Blood and Iron (45 page)

Morgan's bird overshot the hilltop as Whiskey sat on his haunches. I clutched his mane, slipping, not at all certain how I hung on.
“She's pulled him down beside her,”
I thought, inanely.
“She's let the bridle fall.”

"Ian, don't do it! Don't do it!” The bird passed over and the storm went with him like a counterpane ripped back from a bed. He wasn't a raven anymore, but something huge and old as the faint coyote laughter still ringing in the fading thunder.

Ian's left arm was bared to the shoulder, the sleeve of his shirt hanging in wet rags, and as I watched he gentled his wild-eyed mount with the pressure of his thighs. He laid the edge of the forte of his sword against the inside of his arm. “Mother,” my son said coldly, as blood, red as rowan-berries, welled over the wet pale skin of his hand, “get out of the way.”

I let go of Whiskey's mane and raised my hands to the wilderness of my hair, turning my back on the girl, catching Ian's glittering green eyes with my own. “By my hand and my heart,” I replied, “by the name of your soul . . .”

Hope shouted and spurred her gelding into Whiskey's shoulder, her thin hands sharp on my wrists as she dragged them down. “No! Fuck you! No!”

Whiskey reared, pulling her out of the saddle. She held me tight, and without stirrups I had no chance. We fell hard in the mud between horses, black hooves and red blood raining down around us. Hope's gelding sank white teeth into Whiskey's neck, and a silver-shod hoof replied across the gelding's shoulder, bone and blood sickening against a hide like rippling night.

I twisted to land on top of her, sensible enough not to put my full weight on the elbow I drove into her diaphragm.

Hope's horse screamed as Whiskey slammed into him again. I covered my head with my arms as he leapt us, hoof glancing off my shoulder like a blow with a sword, and took the hill at a skidding run I couldn't bear to watch. Hope rolled over and puked into the mud. Over the screams of the horses, I heard Ian's voice still rising in the unnatural calm after the unnatural storm, naming Names I had never heard, and some I knew. Names of gods, it must be, and Names of Fae, and Names of men. Blood ran down his arm, dripped black in the moonlight from his fingers, stained the blade of the sword, which he raised now, ready to plunge it into the waiting bosom of the earth. I saw his fingers tighten, saw him lean forward, ready to throw himself down over the shoulder of his horse. Something ran behind me—footsteps splashing and slipping, garbled swearing.
Robin. He'll never get up the hill in time.

It would probably kill me. It might not even stop the blade from severing the binding.

I was dragging myself to my feet when Whiskey whirled on planted forelimbs and lashed out behind, muzzle brushing the earth, silver-shod black hooves fracturing the last sad remnants of the moonlight. Ian shied away from the blow; it would have taken him high in the chest. Instead I heard bone crunch and shatter, and the flat tensile crack of the sword blade.

Ian's horse shied. Ian fell, keening like a broken-backed rabbit. Hope kicked the inside of my knee and I went down too, mud in my mouth, fire across my shoulder and a crunching sound as I tried to get the leg under me. Wet earth tasted of desert and smelled of dog. I expected a knife in the kidney, a knife between the shoulders.

Whiskey snorted and began to turn. Ian clutched his arm and did not rise.
If you can't stand, roll,
I thought, and pushed myself over just in time to see Hope looming over me, brown as a mud goddess . . . and to see Puck tackle her at waist level and spin her down into the slime.

“Mistress.” Whiskey, his voice urgent and low.

Whining with the pain of it, I blinked mud away and shoved myself to my knees. Over my shoulder, the vast white movement that was Whiskey drew my attention, and I turned as best I could.

Ian had retrieved the broken stump of his sword in his left hand, and Whiskey pinned that hand to the earth with a hoof as big as the boy's head. Robin's scuffle ended with a thump, and I heard Robin groan and curse, and sounds as if he pushed himself to his feet.

“Ian,” I said. “Swear to me you will not try this again.”

“Mother,” he said, pain making the edges of his voice glitter, “I will do what I must do. Faerie is mine to protect. I am the heir to the throne of the Daoine Sidhe.”

You are her King,
I thought, but thought of the bright edges of that throne and didn't give it voice. “Very well,” I said, and—my right shoulder twisting under my skin like a knife when I raised my hands—I teased loose a mud-clotted, salt-clotted lock of my hair, and began again.

“By my hand and my heart, by the name of your soul,” I whispered, feeling like every word had barbs. I'd named him after Keith's grandfather. And my father. “By this lock of my hair, I know you to me.”

And because I'd wanted him to have a Name no Fae would ever guess, I'd named him for the very first star I'd ever known the name of. A star that was in the sky, that night in summer when he was born. Behind me, Hope and Robin were silent. I wondered if the girl was conscious.

"Ian Patrick Rasalgethi Andraste MacNeill.”

Ian whimpered. Whiskey snorted, and lifted his hoof, and turned his black-daubed face to look at me. “He needs a chirurgeon,” the water-horse said, his ears pinned back. He lifted a mud-caked hoof. “Silver. The wounds will not heal of themselves. And you need a doctor as well.”

“Get him up,” I answered, trying and failing to rise. “We're going home.” I put my hand down in the mud and pushed harder, but my elbow wouldn't lock and my knee wouldn't bend, and I thought I was going to wind up face-down in the mud until Robin came and picked me up, his strange hands unusually gentle.

Kelly was fascinated and frustrated by the flickering images on the television set. He was unresponsive to Matthew, even when Matthew fed and cleaned him, but he'd sit for hours hunched close to the screen, pressing his fingers against the picture tube as if he expected his hand to melt through the glass and become part of the magical world on the other side.

Matthew couldn't bear to watch, and he couldn't look away. He made his brother as comfortable as possible, grateful for and resentful of the caretaker that Prometheus had arranged so he would not miss work, and he pretended, almost, that Kelly was not there. He kept his routine with a scrupulousness that bordered on denial. His apartment was cleaner than it had ever been. He contemplated tearing out the harvest-gold countertops and replacing them with something modern and glossy.

And he waited for Jane, who checked in via e-mail and brief meant-to-be-reassuring phone calls, and never gave him the information he wanted, quite. It was too much time to think, and Matthew went from restlessness to insomnia very quickly. He strained a muscle in his neck, which kept him out of the weight room, and when he tried to run all he could think of was Kelly, huddled under blankets although the apartment was not cold. The inactivity made him worse, more restless and more unhappy.

On Devil's Night Jane called from the lobby to warn him she was coming up.

Appropriate,
Matthew thought, slipping the security latch. She was alone, dressed impeccably in a dark plum suit that walked the line between conservative and couture. Her shoes matched her bag and her hair was braided in a careful crown upon her head. Pearl earrings stood in stark contrast to the twisted iron torc that rode her throat, matte black roundelles flanking the notch of her collar-bone.

She smiled. “Are you ready to travel?” she asked. “I've brought the car.”

Matthew folded his arms. He blocked the doorway with his body. “I'm not sure I can do this, Jane—”

“Matthew.” Calm and certain, as she raised her eyes to him. “Let me in.”

“I can't—” he said, but he stepped aside, obeying. “I can't.” He locked the door behind her and put his back against it, breathing deeply, cold all down his spine.

“I ask nothing of you I am not willing to give myself,” she said, walking across the stippled rug toward Kelly. “Nothing I will not give myself.”

“Elaine—” He shook his head and cleared his throat. “She's in a position to make a decision. Kelly is
not
.”

“What do you say, Kelly?” She leaned down beside him and stroked his hair out of his eyes. He ignored the touch, his fingers leaving greasy lines across the television screen. Jane looked up at Matthew, who had not moved from his place against the door. “Kelly went willingly, Matthew. He chose what he chose. He would have died fifteen years ago if it weren't for the link between you and him.”

“A very convenient link,” he said. One Jane had suggested and paid for, in point of fact.

“That doesn't change the fact that he went with the Fae, and that he wants to go back. Don't you, Kelly?”

He didn't look up. He was humming softly to himself.

Jane smoothed his hair again and continued. “Elaine was stolen away, and I'm still willing to sacrifice her if I must.” She turned then, and looked up at Matthew. “Another thing you should know: do not trust Murchaud if you see him, after tonight. The Morningstar tends to play both sides against the middle; chaos is his aim, and I think we've gotten as much help out of him as we're likely to without paying the piper. And Murchaud's own loyalties are . . . erratic.”

“I see. Is that a subtle way of telling me he's in revolt against Hell? There's a certain poetic irony there.”

“Isn't there?” She smiled. “Get the door, Matthew. It wouldn't do for us to be late.”

A limousine brought them uptown to the Prometheans' penthouse, Jane taking stewardship of Kelly's wheelchair throughout. Matthew kept his hands in his pockets, relieved to be released of the duty and itching with shame over that relief. Kelly seemed to doze in the car, and he didn't awaken when Matthew lifted him again in the heated underground garage and settled him—a bundle of twigs in an armload of blankets—back into the wheelchair after Jane unfolded it.

Palpable silence clogged the elevator as they ascended. Kelly moved slightly in his sleep, blinking into what passed for wakefulness. He turned his head from side to side, examining the interior of the elevator, and then slumped back against his chair. “What does the ritual entail?” Matthew asked, as much to fill the silence as because he wanted to know.

“The sacrifice must be in Times Square,” she said. “At midnight, and it must be performed by no man's hand. We've summoned an avatar to accept it, so that won't be a problem.”

“So what are we doing here?” The penthouse indicator lit; the door dinged open. Jane wheeled Kelly forward and Matthew trotted to keep up.

“Tapping into the power we've raised,” she said. “Laying the web of deceptions that will let us do what we have to do in the middle of New York City without being noticed or arrested. Tightening the final knots in the net before we cast it.”

“Dotting the i's and crossing the t's.”

“Exactly,” Jane said.

Matthew was unprepared for the swell of applause that greeted them as they passed from the antechamber into the workroom. Even Kelly reacted to it, studying the lines of cheering Prometheans with intensity. Matthew, shivering, lowered his hand to Kelly's shoulder. “Don't worry, Kell,” he said, aware that he was talking to himself as much as to his brother. “It will all be over soon.”

I ordered Ian to confine himself to his chamber and sent a chirurgeon to set his broken arm, while Robin escorted Hope back to her quarters. I relaxed into steam, hot water to my chin, and wondered if the Mebd knew what she was doing when she swore fealty to Keith. If she knew the position it would put me in.

Of course she did. Scrubbing peanut sauce-colored mud from the creases of my elbows, I rolled the thought like rolling beach-worn glass across my palm. She had told me her agenda the last time we spoke. Not just the Magi, but Hell as well. The Mebd meant to see us sovereign. I couldn't imagine what else she'd think to buy by her death.

She'd known a way out of the teind, and didn't think the Cat Anna would be willing to pay the price, so she'd chosen instead to blood the throne. Chilly phrase, that.
Blooding the throne.
Like blooding a blade. It made me think of tempering, Damascus steel plunged smoking into the heart of a slave . . .

... which made me think of Caledfwlch.

I plunged my face into the water and scrubbed soapy hands across my skin. The water grew brown; silt and sand gritted between my buttocks and the bottom of the tub. I stood when the knock came on the door, filthy water sheeting from my body, and wrapped myself in a bath sheet. “Come in.”

The handle turned, candlelight flickering violet on knobby amethyst. Bright eyes peered around the edge of the door, and a thin arm fringed in velvet rags and coins appeared. “Lady?”

“Robin. Come in.” I stepped over the high rim of the bath, favoring my knee, wondering what it would take to get central plumbing and a hot tub in Annwn.
I should look into that.

The Puck slipped in and shut the door behind. “His Majesty is here.”

“His . . . Oh. Keith. Is he coming to see me?”

“I told him you were indisposed. He requests your presence as soon as is convenient, my lady. He's gone to see Prince Ian.”

I riffled shadowy images, spying on my husband and son without a second thought, only stopping once I found Hope curled thoughtful beside her window. Keith could handle Ian as he wished. I had business with the girl.

“And . . .” Robin let his voice trail off.