to take it,” I answered, and turned away from Cliodhna and raised my hands in a sudden, sharp jerk and then brought them down hard, as if shaking out a blanket. The pall snapped up, bellied over trapped air, and when I snatched it aside it slid, rippling heavily, sliding on a breath of air from the open windows, the discolored patches stiff and dark.

The throne shone, knife-tipped, mellow ivory between the crusted traces of the old Queen's blood. My mouth worked as I examined it, seeing how I could sit among those spines so that they would only mutilate and not slay me—how the arched curves of antlers would support my weight.

I heard first a gasp, and then silence. And then a tremendous, elastic crash as the stag-carven doors burst open, and I turned to face what came clattering into the throne room over the precious, intricate tiling: a brace of harts, one black as a raven's glistening wing, the other white as the dead Queen's skin. They trotted the length of the chamber as if teamed, cloven hoofbeats echoing. I almost thought Arthur or Keith would step before them, but Whiskey put hands on the two Kings and held them, though Keith's fist clenched on Caledfwlch's leather-bound bronze hilt.

I descended the dais to face the stags as they went to their knees before me, one and then the other. “Hail, Elaine Andraste,” said the white one. “Hail, Keith MacNeill, ” said the black. Their racks were magnificent; I had to peer through the forest of antlers—fourteen points each, at least—to see Keith walking forward, still holding the hilt of his ancient sword.

He came up beside me.

“You're wearing the sheath,” I murmured to him, having an idea what happened next.

“Excalibur's sheath? I am,” he said. “Why?”

“It's blessed by the goddess of war,” I answered, taking his hand to hold him steady. He looked down on the kneeling stags in wonder. “Morrigan. The Lady of Crows. You'll never bleed to death while you're wearing it.”

“Oh,” he said, and the black stag lurched to its feet and ran him through. A moment later, the white did the same for me.

Beyond magic, the trick to going unnoticed is to look like you belong. And magic always works the better when it's assisted with symbolism and a little subterfuge. So Matthew waited with his brother and five other Prometheans in early-morning darkness, watching the street-lights shine through the red-and-white banners of the TKTS booth on Forty-seventh and Seventh. He was wearing a reflective safety vest and a blue Con Ed hard hat and doing his best to look like part of the scenery.

At least he could pass for rough trade.
Or one of the Village People.
They'd had to settle for giving Jane the white supervisor's hard hat, and there was nothing to be done about Kelly except weave the pass-unseen spell so tightly that light barely got through, and trust the eyes of passersby to skip away from something unexpected in the midst of the usual scenery.

“What do we do now?” Matthew asked, leaning close to Jane as he nudged a sawhorse striped with reflective tape into more perfect alignment around the manhole they'd appropriated.

“We wait for the summoned creature, the symbol of the relationship between Faerie and our world, to appear,” she said. “Our spell will bring it to us.”

“And then?”

She looked up at him sadly, reaching to push a few yellow strands of hair behind his ear as a panel truck rattled past, belching and swaying like a drunk. “Your ponytail's coming undone.”

She didn't need to say the answer. He knew it.
And then it accepts the sacrifice, and then the bridge is built.
He handed her his hard hat and pulled his ponytail holder loose with a thumbnail, slicked the escaping lock into the rest, and twisted the elastic back into place. He'd tugged the hair unevenly, making furrows and ridges like a poorly plowed field, but it would serve. Jane reached up and set his hard hat on his head, tilting it playfully. “Here we are at the crossroads,” she said.

“Where you go to sell your soul,” Matthew answered, with a sideways glance at Kelly. He knew she meant to chivy him out of his black mood. It wasn't working.

“But this is the crossroads of the world—”

“So it's the world's soul we're selling?” He tried a grin to soften it, knew he failed when she glanced down.

“You're wearing your shirt inside out,” she said.

As the Merlin had once mockingly asked him if he would. “It never hurts to take precautions. You're wearing iron tonight.”