Blood and Iron (54 page)

“And some will curse our names.”

“I haven't one to curse,” I answered, and lay against his neck as he moved like a pale wandering ghost among the trees.

“I'll bear the curses for you,” he said, and spoke no more until we came to a clearing among the broken wood. I sat back and he halted, restive, his white hide glittering in the gloom. I slid down over his shoulder and stood for a moment, my face pressed against the warm muscle of his neck. A moment later, and his arms were around me.

“Love is a threefold curse for you,” he said. I smiled through the pain of it, wondering if I would forget, over the centuries, how much less it hurt now than it would have before, or if I would always bear the memory of mortal frailty.

“ ‘If I had known, if I had known, Tam Lin,' ” I said into his chest. His skin was warm against my lips. “Sing it for me, Uisgebaugh?”

And he did so. He held me, and he sang.
“And Tam Lin on a milk-white steed, with a gold star in his crown . . .”
and

the purity of it pierced my heart with a mortal pain, and I understood at last why the Mebd would never hear the song sung. To care so much, to feel that pain: it might have shifted a heart, even, of stone. “The Ballad of King Orfeo” reveals that secret, that the Fae will pay any price to one who can move their hearts.

Morgan came out of the trees a few moments after he finished, and after I was done with weeping. I had seen her in the shadows. She had been waiting for some time.

She wore sage trousers cut close to her skin, and a sweater of claret wool. Evèr and Connla paced her, watching me with eyes wiser than they had any right to. But then, dogs have always known us better than we know ourselves, and loved us in spite of the truth.

Unlike wolves, in whose eyes we see the judgment of something too like ourselves, I suppose. I pulled away from Whiskey and went to meet her, stepping over tangled roots in the dark. “Grandmother. What brings you into the woods at night?”

“You do, Elaine.” She took my hands and led me back to Whiskey, who shifted restlessly from foot to foot. The dogs stayed where they were, smiling their wise and secret doggy smiles. “You promised me something, not too long ago.”

Oh. Dear.
“The answer to a question.”

“Yes.” I heard the pleasure in her voice.

“Will you answer one for me as well?”

“Perhaps.” She leaned back against the rough trunk of a tree, half-invisible in the twilight except where it caught in glimmers on the titian of her hair. I found myself looking at her profile: straight, proud nose and an arch expression. Her lips curved. “You first.”

I sucked my lip and leaned back into the strength of Whiskey's calm embrace. I meant to ask a better question, a careful question, but the one that finally passed my lips was a child's exhausted and bewildered “Why?”

“Why not?” Her eyes flashed with humor. “All right. You deserve a better answer than that.” She looked away, and then up at the periwinkle sky. “I made some mistakes, Elaine.”

She was quiet for a long while, and I almost went to her, but she held up her hand to forestall me and when she looked back down, tears gleamed on her cheeks. “The cost. I've stayed stronger than the others, but I've also been changed. From darkling goddess, seductress and battle-raven, mother and murderess, seer in the bowl of blood, to the wicked Queen and the malicious sorceress, the ender of empires. Or, sometimes, even though it was men who wrote the stories down, they remembered a little of what their mothers had woven into the tales: that it is dangerous to wrong a woman simply because she seems weak. And that women wronged are not like men. Women who are pushed to a certain point will do what they must.”

“Yes,” I said, understanding.

“All these things live in me. But we are more than the total of their fears and longings, Elaine. We are what we are, like Mist. Under the layers and the legends, there is a core of . . . reality. Or else how could we surprise them, and ourselves, and each other?”

I nodded to encourage her to continue, but I think by then she was speaking more for herself than for me.

She paused for a breath, and looked down at her boots, sunk in the leaf litter. “A woman wants what a woman wants,” she finished. “And she'll do what she must to ensure it. And if that's the blood of my sisters, the cruel and the bright, spilled on the snow, so mote it be. And if it costs me my brothers, well. It has cost me more than that, in its time.”

“What do you want, Morgan?”

“I answered one question,” she said with a smile. “And now it is time to claim my price.”

I am not ashamed to say I was afraid of what she might ask me. I would have taken a step away from her, but Whiskey's arm was like a steel bar supporting me, and I managed the appearance, at least, of courage. “Ask me.”

She looked back and met my eyes. “What do you want, and what are you willing to pay to get it?”

“That is two questions, Morgan.”

“I'll consider the second one a favor to be repaid, then,” she offered, and tossed her hair back over her shoulder.

My mouth worked.
What do I really want? Beyond anything.
I blinked. “Ian safe,” I said, what seemed hours later. Whiskey's arm tightened on my shoulders, and he drew me closer. I felt no fury in him, no betrayal. Only love and support.
What have I done to him?
“And anything.”

Morgan paused and knotted her hands in front of her hips. “And I think in that, Elaine, you'll find the answer to your question of me, as well. And the reason I needed to arrange to have my elder sister . . . done away with. A woman does not forgive someone who costs her a child, no matter what the child's part in the matter. Also, like the Mother of Dragons, I'd rather see neither half of my heritage eradicate the other.”

“I was your weapon.”

“You are my beloved grandchild, Elaine. And I am proud of you, and I grieve for you, and I will be here for you whenever you call on me, until the day you die.”

She turned to go, her wolfhounds silent, graceful shapes alongside her, one red and one silver in the darkness. I heard a tolling, not too far away—the sound of Weyland's hammer—and then the unmistakable sound of a roaring ocean when no ocean was near enough to hear. Battle was joined. The Magi had arrived.

“What about Mordred?” I think the words crossed my lips before I so much as thought them.

Morgan le Fey paused in the shadows. Slowly, slowly, she turned to look over her shoulder, the fall of her hair kissing the high bone of her cheek. “That was my fault as much as Arthur's,” she said. “And I have paid for it, Elaine. And paid again, I think, not a short week since.” She bowed her head, then, and folded her hands before her, and walked away.

I couldn't have called after her. My throat was full of thorns, and no words could have gotten past.

Matthew had left Jane and the rest in the antechamber surrounded by fabulous art, blinking like so many penguins in front of a seemingly endless stream of poorly focused images of immense mythical beasts confounding mortal skies. Sydney, Tokyo—even in Matthew's current state, he could see the humor in that—Morocco, Addis Ababa, Baghdad, Capetown, Moscow . . . the list went on.

He'd gone into the workroom instead and seated himself on the iron stair. Kelly's body lay at the foot, face covered and arms swaddled in hastily wrapped blankets, laid out on a row of metal folding chairs that must have come from a storage locker somewhere. Kelly looked almost straight and tall, wrapped up like that, as if his twisted bones and ruined feet had been healed in death. Matthew left the broad doors cracked open; the voices of the others carried to him very well, enhanced by high ceilings and the inlaid hardwood floors.

He tried not to look at those floors. The inlaid dragons were too much of a taunt, and he could half imagine that their steel claws and eyes flickered with a bloodred tint.

“Kell, I haven't been a very good brother, I'm afraid.” Matthew scooted down two steps, until he was sitting on the second one from the bottom and could lean forward and smooth the blankets across Kelly's face. His tattoos still itched. He didn't really mean to—although he didn't mean not to, either—but he found himself drawing a corner of the swaddling back, to give himself one last look at Kelly's face.

He paused when his fingers brushed smooth, cool flesh. Then he settled himself and twitched the cloth aside.

It wasn't what he had expected to see. Kelly looked young, a mere few years older than Matthew. His eyes were closed over a placid, dreaming face, his gently parted lips full and plump, with only the start of crow's-feet strengthening the corners of his eyes. Matthew leaned forward, one hand outreached and his other elbow resting on his knee, holding his breath, unbelieving.

Healed. Healed and dead.

The twisting unease that had been his constant companion since he brought Kelly home from the hospital solidified, settled like iron in the pit of his belly. The unicorn healed Kelly. And killed him. And Jane had summoned the unicorn ...

... which meant she could have healed him at any time in the last fifteen years. Except it hadn't been
her,
had it? It had been the unicorn. A creature of magic and . . .

... a Fae thing. A beautiful, terrible thing with eyes like a forest night and a horn of Damascene steel, and Matthew could not find it in his unicorn-pierced heart to think the animal evil. His blood. Kelly's blood. Promethean magic, and a unicorn's horn.

The answer was as obvious as the iron rings on his hands.
Because she's been planning this since he was taken. Because an elf-touched Mage was just the bridge they needed to break into Faerie. Because he was my brother, and the magic in our ink bound us together.

The television still muttered in the other room, broken by the occasional voices of Magi. Soon the sun would rise on Halloween, and the Prometheans would try to find what rest they could. The invasion would begin at midnight.

Matthew balled his hands into fists, veins standing out on his forearms and the rings biting into his fingers.
And where will you be at midnight, Matthew Magus?

Cool twilight grass tickled Keith's neck and back as he threw himself down in the shade of the tent fly, mopping sweat from his chest with a shirt too soaked to be much use as a towel. He panted, thinking of cold water.
If you were a real King, you'd have someone playing fetch and carry for you.
He grunted and got an elbow underneath himself, meaning to go plunge himself face-first in the convenient spring Elaine's mount had kicked in the turf upslope. He opened his eyes, and almost jumped out of his skin. “You're too damned quiet,” he said to Vanya.

Vanya dropped a leather bucket down on the grass beside him. He grinned, a tight wolf-grin. “Already so old you're losing your sense of smell, Sire? Or does the stink of your own sweat just cover it?”

“You came from downwind,” Keith accused. He dipped his hands into the bucket and cupped water to his mouth two or three times, then upended the rest over his head. Vanya jumped back, laughing, and pointed over Keith's shoulder. “There goes your wife. She's pretty.”

“You can tell from this distance?” Elaine, mounted on her piebald stud, was retreating under the shade of the beeches.

“But can she dance?”

Keith laughed and turned to his brother wolf. From this angle, Vanya's shaggy yellow hair obscured his eyes, giving him the look of a myopic sheepdog—hardly the image of a noble wolf. “Not very well,” he admitted. “But she can ride.”

“That's more important in the long run,” Vanya admitted. He crouched, digging his fingers into the rucked, raw ground, turning it over and rubbing it between his fingers. “Fyodor says the pack is ready. And he may not see what you're doing, Keith MacNeill, but I do.”

Keith coughed, and stood. His trousers clung to his skin. He stepped inside the tent and started to strip them off, still talking through the wall to Vanya. “I wish I could run,” he said. “I wish I could strip off and put all four feet down on the earth and run until I left the hounds behind.”

“Pity it is a new moon,” Vanya said, dryly.

“Pity indeed.” Keith left his soaked trousers on the floor and slid into a pair made of tough hide. Dry socks followed, and then he stamped into boots. Elaine's sword hung from the centerpost, jammed into Caledfwlch's ill-fitting sheath with a handspan of blade showing. Keith belted it on over his trousers and cast about for a vest and the shirt of mail Puck had made him promise to wear. “Were you watching the scrimmage?”

“Scrimmage?” Vanya mouthed the unfamiliar English word thoughtfully. “The practice combat?”

“Yes.” Keith tossed the blond wolf his mail shirt, grinning like a human as the metal slipped like water between Vanya's broad, capable hands. “How did it look?”

Vanya shrugged and crouched to pick the hauberk up. The sun had set and silver rings shimmered coolly in the gloaming. “If the Daoine Sidhe and the Unseelie don't kill each other, you might have an army. And don't think you've distracted me, Sire.”

“Vanya?”

The light made his blue eyes shadowy and strange. “Fyodor Stephanovich, Elder Brother. I know why you saved his life.”

“Don't you think he would have beaten me?”

Vanya nibbled his lip. “I think he was fated not to, Sire. I think it had nothing to do with skill, or who might be fitter to lead. And I think—”