Blood and Iron (22 page)

“For an heir to Arthur. And you think I'm it?” He did not sit. His eyes stayed fixed on Ian, who had returned to crouch before the fire. The birch logs burned incandescent, crackling bark flaring brighter and hotter than strips of paper.

“Not an heir to Arthur. A . . .” She shrugged hopelessly. “The prince is always a
drighten,
a warlord. He comes in a time of turmoil, and changes everything. Unites the beleaguered against their foes, pays some terrible price through his own greed or shortsightedness or cruelty. Is betrayed by someone who should love him, and dies bloodily.”

“I know all that,” Keith said. He closed his eyes. “It cannot be. I have it from Mist that the Dragon Prince is another—”

“—and you have it from the Merlin, with Mist's shadow on her hair, that it is you. They used to say Merlins lived backward, you know, because they knew so many things they shouldn't have had ways to know.”

“I know.” He hesitated, rubbed both palms across his face before he opened his eyes again, stretching and smoothing freckled skin. “Dammit. No, the Dragon said
if,
not
is
. ‘
If
he is a Dragon Prince.' I just assumed.”

A cold tingle in Seeker's fingertips, and she turned away so she would not have to see Keith's eyes. “How did you come to talk to dragons, Keith?”

“I—” He stopped and lifted his wineglass again. “Dreams, first. And then she spoke to me. I thought—”

“Conquered any kingdoms lately?”

“My father's ill,” he answered, and took that chair after all. “He stands at the head of the pack. But I haven't any brothers and I won't do what Arthur did. Or what Vlad did, either. From what the Dragon said to me, I thought I knew who the Prince was to be, and he's . . . fit to lead. I've all but promised not to stand in his way.”

Ian stood and turned to them, his green eyes wide and the pupils dark. “Father.” As if the word felt strange on his tongue. As if he had not been listening to the conversation at all. “I don't even know you,” he said. “I want to know you. I won't do it, whatever it is that I'm supposed to do to betray you. We're here, all in the same room, finally. We're talking. And we know things that Vlad and Arthur did not know. Who cares about a stupid prophecy?”

“It's not a prophecy,” Seeker said. “It's a pattern. A story. Keith, have you other children?” She held her breath over the answer.

And he shook his head, picking at his trousers.

How did I come to be living in a Faerie tale?
“It's a pattern repeated with variations. And it means that—if the pattern holds, and it always has—either Ian or I, or both of us, is going to betray you.”

“Not before I kill a lot of other people,” he answered, and scrubbed his free hand across his face, wincing as the motion tugged his stiffening injury. “Is there anything we can do about this right now?”

“Worry ourselves sick,” Seeker answered.

“Yes.” He set the glass aside and looked over at her. “I gathered.” He sighed and stood back up. “Ian.”

The boy's face was curiously still, unfrightened. “Yes?”

“I haven't been here. It hasn't been my choice. But it was my fault.” He stopped. In the silence that followed, Seeker looked into the still-rising flames. “I'd like to be friends.”

“I don't need a friend.” Ian fingered the bulky golden belt, adjusting the hang of his sword. “I'm going to wind up on a throne of my own eventually, unless my life gets any more like a ballad. Ballads”—he shook his head—“rarely end well.”

“I'm sorry, then.”

Seeker heard the pain in Keith's voice; it twined around the guilt in her heart, enough to strangle her. “It's my fault, really,” she said, but Ian stopped her with a gesture.

“I need a family. Not friends. I'll have all the friends I need, every one of them waiting to be thrown some tidbit. From pet to Prince in half an hour.” Cool resignation. “I'll manage. But I want to know you both.”

“Yes,” Keith said.

Seeker couldn't find the words to go with what was rising inside her, so she nodded and kept nodding, her head jerking up and down erratically until it filled her and ran over into hiccuping sobs. She didn't push Keith away when he came and pulled her into his embrace, warm and smelling of soap and blood, and a few moments later Ian came and wrapped cool arms around her as well.

Keith's clean shirt wasn't clean anymore by the time her sobs faltered. She looked up as a page rapped on the door and summoned Ian away to attend the Mebd. The boy glanced back over his shoulder guiltily, and Seeker looked up long enough to see Keith give Ian a worried smile over her tangled hair.
Go.
She wiped salt from her face.

He went, and Keith pulled her back into his arms. “I'm sorry,” she said, her voice still taut and strange. She leaned against his shoulder, an old command to silence stilling her tongue when she would have explained more, about the Merlin and the Dragon and a thousand other things.

“I'm sorry too.” He leaned against the wing chair; after a moment she sighed and rolled her head back, cracking her neck.

She turned and sat beside him, letting him drape his arm over her shoulders.
I should get up. I shouldn't let this happen. Cold and stern, and show no weakness. No emotion, no fear and especially no love.
She leaned back into the embrace.

“You were so . . .
fey,
” he said, his voice wondering. “More fey than the full-Fae themselves.”

“They can smell pain,” she said.

“So can I.” He smoothed her hair back from her face. “We still work well together in a crisis.”

“We do.” She sat beside him, watching the Merlin sprawled across her bed. Carel muttered and turned on her side, her eyelashes fluttering. “That looks like natural sleep.”

“It does. Should we wake her?”

“No.” Her hair tangled against his sleeve as she shook her head. “I haven't the energy to explain to her what happened. Her power of prophecy is manifesting. Before long she'll be speaking for the Dragon.”
And then I'll have failed in my task, unless I can find a way to control a Merlin at the height of her power.

She shivered. “What's wrong?” Keith asked.

“The Mebd is scared,” Seeker said. “And I don't know why, but I think she's trying to consolidate power, and she's trying to get her sisters to commit to the same plan. Which means something's going on. Something above and beyond their game.”

“Ah,” he said, as if he thought of something, and was silent while the quick-burning birch logs flickered down. “You know,” he said, “Ian looks like you.”

“He has your eyes,” she answered.

Time passed, and before too long the sun rose behind the clouds and morning came.

The Mebd summoned Seeker at the breakfast hour, when servants came to bring Carel to her new chambers. The werewolf laid a hand on Seeker's arm after she dressed herself— too tired to attempt a glamourie—and headed for the door. She turned to look into eyes yellow-green as peridot.

“Elaine.”

“Don't.” She didn't shake his arm off, though—instead pinned him with a look as wide and dark as the sea. “Keith, what can you possibly want from me?”

“I . . .” His voice fell apart. “We loved each other.”

She snorted laughter, and then she did pull away. “You're going to die, Keith. And I'm probably going to be the one to betray you to that death. Doesn't that mean anything to you?”

“No,” he said, but he didn't reach out to her again. “No. Because the pack is loyal to the pack, and families are loyal to each other.”

“I'm not a werewolf.”

“Of course not.”

“And you're the fucking Dragon Prince.”

“I know that too.”

“So what the hell do you want from me?” Her voice was dead and calm.

The silence hung between them like the pall on Arthur's bier, like the tapestries on Morgan's walls. She stopped, turned, looked up into his eyes. “I want you to love me the way you used to,” he said.

“I do,” she answered, and slammed the door in his face.

Chapter Ten

It wasn't the first time Keith had stood, his fists clenched at his sides, and watched a door close between them. He suspected that it wouldn't be the last.

"So.” A throaty drawl from the window: a cold draft as the diamond-paned casement swung open. “
You're
the competition.”

Keith turned. Rain-kissed breeze brought with it three yellowed leaves and the rich sharp scent of the sea. Black-skinned fingers gripped the window ledge, silver rings glinting on the thick-nailed thumbs, and a tall lean man in a ragged white shirt climbed over the sill to stand, dripping rain, at the edge of the rug.

“Competition?” Keith wrinkled his nose. Even in man form, the Fae smelled of wilderness, of seashore and stallion and hay bales curing in the autumn sun. “You're the Kelpie.”

“Call me Whiskey,” the Kelpie answered. “And I will call you my Prince, my Prince—”

“I am no one's Prince.” Keith's gut clenched as he said it, knowing it for a lie. He flexed his hands, sidestepping slightly as the Kelpie moved into the room.
Will it come to a fight?

“Oh,” Whiskey answered, tossing his head so that jeweled droplets spattered, “but you are. The whole hall knows it. My Prince, and our Prince, and my mistress's true love . . .”

“You're here to warn me off, I take it?” Keith smiled, a curl of his lip and a showing of teeth. He stepped sideways again, circling, getting his back to Elaine's enormous bed-stead. The Kelpie turned to keep them face-to-face. “I am not Fae, Whiskey. But I am no mere mortal to be threatened and bullied.”

The Kelpie crossed his arms and leaned back on his heels, seeming at ease, his back to the wall now, the window on his right. His eyes glittered gray-blue in the watery light. “
‘Tell her to find me an acre of land / between the shore and

the salt sea strand.'
Really, my Prince. I am but a bondservant, and have nothing with which to threaten
you
. No, I merely came to introduce myself, and meet the man who will lead us.”

“My leadership is not a settled thing,” Keith said. He eyed the Kelpie a moment longer, his hackles bristling, and suddenly came to a decision—not to trust, exactly, but to risk—and turned his back on the stallion and strode back to the fireside. He crouched, warming his palms by the embers. “And I am a wolf, not a man. Do you want a drink, Whiskey?”

“Whiskey,” Whiskey answered, coming to join him. Keith shuffled sideways. They squatted knee to knee, Whiskey's damp sleeve steaming slightly, until Keith stood again and moved to the cabinet to find Elaine's glasses and liquor.

He spoke over his shoulder as he poured. “I know it's Fae to speak around an issue in epic spirals, Whiskey, but do you think you could take pity on an old wolf and say what it is you came to say, if you're not here to kill me?” He turned as Whiskey came up, and pressed a glass into the stallion's hand.

Whiskey lowered his head over the rim, nostrils flaring as he sniffed. “We wish her to live.”

“Elaine?”

“Yes.”

“But you will kill her if you can,” Keith answered, cupping his own glass between his hands instead of tasting its contents.

“I am divided.” A shrug. “I will kill for my freedom. But I would rather have it given than take it, Dragon Prince. Surely, you have some influence on the lady—”

“Whiskey,” Keith said, “how much strength—how much power in magic—does it take to bind something like you? You are not a little wild thing, a sprite of the rocks or moors, to be bound by what knows your Name. Are you?”

“. . . No.”

“It would take a great deal of strength, wouldn't it? Not merely skill. Or luck. Raw power.”

“Yes,” Whiskey answered, and swirled liquor in his glass. “I'll kill her if need be.”

“You wouldn't be much of a Faerie if you didn't,” Keith answered. “You're not actually offering me fealty in exchange for your freedom.”

The water-horse looked up at him and smiled, and tapped one silver-ringed toe on the floor. “If you were in my shoes, wouldn't you?”

“What is she?”

“Her father's daughter,” Whiskey said, with a shrug. “And her father is his mother's son.”

Matthew's headphones were camouflage. His own internal monologue provided the beat his footsteps syncopated. He ran to get away from magic, not to find portents and hints in the way his Walkman chose to pick up one local station and let another dissolve into static on any given day. If Jane wouldn't have had his hide for it, he would have left his cell phone home as well; instead, he turned the ringer off and made sure the carry case was zipped tight.

His feet sparkled in white, white sneakers, his legs content to be doing what legs were meant to do, over a rolling path with the strength of a body in motion, under yellowing edges of the overreaching leaves. A blur, and he kept just enough awareness to scan through the dusk—not true dark yet—for obstacles and potential enemies. Too cold already for the shorts he was wearing, and too warm yet for sweatpants. Cold wind prickled on sweat, his hair working loose of his ponytail and sticking to his face. His water bottle was halfway empty and he wasn't thinking of Merlin the Magician and her blatant and totally insincere seduction attempt.

He still had three miles to run.

Matthew tripped on the rubber sole of his own running shoe when he saw the unicorn. He recovered, drew up limping, favoring his stubbed toe, and regarded the mythical beast. It stood in the center of the jogging path, tail lashing like an irritated cat's and head raised to stare. No point in being coy with himself about it: there it was, horn like a twisted sword blade glittering steel blue in the gloom, eyes flatly metallic as the darkening city sky.