Cold Iron (2 page)

Her
hill fort had made
his
career.

She’d been living with him when they’d started their second expedition and too besotted with her idol to argue for credit. He knew so much about their field, had met so many of the heroes in her professional pantheon, traveled to so many of the places she longed to go. Just being with him, she could feel a little of his personal glamour wear off on her.

By the time of their third major discovery they were married, and from the outside their partnership appeared perfect. They were a globe-trotting academic couple, invited to lecture at cultural institutions around the world. When Beth’s name appeared as coauthor of their treatise on the new findings at Hallstatt, everyone assumed that her role was that of devoted academic spouse: editor, cataloger, subordinate. When she insisted on an equal share of the credit, he began sleeping with his students again, and she refused to identify any more sites for him. Then he betrayed her in an act that still turned her stomach whenever she thought about it. After the divorce, she found herself shut out of grants to dig unless she partnered with her ex-husband.

Beth almost felt sorry for Christie Kelley, nestled in a corner table at the other side of the taproom with Frank, sipping her half pint and staring up at him with starry-eyed adoration. She could remember feeling like that about him.

Beth had never met anyone before him who’d shared her fascination with the ancient Celts. She had not connected them with the iron brooch in her mother’s jewel box until she was fourteen, on a class trip to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, when the guide had led them past a gallery that Beth had known she had to enter. The compulsion was so strong that she’d been parted from the group and was standing alone in a vast hall in front of a massive glass case before she’d even realized what had happened. Her teachers and classmates, oblivious to her defection, had continued on to the Greek and Roman galleries.

In the hush of that empty chamber Beth had felt it, the same thrill her mother’s brooch had given her, magnified a hundredfold. Though the brooch had been snatched away and hidden, Beth had always continued to be aware of its location. There were similar brooches in the case. Several in iron, two in silver, one in gold. Pennanular, she later learned. Moon shaped. She’d pressed her fingers to the glass, longed to touch them, then gone home, searched out her mother’s brooch, and started to learn to harness her strange ability. That summer she’d begun volunteering every weekend at the museum, desperate for a chance to touch the objects in that gallery.

Christie Kelley wasn’t enamored of Frank for his knowledge of Celtic archaeology, though. That wasn’t even her specialization. Her thesis was focused on the early Maya. No, she was attracted by Frank’s charm, his fame, his power in the department. His patronage could make or break her career. No wonder she stared up at him with such slavish adoration.

But Frank wasn’t looking at Christie now. He was looking straight across the room at Beth, smiling. He winked, then produced one of the glittering torques from the tomb out of his pocket. He slid it around Christie Kelley’s twig-like neck, then basked in her fawning praise. Beth had fallen for the same tricks when she was his student. Frank playing the great archaeologist, Schliemann, decking his wife in the jewels of Troy.

Only, this wasn’t the nineteenth century, and archaeologists didn’t loot graves. They cataloged them, preserved them, wrote about them for the public. The torc belonged in the tomb. She contemplated getting up and retrieving it. With a sinking feeling, she realized she couldn’t. Not here, in public. She would look like a shrew. The jealous ex-wife snatching jewelry away from the pretty young girlfriend. Ugh.

The hairs on the back of her neck rose. There was something behind her. Something outside the window. She tried to tell herself that the inn was old and the windows drafty, but the danger was real, and she knew it in her bones. Whatever was out there, it had power over her. It intensified the low throb between her legs and made her breasts ache. She had to get out of the bar, away from the window.

She stood, jostling her table and sending beer slopping over the rim of her glass. The bartender darted a quick, worried glance her way. Of course he did. She was behaving like a drunk. But the couple at the next table was also staring at her as was the quarryman at the bar. Was her blouse unbuttoned? She looked down to check, felt even more foolish. Her nipples were pebbled, visible through the soft cotton of her blouse.

She looked back up. Now the quarryman and his buddies were smirking, but the bartender and the old-timers near the fire were studiously looking the other way. Was she imagining all this? She felt flushed, awkward, self-conscious. She couldn’t remember a moment like this since middle school—everyone aware of her and ignoring her at the same time. Except Frank and his floozy in the corner, too absorbed in themselves to notice.

She edged out of the window seat and ran smack into the quarryman. And his friends. Five of them. “Don’t leave yet. Stay and have a drink with us,” he drawled, backing her into the alcove. She could smell whiskey on his breath. She darted a quick look at Frank, still absorbed in Christie Kelley. No help there.

“No thanks. I was just leaving.” His friends were sliding onto the bench behind her, cutting off her retreat.

And the thing outside the window, the danger her body could feel like an icy wind, was growing closer. She had to get out of there.

There was no room to maneuver, but she knew from her earlier clumsiness that the table wasn’t screwed to the floor. She grabbed the apron of the heavy wooden top and shoved. The bastard menacing her swore and jumped back, and she scrambled past him.

She fled from the room, into the front hall, and straight into the neat, silver-haired landlady. “I’m so sorry,” Beth murmured, trying to steady the tottering innkeeper. Mrs. McClaren was one of her best sources of local folklore, had talked for hours about the fairy mound when Beth had first visited last spring. The woman was tiny and frail, eighty years old if she was a day, but her grip on Beth’s wrist now was like a vise.

“I’ve got to change your room, dear,” she said. It was an ordinary enough statement, but Mrs. McClaren sounded as spooked as Beth felt.

“Now isn’t a good time, Mrs. McClaren,” Beth said, trying to loosen the woman’s hold.

“I’ve got a nice room right across the hall with an iron latch on the door,” she persisted.

“An iron latch won’t keep him out.” Beth recognized the speaker. The old man sitting behind the desk was Mr. O’Donovan. The locals accounted him a great authority on the
sídhe
, the mythical, semidivine inhabitants of the fairy mounds, but when Beth had approached him on her first visit to Clonmel, the man had refused to speak to her. When she’d returned with Frank, the old man had marched up to them and told them to leave the mound alone. Then he’d marched off and never said another word. Until now.

“Who are you talking about, Mr. O’Donovan?” Beth asked.

His eyes were wild and his smile was gleeful. Beth didn’t like that at all. “You know who. You came here looking for them. You woke the worst of a bad lot. I warned you not to dig in the mound, but you wouldn’t listen, and now he’s come for you.”

“Bite your tongue, old man,” Mrs. McClaren said, and turned to Beth. “Pay no mind to him. Sit here for a minute and I’ll have your things moved across the hall into the nice room with the batten door. An iron latch and iron bands. Old as the inn. Strong in the earth,” she said, as though she was recommending chocolate biscuits or vanilla cake, something ordinary and pleasant.

“Won’t keep him out,” the old man cackled. “It would take iron windows and iron walls and an iron floor and a roof of iron to keep him out. And even then, he’d get to you. And it’s no more than you deserve. No decent woman goes searching for the likes of them.”

It was too much. Beth bolted. Up the stairs, into her room with the brass doorknob, and the brass bolt, and the brass window latch. She locked all three, then took a deep breath and rested her forehead against the cool glass of the window.

“Don’t let them frighten you.” The voice was musical. Wind in the forest. Deep and primal. Musky sweet like honey. It compelled her to turn and behold the speaker, who leaned casually against the door she had just locked.

The man was well over six foot, and his skin was the ivory of Viking raiders and Celtic heroes. His hair was pale gold and arrow straight, woven in slender braids. She recognized the silver dagger at his hip, twin to the blade in the tomb, tucked into a wide leather belt that cinched soft fawn trousers. His linen tunic was embroidered by the same hand as the tapestries in the burial chamber, and around his neck was a torc finer than the one Frank had palmed that afternoon.

Strong limbs and broad shoulders in soft pelts. It flashed through her mind, and though the rational academic in her said
no
, the woman in her said
yes, this is him.
The Celt from the tomb. Rational Beth said,
It’s some local joker playing with you
, but irrational Beth, the Beth who could feel the old places through maps and pictures, heard a voice whisper,
The Good Neighbors. The Fair Folk. The Lords and Ladies who dwell in the earth. The Sídhe.

You’ve always known they would come for you.

C
onn had chased the deer
for miles, not because he had to, but because he enjoyed feeling the grass beneath his feet and the wind in his hair, and because prey deserved the dignity of the hunt. He roasted and ate his fill, washed in the stream that ran down toward the mill, and left the carcass hanging outside the mill door so that word might spread. “Bring your tithe to the mound,” they would say. “Keep your daughters inside. One of the Old Lords walks abroad, and requires meat for his table.”

The inn he remembered. He could feel the age of it in the timbers, could read its history through the wood. A stand of living trees four hundred years ago, hewn and new, rooted to this place. He had liked it then, with its thatched roof and shuttered windows, better than the stone buildings the invaders brought. He liked it less now. The building was the same, but it stank, inside and out, of black iron and burning smoke. The filthy tar of the long dead beasts under the earth was poisoning the living wood and clay, driving the clamorous engines that rumbled past at unnatural speed, drowning out the sounds of the birds in the trees and the wind in the meadow. The girl was here. And her weak man. And another foreigner, a different woman. Younger. Callow. She smelled of base metals and dead beasts, too, bright and clattering like the smoke engines.

He entered the low door of the inn, and the old man sitting by the fire nodded. “I warned her,” he said. “She wouldn’t listen to an old man. But here you are, come to claim her. And it’s no more than she deserves.”

“Quiet!” The old woman curtsied, the creak in her arthritic knees audible as the snap of the fire. She tried to keep her eyes downcast, but her gaze was drawn to him. He knew the glamour he cast, irresistible even to a woman long past youth, wondered what it would be like to be obliged to woo a woman, to win trust and affection, rather than receive them as his due.

He followed the trail of the woman,
his woman
, her scent now spiked with fear, into the common room. The crowd fell silent as he entered. all save the granite-dusted men clustered in the window seat, where
she
had been. He could feel her lingering warmth there, see the print of her lips on her unfinished glass of ale.

He strode to the table, lifted the beaker, and licked the taste of her mouth from the rim. Summer fruit and honey wine.

He addressed the biggest of the quarrymen. “Where is the woman who was sitting here?”

The big man stood. Almost as tall as a Fae. Conn caught another tendril of the woman’s scent, all panic and indignation, clinging to the man’s clothes.

“What’s it worth to you, pretty boy?” the man asked. His friends laughed. Memory, it seemed, was growing short in Clonmel. The quarryman reached for a lock of Conn’s hair, and faster than the human eye could see, Conn seized the man’s wrist and broke it. Beneath the skin, the two long bones jostled and splintered like dry kindling.

The man screamed. His nearest friend swung a fist at Conn. Foolish. But this one hadn’t touched the woman, so Conn decided not to maim him, and merely picked him up bodily and dropped him onto the table, shattering it.

The rest thought better of challenging him.

“Where is the woman?” This time he addressed the room at large.

“Upstairs,” said the bartender.

The callow girl who smelled of metal, and was, he noticed with amusement, wearing one of his lesser ornaments filched from the mound, tugged at the sleeve of the foreigner. “Frank,” she said. “What’s going on? Why doesn’t someone call the police?”

“She’s right,” Frank hedged, nodding at the bartender. “You should call the police.”

“For the love of God, shut up,” said the bartender.

But the woman persisted. “Aren’t you going to do something? He’s threatening your ex!”

This was entertaining. Conn watched as the foreigner—Frank—deliberated. The man wished to keep both women, not because he valued either one, but for status. The arrangement was an old one, a woman to make his home, and another to warm his bed. But this Frank was a fool. He had made a queen out of his concubine, and a drudge out of an empress. No good could come of it, and he deserved to lose both.

“I’ll go check on her,” Frank said to the woman. But Conn held up a hand, and two strong villagers—memories apparently in good working order—grasped the outlander’s shoulders and held him there.

Conn smiled. He enjoyed seeing the man humbled. It was one of the delights of waking. Food and drink and sex and the taste of mortal emotion. Salt and sweet. Anguish and joy.

He took the stairs two at time. The hall was long and dark, the only light coming from beneath the door at the end.
Her
room. He crossed the hall and
passed
through the door.