Blood and Iron (51 page)

“Weyland,” I said. “He can't refuse a commission. Any commission. It's part of his bond. Summon him here and pay him in silver, and have him rip the damned thing down. They'll come to defend it then.”

“And we'll be waiting.”

I shook my head. “You'll be waiting. You and Arthur. And Carel, probably.”

“Where will you be?”

I closed my eyes, feeling that cold inside. “Times Square, I imagine.” I looked up the hill at Jack-in-Irons, a hulking, shaggy shape that smelled of rot even from a few hundred yards. Sunlight glittered on the hanging blade of his axe.

“Elaine, what are you suggesting?”

Whiskey was calm and solid under me, one ear back and one ear forward, his breath coming in time with the beat of Ian's heart. “If they want a war,” I said, “we'll bring them a war. I've cut you a deal with Hell and the Unseelie, Keith. I'm afraid you're going to have to live with it.”

“Do I get to know the prices?”

“I'll pay them on my own. Consider it a wedding gift and don't ask.” I couldn't meet his gaze.
I have everything I ever wanted. Keith, Ian, my freedom. Love. Respect. Power.

It tasted like ashes and iron in my mouth, an electric feeling as if I bit down on tinfoil. “I need to talk to Carel.” Whiskey moved away before I could rein him, pulling my hand out of my husband's. I felt Keith looking after me as we went to stand beside the Merlin.

Carel didn't ride well. Her bay mare tugged at the bit, uncomfortable, and I wondered if she had ever been on a horse before. But she didn't quite sit like a sack of potatoes; there was hope for her yet. She turned, frowning, as I rode up beside her. “I haven't any right to be upset with you,” she said.

“But you are anyway.”

“Yes.” She sighed. “The boon the Mebd granted me for my song. Do you remember it?”

“Yes. I'll honor it, of course.”

“It's already used,” the Merlin answered. She gestured with a fine-nailed hand to the braided bracelet around my wrist, below the edge of the hauberk. “I asked her to cut that out of her hair, before she sat down on the throne and died.”

“You—” It rocked me in my saddle. I clutched the pommel and tried to remember how to breathe. “She was going to kill me?” And then the next layer sank in. “You were with her?”

A very simple answer. “Yes.”

It changed everything. Changed my thought. The Mebd hadn't trusted me at all. Had intended my death, and Whiskey's, and that death was part of her plan. Ian, heartless and motherless, but linked to Hope. Keith, faced with the destruction Ian would have wrought. Keith might have killed Ian.

But the mortal world would have fallen in flames.

“Was she really so ruthless?”

“She honored her word to me,” Carel said with a shrug. A little condemnation, and she knew it when she said it. She narrowed her farseeing eyes.

“She meant to make Faerie supreme again, and was willing to pay in her own blood to get it. Her own blood and grief.”
This is what I am now,
I thought.
This is what I've become.

“That is what she was born to do,” Whiskey said, his voice like coffin nails. “And, Elaine . . .” He dipped his head as Carel looked at him, and looked at me. “You are stronger than she. Stronger than Morgan. I don't think she knew what Morgan taught you. And it was the Mebd who taught Ian the Names of the Hunt.”

“Do you know them? The Names?”

“Yes.” His tail stung my calf.

Carel coughed. “Whatever was meant to happen no longer matters. What matters now is what did happen, and what will.”

“Worried you backed the wrong horse?”

“The Dragon doesn't take sides.”

“No. But she is a side all on her own, and you serve her.” I wasn't sure myself what I meant. “And I begin to think I serve her too,” I said. “She moved me on the board easily enough.”

Carel nodded. We watched Keith ride down the hill, to tell the chiselers to stop chiseling. Kadiska rode beside him, bearing the banners again, and the Unseelie streamed down as well, out of ranks and now simply walking to join the camp. Arthur and Morgan and Murchaud must have finished their parley. I thought about the harsh texture of Carel's braids, the coolness of the glass beads woven into them. “I took advantage of you,” she said, after a long silence.

“And I, you.” Forced by honesty to answer. “I'll never bind you into a tree, Merlin Magician, or lock you into a cave.”

“Never say never.”

“Mist trusted my decisions.” The air felt clear and complex as I breathed it in, warmed by the sunlight and chilled by the not-too-distant sea. “And you saved my life.”

Carel chuckled. “Didn't I? I won't say I'm not jealous.”

“Of Keith?”

“Among other things.” She shrugged, and I saw her close her eyes. “Wouldn't you expect the Dragonborn to be a ruthless thing?” A reaching gesture with her hand, toward Keith and the rest, fingers spread. She smelled of bittersweet chocolate and nutmeg. “Or the Dragon Prince, for that matter?”

“Thank you. For my life.” Whiskey shifted under me. I knotted a hand in his mane.

She turned and studied my face, her eyes glistening. “Mist will let us destroy ourselves, if that's what it takes,” I said. “And if the mortals go too far, she'll shrug them off like a too-small coat. Legends and mythologies, races and civilizations come and go. The Dragon remains.”

There was a little silence, as we watched the people move along the length of the slope. “So here it is,” I said, to break it. “I mean to take the battle to them. They've made their own mythology, but ours is not gone yet.”

“Most of them can't even see into this world anymore. That presents a problem, if you mean to demonstrate magic.”

Hoofbeats: horses approaching at a trot. I glanced over my shoulder and saw Arthur riding toward us, so much a part of his horse that he seemed a centaur. Morgan was beside him, and Ian. Behind them, I saw Hope coming down the hill with Murchaud, as if in search of Keith. “Hail, my ladies,” Arthur said, smiling. He drew rein. “What are we discussing?”

“Morgan,” I said, “you know mortal magics. Can you make them felt, these days, in the mortal realm?”

She looked down and ran her fingers through the tarnished strands of her dapple's mane. “Once,” she said. “No longer. The old sciences are tied up in metal and technology now. The Dragon is bound.”

“Fuck.” It had seemed like a brilliant plan for a few short moments. Prove to the mortals that Hell and Faerie exist. There was power in that, and it would do less damage than Ian's plan to unleash the Hunt and simply
kill
as many mortals as possible.

Whiskey snorted and stamped. “I can make myself felt,” he said. “And Hope can.”

“It won't be enough. Freak storms and flash floods. Those can be explained away.”

“Yes, they can,” Carel said. “Along with earthquakes, volcanoes, and anything I could muster through Mist. She's chained by proxy and by symbol, but it binds her as surely as the laws she wrote for the rest of us. There's no magic in the real world while she's bound.”

“I saw a unicorn in Central Park once,” I said. “No one noticed her. And then there's the willows . . . the last one I knew who would still look up and talk seems to have drifted off into treeness now. Faerie's become all but transparent. I guess that means there's nothing to it but to ride to war.”

Arthur closed his eyes then, briefly. He opened them again and looked at Morgan. She read something in his face I didn't know him well enough to see. “Artus. No.”

“Pendragon. Two Dragon Princes at once? Unprecedented. ”

“So is a female Merlin,” Morgan answered. “Times change.”

“They do indeed.” He took his helm from under his arm and lifted it onto his head. “There's been one sacrifice already. ”

Morgan looked ready to argue. Arthur silenced her with a gesture. I wished I knew what they fought about. “Queen Elaine. I'll need my sword back. If you would speak to your husband?”

“Need your sword back? Caledfwlch? What for?”

Arthur Pendragon chuckled, and stroked the neck of his bloodred horse. “I'm going to save a Dragon.”

Chapter Twenty-four

I knelt in the green grass, watching Weyland Smith limp around the massive base of the black iron bridge, sucking his teeth, naked and carrying an iron hammer. He stopped every so often and knocked with the hammer on one of the branching roots of the structure: sometimes a light tap, sometimes a double-handed, back-arched blow.

Cold, wet earth cloyed around the fingers of my left hand, which burrowed in the soil like blind, seeking worms. Moisture soaked through the knees of my trousers, and my chain mail hung on my body thick and fluid and heavy. The prickle of tiny claws touched my right forefinger; I held the sparrow close to my lips as I whispered in its ear. A fine-etched tawny-and-gray head I could have worn as a pendant turned from side to side, eyes dark as black garnets catching the light. The delicate bird studied my face for a moment longer, after I whispered, “Spread the word to your brothers, little friend. Go. . . .” And then feathertips brushed my nose and eyebrows and tiny talons left ephemeral prints in my skin, and a weight so slight it wasn't a weight at all ascended into the sky.

Caledfwlch was a heavier weight across my back, in the plain new scabbard I'd brought to go with my own borrowed silver sword—the one that Keith now carried. “I won't be needing the scabbard,” Arthur had said, irony dark in his eyes before he turned to go off among the ruined beeches with his sister and her son. I didn't wish to know what they spoke of. I'd give him the sword when he returned.

I was half-surprised Keith had trusted me with it. But then, he'd seemed half-relieved to see it go. Ian stood over my left shoulder, his eyes following Weyland as the crippled old smith examined his task. “Contracted and paid for,” I heard Weyland mutter. “There's got to be a way to get it done.”

Ian sighed. “This never would have happened if you'd let me call up the Hunt, mother.”

“Over my dead body,” I answered, and meant every word. Ian's heart still beat against my side, strangely like the struggles of a kicking baby. I put the thought away. “One thing you'll need to learn to be King is that every action bears a moral responsibility.”
I should get Whiskey to explain this to him.
“Every choice is a burden.”

“I know that.”

“No,” I said, standing up and smearing dark earth off my fingers onto my tabard. I lifted my hauberk and fumbled in my sash, drawing forth the lidded cinnabar box, not much bigger than a pack of tarot cards. It was a beautiful thing, the lacquer-red lid carven with coiling dragons and cherry blossoms. It trembled in my hand as I held it up, or perhaps it was my hand that trembled. “Ian.”

“I'm to be King,” he said. “To sit on the throne would kill me, if I had a mortal heart. The Mebd said so.”

“You'll take it,” I said. “You're Keith's heir as well as mine. And you're a wolf. No mere chair can kill you.”

“I say no. I should be King of the Daoine. And who are you to gainsay me, who gave your soul away?”

I laughed. “When your child is born, Ian MacNeill, you ask me that question again. If you need to.”

“You cannot make me do this.”

“Oh,” I said, “that's where you're wrong, my beloved. My son.” I took a step forward and opened the box.

The heart within it glistened like a ruby on its bed of pearl white satin. It pulsed a steady beat that fluttered with tension or fear.

“Mother.”

“It's for your own good,” I said, and picked Ian's heart up in my hand, letting the red-and-black box fall upon the grass. “Open your shirt.”

Light leaked between my fingers like drops of blood. Ian looked around for intervention, but he was used to following orders, and used to obeying a Queen. I felt someone watching me—Keith? Carel? It didn't matter.

“It will make Hope happy,” I said. I had the sudden wild thought that I was holding a bird in my fist, and that if I opened my fingers it would fly up, cardinal-red against the cobalt of the sky.

He startled and paused, tugging his shirt open over the smooth pale expanse of his chest. He looked so terribly young, a slender boy with a boy's narrow shoulders and his father's green, green eyes. “Do you think so?”

I laid my hand on his chest, opened my fingers, and pushed.

I felt no resistance. One moment the heart was in my hand, red and hot and pulsating. The next my palm lay flat against the cool skin of Ian's breast, a pink flush of warmth tingling beneath it, spreading rapidly throughout him. He never even closed his eyes, but his hands came up and wrapped loosely around my wrist.

“I don't feel any different,” he said, and then he sat down on the grass and started to cry in silence. He gave my wrist a tug to bring me down on the grass beside him. I sat uncomfortably, half of the box under my hip, and didn't care. I sat there in the grass while Hope came running toward us, holding my son's hand, looking up at the shadow of the great iron spiral across the cloudless sky of Annwn.

Keith left Petunia's reins looped lightly over the branch of one of the birch trees. He stood in the tawny, translucent leaf-litter and waited for his father-in-law to join him. Murchaud didn't bother to tie his winged, fanged black steed. He simply stroked its nose and left it where it stood, the reins knotted around the pommel. Keith was surprised that his own mount seemed singularly unimpressed by the hell-beast. Whatever it looked like, it must have smelled like a horse.