Blade Dance (A Cold Iron Novel Book 4) (23 page)

“You are not a member of my house. You may profess a desire to obstruct the Prince, but that does not necessarily make us allies.”

“Doesn’t it?”

“The enemy of my enemy is my friend? No. Not in all circumstances. Finn, I think, understands that we face a common threat, but we have faced this common threat for years now and he has never been able to let go of his vengeance. He abducted my right hand, Elada, and Elada’s wife, who happened to be a Druid, because he hadn’t had anyone to torture in two thousand years and thought it might be fun.”

“But you helped him save his grandson today,” said Iobáth, frustrated with these petty politics.

“And I may come to an understanding with him tonight that unites our two houses against the Prince, but I fail to see what role you will play in it. You have already told my granddaughter that you will not act as her husband’s right hand.”

“Because that is a role she should take herself,” said Iobáth.

“Yes. So she told me. Did Finn put you up to that?”

“Why would he do such a thing? She’s carrying his grandchild.”

“Because Finn has never thought my Nieve was good enough for his son. He has encouraged him to betray her for years.”

“I believe he has seen the error of his ways. He said as much.”

“Words,” said Miach. “Nothing more, until he acts on them.”

“That Nieve should be her husband’s right hand, his sword as well as his helpmeet, was entirely my idea. You raised her as the equal of any Fae. If she has fallen behind in the study of arms, it is only because she has taken up the role of chatelaine, one your wife would be happy to see passed to a professional.”

“My wife,” said Miach, “would hire fucking Lydia Shire to cook for us and still want to go out five nights a week. And Nieve, as you have pointed out, is pregnant. She was lucky to survive the birth of her first child. She’ll be lucky to survive the second, even with my help. She’s hardly going to be wielding a sword tomorrow or soon after this child is born.”

“What is it you want, in exchange for the book, Miach?”

“We come to the heart of the matter,” said the sorcerer. “You want the book. I agree that my granddaughter could serve as her husband’s right hand, but she cannot play that role until she has delivered the child, and she will not survive long in that role without better training. Elada is away with his stone singer. I am willing to give you the book to return to this student, to whom you made such a rash promise. But in return, you must serve as Garrett’s right hand until Nieve is ready, and that means until she can wield a sword to my satisfaction—under your tutelage, of course.”

“That is blackmail.”

“What if it is? I am fighting a war here, Iobáth the Penitent. You have stayed aloof from Fae and human affairs for two thousand years, wedded to your grief and guilt. I have no sympathy for you. The rest of us—here in Boston, anyway—built something.”

“I have defended the weak from the strong, curbed the excesses of the survivors of our race,” he said, gravely offended. The sorcerer was suggesting that he had wasted the last two thousand years.

“And some good, no doubt, has come of it,” agreed Miach. “But wandering has also spared you fresh pain, allowed you to nurse your grief, absolved you from living in the world. I do not see the virtue in that.”

“I don’t fucking care what you see virtue in. You have given me no choice. Unless I wish to eat dog meat like Cú Chulainn, I must have that book.”

“Then you agree to my terms? You will bind yourself to my house, do as I bid, until I am satisfied that Nieve can take up your mantle?”

“Yes, but not with an open heart or any good will to you or yours,” said Iobáth, feeling spiteful. It was not an emotion he had experienced in a very long time. It shocked him to think how long it had been since he had felt anything but the familiar weight of his grief.

Miach smiled. “I think that’s the first time I’ve seen your composure shaken, Penitent. Is the girl pretty?”

“What girl?”

“The Druid you made such an asinine pledge to, of course.”

“You know she is,” said Iobáth. “Else you would have taken her in and trained her, but your human wife won’t let you keep a harem of Druids.”

“And quite right she is, too,” said Miach. “Notwithstanding the fact that her best friend is a Druid. But fortunately for all concerned, Beth Carter is bound to Conn of the Hundred Battles. And in any case, I love my wife.”

“Your taste for human emotions blinds you, and it has endangered this girl. The Prince followed us to the library. He knows of her existence. And that you have an interest in her.”

“If we leave her alone, chances are that he will as well. At least until he’s tracked down his rogue Druid.”

Iobáth took the book and his leave of Miach. His anger evaporated somewhat on the way to Cambridge. He told himself it was because he had the book, because he would be able to fulfill the terms of his
geis
and be released from it, but he knew that wasn’t the reason. He was looking forward to seeing Diana Seater again.

Chapter 19

A
nn knew Finn had been right as soon as they
passed
inside the house. It was the bustle and the hum of voices that told her. It felt like a family celebration, a wedding or a christening, something she had only ever been a guest at, never a host, but from the minute they arrived, Mrs. Friary was asking her for direction.

“Now, we’ve got Davin and little Garrett, who aren’t angels at the best of times, and we’re expecting a handful of MacCecht cousins as well. Will you be wanting the children in with yourselves or at a small table in the parlor?”

Ann thought about it a moment and quickly realized that the children would be happiest at their own table. “Davin can regale them with his adventures,” she said.

“Just so,” said Mrs. Friary, seeming to approve her decisions. “And do you think himself and the MacCecht are on friendly terms, or should we seat them apart?”

“I’m not sure,” admitted Ann. “But Miach saved my life, so I expect we ought to seat him close to us and hope for the best.”

“That would be wise,” said Mrs. Friary. “You’ll pick it all up quick as a bunny, I don’t doubt.”

Ann wasn’t as certain, but the vote of confidence certainly helped. She had an opportunity here, she recognized, to re-create some of the warmth and sense of belonging—of family—that she had experienced spending holidays at her college roommate’s house. That meant thinking about everyone in attendance—what they liked to eat and who they could and couldn’t sit next to and a thousand other details that thrilled her with a sense of potential.

“Will there be ink?” asked Mrs. Friary, when all the questions of menu and seating and how many beds should be made up had been answered.

She’d been asking herself the same question all afternoon. “Does it make a difference to your menu?”

“Well, it never hurts to have a bottle of whiskey handy, and depending on who’s going under the needle, we might have something special put by.”

And that settled Ann’s unspoken question as to whether there was any anesthetic involved in the process.

There was a lull just as the sun went down, when all of the places in the dining room had been set and all of the dishes had gone into the oven and all of the Fianna who had no place else to be had found their way into the garden behind the house for, of all things, a soccer game. Ann watched from the window in Finn’s bathroom, wiping steam from the glass and clutching her towel so she didn’t inadvertently flash the assembly.

There was a knock at the door. “I’m decent,” she said, turning to find her lover, showered and dressed himself. “No soccer for you?” she asked.

“No.”

“It doesn’t strike me as particularly Fae,” she said.

“It is, though. We played something like it two thousand years ago. And everyone has had enough blood for one day. They want to be outside, in the open air, and they want to forget all about Druids and death.”

“But not you?” she asked.

“No. Not me. I want to be with you,” he said.

“I’ll get you wet,” she said.

“I’m counting on it.”

“We don’t have time.”

“We have an hour. Remember how I promised you that I would never
pass
with you without warning?”

“Yes?”

“Consider yourself warned.”

It was easier this time, perhaps because she’d done it several times now, perhaps because it was such a short trip compared to the stomach-churning return from the island. Perhaps because she was soon where she had longed to be all day: home, in her own bedroom.

“Thank you,” she said. “It’s good to be home.”

“Good enough that you’re ready to tell me about your mother?”

“Do you really want to know?” People often said they did, but Ann had long since learned that they didn’t really want to hear the bad stuff.

“I want to know everything about you, Ann Phillips.”

She sat down on the bed, and he joined her there, pulling her into his arms and making her feel safe and secure. “I’ve never told anyone the whole story,” she said. “My caseworker knew some of it. The foster families I lived with got the official records, but they didn’t
know
. I had a roommate in college whom I wanted to tell. She was the nicest person. She took me home at the holidays to stay with her family, and after that, I couldn’t tell her. They lived in a big house in Beverly. It was old, like your house, with big beams and creaky floors and photographs everywhere. Nieces and nephews and cousins. The rooms upstairs were like a maze and wandering around in them felt like trying on someone else’s life.

“They were so nice and so normal. I knew I could never tell them the truth. I cherished those holidays, the time I spent with them. And they would have looked at me differently if they’d known. I used to lie awake at night on those trips, tucked up in a twin bed with my friend sleeping a few feet away from me, imagining what it would be like to be part of a family like that. I used to tell people that my parents were killed in a car crash. I made myself into an orphan from a fairy tale. But that isn’t what happened.”

He rubbed slow circles over her back. “If the memories are too painful, you don’t have to share with them with me.”

“I do,” she said. “I need you to know why I’ll never trust the berserker inside me. Even if I learn how to use her. Even if I say yes to Fae ink. I need you to know, so someone can stop me if I ever . . . You need to know what happened to my mother.”

And you might not love me once you know.

“Tell me, then, because I’ll always have your back, Ann Phillips.”

She prayed that was true. “It was the third time we’d moved that year. All those little towns south of Boston started to blur into one for me, but this one was different. The lawns were bigger. The school was built out of red brick with leaded glass windows and it had a real gymnasium with parallel bars. I remember because I thought I was very special when my teacher told me I could stay after school every day and use them. It felt a little bit like a castle, that school, with all its dark wood paneling and nooks and crannies. It was just an ordinary nineteenth-century public school, nothing special, really. I know that now. But it seemed so permanent and reassuring to me. And I didn’t realize until years later that the after-school program was something for poor kids, so my mother could work a full day. I thought it was because I was special. They gave us dinner, and I loved eating with the other kids and sitting in the lunch room at night with the pretty brass chandeliers lit. It made me feel like a princess. I didn’t understand that they gave us dinner to make sure we were getting three square meals.

“My mom had lucked into the job. She’d been working as a night janitor at an office building outside Route 128. One of those invisible people who empty the trash and vacuum the floors every night after the employees go home. It’s lonely work and a little dangerous, being in a big empty building at night, but a lot of single mothers do it on top of their day jobs. You can’t support two people on just forty hours of minimum wage work. There was another girl who worked the same building, and there was a supervisor who kept bothering her. One night he cornered her, and my mom heard her crying and she stopped him. He fired both women. But there was a man who worked in the building, an engineer at a tech company, and he saw everything. He couldn’t get my mom’s job back for her, but he wanted to help.

“He had an elderly mother who lived in a big place in the next town all by herself. She was going deaf and she needed someone to help out around the house. There was an apartment above the garage, two little rooms, with a dust ruffle on the bed. It had pleated trim that I used to run my fingers over as I fell asleep at night. And my mother could keep her day job clerking at a dry cleaner as long as she did chores.”

“That sounds ideal for a woman in your mother’s position,” said Finn.

“It was perfect. Even my mother seemed hopeful. We were finally going to get on our feet. Every time she got fired, she’d promise that it would never happen again, but this time I believed her. I’m not sure why. Maybe it was the pleated ruffle on the bed or the big lawns or the hot meals at school. It felt like the kind of place where bad things didn’t happen. And then it all went wrong.

“We weren’t supposed to have guests. I thought that was because of me, that a little old lady wouldn’t want loud children running around the house, and it seemed like a small price to pay. Mrs. Vandersalm was nice, but she couldn’t hear very well, so you couldn’t really carry on a conversation with her. On weekends she’d put my mother to work cleaning out the attic—so her children wouldn’t have to do it when she died, she said—and sometimes she’d find old things that she gave to us. Winter coats. I was warm walking to school for the first time in my life that winter. And ice skates. I’d never owned a pair, but she had dozens up in the attic, all stiff leather and rotted laces, lined up by size as her children outgrew them. I got a bicycle, and my mother taught me how to ride it but Mrs. Vandersalm wouldn’t let me go past the driveway. That was all right, though, because the driveway went round in a circle and it was as big as a small street. It was perfect.”

“What went wrong?”

This was the hard part. The part Ann had never told anyone. “My mother brought a man home. She’d done it before, in our old places, in our awful rented rooms in flophouses, in the motels we sometimes had to stay at. But I’d been too young to understand. This time I was just old enough to figure out what the sounds coming from the next room meant, but my mother had always done that, just like she’d always gotten into fights. She did it again the next week, with a different man. And the week after that. It was just something she did.

“Mrs. Vandersalm must have heard, too. Or maybe she saw the man leaving. I never found out. They argued. I remember Mrs. Vandersalm telling my mother that she was setting a terrible example for me. I think she was worried that one of the men would turn out to be dangerous, or maybe abuse me. I don’t think she understood that my mom could bring men home just for sex. She wasn’t needy or looking for something she couldn’t find, and she wasn’t going to fall into some kind of abusive relationship.”

“She was a berserker,” said Finn, brushing Ann’s hair back from her face and tucking it behind her ears. “Even if she didn’t know it. Fighting and fucking came naturally to her. She would never have let anyone hurt you.”

“No. She wouldn’t have. She couldn’t hold down a job because she couldn’t let an injustice pass unpunished. It made her mad, but she never even raised her voice with me. But Mrs. Vandersalm didn’t know that. She didn’t know what my mother was like. That she could handle herself.”

“And Mrs. Vandersalm was old enough,” said Finn, “that she came from a different generation. She probably couldn’t conceive of a world in which you could grow up unchanged by your mother’s sexuality.”

“She was right, in a way,” admitted Ann. “Even after what happened to my mother, I never thought that sex was something dirty or shameful. I was curious about it as a teenager, eager to experiment. My mother had seemed to enjoy it like a good meal or a hot cup of coffee or a bar of chocolate. Like it was one of life’s pleasures. So I approached it that way, too. And it got me labeled a nymphomaniac and a slut long before I even managed to lose my virginity.”

“That wasn’t your mother’s fault,” said Finn. “That was the cruelty of children, the hypocrisy of human society and their idiotic ideas about sex. I have lived through two thousand years of changing human mores, and while the ones you were raised with were not the stupidest, they’re far from the most enlightened.”

He pulled her into his arms, and it felt good to rest her head on his shoulder.

“I know Mrs. Vandersalm was only trying to help. She thought my mother was endangering me. She thought I would be better off living with her in the big house, away from my mother.”

“And your mother didn’t like that idea.”

“No. She didn’t. That’s why I don’t blame Nancy McTeer for her behavior. I know what it’s like to have someone try to take your child away from you. I was that child. Mrs. Vandersalm just wanted to help. She took my hand and pulled me toward the big house, and my mother tried to pull me back. She pushed Mrs. Vandersalm, and Mrs. Vandersalm fell. She broke her hip, and she died in the hospital a few days later. The police took my mother away after that. I went into foster care. It was easy for the state to get custody, and my first caseworker didn’t think I should be allowed to see my mother. Neither did the one after that. My second foster mother took me to visit her, but by then she was already dying. She was serving a life sentence. When she got cancer, my new caseworker tried to get her out so we could spend the time she had left together, but she died before that could happen.”

“You’re not your mother, Ann.”

She sat up and faced him, because she needed him to understand. “But I could be. I could lose control and hurt someone. I’ve always been so afraid to have my own children because I can’t bear to think what would happen if I thought someone was threatening them. Even someone old and frail who couldn’t have hurt anyone.”