Blood and Iron (6 page)

“It will,” she said, and stood on tiptoe to kiss the air beside his cheek.

Keith joined his father fifteen minutes later, having taken the time to clean the mud from under his nails and change his dressing gown for blue jeans and a cable-knit sweater. The study was only loosely so termed; Eoghan MacNeill had lavished more attention on this room than any other in his slow restoration of the old manor house, and its rugged tapestry-hung walls framed a view of the moonlit ocean through broad modern windows. The massive table that served as Eoghan's desk was butted up against the outside wall. As Keith entered the room, he saw his father's head framed by the window, silver hairs picked out by the green-blue glow of twinned monitors and the remaining ginger strands sidelit by the amber warmth of the fireplace.

And when did he get so much gray in his hair?
“Your Highness,” Keith said, and paused just within the door, sorting the aromas of the room through his inadequate human nose. Smoke and whiskey, mothballs and his father's human sweat . . .

... and in that sweat, a sourness Keith recognized all too well. Eoghan turned in his swivel chair and smiled like a wolf, lips closed over his teeth, but did not rise. He looked drastically thinner than when Keith had seen him last, his cheekbones standing high under papery skin, and his eyes had sunken over them and were smeared with darkness like kohl. Keith came across the carpet, sandalwood and camphor rising from the wool compressed under his loafers, and crouched to take his father's hand. The old wolf's nails were yellowed and sharply hooked; Keith saw the marks of the file along their edges, and the cramped-looking bulges of Eoghan's knuckles as he tightened his grip—a grip still strong enough to make Keith set his jaw to endure it.
Not quite ready for his deathbed yet,
Keith thought, and squeezed right back.

“Stand up, stand up. Get a chair. We don't see you enough at home anymore, my boy.” Eoghan released his grip and turned back to his computer long enough to save his document. “Pour me a wee dram while you're up, there's a good lad.”

Keith did as he was bid, smiling into his beard, and tried not to notice how his father braced both hands on the edge of his desk in order to gain his feet. Eoghan met him by the fire, gesturing him into one of the twin wing chairs set before it, and shrugged Keith's hand off when Keith would have helped him to sit. “I smell that wench of yours on ye,” he said, after Keith pushed the tumbler of whiskey into his hand. “I don't suppose that means there's word of your son?”

Keith shook his head. “Things are . . .” His voice trailed off, and the old wolf snorted and leaned forward, hands dangling between his knees and the glass pressed between his palms, staring into the fire. Keith pressed into the overstuffed chair, as if in contravention of his father's posture. “. . . no better.”

“You'll need that lad when I'm gone,” Eoghan said. Keith shot him a startled look, and saw his father complacently sipping whiskey, eyes twinkling like peridots in the firelight.

“Gone?”

“Aye, or did you mean to let the princedom of the pack desert our lineage? Tell me you'll fight in my memory, lad.”

The fire was warm on the soles of Keith's feet, even through the leather of his shoes. “I haven't thought of it,” he said, pretending the nauseating twist of panic was someone else's emotion. “I hadn't thought of it at all.”

“Think on it now,” Eoghan said. He leaned back with a sigh, and rested his glass on his leg. “It won't be long—”

“You're strong yet.” Said as a dismissal, and Keith could not stop the oblique twist of his right hand that brushed the issue aside, and away.

“Deny it if you like,” Eoghan answered. “I'll be dead before the New Year; I can feel the weariness in my bones when the moon changes. And I'd like to meet my grandson before I go.”

“It won't be easy,” Keith said.

The old wolf shrugged. “What in life is? A wolf who won't claim his own offspring won't be seen as fit to lead the pack.”

“Who said I wanted to lead the pack, father?”

Eoghan tilted his head to one side and smiled, and this time he showed Keith the edge of his teeth. Just enough to make an impression, and no more. “Did ye think you had a choice?”

Whiskey awaited Seeker in the predawn light, head bowed, nosing listlessly among the waterweeds. He lifted black-socked feet aimlessly from the stream and set them down.
Waiting to be struck dead.
Seeker felt pity like an edge of glass parting her skin, until she recalled his many murders.

“Uisgebaugh,” she said from the mouth of the cavern.

His head came up. He snorted and thrust himself up the bank, water puddling from his lower legs and feet. It dripped from his mane as well, spotting the shoulder of her tunic as he lowered his head to look her in the eye. “You are well.”

“More or less. Bend a knee for me, water-horse.” She reached up and grasped his mane, sliding belly first over his broad back before slinging her right leg across his rump. Water streaked her front and soaked her thighs, running in streams over her fingers where she clutched the mane. “I don't suppose you can shut that off, can you?”

From the shadows that lay all around them, she saw
otherwise
as his head went down; she was ready. Big hooves left the ground; he rocked forward, sunfishing halfheartedly. She held on, feeling water stream between her legs and his hide, smacking him once on the neck with her open hand. “Enough.”

He pawed the earth, but his hide was abruptly dry.

She tugged his mane so he sat back obediently on his haunches and spun like a cattle pony, hooves carving gullies in the streambank. He leapt the water, snorting, and set off at a trot that was harder than it had to be, grinding her groin against his backbone and rattling her teeth. She kicked him in the ribs, twice, and he settled into a canter gentle as a rocking horse. “You ride well,” he said grudgingly.

“I'm from Wyoming.” As if that explained everything.

“Where are we going, mistress?”

“You heard of the task the Mebd set for me?”

He shook his mane, ears flickering. Bladderwort squelched between her fingers, tangling his mane. “Every-one has.”

“We're looking for a mortal man to seduce and betray. Your specialty.” His hoofbeats echoed from the face of the down. She turned him with the pressure of her knees and started up the flank of the big hill at an angle, toward a copse of trees that crested it. East, the sky shone pink and silver, ephemeral.

She leaned into the beat as he picked up speed, powerful hindquarters propelling them. Big as he was, he moved like a quarter horse, bunching and extending, covering the ground in fast, jerky strides. His feathers, the dark long hair on his fetlocks, flared and floated.

“This is the way to the Weyland Smithy.”

“It is,” she answered. “We're seeing about shoes.”

He stopped short, head-tossing. She squeezed with her legs and he danced backward.

“You will go on,” she said. “Our hunt will lead us into the iron realm. They lay iron under the roadways.”

He shivered beneath her, ears laid flat. “I went into the mortals' city barefooted. You saw.”

“Indeed. Barely ten feet from the water, dripping oceans with every step, and weak enough that something like me could bind you. You will have shoes.”

He pawed another gully, water flooding from his hoofprint. His head dipped and Seeker held tight to the mane, expecting him to kick out again or to rear. The final contest.

Instead, a great breath heaved from his barrel. “As you wish.” Docile, he turned toward the copse.

Rowan, hazel, ash and willow: she knew their flowering branches. As Whiskey bore her to the edge of the glade, a heavy hammer thundered, faster than any smith should have swung it. She slid down, sighing as her feet touched the greensward. The scent of burning coke and scorched metal reminded her of Mist.

One hand on Whiskey's neck, she led him forward.

Trees completely enclosed the rough clearing. Beside a rock-rimmed well a bandy-legged little man bent over his forge, naked except for a leather apron. Terrible scars marked the back of his leg where a jealous god had lamed him. He wore his long matted beard parted and braided, the ends knotted behind his back; the hammer he swung with such ease bore a head as big as a breadloaf. Other tools hung like offerings from the branches of the trees.

Weyland Smith turned at the sound of Whiskey's hooves and set his tongs and hammer aside. He cocked his head, bald at the center as if tonsured, and sucked his cheeks in as he looked from Seeker to Whiskey and back again. “Well,” he said, and turned his head to spit into the grass, “what have we here?”

“A horse for the shoeing, mastersmith.” Seeker walked forward, holding out a hand with two silver coins glittering in the palm. Weyland Smith's geas—the rule that bound him—was simple: he could refuse no commission, no matter how daunting. His little eyes glittered like stars as he reached a gnarled hand for the money.

He bit down on the silver and then dropped one coin each in the two pockets of his apron. “I've not shod a horse like that one before. It'll be silver, shall it? Silver for the moon-horse, silver for the horse of the water.”

“Silver will do nicely.” Seeker turned and beckoned Whiskey. He came stamping, pied tail swishing, his nostrils flaring wet red in his face—a piebald who was almost a horse white as milk, black-legged and splashed with black on face and breast, with black strands lacing the pale mane and tail.

The little smith ignored him and bent to his bellows, nattering away as if Seeker had not spoken. “So it will be! Silver as the wheels of Arianrhod's chariot. Gold for collars and bindings. Silver for protection. Werewolves and wampyrs and such. And protection from iron, of course.”

Gold is for collars. Oh, indeed.
Seeker swallowed, and did not think of werewolves.

Weyland Smith lifted his hammer and his tongs, singing as he pounded out the heated metal.
“Tam Lin.”
And the Mebd would be as terrible in her displeasure at him as she would have been at Seeker. But the rules were different for the ones that were gods. What could the Mebd do to the Weyland Smith? They were both descended of Dana.

Seeker walked to the well and peered over the smooth white stones that marked the edge in the grass. Water rippled and reflected as more hammer blows and the scent of scorching hoof revealed that Weyland had fitted the first silver crescent to Whiskey's foot. Whiskey snorted in protest; Seeker looked over her shoulder to check. But he stood patiently as Weyland drove the nails through the hoof wall and clipped them short.

“That'll be a fine silver ring in your man form,” Weyland said. “Next foot.”

Seeker blinked to clear her vision and gazed back into the water. The rippled surface now shivered with the pale circle of her own face, distorted by dim light and water. She bent closer, fascinated by the twisted image—and jerked back when a gout of icy water struck her face. Blinking, about to curse Whiskey, she glimpsed the spined back of a rose-and-green fish as it slid into the depths.

The water on her lips tasted cool and sweet, and she had just dipped up a handful when the hammering stopped. “Finished, m'lady,” the smith pronounced. “Best be on your way.”

“Already?”

He smiled and nodded, cheeks like ripe crab apples under waggling eyebrows. He set his hammer aside and made her a stirrup. Whiskey stood foursquare, testing the unfamiliar weight. The clipped ends of silver nails shone against hooves gleaming black as if shoe-polished. Weyland all but threw Seeker onto Whiskey's back.

Before she was fairly settled, Whiskey broke into a flying trot, footfalls light and his knees rising as if racking in the show ring. He threw his head up. Seeker, clutching his mane, turned to call back thanks to the smith—but the forge under the hazel tree was gone, and she couldn't see the outline of the well in the grass.

Whiskey floated on his new-shod hooves. He was behaving himself, so she leaned low over his neck and let him stretch into the gallop.

There wasn't anyplace for them to run to, Seeker and steed; the Blessed Lands were vast but quickly spanned if one knew the proper routes, and the paths to return to the mortal world lay nowhere and everywhere. But there was running for its own sake, and there was a task before her and a rival Queen's Seeker to address. So she knotted her hands in Whiskey's weed-matted mane and threw her weight as high on his withers as she could without a saddle, and they raced through mist and over downs and dales. He snorted once, a sound like a hiss, as she kneed him into a river that ran red and warm between the banks—
“for all the blood that's spilled on earth runs
through the springs of that countrie”
—but he did not fight her.

Blood-heat swirled around her thighs, staining her leggings and Whiskey's white hide.
I could release him.
She tasted the idea for a moment.
I could. And then, on the very slim chance that he didn't kill me for having had the temerity to bind him in the first place, I wouldn't have him to use on the Merlin.

Whiskey swam strongly, although the river of blood was no more his element than hers, and brought them safe to the other bank. He clambered up, spattering red across the crisped, sere earth. Seeker did not complain, this time, when a freshet welled from his hide and washed the sticky droplets from them both.

Whiskey snorted and stamped, resting at the top of the bank, and Seeker almost relaxed into the companionable silence of horse and rider—until Whiskey turned his head and fixed her with a cold, sidelong stare. Water welled up like tears in his china-blue eye, tracking the sculptured veins and bones of his muzzle. A chill closed her throat.
I am looking my death in the eye.