Blood and Iron (59 page)

“It is so,” she said.

I nodded. I looked down, at the Merlin and at my mother. I knew what the choice entailed; it was more than the sacrifice of a woman that Mist asked of me, and until that moment I could have told her without hesitating what my choice would have been. First one way and then the other. I would have known.

I looked around the ruined Square, the wreckage of neon. Mortal lives, or Fae? I wondered if Keith yet lived, or Ian. There was blood on the stones around me. Innocent blood, and not nearly as much as I had meant to shed, this night of all nights.

“Who am I to choose?”

“You are the only one who can,” Whiskey said. He laid a hand on my arm. “You stand between worlds, Elaine.” I looked up at him and knew he stood ready to pay the price for what he was made to be.

Somewhere nearby, a baby wailed like a siren. I closed my eyes. I wished Murchaud were there, but still he did not come forward, and then I remembered something about tithes, and what it meant if they went willing.
Balance grows out of struggle.

“Take me,” I said before I could change my mind, and stepped forward, putting myself between Carel and my mother and the Dragon. “I'll stand payment for both sides, Mist, and all they've done.”

I expected Whiskey to protest, but he made no sound.

The Dragon's smile grew wider. “Done,” she said, and opened a mouth lined in teeth long as swords, dripping liquid gold-red flames. I steeled myself for the pain, and then the emptiness, and barely made a sound as the Mother of Dragons angled her head straight down and closed her maw over me.

Chapter Twenty-seven

First darkness, and then the music. Keith struggled against it, bore down, teeth in his lip and a wolf's white passion to be free. He'd gnaw his paw off before he stayed in a trap. Could he do less now?

And there was the music, the music to follow. The music and the light.

The big bay shifted underneath him. He felt the reins knotted in his palm.
I am not mad. I am not blind. I am ensorcelled. And I still have a wolf's nose on me.

He forced himself to calm and touched his heels to Petunia's flanks. He dropped the knotted reins against the horse's neck.
Trust the horse.

Cairbre was still behind him. He felt the harp prod the small of his back when he leaned back in the saddle. The bard's hands were moving, a rhythmic, facile stroking of his instrument. Vibrations touched Keith through the saddle, and he leaned into them, grateful for anything.

Anything.

Anything.

The deep tolling like a hammered bell that rattled his teeth and trembled his heart, for example. The swell of his mount's breath between his legs. The delicate notes of—

He heard music.

Keith lifted his head and cast for the scent. Cairbre. Cairbre was playing. Playing to wake the dead.

“No,” Keith tried, and felt his voice box vibrate. He leaned on the pressure that held him immobile. “No!”

Something broke, with a palpable
snap
like glass pressed with a cutting blade. He blinked hard, rubbed his eyes.

All around him, Fae and wolves did the same. Keith turned in the saddle and saw flickering light. A tolling as of some great bell, vaster than imagination, shook him in the saddle; Cairbre's music rose over it, consumed and subverted it.

Around them, other Fae sat up. Wolves found their feet. Keith saw Vanya, who must not have given himself up to the warfetter, pulling Eremei up. Keith swallowed, his throat too dry, and worked up saliva to swallow again.

The Prometheans were still on the other side of the light, pushing forward, unable to push through. Keith heard hammers on iron, turned his head and saw the Weyland Smith swinging his mallet overhead like a cartoon railway-man. He brought it down again—again—again—tolling the bridge like a bell. No delicacy now: just
force
.

He couldn't possibly affect the massive spiral of the bridge. And just as Keith thought that, something rumbled and something tore, the sound of fatigued metal giving way echoing from hillside to beechwood. It shook Keith from the last of his stupor. He'd dropped his sword. He raised his empty hand instead. “To me,” he shouted, reining the horse once more at the clustered Magi. “To me! To me! The day is ours!” and then he took a breath and said the thing he had to say, to claim his place under the Dragon's wing. “I dedicate this battle to the Dragon, Mist!” he shouted. “Leave none alive!”

Cairbre clutched at his belt, and he kicked the bay forward to the harmony of rending metal as the bridge began to sway overhead like a wind-whipped pine.

It hurts for much longer than I expected.
Arthur,
and I try to coil into a ball against the pain.
If he can do it, so can I.

I imagine acid etching my skin, peeling it back in sheets and laying bare nerve endings open. My hair burns away. Lips, cheeks, eyebrows. I had thought it would be quick.
I thought it would be over quickly.

I hear an answer—the rumble of Mist's voice through ears I feel searing, blackening, charred stubs and then bare bones.
It never is. Over quickly, Queen with no Name. The pain will go on. I can end it for you if you ask.

I shall endure.
My eyes melt down my cheeks like tears; I think of salt water, think of Whiskey.
I wish I'd gotten a chance to say farewell to Keith. Does this count as a betrayal?

Everything you do,
Mist replies, the weight of her attention staggering even through the pain,
is a betrayal. There are no innocents.

That seems to silence the Mother of Dragons for a moment.
There is,
she agrees at last.
There is a unicorn. And she has blood on her horn.

The flesh burns on my bones, searing like a roast in the oven, leaking gravy through blistered cracks. Blind, and my bones burning, my heart cooking in my breast.
This is what Hell is like,
I understand.
Burning, and never ending. In the belly of the Beast.

Wolves are innocent,
I argue.
They are what they are, and if it is bloody, so be it.

Bones crumble into ash, and I feel every instant. Taste my own burning, rank smoke and incinerated meat. I would scream if I had throat and tongue left to do it.
No. And yes, men trust their leaders. Too well, sometimes.

And now Mist smiling, the Dragon surrounding me, burning my body away.
Does that make it right, Queen with no Name?

What they have done? What we have done? No.
No heartbeat, my brain boiled away inside my skull, blackened bone crumbling into a gritty ash, mingling with the Dragon's acid saliva. Burning, failing, melting, gone.
Nothing makes it right. But you are the Dragon. What do you care for right and wrong?

And the pain continues. How can it continue? Worse than the stag's antlers. Worse than childbirth. Pain both sharp and deep. Pain that can only be borne, because there is no way to end it.

I care for enduring,
the Dragon replies.
Wisdom of old, and foresight for the future, and treasures guarded by monsters in the bottom of your mind. What will you endure to reach them?

I
am
the Dragon,
Mist answers.
I am your Mother, and I am as cruel and kind and arbitrary as all the world. Do you see yet, Queen with no Name?

I feel her. Feel her body as my own, as if I shrugged into her shadow. Feel the vast sheltering spread of her wings, the ragged teeth of her jaws. The flame dripping, crisping, and the shattered kindness in her eyes. I see her drawing back from the sword, dragonblood running like magma down her face.

You destroy what you touch,
I say, remembering Arthur.

I am inside the Beast when she spreads her wings. Small figures cluster and break below me: Fae and mortal forms, and the little damage they have done me itches, itches like the throne's deep gouge in the palm of the hand I no longer have. Among the trees, walkers and riders, little beings move on my skin, even as I look down on them. So fragile.

I blink. Mist's eyes blink with me. Blood moves through my veins, except it isn't blood, not quite, and I hear the pulse of my own enormous heart, a spinning mass of iron and nickel and the hot brief elements that burn and change whatever they touch. Burn, as I am burning still, bodiless in the body of the Dragon.

The injury itches, low on my back beside the iron ring still welded to my spine. I want to scratch it, rub it like I rubbed the healing wound in my hand. Mist draws back, observing what I will do. I reach. My vast clawed hand hesitates. I rise, and the shattered facade of a building crumbles as the earth shifts and complains beneath it. I know what would happen if I laid my taloned hand against this little, irritating wound.

The Dragon's body flows around me. I feel as if I animated a statue: the limbs are heavy, the movements ponderous unless they are lightning fast. I grin, and her lips peel back from her fangs.

Dragon,
she answers quietly.
How do you like your choice now, Queen with no Name?

It is dangerous to lie to dragons. It is even more dangerous to try to bargain with them.
There is no choice,
I answer.
You are all that is dark and bright in us, Fae and mortal, wolf and dog. White hart and black, Queen and King, Merlin and Mage. We are the same.

I know the answer now, around my unending, unendurable pain.
The Beast has a thousand Names. Maat is only one of them, and I could not have bound you with it. They're us. We're you. All the Beasts there are, and there is only one Dragon.

Yes,
she says.
That is one of my names. When you know them all, only then can you can make me do your bidding. Do you fear me now, Queen with no Name?

Perhaps I am,
I say, and if I were more than ash in the belly of a dragon I would laugh, and laugh, and laugh.
Like goddamned budgies in a cage. That's why the Dragon Princes. That's why the sacrifice, and the betrayal. You must admire the irony in going to war and realizing that we are fighting a mirror.

She turns in the air, shows me destroyed Times Square and the crumbled billboards.
And I'm not sorry I hurt you.

“Go home, daughter,” the Dragon said, and spat me out among the stones of a crossroads in ruins—spat me out whole and shapely in every limb and garbed in clean white linen.

Weyland swung his hammer again, and the whole sky shivered. Matthew scrambled back into darkness, pressing his right hand to his chest. Gooseflesh pimpled his shirtless back. His own blood drying on his skin prickled; his right hand was a dull, severed ache as long as he kept pressure on it. He held his own fingers shut around the cloth. They didn't want to bend.

He didn't know where to go. There was a wood a little way off. The reaching branches were silhouetted against the stars, and it didn't seem as if the fighting had ranged among the trees. He heard shouting, metal squealing as it tore. A pale yellow glow surrounded Weyland, sparking like the aura of flame over a bellows-fed forge. The Faerie smith cocked his head back, calculating the sway of the bridge. When it was at the nearest point of its oscillation, he swung his hammer again. The span rang like a gong. The sound of straining metal intensified to a vast, twisted, ripping shriek.

Matthew put his head down and ran for the tree line. Shouts from Fae and Prometheans told him that the battle had turned to a panicked rout. The flickering lights were dying, and he recognized some of the voices crying out in the darkness. He didn't turn. He didn't look.

The shock wave of the falling bridge knocked him off his feet before he reached the wood. He fell intelligently, taking it on his shoulder and rolling, and could have come up to his feet if he'd been able to use his hand. Instead he ended in a crouch, one knee bent and the ball of the other foot planted, dirt clotting his hair and sticking to the blood drying down his torso, dappling his body so that he vanished in the shadows.

The bridge had fallen. The Prometheans were dying.

Matthew stood, and limped into the wood.

He knew he should have kept walking, but he was so tired, and the wood so dark that he feared falling over a root as he plowed through autumn's fallen leaves. He sat down in a drift of leaves with his back to a silver birch, the bark just rough enough to rasp against his skin. Shivers ran the length of his body. He hugged his legs tight, pressing his face to his forearms, and burrowed into the leaf drift as well as he could. The leaves made as good a symbol of notice-me-not as anything, and he needed their warmth, but he didn't expect to sleep.

When the sun rose, he'd have to figure out how to get back to the mortal world. Assuming he could. Assuming he wasn't going to end up another mortal Mage trapped in Faerie. And he'd have to come up with a plausible excuse for what happened to his hand, and get himself to an emergency room.