Blood and Iron (9 page)

Seeker stood between greenhouse and tavern, motionless as if the music were a pin thrust through her heart. Men and women jostled her, turning sideways to slip past, headed for the bathrooms or the bar. She did not move. She did not blink. She barely breathed.

Eyes unfocused, she hung in the sound of the music, caressed by the melody, the rhythm of the drums deep as the rhythm of her heart. The lead guitarist's fingers danced, clutched, fought the neck of his guitar—he tangoed with the blue-swirled axe and made it cry. The bass line and the rhythm buoyed her up and swept her along, until Seeker felt like she was bodysurfing the music. It reminded her of Whiskey, and the thought seared like a match struck down her breastbone.

And then the keyboardist leaned forward and growled into the microphone bent like a black swan's neck toward her lips, and the world lit red behind Seeker's eyes.

No.

Seeker rocked on her feet and fell hard against the wall. She craned her head to steal another glance at the keyboardist. The woman pulled her hands off the keys, sharing a smile with the drummer as she bent for her water—

—and her gaze brushed Seeker's, and she stopped. Drew a breath. Picked up the glass in her right hand and settled back in her chair, never looking down. Seeker was trapped, unable to break a regard that pulled like wire drawn through a die. The musician's face seared itself in Seeker's vision: a mask impassive as an Egyptian empress', lips blooming fat and sensual as orchids beneath the flat, aristocratic nose; skin red-black as the famous bust of Queen Tiy; hair braided in a thousand beaded Medusa serpents.
I wonder if a Pegasus would spring from her blood if I spilled it.

Those eyes were opaque opals set in creamy, ancient ivory. Bottomless and appraising, and she seemed to sort through Seeker's soul like riffling a deck of cards—and then she broke the contact, nodded once, and looked down at her hands as if gathering her thoughts. She half stood, drained off her glass, and leaned forward over the keyboards to talk to the bassist, who nodded and whispered in the guitarists' ears. The three men shared a glance, and the lead guitarist pivoted and gave the keyboardist a careful look until both of them nodded. And the guitarist very carefully, very quietly, began to play.

Seeker pressed her open hand to her own throat, fingers curved as if easing a chain.

The keyboardist's voice was soprano, silken and ice, rivers of gold and green, fish flashing in the sunlit depths and subtlety and the taste of hazelnuts and . . . Seeker licked her lips, savoring coolness and wet, the leaf-mold flavor of splashed water on her mouth. She leaned forward over the partition and let go, at last, tasting salt.

Chains of gold. Chains of silver. Chains of iron.
Chains, bending you back in a circle. A spiral walked around the stake. No freedom. No answers.

“Ian,” Seeker said. She bit her tongue. She had to push through the crowd to get a clear view of the band, but the keyboardist didn't glance her way again, even as she sang the final verse and brought the song down to a shivering finale.

When it ended, the silence hung on the air for seconds; Seeker was not the first to applaud. She raised her hands, half-dizzy, feeling like a collar had been ripped from
her
neck. Lighter, stranger, as if she could step out of the spiral and drop the chain on the bare earth where the grass had been worn away.
Pacing, pacing.

The Merlin looked up, twisted her open magic closed, smiled into Seeker's eyes one last time . . . then winked and looked away.

The set lasted forty-five minutes. Seven songs. Every one of them, Seeker thought, was sung
for
someone, and she could usually tell who. The edges of the sung spell that had held Seeker lifted, curling like paper steamed from a wall— as if the veil over some ancient grief had cracked and begun to flake.
Picking scabs,
she thought, almost reaching after the muffling darkness that had covered the raw new pain to pull it back around her shoulders like a comforting cloak.

Almost. She rubbed her hands across her face and recollected herself.
Pain is pain. It can be endured.

So much power in her. A bard, like Ambrosius. Like Cairbre, like Taliesin. Thomas the Rhymer, Orfeo. A true singer, who could raise emotion, stir the hearts of men to fear or love or courage. Seeker shook her head, the braids in her hair snaking across her neck heavy as a chain. What a power. What a gift.

And she was here to break it to the will of her Queen.

Seven songs, and at the end of them Seeker gathered herself and pulled her hands off the partition. Her fingers snagged in a braid as she ran them through her hair. She tucked it behind her left ear.
First learn. Then act. No hurry—no hurry at all.

Seeker blinked and frowned, watching the keyboardist laughing, leaning on the arm of the tall bass player, cupping her brandy snifter in her free hand. She moved with a willowy grace—
ballet,
Seeker thought—but her gaze was endlessly mobile, always touching the faces in the crowd. Aware.

And not the innocent I thought she'd be. The innocent I was. Once upon a time.
Seeker felt the compulsion of the Mebd's will upon her, a pressure that could bend her until she broke, make a puppet of her body if she opposed it fiercely enough. At first, she had.

At first. For a little. Seeker turned away from the laughing Merlin and moved down the bar, into the shadows, where there was darkness at least, if still no peace.

Seeker blinked, frowning against the images the music piled into her mind. The night crested over midnight and crashed down the leeward side, and the band swung into their last set. The music had an edge to it now: a tang of sorrow sweet and pure and focusing in its agony.

She stood when the last song came to an end. Her eyes stung. A weary moment hung on silence before conversation resumed, and Seeker garbed herself in shadows before she started forward. For safety, or just for something to hide behind.

The keyboardist walked toward the restrooms, and Seeker appeared at her elbow. Braids swung and beads clicked as she turned to Seeker, smelling of patchouli and clove cigarettes. Her eyes were even more bottomless up close. “Excuse me,” Seeker said.

“Yes?” Her accent wasn't island at all. Pure mainland, and educated. Local.

Seeker focused on the smaller woman's eyes and put all her sincerity and power into her words. “I'm the Seeker of the Daoine Sidhe. I'm here to teach you how to use your magic.”

The woman blinked. Her mouth fell open, and if she shaped words, no sound came out.
Lost her. Too much, too fast.
It had been a gamble, and an easier path than stalking her like a fish to be tickled from the stream. Seeker swallowed on a dry mouth. “You do know you have magic, don't you?”

The room seemed suddenly distant as the two women stared into one another's eyes. “Yes,” the Merlin said finally, and took an unwilling step toward Seeker. “I know.”

“ ‘Face what you have lost,' ” Matthew murmured, although he was alone in his automobile on a dark highway in Connecticut. “I'm not sure I like the sound of that.”

He shrugged off the chill between his shoulders and pushed random buttons on his radio until he found a Providence classic rock station halfway through an old Doors standard.
Providence?

An aptly named city. Magi learned to pay attention to minor details such as names and synchronicities; portents were where you found them. In the interstices where reality and story touched, a man—a Mage—could find clues to which shaped which, and follow them to surprising destinations.

Stories had a way of telling themselves.

Matthew took the 384 exit eastbound, toward Providence via the University of Connecticut, but he never made it that far. The road was quiet and dark except for the intermittent flicker of headlights in the oncoming lane across the barrier. Most of the highway was shielded from habitations by a curving tunnel of maples and oaks; near one of the Manchester exits, a glimpse of a main street and a row of houses beyond a park off to the left caught his attention due to their brilliance in the darkness, but one structure among them in particular was unique. The first story of a two-story house, with a walkout basement built into the side of a hill, had been extended into a greenhouse on stilts, the whole structure glowing with a white, peaceful light.

The Jethro Tull song on his car radio cut out the instant his eyes settled on the greenhouse.

“Well,” Matthew said into the darkness, as he put his blinker on, “that wasn't very subtle at all.” He allowed a bit of a grin; he was past the exit and had to proceed up the highway and loop back. Just to convince him the forces of the universe were serious, his radio died again in the same place.

I hope you're out there listening somewhere, Kelly.
The thought tightened his smile. He swallowed it, and downshifted to fourth as he hit the exit ramp, before rolling down the window to let the night air in. The end of summer was coming; a sharpness under the warmth carried the musky snake-smell of leaves.

The house was actually a bar. He turned down the steep narrow driveway and parked in the lot behind it, settling his camouflage jacket over his shoulders before he closed and locked the Volkswagen. He scraped his hair back into the ponytail as he climbed the hill beside the drive, made sure his jacket was zipped, and brushed the back of his hand across his clean-shaven jaw. It would do.

It was almost last call, and the bouncer let him into the narrow entryway without collecting the cover charge. There were pegs along the wall and the heat in the cramped bar was stifling, but a tingle across Matthew's nape and the backs of his forearms stilled him when he would have unzipped the jacket.

He stepped to one side so he wouldn't be framed in the doorway and leaned against the wall. Too late, the rings on his fingers chilled enough to sting, reacting to the fey presence. Across the crowded room, he saw the Seeker's dark head come up—and knew by the way the cold burned in the iron piercing his ear when she found him through the shadows, although she never turned. The profile of the woman on the Seeker's right hit him like a jolt of cold water on an empty stomach, and it wasn't just the beauty of her face; she burned against the darkness of the room as if someone had sketched over her outline with a silver-gilt pen. She lifted a cased keyboard in her right hand, a folding chair and the stand slung over the crook of her left arm. The power in her made his fingers curl.

Matthew saw the grasp of her hand on the Seeker's sleeve, the way she looked sidelong at the Seeker's profile, and swore.

Yes, the Fae are lovely, aren't they, Matty?
Kelly's dry, dark voice in his ear, and Matthew shook his head at the memory of his brother's cropped blond hair and the razor-edge blackness of the ink patterning the back of his neck, his shoulders.

The chill up his spine had nothing to do with the Seeker's slow turn, the tilt of her head as her gaze fell on him, her long neck gleaming dull gold where the lights over the bar touched it, or the breadth of her shoulders under her black turtleneck. When she smiled, lines sprang into relief from the corners of her mouth to her aquiline nose, and the unlikely angles of her face rearranged themselves into vibrancy.

And then, unbidden:
She looks like her mother, doesn't she?

The woman beside the Seeker shifted a quarter step closer, hugging her various burdens to her side, when Seeker glanced away from Matthew and turned a dazzling smile on her. Cursing himself for an idiot, Matthew stepped in front of the door as the Seeker and the Merlin strolled toward him, checked quickly to be sure his shoelaces were tied and his hair still bound, and pushed his spectacles up his nose with a fingertip.

“Matthew. Szczegielniak,” the Seeker said, pronouncing his name better than he did himself.

“Elaine Elizabeth Andraste,” he replied, smiling with a confidence he didn't feel. Her footsteps hesitated, though, and he stepped within the doorway's frame. There was strength in the places between places, just as there was strength in the forged iron on his hands and the fastenings of his clothes.

I should have turned my jacket inside out,
he thought, and looked past the Seeker to her prey. “Greetings, wizard, ” he said to the Merlin, watching her eyes widen. He glanced down to flick an imaginary bit of lint from his sleeve. “Before you go with this one, my lady, would you like to hear competing offers?”

“Matthew,” the Seeker said, more kindly than he would have expected, “did you follow me here?”

“You are untraceable, of course,” he said, returning the gentle tone. “Synchronicity. Or Prometheus' guidance, perhaps . . .”

“Oh,
that
explains it.” She shook her head, one hand on the Merlin's shoulder. The Merlin shot her a glance, but did not move away. “You Magi lost your Prometheus four hundred years ago, Matthew Magus. After such a messy divorce, most brides would give back the name.”

She was Fae, and not to be trusted. And he could tell by the twist of her lips that she wanted him to ask—
lost Prometheus?
—or at least hesitate. It was a diversion. And he didn't believe she knew anything worth telling. Prometheus was a symbol, a legend. Not a person.