Blood and Iron (25 page)

“I won't.” Seeker pressed the warm, rough-glazed surface against her cheek. The tea smelled of summertime, haymaking and warm winds. “I came to see how you were doing.”

Carel shrugged, settling one hip on the edge of the desk. “Strange. Ian—your son, yes?—visited this morning. He told me I could spend months here for every hour going by in the real world. And that I was welcome to stay as long as I liked. He told me more about the politics too. And I'm cramming history.”

Ian. Ian stands at the Queen's right hand now.
It struck Seeker that she did not know the man her own son had become.
One of us will be the betrayer. He looks seventeen.

“What do you think?” Seeker sipped her tea.

Carel shrugged and gestured around the room, fingers splayed and sweeping. “How can you refuse an offer like that? Look at this place. It's . . .”

“Magic.”

“Yes. And then there's that dark-haired singer.”

“Cairbre? I thought you liked girls.”

“I do. I didn't mean like that. I mean, I could learn something from a musician like that.” Her eyes danced. “And Morgan wants to teach me magic.”

“Don't forget the ballads,” Seeker said, and her geasa wouldn't let her say anything more. She cupped both hands around the mug and swirled, watching the brown fluid sparkle.

“I won't.” Her dark eyes met Seeker's, and she chewed her lip. “I dream things now,” the Merlin said. “I hear voices.”

“Voices?”

“A voice? The Dragon's voice. It's full of . . .”

“Riddles.”

“That too,” Carel said. “And instructions. I have a lot to learn. I need all the help I can get.”

“Seduced by Faerie already, Merlin the Magician?”

“Not everyone who comes to a lover's bed is seduced. Some do it of desire, some are paid cold cash—”

“—some come of their own free will?” Seeker tipped her head, dismissing
that
.

“—some may have agendas of their own, or serve masters who do.” Carel's eyes met Seeker's, and Seeker understood as plainly as she understood anything that this was a warning too.

“It's all a chess game,” Seeker replied.

The Merlin grinned. “Some prefer poker, you know. Will you tell me about the Dragon Princes?”

Seeker bit her tongue. “Have you heard of Hermann the Cheruscan?”

“Arminius. The German rebel.”

“Yes. He was a Dragon Prince. Called Sigurd in the songs. Two thousand years ago, he was the sacrifice. And after him, Arthur Pendragon. Harold Godwinson. Vlad Dracula.”

“An . . . interesting list of names.” Carel flipped a page of an open book back and forth with her fingertips. “What do they have in common?”

Seeker watched the Merlin carefully, and said, “As with everything
otherwise,
there's more than one story about them: where they come from, what they are. What purpose they serve.”

“But?”

They shared a smile. “I always liked Robin's version the best. Better than Morgan's or Cairbre the bard's. Robin says the Dragon Princes come every five hundred years or so. That the first, the Yellow Emperor, Huang Di, cut a deal with the Dragon on behalf of the oppressed, that those enslaved could never be held forever.”

“Pretty story.”

“No,” Seeker said. “It's not. Like all deals with the Dragon, there is a price. Twice in a millennium, a Dragon Prince is born. He is born to death and glory, to madness, to loss, and to eventual sacrifice. If he fails—if he will not serve the debt he is born into in blood—then he pays the price Harold Godwinson paid.”

“He was . . .”

“The last English king of England. Elevated to that rank by the deathbed choice of his immediate predecessor Edward, called the Confessor.

“He faced immediate challenges on two fronts: from the Norman William the Bastard, later called William the Conqueror, and from the bloody warlord Harald Hardrada of Norway, whose invasion was supported by Godwinson's brother Tostig.”

“His brother?” Carel closed the book she was toying with and frowned. “Nice family.”

“Wait for it,” Seeker replied. “Godwinson met the Norse at Stamford Bridge on September twenty-fifth, 1066, and was there victorious despite the machinations of his own family. He and his battle-weary men were at their meat on September twenty-eighth, so the ballads record, and so Robin assures me is true, when word came that William the Bastard had landed.

“Godwinson brought his exhausted men nearly three hundred miles in seven days, reaching London on October fifth. They met William's men in battle at Hastings, beside an ancient apple tree, under the banner of the white dragon of England, and it is recorded that they held the field against archers and superior forces ‘until the stars shone in the sky.' ”

“You mean the Norman conquest.”

“Harold failed. Yes. But. If his men had not been weary with traveling the length of England and back to fight Harold's own brother and a foreign lord, who can say what might have happened? As it was—well, sources vary. But Robin says it took three knights and an archer to hack Harold to death on the blood-soaked earth of England's most famous battlefield.” Seeker breathed in, sipped the tea, and breathed out again. “Thus the death of a Dragon Prince.”

Carel watched intently, her fingers folded under her chin. “You should have been a lecturer.”

“I was a TA, actually. And now you're going to ask me what Harold's death had to do with anything.”

Carel smiled and said, “So, tell me, Seeker. What did Harold's death have to do with anything?”

“Harold did not spill blood for the Dragon at Stamford Bridge. He was a failed Dragon Prince.”

“Blood.” Carel said it calmly, but she also swallowed hard when she said it.

“Do I need to tell you about the others?”

“Briefly, I think. What happens when they succeed?”

“They exist to overthrow conquerors. They're warlord and sacrifice in one. There was Hermann, or Sigurd the Dragon Slayer. The dragon he slew was the Roman army; he was a German who served Rome under the name Arminius, and was said to be the finest general of the Western empire.

“But Arminius turned his back on the legion and became once again Hermann the Cheruscan. He gathered the warring tribes of Germany and organized them in defense of that land. At Teutoburger Wald—despite Hermann's betrayal by his own father-in-law, a rival warlord named Segestes—Hermann so badly humiliated the Roman commander Varus that Varus committed suicide. Then Hermann sacrificed prisoners to Wotan on altars and gallows, until the wood dripped with bodies like ripe, taut apples abandoned to windfall and rot.

“Segestes pleaded with Rome for protection, and gave his daughter, Hermann's pregnant wife, into Roman captivity. There Hermann's son was born, and there he died.

Hermann himself drove the Romans from Germanic lands, and died at the hands of his own blood relatives on the field of battle.”

Carel had leaned back against the desk, her hip propped, her arms crossed. “Betrayed by a brother?”

“You know,” Seeker said, “I'm not sure. But are you beginning to sense a trend?”

“What about Vlad Tsepesh?”

“It was the Germans who called him that.
His
name was Dracula. And you can figure out what
he
sacrificed.”

“I've read about the Ottoman Empire. They weren't nice.”

“They taught Dracula everything he knew, apparently,” Seeker said. “You know Vlad and his brother Radu were held by the Turks as hostages for I can't remember how many years?”

“No,” Carel said. “I didn't know that. And Vlad was a Dragon Prince?”

“Maybe the most successful of the lot. Certainly the most enthusiastic. He came to the crown under siege by the Turks and oppressed by Hungarian overlords, killed a lot of people in the most awful ways imaginable, and”— Seeker saluted with her mug—“is remembered as a national hero of Romania, a man who kept his country free in a time of conquest. And who was betrayed and eventually assassinated by that same brother Radu's command.”

“Another brother.”

“Sometimes it's a son,” Seeker said. “Or a wife, or a sister. Or all of those at once.”

Carel stilled. “Arthur,” she breathed. “
There's
a fairy tale.”

“Most likely.”

“Can you be a fairy tale and also a Dragon Prince?”

“You can apparently be a whole goddamned bushel basket of fairy tales. It's required. We're all fairy tales together. There is, in fact, nothing to prove Arthur was real. Ard Ri or general, Christian or Pagan, even his name is the subject of scholarly dissent. If he even existed, as some will say he never did.”

“I can hear the
but
hanging up there like a great big water balloon,” Carel said.

“But I know where Arthur lies. I've combed my fingers through his hair and I've seen the Gwragedd Annwn come down in the moonlight to bathe him and straighten his head on the pillow. I know that his story is true, as are all stories that last that long.”

“But he wasn't real.”

“Now he was,” Seeker said, and handed Carel back the mug. “More?”

Carel poured, watching her hands. “So there's always a sacrifice.”

“Always. Or he fails.”

“And he fights for the underdog.”

“So to speak.” Seeker took the cup back and sipped. “The Dragon must be fed. And when the Dragon has supped enough, the final morsel to satiate her is the life of her Prince. Earth the dark mother devours both lover and child.”

“My Dragon.”

“Your Dragon,” Seeker said, harshly. “What you serve.” Carel pushed herself from her perch. She hooked her thumbs in her waistband, eyes cast down at the floor, and paced three or four steps before stopping and turning to stare at Seeker. “We're fucked.”

“We're fucked,” Seeker confirmed. “Welcome to fairy tales. Have a nice day. Canapé?”

Carel stared at her for a three-count and then burst out laughing, hands pressed to her stomach, whooping and wheezing.

“Well,” Carel said, when she had wiped her eyes, “you did say you weren't going to lie.”

“Freedom paid in chaos,” Seeker said.

“And the sacrifices?”

“Dragons like innocent blood,” Seeker said. “Arminius sacrificed camp followers and beardless boys among the Roman soldiers. Dracula tore the breasts and bellies of women with iron pinchers. And Harold refused.”

“And Arthur?”

“Children,” Seeker said. “Like Herod before him. A generation of baby boys.”

“And that's what lies before me? As a . . . servant of your Dragon.”

“Not mine. But yes. You. And the father of my son.” A long silence stretched between them, and Seeker thought she wasn't fooling herself when she called it understanding. “I'm here if you need me. I hope . . .” She hesitated, set the mug on the desk. “I hope we'll be friends.”

“I know we will,” Carel said, and then took a deep breath and leaned forward, as if about to say something else.

Seeker cocked her head, waiting.

The Merlin shook her head. “I need all the friends I can get.” She gestured to the book on the desk, and the next words came out an uncomfortable tangle. “Ian said the man I—I drew a sword on?—was the Dragon Prince. That I marked him.”

“You're the Merlin,” Seeker answered, quietly.

“It seems like a dream now . . . is that your husband?”

“I'm not married,” Seeker said. She reached for the mug, her fingers brushing Carel's hip. The Merlin slid sideways on the desk to give her room. “But he's Ian's father, yes.”

“You're not together anymore, then?”

Seeker shook her hair, wet, cold coils moving against her neck. “My job doesn't lend itself to long-term relationships. ”

“That's a pity.”

Is she flirting with me?
Carel's dark eyes sparkled. Seeker gestured with the mug. “Sometimes.”
She is.

Something dark and chill moved under Seeker's breastbone—an ancient bleak webwork of magic and compulsion.
I know how to bind her.

And with the knowledge of how to
do
it came the tightening of Seeker's binding, and the need to see it
done
. Seeker put the tea on the desk and stepped back. “I have things I must accomplish,” she said. “Will I see you at dinner?”

“I'd like that,” Carel said, and showed her to the door.

Keith found the Queen unattended in her retiring-room, the door propped open to permit the draft that brought him her scent. He took it for a sign. The Mebd was not one to go warded about with courtiers and men-at-arms in her own palace, and Keith knew from old experience that she was open to those who might make so bold as to approach—if they were willing to risk the barbs of her intellect to do it.