Blood and Iron (3 page)

He reared and Seeker cringed under his hooves, a lock of wet hair tangled between her fingers. Jewels of water shattered around her; behind Kelpie, the girl crouched in a puddle.

“To bind a thing, you must know its right Name,” he said.

“By this lock of my hair, I know you to me. . . .” Her hands trembled. His weight bore her down—beyond control, beyond thought, beyond panic.
Four Names: Scian. Lile. Maat . . .

The hooves came down.

There was no time to move and so she stood. Her will bent against his; strength crushed strength like blind, slick behemoths striving in the depths of the sea. Resilient, muscular, vast.
Please, please, please . . .

“. . . Uisgebaugh!”

Her fingers twisted the tangle into her hair as hooves shuddered above her. He all but
vibrated
—all power, all courage, and wilderness surged in his Caribbean eyes.

His shadow fell across her face. She reached out, gasping, and bent his power back like the fingers of a hand. Until he failed.

Squarely and sullen, his neck bent like a bow, he came to earth. Seeker wiped from her cheek, below the eye, some flecks of salt water that must have been thrown from his shaking mane.

“Mistress,” he muttered.

She stepped away. “Fetch the girl.”

The moon rose over the ocean, wearing a weary smile, her light reflected on billowing waves and Kelpie's sleek mane. His magic moved him quickly, for he was a part of this water and all water everywhere: all tides and currents, the great cycle that falls and flows and falls again into the vast blue cauldron of the ocean . . . and where there was water, there was also Kelpie.

And Seeker and the girl sat his back—Seeker shaking wet hair from her eyes, the girl growing stiffer in the cold.

Storm clouds massed on the horizon, black in the silver-lit sky. Distant lightning flashed, but Seeker didn't delight in its rumble. She saw the misery in her burden's face revealed in every flicker. The girl shivered and sobbed. She cried for water, and Kelpie gave her sweet water. She cried of the cold, and Seeker cloaked her. She cried for her pimp to come and save her, and Seeker bit her lip on a scathing
Gladly would I send you to join him.

“Have courage, girl. There's worse to come.”

They'd be rid of her soon. And then Kelpie and Seeker would continue their business. Though Seeker had bound him once, Kelpie might try two times more to kill her. If he failed thrice, he would belong to her—until she chose to unknot that lock of hair . . . or he died. Should she die first, his heart would stop with hers.

That was why Seeker was here, on his back, following his paths from the iron world to the moonlight one. If it had been merely her quarry and herself, she would have taken the thorn-tree road, her own path through the shadows not being made for sharing. But she judged it better to keep the Kelpie close and under her command, rather than trusting whatever devices he could get up to in her absence.

Waves pitched up and sideways, the sea hungry and unkempt. The ocean reached out contemptuously; the tips of the girl's fingers slid through Seeker's as a wave struck her from the Kelpie's back. She clawed upward, spluttering, shocked that the ocean should be so terrible.

Seeker leaned out, her fingers knotted perilously in Kelpie's pale mane, and clutched at the girl's grasping hand. She felt no fear, no rush of courage—only an overwhelming weariness that threatened to drown her as surely as the ocean would the girl. Seeker's fingers locked on her charge's wet wrist; she hauled the girl gasping and choking across Kelpie's withers. He tossed his head, eyes rolling, reflecting lightning as water sheeted down his face.

“Is this your storm?”

“Mistress, no.” He might omit, but he could not fail to answer. And she had charged him to bring them safely to Annwn. “We are opposed.”

“By whom?”

His shrug rolled his shoulders under her. “Magi? The Unseelie? I know not.”

Seeker licked at the salt cracking her lips. “You need a name,” she said.

“I have a Name.”

“And shall I call you so before the court?”

He snorted and kept swimming, great muscles writhing under her thighs. She tightened her fingers in his mane.

Wet and wept out, the girl eventually curled into Seeker's arms. With her easy breathing, the storm subsided, and for a moment the Kelpie forgot himself enough to twist a look over his shoulder, one blue eye meeting Seeker's in surmise.

“Whiskey,” he said. “Call me that.”

The clouds shuddered to pieces before a setting moon and the easterly sky grayed. Seeker shook her charge awake. “Dawn and the clouds are breaking; you must see this.”

The girl's eyes flickered open, the color of lichen: neither gray nor green nor hazel. Seeker had seen such eyes before, in the mirror and elsewhere. The girl seemed calmer now. Nothing was ever as bad in the morning as it had been in the night before. “Who . . . ?” and then her eyes registered Seeker and she sat up, squinting in mounting brightness.

“What do you see, girl?”

She grimaced.

“Water. Waves. The sky.” She glanced over her shoulder, skin like honey once the makeup had washed away, her dark hair matted as stiff with salt as it had been with hair spray. “My name is Hope.”

Seeker made an odd sound, a strangled laugh. “Certainly, it is.” Then she leaned forward and kissed the girl's stone-colored eyes and her salt-wet mouth. The girl flinched, and when Seeker drew back, stared at her. Seeker pointed westward, where green hills welled up, visible to the
otherwise
eye. Taller swells on the ocean, hills like the call of the heart for home.

The sunlight touched those hills with gold.

Seeker's voice rose, off-key. “ ‘What are yonder high, high hills, the sun shines sweetly in? Those are the hills of Heaven, my love, where you will never win. . . .' ”

Dawn in the Western Isles. How she'd grown to hate it.

Hope jerked against Seeker's grasp, her face lit in wonder as Seeker sighed once, quietly. They were lovely, high downs and the white faces of cliffs wrapped in rainbows struck from the golden mist. “The Westlands, Hope. Hy Bréàsil. Annwn. Tir Na Nog. Your home.”

Whiskey snorted and surged forward—the end of his journey in sight. Seeker wondered if he truly swam so fast, or if his magic shortened the distance. Morgan would know. . . .

The Mebd's castle came into sight around a rocky curve of land, the reaching arm of stone protecting a half-moon of white sand at the base of a terraced, magical lawn. At the crest of the hill a beechwood harbored mist and chill morning. The line of trees vanished behind the palace, a fantasia of latticed golden stone translucent in the slanted light, green banners snapping in the stiff sea breeze.

A cluster of fair-haired fey ladies and Elf-knights waited along the beach. The impact of the Kelpie's hooves on the sand jarred his riders as he heaved himself from the ocean. Leaving the water was such an effort for his kind.

The courtiers of the Mebd came down to meet them, to receive Seeker's burden. Seeker handed the girl down willingly. And as she was off balance, her steed melted beneath her with a breaking crash. Seeker rolled, scooping up a handful of sand. “An old trick, little treachery. And hardly your best . . .”

The wave struck before she saw it, knocking the precious bit of earth from her hand. It sucked her under, churning; she struggled for the surface, breathlessness an iron band across her chest, fingertips breaking into blessed air as she dragged herself upward. Sweet breath filled her lungs in the moment before he knocked her under. He was implacable as the bottomless lochs of Scotland, and he liked to play with his prey.

Violent currents twisted her. She struck for the bottom, hoping he would think her disoriented. One hand clawed through rocks, into sand. A sharp shell gashed her, blackness billowing. But she brought cupped hands to her mouth, blowing into them through the blood and watching the bubbles rise through water gone still and silent.

She drifted, knowing he could push her back if she struggled upward, wait for her to drown. Hoping that he needed a more
direct
vengeance—until a mammoth blow, a wall of water, slammed her chest, would have hammered the air from her lungs if she had any left, struck again. She spread her hands, the silvery net between them terribly frail.

She cast the net into the sea.

The ocean grew still, as if lost in memory. When she broke the surface, gasping and fuming, a cheer went up, and when the Kelpie arose behind her draped in her net as if in seaweed, a laugh. Seeker was not well loved. But nothing tamed is fond of that which still has freedom, and it amused the Mebd's courtiers to see one of the wild Fae bound.

Chapter Two

The Mebd awaited her, but Seeker did not hurry to dress. She stood before her mirror, feet bare on damp stone, a white linen shift brushing the tops of her knees. The tarnished silver backing of the looking glass mottled her reflection.

“Hurry,” said Robin from the doorway. “Herself will not be pleased at the delay.”

Seeker reflected an arch glance at the Puck. “The more you talk,” she said, “the longer it takes.” She turned back to the mirror and examined her face while Puck hopped on one foot, long ears twitching. She hid her smile, spread her arms, and spun thrice, hair flying about her.

Rippling folds of cloth of silver flared as she whirled, swaying heavily when she set her heel and stopped. Pewter-colored brocade skirts brushed the floor, the bodice pushing Seeker's bosom higher and cinching her waist.

She examined herself critically. Nothing but glamourie, and gone on the stroke of midnight. Fortunately, there were no clocks in Faerie. Seeker motioned as if tugging on gloves, and gloves appeared—darker gray than her gown, and of kid. Puck tapped his foot.

“Coming, Robin. Really, you'd think it was something important, and not the same audience every time.”

He made no answer, and Seeker snorted in irritation. She too tapped her heel on the stones, but the third time she made the gesture she was greeted not by the
pat pat
of bare skin but by a musical jingle. She raised her skirts in one hand and thrust a foot out, inspecting a slipper of gray-and-white vair decked with tiny silver chimes.

“ ‘Rings on her fingers and bells on her toes—' ” she commented, and Puck cut her off.

“And she'll be beheaded by morning if she delays longer.”

“That doesn't rhyme, Robin.”

“Or scan, either. It's
modern
poetry. Are you ready?”

“My hair's not done.” Seeker angled her head and lifted her hands, running gloved fingers through glossy black strands. They fell into place, narrow braids twining accent to pearls and silver, the crude knot with which she had bound the Kelpie smoothing itself into a ladderlike four-strand braid bound with silver wire and a single pearl black and shining as a moonlit sea. Seeker touched her ears and throat to conjure quiet jewelry, and passed a hand across her face. “How do I look?”

“Well enough,” Puck replied, tugging her toward the door. His legs were much shorter, but she had to step quickly to keep up. Her slippers jangled like sleigh bells; she took short breaths of air laden with the scents of wisteria and mist.

They hurried through vaulted corridors wrought of translucent golden stone, past the doorways of rooms that had stood empty for all the twenty-five years of Seeker's service, immaculately clean, waiting like grooms abandoned at the altar.

The Mebd's palace was bigger inside than out, and Seeker could not imagine it full. Its forlorn elegance spanned distances she associated with city neighborhoods and college campuses, and seemed designed for mourning. A certain misty forsakenness became it.

To think of these echoing passages teeming with Fae was daunting, both in the idea of that much alien extravagance, and the vivid realization of how much Faerie had lost.

The small ones had sickened first: the nature spirits, the little lives of brooks and trees. Some prospered, finding niches in wild places or under the aegis of sympathetic householders, but most limped, faltered, died. Imps and pixies, brownies and sprites, were not comfortable in kitchens full of stainless appliances and gardens sown with commercially propagated flowers. This was the true triumph of the Prometheans: to turn even the red, red rose into a warding that kept the Fair Folk at bay. And if the roses lost their scent along the way, it was a small price for safety, for preeminence.

William Butler Yeats, who should have known, reported conflicting theories about the Fae. Some, he said, called them the last remnants of the Pagan gods, shrunk now and small, half-forgotten. Some said they were angels too bad to serve in Heaven, and too good to be damned to Hell. Other stories listed them with the Nephilim, among the children of angels who were tempted by the daughters of men, and so fell.

In any case, this much was true: they would not abide the name of the Divine; they preyed on the iron world to enslave knights, courtesans, paramours, poets, and lemans, and—as recorded in the ballad of Tam or Tom or Thomas Lin or Lynn or Lane or Line—at the end of every seven years, they paid a tithe to Hell. They brought home children of Fae descent as well, like young Hope, to replenish their fading line.

And they took mortals to pay that tribute.

Seeker's quarter-century in Faerie had taught her how worthwhile was the price—the scent of a rose, the life of a Fae—for human safety. Annwn's Queens were immoral as glaciers, righteous as stones. They locked their hearts in secret places, and they had learned to lock away the hearts of their lovers and playthings too.