Blood and Iron (26 page)

He stood in the doorway and watched her head bent over her embroidery hoop, the gray light from the window catching on the white veil over her hair and the silver sliver of her needle dragging violet silk. He did not speak, but stood and thought about the itching wound under the bandage on his neck, waiting for his presence to command her attention. She would have noticed him before he ever came in sight, as he had followed the trace of her scent. At last she looked up, the corners of her eyes crimping, and tucked the needle through the fabric stretched over her hoop.

“Your Highness,” she said unexpectedly, and came to her feet gracefully as a length of cloth drawn on a string. “You honor the Daoine Sidhe with your presence, Dragon Prince.”

He sighed and pushed the door shut with his heel as he came into the room. “Not you too, Your Majesty.”

“Me too?” Polite whimsy, but the look she gave him through her lashes was wryly amused and most unqueenlike. She turned to face him, the folds of her gown falling perfect as flutes on a column, and drifted across the narrow room to stand beside him.

“ ‘Dragon Prince,' ” he quoted, mockingly. “I am Prince of nothing, yet; my father lives, and there are wolves between me and the head of the pack. And I have never wished to be Wolf-Sire. What if I refuse the purple, Your Majesty? What if I refuse to make the sacrifice?”

“Then, like Harold, you fall.” Ruthlessly cool, her eyes shifting toward a green as deep and opaque as the sea. “To be the Dragon Prince, you must be warlord of something— the pack will do—and you must spill the blood demanded. Do you suppose everyone who is a King wants to be one?”

“It's how all good fairy tales end,” Keith answered, bitterly. The Mebd blinked, lifting her long white skirts in her long white hands.

“Not all,” she said. “What seek you of me, Keith MacNeill? Elaine has taken my bargaining chip from me; she has permitted you your son—”

He drew a breath. She was almost as tall as he, and the way she angled her chin up slightly to meet his eyes was more imperious than any downward glance. “And you've claimed him so firmly that if I answer this so-called destiny, Ian will stand as the pack's Sire's son and as the heir to the Daoine Sidhe. You've bound us together one way or another. Unless I refuse to lead.”

“In which case we all pay for your weakness. Yes. I've often wondered”—she smoothed her skirts, as if considering— “why is it that the pack's Sire must have a son? If the leadership is not passed by primogeniture.”

“The young wolves are the future of the pack,” Keith said, watching her eyes. “What's a leader with no future to protect?”

Her eyes gave nothing away, not even a flicker to show if his barb had struck. “Ah.”

“So you've got your wish to ally the wolves and the Fae,” he continued. “Unless I refuse. And you know I cannot. And I must kill a cousin to be Prince. I do not see what advantage any of this offers the pack, Your Majesty.”

“Advantage remains to be determined when the cards are played out,” she said. “What is it that
you
want? In trade for your more willing cooperation?”

“That you can give me? Elaine's freedom.” He fisted his hands on the cloth of his trousers.

“I will not give you that, but your son is my heir, and that cannot be taken back. It is possible and more than possible that when I pass my bindings to him I will not pass that one.”

“Then Elaine dies with you.”

“Knots can be cut. Do you love her, Dragon Prince?”

It was the last question he had expected. It struck him almost dumb. He nodded, finally, recollecting himself, and glanced down at his boots. “We do not take it back, when we love.”

“Even when you've betrayed your love so carelessly? Never mind”—she interrupted herself—“what is it like?”

“What is it like to be chosen?”

“What is it like to love?”

“Ah.” He stepped back until he felt the boards of the door against his spine. “It's not like anything,” he answered, and then clarified. “I think it's a choice.”

“Most don't seem to think so.”

“Most are not wolves.”

She nodded judiciously, moving away to pour wine. She offered it to him with her own hands. “A choice to love? Or a choice to keep loving?”

“A choice to keep your soul,” he answered. “I know the Fae believe that a thing with no soul cannot love, and a thing with no heart can feel no loyalty. I think instead that if one has a soul, one
must
love.” He smiled. “And hope. One must hope, or one is dead.”

Her lips twitched at the irony in his tone. “And what do you hope for? With your doom marked on your throat like the bite of a wolf?”

He tried to pin her on a glance, but she slid free with a tilt of her head and a smile—acknowledging the effort, dismissing the effect. “If I am a Dragon Prince,” he answered, “then I am already as good as dead. So hope should not matter to me, should it?”

“But it does.”

“Yes,” he admitted. “It does.”

Chapter Twelve

Seeker leaned on figured stone in the shadows of an archway and pressed the palms of her hands to her face. The flesh was still warm from the heat of the tea mug. She shivered nonetheless.
The Faerie host needs humans among it for games of hurling and for fighting,
she remembered.
But Ian's not human. No more human than I.

“Damn it to Hell,” she muttered, and braced herself against the wall, fingering through the shadows of the Mebd's palace for a glimpse of her son.

Some rooms were warded against her. One such was the Mebd's bedchamber, and another was her study. The rooms of both Cairbre and Cliodhna were spelled so that she could not see in. Warded, as Seeker warded her own rooms when she wished privacy. Carel's were not, but the Merlin was bent over her desk, reading, and sometimes glancing dreamily at the window or the wall. Ian's was not—but she did not find him there. Seeker cracked her shoulders, stretched, and sought farther afield. Something brushed the edge of her awareness again. She frowned, remembering a similar sensation from the night before.
Kadiska? Here?
Possible.

But then Seeker did find her son, caught a glimpse of his face where the interplay of light and darkness outlined long eyelashes on a tender cheek, and shadows curled in the blue-black hollows of his hair . . . and in the long, dark hair of the girl in his arms, hair which draped over his shoulder to mingle with the black velvet of his cape.

They stood in a niche behind an arras, and if the tapestry had not been disarrayed, no light would have crept in to cast a shadow for Seeker's use. The young woman's face was pressed into the curve of Ian's shoulder. He bent over her, and Seeker felt a tingling shiver of guilty memory as his lips moved against the girl's ear, murmuring something that was more breath than words, then trailing kisses down the side of her neck. She laughed and lifted her head, and Seeker blinked and banged her skull on the archway. The girl was Hope, her loden green eyes shining with delight as she looked up at her smiling suitor. “I've a lesson,” she said. “I'll see you after dinner.” And she slipped out of his arms and let her fingers trail down his cheek before she pushed the tapestry aside and danced away.

Ian blushed when, a minute or two after also leaving the hiding place, he saw Seeker coming toward him along the cross-corridor. “Hello,” she said. “I was looking for you.”

He smiled at her, watching her eyes very carefully. She wondered if she was projecting her own misgiving onto him. His face seemed calm under the faint reddening of his cheeks, his skin as fair as his father's. Seeker felt a fist knotted in the fabric of her heart when she looked at him: the high cheekbones, the porcelain-fine, angled tips of his ears showing through the tangled black curls.
He looks like an Elf-knight.
The gold links of his belt rustled as he shifted from one foot to the other, his father's gesture.
He is.

“Mother,” he said, waving her into step beside him. “Wet hair and barefoot, roaming the halls. You'll catch your death.”

“I'm accustomed to the cold.” He moved like a young wolf, cocky and confident, his expression impassive. “Has the Mebd been good to you?”

“Like a mother. If she were distant and manipulative.”

She hissed; he turned. “I didn't mean it that way.”

“Of course not.” Seeker forced a smile. “She named you her heir. She must trust you very much.”

“I've given her no reason not to. You're not about to enlist me in some conspiracy against her, are you? Because

I . . . you, and my father. I've only just gotten you back.” Was that worry? She couldn't quite tell, but he stopped walking and turned to face her, lifting his shoulders and chest. “But she's been kind to me. As kind as she can be. Given what she is.”

“Heartless as Arthur?”

“She's got a heart,” Ian answered, with a funny little laugh. “No soul, but all the heart and heartbreak in the world.” His dark curls bobbed as he shook his head. “Mother.”

“Yes?”

“What did Arthur do that was so terrible?”

“Oh.” She put a hand on his shoulder, stroked the soft cloth of his doublet.
If he were blond, he'd look like Hamlet— the young Prince all in black.
“Why is he bound? There's a similar legend about Vlad Dracula, you know. That he'll come back when Romania needs him.”

“I hope I don't live to see that,” Ian answered, his right hand dropping to the hilt of his sword. An unconscious gesture, and so automatic it told Seeker volumes about how long he'd worn the blade.
The Mebd has been raising him to this role.
“But Arthur didn't do anything like what Vlad did.”

“No.” Seeker pulled a tangled handful of damp hair out of her face and tugged it back. “Arthur tried to kill his son.”

“Did kill his son.”

“Earlier. When Mordred was a newborn babe. Arthur . . . Ian, Merlin Ambrosius told Arthur that his son and Morgan's would be the downfall of Britain and the death of the King. Arthur had already earned Morgan's enmity— whether over politics or over the death of her lover, the legends aren't plain. You could ask her. You might even get a straight answer.”

He smiled through lowered lashes. “You're dodging the question.”

“Morgan hid her son from him. So he had all the male babies in Cornwall taken from their mothers.”

“Ah,” Ian said, as if to keep her from saying more.

“And,” she finished, pitiless, “set adrift on the sea, Ian. Abandoned. To drown.”
If he's to be a King,
she thought,
let him learn what kinghood costs.
“And they did.”

“And that's why he sleeps in Faerie now? In payment for that crime?” His voice didn't quaver. His green eyes were bright with curiosity.

“No,” Seeker told him, turning away. “That sacrifice fed the Dragon, you see. It was expected of him. It was the price for Britain's salvation. He sleeps in Faerie now because someone thought they had a use for him.”

Jane Andraste took one look at Matthew as he stumbled in the door and ordered him into the bathtub. He went, stripping off his sweater and shirt, and tossed them at the hamper in the hall and missed. Jane, following, stopped him with a hand on his back, a brushing touch that nevertheless made him hiss. “You fell,” she said. “You should go to the emergency room.”

“I'll be fine,” he said, turning to face her. She lifted her chin to look him in the eye. He smiled. “We'll need to set wards on the apartment I was in tonight—”

“You stopped her.” Relief, and Jane's eyes seemed to catch more light. She stepped away. “You might have bruised a kidney.”

“I'll be
fine,
” he insisted, and shut the door so he could strip off his jeans in privacy—even though her interest was about as intimate as a physical therapist's. “She'll be back if we don't ward them, now that she's found them. It's a baby, big family in a little apartment. You know how it is.”

“I'll see to it,” Jane answered, voice muffled by the door.

Matthew slid the shower door back in a slot that needed oiling, regretting the abruptness of the gesture as he bent painfully to adjust the water.
“Bath,”
she said. “You'll regret it if you don't. I'll fix you a drink.”

Her footsteps clicked as she walked away; he dumped shampoo into the tub to make bubbles in self-defense. He knew perfectly well he had no chance at all of keeping her out of the bathroom once he was in the water, but at least the doors were frosted glass. He was in the tub, steaming water and foam lapping at his belly, when she brought him iced grapefruit juice thinned with vodka, along with a half-dozen ibuprofen tablets, which she fed to him two at a time. “Ice when you get out of the tub,” she said. “Heating pad tomorrow.”

“Yes, Mom.” He gulped grapefruit juice, cold enough that the alcohol didn't sting any more than the acid would account for. “Medicinal purposes, right? This isn't mine.”

“I have a flask in my purse,” she said, flipping the toilet seat down and sitting on the lid, crossed ankles precise under her tailored skirt. She'd kicked her shoes off, and a run was starting over one pedicured toenail.

“Don't get pulled over.”

“I never,” she said, offended, “drink and drive. Which is why you're drinking my vodka and I'm not, because I have to be back in Albany for nine a.m.”