Cold Iron (25 page)

It was all true. Every last word of it. Frank had never been the real cause of her problems. He had only been a symptom. It was the vilest possible weapon to use against her, the most difficult to deflect. She fought the despair welling up inside her. The oldest wounds were the deepest.

“They didn’t know,” she countered. “My family didn’t know what they were, what I was. They wanted what was best for me. They thought they were protecting me from hurt and disappointment.”

“No. They
knew
what they were doing. They were tearing you down to their level. They told you that you were getting above yourself, that no good would come of aiming for things above your station. That people like you didn’t go to university or become scholars. And when your husband betrayed you, they clucked and crowed and told you that you’d gotten what you deserved for marrying out of your league. Even when you tried to tell them what Egan and Frank did to you that night, when you most needed someone to understand—to care—your family didn’t listen. Because in their minds you brought it all on yourself.”

“Stop it.”

He was sitting on the bed now, and she could feel the heat of his bare golden skin. He’d tried to seduce her with pleasure. Now he was using old hurts to inflict new pain, and holding out the promise of warmth and understanding.

“The Fae have been calling to your Druid blood all your life. The power inside you comes from us. We are a part of you. Without the Court, you will always be an outsider, you will never fit into the human world. If the Court returns, you will finally belong. More than that. Now, in this world, you must bow and scrape to men of limited imagination like the cretin who directs your museum. You are forced to walk in the shadow of beauties like your friend Helene. When the Court rules once more, you will bow to none but the Fae.” He stroked up her shoulder, pushed a loose tendril of hair behind her ear. “To none but me, if you so desire.”

“I refused servitude with Conn. Why would I suffer it with you?”

“We all must bow to someone, Beth. Our place in the hierarchy derives from that of our master. Or in my case, mistress. I defer to no one but the queen. Conn was the first Fae you met, and it was natural that you should want him. He was once a great champion, and so a worthy conquest for you, but there is so much more to us, and to you, than one Fae’s vendetta. Conn is like your family. He would keep you weak and powerless, deny you your birthright. Keep you all for himself. His grievance with the Fae Court is not yours. You were born to taste the splendors of the Court, and without them, you will never be whole.”

“The splendors of your Court included rape, torture, and murder. That’s why the Druids banished you.”

“The Court is the culmination of all things: beauty, pleasure, pain. I grant you, there were excesses. Where there is power, it will always be so. The Druids proved no less cruel when they gained the upper hand. They were right to want to curb us, but not to punish us so. We would have agreed to their demands. We will agree to them still.”

“Are you trying to bargain with me?”

“I would rather convince you that you belong with the Fae,” he said. “But if you prefer, we will bargain.”

She had bargained with him before. “On the island you promised that Brian wouldn’t touch Helene. But you’d already spotted or sensed Miach’s mark on her. You knew he couldn’t touch her.”

“I only said that Miach’s son would not molest the woman,” the prince pointed out with a pretty shrug. “I never said I would do anything to affect the matter. So you see it was a fair bargain.”

“Only to the mind of a Fae.”

“Or a Druid’s. You can no longer deny what you are, Beth. You are a true Druid now, birthed in blood sacrifice, as of old. You can never be anything less. But you are the only one of your kind. More alone than you have ever been. There is no place for you in the mundane world anymore. The power awake in you has but one proper home, and that is in the Fae Court.”

E
lada was searching the gardens
and sheds.

“He won’t find her,” Conn said. “The Prince Consort has taken her. He will have
passed
with her.”

“Elada may find some clue as to where they have gone,” Miach insisted. “Take comfort in this: the prince needs her alive to free the Wild Hunt.”

Elada found the scorched circle a few minutes later. Miach examined the ground and the surrounding trees. “He let her draw—enough to save herself—but he’s keeping her weak.”

Conn had to turn away from them. His face felt wet.
Beth. Beth.
He had failed her.

“
Conn
.” The urgent tone of Miach’s voice told him it was not the first time the sorcerer had called his name. He took a deep breath and faced them.

“We will get her back,” Miach said. “She’s in no shape to summon the Court for him yet. He’ll need to keep her somewhere until she’s strong enough. We will find out where, and we will get her back.”

“They could be anywhere,” Conn said.

“Not anywhere,” Elada said sensibly. Conn did not feel sensible. “Beth was covered in blood and likely unconscious. The prince will take her someplace familiar where no one will ask awkward questions. Someplace with servants to tend to her.”

“Elada is right,” Miach agreed. “We can question his associates, discover where he is likeliest to take her.”

“And how will we find these associates?” Conn asked. Every minute she was in the power of the Prince Consort was one too many.

“We don’t have to find them,” Miach said bitterly. “We’re holding one of them on the island. My son, Brian.”

They lost precious time in the boat. They could not
pass
to the island, because of the iron chains in the water. Conn paced the deck, jumped to the dock before Elada could even tie up.

The island looked different by day. There was a wild beauty in the place that no true Fae could resist. Conn saw it clearly now. Miach had not intended this to be a prison. He had meant it to be a place of reflection. There were deer on the island, and turkey, and probably hare as well. There would be good fishing in the shallow pools along the beach, and fresh water somewhere high on the hill. Conn could smell it in the air, running clear and sweet. A bow, a knife, a flint, perhaps, and a Fae could thrive here.

Brian had all of these things, but he was not thriving. He was surviving on tinned food and spite. They found him in the parlor, sleeping like a hound on the hearth tiles. Conn had not seen this room on his last visit, but he knew it now for the place where Beth had been hurt. He might have missed the bloodstain, but the scorched circle on the floor was unmistakable.
Beth.

The boy rolled over. He was filthy, unshaven, and by the way his lip curled at the sight of his father, unrepentant.

“The Prince Consort,” Conn said, wasting no time, “has taken Beth. Where would he hide an injured woman?”

Brian sneered. “I’ll tell you nothing, Druid lover.”

“You will tell him,” Miach said softly. “Or you will rot on this island.”

The boy’s lip curled. “You can’t keep me here forever. The younger Fianna don’t like how you and Finn run things anymore. We’re tired of living in slums. We should rule here like kings. You’ve become weak,
human
, choosing the Betrayer and some Druid slut over your own son.”

Conn grabbed the boy by the collar, hoisted him into the air, and slammed him against the mantle. “A true Fae wouldn’t eat out of tins like a dog. Perhaps your father has become too human to kill you, but I have not. Tell me where the girl is, now, or you die.”

“Let me off the island, and I’ll tell you.”

“You should know better, my son,” Miach said, the weariness plain in his voice, “than to bargain with one of us.”

“Leave me here,” Brian sneered, “and you’ll never find her.”

“A bargain it is, then,” Miach said quietly. “Tell us where the prince has taken her, and you may return to the mainland.”

“Ireland,” Brian said, grinning. “He has a grand house. Old. Beautiful. A palace. Like we should have.”

“Where is it? What is it called?” Conn demanded.

Brian laughed. “I don’t know. He didn’t tell me, and I never traveled there. He put me out and we
passed
. He said I would go mad if I
passed
with him while I was conscious. And I can’t tell you what I don’t know. But I’ve fulfilled my half of the bargain, so you’re bound to let me go.”

Miach’s son was smirking, playing games with them. He knew more than he was telling.

Conn turned to Miach. The sorcerer nodded. “He has told us nothing,” he said, heading for the door. “Do what you must.”

Conn drew the Summoner.

“Wait!” Brian screamed. “I’ll tell you. I’ll tell you all I know.”

Miach paused on the threshold. Conn rested the Summoner against the boy’s throat. He was done playing.

“I don’t know the exact location,” Brian sobbed. “But it can’t be hard to find. It was huge. And it was old. And it was round. Nothing around it for miles, except a mound.”

Miach nodded. “There are half a dozen houses, at most, answering to that description. It won’t be hard to discover which, if any, of them belong to a Fae.”

Conn released the boy.

They returned by boat to the mainland, an awkward journey, during which Miach served as pilot and Elada kept his eyes fixed on the sorcerer’s wayward son.

They tied the boat up at Miach’s dock in the channel. When they reached the end of the pier and turned toward South Boston, Brian followed.

Miach halted and rounded on his son. “I said you could return to the mainland, Brian. I did not say you could come home.”

“You can’t—” Brian said.

But Miach cut him off. “You are banished from South Boston. There is no longer a place for you at my table. See if the Fianna have any use for you now that you are outcast. You wanted me to be more Fae. I tried to warn you. This is how we bargain with mortals.”

B
eth wanted her practical museum
clothes back, her tweed skirt and cotton blouse and snug wool jacket. Instead, the prince sent her a trunk of antique finery. There were Georgian round gowns and Victorian dinner dresses and long velvet evening coats. She knew what message he intended: that she was part of his world now.

But she wasn’t, and never would be. She chose the plainest thing she could find, a column of pleated white silk and kidskin slippers and left the heaped boxes of jewels, the rosewood, velvet, and lacquer containers, untouched on the dressing table.

She asked for a meal and a bath. The prince’s servants, silent, efficient, and beautiful, brought her platters of autumn fruit and wild game and cakes soaked in honey. They drew her a bath in the marble tub adjacent to her room, and scented the water with jasmine and neroli.

She bathed and dressed and by the time the prince returned, she had made her decision. Even if Conn and Miach had bested the Manhattan Fae, that did not mean they would be able to find her here, wherever here was. She couldn’t count on them to save her.

The prince returned after the servants cleared her meal away. He was dressed this time in a flocked gray coat sewn with pearls atop black velvet jeans. As he entered the room, his eyes traveled her body, and she forced herself not to flinch. “You should have jewels,” he said. “Citrines, to complement your eyes.”

“I want my earrings back.”

“Later, perhaps. When we have concluded our bargain.”

“As you said earlier, I’m a fledgling Druid. What makes you so sure I know how to free the Court?” she asked.

“The Druids encoded all of their secrets in their blood. If I had not been reasonably certain you had inherited their knowledge—intact—when you came into your power, you would not be here, or alive, today. And if by some mischance your inheritance is defective, then I have no further use for you.”

He would kill her. She was too weak to fight him. He had planned for everything.

“Is it?” he prompted. “Is your knowledge defective?”

“No. I know how to free the exiled Fae. I need a solstice gate.” Another revelation that had come with her Druidic inheritance. The doors to the passage tombs in the mounds, the angles and elevations that had perplexed scholars for decades, that allowed light to shine all the way to the center of the structure on two days each year, were not calendars or ritual aids. They were gates to the Otherworld, where the Druids had imprisoned the Fae, confluences of magic and mathematics and the natural lines of power than ran through the earth to form cracks in the fabric of the world that could be widened—or narrowed—with the correct application of force. Druidic force. And there was one at the entrance to every mound.

“There is a mound nearby,” he said. “We can
pass
to it.”

Now she did flinch. She couldn’t do that again. “I’d rather walk.”

“As you like.” He smiled, and confirmed her suspicion. He had enjoyed her distress when they
passed
. She was like a toy to him. He would play with her until she broke.

They left her gilded prison and traveled down a lofty corridor flanked by wide doorways on one side and tall, corniced windows on the other. She’d already guessed the building was Georgian, but her own chamber had barely hinted at the grandeur of the structure. A palace equal to Versailles somewhere in the Irish countryside, to judge from the soft accents that floated from half-closed doors.

There were other Fae here. As they passed an open door, she glimpsed one of the prince’s companions from the island, lolling in a canopied bed. He was not alone. The prince paused outside the door, placed a hand at the small of her back. “Would you like to join them?”

She was not immune to the eroticism of the tableau beneath the canopy. The Fae on the bed was not as handsome as the prince, or as well-formed as Conn, but he was still exquisitely beautiful. He reclined against the headboard, one leg bent, his fingers absently stroking the gilded hair of the woman servicing him with her mouth. His eyes, though, lingered on the tangled bodies at the foot of the bed, where a pretty young brunette writhed between two muscular men.