Blood and Iron (44 page)

It is very dark in the desert at night.

I settled in the mud beside Whiskey and Robin, and composed myself to wait.
Kadiska has Ian's heart.
Yes, and I would be on her heels as soon as I'd stopped my son from unleashing the worst thing I could imagine.
Child, you cannot do this thing.

But he could.

And he would.

I leaned back against Whiskey's flank and looked at the stars—serene and uncomplicated, and not the trace of a cloud to hide them. The water-horse breathed easier; he'd let his hide and the earth grow dry. Robin dozed against my shoulder, and I breathed a sigh into air rapidly blooming with desert chill. There might even be dew, later, and that would help Whiskey.

I had time to think, watching the stars, leaning against my stallion. I fingered the golden bracelet binding my wrist, feeling the slick convolutions of the braid.
I wonder if the Unseelie are allied with Prometheus. It would explain a lot. Like how Matthew knows as much as he knows.

And how
does
Matthew know as much as he knows, anyway?

The hair in the bracelet tickled and itched. I sucked silently on my teeth, finding and naming stars. Betelgeuse and Bellatrix. Sadalmelik and Aldebaran. Rigel and Alcyone and Menkar and Castor. Such strange and lovely names: strange and lovely as the names of things in Faerie.

There is a power in the naming of things.

Fomalhaut, Achernar, Menkalinan. Sirius, Suhail, and Saiph.

I smiled in the darkness, knowing what Morgan had done. Knowing what Morgan had given me, and what she had made of me. Knowing something that I had never told another soul, except the Mebd, because she had demanded it of me. And Ian, when Ian was too small to understand what he heard, much less remember it. Not Keith, and not Robin.

My weapon.

My only son's Name.

Keith dragged his gaze from the closing door and turned back to the room, to the assembled wolves and men. “And now we must choose as well.” He let his gaze wander over the members of the pack, but none of them would meet his gaze—until he reached Fyodor, who stood with both hands folded behind the small of his back and would not look down.

A rustle—nothing so concrete as a murmur, but merely the restless shifting of feet and hands—swept the hall. Keith laced his fingers together as well, and breathed out, and breathed back in again. “Fyodor Stephanovich,” he said. “It seems we must discuss the leadership of the pack.”

“What discussion remains?” Fyodor came the length of the parquet floor with a strange, diffident sort of confidence. Vanya and Eremei flanked Fyodor, one on either side, but Keith stood alone, tilting his head back slightly to look Fyodor in the eye. It was only with an effort that Keith managed to keep his hand off Caledfwlch's hilt, his fists unknotted at his sides. “Is there anything left to us but decision?”

Keith tilted his head and rubbed at his throat, watching the other wolf's eyes. Vanya and Eremei had stopped a few steps back, lending support without intended intimidation. “No,” he said. “I suppose there isn't. Come, Fyodor Stephanovich. Let us drink together before we must make war.”

But the black wolf laid a hand on his shoulder when Keith would have walked past him, taking a firm grip on the sleeve. “I do not understand why you must fight to claim the pack.” His voice was low enough that Keith suspected Vanya and Eremei heard it, though no one else.

Keith's mouth twitched. “Because it suits the Dragon. Because I'm born to be a sacrifice, Younger Brother: a sort of a Summer King. I don't know if your Slavic fatalism has room for the Celtic concept of geasa. . . .”

“Hmm.” Fyodor bit the knuckle on his thumb. “They're not so different, you know.”

“Yes. I did not think so.” Keith smiled, feeling a bit of that fatalism himself, and Fyodor smiled back, bitterly. “It's not so much a fate or a destiny as a . . . a doom, a wyrd. A condition that must be fulfilled, and avoiding it will only see it met in an unexpected way. So I must become a Prince of something. And I must fill the role of the Dragon Prince.”

“Yes, you must,” said another voice: a woman's voice. A voice that should not enter among them now, in a time and place that was meant for wolves of the pack. Her scent followed a moment after, sharp and sweet with the tang of the sea.

“Nuala,” Keith said. “You cannot be here.”

“The King is dead. Long live the King. Now is not the time for wolves to fight their brothers, brother wolves.”

Fyodor had not looked away from Keith. Now he did, but glanced at Vanya rather than Fionnghuala. “Ivan Ilyich,” he said. “What do you know of this?”

Vanya shrugged and spread his broad hands wide, forelock falling into his eyes as he tilted his head, allowing a quirk of smile. “I know very little,” he answered, as if it were a great admission. “But I suspect a great deal. My lady Nuala—”

“—can speak for herself,” she said tartly. “The Prince of the pack is gone ahead, and the Mebd of the Daoine Sidhe—”

“The Mebd is dead?” He'd taken a half step forward, he realized, but only when the susurrus of conversation rose into a buzz. “But Ian—”

“Aye, was summoned home. Make of it what you will, Keith MacNeill. It does not signify. What is significant is that it is time for brother wolves to compromise.”

Fyodor folded his arms, his attention on Keith so strongly that Keith could almost see pricked ears. “I will not stand for a war that sees the humans face . . . a holocaust. ”

“Though they'd stop at nothing to eradicate the pack, if they knew it existed?”

The Russian wolf shook off Nuala's question like so much rain. “What was your quaint Americanism? It does not signify.”

Vanya coughed lightly into his hand. “If the Prince of the pack is the Ard Ri of Faerie”—suggestively, one eyebrow rising—“then the war could end as he decreed it. Assuming the war did end as we wish it to.”

Keith glanced from Vanya to Nuala. “You're suggesting something too clever for me to follow, I fear. And you still aren't supposed to be here, you know.” But he managed it with a twist of a smile this time.

Fionnghuala lifted her curtain of harsh gray hair with her fingers and brushed it away from the sharp bones of her face. “Now, Keith, are you suggesting I might be plotting something? And I'll have you know my kind were old in Britain when yours were still hiding from dire wolves in the wood that stretched from the Atlantic Ocean to the steppes. We come and go where we wish,
go n-ithe an cat thú is go n-ithe an diabhal an cat
.”

Fyodor cleared his throat. “I do not speak that language. ”

“She said, ‘May the cat eat you and the Devil eat the cat,' ” Keith translated. “I think my lady is a little put out with us, brother.”

Before Fyodor could answer, Fionnghuala turned her head to the side and spat on the parquet, her throat working in cords. Keith laughed out loud in sudden delight at her gesture, biting it back when she rounded on him, hands on her hips. “Aye, and you'll kill this your brother over a damned tradition? I'd think two smart wolves could find a better way between them. The traditions of the pack are well and good, boys, but not when they blind you to solutions, or have you lining up to die because it's the way things have always been done.”

She flashed, glorious, her hair tumbled back and the bridge of her nose sharp as a dragon-backed ridge, and Keith dropped his gaze to the floor and shook his head, hair falling in his eyes. “Talk to him,” he said, angling a nod toward Fyodor. “The last thing I want to do is fight this man.”

He was startled by Fyodor's warm hand on his shoulder. “It's genocide I can't permit, Elder Brother,” the black wolf said, without looking at him. “That's why I have to fight you.”

Keith turned, careful not to dislodge Fyodor's hand, and reached out and placed his own hand on Fyodor's shoulder. “Nobody wants genocide.”

“But you're prepared to pursue it.”

Silence, and Keith knew the whole room was watching, waiting, leaning into the quiet as if leaning on a wall. “Fyodor Stephanovich,” he said, “I give you my word as a wolf that neither humans nor Fae will meet such a fate at my hands. And I will do everything in my power to prevent such occurrence.”

“Your office demands blood, my brother.”

Keith could smell the emotions swirling behind Fyodor's impassive voice, the richness of fear and sorrow like old thick blood, the determination and the bright sharp steel of need and fear. He breathed it deep and nodded. “It demands blood,” he answered. “Rivers of blood. The blood of innocents. But it doesn't demand
all
the blood. And I can promise you, not a drop more than I have to shed. Ever.”

Fyodor held his gaze. Held it while the ranks of the pack shifted restlessly, while Fionnghuala folded and unfolded her white hands and Vanya took silent, watchful Eremei by the elbow and led him a few yards away.

And then the black wolf sighed and shook his head, and muttered,
“Kroviy e bolshye kroviy.”
And then with great, implacable dignity, he reached up and unbuttoned the collar of his shirt, tilted his head back, and offered Keith his throat.

Chapter Twenty-one

Robin drowsed against my knee like a child. The beads and baubles in his long ears and hanging from his motley glittered faintly in the waning moonlight. A wild, sleepless sorrow hovered inside my chest. I had known I would lose love. I had not realized it would take hope and faith with it. But then Ian, heartless, could still feel love. What he could not feel was loyalty, or the kind of reckless courage that makes a moral judgment, drives one into a hopeless fight and still draws the line that there are things one does not do.

Things like the Wild Hunt. Something even the Mebd thought better bound. But perhaps I was too quick to assign blame to heartlessness. Humans have their hearts. Humans have their souls. And look at the abominations they achieve.

“There's no way to win this,” I said, mostly to myself.

Whiskey snorted, warm breath tickling the inside of my ear. “Wars are not winnable,” he said, softly enough not to disturb the Puck. “The object has always been to lose less than the other fellow, mistress, and take enough to show profit.”

I would have answered, but a rattle of gravel and the sound of low voices buried under hoof-clatter stilled me. I jiggled my knee under Robin's head, and his knobby fingers convulsed on my trousers as his eyelids cracked apart. He sat up, and I pushed fingers into my matted hair and then pulled them out again, defeated by crusts of salt and knots like hairy-legged spiders.

I stood, not shivering in the desert chill; Whiskey let us get clear before he heaved to his feet, still limping. His tail flicked, his ears pinned back above the coarse tangle of his forelock. I gripped his mane in my right hand and cat-leapt onto his back, though the earth was so dry it sounded hollow when he put one hoof down, and then another. He snorted a platinum blue plume in the moonlight.

“Robin?”

“Ready. Aye,” the Puck said, stepping close enough to Whiskey's side to rest his hand on my boot. “It's a strange and heady thing to be free, Queen Elaine, isn't it?”

“I wouldn't know,” I said, and touched Whiskey with my heel as two riders appeared on slender Fae horses, black in the light that etched each furry sage leaf and broom-twig branch of Indian tea in silver and dun: all the colors of the shadows and highlights on a coyote's fur. A hoarse call, an old woman's irate croaking, parted the night on my left side, a flurry of black wings bearing it. My first thought was Gharne, but I heard wingbeats. A blur of feathers and jet-button eyes: Morgan's raven.

No blade and no reins, no saddle. The heads of the silhouetted steeds and their riders came up at the bells of thunder cracking from Whiskey's hooves. The raven laughed beside me, his wings impossibly broad, sheltering me as the figure who must have been Hope raised her hands and clapped them over her head, an answering peal to the roll of Whiskey's onslaught.

A wind sprang up, no moisture in it but a pall of stinging dust, and black clouds slammed over the stars like the lid of a stone coffin sliding shut. Whiskey's mane lashed my face, and he put his head down into the wind, bunching his haunches and driving himself up the hill. Robin had been left behind. Lightning forked down the sky, a river in reverse, once and again, and again, lighting Hope's face and her hair streaming out like a tangled banner behind her.

“Ian!” The raven circled overhead, impossibly large. Storm crow, battle raven. Lightning glittered between the feathers of his wings, forking the roiling black clouds, sheeting from horizon to horizon, an endless staccato strobing. My stallion sidestepped, single-footed, and I felt my hair stand on end as a clap of thunder I felt
inside
rang my ears, rattled my skull like the clapper in the bell. Blue light—electric blue now, not pewtery moonlight—rippled the edges of the bird's dark wings. Coronas of lightning limned each feather, extended in thunderbird radiance from horizon to horizon. Hope dropped her hands and stared, and then raised one fist and made a pulling, ripping gesture. The veils of lightning arced and rippled, the smell of burning plastic bitter in my nostrils, the earth scorched black by the curtains of fire dropping from the raven's wings, around me.

The storm ripped my son's name from my lips. I drew a breath more sand than wind and roared his name again as Whiskey careered toward him.
“IAN!”

Hissing through the dry air, the rain came in fat drops, burning like a baptism.

Ian had a sword out, upraised; he half-lowered it when lightning revealed my face. Whiskey would have checked at that but I touched him forward, clutching his mane in my left hand, my right holding my wind-tattered snarls away from my eyes. The lightning shattered, fluttered. I couldn't hear my own voice as the black bird spread wings as broad as the torn clouds writhing overhead. Whiskey's hooves splattered mud now, rivulets and viscid clumps, and a mortal steed would have slithered and gone down badly, shattered bone amid the terrible betrayed screaming of horses. Even the Kelpie struggled and slipped, just shy of the ridge-top, but Weyland's shoes held, and—fighting the footing, fighting for balance, strengthened by the rain—Whiskey gained the crest of the hill in a rush and a stumble that brought us between the coal-black, rain-wet horses.