Blood and Iron (42 page)

“Yes.” I knew. “Crisis of faith?”

“I chose.” She closed her eyes. “I stand by my choice. But I didn't tell you what I chose, did I? You just assumed.”

There was nothing I could say to that, and so I nodded.

“We're groping toward something, but I don't know if it's darkness or light. Mist tells me things. I serve her. But I cannot trust her.”

“You can,” I answered, looking into her black opal eyes, knowing it was true. “You can trust her to be Mist. Darkness
and
light.”

“That would suggest to me that I am on both sides,” Carel said. “We are all the Dragon's children, Seeker.”

I breathed in hard. “What did Kadiska tell you?”

That startled her. She looked up, blinked, and shook her braids so the beads rattled. “She told me you'd use me and discard me. Trick me into betraying my own kind for the power of Faerie, and lock me away for safekeeping when you were done.”

“All true,” I answered. “Unless you can stop me.”

“I see.” She turned away from me, looking out over the goose-dotted waters of Mirror Lake to the little island at its center, a riot of maple leaves, the green of conifers, and birch trees white as upthrust bones. “Why is Mist chained, Seeker?”

“Chained?” I blinked. “Bound, yes—as far as I know, by the rules she set herself.”

Beads clattered. “There's a chain half-buried under the coins. Iron chain, I think. You never noticed?”

“I've only been there twice,” I answered. “How close can you get to something like that?”

The question had been rhetorical but she answered anyway. “As close as it takes. Would you like to go sit in the tree?”

The Merlin took me by the hand and led me up the bank toward Old Man Willow. I expected him to rustle his branches, welcoming, but there was no response. “Hallow's Eve,” I said. “That's it, I expect. I didn't know it was coming so fast.”

“Halloween's on the new moon this year,” Carel said. “I hope that means the students will be decently behaved. For a change.” She put a foot on the stairstep root and was hoisting herself into the willow's branches when a voice interrupted.

“What a beautiful day for a walk.”

A familiar voice. And an unwelcome one.

The rain had come up from New York City and swept the leaves from Connecticut sugar maples as well: a classic nor'easter. It was easy to pick the two women out among the branches of the willow; Matthew came up the slope, panting lightly from running in steel-toed boots, and forced himself to slow to a walk as he came in under the branches. His bruised back protested, but it was healing. “Merlin,” he said. “Elaine. Fancy meeting you two ladies here.”

He rubbed his hands together, easing the ache of his rings. The Seeker was pulling her shadows around her, cat-claws that were just material enough to scratch showing at her fingertips: no subtlety this time. Ready to fight. Light glazed Matthew's spectacles for a moment. He stepped sideways, seeking a shadow.

“I rather imagine you planned it that way,” Elaine purred, silky-cold. She had height from the tree if she decided to pounce, but he didn't think she would. Unlike the Unseelie Seeker, Elaine was . . . ambivalent, he judged.

“You imagine right.” He extended his right hand to Carel, iron rings dull against pale skin. “My lady Merlin. I've come to speak with you one last time.”

“In Faerie you're given three chances,” Elaine said, tucking a braid behind her ear.

Matthew looked up, surprised, and met her flat, reflective eyes, and wondered how he had thought her easily swayed. “In magic as well.”

“Matthew Magus,” Carel interrupted, gripping his hand as he reached up into the tree, fire opal glittering in silver on her thumb. “I know you—”

“A little, at least.”

“Would you truly stand by for genocide?”

Matthew stepped back, retrieving his hand. “It's not genocide, and I've told Elaine as much. It's not even retribution. All we plan is self-defense.”

“All
you
plan,” Elaine said. “What about your masters?” The Merlin half crouched in the tree behind Seeker, and Carel's hand on Elaine's shoulder silenced her. Matthew squirreled that bit of information away. The power dynamic had changed.

Matthew glanced down and tugged his glasses off, unzipping his camouflage jacket in a calculated display of confidence to polish the lenses on his shirt. “I can make you human, Seeker. Take the Fae taint out of your blood and make you mortal again. And there's a place for you both in Prometheus. We take care of our own.” He wondered if he kept the betrayal out of his own voice when he said it.
Kelly.

He risked a glance up. Carel's hand was still tight on the Seeker's elbow. The Seeker's mouth worked. “Human.”

Matthew slid his glasses back up his nose. Carel flashed him a smile at the gesture. “It won't work on full-Fae. But we have been experimenting. We have ways.” And he spread his hands wide, showing Seeker the iron rings on his fingers. Waiting for the realization to touch her eyes.

“Hellfire,” she whispered, and looked at Carel. “Experimenting. Cairbre.” Then she looked back at Matthew, gray-green eyes wide, her long neck arched like an angry swan's. “How do you justify that, Matthew Magus?”

“Justify?”

“Torture—”

“How does Faerie justify death and kidnapping and trickery and rape and crippling, Elaine? How do they justify you?”

“Survival,” she said, and Matthew nodded.

“Likewise. And how do you justify it?”

Elaine edged forward, twisting her hands together, ready to hop from the tree. Matthew stuffed his own in his pockets to hide the trembling and the pain. Carel turned aslant and dropped her hand from Elaine's shoulder to the bark of the tree that cupped them as if in a giant palm.

“I don't justify it,” Elaine said, at the same moment Carel leaned forward to ask, “What have you done to my tree, Matthew?”

“Your tree? The willow?”

She nodded. “He's asleep.”

“And likely to stay that way.” Matthew shrugged, hunkering down himself to rest his ass on the heels of his shoes. He picked idly at a flaked bit of bark in the grass, looking down at his hands rather than up at the women in the tree.

“ ‘Tonight it is good Halloween,' ” Carel quoted. “ ‘The Faerie court will ride.' What happens on Hallow's Eve, Matthew?”

“Halloween's not for a week,” he answered, pulling the strength of iron around him. The Seeker's shadowy clawtips worried yellow furrows in the willow's much-scarred bark.

“Come back to humanity.” And even Matthew could hear the plea in his own voice. Elaine's fingers twitched deep into the tree, and it never shuddered. Matthew imagined that she was visualizing tearing his throat from ear to ear. “Like everything else Fae, the tree will be bound. But it will be unharmed. No genocide. I promise you. And you, Carel—”

She collected and gathered herself; he interrupted, talking fast. “You're one of us. You have friends, family, students. How do you justify what will happen to them if Faerie wins?”

“What will happen to them if Faerie wins?”

“Ask her Queen,” Matthew said. “Ask the Unseelie Queen. We'll never be safe again.”

The Merlin disengaged herself from Elaine and the tree as neatly as a gymnast sliding to the ground. “I don't justify magic, Matthew Magus, or claim its price is not too high. But neither am I certain that
safe
is all that healthy. Besides, who says somebody has to win?”

Matthew's smile creased into a frown. “What do you mean?”

“A greenhouse is not a garden,” the Merlin answered, and now Elaine slid out of the tree behind her, her boots soundless on the bare damp earth. “And a garden is not a jungle, mortal Mage.” She seemed larger, darker, as if the shadow of vast wings had fallen over her. She glanced up at Elaine, the breeze bringing Matthew the odor of incense that hung on her hair, and she grinned like a wolf. “Of course, if the Seeker wishes to accept your offer—”

A garden is not a jungle.
Matthew's tongue seemed swollen. “I'm willing to accept the cost,” he said. “I wouldn't let my child wander in a jungle.”
And this is one more way to save Kelly's sorry life a little while longer, isn't it?

The shadowy wings seemed to flicker and settle against Carel's back. She tilted her head, watching him out of one enormous eye.

“Come home, Elaine,” Matthew said. “Leave the monsters under the bed where they belong.”

The Seeker of the Daoine Sidhe closed her eyes. “And what happens to the past? To the evidence? You won't need industrial smelters to dispose of the bodies of the Fae ...”

“I don't understand,” he said. He reached out to take Elaine's wrist in his hand, as he had one other time. She shivered like a deer. His fingertips brushed her flesh.

“Bhopal,” Seeker said, shaking her head, covering his fingers with her own. “Nagasaki. Wounded Knee. Diamond mines in South America. The coolie labor that built your chains across North America, Promethean.”

“You're going to hold me accountable for that?”

“You hold me accountable for whatever broke your heart.” She smiled and freed her hands from his, touched his face as if in benediction.

“Don't pretend you love Faerie.”

“I don't,” she said. “I hate it. But my family lives there, and I'll defend it to my last breath. And another thing. You need better monsters than yourselves, Matthew Magus.”

She interrupted herself, looking down in surprise as if confirming that iron still clinched Matthew's fingers. “The rings don't hurt. Carel—”

“All's fair in love and war,” the Merlin said, one hand on the bark of the somnolent willow. Matthew met her eyes, and her eyes looked through him. “And Matthew Magus has touched a unicorn. Haven't you, Mage?”

“How did you know that?”

The Merlin smiled, the Dragon smiling through her. “It's in your eyes. He can't hurt you, Elaine. Now go home, Matthew Magus, and decide if you really do want to die with your hammer in your hand.”

Chapter Twenty

The pack had assembled.

Wolves and men, yellow eyes and green and blue turned with Keith as he walked the length of the main hall, Caledfwlch tapping his thigh like a metronome's wand. Eoghan lay by the fireplace on a pallet, and Keith had to walk past every wolf in the hall to get there. It could not have been more quiet, but their concern smelled like muttered conversation. Fewer than a hundred had come, and that more than half the pack.
How did there come to be so few of us?

He knew the name of almost every wolf; the ones he did not he presumed were Russian, by the kinship of their scent to Fyodor's or to Vanya's. Fyodor and Vanya—and Eremei, and Ian—clustered near Eoghan.
I wish Morag were here.

But she could not be, of course.

Such things were only for the pack.

Vanya crouched closest to Eoghan, although as Keith hunkered down beside them he could see his father had turned his face away from the cup of water the blond wolf was coaxing him with.
Old bigot,
he thought affectionately, and reached out to take Eoghan's hand in his own. “Father, I have come.”

“And about time it is, you daft bastard,” Eoghan replied, turning to look Keith in the eye. He squeezed, and there was still strength in the grip, but the bones in his hand felt as if they were in danger of poking through. “I thought I'd have to get on with the dying without you.”

“I had to get married,” Keith said, and showed his father the golden band. “How do you like your grandson, Sire?”

The dry laugh was strong too. Eoghan wouldn't show weakness. Couldn't. But there was a particular little hitch in it that spoke of pain, and Keith could tell the old wolf collected himself so his breathlessness wouldn't show.
How did it happen so fast?

“I like him well enough, for a cub with the look of his mother,” Eoghan said.

Keith smiled to hear him sound so much like himself, and then steeled himself for the question he knew he had to ask. “Father, do you think it's time?”

“While I can still walk,” Eoghan answered, using Keith's hand to pull himself up. “Spare me the ignominy of dying in my own bed. What's the sky like, son?”

“Full of stars,” Keith answered.
Wolves do not weep.
“A mild night for a journey.”

“Pity,” Eoghan replied. “A little cold would send things quicker. Tell your son about me, lad. Now help me off with my pajamas.”

Keith's hands trembled as he undid the buttons on Eoghan's top. His father lay passive before him and permitted the touch, his skin already cool; Keith bowed his head, breathing deeply. He was surprised by a warm presence at either shoulder when he looked back up. Ian squatted at his left hand, cool eyes acute and long-fingered hands deft as a surgeon's as he helped undress his grandfather, and on Keith's right hand Vanya leaned a little closer, steadying him with his warmth. Keith looked up, seeking Fyodor's eyes, but the Russian wolf leaned back on his heels, arms crossed, watching the pack.
Claiming the pack.
Keith understood the body language well enough, and as he gathered his father into his arms he couldn't be bothered to care.

“Are you strong enough?”