Blood and Iron (30 page)

The heat was dizzying; she didn't remember it being so bad. Carel grabbed Keith's other elbow. “Is this normal?”

Seeker shook her head, wondering if Carel could even see the gesture in the red-lit darkness. “I don't know. It's been five hundred years since the last time.”

“The last time? Dracula? Oh. Hell.”

“Yes.”

“Blood,” Keith said, clearly. And then they rounded the corner into the searing brightness of the tunnel overlooking Mist's chamber.

Keith went to his knees. Seeker bent over him. “Get up, get up!” Dragging at his arm. “Get up, dammit!”

Carel let go of his left hand. He pushed at the vine-traced floor feebly. “It wasn't this bad in the dream.”

“This is it,” Seeker said. “She's chosen. You're it. Refuse, show weakness, and she eats you, or worse, casts you out to fail. So let's do this thing.”

And then Mist's massive, shifting laughter boomed through the cavern, and her great opalescent eye blinked lazily in the opening of the tunnel—
occluding
the opening of the tunnel. “Indeed, Elaine Andraste, Seeker of the Daoine Sidhe,” the Dragon whispered. “Let us do this thing. Come unto me.”

“It hurts,” Keith said.

“So does being born,” the Dragon answered. “Carel Bierce, Merlin and musician, scientist and seer. Clever of you, my lady, to study so deeply the secrets of the earth. Did you never suspect that the very bones of the earth lay under your skin? No? Come unto me.”

The Merlin moved forward, not shuffling but striding crisply, moving as if under the force of a command. Her footsteps carried her to where the passageway widened to cavern, almost within touching distance of the boulderlike head, before she stopped and put one hand out to brace herself against the wall. Seeker squinted her eyes to hurting, trying to look at Carel's form stark against the black-bright glare of the Dragon. “No,” the Merlin said, quite clearly, and slammed her fist into the wall. “No. I'm not a puppet. I don't care what you are. I'm not a puppet. ”

Mist reared back, a violent hiss spraying droplets of flame from red-lipped nostrils. Wings unfurled the width of her echoing chamber and hot gold hailed from scrabbling talons. “Who are you to deny me?”

“Merlin,” Carel said, her head swaying dangerously. “And born to master you. So don't give me any shit, Mist. You may live in my head, but I live in yours too, and this initiation is going where I say it goes. I don't know what you got away with before, but I am not going to let you be pushing me around.”

Seeker's fingers felt numb at the ends of her hands. Somehow, she kept her hold on Keith's arm and helped him get one hand and one foot down and force himself to his feet. Blood streamed down his face from his nose, from the corners of his eyes. He spat blood on the stones and it sizzled there. His hands left red smears on Seeker's green tunic as she led him forward, into the gale of Mist's dark, chaotic laughter.

“And you, Dragon Prince?” Her head ducked, darted like a hungry pike, showed a smile fanged in stalactites— impossibly fast for something her size. “Do you deny me too?”

He shook his head. “She's the will,” he said, waving a bloodstained hand at Carel. “I'm the hand, I guess.” He stepped away from Seeker, although she held the hem of his shirt as if she could prevent his going. “You've got me looking the part. Blood and more blood. Is that all there is?”

“Blood makes the grass grow,” Mist hissed, her forked tongue a lightning bolt caressing Keith's bloody face to leave a streak behind. He didn't flinch any more than he had when Carel leveled the sword at his throat. “Choose your battle well,
drighten
. Choose well your sacrifice. Choose your betrayer.”

Keith opened his mouth, and Seeker—shivering in fear, her hand tight on the hilt of Caledfwlch—Seeker stepped in front of him. He dropped a hand on her shoulder, as if to push her aside, and Carel turned back to them with eyes, opal-bright as Mist's, wide in shock. “Damn you, Dragon,” Seeker said, shrugging Keith's hand away. “No. He's mine. Father of my son, and I claim him. You cannot have him.”

“I cannot?” The Dragon winked, amused. “Father of your son, you say, and it is a rightful claim. And how will you stop him from carrying out his destiny, when he was born to stride the earth as the Dragon does, to bring me the blood that is rightfully mine?”

“I can't.” Seeker shook her head. Carel smiled farther down the corridor, her teeth dazzling white in the gloom, a low laugh bubbling in her throat. “I can't, because he'll do what the stories demand. Spirals, it's all spirals, and I know it.”

The Dragon lowered her head. “Will you marry him?”

“I will.”
Unless the Mebd countermands it.

A long silence, as if Mist considered. “It is not enough. I'll not be subject. Your claim is fair, but my claim is older, and written on the stone the world was forged upon.”

Seeker smiled then, and unsheathed the sword. “I have a second reason.” Mist lunged at her, the great head narrowing as it drove into the passageway. Carel squealed, throwing herself against the wall, her hands spread flat as the Dragon's muzzle hammered past like a freight train a finger's breadth away. Seeker laughed, and didn't step aside; Caledfwlch felt light as a bee sting in her hand and it was Mist who drew back, blood running like magma down a slash from the top of one nostril diagonally across her face to split her lip.

The Dragon hissed, spraying blood like smoking jewels into the tunnel. “Caledfwlch. Two reasons,” she said. “I'll have that sword for my horde in a moment, though.”

“I think not,” Seeker answered.
Keith. Carel. Forgive me.
“I gave you two reasons.”

“Have you the third?”

“Yes,” Seeker said, and—too softly for Keith or Carel to hear over the rasp of the monster's breathing—Named the Mother of Dragons to her face. “Maat.”
Thank you, Morgan.

And slowly, slow as a glacier retreating, slow as stone worn down by water, Mist nodded her acquiescence to that Name and, folding her wings, lay down upon her bed of gold. Seeker sheathed Caledfwlch and turned her back on the Dragon, dropping to one knee before Keith. She unhooked the blade from her braided belt and held it up to him, hilt first.

“Your Majesty. This is yours now.”

He took it, bemused, and drew the blade a handspan from the sheath, watching it glitter in the dragonlight. “Marry me?” he said over its edge.

“So it seems.”

“Did you bind her?” A toss of his head over his shoulder, and Seeker shook her head.

“No. She can't be bound that way. I—I proved myself, I think. I wasn't supposed to be here. It was supposed to be you and Carel . . .”

Keith nodded. He looked down, swallowed, wiped blood from his face and tested the edge of his sword on a thumbnail. “You changed the equation.”

“I don't know what I did,” she admitted, struggling to her feet. “But I never want to have to do anything like it again.”

“This is only the beginning.” Carel's voice, soft with the certainty of prophecy. “There is blood upon blood to come.”

Chapter Fourteen

Keith walked Seeker to her room. She stopped him with a raised palm, turning to look at him as she touched the cool stone of her doorknob. "You can't trust me,” she said.

"I know.” He arched his eyebrow and smiled out of the left side of his mouth. She bit her lip against the pain. “Do you think that ever stopped Arthur from loving Guenevere? ”

“Arthur didn't exist.”

“Now he does.” He reached out and brushed a strand of hair that had escaped her hasty braid away from her cheek, tucking it carefully behind her ear. His fingers lingered. “And if I can't trust you . . . well, whose fault is that, but mine?”

She didn't have an answer for that. Didn't have an answer when he tilted her chin up and looked her in the eye. “If I were going to get over you, Elaine, I would have done it by now.”

“Do you think Janet ever got mad at the balladeer?”

“Janet won,” he reminded her, and kissed her on the mouth before she could say anything more. He pressed her against the door and nuzzled the side of her throat, holding her face cupped gently between his hands. “ ‘She'll shape me in your arms, my love / to a woodland beast sae wild,' ” he sang under his breath.

“But hold me fast and fear me not,”
she thought,
“the father to your child.” What is it with men singing me “Tam Lin”?
She put a hand on his chest, ready to push him away. She thought about the sulfur-tinted breath of dragons, and the seaweed smell of the Kelpie.
At least tonight you can have the fantasy.
She pushed him back enough to catch her breath, although it took all the concentration she could muster. “When's the full moon, Keith?”

“Three weeks,” he said. “Waning from full now. You used to know.”

“I used to be somebody you could turn your back on.”

“I'll take my chances,” he said. “I'll steal you back from the Faeries. Like Orfeo. ‘What shall I give you for your play? / Pray, let me take my lady away.' ”

“You were the one who gave me to the damned Faeries in the first place. After you realized I was a changeling. When I didn't know a thing about it. Because you didn't want to watch me grow old and die, remember?”

“I remember,” he said. “I live with it.”

I'll lie to you, Keith,
she wanted to say.
I'll use it against you. I'll wrap you around my fingers and I'll make you serve the wishes of my Queen. Even if she pretends to bend a knee to you. Even if she names you sovereign.
But the geasa commanded, and with a sigh, she surrendered to it and twined her fingers in his hair. “We all know those songs.”

“We hear them sung enough.” He whispered against her skin, “You're not Guenevere. And I'm not Arthur. Unlock the damned door, Elaine.”

We're doomed one way or the other,
she thought, and did as she was told.

Matthew twisted the iron ring on his wedding finger and folded his arms over his chest, waiting. The earth under his shoulders was cool, soothing to his still-sore lower back, new-mown grass tickling the nape of his neck, the ground soft when he pressed his shoulders into the hollow. “Set the ward and watch it,” Jane had said.

And he could have watched from one of the fast-food joints that ringed the campus—a little island of suburban consumerism in the midst of a rural society of dairy farms and hardware stores ranged along state highways—but the sun was warm and the sky was blue. He'd entertained himself by wandering the campus, reading the plaques screwed into the bark of various botanical specimens and the tidy signs posted beside the geological ones, and had finally settled down here. Surely the Merlin would return before too much longer. He'd checked her class schedule, and her first section of the week was at one that afternoon.

She didn't seem the sort to abandon her students, although Matthew admitted that first impressions were misleading. And he was himself absent from Monday classes currently—
A college education will do no one any good if the world ends while we are engaged in the classroom,
though that did nothing to assuage his guilt—but still. He thought she'd be along. And so he closed his eyes and attuned his senses to the iron spike linked to his blood that he and Jane had driven into Horsebarn Hill.

Power ran thickly here, and many things clustered around it, huddling close. Matthew felt them moving, tracking them by their ripples like trout beneath a stream. He opened his eyes as he sat up, distracted momentarily by the vermilion-and-brown flicker of a cardinal shedding its summer plumage for winter. Someone coughed behind him, and Matthew shook his head and sighed. “I suppose you won't believe I let you get the drop on me intentionally?”

Carel's voice had an amused burr. “You can pretend I believe that, if it makes you feel better.”

“It might.” He rolled forward in one smooth motion, finding his feet, the heels of his boots leaving indentations in the greensward. “Take a lot of chemicals to make a lawn this green.”

“Or a lot of bullshit,” Carel answered, pushing her braids behind her ear. She carried the same suede backpack, but today she wore faded blue jeans and a velour turtleneck with a patchwork vest unbuttoned over it. Always the gypsy colors and swing of fabric. “Here in academia, we have both. I take it you were looking for me?”

“Indubitably. You have a class. May I walk with you?” He laid a hand on her elbow; she shrugged, but didn't shake it off.

“You're here to persuade me again.”

“I was going to ask how you slipped past my ward without me feeling it, when you came back from Faerie. But if you wish to be persuaded . . .” Matthew shrugged in his turn. “You know what the Fae are. You know what the Fae do. What more do you need?”

“And the Prometheus Club is innocent in its power?”

“I never said that. But we're trying to protect—” His bruises reminded him of exactly what it was he meant to protect.

“Have you ever been married, Matthew?” Unexpected and abrupt. She finally looked up at him as she said it, her expression arch and concentrated.

“. . . Um? No.” He shook his head, then pushed escaping locks of hair out of his eyes. “I haven't been married.”

“Neither have I,” she said, her sternness melting into a conspiratorial grin as she stepped onto the path. “But a friend told me that in a good marriage, nobody wins.”