Blood and Iron (38 page)

“That seems a little . . . arbitrary.” She swallowed tea too hot. It burned the back of her throat, but she refused to splutter. “Sudden, even.”

“Well, Her Majesty is nothing if not arbitrary. She pressed the issue. Something about my legitimacy.”

Carel didn't mention it last night.
Seeker closed her eyes on that memory.
Because she thought I already knew. Was coming to ask what it meant, and is savvy enough to notice that the marriages bandied hereabouts are chiefly political.

“Perfect,” Seeker answered. “I don't suppose she has a dress picked out?”

“Probably,” Ian answered, starting on his second roll. “I've been thinking about the enemy.”

“Cold word, that.”

He nodded, but it was dismissal disguised as agreement. “Arbitrary,” he said, a chuckle coloring the word. “Cold. Have you forgotten where you are, mother?”

“No,” she said. “I'd never assume anything Fae confused itself too much with morality.”

“Good.” No irony shaded his voice. “You need to eat, you know.” He pushed his own plate at her. “Break bread with me.”

Unwillingly, she took bread he had buttered already and spread with honey, holding it in her fingers, unable to raise it to her lips. “What have you been thinking, then?”

“I saw a black stag in the wood.”

She dabbed a finger in honey, licked it off. The sweetness sickened her. “I saw a white one. Milk-white, with a rack like an emperor's crown.”
Like that bloody throne in the other room.

“Cernunnos.”

“Oh, no. Ian, no.” The bread scattered crumbs.

“I'm a hunter and a Prince, mother. Fae and mortal both. I know. . . . The Mebd taught me the Names.”

She held up her hand, but his voice, soft and assured, rolled over that fragile barrier. “I could ride with them. I could call them up—the Sluagh, the Hosts of the Unquiet Dead.”

“No.” She shook her head, kept shaking it, unable to stop. “Not that.”

“Are you afraid for me, mother?” He took her hand in his cold one and covered it with his other pale palm.

“You're talking about unleashing the Wild Hunt.”

“Well,” he said quietly, “it would be awfully hard for the enemy to pretend there was no magic in the world then, wouldn't it? Besides . . . the sacrifice. I thought it would be better. . . .”

Her thoughts took on a terrible slowness, thick and clear as the honey still cloying her tongue. “That's too much,” she said. “Too much blood. Too much. And it's your father's responsibility. Dammit. His blood to shed, not yours. Not
yours,
do you hear me?”

He looked up at her, blinked. She realized she was standing. That she had been shouting, and every eye in the hall was on her, and that her hands were clenched to whiteness over Ian's. She drew her shoulders back and bit off a breath, did not turn to survey the room. Gave his fingers an extra squeeze before she jerked her hands away. “Not yours,” she hissed, and stalked from the hall.

It was raining on Manhattan, a steady biting precipitation that splattered Matthew's windshield with fat gray drops and left tire-dragging puddles in the hollow places on the road. The rain would be the end of autumn's colors; golden-red and auburn leaves would clot the gutters near the park by morning, stripped from the branches as if by brushing hands. October was passing quickly, and he was no closer to convincing Carel Bierce to give the Prometheus Club another chance.

Matthew parked the car in a lucky space that he'd been manipulating chance and reading portents in favor of for almost two blocks, opened the door, and stepped over a White Castle burger wrapper snagged on a sewer grating in the flooded gutter. He flipped the hood of his sweatshirt up. A middle-aged woman caught sight of his tattooed wrists and put the breadth of the sidewalk between them. Matthew sighed resignation.

Prometheus would have sent a car, of course. But he didn't want to rely on them. Not for this.

Not at all.
I should have worn a suit,
he thought, but the constrained symbolism would have been more harm than help on a personal level, even if it did disguise him as a responsible member of society as far as the hospital staff were concerned. Instead, he zipped his camouflage jacket over the heather-gray hoodie and stuffed honestly chilled hands in his pockets, glad it was the rain and not Faerie treachery, for once.

Autumn was sliding into winter, and sometimes he didn't think it could happen quickly enough.

A hunched but unhurried stride carried him across the puddled sidewalk; he passed through revolving doors and stood dripping in the dim, luxurious lobby as his eyes adjusted. A crisp young person in ivory and blue manned the desk. Matthew dragged his hands out of his pockets and walked forward, fortifying himself with two deep breaths of filtered air.

“Hello,” he said, when the young woman with the carefully pinned cap looked up. “I'm Dr. Szczegielniak. I'm here to see my brother, Kelly Szczegielniak. He's coming home with me.”

Kelly stayed quiet as Matthew lifted him out of the car and into the wheelchair. Another time, he might just have carried his brother across the garage to the apartment building's elevator—Kelly was frail enough that it was just as easy to keep him up, once he was lifted, as it was to open out the chair—but Matthew's back was still complaining from his fall.

The elevator climbed; Matthew found himself smoothing Kelly's thinning hair and forced his fingers to rest on the slightly sticky handles of the wheelchair and curl into the black plastic grooves. Kelly made a sound like a nervous dog, huddling into himself, but calmed when Matthew relented and rested a hand on his shoulder. “Hang tough, Kell. It'll be fun. Like old times.”

And hopefully he won't try to climb over the caregiver while I'm at the college.
Of course, the caregiver that Jane had arranged was a Promethean, which made all the difference, but . . .
Oh, admit it, Szczegielniak. You're afraid to bring your brother home.

The apartment door opened as Matthew wheeled Kelly up to it, dull tan hallway carpeting giving way to the gun-metal blue and gray-green variegated wall-to-wall carpeting he'd installed himself, unwilling to live with the complex's seventies industrial shag. Kelly curled into the vinyl of the chairback as Jane framed herself in the door, the smell of chicken stock and cooking vegetables drifting onto the corridor air. Matthew patted his brother's hair again, and wheeled him into the apartment. “Jane, are you everyone's mom?”

“Soup's on,” she said, nudging her discarded shoes out of the wheelchair's path with a stocking-clad toe. “And I only mom the deserving. Can he handle hot food?”

Matthew shook his head. “If I can't get enough of the soup down him, there's a case of Ensure in the trunk of the car. But I wouldn't will that on my worst enemy.”

“How bad could it possibly be?” Jane closed the door crisply and engaged both locks and the security latch.

Kelly had raised his head and was craning his neck to examine the room. Matthew's tastes ran to the eclectic, and bookshelves. His computer desk, in the corner, could have docked the
Lusitania
. Matthew checked to make sure his brother's seat belt was fastened, and crouched to unlace his own boots. “They gave me butter pecan.”

Jane, for all her dignity, mimed gagging like a teenager. “For the love of God, Matthew. Just put an egg in his whiskey, or let the man starve in peace.”

He followed her into the kitchen, pushing his brother before him, and seated Kelly at the edge of the table. Jane waved him away with a glance when he would have gone to assist her in spooning soup into bowls. “I've been thinking of moving,” he said, settling down on a white-oak Danish chair. “Out of the city. After . . .”

“After the ritual?” She half filled the first bowl and slid it into Matthew's freezer to cool. “You're edging up on asking me why I asked you to bring Kelly home.”

“I was considering coming at it directly, actually.” But he smiled, and when she turned to him, Jane grinned. “All right, what are you plotting?”

“It's more what the Faeries plotted for us,” she said, and set the bowl she was filling on the edge of the sink. “Take off your jacket, Matthew. Give me your hand.”

Unhesitating, he did, and she unbuttoned his right shirt cuff and pushed the blue-and-white broadcloth up to his elbow. She laid his forearm on the table and unwound the rain-dampened blanket he'd draped over Kelly's shoulders to reveal a sweatered left arm. She pushed the sweater up as well, Kelly passive under her touch, his head twisted to one side as he hummed under his breath. Matthew knotted his hands into fists, watching the veins move over the tendons, and willed himself to stay still as Jane nudged Kelly's arm against his.

“The ink?” He forced himself to look at the way the black, sharply delineated lines on his own skin echoed the livid indigo of Kelly's. “It didn't protect him,” Matthew said. “It won't protect me.”

“No,” Jane said, leaning back and exchanging a motherly expression for a brittle, determined smile. “But it brought him back to us alive. And has given us a link to Faerie that we can use to bring the Westlands to us. More or less.”

Matthew considered, moving his arm just far enough that it didn't touch Kelly's skin, although he could feel the brush of hairs on fine hairs. “It would be better if we were twins,” he said, when a crash of breaking glass from the street reminded him that he should be speaking.

“We will use what opportunity gives us,” Jane said. Matthew looked sidelong at his brother, and couldn't look for long; Kelly had drifted off, his eyes drooping to slits, a thin line of saliva drooling down his chin. “You know what I'm going to tell you.”

“Yes,” he said, fiddling with his rings. “Someone always has to sacrifice something to make magic that large work. I can't believe you expect this of me, Jane.”

She shook her head, her hand on his shoulder as he rolled down his sleeve. “I expect you'll do what you have to do, Matthew. I have faith in your commitment. And of all of us, I think you and I have the most to lose.”

A few moments' thought before he could bear to nod, but he did, words sticking in his throat like burrs. “Yes,” he managed eventually. “We have both got something to lose, haven't we? Tell me it's worth it, Jane—”

“It's worth it,” she said, the ring of certainty in every word, and then she brought him a bowl of soup he couldn't eat. “Tomorrow,” she said, “I think you should make one more attempt to contact the Merlin.”

“It's falling apart, Gharne.” White gravel scattering before her, Seeker stomped along the hardened path. Her familiar floated alongside, matching pace. “I thought—I don't know what I thought. Everything's crumbling, and I don't know what to do.”

“It's been crumbling for a thousand years, mistress. Empires rise and fall. Languages die and peoples go extinct.”

“It's different when it's your children.”

“Why?”

She stopped on the path and dug her toe into the gravel, looking down. Her hair fell into her eyes and she smoothed it out of the way. “It just is.”

“Right.” His tone was mocking, but he came to rest on her shoulder, nuzzling her ear. “I notice you've given up the conceit of being the innocent victim.”

“A victim is a victim. I can't afford to be that. And innocence . . . well.” She shrugged and looked up. The white roof of Arthur's pavilion showed over the roses. She licked her lips as her gaze settled on it, and a black-beaked raven took flight from its peak. She heard other footsteps on the gravel, beyond the hedge and rosebushes, and reached through shadows to see Keith speaking with a black-haired man. It was a temptation to eavesdrop on Keith and his raggle-taggle Wolf-prince. It might even be a duty.
I cannot trust him. I cannot be trusted.

And yet she hesitated, twisting her hands together. It would be the Fae thing to do. The Mebd, Whiskey, Robin— even Hope—would not hesitate to use their power so.

And it would be the human thing to do, to trust even if trust seemed foolhardy. Seeker reached up to scratch the softness behind Gharne's ear and kept walking. “He's supposed to come in our hour of need.”

“Someone's hour of need, anyway.” Gharne settled his wings warm over her shoulders. “But you don't know how to wake him.”

She pushed her hair back with her hand. Her fingers tangled in Gharne's braid, and she unsnagged them abruptly.
I wish I could get this mess cut.

She stopped, contemplating that, and worried her lip between her teeth. “Gharne?”

“Yes?”

“Get Keith for me. Tell him to bring his sword. And leave his friend behind.” She shrugged the protesting familiar off her shoulder and walked forward, eyes fixed on the roofline of the pavilion. Keith was sitting on the steps when she came from among the fall of yellow roses.

Caledfwlch leaned against the rail and Keith's long legs stretched out. He stood as Seeker approached. “You always liked this place. The Mebd's arranged us a state wedding. ”

“I heard.” She couldn't meet his eyes. Her own stung. “Keith. I—”

“Don't.” He shook his head. “I don't want to talk about it. We can't have normal expectations of each other anymore.”

It wasn't what she anticipated, and it wasn't what she wanted, but she nodded. He put a hand on her elbow to guide her up the steps. She smiled. “I do love you.”

“I know.” He gave her arm a squeeze before letting his hand fall. “Every time I come here, I find myself wanting to say, ‘He looks so real!' As if he were a wax doll.”