Blood and Iron (27 page)

“Ouch. Sorry, rough night to call you down here.”

She leaned forward enough to pat him on a soapy shoulder, carefully averting her eyes. The sallow bathroom light turned her hair from iron-and-silver to pewter, and cast haggard shadows down her cheeks. “It's all right. I'll send a team to take care of the warding and guarding on your Faerie child—”

“Not mine,” he said. “I'm pretty sure of that. The family's probably a social services candidate, given the neighborhood—”

“That makes it easier.”

He shifted in the water to give her the empty glass back, suddenly dizzy with heat, alcohol, and the realization that he hadn't eaten in almost twelve hours. “Jane—”

“No passing out in the tub. I did pick up Chinese, but I don't think you're quite cooked yet.”

“Not yet.” He slid down in the water, his muscles starting to unknot. “How bad
does
my back look?”

“It's hard to tell under the ink,” she answered, leaning back and closing her eyes, holding his glass cradled in interlaced fingers. “You're going to have one heck of a bruise.”

“Could be worse.” The vodka was making him giddy, and maybe a little brave. “Jane, have you ever seen a unicorn?”

She coughed, abruptly bolt upright and stiff. “A unicorn? I've glimpsed one, once or twice. I wouldn't try to touch one, personally.” She grinned. “Chastity was never a virtue of mine, if it doesn't horrify you to hear an old lady say so.”

“I saw one today,” he said, his fingers curling with the memory of its warmth. “I—” He looked up. She was leaning forward, elbows on her knees, intent as a carrion bird. He shivered, despite the heat of the tub. “In Central Park.”

“Did it notice you?”

“It just looked at me,” he lied, and changed the subject quickly. “It was the Unseelie Seeker tonight.”

“If it had been Elaine,” Jane said in a too-even voice as she stood, “I would have assumed you would have mentioned it. Is your robe in the bedroom? You should eat something, I think, and lie down.”

“It's in my closet,” he said, and she left his glass on the back of the toilet and walked out of the bathroom.

“On the left-hand side?”

“Mm. Yes. Jane, she said something about Kelly tonight.”

“Something you hadn't heard before?”

“She wanted to know if I had the same tattoos,” Matthew said, as Jane poked her head back through the door. “Why would she want to know that?”

The archmage chewed her lower lip. “To unsettle you? Do you need a hand out of the tub?”

“I can manage,” Matthew said, bracing himself to endure the pain. “You should—”

“—go warm dinner back up,” she agreed. “Yes. Do you want coffee with that?”

“With
Chinese
?”

Seeker stumbled on the age-smoothed flags of the vaulted corridor, too tired to lift her foot properly as she rounded the corner. Fire surged the length of her shin; she toppled against the wall and nursed her stubbed toe, tears stinging her eyes. A few steps confirmed that it was broken.

At least she could walk on it. And there wasn't much to do for a broken toe except live with it. “Gharne,” she muttered.

He was there as if he had always been, dark body warm and soft as suede as he coiled around her neck, rubbing a poison-arrow head against her cheek. “Mistress? Problems? ”

“Nothing,” she said. She let one hand slide along the wall as she fumbled toward her chambers, somehow got the door open and began fighting with the buttons on her top. Gharne lifted into the air as she gave up on the closures and ripped the shirt over her head, his claws leaving tiny pinpricks behind. As she bent to struggle with the trousers, she noticed that the tub was gone and the floor had been mopped. “Lock the door, Gharne.”

He sailed that way, moving like a flying squirrel: weightless, wings unbeating. “You need more rest, mistress.”

“I'm going to sleep for a week.” Her hair was still wet and tangled as she bent over the bed. Her fingers traced an impression in the neatly tucked bedspread. She wondered how long Whiskey had waited for her. “Don't let anyone wake me unless the world is ending.”

“Do you mean that literally?” He slithered between Seeker and the bed and peeled back the covers. She already shivered, a cool draft leaching any lingering warmth from the room. The fire had burned cold.

“Use your judgment,” she answered, and let Gharne pull the blankets over her.

Seeker awakened an indeterminate time later in the gray darkness of Annwn. At the edge of her sleep, she thought she heard small, scratchy voices distorted by echoes, but she couldn't make out the words. She opened her eyes on the charred, upside-down silhouette of Gharne perched vulturelike on the headboard, his serpentine neck pulled comfortably between furled wings. She rolled over and propped herself on her elbows, and the perspective righted itself. “When is it?”

“Tomorrow, very early.”

“Oh, damn.” She sat up, head throbbing with the effects of too much sleep on top of not enough, her toe aching in protest. “Has anyone come?”

“The Kelpie,” Gharne said in mild disdain. “The werewolf, and the Mebd's pet—along with that last mortal you stole.”

“And the Merlin,” Gharne continued. “She said not to worry about dinner.”

“Damn!” Seeker reached for a robe and stood, the oak-leaf-dagged hem fluttering around her ankles. Someone had kindled a fire during the night, so the room was slightly warmer.

Gharne coaxed her to ring for breakfast; brownies brought it when her back was turned, and she never saw them. After jasmine tea and pastry Seeker's headache receded to a tolerable, grasping pressure. The mist had rolled in, but there was no lightening beyond the heavy velvet drapes. Seeker pushed herself to her feet and winced; the nail bed of her toe was purple, the whole thing swollen and sharply painful. She limped to the windows and leaned against the frowning green man carven between them, her left hand splayed over his face as if caressing the muzzle of a friendly dog. In the tangerine light, her olive skin seemed not very different from the golden stone. The pattern of oak on her dressing gown made her feel almost an extension of the carving.

“Gharne,” she said after a short while, “do you know any stories of people who could talk to animals?”

“Other than Taliesin and Merlin Ambrosius, you mean?” She thought he was smiling, a mouthful of rose-thorn teeth white against the velvet blackness of his hide.

Seeker clapped her other hand to her forehead. “I'm stupid, ” she said.

Gharne hopped up on the rust-colored cushions of the window seat. The panes separating Seeker and her familiar from the garden were contained in Gothic arches, clear glass set in filigree of that same golden stone. “Overworked, ” he answered. “You drank of the well under the hazel tree, same as they did. What's so surprising about being able to talk to animals?” He shook out his wings into her silence. “Where are we going now?”

“To visit a dead man and his sister.” She let her hand fall from the green man's cheek and went to dress. Seeker wasn't sure what moved her, but she pulled stout gray trousers and a green tunic with a braided belt out of the cabinet, adding a silver-bladed knife at her hip. She winced as she pulled a boot on over her throbbing toe. “I look like I think I'm Robin Hood,” she said wryly, standing before the mirror, twisting her hair back.

Gharne circled her head twice, inertia-less as a shadow, and moved toward the door. He slid through the heavy wood a moment before Seeker closed her hand on the cool irregular amethyst of the knob and pulled it open. He paced her down the palace's endless vining corridors to the garden and outside, into tangled mist and breaking darkness. Wisteria hung heavy over the portico, scenting damp air, and Seeker limped down a white gravel path, her ankles brushed by ferns uncurling as if for spring among others brown and crumbling.

The fog hung thick. She found her way through the moss-dripping boulders, into a narrow crevice and across a lacquered bridge as the first true light of day penetrated the overcast. She felt as if she moved through layers of milky crystal, translucent and illuminated—but the fog burned off by the time she came to the pavilion housing Arthur's bier. She saw its pale struts clearly against the darkness of the open, parklike wood beyond. Something moved on the edge of it: a silhouette, a stag white as a chalk cut, watching her. Then he tossed his head and vanished into the beech trees and ironwood.

Seeker's eyes followed the dozen points on the white hart's antlers; she paused midstep. It was a problem she hadn't considered. The Sluagh—the Wild Hunt—rode no more . . . had not ridden since the Prometheus Club and their minions bound Faerie in iron and oak and copper, in railways, roadways, the spent cartridges of a hundred wars that laid chains across the earth.

In the New World, the greatest wreaking of the Promethean Age had been completed at the moment when a golden spike joined the Union Pacific and the Central Pacific railroads. In Asia, along the course of the Trans-Siberian, across the width of Africa, skirmishes were fought and battles raged. The fey folk witched weather to blizzard and drought, sent the furious ghost-lions of Tsavo and angered the mortal warriors and spirits of the American Southwest, killed workers by the hundreds along the railroad routes. Faerie had magic, and wrath.

Men had iron. John Henry, Paul Bunyan: the folk heroes of the industrial age wielded axes and hammers. Men had once met Faerie on Faerie's terms: with wits, with music, with Names and knotted hair and riddles told in the dark of the moon.

But men had iron.

Men prevailed.

What mystery there was stepped sideways, slipped elsewhere, ceased to be seen. And was soon enough forgotten, for the lives of men are short. Very short indeed.

And the worst of what was bound was the Sluagh: the Host of the Unquiet Dead, the shades of evil men who rode and fought forever—the hunt that rode at the back of the Horned God, and slew whatever it touched, and slew whatever it saw, and could neither be evaded nor appeased. The Sluagh killed like the Elf-stroke, only not so quick and painlessly. Humans still remembered the rides of the Sluagh as plague years, like the unholy darkness that fell over Europe from 1347 to 1350, laying bony hands on Kings and paupers—or like the smallpox in the Americas, the reeking years of death that swept the continent far in advance of Lewis and Clark.

The Host of the Unquiet Dead
could
rise from uneasy slumber and stalk with the thunder again: the Wild Hunt, the Riders on the Storm. If that was the weapon the Mebd intended to use, if Faerie shook off Promethean chains . . .

Seeker shook her head and put her foot down, frowning like a cat. Gharne settled on the rocks with a hiss. “What are you waiting for, mistress?”

“I don't know.” She limped forward and climbed three white stone steps into the open pavilion, leaving Gharne behind. Under the eight-cornered roof, the smell of roses lingered. Seeker crossed the floor to the high bier where the sleeping Ard Ri lay, his broad hands crossed over the hilt of a sword that was not his. The Gwragedd Annwn had been and gone; his uncut hair was neatly ordered, the tips blonder than the root. Slow breaths stirred his tidy, gray-shot red beard.
I wonder why they trim the beard and not the hair,
Seeker thought. She reached out and laid her right hand on Arthur's, leaning close to study his face, placid as a sleeping child's.

“What are you dreaming of, Your Majesty?” His breath smelled sweet when it brushed her cheek. There was a fine line between his brows. “I half hope it's nightmares.”

And half hope it's not.
She shook her head and pulled her hand back, letting it trail down the length of his blade. “What will it take to awaken you? A threat to Britain, they say. Then shouldn't you have been there at Hastings, at Coventry, my lord?”
I'm talking to a dead man. A miraculously preserved corpse. It's glamourie and nothing more. Smell the roses? Odor of sanctity. Smell of sainthood.

“But you were no saint, were you, my lord?” Seeker yanked her hand back as she carelessly nicked her thumb on the mirror-bright edge of the bronze sword. She examined it and sucked the wound, tasting metal. “Is what I've done so much worse than your own deeds? I think not. I cannot think so.”

The ancient warlord breathed in, breathed out, did not stir. She straightened the sword in his grip; her sudden movement had disarrayed it. “So if not Britain, what is it? What can awaken you? Dammit—” Blood welled, and she sucked it off again. The wound stung. “
Dammit.
If I'm Lancelot's granddaughter, Lancelot who did and did not exist . . . I owe you something, don't I? It's not so much that Gwenhwyfar was unfaithful. What woman can resist an Elf-knight, after all?”

Seeker paced back and forth, covering the few short steps from bench to bier and back again. She forgot to favor her foot, her bootheels clattering on the stone. Reminded of Whiskey, she shivered and stopped, stood still with her head cocked as if listening. No sound followed, and she addressed the sleeping king again. “How all the stories contradict themselves. How can you be such a bloody enigma, man? Worse than Robin of Locksley, worse than anybody this side of . . . Joshua ben Joseph. There are
records,
for crying out loud. I can tell you Boadicea's dress size. So how can you be such a cipher? Such a myth.”

She leaned over his bower, ran her fingers through the raw, ruddy gold of his hair. “You existed, you did not exist, you were a dozen men with a dozen names, and none of them Arthur. Arthur, the Bear of Britain. You were a warlord, you were a general, you were Ard Ri, a High King. Roman, Saxon, Welsh. From Yorkshire or from Scotland. Your wife betrayed you with your son, with a rival warlord, with your bravest knight. Your sister is a fey witch, she's a priestess, she's an avatar of the goddess. . . . You had another sister, Anne—a twin, or younger—or you had only yourself and Morgan. Of all of them, all your family and all your kin, the only one who never betrayed you was your foster-brother. Who is remembered now as a braggart and a fool, although that is not how the oldest tales of Cei the Strong, Horsemaster of Camelot, would paint him.”