Blood and Iron (60 page)

And then he'd have to figure out what to do with the rest of his life. Because like Hell was he going crawling back to Jane Andraste.

He was cold. The shivers started between his shoulders, a clenching sensation as his muscles contracted. He gritted his teeth to keep his jaw from rattling, and forced himself not to keep glancing at his watch. He could still hear calls and conversation from the battlefield, Fae voices that seemed almost human and others that were deep and strange or high and crystalline, as if they were the voices of woodland glades and foundation stones and cracked glass bells. And something else, soon—a susurrus like a wind through a wheat field, and a creaking like the mast of a sailing ship.

And singing, a singing that trembled the earth under Matthew's ear and got into his bones and shook him out of chilled and fitful slumber into wakefulness. The leaves kept some warmth close to his skin, but not enough, and he raked more over himself with his left hand. The right one hurt worse now, but the bleeding seemed to have stopped. He imagined the improvised bandage must have scabbed to the wound; he didn't look forward to getting it loose.

The sky at last began to lighten, the warmthless gray light of false dawn creeping up the sky beyond the bare fingers of the beeches. The earth seemed to shiver and stretch. Matthew rolled out of the leaves in the bone-deep chill and rubbed his eyes with his left hand. Not too far away, a big dog barked joyously, answered by another. He huddled closer to the tree, working a little lace of magics to keep them off his scent. The insignificant effort left him trembling with exhaustion.

He needed water desperately, as much to wash the blood and filth off his skin as to drink. He didn't know where to find it.

A crashing through the leaves drew his head up. The very air was graying now, that quality of light where the atmosphere seemed to lose its transparency and hold up veils between observer and observed. Something glimmered nearby, white enough to glow through the dawn— flashing the first rays of sun off a blue like steel.

Matthew forced himself to his feet, knowing who came. He rubbed his eyes again, determined to meet the unicorn with whatever dignity he could salvage.

But it wasn't a unicorn.

It was a woman. Tall, her red hair braided into a single straight tail down her back, wearing blue jeans, boots, and a bloused shirt of linen bleached white as a goose feather and sewn with tiny clear crystals over the yoke, a fillet across her brow with baroque curves worked in knife-blue steel instead of gold or platinum. Her eyes were the color of wintergreen leaves, and a red dog and a gray dog trotted at her heels.

“Matthew Magus,” she said, with a smile that brought out all the pleasant lines in her face. “You're hurt. Won't you come home with me? I'll see you tidied up and doctored well, I vow.”

He swallowed and straightened up, eyes on her fillet, clenching his left hand into a fist to feel his useless iron rings. “What happens to me if I don't?”

She gestured upslope and over her shoulder. “I take you where the thorn trees are, and I show you the way back home.”

“And if I do?” His voice was steady, suddenly, his hand hurting less. As if her presence gave off strength that he could use. She came closer, seeming undeterred by the blood and filth that crusted his skin.

“How long are you going to wait for your unicorn?” she asked, and when he blinked in surprise she leaned forward and kissed him on the mouth.

Her mouth was soft and hot; her tongue sent a shiver of necessity down his spine. He found himself leaning into the kiss, his bandaged hand gentle on her hair as hers were not gentle in his. She smelled of rosemary and bitter herbs he didn't know the names of, and she tasted of honey and ale. She was soft and certain in his arms, and it tingled in his belly and along his spine when she pressed her body close. It was fire, and when he came out the other side, he was remade.

And not in the way she had intended. “I know your name,” he said, when she leaned back.

“You know so many things,” she said, and laid her long hand flat against his filthy chest. The mud and blood that smeared him hadn't touched her. She still shimmered white as a princess in a fairy tale. He couldn't feel her hair against the fingers of his injured hand, but the longing in his breast was powerful enough to ache. “And so do I. We should share them with each other, Matthew-with-no-place-to-go. Come with me.”

“Morgan le Fey,” he said, and shook his head because it was too hard to say the next thing he should say. She smiled: smiled more when he pried the iron rings off each finger of his damaged hand, pulled the ones on his left hand off with his teeth. He reached up and fumbled his earrings out left-handed, tearing his earlobe, but what was a little more blood at this point? He knelt down and dug in the soil with his left hand, his good hand, meaning to pry up leaves and woodlot flowers and horsetail ferns and bury that iron in the earth, where it could not trouble him again. His hand closed tight over the iron, though, and he frowned down at it, suddenly unable to remember why he had planned what he had meant to do.

He stood. He shoved his hand with the rings in the pocket of his trousers and dropped the rings there. They rattled on each other like change. Morgan watched, amused, her steel fillet gleaming on her brow.

Matthew shook his head again, harder, and answered, “Morgan le Fey. I am honored—”

A wry smile from the Faerie, rather than the wrath he had been half-afraid of. “But.”

“—but send me home.”

Chapter Twenty-eight

Whiskey must have carried me back to Annwn, for I don't remember anything between the stones hard against my face and the softness of Keith's cloak under and over me, the smell of green grass and the shade of a willow tree. Someone sat beside me, and even as I turned and raised my head I knew from the smell that it was Keith. He put a hand on my shoulder to press me back but I sat up against it, looking out at the cool, bright morning. And swallowed.

I barely recognized the vale and the devastated beechwood beneath a grove of willows that had taken root in the furrowed ground. I reached out, feeling the iron settled in the earth. The bridge wasn't visible, so I knew Weyland must have succeeded in gnawing it off at the root, but that root still sank a taint deep into the soil. “A problem for another day,” I said, and realized I had said it aloud when Keith slid his arm around my shoulders and squeezed. “What news?”

“Stalemate,” he said. “They may be back.”

“If they are,” I answered, “it is my fault. I could have destroyed them, in New York.”

He nodded and helped me stand. “It wouldn't have saved me in the long run.”

I shook my head and leaned against his shoulder. “And I lost my binding on the Cat Anna. My hair . . .” I ran my hands through it. It was thick and soft and untangled, and felt freshly washed. “She can't be made to go to the teind now. She's been freed of a binding.”

“Worry about it later, Elaine,” he said. He turned me to face him and then let his head roll down his neck, studying the smooth grass under his boots. Pale skirts blew around my calves. Mist had garbed me in a dress unlike anything I'd worn in Faerie before: white linen, soft and fine, the neck high and simple and the bodice cut to flare into a gored skirt. A very modern sort of dress, with buttons up the front from hem to collar. I fussed with the hang for a moment, so I wouldn't have to look Keith in the eye. “Who?” I said at last.

He rubbed his face before he answered. “Your father, Elaine. I'm sorry. More than half of the Daoine, and perhaps two-thirds of the Unseelie court. They fought hardest, and rode at the front. And seventeen of the pack.”

I knew he wasn't finished. It didn't hurt enough yet, under the layer of ice and fire that numbed my heart. I reached out and took his arm. “Who else, Keith?”
Not Ian. Please.

“Hope,” he said, after a long time. “And Robin.”

“Robin
fought
?”
Hope. Dead.
Bullets? Or the falling buildings? And did it matter, in the end?
No. No. No.

“Everybody fought by the end of it,” he said, and then he buried his face in his hands and stood before me, swaying like a willow in the wind, his breath whistling through his fingers.

“I shouldn't have let her go,” Keith said, and let his hands fall to his side. He looked down over the willow wood, dry-eyed and haggard, and I reached out to touch him and drew my hand back before I could offer the cold mockery of comfort that was my own.
No.

“Keith,” I said, the words chillier than I would have meant them. “We did what we did. And we'll carry it.”

He turned to study me, the yellow branches of the willow brushing his hair fondly. “I imagine we will,” he told me. “What will you do now?”

“Are the bodies buried?”

“They've been washed and laid out, as best we could. Ours and theirs. Damn the distinction. The willows said they'd handle the burials. You want to say good-bye?”

“Yes.” I twisted my wedding ring on my finger. It was wearing a place already. I scuffed a bare foot through the grass of Faerie, the greenest in any world. “Carel? And my . . . mother?”

“Mist brought them to me.” He opened his hands as if pouring water. “I let your mother go. The Kelpie told me your bargain, and Jane seemed willing to abide it. All things considered, I understand the toll was worse than she imagined.”

“It was worse than any of us imagined,” I said.

Keith shook his head. “We killed them all, Elaine. Every last one who came to Annwn. Men and women. Some of them were very young.” He turned away, looking down over the tossing sea of willow crowns below the rise of the hill. “I wanted to teach them a lesson.”

“You're a Dragon Prince,” I answered. “It is what you were born to do.”

“And what I'll die doing too,” he answered. “That doesn't excuse it.”

“No,” I said. “It doesn't excuse anything.”

“Elaine,” he said. “I still love you.”

I couldn't lie to him. I turned away, trying to hide my smile and my sorrow both.

The rows of white-wrapped bodies stretched endless under the bower of the willows. Side by side, with just enough space to walk between them. Dozens. Hundreds, with red stains blotting the white linen of their shrouds and their dead eyes closed against the filtered light of the sun. The shadows of budding leaves moved across their faces. I imagined the earth would just open up and receive them when the willows were ready.

“Thank you,” I said to the trees, and they whispered things in return. Soft things, forgiving things. There were rows of bodies, and rows beyond those. I walked along them all. Gharne came out of the trees, his wings unlike the heavy wings of the Dragon, and he settled on my shoulder. Unseelie, Daoine, men. Tidy and white as snow-drifts, blossoming with red flowers. I knew their faces and I knew their names.

I found Matthew laid out among them and knelt down by his side. His hands were wrapped tight to his breast, folded one inside the other. Through the linen, iron from the rings still on his fingers stung my hand. His hair had come loose from the ponytail. I smoothed it back from the ruin of his face. Something with a clawed foot had opened his flesh from temple to chin, and I saw the white nuggets of his teeth through four slashes in his shredded cheek. The blood had been washed away; his skin was pale and waxen. “I could have known you,” I said, and tucked the loose strands of his hair inside the shroud.

And then I drew my hand back, startled, and nibbled on the inside of my cheek. “You're not Matthew Szczegielniak, are you, sir?” No. I pushed the linen wrappings back, and all the details were correct: the straight blond hair, the startling dark eyes, the intricate details of the ink under his skin. But this man wore no earrings, and there was nothing to show he ever had.

It was a simulacrum. A changeling, like the ones Kadiska and I had left in many a baby's bed. The body of another, witched to look like the body of the Promethean.

He even smelled like Matthew, somewhat. A relative?

I wondered what his name had been.

Finding Robin hurt more. By some hard coincidence, they had laid him beside my father, but when I knelt down between them no tears blessed me. His strange little ear was shredded. His glinting eye was dark. Murchaud looked all but unmarked, but there were stains on the cloth wound over his breast. I closed my eyes so they matched my father's, and sang to the wind. “ ‘Mother, mother, make my bed. Make for me a winding sheet. Wrap me up in a cloth of gold, and see if I can sleep.' ”

“You won't,” my mother said. She crouched on the other side of Murchaud's cold body and stroked one hand across his eyes. “Not much, and not often.”

“Jane.”

“Sweetheart.” Her eyes seemed very deep. I couldn't tell if it troubled her that I called her by name. “I'm sorry.”

“Why?”

Her lips pursed, fine lines spiderwebbing alongside them. She seemed much younger than I would have expected. “Why fight Faerie?” she asked.

“Because it needs to be fought,” I answered. “No. I understand that. But why all this?”

She tilted her head, gazing up at the sky. “There's no other way to fight a war,” she answered, and touched my face with a hand still cool from my father's cheek. “Diplomacy amounts to nothing; it all comes down to blood and iron in the end.”