Cold Iron Page 24

  Chapter 12

  Beth sat bolt upright in terror. She was naked. On silk sheets. In an unfamiliar bed. She had no idea where she was. Or what had happened to her.

  The air was warm and sweet with newly cut hay, the light filtering through the snowy white bed curtains was soft and diffuse. She was swaddled in silk. Silk sheets, silk pillows, silk bed curtains. Carved and gilded bedposts supported a carved and gilded canopy worthy of a papal baldachin. The rococo paneling she glimpsed beyond the bed hangings would have been entirely at home in Versailles. The domed and painted ceiling played host to a pantheon of frolicking gods and their mortal conquests, disporting themselves across blue skies on sunlit clouds.

  She was a long, long way from home. “This isn’t New Hampshire,” she said out loud.

  “Would you have preferred that I left you to die?” The voice came from the other side of the bed. The Prince Consort lounged in a gilded velvet chair, his elegant court shoes resting on a footstool. The coat he wore today was slubbed gold silk with gored panels of wire embroidery. It was open at the waist, revealing the bare skin of his chest. His long black hair was plaited with the silver beads she remembered from the island, pale and glittering.

  He was so beautiful, her teeth ached.

  And she remembered. The desperate journey to Portsmouth with Helene. Her friend’s selfless gesture. The ploy that had bought her enough time to reach the clinic. Frank, anxious and disheveled. Egan appearing from behind the carriage house. Backing her into the hall. The heady rush of the drug and then—

  “No,” she said out loud. The blood and the pain and the loss and that terrible, wonderful flood of knowledge. Conn had come, and Miach. The sorcerer had given her as much power as he could spare, and Conn and Miach and Elada had gone out to face long odds and defend her.

  All for nothing, their brave fight, if she died. And she had been dying, with life-giving earth and grass and trees just beyond her grasp.

  “What happened?” she asked.

  The Prince Consort rose gracefully. Everything he did was graceful, a perfection of form and function. He came to stand at her side of the bed and she gathered handfuls of silk to cover herself.

  “Coyness,” he said, “doesn’t suit you. We made a bargain.”

  She remembered.

  The cold stone of the terrace. His dreadful beauty towering over her. The blood running down her legs, her life running out of her.

  “You are finally of use to me, little Druid. What a pity you won’t live out the hour, that you won’t even make it down the stairs,” he said, leaning against the weathered balustrade and looking out over the rolling lawns.

  She knew he was right.

  “I could carry you,” he went on. “There’s a green patch over there, sunlit, so verdant you can taste it in the air. Sage and sassafras. Would you like that, little Druid?”

  “Yes.” More than anything.

  He knelt on the second stair, still so tall, even crouched like this, that she had to look up to see him. “Then let us make a bargain,” he said.

  “I won’t summon the Court.” Her ancestors had possessed the courage to face extinction rather than that.

  “We’ll speak of our reunion with the Court later. If I carry you out to the lawn, you must accept a geis never to draw from me without my explicit permission.”

  She opened her mouth to speak, to agree.

  He forestalled her. “Do not accept this lightly. You are wholly Druid now, bound by the same forces as the Fae. Any oath you swear will be binding. To break it will result in your destruction. What we call magic, your age has renamed physics. Both are exchanges of matter and energy. And both are bound by immutable laws. Think before you accept this obligation.”

  She thought. Where there was life, there was hope. She swore.

  He lifted her, unconcerned about the blood soiling his silk finery, and carried her down the slick marble stairs. She felt the sunlight on her face, so bright it blinded her after the darkness of the porch, smelled the green grass in the air, felt the soft earth beneath her back as he lowered her to the ground.

  She drew. The earth beneath her trembled. The trees at the edge of the lawn groaned and split. Her body drank in the energy. Life. She was going to live. She opened her eyes. She was lying in a burnt brown circle of grass edged by broken trees. Red and gold leaves swirled around her, dead maple and birch shedding their foliage in a violent shower of color.

  The bleeding had stopped. She was kitten weak from the trauma, and there was no more energy left within her reach. But she was alive.

  The Prince Consort strolled across the lawn, his court shoes whispering through the dead grass. “Remember your oath, little Druid,” he said, and caught her, limp as a rag doll, up in his arms once more. “Take a deep breath,” he said.

  She didn’t.

  He passed.

  She wanted to die. He sank through the earth and she was buried alive, suffocating, pressed to death, every inch of her body smothered first by soil, then rock, then water, then wood, then grass, then cold, cold granite, and then . . . free.

  She was free. They were out. Her mind screamed while her lungs heaved. She breathed but she couldn’t feel it. There was air but she couldn’t taste it. There was light but she couldn’t understand what she saw. Light and marble and paint and gold and grandeur beyond all comprehension after darkness and death, and she went for a brief second completely mad.

  Mercifully, as though tripping a fuse, her overloaded senses flared and failed. She lost consciousness.

  And woke up here. The memory of the journey, and the journey’s end, was so vivid she had stopped breathing.

  The Prince Consort was still standing beside the bed.

  “You passed. And you took me with you,” she said.

  “Yes. Did you enjoy it?”

  “No.” She never wanted to do that again. Ever. “I thought the Fae couldn’t carry much with them when they passed.”

  “Most can’t. I am, you may find, in all ways extraordinary,” he said. “As are you, little Druid. You passed with a Fae and you did not lose your mind. For very long, anyway.”

  Miach had called him dangerous, but the word was insufficient to describe this creature.

  He pushed back the bed curtain that had been shielding her and sat on the edge of the mattress. Now that she was not covered in blood, she could smell him. Sunlight and oranges. Sweet, with a hint of spice. Cinnamon, perhaps. He was not moon pale, like Conn, but golden. Tanned. Perfectly, evenly tanned. His chest was smooth and hairless, the muscles like cast bronze beneath the softer gold of his open jacket.

  She was staring at him. She shook herself. Staring at him was wrong. Being in his bed was wrong. Reflexively, she felt for the iron rings in her ears. They were gone.

  “How did you take my earrings?” she said. “They were iron. You can’t touch iron.” And if iron didn’t work, she had no defense against this creature but her will.

  “My human servants removed them,” he explained. “And bathed you and made you comfortable.”

  She shifted. They’d done more than bathe her. Her skin was oiled and scented. Her body felt smooth and hairless. Everywhere. His servants hadn’t done that for her comfort, but for his pleasure. The thought made her panic.

  “Your glamour shouldn’t affect me like this,” she said desperately. “I have my power now.” She would never forget the cost of it. It sobered her for a second, helped her to see him clearly. If his beauty surpassed Conn’s, so by several orders of magnitude did his cruelty.

  “You have acquired the Druidic learning, true, but you remain weak from your ordeal, and I can keep you so until you see reason. You are a fledgling sorceress, Beth, and I am the most desirable creature the Fae have ever produced. The only Fae able to captivate and satisfy the queen. Most of my own kind covet me. No mortal has ever denied
me.”

  His hand whipped out and yanked the sheet away from her breasts. She snatched it back, scrambled away from him to the center of the bed. “There’s a first time for everything,” she said. “Where is Conn?”

  “He has the Summoner now, Beth, and is in compliance with his geis. Dear, treacherous Conn has no further use for you.”

  “That isn’t true. He came for me.”

  “He came for the Summoner. You have known Conn a few short weeks. I have known him for millennia. Now that he has the sword, he will return to his barrow and nurse his dusty grievances against the Court. He has done precious little else for two thousand years, and the members of my race are nothing if not creatures of habit.”

  “Conn has changed.” She was sure of it. He had given her the earrings. Bound himself to her with an oath.

  But she had released him from that vow . . .

  “Has he? While you lay bleeding out your life, he was exacting revenge for a slight that happened two thousand years ago. Revenge for another woman—and to assuage his own wounded pride. He was outside slicing Donal into ribbons, slowly, and savoring it. Donal, who was among those present when Conn’s daughter was destroyed.”

  She had lain there so long, come so close to death . . . but doubt was a weapon the prince could use against her. “Good, then. I’m sure Donal deserved everything he got.” A chilling thought struck her. “Were you there, too?”

  “No. But not because I did not care for the sport. The queen is a jealous bitch—and let us just say that Conn’s daughter had all of his beauty and none of his boorishness.”

  She could see why Conn had wanted his whole race punished. It was like what the landlady in Clonmel had said. “You’re as rotten inside as you are beautiful without,” Beth repeated.

  The Prince Consort laughed. “Whatever romantic notions you entertain about the Betrayer, know this. He is Fae to the core. He exults in violence. He is ancient and jaded, and he fucked you because it was a dangerous thrill to toy with a toothless Druid. But there is nothing at all appealing to the Fae in bedding a creature that can drain us with a touch. Conn would not have you now if you begged him.”

  “I’m not that easily manipulated,” she said. “Conn loves me.”

  “Such words and affectations come easily to the Fae. Miach wanted you as well, did he not? But only when you were powerless. We have all suffered at the hands of the Druids. Demeaning one who didn’t even know what she was, enslaving her with pleasure, keeping her in ignorance, would be a nearly irresistible temptation to any Fae. They wanted you for what you were, not who you were. That is not love. It is lust. Or a mere diversion. And they will not want you now. You have become a true Druid, a creature with the power to bend and banish us, the stuff of our collective nightmares. You are everything the Fae fear most.”

  There was some truth to what he said. Conn had admitted as much. But all attraction was based, at first, on the superficial. The Prince Consort was trying to wear her down for his own purposes. She did not imagine for one second that things would ever be the same with Conn. The power inside her was wondrous and exciting—but also cruel and intoxicating. There was a very real possibility Conn would not love what she had become, but she could not afford to show even a sliver of doubt to the beautiful Fae poised on the edge of the bed.

  “If that’s true, then why don’t you fear me?”

  “You swore an oath not to draw from me without my permission. And I am the only Fae free who does not bear the mark of Druid obedience.” He shrugged out of his coat, revealing the unblemished expanse of his chest, his arms, the smooth planes of his stomach.

  “How?’ she asked.

  “An enchantment even the Druids could not break. My queen desired it done. I hated her for it at the time, because gaesa are not only obligations and curses, they can be brave undertakings, marks of prowess. To be denied the needle and knife was like being gelded.”

  “You make them sound like dueling scars,” she said.

  He reached across the bed and touched the quicksilver on her shoulder. It pulsed in response to him. And desire stirred, in spite of her resolve, in spite of the fact that this same man had once injured her, caused her excruciating pain.

  “Would you be rid of his mark now if you could be?” he asked.

  No. She wouldn’t. It was part of her. She had endured it, and that made her proud, taught her that she could do what she set out to do. It was a physical connection to the hidden world of the Fae, a tangible symbol of the birthright she had been denied, and only now—with her unborn child’s sacrifice—reclaimed. She watched his finger trace it. She couldn’t bat him away without relinquishing the sheet, but under it her nipples were tightening into hard peaks. The silver began to dance under his fingertips, the way it did for Conn.

  “No.”

  “I’ve seen inside your mind, Beth. You have always known you were different. Even from your family. They shared your Druid blood, but not the spark to seek us out. That is what makes you unique. Not your heritage. We didn’t kill you all, try as we might. There must be thousands of Druid descendants in the world. You are special because you were clever and brave enough to find the Fae. Think how many generations of your family must have passed, content with their lot. Others of your line must have felt the stirring of their power, and turned away from it, out of fear. But not you. How lonely you must have been as a child. Bookish Beth. Always shut up in the parlor with some dusty tome. They mocked you, the people who should have loved you best. Mocked your accomplishments. Mocked your ambitions. And when you won that scholarship to college, told them what you were going to study and where, they laughed at you for putting on airs. They broke you, your family. Not Frank Carter or Jack Egan—you were easy prey by the time they came along. It was your family who convinced you that you had no worth.”

  It was all true. Every last word of it. Frank had never been the real cause of her problems. He had only been a symptom. It was the vilest possible weapon to use against her, the most difficult to deflect. She fought the despair welling up inside her. The oldest wounds were the deepest.

  “They didn’t know,” she countered. “My family didn’t know what they were, what I was. They wanted what was best for me. They thought they were protecting me from hurt and disappointment.”

  “No. They knew what they were doing. They were tearing you down to their level. They told you that you were getting above yourself, that no good would come of aiming for things above your station. That people like you didn’t go to university or become scholars. And when your husband betrayed you, they clucked and crowed and told you that you’d gotten what you deserved for marrying out of your league. Even when you tried to tell them what Egan and Frank did to you that night, when you most needed someone to understand—to care—your family didn’t listen. Because in their minds you brought it all on yourself.”

  “Stop it.”

  He was sitting on the bed now, and she could feel the heat of his bare golden skin. He’d tried to seduce her with pleasure. Now he was using old hurts to inflict new pain, and holding out the promise of warmth and understanding.

  “The Fae have been calling to your Druid blood all your life. The power inside you comes from us. We are a part of you. Without the Court, you will always be an outsider, you will never fit into the human world. If the Court returns, you will finally belong. More than that. Now, in this world, you must bow and scrape to men of limited imagination like the cretin who directs your museum. You are forced to walk in the shadow of beauties like your friend Helene. When the Court rules once more, you will bow to none but the Fae.” He stroked up her shoulder, pushed a loose tendril of hair behind her ear. “To none but me, if you so desire.”

  “I refused servitude with Conn. Why would I suffer it with you?”

  “We all must bow to someone, Beth. Our place in the hierarchy derives from that of our master. Or in my ca
se, mistress. I defer to no one but the queen. Conn was the first Fae you met, and it was natural that you should want him. He was once a great champion, and so a worthy conquest for you, but there is so much more to us, and to you, than one Fae’s vendetta. Conn is like your family. He would keep you weak and powerless, deny you your birthright. Keep you all for himself. His grievance with the Fae Court is not yours. You were born to taste the splendors of the Court, and without them, you will never be whole.”

  “The splendors of your Court included rape, torture, and murder. That’s why the Druids banished you.”

  “The Court is the culmination of all things: beauty, pleasure, pain. I grant you, there were excesses. Where there is power, it will always be so. The Druids proved no less cruel when they gained the upper hand. They were right to want to curb us, but not to punish us so. We would have agreed to their demands. We will agree to them still.”

  “Are you trying to bargain with me?”

  “I would rather convince you that you belong with the Fae,” he said. “But if you prefer, we will bargain.”

  She had bargained with him before. “On the island you promised that Brian wouldn’t touch Helene. But you’d already spotted or sensed Miach’s mark on her. You knew he couldn’t touch her.”

  “I only said that Miach’s son would not molest the woman,” the prince pointed out with a pretty shrug. “I never said I would do anything to affect the matter. So you see it was a fair bargain.”

  “Only to the mind of a Fae.”

  “Or a Druid’s. You can no longer deny what you are, Beth. You are a true Druid now, birthed in blood sacrifice, as of old. You can never be anything less. But you are the only one of your kind. More alone than you have ever been. There is no place for you in the mundane world anymore. The power awake in you has but one proper home, and that is in the Fae Court.”

  Elada was searching the gardens and sheds.

  “He won’t find her,” Conn said. “The Prince Consort has taken her. He will have passed with her.”