Blood and Iron (61 page)

“Don't misquote Bismarck at me.” I stood and stepped away. Her suit was stained and torn, patched with blood and dust. “Will we be able to talk?”

She shrugged and sat back on her heels, shading her eyes with a black-bruised hand. “Well, we seem to have something like an armed truce going. Heaven and Hell aren't much for détente.”

“Heaven and Hell can go hang,” I answered. “What about you and me, Mom? Are we burying enough here? Or are we just like all the bloody fools before us?”

“I don't know,” she answered. “As long as Annwn stays under the protectorate of the Morningstar, as long as you steal our—children, steal mortal men and women too . . . No, I think. We're not different at all.”

“Did it trouble you that the Devil plays both sides of the game, mother?”

She paused, and pursed her lips. “Yes,” she said. “It troubled me.”

“I see,” I said. “Good-bye, mother.” And turned my back on her, trying not to trip on the root-bulging ground as I strode unsteadily away.

I knew where Hope lay before I came up on her, by the slender figure in black velvet who sat on the ground beside her. Ian looked up when I walked round the trunk of a willow, and looked quickly down again. “Mother,” he said. “You don't belong here.”

"Ian ...”

He stood, a fluid movement, one hand on the hilt of his sword, the other still bound up in a splint and a sling. “This is your fault,” he said. Dead and cold, and he pressed one hand to his chest as if his heart would burst through the walls of his body and fly away. His mouth worked bitterly.

I thought of Arthur and Morgan, and the break that came between them and took fifteen hundred years to heal. Hope looked very pale in her white linen wrapper. It was easier to look at her still face than Ian's eyes. I looked up at him anyway.

“Yes,” I said. “My fault. My fault, Ian. And I am sorry.”

“Maybe someday,” he answered, “that will be enough. For now, though, leave us be.”

Gharne shifted, twisting his tail around my neck for balance when I turned away. And then I looked back, frowning. “Ian. One last thing.”

I chose to take his silence for permission.

“Arthur and Morgan, Mordred and Lancelot. You said it once, and I say it to you now in return. They didn't know, Ian. They didn't know what would happen. Whereas we . . . well.”

I wanted an answer. I wanted him to look up and squint and say
Maybe that will help me forgive you someday.

I waited a long time for him to find his voice, his one hand twisting like a white banner in the wind. “I've lost my child,” he said, and turned to face me, finally, with human grief in his eyes.

“Ian. Don't take mine away as well.”

But he shook his head and looked to the horizon, and gestured me away.

I went, walking and not sure where I was walking to. The willows had come to rest in the scarred earth, making wide avenues and wandering lanes. I walked uphill, and left the dead behind me.

Willows are the trees of death. “Will you stay in this wood?” I asked them, not expecting an answer.

“Tomorrow and the day after,” someone answered, over the sound of a trickling spring. “Many of them.” I recognized the place; Whiskey had struck the earth here, and now the cold water ran between the roots of a thirsty tree.

“Old Man Willow,” I said, and leaned against his trunk. “Are
you
staying?”

“Do you wish it?”

“Yes,” I said. “I miss you.” And then I hesitated. “You're needed where you were, though, aren't you?”

“I offer comfort,” he said, brushing my shoulder.

I smiled. “I'm not supposed to need that.”

I heard the hoofbeats before I saw him, and I stepped away from Old Man Willow's embrace. Whiskey shifted as he came to me, a blur of motion, ivory, jet and seafoam-white among the shadows of the trees, his cuts all scabbed and crusted closed. The whole of the wood lay around us, silent as hallowed ground. “Whiskey,” I said, and he drew me into his arms and held me tight when I would have thrust him away. It was warm and comfortable there in his embrace, and a little while went by before I lifted my forehead from his shoulder. “I've changed again,” I told him.

He nuzzled my neck as if looking for sugar cubes. Gharne hissed halfheartedly and hopped out of the way. “I was—frightened for you, Elaine.”

Wrong, and wrong again.
“I can't take it back, Uisgebaugh. ”

“I know,” he answered, stepping back and tossing his forelock out of his eyes. His hair had grown. “I know. The Merlin is looking for you.”

I opened my mouth to comment. His blue eyes fixed on me, stopping the words before I shaped them. Old Man Willow stroked a weeping bough down my hair. “It's not done yet,” I said. “I meant to pay the tithe. Pay it off forever, pay it with my own blood and the blood of the other Queens. We'll have to carry on as we have been, raiding Fae half bloods from among the humans and shrinking slowly into nonexistence. Or. There's another answer.”

“You did a lot on Hell's behalf,” he answered. I tried to pull away a second time, and he held my forearms, gently but firmly. “Look at me, Elaine.”

“That is not my name.”

“No,” he said. “You are not Elaine. You're not Seeker anymore, either. You change in my arms and change again, and all I can do is hold you.”

I looked at him. Looked carefully, and saw him worn around the edges, thin and sallow-seeming. “How long since you fed, Uisgebaugh?”

“Recently enough,” he lied. He took my cheeks between his hands and kissed my mouth, hard and sweetly. I gasped, and he held me fast and warmed me in his arms, finally leaning back enough to search my eyes. I closed them, smiling with a sort of passion that left me cold and distant inside. Mountain peaks, ice in the sun. Smiling unconcern, and a ruthless certainty. Somewhere under it, magma shifted and passion burned, but I could not touch it—only feel it far away, like stroking the fur of a wolf with gloved hands. Like feeling the earth under hooves shod in silver, I imagined, rather than warm, living feet.

At last,
I thought,
you know what it means to be Fae.

I kissed Whiskey back, and drew him down by the spring on the blood-fertile earth. Gharne flew up into the tree's branches and left us in what passed for privacy. Old Man Willow, I imagined, had seen it all before.

The white dress wouldn't take a stain, and rode up around my thighs like a blanket of daisies while Whiskey bore me uphill. I headed him out of the ghost-riddled wood, but before we came back into the sunshine something dark strolled deliberately across our path and turned to stare at me.
Gharne,
I thought at first, but it wasn't.

The black dog paused in a framing beam of sunlight, and at first I thought it was a Great Dane or boarhound that had wandered into the wood. It gleamed in the sunlight like oil on peat-stained water, and I almost slid down Whiskey's shoulder and went to it, hand extended. But my stallion's ears pinned and he danced back a step, snorting, and the giant dog's eyes flamed golden and orange.

I knew what I was looking at then. “Black Shuck,” I murmured, and if Whiskey had been wearing a bridle my hands would have tightened on the reins. “Which of us do you suppose he's here for?”

The stallion snorted. “At least it's not a bean sidhe.” His voice was low and worried. I flinched at the tone. He backed away slowly, his hooves soft on the fallow earth, and turned away. “Is he following?”

I looked over my shoulder. The black hound watched us go, tongue lolling. “No,” I said.

Whiskey stepped carefully, slowly away. “Marked for Hell, then,” he said, when the hound vanished behind us with a final glimpse of glaring eyes.

“What else is new? Must it be us?”

“Us,” he said. “Or someone near us.” He snorted, finally tossing his head up and braying wildly, shaking his mane. A sharpness grated in his laughter.

I finally interrupted through the frost that had settled over my heart. “Don't tell Keith about this, Whiskey.”

“Keeping secrets already?” Serious now, with a trace of the old edgy mockery in it. “I wouldn't dream of betraying you, my lady. To your husband, or anyone else.”

The doorman opened the spiral-worked doors, and Carel and I entered the throne room.

The white-horn throne still stood uncovered, slightly to one side of the dais, the velvet drapes drawn back. Somebody had removed the pall I'd torn off of the Queen's deadly chair; I imagined it neatly folded away in a cabinet somewhere, labeled, in a white linen sack.

“Elaine.”

“Carel,” I said, and looked at her. “I'll survive it. And the Daoine Sidhe must have a Queen. Until I sit in that chair, I'm nothing more than a pretender. And I've tasks to undertake that only the ruler can. Besides . . .” I pushed my hair from my eyes. “It can't hurt more than being swallowed by a dragon.”

She sucked her full lips in. The silken flesh of her throat dimpled and smoothed as she swallowed hard. I looked away, up the dais at the throne that crouched there, waiting for me. I thought I saw it breathing, the breaths I couldn't feel swelling my own breast, and moved toward it.

“Elaine.”

Not Carel's voice. My husband's, taut with fear.

“What do you think you're doing?”

“I'd hoped to keep you away until it was done,” I said, and spun on the ball of my foot to look into his eyes.

“Then you shouldn't have sent a page for the crown,” Keith answered, and strolled out of the doorway and across the green-and-azure tiles. “Elaine. Don't do this.”

“Are you ordering me, Your Majesty?” I half hoped he would. I turned away and eyed that throne, poised like some predatory beast, its base just at eye level.

“Yes. I forbid it.”

I began to argue, but—“Indeed.” Carel stepped in between us. “Forbid it. Go ahead. She'll do what she must,” the Merlin said, prophecy dripping from her voice. “Stand in her way. See what it nets you.”

He walked across the stone tiles, bootheels clicking, and laid a hand on the cold flesh of my arm. “I know better,” he answered, and went down on one knee. “Elaine. No. Please.”

My hand was in his hair before I knew it. Carel looked away; I pulled Keith's mouth up to mine and kissed him hard, tasting the softness of his lips. Wine. Sorrow. “Will you stop me, my King?” His eyes on mine were greener than I had recalled. I smiled into them, and I didn't think he saw it.

“Go,” he said, this man, my husband. I heard agony in his voice. “Go. I won't stay to watch it.”

I kissed him again, lips and forehead. His hair was coarse between my fingers.
I loved him once.

It seemed a very long time ago.

“I wish I could love you like I used to,” I said. “You will not stay?”

The door swung open silently and Wolfsbane the page sneaked in, bearing the crown tucked under his arm like a bolster. I hated to see Keith flinch, and reveled in it. “Enough blood,” he said. “Enough for one fucking day, Elaine.”

“Is it ever enough?” The dress clung to my thighs when I turned, sticking to sweat. I shook it loose. Wolfsbane thrust the crown, not into my hands or Keith's, but Carel's. She would not look at me. At either of us. “You don't have to stay,” I said then, as the page slunk toward the massive doors.

Keith touched the underside of his fingers to his lips. I felt the pressure of his eyes on me, then dropping away. “I wasn't there for you last night,” he said, quietly as water droplets falling into a pail.

“Nor I you.” One step up, and two. I felt as if the throne pressed me away from it. I leaned into the pressure, while Carel went to stand before it, feeling nothing. “Go on, Keith. It's not fair to ask you to stay.”

“It's not fair to leave,” he answered, and that was the end of it.

I reached the top of the dais and turned to face him, my back to the chair like a pile of ivory daggers. I shook as if a hard cold had settled over the room. Perhaps one had. I could not feel it. Carel handed me the crown.

“Fair has nothing to do with it,” I said, and sat down on the bloodstained chair.

Mist's white dress was red in every stitch when I managed to stand from its embrace once more.

I'd like to say that throne seemed as nothing after my rebirth in the jaws of the Dragon. There are limits to pain, and truthfully it wasn't as bad as burning, but it was bad enough. When Carel helped me to stand, I felt my injuries sealing themselves behind the passage of the tines. The crown was heavy on my brow when Keith came forward to receive me; strength filled me, subtle and vibrant, and I felt all of Annwn stretched over me living and rich as my skin. My husband took my hand and turned it over to see the new scars marking my flesh. He raised it to his mouth and kissed a healed wound at my wrist.

“How does it feel?”

“Alive,” I said, the heartbeat of Annwn twinned to my own. “And now for Hell,” I said. “See a messenger sent, Carel, please. Tell them their emissary has perished, and that we wish another.”

“Of course,” she answered. I could not read whatever was in her face. She turned away, and I let her go.

“You were going to send the Queens to Hell,” Keith said, when the doors swung closed behind her. I turned and trailed a thumb up one of the antler tines. It didn't part my skin this time, and I smiled.

“To pay off the tithe. Yes. I thought to force the Cat Anna. It can't happen now, though. No one who has been bound and freed can be made to go. And we're a day late anyway. The tithe is due on Halloween.”