Blood and Iron (8 page)

She stepped back into shadows and sought the third Queen in Faerie: the one who ruled no kingdom, and wore no crown.

On Seeker's first visit, she had expected some gaunt wildwood-wrapped tower or a castle on a cliff overlooking a tempestuous sea. But Morgan le Fey lived in a cottage tidy with thatch in a wildflower meadow. Although the skies of Faerie were gray overhead, Morgan's doorpath bloomed with jonquils and mayflower, drifts of bluets and forget-me-not. And those eternal roses, tumbling over the cottage in a damasked waterfall.

Dragon colors,
Seeker thought.
King's colors too.

A raven with a crooked wing perched on an eave, smiling as well as could be expected. “I've come,” Seeker said to him.

“I knew you would,” someone else replied. Seeker turned to regard the witch framed inside the red-and-gold-painted door.

Morgan was fair as her sleeping half brother, as her legended son and her sister's four were remembered to be fair, even fifteen centuries later. She came to Faerie alongside her brother's body, one of three Queens, old debts forgiven. And the blood of an Elf-knight ran in Morgan's veins as well as the blood of a mortal Queen: twice cuckold, Ygraine's husband.
Ygraine, whose name I bear. Another spiral, like the spirals carven on the doors of the Mebd's great hall.

The sorceress pushed a graying red-blond lock behind her ear and stepped from the shadow of the doorway. “Seeker,” she said. “Have a cup of tisane.”

Morgan wore a cable-knit heathered sweater and canvas trousers dirty at the knees with gardening. She held the vermilion door open, stepping aside so Seeker could precede her.

The doorframe was polished bone-white trunks, waxed shining and lashed together at the crosspiece. The door opened inward and Seeker entered the little house under a tapestry hooked to one side. “It keeps out the draft,” Morgan said, closing the door. Daylight shone through the cracks.

Inside, the cottage was one clean, spacious room. Slates in a dozen colors tiled a rammed-earth floor, half-hidden under woven rush mats, and the unlofted half of the rafters hung thick with ropes of garlic and onions and hanks of herbs. Two wolfhounds cuddled in elegant twin sine curves by the fire, the dog red and the bitch silver. They did not lift their narrow heads when Seeker entered, but lashes long as a girl's flickered over amber eyes. A cauldron of iron hulked lightlessly in the hearth corner, chilling Seeker's bones.

The fieldstone walls were also thick with tapestries: one in particular caught Seeker's eye, showing a white hart and a black in lathered, eye-rolling detail, pursued by hounds and men on horseback. “This is new, isn't it?”

“It is.” The sorceress gestured to the frame that stood in the corner farthest from the hearth, spanning floor to rafters on the unlofted side. “Few see them. The Fae won't venture here, where there's iron. But I need the cauldron for my work.” She strode to the hearth and took two wooden mugs from a peg. While Morgan measured herbs and ladled steaming water from a silver kettle with a dipper made of horn, Seeker walked along the wall, touching the tapestries and examining the other odd objects hooked in among them: a crimson-glazed Japanese tile emblazoned in black with the character for
love;
an iron horseshoe hung to mimic a crescent moon; a sword in an embroidered tapestry sheath, the style of the embroidery matching that of the surrounding tapestries so it almost vanished against the wall. There were bundles of rosemary and strings of glass witch-globes—blue and red and violet, catching the glimmer of light from the hearth and the overcast glow from the unshuttered windows—and a dusty cloak in black-and-gold brocade that Seeker knew better than to take down and try on.

Morgan came up beside her and slid the mug of tisane into her hand. “You admire the sword?”

“It's very old, isn't it?” Seeker reached out with her free hand to touch the leather-wrapped bronze hilt. Serpents chased each other around the abbreviated crosspiece.

“It's a spatha,” Morgan said. “A Roman-style blade. There is a leaf-blade here”—she crossed the floor, rush mats rustling under her footsteps; the fire popped on the hearth—“and here, this one is older. My favorite of the three, a furrowed Celtic blade with the man-hilts. See his head and arms?” She took the sword down from the wall and extended it.

This one was sheathed in plain leather. Seeker took it by the dark wood hilt and slid it from the scabbard. The polished bronze blade gleamed richly in the faltering light. “Interesting symbolism,” she said, and sipped her herbal tea. It tasted of moss, the steam coiling up redolent of leaf mold and memories. The sword's blade protruded from between the legs of the figure that made up the sword's pommel, hilt, and crosspiece.

“Men,” Morgan answered. “You'd think they invented sex. Or violence, for that matter.”

Seeker reversed the blade one-handed and gave it back to the witch, who sheathed it and returned it to the wall. “I thought the Fair Folk invented those things.”

Morgan's hair tumbled in a rippling tawny-red curtain over her shoulders when she laughed, the liquid in her mug splashing her hand. “Perhaps they did,” she gasped. Her eyes met Seeker's, and Seeker looked down from that piercing light.

“Which brings me to my question—”

“How did I know where you were going? I didn't,” Morgan answered. “You realize your mistress has set you up as a stalking-horse, I hope?”

“What mean you?” Seeker paused with her mug at her lips.

“Her public announcement of your task and quest. Foolish, unless she wanted all of Faerie to know. Thus, she must. And she must hope the knowledge will provoke someone to action.”

“And of course, Morgan, you have a theory.”

“I have enough theories to build a bigger house than this from. They avail me not. But your Queen's magic will not reach here and so here we may speak freely.” Morgan pulled a stool away from the narrow table and gestured Seeker to it before seating herself opposite.

“I don't understand your motives.” Seeker hooked her bootheels on the bottom rung of the stool.

The statement drew another of Morgan's rich, enigmatic laughs. The sorceress rolled it on her tongue as if savoring the flavor. “No one has
ever
understood my motives, Seeker. I see no reason why I should become uncomplicated with age.”

I wonder what it is that pleases her so greatly. Not that she'd ever tell me.
“I wondered about the Kelpie's magic.”

“Ah, and the Kelpie may be half the reason the Queen sent you now. Binding him, even though he was weakened and out of place, shows your maturing power.”

“It was you taught me his Name, Morgan. How did you know I would have need of it?”

“It's not the only Name I've taught you. And you'll have need of more.” Morgan rose, taking the two empty mugs with her as she went to freshen the fire. Baskets of wool huddled beside the hearth, a heathered gray and ivory that matched the sweater Morgan wore. The knitting needles protruded from the basket. Morgan tucked them to the side with sinewy hands, stepped over the enormous dogs, and squatted before the fire.

“You've seen these things?”

“Many things,” Morgan answered. The scent of brewing herbs filled the cottage; she pushed her hair behind her ear. “You're thinking,” she said through the smile marking her narrow face, “that the Morgan of the stories surely could not have been me, homely and house-proud, knitting sweaters by the fire.”

Seeker nodded, turning on her stool to face the fire and the woman beside it. “But then, I know the divide between my own office and who I wish I were.”

“Ah. There is that. But I am a woman and not an office.” She stood, vapor coiling like dragon's breath from a mug in either hand. “Have you asked yourself how I came by those swords?”

“I imagine,” Seeker answered, “that I know those stories as well. Which one was Lancelot's?”

It was a risk, of course. But the witch was in a mood for laughing, and she continued as she had begun. “None of them,” she answered around a chuckle. “His I gave back when I was done with it.” Morgan grinned wider, amused by her own pun. “Few now remember that twist of the tale.”

“I've had time for some reading.” Seeker pushed her own dark hair back, mirroring Morgan's gesture without thought.

“I imagine you have.”

I see why men wanted her,
Seeker thought.
You want to make her laugh and look at you. She was famed for her conquests, was she not? Morgan the Enchantress. I'll wager she needed no magic to bring men to her bed.
“I thought he was a later invention.”

“Oh, he was and he wasn't. Bard's tales shape history as much as history shapes the tales. Especially here, where will is the shape of the world. No, you have the lay aright. He came to me in grief, that I would keep him from Gwenhwyfar. ” She slid a mug onto the table by Seeker's hand and sipped her own.

“And?”

“And I did. For a time.” She rolled her shoulders back. “As Calypso kept Odysseus. For a time. Neither Lance nor Arthur had much to recommend them as lovers, though. Gwenhwyfar could have chosen better. But for all her beauty, she was not clever.” And Seeker thought she heard in Morgan's voice a trace of the old disdain of the brilliant— and lonely—woman for the one who is simple, and sought. “No matter. I wanted to warn you of the hands raised against you. And offer assistance.”

“In trade for what?” The tea was hot and soothing; Seeker cradled the mug close in her hands.

“Whatever may come. Alliances are not based solely on an even trade of resources, you realize. Besides, I'd like to meet this Merlin of yours once you catch him.”

“You seem to have no doubts that I'll bend him to my will.”

“Ha.” The witch leaned her shoulder against the tapestried wall. “You will do. Or the Cat Anna will. You know he cannot be bound—not like the fey folk. Not bound with a Name.”

“I know.”

“You'll have to make him
want
to serve you.”

“I know.”

“As Nimue did before you. There are ways and there are ways, Seeker of the Daoine Sidhe.”

“Just tell me where to find him,” Seeker said, pushing her mug aside. “I'll worry at the rest when the time comes.”

Seeker returned to the iron world on a busy, winding, mostly residential street in Connecticut. A cold wind sailed maple leaves in tawny, cinnabar, and crimson through the outside lights of a housefront bar. The same night breeze ruffled Seeker's dark hair and set the green, orange, and gold sign above the door swinging.
“A place called the Hungry Tiger,”
Morgan had said, pale lips curving beneath her aristocratic nose. Seeker climbed three narrow steps to the jade-colored door, paid the bouncer eight paper dollars that would crumble into dead leaves in the morning, and stepped through the entryway and inside.

She paused as she entered, extending her awareness
otherwise,
wondering if she would feel
this
quarry. The bar was dark and smoky, paneled in raw oak and divided lengthwise by an awkward half-wall. Morgan's cottage was bigger inside than the main part of the bar, although there was an extension out back—a greenhouse of sorts, cantilevered off the hill, arranged as a dining room. Seeker knew the layout from the shadows: the kitchen, the narrow basement, the rooms upstairs; the couple kissing in the corner near the stage and the flannel-shirted steamfitter who shot her an admiring glance as he lit a cigarette beside the bar.

Ripples. Ripples and shadows, shattered visions not-quite-resolving into the crystalline clarity, the reality of prey. Seeker blinked, shook her head, and stepped toward the bar, her blue jeans and boots blending with the crowd. The bar was busy for a Thursday night; the sharp vinegar tang of buffalo wings reached her through the reek of smoke. The girl behind the bar wore black jeans and a knotted shirt. Seeker leaned over the scarred wood surface and ordered a Ballantine's.

The camouflage of the beer in her hand, she straightened and scanned the room, her eye skipping over men and women in blue jeans, boots, and leather or denim jackets. Beyond the half-height partition a five-member band was setting up on a stage roughly the size of a lap desk. Quarters were so tight the keyboardist was crammed half behind the drummer in the corner; two guitarists and a bass player paced the dime-sized space between their amps, taping and tie-wrapping cords.

Seeker stepped forward, leaning over the partition between support pillars and pretending to watch the musicians. The bassist caught her eye: a rugged-looking blond, neat beard redder, with broad shoulders and nimble hands.
It could be one of the musicians.
The lead guitarist was too old, she guessed—a stocky round-cheeked black man in his fifties—and so was the rhythm guitar. The keyboardist had an islander look and might have been thirty, thirty-three, but she was a woman, balancing a snifter of brandy in one hand while she crawled under patch cords. The drummer was another possibility, burly and swarthy, black curls poking through the open collar of his shirt.

The shadows showed her nothing. She pushed off the wall and passed through the bar into the fern-hung greenhouse. Something little moved in the shadows, scampered away under a bench, but Seeker shrugged. Brownies or bogeys: she didn't care tonight that they'd found a corner to persist in. She sauntered to the back wall and stared over the moonlit parking lot and the darkness of a municipal park beyond. The night lay motionless and cold beyond the glass, and Seeker cast her awareness out into the shadows beyond it.

In the front room of the bar, the music began. And Seeker, picking the unmistakable strain of magic out of the hard-driving melody of an old blues standard, turned lightly on her toes and walked back into the bar as if drawn on a thread, leaving her beer forgotten on the window ledge.