Blood and Iron (29 page)

It was the last mow of the season, and Matthew was a city boy at heart. Curved blades effortlessly turned yellowing meadow into a soft greensward that clung to the curves of the hill like a knit dress to a beautiful woman's hip; the sight lightened his heart and his step. The topnote of cut grass, a clean, organic scent, came to him through the cattle fences as he passed a harvested field and ascended Horsebarn Hill, pressing a fist against the pain low by his spine.

A road girdled the hill like a belt. Below it and behind him on one side lay the campus where Carel Bierce worked. On the hill's other flank, a small broad valley led down to a marsh with a stream running through it, the grassy bottom dotted with grazing geldings and mares. Matthew leaned forward, accustomed to walking but not accustomed to climbing, his calves shaking, wincing with the effort so soon after his encounter with the Unseelie Seeker.
Work it or it'll stiffen.
It was small comfort.

A cluster of trees graced the peak of the hill, a few clapboard-sided houses among them, and as Matthew came over the ridge he could see a figure so diminished with distance he could have covered her outline with his pinky nail.

Jane waited for him beside a tangle of brambles: wild roses and black raspberries, both past their season, and the whole weighted down with the strangling branches of bittersweet. Scarlet berries and their papery vermilion casings scattered the dirt road under her hikers; she had broken some branches loose and was twining them into a wreath sized like a crown, her head bent down and her silver-black hair breathtaking under the sunlit blue of the autumn sky. She raised her eyes as Matthew tromped up, fists doubled in the pockets of his camouflage jacket, hair blowing across his face. “How's your back?”

“It hurts,” he admitted. “But not as badly as I expected. What are you making?”

“A crown for the Summer King.” Wryly, and then she raised her hands to place it on his head. It slipped askew, his straight heavy hair giving no purchase, and he reached up and steadied it left-handed.

“I've never been crowned before.” Matthew tucked his fingers against his palm and slid his hand back into the warmth of the jacket. Small twigs prickled Matthew's scalp through his hair; he could smell the acrid scent of the berries. Starlings and sparrows quarreled over the ones remaining in the bushes. “I don't suppose it grants me any special powers?”

“Alas.” Jane rubbed cold-chapped hands together and shoved them into the pockets of her coat, lifting her chin to gaze down the hill past barns and fences, to the woods and river bottom below. She was dressed immaculately, even here.

She probably irons her jeans.
Matthew's lips twitched, but he kept them closed against the chuckle. “Here?” he asked.

Jane nodded, scuffing the ground with a boot. “This is the place. Or one of them, I should say.”

“I only managed to follow the Merlin as far as the bottom of the hill,” Matthew reminded. “The moonlight was too bright to cross all that open space without her spotting me.”

“Yes,” Jane answered, jerking her head at the rosebushes. She crouched and laid her palm flat on the ground as if feeling for a heartbeat. “But this is where the thorn trees are. And yes . . .” She smiled and looked up at Matthew, who grimaced as he tilted his head and the wreath slipped down over his eye.

He dropped to one knee beside her. “Yes?”

“You did well.” She fumbled in the pocket of her tan suede jacket and came up with a handspan-long iron spike and a red-handled pocketknife.

“Now what?”

“Now we bind the mound. Give me your hand, Matthew.” She opened the knife and balanced the spike against her knee.

Matthew looked at her, his eyebrows drawing together as he frowned. “That's a knife in your hand, Jane.”

She grinned up at him. “ ‘Scared of a little fire, Scare-crow? ' I need enough blood to wet the metal. Just a prick.”

Matthew kept his hands folded in his pockets. “Are you calling me a prick?”

“Perish the thought. Here.” She folded the knife open and held it out to him, handle first. “Make the cut yourself.”

He took the knife, red plastic handle slightly sticky from the heat of her palm, and eyed it dubiously. “What do we hope to accomplish with this?”

“Blood and iron,” she said, polishing the iron spike on her spotless blue jeans. “We spike the Faerie mounds, weaken the connection between our world and theirs. Enough times, enough passageways—”

“And we'll cut them loose. What about the children, then?”

“I think we'll weaken them enough to go kick their asses first, and then go in and get the changelings. Are you going to bleed for us or not, Matthew?”

He weighed the knife in his palm, used the heel of his hand to push the ridiculous, flopping wreath back up on his head, and stroked the blade across his thumb. “Blood.”

“Just a little. Then I'll seal the spike into the hill.”

“Hmmm.” But he set the rounded point of the blade against his skin and drew it toward his wrist, slicing rather than pressing. Skin cuts better than it punctures. “Very well,” he said, hiding the pain as shiny dark fluid welled around the blade. “There. Just a little, then,” Matthew said, holding the railroad spike out to Jane. The shallow cut on his palm, bisecting the mound of Mars, was already crusting. “Enough blood, archmage?”

“Blood enough,” Jane said, and set the tip of the spike against the root of the white oak they crouched beneath. “There's a mallet in my pack,” she said, gesturing to a bag he hadn't noticed, tossed on a pile of leaves. “Hand it to me.”

When she struck the first blow, Matthew felt the earth under his feet shiver, as if the tree were curling its roots deep down, like the fingers of a man in pain.

Seeker watched from the shadows, Gharne draped across her feet, heavy as a hunting dog, but the door to Cliodhna's chamber stayed inexorably closed. “I suppose it's too much to hope that he climbed out the window?” Seeker's physical self was curled on a divan in a small niche library down the corridor from the Unseelie emissary's room, the heavy weight of a bronze-and-copper-hilted sword depending from her belt at an angle, the tip of its scabbard resting on the floor. She held an ignored book in one hand. The other lay against the sheath, but she couldn't feel the burn of cold iron through it.

Gharne mumbled something but didn't lift his head. Seeker wiggled her boot under his jaw. She'd taped her toe, and the pain had subsided to twinges and aches. “Gharne, would you find the Kelpie for me?”

He sighed. “If I had known you would be this much trouble, I never would have tried to eat you all those years ago.”

“Pity,” Seeker said. “I would have missed the company. Come find me once you know what he's about. I suspect there won't be much rest for either of us from here on in.”

He rose into the air and passed through the nearest wall. Seeker thought she heard a brownie chambermaid shout in surprise as he glided through the corridor beyond. A few minutes later, her
otherwise
eyes showed her the door of Cliodhna's room opening, and a tired-eyed Keith came out. “I'll think on it,” he said back into the room.

The Leannan Sidhe stood framed in the doorway, backlit from the windows behind her, clad in a different but equally diaphanous robe. Seeker flinched at the casual way she laid a hand on Keith's arm before he turned away. “Think hard.”

He nodded, the corners of his mouth turning down. Rooms away, Seeker thought about stepping through the shadows, taking his arm and dragging him away from the fey, soul-killing muse. The Leannan Sidhe pressed against his arm, but he kept his gaze on her eyes. Seeker sighed in relief, and remembered Whiskey, and cursed herself. And then she caressed the smooth-worn ancient pommel of the sword called Excalibur, and shook her head. She still trusted him. Foolish, reckless, and possibly stupid. But she trusted Keith MacNeill, Dragon Prince, a man doomed to bloodstained life and a bloodier death.

He extricated himself from the Leannan Sidhe and prowled in the other direction. She thought of intercepting him, stepping from the shadows to catch his sleeve, but she was more interested, suddenly, in what he might do. A cat-shadow stretched on the floor behind her and she forced a breath that came out like a hiss. Her footsteps silent, she left the library and paced the hall, following the corridor away from Cliodhna's room until she came to a cross-passage.

She turned left, parallel to Keith and a few dozen yards behind, letting
otherwise
sight tell her where he was. He paused by the door to Seeker's room, but she did not permit her stride to falter, even when he raised his hand to knock. Other Fae were in the corridor, so Seeker kept her expression distant and aloof, suitable to the Queen's servant. The Queen's grandniece. One or two of them looked askance at the sword, but none showed recognition, or any aversion to the presence of cold iron.

I bet that would change if I drew it,
Seeker thought. Not too far away, Keith lowered his hand before it could touch the door panel and continued on his way. He turned down a side corridor, counting doors, and this time he didn't pause before he raised his hand and rapped sharply.
Carel's door,
Seeker thought, as the Merlin opened it and blinked up at the werewolf.

“Hello,” he said mildly. “You nearly cut my head off. I thought we should talk, if you were feeling better.”

“By all means,” she said. “Come in. I suppose I owe you an apology, but you did leave bloody handprints on my clothes.”

“I'm told to expect that,” he said, as Carel grasped the heavy door behind him. Seeker stepped into a dark corner of the corridor and out of the tapestry-shadowed wall behind Keith.

“Boo.”

Carel jumped, the door slipping from her fingers to close with a bang. Keith spun, half-crouched and reaching for the collar of his shirt as if he meant to tear it off. And then rocked backward, a strained laugh sliding out of his mouth. “I'm glad you're here,” he said.

Carel leaned on the doorknob. “You walked out of the wall.”

“She does that,” Keith replied. “She's a Seeker. A shadowmaster. ” He was looking at her, looking into her eyes.
The way he did the Leannan Sidhe,
Seeker thought, but he hadn't been smiling faintly when he looked at the Unseelie woman.
He likes to see me using my power. Who would have thought of that?

And then came a voice that was not the voice of her conscience. A vast, old voice that touched her nerves like honey and acid.
He loves you, Elaine Andraste. You are the mother of his son.

“She wants us,” Keith said, breaking the settled silence. “She wants us now.”

Seeker nodded, and Carel glanced between them, shaking her head so slightly it could have been a tremble. “Where?”

“Put your boots on. Follow me.”

Carel studied Seeker's face as she had earlier studied the pages of her book; Seeker kept her expression serene. And when Carel nodded and crouched to fish around in the wardrobe, Seeker reached out, as if unconsciously, and squeezed Keith's hand.

He didn't react for a moment, and then, slowly, he squeezed back. Carel sat down on the edge of the bed; Seeker caught Keith's eye and smiled slightly before she stepped away, kneeling to help the Merlin lace her boots.

Heartsick, Seeker led her charges from the palace and down the river to that shallow ravine at the base of the down. Distances were strange in Faerie, and it could have taken an hour or a day to walk it. The path led them through a butterfly-filled wood, over a moss-covered log laid across the stream—seeming first to be there, to be not, to be nothing but the blade of a sword laid edgewise—and, at the last, left them hopping from rock to rock like children.

“If I didn't know better,” Carel said when they paused for breath, “I'd think things changed here from moment to moment.”

“They do,” Seeker answered. “That's one of the reasons why it's so easy to get lost.” She caught herself humming and frowned. “There, under the vines. That's where we're going.”

“It looks like a cave.”

“A bit more than a cave,” Keith interjected. “Well, we'll see soon enough.” The strain in his voice drew Seeker's attention. His face was paler even than usual and it wasn't only from the grayness of the light; a fine layer of sweat shimmered on his forehead. He rubbed his hands together as if they hurt.

Carel noticed too. “What's wrong?”

He blinked. “Don't you feel it?”

“No.”

He shrugged. “It kind of . . . aches . . . to be here. Let's get it over with.” He slogged forward, his boots sucking in the streambank muck, and lifted the vines hanging over the cave mouth. Carel followed without a word and Seeker brought up the rear, still fondling the hilt of the sword at her hip. The cool, deadly weight comforted her.

Keith led them through the tunnels in darkness, Seeker guiding Carel with one hand on her shoulder so that the Merlin would not fall. Warm and humid air coiled about them: tasting, reckoning, remembering. “Mist?” Carel said again, softly.

Words failed. “You'll see.”

The glow greeted them before they came in sight of the Dragon's lair. Keith stumbled. Seeker stepped around Carel, owlsight serving her now that the darkness was imperfect, and gripped his forearm. He leaned on her like a drunken man, fevered through the cloth of his shirt. Carel's footsteps came close behind, echoing, and the Merlin must now be able to see them as silhouettes against the crimson glow lighting the fog.
I'm not supposed to be here.
But she had to be. She tasted a droplet of sweat when Keith shook his head like a wet dog, staggering; she held him up by main strength.