[Merry Gentry 04] - A Stroke of Midnight (20 page)

CHAPTER 21

ADAIR STUMBLED AS HE ROSE FROM BESIDE US, CATCHING HIM
self against the wall. Blood was seeping out from underneath his breastplate. “You are hurt,” I said.

“Innis's warriors are as skilled as ever,” he said, in a voice that was a little tight with pain.

I felt a little spurt of surprise. Innis had always been among the most neutral of nobles. He hadn't seemed to care one way or the other who ruled, as long as he and his clan were left alone. They specialized in necromancy of one kind or another. Once upon a time, some of them could raise true armies of the dead. Innis's skill had always been to raise phantom armies that could bleed you, kill you. You could cut them, but they could not die. I understood now why he was the one on the ground. They had had to hurt him badly enough to stop him doing magic.

Hafwyn raised her head from Galen's chest. Tears still traced the pale gold of her skin. “I have some healing left to me tonight. I could not bring another back from so close to the veil, but I can look at your wound.” She looked at me. “I can be of use to you, Princess Meredith, I swear that I can.”

“I believe you, Hafwyn. Attend to Adair's wounds, unless someone else is hurt worse.” I looked at Crystall, who was still standing with a weapon pointed at Kieran. After Adair's show of bravado, I thought I'd better simply ask. “Is anyone else wounded?”

Kanna, the only one of the prisoners without a sword at her throat, spoke up, “Lord Innis, Conjuror of Phantoms, is badly injured.” Her voice was very neutral as she said it. Her long brown hair was coming loose from its ponytail, beginning to show the heavy fall of it around her pale face. Her eyes were wide, as if she might be in shock, but her voice gave none of that away.

“Why should I care if he is injured?” I asked.

“He is a free lord of the court you seek to rule,” she said.

“He is merely one lord among many, Kanna. I see no extra value in him, merely because he had enough power and political savvy to stay out of the guards.”

“Others see the free lords as more valuable than we of the guard.”

“That is because they have forgotten that once it was considered an honor to be asked to join the royal guard. Once it was not a punishment, but a reward.”

“You speak of things too old to bear remembering,” Kanna said. “You were not there. You cannot know.”

“I listen to our stories, Kanna. I remember our history. Many of our best and most accomplished warriors were not forced into the guard, but invited. It only became a burden and a punishment . . . later.”

“You would leave a free lord to bleed to death, then?”

“If it is a choice between a man who risked his life on my order to save one that I love, and a man who tried to take the life of the one I love, then yes, let him die if he can. Wasn't it you, Lord Kieran, who said a sidhe who can die from blood loss is no sidhe at all?”

Crystall had to move his sword back a little to give him breath and space to talk. “Innis is of the purest blood, not some pixie half-breed.”

“Funny how all blood looks the same when it is spilled upon the ground,” I said. “Are any of my people hurt besides Adair?” I looked at Kieran when I spoke, watched his face. I was rewarded because he looked puzzled.

“You truly would let Innis die.”

“Give me a reason not to let him die,” I said.

“He is not important enough to me to bargain for,” Kieran said.

“Then he will lie there and bleed until I decide otherwise.”

“Innis's clan is powerful, Princess. You do not want them as your enemies.”

I laughed at that. “He has already proven himself my enemy.”

“We did not attack you,” Kieran said.

Adair was still leaning against the wall, bleeding. “Look at his wound, see how bad it is, and I ask for the last time are any of the rest of you hurt?”

Aisling spoke still wrapped in his cloak, so that most of him was hidden. “I let this one get past me.” He emphasized his words by driving the edge of his sword a little tighter against Melangell's throat. Enough that a thin edge of crimson began to flow.

“Was it you that nearly cleaved her helmet to her skull?” I asked.

“Yes, but only after she bloodied me.” He sounded disgusted with himself.

“Frost, choose someone to take Aisling's place, so we can see to his wounds.”

“Hawthorne,” Frost said, and one word was enough. He put his helmet back on, and went to take Aisling's place.

Dogmaela was standing there between the two groups, as if she didn't quite know what to do. Melangell was her captain of the guard. Unless she was willing to make the same offer that Hafwyn had made, she would have to go back under Melangell's rule. In the middle of such a power struggle was a tricky place to be. Dogmaela was like Galen, you could see her struggle with the problem on her face, in the posture of her body. She had fought with the others, but now she didn't know where her loyalties lay. The fact that she was so divided made me put her in the untrustworthy category.

Hafwyn and the other wounded moved to one side, leaving me with Galen cradled in my lap. I slid my hands down the front of his shirt. “You need to start wearing armor.”

“Unless it was enchanted armor, it would not have helped,” Adair said. Hafwyn and Aisling were helping him remove his armor in pieces. The padding underneath was soaked crimson with blood. The wide, clean cut was plain in the padding, low on his side. “He was able to do this to me, even with the armor.”

“Your armor is still worthy of its maker,” Kieran said. “I could not pierce it. I had to find a seam.”

“No true sword could have found the opening you used,” Adair said. The padding peeled off in layers. The linen shirt next to his skin was a ruined red mass.

“That is why magic will always win against weaponry,” Kieran said.

“It was not magic that stopped Innis,” Crystall said.

“It was human magic,” Kieran said.

“Guns are not magic,” Crystall argued, “they are weapons.”

Kieran shook his head. “What is human science but another name for magic? Even now, the princess has brought human spell casters into our sithen. She allows human magic free range inside the only refuge we have left.”

“That's a reason to attack me,” I said, “but not a reason to attack Galen. Why him?”

“Perhaps we are attacking all your guards, if we find them alone,” Kieran said.

“No,” Galen said with his head still in my lap, “when I came around the corner Melangell said, ‘We've been waiting for you, green man,' then you hit me in the back. Where were you hiding? I must have passed right by you.”

“Innis can hide in plain sight,” Frost said, “and he can hide one or two with him, if none of them moves.” Frost was still very much on alert, guarding me. He hadn't looked at a wound, or participated in the conversation. He was working and it showed.

“So Kieran, why Galen?” I asked.

“Lord Kieran,” he corrected me.

I shook my head, my hand sliding a little farther down Galen's chest, so I could feel his heart beating against my palm. “Fine, Lord Kieran Knife-Hand, answer my question.”

He looked at me, his face arrogant and handsome in the way that most of the sidhe were. But his was a cold beauty, or maybe I was just projecting. “You have captured me, but you cannot make me answer your questions. Take me to Queen Andais so I may get on with my night.”

I stared at him, with Galen's heartbeat under my hand. Was Kieran being that brave, or did he believe that the queen would do nothing to him? “You have attacked a royal guard. You will not be getting on with your night, Lord Kieran.”

“Siobhan nearly killed a royal heir, and yet she lives. Imprisoned, but she lives. The queen's pet torturer fears the touch of Siobhan's skin, so she has not even been tortured. She will sit in her cage until Prince Cel is released, then she will be his right hand again. If that is all the queen does to a would-be assassin of royalty, then what more can she do to us? Nerys's house still lives, even though all of them turned traitor. They tried to kill both you and the queen herself, and they have lost nothing.” He sneered at me, all that beauty turning ugly.

“That is why you and Innis agreed to this,” I said. “You saw Nerys's people go free, and you think you will go free, too.”

“The queen needs her allies, Princess.”

“How can you be her ally if you toadie for Cel?”

“I toadie to no one, but I admit to preferring him to you. There are many who feel the same.”

“Of that I have no doubt.” I looked at him, so sure of himself, and I needed him not to be. I needed whatever information he possessed, and I needed the court to fear me. To fear harming my people. If the queen would not put that fear into them, then I had to figure out a way to do it myself.

There was a sound like a great hollow gong being struck.

“What is that?” I asked.

It sounded again before the first echoes had died.

Frost reached for a knife at his belt. “I have a call.” It was Rhys.

“What are you doing, Merry? It was all I could do to keep Walters and the police from running to check out your screams. Is Galen all right? You were screaming his name.”

Galen spoke from my lap. “I'm touched that you care.”

Rhys chuckled. “He's fine.”

“He was attacked, though,” I said.

“Who?”

“Nobles and guess whose guards?”

“Let me think . . . Cel?”

“Who else?”

“But why does he keep picking on Galen?”

“I'm about to try to find out. How is the evidence collection going?”

“Okay. I put a guard on each of the humans, as per your order. We figured out how the reporter strayed outside the magical boundaries we set up.”

“How?” I asked.

“He had small iron nails in the soles of his shoes.”

“Cold iron,” I said. “He'd done his research.”

Rhys's reflection wavered as he nodded. “And he came here planning to try to see something we didn't want him to see.”

“I guess it is part of the job description for a reporter.”

“I guess so.” He sighed, and it was heavy.

“What's wrong, Rhys?”

“Major Walters insists on seeing you in person. He says that the reflection could be an illusion.”

“I'm a little busy here.” I glanced at our prisoners.

“I figured that, but if you don't put in an appearance soon, he's going to want to come looking for you. Just a heads-up.”

“I'll be there as soon as I can.”

“I'll try to keep him pacified.” The sword was suddenly empty, only my own distorted reflection showing.

I handed Frost's blade back to him and looked at the prisoners. If I had been certain how the queen would take it, I would do something drastic to at least one of the nobles. But Kieran was right, the queen did need her allies. I didn't think Kieran qualified, but Andais might, and I didn't want her angry with me if I could avoid it. Still, Kieran's reasoning meant that Andais was losing her hold on the court nobles. That was bad, because I didn't have enough political clout on my own to compete for the throne, even though I was still of the ruling bloodline. If Andais failed as queen, they would see me as a threat, no matter who took the throne after her.

Hafwyn's voice came with a thread of anger to it. “Let me see the wound, Aisling.”

“I dare not let you see more of my body.”

“I am a healer. We are immune to most of the contact enchantments. If it were otherwise we could not heal the sidhe.”

Aisling was holding his white cloak close around the bloody front of his tunic.

“Take off your tunic so I may see your wound.”

He shook his head, spilling his hood back, and revealing a veil like some of the Arabic countries make their women wear. It was a thin, gauzy, golden cloth, so you saw his head and face through the haze of it. Only his odd eyes were free of the cloth, showing pale skin, and a lace of pale eyelashes.

“I'd forgotten that you covered your face,” I said, and hadn't really meant to say it out loud.

“Much is forgotten,” he said, hands still holding his cloak around his bloody side.

“I said I forgot that you covered your face, not why.”

“Yes, yes,” Hafwyn said, “the most beautiful man in the world. So beautiful that if a woman, or even some men, look upon your face they will be instantly besotted with you and unable to deny you anything.” She grabbed his cloak and tried to wrench it from his hands, and finished the rest through gritted teeth. “But I am not asking you to take off your veil, just your tunic.”

“I fear what effect it would have upon a mortal.”

Hafwyn stopped struggling with him, and leaned back on her heels, I think too surprised to know what to do. I realized then that he meant me. How could I ever truly rule here if they still thought of me as a human?

Kieran spoke my thoughts out loud. “Even the guard itself thinks of you as only mortal, and not sidhe.”

I would have argued with him, if I could have. “Are you saying, Aisling, that your bare chest is enough to bespell me?”

“I have seen it happen before to humans.”

I gazed up at him, Galen still in my lap. “Aisling, do you think of me as human?”

He lowered his eyes and would not look at me, which was answer enough. “I guess that's a yes.”

“I mean no disrespect, Princess Meredith. If you are sidhe enough to look upon me, that would be a fine thing, but what if I did bespell you? There is only one remedy for the enchantment.”

“And that would be?”

“True love. You must be in love with someone else before you can look upon me.”

“Not entirely true,” Hawthorne said from his place at Melangell's side. “Aisling's magic can overcome even true love if he wishes it and tries hard enough. Once he could make anyone fall hopelessly in love with him.”