Blood and Iron (58 page)

“No,” I said civilly. “I don't mind at all.” I let my hands fall to my side.
This is going too well. They'll send a professional negotiator next.

I was wrong. “Look,” said the man behind the lights, “this is some kind of publicity stunt, right? Halloween and people dressed up like devils and fairies.”

“I wish it were,” I said. I could feel him grappling with the evidence of his own eyes, versus the problem of what he
believed
to be true. Your average modern rationalist doesn't
understand
the scientific world. He simply places faith in it, much the same way he places faith in what his doctor tells him, or his priest. All that belief is a powerful thing. At least Hope's lightning was keeping any helicopters at bay.
How do I make you believe in me? And quickly? Before the Magi get here.

The answer was the same one I'd come to before, and tried to find a way around.
You break things.

And then I heard another voice over the bullhorn, one I barely remembered: a woman's voice, rich with age. “Elaine. And Murchaud. I'm not surprised to meet you two here.”

I looked back over my shoulder. “My
mother
?”

Murchaud caught my eye through his visor and tilted his head to one side. “I did try to tell you. All your talent comes from somewhere, Elaine. From Jane Andraste.”

My mother's voice continued, mechanical and distorted. “There's still a place for you with us. The fight in Annwn is going well. Come over to the winning side.”

I ignored it. My father rode up close beside me. “I thought it came from Morgan ... from
you
.” I wrestled cold emptiness and a sucking disbelief: that terrible realization that the world goes on and changes around you, and you don't always get the memo.

He shrugged under his armor, crimson cloak rippling from his shoulders in wind-scattered folds. “It never crossed my mind that you didn't know what she was. That she hadn't told you.”

how Matthew knew my name.
“I suppose it's your fault she signed on with them, father?” I turned back to the lights and the guns.

“She was a Mage when I met her.”

Somewhere, not far away, I heard shattering glass and the wail of sirens. Gunfire stitched the night.
Rioting? Looting?

I couldn't think about that now. I dropped my chin and closed my eyes. “Mother,” I said. “Come and talk to me.”

She still held the bullhorn dangling from her hand when she walked out of the maze of police cars. Whiskey danced in place, and I gentled him, knowing he was only doing what I, myself, would like to do. She should have been in her seventies, but she looked trim in a violet suit, discreet diamonds glittering in her ears. Her shoes were sensible for walking.

She laid the bullhorn by her feet. Hope let her lightning fall quiet; only the floods lit the scene. She was my mother, and she smiled at me, and held out her hand. “Come home.”

“I wanted to,” I answered. “But I can't.”

“They took you from me,” she continued, coming closer. I looked down into her eyes, and they were neither green nor gray, but a brown as dark and clean as river water. “It killed your father. And you never came home.”

“I couldn't stand to. And the war is older than that. Mom.”

“Take your soul back. Bring your friends. You know you're doomed to betray your Dragon Prince anyway. Sooner or later.”

“And you are right, and Faerie is wrong?”

My mother laid her hand over my hand, reaching up to where I held Whiskey's mane to do it. My wedding ring pinched my finger as she pressed down. “Can you deny it? Take back your soul, and tell me what you have done is not
wrong
.”

Whiskey stood still as a board. He loved me, and he would go with me if I chose. Carel looked across at me, stricken. Bound to me, and by more than tangles in my hair. Hope clutched my boot on Whiskey's near side, and on his off side . . .

I looked down into the face of the woman who came to treat with me. She was my mother, and she smiled at me, and she held my hand. I looked over my shoulder at Murchaud.

“Hell would take an alliance offered, and you know it,” he said. “You are the Queen of the Daoine Sidhe.”

I spoke for Fae, then, and for Hell. And for all the Unseelie, for I bound them through their Queen. We had survived centuries of paying the seven-year's tithe and more. We had subjugated ourselves before to survive. There would be so much less blood if I simply nodded, and did what my mother asked. And betrayed my husband, as I was born to do. My mother tugged my hand.
“She's pulled him down into her arms / And let the bridle fall.”

Janet won.

I nodded. I imagined my mother's arms around me. Imagined the home and the family I'd not seen in thirty years. My father's grave, which I had never seen. My father. The man who raised me, who put me through school. Not the man who got me on a mortal woman, like many an Elf-knight before him.
You are wrong, and we are right.

I looked at Carel, and down at Hope. I tugged my hand out of my mother's and squeezed her fingers before I let them fall. “All right, Hope,” I said, and felt her flinch. And I smiled and kicked Whiskey forward.
“Bring it all down on their heads!”

My mother fell backward on the stones, and suddenly a light surrounded her that owed nothing to lightning: the gleam of neon, a thousand colors and a hundred writhing shapes. I heard the un-horse shriek, and Carel's wild cry as she raised her hands and tore down stones and signage as if with clawed fingers, raining them into the crowd. A camera smashed. I could not see if the operator died with it. I kicked Whiskey again and rode him up the hood of a police car and into the midst, I expected, of a storm of bullets that would tatter the blue moonlight surrounding me, shouting, “I dedicate this battle to the Mother of Dragons!” knowing Hermann the Cheruscan must have shouted something similar, two thousand years before.

There was no gunfire. Whiskey landed hard amid running men, shouldered a police horse aside and kicked out at something I did not see. Then there were flashes and bangs, a sound like a string of fireworks on the Fourth of July. Whiskey startled and half reared, expecting the impact of bullets on our flesh as surely as I did. I knotted a fist in his mane, but the bullets were aimed outward rather than in. Metal crunched and fiberglass shattered, and now I heard screaming. The remaining camera crews scrambled to take in the new situation; as they swung their lights around, I threw my fist in the air and cheered.

The SWAT van skidded aside, its ribs staved in. A squad car followed it, tumbling, officers diving aside. I saw clearly now as Hope raised her hands and lit the scene with livid purple balls of lightning. A low wind moaned through the buildings and then picked up, bitter cold and stinging with sprays of ice. Over the wail of the wind, the scream of tearing buildings, the hurt-hawk shriek of Murchaud's un-horse, I heard something deep and terrible rising up as if from the belly of the earth, the subway tunnels and the rock underneath. Singing.

Deep and terrible, singing. Singing to shake the bones of the world.

Lurching down Seventh Avenue, scattering taxicabs and prowl cars, shrugging aside bullets like so many butterflies, marched an army. An army of willow trees. Their roots slithered over the pavement; it groaned and sprouted trails of steam and geysers of water in their wake. Whiskey snorted and danced backward, leaving bloody puddles on the concrete of the sidewalk. He charged through the gap and bore me in among the willows, up alongside their leader. The tree's long, leafless fronds reached down to smooth my hair, as they had before. “Old Man Willow,” I said, and he laughed under his song and said, “Elaine.

“Hoom,” he commented further. Whiskey nickered approval.

“Who read you that one?”

“Many and many,” he replied. “It is nice to be remembered even a little.”

“Water, Uisgebaugh,” I said low in his ear, pointing to a shattered hydrant, and he tossed his mane and bent the spray in among the rallying officers, bowling them over. The wood walked down Seventh Avenue, and not a bullet passed through their branches to threaten Whiskey or me. We faced the others who had first come with me now, and I saw Murchaud grin grimly across the Square, his helm off and his face red-lit by the flames that danced around his hellsteed's neck. My mother lay motionless on the stones at the fell thing's feet, and as I watched the un-horse's mighty wings opened wide. The force of the rising wind lifted it as easily as if it were a scrap of black paper burning at the edge. Hope shouted, but I thought she shouted at the storm, and Carel gestured amid shattering lightning. Glass burst in tiers and fell like daggers. Over the crash rose screaming.

The lights went out in the television studio; gunfire embroidered the night. I couldn't see Hope, though I shouted her name. White as an ibis, a unicorn picked its way over the rubble and bowed to me, glimmering in the darkness, droplets of crimson tracing the steely spiral of its horn. It shied, stung by a bullet, and whirled into the shadows.

I turned my face away.

“What do we do, Queen Elaine?” Old Man Willow asked me. Travelers used to fear his kind.

I reached out and leaned one hand on the rough bark of a low bough. “Tear it all down,” I said. “No stone upon a stone.” My breath tasted like bile.
We are right, and you are wrong.
“There are no innocents in this world,” I continued, more to my mother than to my companions. “They'll remember us now.”

I moved Whiskey forward, marching into Times Square among singing trees, some dozens or hundred of them, to break the glass and hew the stones.
Kristallnacht.
The thought should have made me shudder, but instead I shrugged and raised my hand to point. “That building there. Begi—”

—which is when the sky turned red, and Hope's storm blew out like a candle, and Carel tumbled from her horse to lie upon the pavement, motionless. The bay mare bolted, and even Whiskey shied like a green-broke stud. The trees cowered around me.

I smelled burning stone and heated metal, and fought the urge to bury my face in Whiskey's mane.
Someone will have to tell the story.
A voice like the iron roots of mountains, raised in a wordless roar, shook more stones loose from the damaged facades. Still air groaned under the weight of her wings.

Whiskey fell to his knees among the stones. I saw none of the others. Nothing but Mist, her wings arced high and symmetrical over her head, settling onto the roof of the Warner Brothers store and frowning down on us. Fire and vapor licked from her nostrils, outlining the shape of her face.

“Children,” the Dragon said mildly. “Really.” Her head swiveled side to side, seeking like a serpent's. She tasted the air. “Queen with no Name. Come out of those trees.”

I did as the dragon instructed, and walked out into the center of Times Square, smoothing Whiskey's mane before leaving him to struggle to his feet alone. I splashed through water and picked my way over rubble and came out of the shadows beside Carel, who was oozing blood from a dozen cuts. Carefully, my eyes still raised to Mist, I crouched down and took the Merlin's pulse. Thready and slow, but she lived. I could not see Hope. I could not see my father.

“Mist,” I said, standing up. My mother also lay among the stones, and I couldn't decide if I was relieved or disappointed that her heart still beat. “Is this what you wanted?”

The Dragon smiled. Lava dripped smoking from between her teeth, puddles and spatters of fire. The night should have been moonless, but a full moon had risen behind her, and it lit all the city in silver. I heard footsteps, and hoofbeats, and looked from my left side to my right. I expected Hope or Murchaud, but they were nowhere in sight. Whiskey limped up beside me. Glass crunched underfoot. Mortals too came forward: newsmen, and the camera crews, and police in torn uniforms, blanched faces set with human courage.

I heard a sighing as the willows lurched forward and we all stood in a group, looking up at the Dragon who perched on the crenellated roof-edge and crumbled not a stone under the massive weight of her talons. “You called. Our Merlin commanded my presence. Now choose,” Mist said, very plainly. “Choose your future, Queen with no Name.”

“What do you mean?”

The Dragon's enormous head dipped, her neck so long that her muzzle brushed the ruined square. In the strange blue glow of that unnatural moon, it all seemed very real. Camera lights flickered back on, painted her starker in shadows. She blinked at the newsmen lazily, flickered her tongue across my mother's still form and then Carel's.

“Choose one,” she said. “Which magic would you have in the world? The Merlin or the Mage?”

I swallowed. “What happens to the other?”

The Dragon's breath upon my face smelled of hot metal and cool earth. She smiled. “What do you imagine? I am a Dragon, after all.”

If we could put you away,
I thought.
Really and for all, put you away. Put the Dragon out of us, and become . . .

Mist spread her moonlit, red-hot wings over the city and seemed, for a moment, to embrace it.

We'd have to make another Beast to take her place,
I realized.
Hell, we already have. I'm standing in its belly.

“I have to choose a sacrifice?”

“You are to choose a future.”

“Remember when the time comes. Remember.”
“Some-one once told me,” I said, the dryness of the words filling my mouth, “that in the end, you go to judgment naked, clad only in what you were born with and what you have earned, lessened only by what you have sold or given away. That those things which are taken by force, for good or for ill, go unconsidered. Is that so, Mother of Dragons?”