Blade Dance (A Cold Iron Novel Book 4) (22 page)

F
inn didn’t care what was
in the mound. He didn’t care about the Prince Consort. He was glad the child was safe, but if Ann had died . . .

“Whatever it is can wait,” said Finn.

“There are plans for the wall,” she said, sitting up like the stubborn little berserker that she was. “We found them in a chamber on the way to the Druid’s lab. There’s a whole room where the walls have been cut and inlaid with glowing lines, and the Prince said they were like blueprints for the wall between worlds. He said he would study them until he found a weakness.”

“Destroy them,” said Finn.

Miach sighed. “I doubt they can be destroyed. If they really are plans for the wall between worlds, they’ll exist, just like the wall does, in both planes.”

“Then seal the mound,” said Finn. “Blow the damned thing up. We have C-4 on the docks in Charlestown. Bring the mound down and let the Prince dig through a hundred tons of earth if he wants to study them.”

“That may not be practical,” said Miach. “I don’t know what kind of effect the Silver Skin enchantment will have on the boy. I have to release them both from it now or risk lasting harm to the child. Even if you left this minute and brought back explosives and allies, the Prince would have time to do the same. He would bring back his courtiers and his Druids. Or, if he was smart, he would bring back a high definition camera and photograph the plans and laugh while we dynamite the mound.”

“Then there’s no putting the genie back in the bottle,” said Ann.

“Probably not,” agreed Miach. “But if the Prince can study the plans for weaknesses, we can study them for them ways to strengthen the wall.”

“There are wards in the tunnels,” she warned him. “And there’s iron dust in some of the passages.”

Miach nodded. “We’ll proceed with caution. And I’ll check in on you at Finn’s house this evening.”

He
passed,
and Finn was left alone with Ann. Her clothes were in tatters and soaked in blood, and her hair was wild.

“You’re so damned beautiful,” he said to her.

She laughed and hauled herself to sit up a little straighter against the tree at her back. “I look like hell,” she said.

“You look like a berserker, bloody from battle, and that’s beautiful to me. To any Fae, really. But I wish to Dana you hadn’t come with the Prince. When I think what might have happened . . . Never again, Ann. Promise me that we’ll make decisions together. That we won’t keep secrets from each other like that.”

“I promise,” she said. “As long as you promise never to forbid me from coming with you again.”

“I can’t promise you that. I don’t want you anywhere near a creature like that Druid ever again. Or the Prince Consort, for that matter.”

“So does that mean you’ve retracted your invitation to join the Fianna?”

He sighed. “No. It means that I can’t lead them effectively if I’m worried about you. And I will worry about you until I know you can summon your power at will.”

“You mean with Fae ink.”

“I mean with training, and, yes, with some ink from Miach.”

She bit her lip and looked away.

“Ann,” he said. “Your gifts, the berserker inside you, that’s what kept the Druid occupied long enough for us to get there. That’s what saved Davin. If you hadn’t been able to keep him busy, he could have pulled the knife out of the Prince’s back and killed the child. Why don’t you want to embrace that power?”

“Because I’m afraid of it,” she said.

“But why?” he asked. “You’ve never hurt anyone who didn’t deserve it. I’m sure of that.”

“But my mother did,” she said.

Chapter 17

S
he sat with her back against the tree, feeling the damp, cool air on her face. Finn’s beauty, framed by the wildness all around them, struck her forcefully. As did his concern. She could read it in every inch of his body. This man was her lover. She’d been more intimate with him than with any living being, ever, but somehow it was easier to share bodies than to tell the story of her childhood.

Because she was afraid that he would reject her. She wanted another night with him before that, another night to feel loved and cherished and free to be herself with a man. But that was selfishness talking, and cowardice, because tomorrow she would want another night. And then another. And the problem was not going to go away.

“What were your parents like?” she asked, prolonging the inevitable, trying to figure out how to put it all into words.

“Mine?” asked Finn. “They were country Fae. They were old when they had me, and I always had the impression that they were surprised to have me.”

“Did they love you?”

He seemed to consider it. Then he said, “I’m certain they did, but they were old-fashioned, formal, distant with me, although not, I think, with each other. They had a language of their own in a way, a manner of communicating. They thought the same way. They had been together a long time by the time I arrived, and I was very much a visitor in their lives. Welcome, but a visitor all the same. They did things according to the old ways. We never even had Druids to oversee our lands. My parents and I hunted and we had orchards, but they were suspicious of fields and the vast serf populations needed to tend them. That was all the Queen’s doing, and they remembered the old monarch, from when the court was smaller and less powerful.”

“But the example they set for you as adults was one you weren’t afraid of growing into,” she concluded.

“Not afraid,” he agreed, “no. But I didn’t necessarily want to follow it. It was Brigid’s family who opened my eyes to what a marriage could be. Her parents did love each other, unfashionable as that was with the Queen, and the warmth of their home was something we wanted to re-create together.”

“I didn’t have that,” said Ann. “I had the opposite. I never knew my father. My mother was promiscuous. I learned that word from a social worker when I was five. My father was just one of hundreds of men she slept with. She couldn’t remember their names. Nothing was regular, safe, or secure about living with my mother except the pattern of poverty and flight. That was always the same. She could never hold down a job for more than a few months at a time. She never finished school, so the jobs were never very good. Grocery bagger, dishwasher, parking attendant. It didn’t matter. She could never keep them. She’d get mad and then she’d get into a fight and then she’d hurt someone. She’d get fired, we’d fall behind on the rent, and then we’d be evicted. And I’ve always been afraid that I’d end up like her.”

“You’re nothing like your mother,” said Finn. “You finished school. You hold down a job. You have a temper, I’ll give you that, but you control it.”

“Only because I’ve built my life around controlling it. And my mother was in control, too, for weeks, months, sometimes years at a time, but it only takes one slip. It was a rotten childhood, all in all. We were never warm, we never had enough to eat, but we had each other, until my mother slipped, and then we didn’t even have that.”

“What happened to her?” Finn asked. He was standing very close to her, rubbing her back, and when she shivered, he pulled off his flannel shirt and put it over her shoulders, pulling her into his warmth.

It was so hard to talk about it. She wanted to tell him, but she couldn’t do it now. She was tired and cold and she’d never get through the story in this condition without breaking down into tears. “I’ll tell you later,” she said. “I promise. For now, I want to go home.”

Ann stood up slowly. She felt light-headed at first, but she grasped the tree to steady herself. Somehow she seemed to draw strength from it. “Hang on,” she said. “I never knew bark could be so comforting,” she joked.

“That’s because you have some Fae blood,” he said. He was hovering over her like she was a child taking her first steps, and she was unsteady enough to be grateful for it. “You can draw from living things. Not as efficiently as a Fae, probably, and certainly nothing like the way Miach does, but enough to make a difference.”

“Ginger tea,” she said.

“What?”

“It’s like ginger tea. The kind you buy in packets at the Chinese market. It’s honey powder and dried ginger, and you mix it up in hot water and it makes your nausea go away like magic. That’s what it feels like clutching the bark.”

“If you’re nauseous, then we stay put,” he said.

“How about if I’m starving and nauseous?” she said.

“You can’t be both at the same time.”

“Speak for yourself.”

“Mrs. Friary will have a meal ready when we get back,” he said.

“I don’t want Mrs. Friary’s cooking tonight. I want pizza in front of the television. My television. And beer. And my own bed.”

“Mrs. Friary will be making chocolate mousse,” he reminded her.

“How about we take it to go?” she said, thinking of her bed in the attic beneath the skylights.

“I can’t, Ann. I called the Fianna together today to rescue Davin. I led them into the very last place on earth any of them ever wanted to go again: a Druid mound. You’ve seen the tattoos on my shoulders. They’re the mantle of responsibility. I have to thank those Fae and half-bloods and break bread and drink with them because there is a fight coming, a fight to keep the wall standing, and I finally know what side the Fianna and I should be on.”

“Did you really mean what you texted me? Or did you just send that message because it was too late to tell Brigid?”

The words left her mouth before she realized what she was saying. It was too raw. She saw the meaning hit him like a whip. He closed his eyes and let out a breath.

“I’m sorry,” said Ann. “I shouldn’t have said that. I’m not very good at this. No one has ever said they loved me before. No one except my mother. It’s made me greedy and selfish.”

Finn opened his eyes and stepped close. He took her face in his hands. The warmth of his touch made her realize how cold she was.

“I love you, Ann Phillips. Never doubt that. But I have to do what is right or I will be weakened, and without the Fianna, the wall will come down. Tonight, we sleep in my bed. Tomorrow, it will be yours. I promise.”

Chapter 18

I
obáth was not looking forward to his interview with the sorcerer. He was finding the Fae in Boston and the complicated, dangerously entwined houses of MacCecht and MacUmhaill far trickier to navigate than he had anticipated. And Miach MacCecht had always been the trickiest of Fae sorcerers.

They had conferred briefly before deciding how best to storm the Druid mound.
Passing
to an unknown location could be challenging. Translating Ann’s GPS coordinates to something that a Fae mind could fix on, to wind and rain and surf and sand and tall pines, was the bread and butter of a modern mage like Miach, so they were able to arrive on the island’s shores whole and hale.

It was still a shock to find himself inside a Druid mound after all these years. He had heard that Conn of the Hundred Battles had burrowed like an animal into his, sleeping for centuries at a time. The leader of the Fianna in New York, Donal, had described it to him in the terms of the age, as “depression.”

The Druid was gone, untraceable, according to Miach. And, more important, the berserker was bleeding from a belly wound. Finn looked stricken. Iobáth had thought himself inured to that kind of suffering, but he felt the old grief well up in him and he had to turn away so that no one would see his face when Miach said that she would live, and the three of them
passed
out of sight.

Iobáth knew that he ought to examine the notebooks and computers the creature had left behind, that it was his sacred penance to prevent the creature from doing any more mischief, but all he could think was how different the Druid he’d met at the library, Diana, was from the people who had built this mound. She’d been what the Druids once were, a scholar, fiercely attached to her books. Maybe he should return the book to the girl and take leave of the houses of MacCecht and MacUmhaill and go to one of the old cities, the ones that had been little towns before the fall, like London or Paris, or even great centers of empire, like Rome or Athens, where familiarity would give him some ease. It might be wise to find a woman as unlike Diana Seater as possible. He did not deserve the comfort of a woman who remembered his name.

Miach returned without Finn and the berserker and ordered Garrett to search the Druid’s computers and notes. “And fetch Liam and Nial here so we have half-bloods who can remove the iron dust and get those bars rolled back safely. And when you’re home and have a cell phone signal, call Conn and ask if he will bring Beth. It would help to have a Druid who can interpret the plans of the wall.”

Iobáth stepped forward. “We need to have a word.”

Miach nodded. “As soon as I release the Prince.”

“You’re not going to just let him go, are you?”

“I don’t see that we have a choice,” said Miach.

“He saved my son,” said Sean, who had not left the silver effigy’s side since they arrived.

“But he is safely contained this way,” said Iobáth. “He can cause no mischief with a knife through his heart.”

“We can’t know what effect the enchantment is having on the boy,” said Miach. “Take it out, and after that, if you’re willing to put the knife back into the Prince’s heart, I won’t stop you.”

“That wouldn’t be right,” said Iobáth. He wished someone with fewer scruples disagreed, but Miach MacCecht had acquired a human conscience with his half-blood offspring and Sean Silver Blade was not about to agree to his brother’s stabbing.

“No, unfortunately not.”

Miach circled the Prince and the boy, locked in their silvery embrace on the chamber’s cold stone floor. He wrapped his right hand around the knife’s iron hilt, and his face contorted in a rictus of pain. Miach might be a sorcerer, but he was no coward. Handling iron was unbearably painful. Doing it voluntarily and in a Druid mound, where the memory of his torment must be especially vivid, took incredible strength of will. Iobáth had seen what iron knives had done to Miach MacCecht, the vivisection scars that ran from neck to navel. They’d opened him again and again, relying on his Fae nature and sorcerous ability to self-heal to sustain his body while gutting it.

Miach muttered something in the old tongue and pulled the knife free. He didn’t drop it, but turned to one of the granite tables and set it there, then leaned upon the stone for support.

The Prince’s body did not warm all at once. The wound closed first, then the silvery glow at its edge faded. Life flowed out from his heart, beating once more, and a flush suffused his neck, his face, and finally his hands, the velvet of his jacket and the silk of his shirt shedding their silver hue. He took in a sharp, ragged breath, and stared at the child still clutched in his arms, whose face was ashen pale but no longer silver gray.

Little Davin did not open his eyes.

Something constricted in Iobáth’s chest when he saw Sean Silver Blade’s face. Sean snatched the boy away from his brother and shook him. Garrett crossed the room in a blur and took the child from him.

“He’s not breathing,” said Garrett.

“The enchantment is lifted,” said Miach, moving stiffly to his acolyte’s side. Iobáth felt helpless, watching tragedy unfold, as he had on that fateful day. The sorcerer lifted the child’s eyelids, lowered his ear to his heart. “We have to get his heart started again. Garrett, give him mouth-to-mouth while I try to summon the strength.”

The sorcerer was drained. Iobáth could see that. He tried anyway, pressing his hands over the child’s chest in between Garrett’s effort to breathe for him. The child’s body convulsed. Once, twice, and on the third try the boy gasped in air and opened his eyes.

Sean tore the child out of Miach’s arms and hugged him tight, then looked up at the place where his brother had been standing. “Where the hell is he?”

The Prince had gone. Iobáth was not surprised. Whether he had left before or after he determined if the child lived was impossible to say.

“If you have no other business—” Iobáth began.

Miach held up a hand. “I have to examine the chamber with the plans for the wall and make sure that my grandsons don’t kill anyone shifting iron dust. If you wish to see me, come to my house in South Boston this evening before the feast at Finn’s.”

Iobáth did not like being put off. His business in Boston was concluded, or would be as soon as he fulfilled his vow and returned the book to the pretty Druid at Harvard. He did not attend feasts. He was not attached to either of these families. The child was safe and breathing. He would not have waited on the pleasure of any other Fae living, but Miach MacCecht was the world’s best hope for keeping the wall intact. He would have to stay.

He
passed
back to Finn’s house, where at least there would be water for washing and he could shed the stink of the Druid mound. He arrived at a point a block away from the house so he could walk any traces of iron dust off his shoes. Inside there were scented fires burning in the parlor and dining room, and he could smell meat roasting in the kitchen. Finn’s housekeeper tried to fuss over him as though he was human. Iobáth wondered if Finn liked that and encouraged her or if he just put up with it for the cooking. He could smell rosemary and garlic and beef and, beneath that, the sugared aroma of vanilla, butter, and nutmeg.

Maybe he would return for the feast. He had to eat at some point. He might as well eat among his people. Or some who were his people. There were more half-bloods here than Fae. Once, he would not have been able to bear it. So many half-bloods gathered in one place would only have reminded him of
her
. Yet Finn’s house suited him better than Donal’s, where there were no half-bloods, only Fae and their empty-eyed thralls. The glazed faces, intoxicated by Fae beauty, their personal identities submerged in ecstatic worship, had reminded him of her—of the horror of her death.

Someone was offering him an implement. He must have been lost in his thoughts, lost in the past. Finn’s cook was holding a spoon up in his face.

“Have a lick and then go get yourself a shower while there’s still hot water. Before himself and the new mistress and the rest get back.”

He was being managed. He licked the spoon. Chocolate. Perhaps being managed wasn’t such a bad thing.

“Go on with you, then,” she said, snatching back the spoon.

He went. Up the stairs, to the front of the house, to a bedroom and a bath facing the monument where he showered and was grateful to find the soaps and oils laid out for him were not the acrid chemical soups that made the air on public transportation a noxious brew, but homemade recipes rich with natural scents. He emerged smelling like juniper and pine and sandalwood and found that the clothes he had left there the day before had been laundered and pressed for him.

A Fae could get used to such a life. Finn MacUmhaill evidently had. Iobáth had become too used to being on his own, too used to having to rely on strangers to wash or mend his clothes, to cook his meals, to make his bed. Or he slept in the wild, where he could see the stars and bathe in clean running water.

But there was something to be said for
hot
running water.

He could have
passed
to Miach’s house but he did not want to arrive ahead or at the same time as the sorcerer, so he walked. It was easy to see why Finn had settled on the peninsula of Charlestown. It was cut off from the bustle of downtown Boston by the water, and its little squares were laid out in harmony with the natural contours of the land, not by dint of man’s dogged interference. The iron bridge connecting the little community to Boston was a barrier, but he found the water taxi where the young woman at the museum in the Navy Yard told him it would be and crossed to Boston’s North End. From there he walked through Faneuil Hall, bustling with tourists, where he stopped in to drink a beer at a bar where he had heard that they still played the old music, and where Elada Brightsword’s woman sometimes sang, though she was not there today. From the bar it was another mile to the bridge to South Boston, and he walked through the postindustrial blight of her converted warehouses and truck yards to Miach’s towering white mansion at City Point, hard by the water.

The house was warded, so he waited patiently outside for someone to answer the door. It was like listening to a battle on the other side of the threshold. Voices shouting to one another, feet stampeding across floors and down staircases. Finally Nieve appeared, breathless, wearing leggings and an apron that hid her swollen belly.

“Granddad says you’re to go straight up,” she announced, stepping aside for him to enter and indicating the heavily carved Victorian stair, the newel post crowned with a sculpture of a dancer in brass.

The house was not to his taste, but the rustle of tablecloths and clink of dishes from the dining room held an appealing domesticity, and the shrill voices of half-blood children followed him up the stairs. The second floor was heavily carpeted in a pattern that no doubt showed to better advantage under gas light. Iobáth chose the open door at the end of the hall because he guessed that it faced the water, and that Miach would select its exposure for his library.

The view was indeed spectacular. The sorcerer’s lair looked more like a university library than a South Boston crime lord’s office. The empire furniture, the painted ceiling, the dark wood bookshelves all conspired to give the room a scholarly air.

Miach himself had washed and dressed in contemporary fashions, as all the Boston Fae seemed to, with their short hair and their practical New England layers. Someone had brought him a tea tray, and if the pastries and sandwiches lacked the professional polish of Mrs. Friary’s cooking, they more than made up for it with their heartiness.

“Help yourself,” said Miach, nodding to the tray. “Nieve’s a plainer cook than Mrs. Friary, but a better one to our family’s taste.”

“Speak for yourself,” said a low, cool voice. Iobáth had not noticed the woman in the window seat until she spoke. She was curled up on the cushion, long blond hair unbound, with a book of paintings open in her lap. “I’m saving my appetite for Mrs. Friary’s baked brie.”

“Her employer,” said Miach, in an exasperated tone, “tried to enslave you.”

“Finn has his faults,” said the woman who must be Miach’s wife, Helene, as she rose from her seat, “but his taste in cooks isn’t one of them. You should hire someone and give Nieve a break until she’s had the baby.”

“If she would only let me,” said Miach.

Helene offered Iobáth a cool nod, mouthed the words
save your appetite
, and departed from the room.

Miach took a seat behind his desk. “Now, what is it you wanted to say to me?”

The frost in his tone was not lost on Iobáth. “I need the book that Nieve and I brought you yesterday. I made a vow that I would return it to the student who was using it.”

“So I understand,” said Miach. “Why should I oblige you?”

“Because if I do not return the book,” said Iobáth, patiently explaining the obvious, “the
geis
I have taken will weaken me.”

Miach shrugged. “What concern is that of mine?”

“I beg your pardon?”