Blood and Iron (32 page)

“I can make no promises,” the black wolf said, scrubbing a hand across his curls. “But I can listen to your arguments. You said there were complications, however. And that is only one.”

Sharp.
“Yes, there's more. The Mebd has named my son her heir, and so the pack is involved whether we choose to be or not. And this is the year of the teind to Hell, and there is no telling who may be sent.”

“Hell,” Fionnghuala said, the note in her voice stark enough that Vanya put a hand on her elbow to steady her. “That's still going on?”

“Still?” Despite himself, the surprise got out to color Keith's voice. “Nuala, you cannot be old enough to remember—”

“On the contrary,” she said. “I've seen Hell my own self, and lived to tell the tale.”

“So have I,” Fyodor put in, turning away. His slouched, narrow shoulders rose and fell as he fixed himself a drink. “I'm not sure how it signifies.”

“Because you are speaking metaphorically,” she said, with dignity. “And I am not. Because I was Fionnghuala mac Llyr, of the Tuatha de Danaan like the Mebd and her sister Queens who are the daughters of my brother Manannan. And I was the first tithe who went to serve the Morningstar, when the deal was cut, fifteen hundred years ago.”

Keith turned, just turned and stared at her. “Nuala?”

“Surely,” she said, “you did not think the name of a strange American could be an accident.”

He shook his head. “You served in Hell and came back out?”

“Some are permitted to leave,” she said with a shrug. “Once they've broken and been put to use.”

“Broken?” Just the word felt sharp-edged on his tongue, as he tried not to picture what she meant.

“Everyone breaks.” She came to Keith and lifted his whiskey from his hand, downing it like a man. She smiled into the empty glass. “Now, that brings back memories.” Then she looked up, looked from Keith to Fyodor to Vanya, her clear gaze settling at last on Eremei. The young wolf watched his elders in obvious, utter confusion. Keith could not look away from his face, which was, he suspected, what Fionnghuala had intended.

“So,” she said. “Tell us, Dragon Prince. Who is Faerie's enemy, that wolf and Fae and Hell must all strive together to defeat them?”

“Remember what I told you about the Prometheus Club?”

“Ah, yes. I have been gone for some little time, haven't I? But that begs the question”—a tilt of her head fanned her hair across her neck—“what happens next?”

Keith coughed into his hand. “I take Fyodor to Annwn, if he's amenable. And you as well, Nuala, if you like—”

“I've seen it,” she said dryly, turning her gaze on Fyodor. “And yourself, Fyodor Stephanovich?”

The black wolf smiled. “Why not?” he said. “Since Nuala tells me I haven't
actually
seen Hell.”

Seeker trailed ribbons of laughter through the rain as the white stallion stretched himself to a bone-shuddering run, sweat-and-rain-wet hide rough against her thighs when her robe slid higher. His pounding hoofbeats echoed until they came up a rise to a horizon of water glistening black as oil under groping fingers of light. “Rain and sunlight,” Seeker said. “Weather.”

The Kelpie whickered, pawing the emerald bank, turning up rich earth and clots of sod. “Something's changing,” he said.

Seeker untangled cold-cramped fingers from the wiry strands of his mane and slid down his foam white shoulder. The rain plastered her robe to her body and her hair to her neck. She shivered hard, gritting her teeth so they wouldn't chatter, and leaned against the stallion's steaming side for warmth. He fell away like water under her hand, and she startled, ready for a fight—but instead of a threat, Whiskey in human form stood from a crouch and put his arm around her shoulders. “You should take your robe off,” he said. “You're chilled with the wet.”

“Then dry me.” His hand went to the collar of her robe; she knocked it away. “Don't you think of anything else?”

“Have you known a lot of studhorses?” He stepped back and made a gesture as if smoothing cloth over her body; the water vanished off her skin. “I can't do much for the stains.”

She turned away from him and strolled along the arched bank of the loch. “I'm sure there's a brownie at the palace who can.” The light moved in narrow bands over the water, reminding her of hands stroking a face. “Why did you come for me this morning?”

She watched his face from the corner of her vision: noticed the clever lie, almost felt his frustration when he could not force it past his lips. Knew that frustration as her own. “I was lonely,” he said. “There was no one to share the rain with.”

A simple statement. It struck her with unaccountable sorrow. She swallowed and stooped to pick a pebble out of the turf. “What about Kadiska?”

He grinned, showing her his even white teeth. “Surely you didn't imagine she and I were friends.”

“Well acquainted.” She couldn't keep the bitterness from her voice. The rock in her hand was white, flat, glossy, like a chip of chalk or bone. She weighed it in her palm for a moment and spun it into the loch. It didn't skip.

“You did tell me to distract her.”

“I did.”

“You're jealous.”

“Don't be ridiculous.” His grin widened, and she struck him across the face. “Bastard.”

The blow turned his head. He blinked and raised a hand to his cheek, shaking his head. “I serve my lady's pleasure,” he said. “But if you didn't like the attention, you could order me to stop.”

Seeker pulled back to slap him again and stopped. She bit her cheek, blood salty and sweet on her tongue. “I just came from another man's bed, Uisgebaugh. What do you take me for?”

“The Queen of all Faerie,” he said, the smile falling off his face. “Or soon to be. And a lonely Queen was she. And to be precise, it was your own bed, and no one else's.”

“There's a song about you, little treachery,” Seeker said. She spat blood on the grass. “ ‘Whiskey, You're the Devil.' Where's Gharne?”

The water-horse brayed laughter. “I left your familiar in the Caribbean. I imagine he'll find his way back fairly soon. Once he realizes I slipped away from him. I'm hard to track, mistress mine, for all he was clever. You're still shivering.”

She wrapped her hands over her arms. “It's no matter.”

“Ah,” he said. He tugged her stiff body close and warmed her against his chest. “You want to run away.”

“Only if I can take Keith and Ian with me.” She sighed and let him hold her, shaking her head slightly from side to side. “I had some wild idea that if I could wake Arthur up, he could take Keith's place.”

“You know that wouldn't happen, mistress.”

“I know. And I couldn't wake him anyway.”

“May I speak freely?”

She remembered a command not to speak of Keith in her presence. “As you will.”

Soft, whickering laughter against her ear. “What are you going to do, my lady, when your lover's hands are red with the blood of innocents? When he goes to feed his Dragon? What will you do then?”

“Try not to watch,” she said. “Whiskey. Are you trying to become my friend?”

“Not in the slightest,” he answered, with no sign that he fought the compulsion of the question. “But I need you strong, my lady. I guard your heartbeat as my own.”

“Why do you pursue me so?”

He paused and thought about it. “My lady Seeker. Seduction is what I do. It is what I am. Young women are my rightful prey, the sadder the better.”

“And you so sad and alone yourself.”

“It is,” he said, “what it is. You can command me away from you with a word. But you haven't yet.”

“No, I haven't, have I? I wonder why that is.”

Whiskey started to speak and then paused, as if realizing her phrasing did not compel him to answer. She cocked her head at him and gestured him to continue. He sighed and spread his hands. “You want to hurt him,” he said. “But you haven't quite the courage to do it. You want vengeance and you need him, and you need his attention. You're furious. Furious at him and at yourself. And I'm an easy thing to hurt yourself against.”

“Better pain than that . . . numbness, again.” Her eyes dropped. “There's blood under your fingernails.”

“There usually is, my lady.” He turned from her, staring out over the black water of the loch. The torn clouds sealed like a wound overhead. He squatted on the unkempt turf and let fingers the color of the rippling water trail through it.

“What do you think of Hope? And Ian, my son?”

“I think you cannot trust them, and they should not trust each other. I think as well that Hope's a weather-witch, and strong enough so her power now and again jostles even the Mebd's control.”

“I can't trust them. Or Keith, or you, or the Mebd, or Morgan, or Àine. I can't trust Robin and I can't trust Carel and I can't trust Mist. I sure as hell can't trust myself.”

“Ah,” he whispered, dipping his fingers in the loch once more as the clouds closed for good. “You begin to understand. ”

“Whiskey,” she said, suddenly curious, watching the beads of water sparkle and then go dim upon his skin. “Surely you found it hard to trick people into thinking you were anything but Fae, three or four hundred years ago, looking like that?”

“I didn't,” he said, straightening. “I didn't look like this.” When he glanced back up his skin was pale and his features fine under a shock of straight black hair, his Caribbean eyes less startling in contrast. “Not in Ireland, anyway. But I don't like this skin. It's pasty.”

The petulant tone startled Seeker to laughter. “For a monster, you persist in being strangely charming.”

His broad shoulders twitched, as if shaking off a fly. “I'm a monster, all right,” he answered. “Any human shape I wear is just a guise. But the line between monsters and gods is a fine one, isn't it?”

She watched him stand and stalk away. He stopped perhaps ten feet down the bank, and from behind she watched the texture of his skin and hair change back, the broad shoulders grow a little more slender. “I could bid you to hunt no more. What would happen then?”

“I would starve,” he said. “Eventually. And the seas would go unrevenged. How like a human.”

“Oh?”

He snorted in disgust. “Wolves and foxes, hawks and bears. They eat the same things your people like to eat, the rabbits and the deer. They might be a threat to your obscene fat flocks of sheep and sharp-hooved cattle. Poison them, trap them. Hunt them with dogs you've bred into monsters, mockeries of dogs so gigantic their hearts fail after a few short years of running blood through their enormous bodies. Vilify and fear them, give them evil names. The animals that serve man are blessed, and those that serve their own autonomy are evil? I think not. A wolf is just a wolf, my lady. Innocent.”

“You kill because you like to,” she growled, coming up on her toes. “Don't compare yourself to a wolf.”

“The only difference between me and a wolf,” he answered, striding back to her, leaning down into her face, “is what we hunt, and how we hunt it. Don't deceive yourself that your lover has never tasted blood, or that he felt no joy when he ran the prey to earth. Or that your son is innocent of such things, either.”

She grabbed his shirt collar. “Who are you to judge human morality?”

“Honest,” he answered. “And without the pious illusion that my needs are somehow moral and those of the rest of the world are not. Like your Wolf-prince. Like the Dragon and her servants through the years. Arthur was more moral than Mordred—how? I do what I do to preserve my own, and if there's blood on my hands to the elbow, so mote it be. My lady.”

“That's . . .”
. . . wrong.
“How does it make you any different from the human Magi? Any better than the other side of the war?”

He caressed her cheek with a wide-open palm, his thumb in the notch under her lip. She jerked her head back. “It doesn't,” he said. “Except your mortals do what they were going to do anyway, and then cloak their actions in the justification of right and wrong because they cannot face the truth.”

Her skin tingled where he touched her. She leaned into him and shouted. “You can save the nature-red-in-tooth-and-claw speech. We're
supposed
to be better than that.”

“You lot seem to say that often.” The smug, condescending smile. “Does it make you feel
better
? Will it make you feel better when your lover slaughters mortals by the thousands? Do you suppose it comforted Dracula's wife when she threw herself from the tower, that her husband had done what he had done to protect his people? Or John Hunyadi of Hungary, for that matter, when that selfsame Dracula paid suit to Hunyadi's daughter, even from captivity? Do you suppose Harold died comforted, knowing he had refused a course of savagery and
failed
?”

Her robe fluttering about her, she struck him. Backhand, with a doubled fist, and then kicked him when he staggered, first in the belly and then, when he went to one knee, in the chest. She thought he would attack her, or shift back to his horse form to absorb the blows. Instead he knelt, the wet grass staining his trousers, and raised his chin. Seeker slammed her elbow into his forehead and her knee into his throat, kicking him again until he wrapped both arms around her knees and tripped her backward onto the greensward.

“It feels good, doesn't it?” he whispered, and nuzzled the hem of her robe aside, baring the length of her thigh. “Go ahead and hit me. I don't mind.”