Blood and Iron (34 page)

“That's not all it is.” He shook his head, straight dark hair swinging against his shoulders. Seeker liked the way his face rearranged itself around the corners of his smile. His eyes were dark over the line of his beard. “It's a matter of, who do you want to be turning your back to when the war comes?”

“Not
if
.”

He rubbed his hands together against a chill she didn't feel. “It's already here, to speak precisely. We've been slow in marshaling our forces.” Cairbre poured more wine, and Seeker realized she had finished hers. “My fault as much as anything. Something I'll start to remedy tonight. We're past the time for love songs.”

“War songs?”

“Well, it won't be ‘Bury me under yon rose tree,' I can promise you that.” He stuffed a folded slice of roast into his mouth, wiped his cropped black beard with his hand, and pushed his chair back. He walked around the short end and crossed before the table, bowing to Ian as he passed. Cairbre reached up over the table, one toe on a little step, and caught Carel's fingers in his own. Seeker leaned forward to watch the drama between the roasts and goblets and twining arrangements of flowers and ivy.

Cairbre smiled at the Merlin and kissed her fingers, making a flamboyant little gesture of it. “My lady,” he said in a carrying voice, “if you've finished your meal, will you come and play with me? We had only a taste of your music, and it has left us hungry for more.”

Carel said something too softly for Seeker to catch over the murmur of voices in the shadows.

“Then bring your wine,” the bard replied, which sent laughter rippling and rebounding the length of the hall.

Carel must have nodded, although Seeker couldn't see it through the gathering, because he released her hand and she stood, taking her goblet. She sparkled, clad in honey-and-orange-streaked velvet that dripped with carnelian meshwork, and she took his hand again at the foot of the dais and let him lead her to the corner of the hall where a hammer dulcimer stood shrouded in a pall of black cloth.

Seeker blinked, the draped outline a reminder. She pushed her chair back and started to stand, but the courtier beside her laid a hand on her arm. “One song,” he said. “They'll talk of this night a thousand years from now.”

“If any of us live that long.” She sat back down, frowning, the need to act tugging like a fishhook in her lip. Despite it, she folded her hands around the stem of her goblet, watching with the rest of the murmuring crowd as the Merlin and the bard uncovered the instruments. Carel sat behind the dulcimer, and Cairbre pulled a low bench close and settled a guitar over his knee. He didn't speak. He turned his head, shared a glance with the Merlin, and nodded a moment before she struck the strings.

The peals of the dulcimer struck through Seeker like ice crystals, and what Cairbre sang was not the martial ballad she anticipated. His voice was velvet stroked up the inside of Seeker's arm at the same moment that it was a razor honed bloodlessly sharp, parting skin. A lament as still and cold as a rain freezing in the trees, and Carel's voice came in to support his on the chorus like stars coming out in the perfect blackness of a midwinter night. Seeker didn't know the song, which surprised her, and after it drifted closed in softness and grief, she couldn't remember a word, although her eyes burned and her pulse beat against the skin of her throat. She realized she was on her feet, like half the hall. Like Ian, who stared down from his place near the center of the table, his knuckles white on wood.

Carel struck one last peal from her instrument. It echoed into the silence of the hall like a crystal goblet struck with a knife, and the hush was complete.

Cairbre stood up from his chair a moment before the spell would have been broken by applause. “Let's have a drummer!” His deep voice boomed from the broad-beamed rafters. “Let's have a piper! Summon my student! Push back the tables! Let us have dancing, an it pleases my ladies and lords!” He faced the high table, and Ian smiled and raised his hand, comfortable and in control in his spotless black and slender golden circlet.

“See?” the courtier said into Seeker's ear.

She nodded and tugged her wrist out of his grip. “I expected ‘Johnny Cope,' ” she admitted, and turned and slipped behind the arras, and away.

Gangling Fyodor Stephanovich charged up the hill like water flowing down it; Keith, toiling behind, had to admire his enthusiasm. Keith was fit, but the length of Fyodor's stride defeated him. Shins aching, he resigned his dignity and broke into a trot, scurvygrass tugging his boots, dotted with scraggly, fading asters and campion.

A moment later, Fyodor crested the ridge and paused, glancing back over his shoulder as Keith drew up. “Where do we go from here?” he asked, and followed the line of Keith's pointing finger. “A hedge?”

“Burnet rose and hawthorn,” Keith said, leading the black wolf up the continued rise to a peak. “Thorns are the gate to underhill,” he said. “Are you carrying iron?”

“A knife,” Fyodor answered, and unclipped the sheath from his belt. “I was careful in my clothes.”

“Keep it,” Keith said. “Keep it sheathed, but it can't hurt to have a bit of iron to hand.”

“How do we get in?” Fyodor's eyebrows rose in amused arches, his fingers curling through the sunlight as he spread his hands wide. Keith thought he read some kind of trouble in the black wolf's expression, nonetheless.

“Here as elsewhere, it's polite to knock.” Keith suited action to words. He kept his left hand on Caledfwlch's hilt, just for the reassurance of the sword's heavy presence.

Fyodor's calm certainty as the black mouth in the hill yawned before them would have been a disappointment, if Keith hadn't picked his sharp, worried scent off the sea breeze. “After you, Younger Brother,” he said, graciously.

Fyodor was too proud to glance back, but he drew himself up before he moved forward, and Keith knew the gesture was intended to remind the black wolf to courage. “Onward and inward,” he muttered, as cold darkness closed around them, the movement of the stones as silent as the movement of air.

"'Further up and farther in,' ” Keith answered, and grinned. “No Heaven here, alas. Just the Westlands— there.”

Three steps forward was all it took to bear them into the light. Fyodor blinked, raising a hand to touch his hair as the sweet spring-scented wind curled through it. He craned his long awkward neck, rolling onto the balls of his feet, and Keith indulged himself for a moment in just watching the worry and wonder chase each other across Fyodor's face, followed by a strange, dark recognition. Fyodor Stephanovich closed his eyes. “You never said why, Keith.”

“Call it a wild impulse,” Keith said, turning his head to get the lay of the land. It never did look the same way twice. Today they had come out at the head of a sloped ravine that formed a scalloped corridor between stark ranks of treeless hills. Indirect light lay across it like a golden rind, slanted through the overcast, and Fyodor began to unbutton his shirt, movements jerky as a marionette. “Younger Brother?”

“This is not a place for being human in,” Fyodor answered, heel-toeing out of his boots while folding his shirt into smooth thirds. His scent was like glass, and Keith almost whined in received anxiety. “I come here as a wolf or I do not come.”

“This place is something to you.”

Fyodor stepped out of his trousers and turned, his eyes open wide enough that Keith could see that they were gray as seaglass. “Babi Yar,” he said. “It looks like Babi Yar.”

“The massacre,” Keith said, being old enough to remember. Not that such things could ever really be forgotten. He tugged his shirt out of the waistband of his trousers.

“It was more than a massacre,” Fyodor Stephanovich said. “The executions at the ravine went on for months. SS Special Squad Four A: I remember very well. Later, they said thirty-three thousand Soviet citizens died there, gypsies and Ukrainian Jews and the miscellaneous others.”

“They?” Keith asked. Fyodor would not look at him, but Keith would be damned if he would risk this heartbeat of honesty to intemperate demands.

“I think it was more,” Fyodor said. He crouched on the green grass with the flats of his palms spread wide, but he did not change. Instead he looked down the ravine, shivering. “They took our coats and walked us to the edge of the cliff. They shot us in the head, one at a time.”

“Us,” Keith said, unable to restrain himself in the face of Fyodor's lingering silence.

“Thirty thousand died at Babi Yar, and I was one of them. An SS bullet of lead and steel won't kill a Ukrainian wolf.”

Keith stacked his clothes next to Fyodor's and laid Caledfwlch on the grass, where he could grasp the sheath in his mouth after he changed. “We'll come back and dress after we look,” he said. “You'll see this isn't Babi Yar.”

“Isn't it?” The black wolf shrugged. “Isn't this the place where stories are true?”

“Is Babi Yar a story?”

“It is now. One of Russia's greatest poets wrote a poem about it. About how there was no gravestone there.”

“Yevtushenko.”

That drew a surprised look, those expressive brows rising high.

Keith shrugged. “It's supposed to have changed the Soviet Union's national perceptions of the victims.”

“You've read it.”

“Only in translation.” Keith could not shake the sensation that Fyodor's look was a balance, weighing him.

“Pity. You should learn Russian, then. Come along, Elder Brother. It is time to run.”

Seeker didn't need to step
otherwise
to come to the Mebd's throne room. The passageway behind the arras led from the dais of the one to that of the other, and beyond. This room was smaller than the hall, but not much. Gray light fell through faceted windows on the west side, lying in tall swaths on the blue-and-green-tiled floor. Seeker paused with one hand on the tapestry before she stepped from behind it, unsettled, letting her own eyes and those of the shadows survey the room.

She stepped past the gilded chair that sat at the edge of the dais, letting her hand trail over ornate scrollwork before she grasped the thick gold rope that hung against the wall. It looked like a bellpull, but when she drew it down, the heavy green burned-velvet curtains behind the chair slid apart, whispering on the tile, revealing a tall shape veiled in still more velvet, velvet so red it seemed black in the failing light. What it covered had the general outline of a peaked dining room chair under a sheet, but the top stood eight feet high.

Seeker stood staring at the thing for a long moment: the shrouded throne of the Mebd of the Daoine Sidhe, used only on state occasions and never uncovered. She caught her breath, listening to the faint tones of fiddle and drum drifting through the passageway. And then she reached out left-handed and fingered the cloth where the hand of someone seated in the embrace of the throne would rest, expecting softness and the feather-feeling of the pile against her skin.

The cloth was harsh to the touch, as if something sticky bound the fibers. When she leaned closer, relying on the sense of smell inherited from her cat-shadow, the rusty smell of old blood filled her nostrils.
Why is the Queen's throne soaked in blood?
Raising her head again, Seeker could see the outlines of stains, duller than the sienna sheen of the unmarked cloth. They almost looked like sweat stains, dried sticky-thick where arms, back, thighs, buttocks would press. Seeker laid her hand on the velvet and tugged at it, almost yelped when something snagged, sank into her palm and bit. She clapped it to her mouth and tasted blood, fresh blood: her own. Something yellow-white and hooked like a tooth poked through the dark cloth.

The gouge across her palm was superficial. She glanced at it, and reached back out to the edge of the velvet pall, more carefully this time, keeping her eye on the shadows.

“That's forbidden, isn't it?”

Seeker didn't jump. She was already turning when Kadiska strolled up to her, bare feet patting the tile. “ ‘Everything not forbidden is compulsory,' ” she quoted. “I thought you were skulking about.”

“Unkind words . . .” Kadiska's necklaces jingled faintly as she leaned forward and reached out, turning over Seeker's injured hand. “That looks like it hurts.”

“Not much. And I've never been
told
not to look.”

“Taking refuge in technicalities?” Kadiska's shadow swayed long on the floor, cutting across a wan rectangle of window-light.

“You picked an interesting time to come out of the shadows. ”

“You knew I was watching you.”

Seeker smiled and shrugged noncommittally. “On orders? ”

“Somewhat.” Kadiska let go of Seeker's hand. Blood freckled the tiles at their feet. “Are you going to look?”

“Of course. Are you going to help?”

“It could strike us blind, you realize. There's a wild magic in some of these things.” But her brows were arched, and a sly look slid from the corner of her eye.

Seeker brushed Kadiska with her elbow. “Chicken?”

The Unseelie Seeker laughed and laid one hand on the stiff dark fabric, the turn of her body like the sway of a rope. “Ready.”

Together, they lifted the cloth. It snagged on something sharp; Seeker tugged gently, mindful of the edges, her own bright blood soaking into the rusty stains. They worked the heavy edge up and bundled it back, enough to reveal what lay beneath, yellow-white and jumbled together.

“Bones,” Kadiska said.

“No.” Seeker walked around the throne and—carefully, delicately, as if handling broken glass—reached across the arms and pulled the pall back farther, lifting it off the jagged edges that threatened to slice her skin. “Horns.”