Sacrifice: The First Book of the Fey (75 page)

Only two chairs remained in the room, set near each other as if waiting for two occupants to have a conversation. Something about Domestic magick allowed them to know these sorts of things, to put out the right clothes, or make the right meals, or make the rooms they were in feel just right. It was that talent she envied more than anything else. Even the ability to see possible futures did not allow her to be that sensitive to other people’s needs.

There was a knock on the door. She turned, but it was already half-open. Mend stood there, her hand on Adrian’s arm. His clothes were cleaned, and he looked refreshed despite himself. And that awful odor was gone.

“Thank you, Mend,” Jewel said softly. “I can’t tell you how much I appreciate it.”

Mend nodded and blushed just a little as she let go of Adrian’s arm. His hands were still bound.

“Come in and sit with me,” Jewel said.

He walked forward, his back straight, his movements confident. Mend watched him cross the room as if she, too, were fascinated with him. Then she saw Jewel’s gaze on her. Mend smiled, backed out of the room, and closed the door quietly behind her.

He reached the chair and sat. She sat across from him. They were so close that their knees almost touched. “All right,” she said, not willing to waste any more time. “What do you have to offer me?”

He swallowed hard, his Adam’s apple bobbing. She could feel his nervousness, but his gaze never wavered. “Myself,” he said.

“I already have you,” she said. “I want something worth that boy’s life. Worth his future. And I warn you, Adrian. Don’t play with me.”

“I’m not playing,” he said. “You have my body, and at best, you can offer it to your devils for experimentation. But you do not—and will not—have my mind.”

She smiled. “You underestimate us. Just because we have been kind to you doesn’t mean that we can’t take what we need.”

“If you could do that,” he said, “you would not have taken me at my word about holy water. You would have done what you could to pull that secret from me.”

“I thought you said you don’t know anything about it.”

“I don’t.” He smiled. “But you didn’t even try your techniques to see if I was lying.”

“How do you know that?” she asked. “Magick is not flashy. It’s something fine and subtle. Something that seems as natural as breathing, at least to us. Can’t you feel the magick in this room? The weavers were here, doing their work. There are magick traces here. Can you feel them?”

His mouth opened a little and then closed. He obviously hadn’t felt them. Most nonmagickal beings had no real sense of how magick worked. “So,” he said finally. “Why aren’t you going to get the information from me any other way?”

“Information voluntarily given is often more valuable and more complete,” she said. Then she leaned forward and put her elbows on her thighs. “What do you offer me, Adrian?”

“Myself,” he said again, his voice calm and steady. “In service to you until the end of the war.”

“And what do you offer that we can’t get for ourselves?”

“Intimate knowledge of the Isle and its people.”

“No battle plans, no magick formulas. Just information about the way the system works?”

He nodded. His Adam’s apple bobbed again. He was nervous, although he was trying hard not to show it.

“Until the end of the war,” she said, leaning back. Her chair squeaked with her movements, and bits of wool floated in the air. “What if the war doesn’t end?”

“Beg pardon?” he asked.

She smiled. “There are border clashes between L’Nacin and Oudoun that have lasted for centuries. This could do the same.”

“Centuries,” he repeated. “There isn’t room on this Isle for a war that lasts centuries.”

“You’d be surprised,” she said. She placed an arm on the chair back, making her body look as relaxed and comfortable as possible. “You are, what? Twenty years older than your son?”

“Twenty-five,” he said.

“That means that he will, in theory, outlive you by twenty-five years.” She pretended to consider that. Then she shrugged one shoulder. “I will accept nothing less from you than your life in exchange for his. You advise us on matters Islander. You teach us the secrets of your homeland and keep us apprised of all that we should know, and you do so until you die. Or until your son dies, whichever comes first.”

“My life?” This time he let the anguish show on his face. Such a choice. She wasn’t sure she would make it. “For my son’s.” He took a deep breath. “What happens if we win the war?”

“You won’t,” she said. “The Fey will never allow it. You may win battles, as you did with the First Battle for Jahn, but you will never defeat us. We will fight you until there are none of us left. And even then the Black King will probably send reinforcements. You will never win.”

He looked a bit startled at her vehemence.

“I mean we want you for the duration of your life. Nothing less.” She smiled at him. “And if you lie to us, even once, your son dies. And if you lie to us after your son has children, his children die. We are ruthless, Adrian, especially with people who cross us.”

“How would you keep track of him?”

“We have our ways,” she said. “We will know where he is each moment of the day. This can be of great benefit to you. If there is an attack, one of our people will protect him. And his children, when the time comes. But if you fail us, he will die. We do not give second chances.”

“My life.”

“For his.” She took her arm off the back of the chair. “You get the better part of the bargain. Your life is shorter. We will give him an extra twenty-five years of protection if you live out your normal life span. If you cheat us and kill yourself, of course we will kill him.”

“Do you have that great a need for my knowledge?”

Shrewd man. She liked that about him. “No,” she said honestly. “We have a need for your interpretation. Ways a culture work are easy to discover. Understanding why it works that way is sometimes very difficult.”

He looked away from her, at the point in the wall that would have had a window if the Fey had seen any point in installing windows in Shadowlands. He was not a young man. He understood what he was giving up. She could only hope that his love for his son was strong enough to make this kind of deal possible. An inbred knowledge of the culture would provide more than even a Doppelgänger could.

“What do I have to do?” he said.

“You will live in the Shadowlands, with us,” she said. “You will be available whenever any of us wants you.”

“And my son?”

“I will make sure he leaves Shadowlands today. You may watch if you like.”

He still wasn’t looking at her. His jaw worked, and he blinked several times, hard. Then he swallowed again. “When do I see him again?”

“You won’t,” she said. “You will be with us now.”

His head whipped around, his hair flying, his eyes flashing. Again, she was astonished at the power of Islander expressions, as if their emotions were somehow stronger than hers. “No,” he said. “No. I won’t work with you under that term. I don’t care what you do to me. If I can’t see my son, I won’t work with you.”

“You will not see him,” she said. “We cannot let you out of here, nor can we let anyone else in.”

“No,” he said again. “I will not work for you for twenty years only to discover that you killed my son five minutes after you set him free.”

A point she hadn’t thought of. Not that it made any difference to her. She had other uses for Adrian’s son. “You will see him once a year, then,” she said, “in a prearranged time in a prearranged spot. You will always be accompanied by one of us, and you will speak Nye or Fey unless one of your guards is fluent in Islander.”

He blinked, apparently startled at her easy concession. She stood before he could recover and think he might be able to get her to concede other points.

“And that is all. Have we a deal, Adrian?”

He looked up at her. Emotions warred across his face. He opened his mouth, closed it, then shut his eyes as well. He bowed his head and sighed. When he looked up again, his lashes were wet. “A deal,” he said softly.

“Good.” She went to the door. “I will have Mend return to untie you. We will find suitable clothing for you, and a place for you to stay. I will make sure she brings you a meal.”

“Wait!” Adrian said. “I would like to spend the last few hours with Luke.”

“I understand that,” Jewel said. “But I will not have you giving him ideas, and I don’t have someone to supervise you yet. You will have a chance to talk to him before we set him free.”

She pulled the door open.

“You realize,” he said low and deep, “that if anything happens to Luke, I will kill you. Not anyone else. Just you.”

She turned back to him. He was staring at her with an intensity she had never seen before. Hatred. Pure, deep, and unabashed, just as Ort’s had been. Only unlike Ort’s, Adrian’s felt personal. Didn’t he realize that she had helped him? She could have got what she needed without setting Luke free. She could have coerced Adrian, or more likely, Luke himself. The information would not have been as comprehensive and detailed, but that had never stopped them before.

“I understand the passion,” she said, keeping her tone level. “But I would warn you that if you kill me, my people will make certain that no drop of blood in your line remains to pollute the Isle. And once each and every one of your relations die—probably in front of you—then my people will turn their attention to you. We do not believe in quick death, Adrian.”

“You have no soul,” he said.

She smiled. “So they say. But I suspect that it is the other way around, for we are guided by our ghosts, and you must rely on stories told to you by old men. Perhaps that is why your ‘holy’ water kills us—because we have something inside that can be touched by the supernatural.”

“I will work for you,” he said, “but I will not like it.”

“You don’t have to like it,” she said. “You simply have to do it well.”

SIXTY-TWO

Coulter was talking. His baby voice rose and fell as if he were having a conversation. Eleanora heard excitement in his tone and a kind of joy, as if he found this conversation special. She sat up in bed and wiped a hand over her face. The room was dark, but a thin sliver of moonlight came in the window. The blanket had fallen to one side. She had been asleep for quite a while, but not long enough. She felt groggy.

The baby conversation continued. He laughed, a wonderful soprano trill, followed by the pat-pat of baby hands applauding. How odd. He always slept through the night. He had ever since they’d come there, when fear and exhaustion had overwhelmed him. Sometimes she thought he went through deep grief for his parents, but the others told her he was too young for that. Still, she remembered the feelings: the anger, betrayal, and sadness all mixed together. For the first few months of his life with Eleanora, Coulter had been a difficult child. She had soothed that away by making him the center of her world.

He cooed, and then she woke up enough to remember the cat. She let out an exasperated sigh. She had kept the door to Coulter’s room closed, and her door open, thinking the cat would come to her. But there was no cat in sight. And Coulter sounded awfully loud for a baby talking behind a closed door.

She pushed the wisps of gray hair off her face, careful not to pull any. She hated the way her hair had got thin in the last few years, the way she could feel her scalp through the strands. Sometimes she wondered if she would live long enough to bring Coulter into adulthood, and she prayed that she would. He needed someone who loved him, needed to be cared about. And she needed to be valuable in the last years of her life.