Whiskey and Water (29 page)

His thick neck arched, ripple of hot
muscle under the Queen's hand as he turned and nosed her knee, tickle of
whiskers and a moist pink nose spattered with dark freckles. He huffed warm air
across her skin, welcome as the night breeze cut her shift and chilled sweaty
skin.

"Ride on?" he asked, rejoicing
in the clasp of her legs, the caress of her hands.

"Here," she answered, and slid
down his shoulder before he'd quite halted, hopping a step or two alongside
with her hands still in his mane. "A word in your ear, Uisgebaugh."

He shuddered when she said his name, a
flinch that trembled the tender skin of his neck and shoulders. "Do not
forbid me Jane Andraste. It's gone too far for rescinding."

"Do you think I care for her?"
The Queen leaned her shoulder on Whiskey's shoulder, and found herself, a
moment later, snuggled under the heavy curve of his arm, his solid naked flesh
slick with clean sweat.

He bent and lipped her hair, tangled with
beech leaves and sticks. She smelled of husks and sorrow, a wintry smell for
the Winter Queen. He wondered what would happen to her soul, if he should die.
Surely it wouldn't revert to her, not unless he could find a way to make her
accept its return. It would be his then, for more than safekeeping.

Immortality beyond the body. Eternal life.
Once, he would have said honestly that it had never tempted him. "But
you're unhappy, my Queen."

"Kadiska brought me something,"
she said. She reached into the pocket of her shift and drew out a flat, black,
tightly folded tatter. "After Carel went to fetch you. Uisgebaugh — "

He knew what she held. He snorted.
"Vixen. Say it."

"Who's hunting you, Uisgebaugh?"

"No one I can't handle," he
said. He turned her in his arms and kissed her forehead, her nose, her mouth.
"Or, apparently, that your Seeker can't handle for me."

"My Seeker," she said, and
kissed him back, a lingering glide or tongue between clinging lips. His mouth
was soft and warm, his teeth wide plates of ivory. She flicked her tongue-tip
across them. She leaned into his hands. "Your paramour."

"Call her an ally," he said.
"Put that thing away."

It vanished into her pocket again. Her
skin slid under his palms as he lifted the shift to her shoulders, silken and
moist between the waxy lines of her scars. Her hair came with it, tumbled over
her face. She shook it back as he went to his knees and tugged her palms away
from her body, slipping the sleeves over her hands. "You're angry."
He nuzzled the humid joint of her belly and thigh, the shift dropped to one
side.

"Not with you." His hair between
her fingers was like lamb's wool, springy and fine. "Jane?" A guess,
hazarded between kisses.

"Lucifer," she answered. She
touched his cheek, his neck, his shoulders, her head bowed over him, her body
pale in the moonlight. He balanced her with dark human hands, silver rings
curved around the second joint of each thumb. "And then I tell myself
there's no point in being angry at the Morningstar." "But in opposing
him?"

"Always a point to that." She
shivered. The feather-light brush of horn-callused fingertips across the backs
of her knees, half tickle and half delight. "Uisgebaugh — "

"Can't you see I'm kissing you?"

"Then wait. First that word."

He settled on his heels, hands folded in
his lap, all demure stallion falsity. Tilting his head back, he regarded her,
pale eyes weird in a dark face. "I await my lady's pleasure."

"I can't protect you from Mist,"
she said, her fists at her sides. The wind prickled gooseflesh across her and
snarled her streaming hair. Moss dented softly underfoot. "I can try. But
I can't guarantee." I never asked your protection, my Queen."

A lie, but she let it slide by. "You
have duties." Take back your soul, and I will complete them." And if I
order you?" Order me?"

To kill," she said. Her left hand
unfolded. She reached out and pointed. If Whiskey had stood, he would have seen
the ocean glinting like hammered metal beyond the beechwood and the palace far
below. He didn't need to stand to
feet
it. "To fulfill your nature.
To serve the sea." The gesture closed, her arms folded over her heart.
"You're thin, Uisgebaugh. Thin and worn."

"Take back your soul," he
answered. "Take back your name."

"You'd eat me if I did."

He wouldn't. At least, he didn't think so.
But she didn't need to know that, and besides, one never could tell how things
might change. It was not in his nature to be always blue and calm. "Set me
free." "Give Ian the throne?"

"He wants it."

"He thinks he wants it," she
said. She sighed and dropped to her knees, a sharp rock gouging her kneecap.
The pain barely registered. "He thinks he wants all sorts of things."

"Then let him choose his own
mistakes," Whiskey said. It was an old argument, the sort married couples
have, where they can mouth both sides of the debate while knowing nothing will
ever be resolved.

She sighed and reached up, and touched his
face. "Do you love me so much?"

"Don't be foolish, mistress. Nothing
Fae can love." And that was half a lie as well. But then, he wasn't Fae.
Not quite, not anymore. "What does Lucifer want from you?"

"Dominion," she said.

"Besides that."

"The Mage and the poet, bound up in
satin ribbons and delivered to my mother."

"That's Jane's price, not the
Devil's. What does he get in return?"

"A treaty," she said. She
shrugged. He laid his hands on her shoulders and felt the rise and fall, and pulled
her against him. She moved closer, swaying forward as he went back. The twigs
and stones on their mossy bed bothered him more than they did her. He brushed
them away with a hand before lying back. "Peace under the dominion of
Hell."

"I think not," he said. Her
buttocks filled his palms, a soft weight, more scars. The night was cool, and she
was warm. "Back the poet. You'll get the same, without the Devil. We have
that in common; Master Marlowe's won free of Lucifer too."

"Marley was dead to begin with,"
she quipped. "Morgan says he's a Merlin, or was once, in his own time.
Could he be still?"

"No," Whiskey said. "And no
doubt glad to be free of the Dragon's hand. He's outlasted her attention."

The next question weighed on the Queen
more. "Can he win?"

"I don't know," Whiskey
answered. "Can you afford to let him lose?" He drew her down astride
him. She tasted of flesh and the sea. Her breasts rippled as she moved over
him, the ocean in a woman's body, wave upon wave in the endless deep. She
moaned and held tight, her fingers clenched on his hands.

No struggle, this time. No surrender. Once
she would have fought herself, a piquant edge of rage on the seduction before
she acquiesced. He missed it, missed the challenge and the hunt.

But the Queen knew what he was, and what
he had been, and how far he had fallen. He was her animal now.

Chasing the Dragon

I
an and Cairbre had gone to bed at midnight, when
neither the Queen nor her steed had returned, leaving the mortal and angelic
guests in Morgan's care. Lucifer took his leave with a tilted head and a wing
cupped in farewell, to see Felix home just as Matthew was considering how best
to disentangle himself from the Devil.

And as for Matthew, he went from Lucifer
to the Merlin and leaned down to speak in her ear. "If I
did
want
to find a Dragon, where would I look for one?"

Carel grinned at him through her fingers
and took him by the elbow under the morning glories—replaced at sunset by
moonflowers, now fading as the sky grayed—and said, "You're not about to
do something dumb."

"Because anything Morgan and Elaine
suggest must be dumb?"

"Because I've done my share of dancing
with dragons." She scratched the tip of her nose. "There's nothing a
dragon can do for you that you can't do for yourself, Matthew. There's nothing
she can tell you that you don't already know. And Morgan only agrees with
people when she has an ulterior motive."

Matthew leaned a shoulder on the wall and
folded his arms. Leaves tickled his neck. His face itched with the need to
shave, and he blamed his light-headedness on adrenaline and exhaustion.
"So what's her motive this time?"

Carel smiled over his shoulder. He didn't
have to turn to know she was smiling at Morgan le Fey. "Fifteen hundred
years," the Merlin said. "And no one's ever been able to answer that
question. I think she rather enjoys playing the cipher."

Matthew followed the Merlin's gaze. With
moonset, pages had lit lanterns and set them along the balustrade. Morgan stood
beside one such, straight-backed as a pillar and flanked by lazy hounds, a glass
of wine in her hand. Marlowe lounged opposite, sprawled in a chair, one knee
drawn up and the other leg extended, his head back and his chin lifted. It put
Matthew uncomfortably in mind of a dog showing its throat, and Morgan's smile
was idly predatory.

"She wants him," Matthew said.
"And he knows it too."

Carel laughed, richly throaty. Matthew followed
her as she strolled to a table that still held a half bottle of wine and an
unused glass. "What's so funny? "

"Foolish mortal. Mind if we
share?"

"Not at all," he answered. The
wine breathed a deep scent onto the air, cutting jasmine sweetness. He could
taste it in advance. "You're dodging the question."

"She wants
you.
He's a toy.
She's gotten her use from him." Carel poured and passed Matthew the wine.
"And
he knows it too,"
she mocked. "See what he has in his hand?"

Her eyes were better. Or she'd already
known. "Something dark. A flower?"

"A pansy. From Elaine's garden, which
was the Mebd's garden before. 'Unwilling love.' I'll wager there's a history
there."

Matthew sipped the wine. It was sweet and
dark. "She's Morgan le Fey," he said, and handed Carel back the
glass. "There's
always
a history there."

She laughed. "And what's the history
that has you standing as his second, Matthew? That was an abrupt
decision."

He let the breath go slowly, once the
tightness in his chest reminded him that he was holding it. "You remember
Kelly." With tremendous clarity."

Jane killed him." Matthew turned and
stared down at Carel until she dragged her gaze off Marlowe and turned it on
him. "That's how she built her
fucking
bridge."

And you never did anything about it."

Matthew smiled, cool bitterness.
"Lady Merlin," he said, and held out his hands, the strong one and the
broken, "I touched a unicorn."

She looked at his face, at his hands, back
at his face again, his eyes half invisible in the shadows behind his spectacles.
She licked her lips. "East," she said. "Follow the stream. Mind
the troll. Through the beech-wood, past Morgan's cottage, into the hills. East
until you reach a gorge. There's a cave under the ivy. Mist lives there."

"That will take all day," he said,
when he was sure she'd finished speaking.

"You're a Mage in Faerie," she
said, negligent. "Tell me you can't manage a pair of seven-league boots."

"Thank you."

"Don't thank me," the Merlin
said. "She'll probably just eat you. And take a friend. Somebody to drag the
body home."

"Do I have any friends in
Faerie?"

"You have Sir Christopher," she
said, with a brushing gesture. "And he looks like he could use a rescue."

Across the patio, Kit knew that he was
watched. He didn't turn, however. His eyes were on Morgan, side-lit by the
lantern. More than half a century since he'd braced Morgan le Fey, and the edge
hadn't gone off it. He doubted that it ever would.

Especially when Morgan smiled at him, as
she was smiling now. "I would have been thy second," she said, her
hands folded in front of her belt.

"Aye." Kit twirled the
love-in-idleness between his fingers like the stem of a wineglass. "I
imagine you would have welcomed the chance or a little vengeance. 'Tis dear
work, replacing a tool so worn to the hand as Murchaud."

"Christopher." Disappointed,
with a cold tilt of her chin. His cruelty cut a little, though he'd never
believe he could hurt her. It wasn't in Kit to understand that love and control
could be warp and weft of the same cloth. But then, he'd never understood, had
he, that she had loved Arthur too, and Accolon, and Mordred—and Christofer
Marley himself—even when she drew her power from their obedience.

Morgan let her hands fall apart and
crouched between her hounds, resting her elbows on her knees. "He was also
my son. Dost think thou didst love him more than his mother, Sir Kit?"

" 'Contrariwise,' " Kit quoted,
letting his head arch against the back of the chair, eyes staring upward into
the graying morn, " 'if it was so, it might be; and if it were so, it
would be; but as it isn't, it ain't. That's logic.' "