Whiskey and Water (25 page)

"My mother is making an
assumption," Ian answered. "Do you want to stay in Faerie,
Juliet?"

To her credit, she paused. Her gaze tended
sideways, seeking out the boy with the badly dyed hair. "He won't want
to," she said. "He doesn't like blood."

"I wasn't asking about him."
And
a Fae wouldn't think of him. Iron girl, this land will kill you.
"What
do you
want?"

"To stay." Sharp and flat, and
she hadn't paused to think about it, just slapped it down in challenge.

"Not to stay and go? To come back and
forth? To go up and down in the world, and see what is good in it and what is
not?" Ian felt Cairbre's eyes on him, Carel's, his mother's. It didn't
matter. All that mattered was the girl.

"Can
I?" Just that.
Can I stay and go? Can I
travel back and forth?

"You cannot live here," Ian
said, and raised his hand when she would have protested and told him that the
Queen had said she could stay. "You can't. Not yet. My mother the Queen
has said you can stay, and her word is law. But even her word cannot keep you
alive and safe here without power to call your own, Juliet. And when I look at
you, I can see that you were born without power. Faerie will destroy you."

She shook her head, raising her voice over
his. Her hair flowed in wood-pale waves across her shoulders, breaking into
stray curls and locks in the wind. "I'm not — "

"Without power.
And the lies you tell yourself will see
you eaten all the faster, here." "Your mother said I could stay, Y- .
. . Your Grace."

Highness,
but he didn't correct her.

"It was what you wanted," the Queen
said, with a tip of her head as Jewels turned toward her in supplication.
"But Ian is probably right. I promised permission to stay, Juliet. Not
protection. If you cannot protect yourself, you will not live."

There is always more than one test.
Jewels swallowed, and settled the bubble
of fear in her gut. "But if you give me to ... to Prince Ian?"

"I'll protect you," he said.
"And you'll serve me."

"And you'll teach me?" Fine and
defiant.

He smiled. "I won't forbid you to
learn."

Her pause was long. She peeked at Carel.
Carel spread her hands. "I know somebody who could teach you a little of
the old religion. It would be a start."

Of course she could. She might speak
quietly, but a wolf's ears could hear even what the Merlin whispered into her
phone.

Another silence, this one soft and
pregnant. Jewels sucked her lower lip into her mouth and rolled it between her
teeth. An unattractive habit. Cairbre laid his mandolin aside and smiled.
"Well, Juliet Gorman? It's a rare thing you're offered, permission to walk
into the mortal realm and then back out again. It's not something he'll extend
to you twice. I'll promise you that."

She turned the other way, a flash of light
in her eyes, and found Geoff, walking toward her, a rose stem in his hand. His
face transformed when she smiled at him, and she looked quickly down. "My
Prince," she said, "I accept your terms."

She lifted her slight chin and smiled
shyly. Ian breathed deep on the rush of relief sliding through him. He'd won. A
brief match, and one that the Queen hadn't cared to fight him on. Or Carel, or
Morgan, for that matter. He'd won the girl.

She was just a girl. Alive or dead, it
shouldn't matter. But it did. He pitied her, in his foolish human heart.

And the
power
of standing up to his
mother and having her agree to his choices mattered more.
Yes,
Ian
thought, as he glanced over his shoulder and winked at Cairbre.
Yes. I want
to be King.

The Gypsy Laddie

A
s the sun set and a moon like a Spanish doubloon
usurped its place in the sky, the scent off the gardens shifted and sweetened,
jasmine and honeysuckle replacing the almost-rancid richness of rose. Eternal
day gave way to endless sunset, soft blue twilight laid over everything, and
then — sudden as a set change—there •was moonlight and an indigo velvet sky
rich with stars, like no sky Jewels or Geoff had ever seen.

Dinner revealed another manner in which
the Queen was unlike her predecessor. Kit in particular had expected they would
make their way inside to grace the long tables in the Great Hall. He had been
rather wickedly looking forward to finding where he sat in the Queen's
estimation: above the salt, or below it. But the new Queen was as American as
she was Fae, and she summoned the page Wolvesbane and had platters and plates
and more chairs and small tables brought out to the patio, where they could
dine alfresco, cooled by the evening breeze.

It was a pleasant change, much like Faerie
after Hell. Not that the games here were any cleaner, but flowers and soft
music were an improvement over any devil's taste in decor. Not that Faerie
wasn't
also
Hell, after its own peculiar fashion, but the Queen's chosen
exile from God was more humane than Satan's, or even Lucifer's.

Morgan had a subtle hand in the table
arrangements. If Kit had been willing to dance as led, he would have found
himself sitting with Cairbre and Geoffrey—whose name reminded him of another
Geoffrey entirely, so that he wondered what had become of his old
acquaintance—but instead he managed to arrange a conversation between the boy
and the elegant-necked woman who they said was Merlin the Magician, and excuse
himself to the place at Morgan's table that Morgan had intended for Carel.

He seated himself there, Whiskey on his
left hand and Matthew on the right, and Morgan directly across, while the Queen
sat with Jewels and her son. An unsubtle manipulation: Morgan would know very
well what he was up to. But then, they'd played this game of old, and after
answering the Queen's ill-concealed hunger for whatever news of Keith MacNeill
that Kit could give her, Kit found he didn't have the heart to sit and look at
her. Not when he could see her father in the shape of her mouth, in her arrogant
nose, in the powerful bones of her hands.

So he rearranged things to suit himself, to
play spoiler both to the interest he suspected Morgan had in the boy Geoffrey
and to her cat-and-mouse pursuit of the unexpectedly generous yellow-haired
Mage.

Petty spite aside, they needed the time to
conspire. Kit wanted to know Matthew Magus before he trusted him to guard his
back. Besides, he felt a certain kinship to anyone whom Morgan le Fey was working
that
hard to bed.

Matthew ate awkwardly, the fork in his
left hand and the knife pinned under his right thumb. Kit resisted the urge to
cut his meat for him, and instead turned to Whiskey. "You are not overmuch
interested in your supper, water-horse."

'It does not satisfy," Whiskey said,
pushing the peas around his gold-rimmed china plate.

" 'Tis no fault of the chef's."
Kit smiled. "Not that I can detect, at any rate. I wish you a better
appetite in the future." He sipped his wine. "Matthew Magus, I am
curious.

Matthew looked up. It
was
an effort
not to stare, and finding himself addressed, he indulged. "Curious as a
cat?"

"And as likely to die of it,"
Kit answered complacently. "I mean not to intrude — " Intrude."
Matthew snapped his knife across his plate.

How does a Promethean come to
Faerie?"

I might ask the same of you," Matthew
said. His hand ached. He hated eating in public. Every bite was an epic of
concentration. He reached for his wine, hoping the alcohol would ease the pain,
a little. "But you left us, didn't you?"

"I was expelled," Marlowe said,
with a sidewise smile at Morgan, who was applying herself to her plate with
apparent unconcern. "At the prick of a knife."

"Mine came on the tip of a unicorn's
horn," Matthew answered. "You want to know why I said I'd second
you."

"Not to put too fine a point on
it," Kit said. Matthew smiled at the pun, only a flicker, but it eased the
tightness across Kit's chest. "Yes, of course."

The bread was more manageable. Matthew
could hold it well enough right-handed, and butter it with his left. Whiskey
was doing something similar, breaking off bits of bread and soaking them in the
juices of his meat. "If Jane Andraste weren't archmage, I might have a
reason to come back."

"Or lack reason to stay apart?"

"If you prefer." Their gazes
crossed, and locked until Morgan cleared her throat.

"Shouldn't your opposite number in
this little pavane have sent her dog by now?"

Kit looked up at the moon. "I should
think. Unless we're faster than the mortal world today?" The witch poured
wine. "Perhaps he's lost on the borders."

"Perhaps." Kit swirled his wine
in crystal, and buried his nose in it: plums and oak, radiant as sunlight on
loam.

Morgan toyed with her fork, turning the
warm, heavy silver over and over in her hand. "Perhaps you should go look
for him, Sir Christopher, if you're so eager."

"Perhaps I will," Kit said.
"After dinner."

He enjoyed Whiskey's chuckle. But Matthew
pushed his plate away and made as if to rise, his left hand tightening on the
arm of his chair. "I'll go. If someone will tell me where I'm likely to
meet him and draw me a map. I am your second, after all. And know the
forms," he continued, ending Marlowe's interruption before it properly
got free of the poet's lips. "Probably better than you do. I've only been
to New York recently, not Hell."

But Marlowe's hand, which he had raised,
continued out. The poet stared at Matthew's shirt, or maybe at his chest behind
it, and half stood to catch the laces at Matthew's collar. Marlowe steadied himself
on the table edge while Matthew stood still, allowing the poet latitude to
continue his action.

Which appeared to be tugging Matthew's
shirt open and staring at his ink. He touched a black line with a fingertip,
his skin warm on Matthew's flesh, and drew it back. "There's iron in
this."

"That was the purpose," Matthew
answered. "It's armor."

"It's more than armor. Morgan?"

She didn't look up from cutting her meat.
"Oh, aye, I've seen it. Nice work, no?"

"I know these patterns."

"They're Promethean symbols,"
Matthew said, stepping out of range of Kit's hand. "You would."

Kit let soft-washed linen slip through his
fingers. He shook his head and sank back in his chair. "No, you don't
understand. I've worn the like. Painted by the hand of Prometheus himself.
Where did you come by those?"

"My brother and I both had
them," Matthew answered, hoping Marlowe wouldn't see him shiver.
"What mean you ... I mean, what do you mean, 'the hand of Prometheus
himself?" It was far too easy to get tangled up in Marlowe's archaic
diction, especially with everyone else around code-switching.

The voice at Matthew's shoulder that
interrupted wasn't exactly a
voice.
It was more like the immediate and
vivid memory of someone having spoken, moments before.

:Indeed, Kitten. Whatever do you mean?:

Matthew, trapped between his chair and the
table, turned so abruptly that he spilled his wine. Whiskey intercepted the
tottering crystal with inhuman speed, crimson splashing his hand and arm. He
set the glass back down, and lifted his hand to his mouth to sponge the
remaining droplets away with his tongue.

Whiskey knew better than to look up and
meet the Morningstar's star-blue gaze.

Matthew was not so well-versed. And in
fairness, didn't know who he was dealing with at first. He looked, and caught
his breath at the shadow-crowned beauty of the being who confronted him.
Someone stood at heel on the stranger's left; Matthew barely noticed him.

:Sir Christofer, Queen Morgan, Kelpie,:
the entity continued. :I am content to see you all well. And Matthew
Szczegielniak. I am pleased to make your closer acquaintance.:

Matthew just managed to shut his gaping
jaw. He made a little bow between the table and the chair and stepped free.
"You have me at a disadvantage, I'm afraid."

"So he does everyone," Whiskey
murmured into his wineglass.

The beautiful stranger twisted the toe of
a glossy black boot on pale marble and folded his hands behind him. :If I am
not mistaken, my dear Kit was about to offer introductions.:

Matthew's heart quickened when the
stranger smiled at him.
Another Elf-knight?
he wondered. And then Kit
disentangled himself from the table and stood, and Matthew realized everyone
else was standing too — even the Queen — standing silently, as if at attention,
having made no sound at all other than the scrape of chairs and the rustle of
cloth. And Matthew also now realized he knew the man who hovered at the
stranger's left hand like a coursing dog about to slip the leash.

"Felix," Matthew said, rolling
his shoulders under his jacket to make the talismans jingle. He wore his city
on his back like a snail. Felix he could handle. One-handed or two. "Sir
Christopher, I would hazard a guess that your enemy's second has arrived. Did
you retrieve him at the border, sir ... ?"