Blood and Iron (62 page)

“You were going to go to Hell.”

“
Am
going. I can endure it. Break with the Unseelie, Keith. Let them pay the damned tithe and stay beholden to Hell. I'll pay the price. You win us free, Dragon Prince.”
Even when they break me and send me to betray you.
That was how it would be. How it had to be.

“Elaine, it's not worth—”

“It's worth what it will buy. What it will buy: a Queen gone willing . . . I'll make Hell see that it is enough.”

“I know,” he said. He brushed a hand across my cheek, smoothed a strand of hair back under my crown. “You're unfair to Carel, you know. And the Kelpie as well.”

“Who ever said life was fair?” I heard my mother's tone in my own and laughed like choking. We stood in silence for a little while, and I thought I heard my blood running through the drains under the dais, sticky and dark, down into the hungry belly of the earth. We all feed our blood to one heart or another. We all feed the Dragon in the end.

He pulled me close. I leaned my forehead against his neck. His breath came evenly, counterpoint to the rhythm of his heart.

“Elaine. I wish . . .”

I leaned back on my heels and examined the line of his jaw through the growing beard. “Would you set your son in my chair, then, Wolf Lord? Discard the child to keep the lady?”

“Take your name back from the Kelpie. He would return you your soul in an instant, to be free of the grief it brings him. I'll give you the scabbard. It would be hard but it—”

I pinched the bridge of my nose to keep the sting out of my eyes.
I will never weep again.

“—would keep me alive on the chair? Keith. If I do, then I am Elaine again, and can be bound. And if I can be bound, I cannot be Queen. The Mebd named her heir quite clearly, in the hearing of all the hall—” My hair brushed the neckline of the tattered dress. His hand knotted in it, rested on my shoulder, drew me back.

“Lady,” he said, “you are confused. If you go to the teind, you cannot rule, and Ian takes the throne anyway. He's a wolf, though; I imagine he will survive it, heart intact.”

“Then who goes to Hell, if not me?”

He sighed. “All I want is your love, Elaine.”

“And it's the thing you may not have.” I smiled, like that could make it right. “Keith. You have my loyalty.”
Until Hell's through with me.

“Ian may hate you more for leaving him.”

“Children hate their parents,” I replied, thinking of Mist rather than my mother. Or even Morgan, for that matter. “You've spilled your blood, Keith, and I've spilled mine. Let me bear the burdens for what I've done, rather than passing them on to our children. And Ian—” I sighed. “Ian was ready to turn loose the Wild Hunt. I'm not comfortable with the idea of him as King Under the Hill. You'll have to take the throne, Dragon Prince. Can you do it?”

He sighed, and shook his head. “I would not sacrifice you in his place. Or him in yours. I am not Fae, Elaine. I cannot rule here. And you know what Ian wants.”

Something my mother told me when I was little rose to my lips along with an ironic smile. “Children should not always have what they want, Keith. He has a heart now. He can grow.” I stepped close enough to taste his breath and put my palms against his face. “ ‘I can get other sons,' said Arthur, when he ordered the babes of a kingdom set adrift on the cold man-murdering sea. But Gwenhwyfar was barren, and Arthur lost what he lost. His innocence, if you believe in such a thing. And lost as well the love his sister might still have borne him. And we know what that mistake cost him, Arthur of Britain, King.”

“You compare me to Arthur.”

“I will not be the last.” I reached up to take the crown off and hang it on the spikes of my throne. It tangled in my hair, and Keith silently helped me free the strands.

“There is always a price. Did it have to be you?”

“Be grateful,” I replied. “It is as nothing, compared to the prices your forebears paid.”

“I haven't paid them all yet.”

“May the day be long in coming, Dragon Prince. May the blood spilled in your name content the Dragon. And see that your mistakes are less than Arthur's, lest you find yourself lain on his old bier, awaiting your own chance at redemption.” My voice pealed cold and clear as flowing water, a rill unfrozen in winter. I felt my face calm over my bones as I turned my eyes to stare out the window.

Keith straightened his shoulders, and I realized he had been bending toward me. “As you wish, my lady. Keep your crown, and your cruelty. Love me not. I will go.”

“You are my husband, Dragon Prince,” I answered. “We rule together, or you rule not at all.”

He rubbed at his forehead as if trying to erase the narrow lines that dappled it. “No,” he said. “I mean that one Ard Ri should pay a debt as surely as a pair of Queens. If I am overlord of Daoine and Unseelie alike, surely my flesh can stand surety to their debt.”

I didn't understand him. I didn't want to understand him.

“I'll go to the tithe,” he said, and turned his back on me. “It will be enough. I'll release you from the marriage. Faerie needs Queens. Not a Dragon Prince, not anymore. And you cannot love me.”

“No,” I said. I closed my eyes. “No. It is my place to go.”

“The Mebd swore me fealty,” he whispered. “You will do as you are bid.”

“If I had known, if I had known, Tam Lin.”
I clutched his arm. “No.”

He only smiled, and the silence stretched like molten glass until I could hold it no longer. It cooled, brittled, and shattered while I cast for words, for an answer. “Murchaud came back from it.”

“So did Fionnghuala,” he said, as if I should know the name.

“I'll wait for you.”

“Do you suppose the Mebd made Murchaud that promise? ”

Blood and dragonfire burned through my veins, unholy bright as liquid iron. I looked past him, up at the throne. “Yes,” I said. “She said the same.”
And my mother didn't come to pull Murchaud down from his steed at the crossroads, did she?

If I took my soul back, I could win Keith away from the teind. As Janet won Tam, through love. And Ian would get what he wanted: that chair. The temptation burned me for an instant. Longer than an instant. But—
Ian safe. And anything.

“She promised she would wait.”

“She didn't keep it, did she?”

He knew the answer as well as I did, written in every line of blood on her throne. “Of course she did,” I said, and kissed him, and walked away.

“Where are you going?”

“I'll meet you in a little,” I said. “I'm going to care for my horse, and then I need to arrange for an emissary from Hell.”

Taking care of his horse seemed like a better idea than anything he was likely to come up with on his own, and certainly superior to brooding about the desolate castle. He rather imagined that Elaine and Whiskey would not be in the stables, in any case, but Petunia was, and more deserving of apples than any horse alive. Keith patted the scabbard on his hip, grateful to it for saving the big bay from his—Keith's—rashness.

He detoured through the kitchens and liberated a pocketful of apples, ignoring the sow-headed cook's threat to smack him with a three-foot wooden spoon. He smiled and ducked away like a spoiled boy, and thought she grinned through spotted teeth. The curious lightness in his chest as he strolled outside might have been relief at a decision made and met, he thought. Or it might have been simple, irrational hope.

It didn't matter; he'd take it. He entered a stable redolent with the rich smells of hay and horse manure, and collected combs and brushes and a chamois from a dwarfish Faerie with long, knobby arms and hedgehog prickles along his spine. “Thank you, ah—”

“Vasily,” the Faerie said, picking up another brush and walking down the row of stalls. Bits of straw and hay stuck between his spines. “All stable hands named Vasily in Faerie, yes? Is good you care for own horse. Is good King does.”

Keith pursed his lips, at first amused to find Russian horse-Faeries at work
here,
and then saddened to realize how depleted the Fae things had become.
Many countries,
he thought.
One nation.
He shook his head and ducked into the stall.

Petunia had been groomed, of course—enough to get the sweat and blood out of his hide—but it hadn't been a careful job. There were too many dirty horses in need of attention, and the spined stable-lads and grooms were still giving each animal a lick and a promise to make it comfortable before coming back to finish as time permitted.

Petunia whuffed softly as Keith slipped into his stall and latched the half door behind himself. “Do you smell the apples, handsome?” Keith pulled one out of his pocket and broke it against the bars, feeding Petunia the more crushed half and taking a bite out of the other half himself. The horse crunched, dripping juice, and reached determinedly for the rest of the apple, his upper lip curling like a beckoning finger. “All right,” Keith said, and gave it to him, moving around to the near side and slipping his hand into the loop on the stiff-bristled brush.

He worked steadily for fifteen minutes, occasionally bribing Petunia with apples. The dense yeasty smell of the big animal calmed him. He leaned into Petunia's shoulder and drew deep breaths, scrubbing the hair and dirt from his brush with the currycomb.

The scent of wolves alerted him to company; he glanced up to see Vanya and Fyodor approaching the stall, Ian between them. All three moved softly enough that he wouldn't have heard them if he hadn't been listening.

He'd known he couldn't escape for long. “Hello,” he said, plying his brush with enough vigor to send a cloud of dead hair and dust glittering into the sunbeam that fell through the high stall window. A sparrow flew past, chirping, or perhaps it was one of the birdlike Fae.

“Sire,” Fyodor said, tilting his head just enough to show his throat and the mocking glitter in his eyes. “Sire,” Vanya echoed, without any little displays. Ian just met Keith's eyes and nodded.

Keith did not set down his brush. Petunia's coat whorled across his chest, and Keith crouched to give the sweat dried there particular attention. “Gentlemen. I hope you don't mind talking over the stall door.”

“Not at all,” Fyodor said.

“How did you know where to find me?”

The black wolf chuckled. “A stable full of vasily, and you wonder who told the Ukrainian wolf where you were?”

“You can't trust anyone,” Vanya offered helpfully. Out of the corner of his eye, Keith saw Fyodor shoot him an amused sideways glance.

“I've come to talk to you about your pack, Sire.”

Keith shook his head and blew a sweaty lock of hair out of his eyes. “It's your pack now, tovarisch.”

Fyodor leaned forward on the stall door, his forehead wrinkling with interest. “What do you mean?” His tone was amused, silky-sweet, but Keith caught the worry under it.

Keith ducked out from under Petunia's neck and let his hands fall to his sides, still holding the brush and currycomb. “Let's not play games, Fyodor Stephanovich. You've come to see me, three abreast, because you know what I told Elaine.”

“You're going to Hell,” Ian said. “You're volunteering for the teind. I want to know why.”

The bay lipped Keith's shoulder as he glanced down, picking a jet-black strand of mane as coarse as wire out of his brush and blowing it up into the shaft of light. “Because I can put an end to it forever,” he said. “And I'll be back.”

He met Ian's gaze directly, turned his attention to Fyodor, and ended with Vanya, who nodded slowly. “The King is the land,” Ivan Ilyich said. “The land is the King.”

“Precisely. I go to Hell and I buy Faerie free.”

“And you dodge the price of being a Dragon Prince.” Ian, wry and bittersweet and sounding so adult that Keith looked twice to be sure it was actually Ian speaking. There were shadows like thumbprints under his eyes, and Keith looked down again.
Are you sure you're not just running away again, Keith MacNeill?
Morag's mocking voice, but in his head this time.

“However it's paid, it's paid,” Keith said. He licked his lips and forced himself to meet Fyodor Stephanovich's eyes. “Take care of Morag,” he said. “The crumbling heap is yours now, Ian. If Faerie gets a bit much, it might be nice to have someplace to go.” The boy nodded; he caught it with his peripheral vision, even if he didn't look away from the Ukrainian wolf. “And you, Fyodor Stephanovich.”

“Sire.”

“The pack is yours,” Keith said firmly. “Keep it out of genocides if you can.”

“That's not how it's done—” Fyodor protested, stepping away from the stall door.

Vanya caught his elbow and led him back as Keith settled his brush into his hand again. “It is now.”

“Father—” Ian said, and Keith heard, finally, what was in his voice.

He scrubbed Petunia's nose with his palm, set the brush on the ledge beside the water bucket, and unlatched the door. Fyodor stepped out of his way as he came into the aisle. Ian backed away, glancing down at his shoes, flinching when Keith reached out and put his hand on Ian's arm. “I'd stay if I could,” he said. The boy shook, flinching again, pulling himself away.

Keith closed his fingers tight on Ian's doublet—thinking that a wolf would grasp a cub so, by the scruff, careful never to break the skin—and dragged him into an embrace.

Stiff, so stiff, like twigs wrapped in wire. Keith thought he would struggle, would bite. Instead he stood, trembling, stiff as a statue. “I'm sorry,” Keith said, stroking Ian's hair.