Blood and Iron (5 page)

While she opened cans and clattered spoons, he waited for his coffee to cool enough to drink. “Someone,” he reminded, when the aroma of chicken stock filled the kitchen.

She chuckled and turned back, raising her wooden spoon. “What could we do with a Merlin, Matthew?”

Matthew blinked. “What
couldn't
we do? But if you expect one, doesn't that mean a Dragon Prince won't be far behind?”

“Not necessarily,” she answered, stirring the soup before it could scorch. “But it's time.”

“That could be everything Prometheus needs—”

“Yes,” she said, and reached for the ladle on the drainboard. “Everything we need to win this. Once, and finally.”

The pain she hid so carefully spoke to a like pain in Matthew, and he leaned back, refusing to give in to it.
Everyone's lost someone,
he told himself firmly.
Your circumstances are not special.

Seeker paused in the darkness at the base of the down, in a narrow valley overgrown with gorse and heather. The moon was slipping over the edge of the world and a cold fog coiled her ankles like an anxious cat; she closed her eyes and ducked her head. Three deep breaths brought little calm.

Seeker raised her face, looked around, and set off down the bank of a rocky stream that ran along the bottom of the vale. She saw in the dark with owl-eye facility, now that her shadow-bound familiars were rested.
If the sun would break through the mist once in a while. If it would thunder and rain. Why is it, I wonder, that we are permitted moonlight and not sunlight? What's so terrible about weather?
She laughed at the thought, her voice echoing strangely off the moss-and-ivy-hung rocks. The sound was eerie; it struck her to silence again.

Below a sheer escarpment, Seeker splashed through the brook, slick rocks turning under leather-soled boots. She could see the shadow of a greater darkness behind the thick tapestry of brier-rose and ivy. A frog jumped under her footstep; she recoiled, almost falling as she put her foot down hard. She windmilled her arms, regaining balance, and thought she heard the echo of a bubbling, neighing laugh.

She closed her lips on the first comment that came to mind, counting silently to five. “Behave yourself,” she said softly, “unless you plan to challenge me again today, Uisgebaugh. ”

The narrow brook chortled over the rocks in answer. Seeker stepped onto the bank as the music of trickling water changed to the clatter of hooves. “I shall bide my time. I am patient.”

“So the legends tell me.” She glanced over her shoulder. Whiskey stood just as he must have risen, dripping, out of the chattering stream. He bowed his head to her with a little toss of his mane that made the gesture into mockery.

Then he snorted, a giant pale shape in the darkness, his black-splashed head raised, Roman nose in profile against the sky. “Walk into that cave, mistress, and you'll never walk out. There's something in there older, even, than I.”

“Your concern flatters me.”

“Hardly. Your death means my death, unless I kill you myself. I am knotted in your hair.”

Seeker had heard the ritual words before. So close after the werewolf's visit, they all but burned her. “I am sorry.” She turned back to the green-shrouded entrance of the cave. She reached out and took a handful of hanging vines, careful to grab the canes of brier-rose between the thorns.

It was in bloom, out of season or not. The roses never faded in the Blessed Isles. Seeker was tempted to strip the five-petaled blossoms from it with her bare hands for spite.

“Permit me to protect you.”

“If you want to protect me,” Seeker answered, lifting greenery aside, “don't tell the Mebd.” She pushed into the cave.

When the curtain of vines fell behind her, shutting the Kelpie and the starlight away, the darkness was absolute. Even her cat's vision could not penetrate it. Seeker felt the dry stone of the cave under her boots and raised her right hand, calling foxlight around her fingers. It cast a flickering St. Elmo's fire throughout the arched stone tunnel, revealing the marks of chisels and hammers and the gold-flecked veins of quartz for which the dwarves had delved. Vapor coiled her limbs.

Cool air redolent of moldering leaves and old charred wood filling her lungs, Seeker started down the tunnel. It descended to a shallow, spiraling slope broad enough for two lanes of traffic. The floor was almost polished, chiseled with patterns of ivy and roses to echo those that hung by the entryway. In the souls of the craftsmen who carved this mine, utility was no excuse for a thing to be anything but beautiful.

The odors of rot and burning grew stronger as she crept under the earth. She let the foxlight die off her fingers when a dull crimson glow began to cast relief shadows along the carvings. When the threads of mist lit orange-red, she almost hesitated. But if she stopped, she wouldn't start again.

Seeker took a final step around the corner into a painful light. The tunnel opened halfway up the wall of a cavern as vast and changeable as a view of the sea. Mist coiled within it like twisted pennants, drifting in banners and streams on cool currents of air. And within the mist . . . lay
Mist
.

Fog-white tendrils scrolled about her face, a face that transformed from moment to moment while the Dragon lifted her massive head. Eyes gleaming in streaked planes of hot light, translucent as fire opals, considered Seeker. When the Dragon bent her neck to shift a wing long as a battlefield, an ashen sheen rippled over char-dark scales. The hide between glared golden, scarlet, lava cracking as it flowed.

Stirring the sea of gold and jewels on which she nested with one lazy five-taloned hand, the Dragon blinked. She shifted again—scales now more black, like sharp-chipped obsidian; now red as magma; now a dark hot gold like molten steel. The wings first spread wide and then the body coiled sinuous and narrow—the head horned and then maned and then antlered a moment later.

The eyes remained unchanged.

The Dragon's voice rang like forged iron. “Elaine Elizabeth Andraste, Seeker of the Changed. Enter freely into my domain, secure in love and trust.”

“Dana,” Seeker tried to say, or one of the Dragon's other Names. “Mist.” Her knees went to water. She fell under the density of the Dragon's presence, ducking her face toward bedrock. Carven stone scored her palms; the heat of blood smeared the petals on the bas-relief briers. She managed one breath, and then another, and then her voice. “Grandmother Dragon. I am not Elaine Andraste. I have no Name.”

Hot breath surrounded her, fragrant of summer. The voice was tolerant and amused, maternal in its enormity. “Of course you have a name, child. Your mother gave it you, did she not?”

“I am the Seeker of the Changed. The Queen of the Daoine Sidhe has me tangled in her hair.” Something stiffened her spine as she said the words, however, and Seeker raised her eyes to meet Mist's. “She's stripped me of such insignificant things.”

The Dragon chuckled, rattling small stones loose from the tunnel roof. Seeker felt the vibration between her teeth. “Foolish child. Has no one ever explained the rules to you?”

“Yes.”
It's no worse than being condescended to by the Mebd, and you bow your head to her.
But another rogue voice whispered,
But here you have a choice,
and Seeker pressed her slashed hand against the stone and, wincing with pain, pushed herself to her feet. “I know the rules. I've spent my three chances, Grandmother Dragon.”

“Chances are nothing. These are the older rules, and even the Mebd must abide them—that in life one may be bound or bought, but in the end you go to judgment naked, clad only in what you were born with and what you have earned, lessened only by what you have sold or given away. That which is taken by force, for good or for ill, goes unconsidered. Understand?”

It is perilous to admit weakness. It is even more perilous to lie to dragons.
“Mist, I do not.”

“No matter. You will. For mortal men, immortality is of the soul—but for Faerie immortality is of the body only, as they have no souls. And you were born mortal, Elaine Andraste.” The ever-changing head rocked from side to side.

“I was born a changeling. I am of Faerie now.”

Mist seemed to ignore the statement. Pricked ears swiveled forward at the top of the mountainous head— then they smoothed into scales and antlers emerged in their place.
The Dragon that is all dragons.
Seeker thought the Dragon smiled.

“Perhaps that is as it is.” Wryness colored the voice, and a forked tongue thick as a hawser darted forward to taste Seeker's sweat. And then a lightning shift, quick as the flicker of that tongue. “Your task is to bind me.”

Seeker blinked at the suddenness of it. “Yes.” A sour taste filled her mouth, her heart hammering in her chest.
If she slays me, I don't have to worry about the Mebd—or my crimes in her service—anymore.
Another realization, a heartbeat later, like a ragged follower to the first—
But I don't want to die.

“Here, in this place, you stand in the heart of my power. Even your Queen cannot protect you.”

“Yes.” A cold fear, like a dagger pressed up through the diaphragm and under Seeker's breastbone.

“And despite this, you came before me.”

Seeker swallowed.
Dangerous to lie to dragons.
Gold coins rattled like beach pebbles beneath the Dragon's feet. Seeker thought of the sound of a shaken length of chain. She understood that she was being tested, but she did not know the nature of the test. “Yes.”

“Why?”

What is the right answer?
Quickly, without thinking, Seeker closed her eyes and blurted, “Because you asked nicely.”

Silence—a great and echoing silence—followed by laughter that knocked Seeker from her feet again and rolled her aside, literal gales of laughter. Seeker curled into a ball, huddled on the knotty carven granite, arms drawn up to protect her face. It went on for a long time, smelling of roses and the end of winter, and at last trailed off with a satisfied sigh.

Seeker risked uncoiling enough to open her eyes and look out. The Dragon's enormous red-shattered eye hung over her, blinking lazily. “You'll do,” the Dragon said. “When the time comes, remember this conversation. What I have told you will prove useful. And take some pains to conceal it from your mistress—she would be angry.”

Chapter Three

Grass stems bent cool under the pads of Keith's feet as he paused on a hillside in Scotland, a northern outpost of the iron world. He crouched behind a shaggy line of meadow plants, his elbows barely brushing the earth as he tasted the wind and observed the long, exposed slope he must descend. Wolves don't live long, who walk heedlessly into a moonlit field. Even one that amounts to their own backyard.

A house—a romantic old heap, more properly—dominated the valley below, straddling the narrow zone of safety between the hillside and where the marshy burn might flood when it rose. Neither precisely a manor house nor a castle, its outline described an irregular rectangle of mortared stone with chimneys and additions and gables protruding at odd angles like the spines of a hedgehog. It was the same color in moonlight or sunlight or overcast: dappled silver and charcoal, a few of the boulders nearest the foundation glinting with mica when the light slanted against them.

The sea tossed against a rocky beach; the village was a little way off. The house had the look of a gentleman farmer's abode, and the lawns were indeed cropped close by sheep and shaggy Highland cattle—
coos,
in Eoghan MacNeill's parlance—but there were those who knew the deeper truth: that there were no more wolves in Scotland, except the wolves who dwelled here.

Keith let his tail rise cockily, picture of a returning Prince, and trotted down the slope through cold reflected moonlight to his father's door.

He passed through late-summer herbs—the mint gone to flower, the dill setting seed—and scratched and whined at the kitchen door rather than the big main entrance that faced the road and the sea. Stout gray-haired Morag was there to let him in, the dressing gown in her hands draped over his shoulders deftly even as he began to change. His paws became hands as he fumbled with the belt; Morag stepped back to stir the soup pot on the stove.

“Welcome home, young master,” she said. “You were missed a bit. The bread's in the oven. Your father is in his study, and I imagine he'd be glad of ye.”

“I'd have thought he wouldna be at home,” Keith answered, bending down to kiss her on the part of her hair. “Isn't it his Glasgow week?”

She hesitated, the thick stock curling around her wooden spoon. “Och. He's not well, Keith my love . . .”

“Ah.” Keith stepped back, thrusting his fists into the pockets of the dressing gown.

Morag dropped her spoon on the ceramic spoonrest— shaped like a chicken—and turned to face Keith. She craned her neck back, hands on her hips, her frown twisting the tip of her nose to one side. “You sound like a damned American, laddie.”

“ 'Tis a thicket of deception,” he answered, grinning. “
Some
of us have to leave Scotland once in a while, Morag. Or there'd be not a soul left in the country but wolves and their brides.”

“And would that be such a bad thing?” She
tch'd,
cocking her head to one side like a bird, eyes glittering bright enough to make him laugh. “Go, see your father, young master. It would be a kindness of you.”

“He's that poorly?”

“Aye.”

“I've nowhere else I need to be,” he answered. “Of course I'll stay. And I'll go up and see him as soon as I get some clothes on. Will that suit?”