Blood and Iron (63 page)

Fyodor came up behind him, a wolf among wolves, and pressed his body against the boy's narrow back. Vanya moved back, shifting from foot to foot, an anxious whine hovering low in his throat. Ian shivered harder, Keith and Fyodor holding him tight, arms around each other's shoulders, eyes meeting as Ian buried his head in his father's shoulder and folded into the embrace.

“I'm sorry,” Keith repeated, quite helplessly, wishing Fyodor would look down. The black wolf didn't shift an inch. Of course. “I'm sorry I have to go.”

Sunset, he said. Sunset on All Saint's Day: a day later than tradition demanded, but that seemed appropriate. I took Keith away to my rooms for hours and we spent them alone. I slowed the course of the sun in the sky as much as I dared. I guessed he noticed, but he didn't say a word.

When the light began to grow golden and slant across the garden, I bathed him and dressed him in the finest clothes I could find, and myself in black for mourning. I crowned him with a golden circlet as befit a King, and had the blood-bay stallion brought to the stableyard. Keith tried to hand me Caledfwlch's sheath, with my misfit sword still stuffed into it, and I pushed it back at him. “You may need that later.”

“You're right,” he said. “I may.” He looked at me, and I looked at him, and there didn't seem to be anything further to say, so I held the stallion's reins while he mounted. The horse tossed his head and sidled. Hoofbeats clattered on the cobbles.

Whiskey dipped his head over my shoulder. “You'll want to ride,” he said. I gestured to my gown, and he came a half step forward. I saw him fitted with a sidesaddle and jeweled blanket, his mane and hide groomed and oiled until they shone.

“No bridle?” I joked, but my heart wasn't in it, and the sidelong glance of his china eye told me he knew. He dipped a knee so I could mount more easily, and Keith reined his mount out of the way.

Carel had already sent the messenger, so Keith had an escort for his departure. The promptness pleased me; I must have impressed someone. Side by side, my husband and I rode through the palace gate. Keith put his hand out to take mine, and thus we left the courtyard and went into the twilight. I hadn't told anyone what Keith intended. I had thought we'd go alone: the red steed and the white, out among the emissaries of Hell.

Riders lined the road up to the gate on either side, and at their head sat Carel and Morgan. I saw Cairbre and Kadiska. I wasn't surprised not to see the Cat Anna present, but I had hoped for Ian, once I saw the crowd.

Too much too soon.

Whiskey curvetted like a parade horse. The red destrier paced beside him, calm and unworried, despite the tremble in the hand with which Keith stroked his mane. My husband looked at me, and I at him, and I drew my cold, dry hand from his. We came to the end of the honor guard; it hurt to look at the shifting shapes in fire and smoke that waited at the bottom of the hill. One among them stood taller than the rest, his steed like a wall of red-hot iron under him. Flames wreathed his horned iron crown, and I shuddered.
Queen,
I thought, and forced myself not to look away from his gaze, and his smile, and his nod as he did me the dignity of a very small bow.

“This is it,” Keith whispered. I nodded, not ready to trust my voice. He cast one long glance back over his shoulder as the blood bay finally seemed to realize himself on display and picked up his feet. I knotted my hand in Whiskey's mane and set my face in the mask that was becoming my habit and ward.

Keith seemed to take a long time covering the distance. “Go after him,” Whiskey murmured. His ears were up, tail high and caught on an evening breeze. Overhead, I saw the old moon rising in the new moon's arms, a sliver like a horse's hoofprint on the sky. “Go after him. Love him again, and take this pain from me.”

“Whiskey,” I answered, leaning forward. I felt him shift under me, gathering himself, tasting the wind.
The Arabs say Allah made horses of the south wind, but the Celts say they came out of the sea. And both have the truth of it. That's the wonder of the thing.
I laid my other hand on his mane. Carel's eyes were on me, and Morgan's over her calculating frown.

In the end, it was the Queen of Cornwall's solemn gaze that broke me.

I jerked the coarse, shining strands between my fingers. “Let him go. Take me back inside, Uisgebaugh.”

Two lines of riders peeled in behind us as we rode all the length of the long, lone lane up to the gates: followed at a distance, but still alone. Storm clouds were covering the slender clipping of a moon when the doors swung closed behind us. Carel rode up beside me. I stared straight ahead and didn't notice her until she reached out and laid a strong hand on my arm.

“It's permanent,” she said.

I blinked at her in confusion. “Keith leaving?”

“The binding of Annwn into the mortal realm. There's unicorns on the six o'clock news.”

“You went home?”

She looked up at the changing sky. “Briefly. Time is still moving much faster here. Next time you ask, Elaine, you'll get the president. And he'll be pissed at you.”

I shrugged.
I'll worry about that tomorrow.

“What about the emissary?”

I glanced back over my shoulder, ignoring the searing grief and the iron resolve in the look Cairbre directed at me.
This is only part of the price.

I'm sorry about your daughter, master bard.
I hoped he read it in my eyes, for I could never say it. “Find the Duke of Hell a room,” I said to Carel. “And let him know I'll receive him on the morrow. I am too weary for politics tonight.”

It was Whiskey who took me to my bedroom. My bedroom. The Mebd's bedroom, now, and not my own chambers. I couldn't have borne the sight of my own unmade bed.

The Mebd's was tightly pulled and dressed in velvets, silks, feather beds, pillows larger than I was, and draperies heavy as the touch of the rain-wet wind through the windows. Whiskey opened the black jet buttons glittering the length of my spine—buttons that Keith had done up so little a time ago. Something stung my eyes, so I closed them. Queens do not weep.

He opened my gown with gentle hands and brushed the loose fall of my hair aside. His hands touched here and there across my shoulders, down my back. Soft, pained whickers told me he was touching the pale new scars that covered my skin like crescent moons in a twilight sky. “You wear no braids,” he said.

“Nor ever will,” I answered. He slid my gown to the floor and lifted me out of it, sat me before the mirror and brushed out my hair. “Uisgebaugh, how can you bear it?”

I saw him kneel behind me. Saw him lower his head and kiss and rekiss my scars. “I can't,” he answered. “But I do it anyway. What's this?” He reached out then and picked up something that lay on the black marble of the vanity: a crimson ribbon, and knotted onto it with a goosenecked loop, a simple circle of polished resin that caught and held the candlelight like a sliver of the sun. An amber ring.

“Payment on a bet,” I said, and took it out of his hand. It felt like nothing, airy and weightless as the light it represented. I parted the two sides of the ribbon and pulled it over my head.

I looked in the mirror and watched my eyes shift from green to lavender and then to gray, changing as the sea, changing as an olive leaf turning in a wind. Uisgebaugh lifted the black locks of my hair out of the confines of the crimson strand. Kadiska's payment fell between my breasts, and hung there like a reminder of summer, and sunlight, and things that were growing once and now are frozen.

“Do you love me, little treachery?”

“Aye,” he said. “All unwilling. And I am not sure I would trade it back to you now if you asked me.”

“Give it a few hundred more years,” I answered, and as the storm broke outside the window I blew the candles out.

The darkness could not disguise the sound of tapping on my chamber door, the scratch of Gharne's claws unmistakable as he slithered through wood and stone and blinked his lamplit eyes. “Elaine?”

“My friend?”

He laughed; the Fae do not have friends. “Your son is in the hallway, my Queen. He says he wishes to speak with you.”

If my true love were an earthly knight
As he's an elfin gray
I would not give my own true love
For any lord here today

The white horse that my true love rides
Is lighter than the wind
With silver he is shod before
With burning gold behind

—
“Tam Lin,”
Traditional

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Originally from Vermont and Connecticut,
Elizabeth Bear
spent six years in the Mojave Desert and currently lives in southern New England. She attended the University of Connecticut, where she studied anthropology and literature. She was awarded the 2005 Campbell Award for Best New Writer.

Look for the next two
Promethean Age novels
Ink and Steel
Coming in July 2008
and
Hell and Earth
Coming in July 2008