“You said that.” Seeker leaned forward and put her hand over Hope's, as if she expected to feel something. Of course, it was far too early. “He can't marry you.”
A dismissive gesture of the young girl's hand. “What's a marriage worth?”
“Whatever you pay for it,” Seeker answered dryly, and Hope gave her a tight little smile and squeezed her hand.
“Seeker. I want to win him free.”
Something flared in Seeker's breath. Something white and hot, eye-wateringly bright. She thought about the throne of twisted antlers, the flaking taint of blood. “He's not bound. Not tangled in her hair. He can't be . . . or he couldn't survive to
be
the Mebd's heir.”
Hope shook her head. “She has his heart.”
“He cares for her.”
“No.” She hummed a bar of music:
“If I had known, if I had known, Tam Lin . . .”
“ âI would have taken your heart,' ” Seeker finished, speaking rather than singing, her voice hollow and soft in her own ears, “ âand put in its place a stone.' Oh. Oh, Hope.”
“Yes,” the girl said, misunderstanding. “She's made him Fae. She's taken his heart away. She has it in a box, and she feeds it little drops of blood, and while she has it there, he can love me but he cannot give me loyalty.”
“And if he cannot, you cannot win him free.”
Hope smiled. “Can we be friends?”
“Yes,” Seeker answered.
Grandchild.
“I think we can.”
The two women sat in silence until jingling footfalls and a calling voice disturbed them. “Seeker?” The Puck's voice, and Seeker stood and stepped out of the little niche to face him.
“Robin. Is your mistress looking for me?”
“Aye,” he said, holding up his hand.
Seeker sighed and took his long fingers carefully. “I don't know why she doesn't just say my name and summon me,” she said.
“It wouldn't be polite.” He led her through the weirdly woven passageways of the palace. “She's in the garden.” Before Seeker could ask further, he opened a glass door of jewel-colored panes and gestured her outside. She'd never stood on this particular patio before; raised up over the lilies and iris of the morning garden and paved in white stone with airy railings, it gave the impression of a low balcony.
Robin drew the door closed behind her; it clicked as it latched. The Mebd, clad in robes as white as the marble under her feet, a veil of down-white lace covering her hair, did not turn toward Seeker. Rather, the Queen stood straight and serene, her hands resting on an alabaster railing carven of stone so fine that even the filtered light made its translucence glow. A sweep of stairs began beside her, leading down, and a young wolf lay across the landing.
He rose when Seeker emerged from the doorway and paced toward her, toenails clicking, and then his wet nose touched cold on her hand. She stroked his head, his fur cool between her fingers.
Oh, Ian.
Somewhere a thrush sang, and the light breeze made the lilies nod and shoulder one another.
He raised eyes to her that glittered like peridot, let his tail sweep on a graceful curve, and turned and trotted down the stairs. “Greetings, Seeker,” the Mebd said. Seeker started to curtsy, but the Queen's gaze remained fixed on the flowers below, so instead Seeker came up beside her and set her hands on the railing too. Seeker studied the Mebd's bone-china profile through the fall of lace stroking the Queen's cheek, and found it as flawless as a slightly smiling mask. As always.
“Your Majesty.”
"You gave MacNeill something.”
“Yes.”
An angled look, a slow flutter of the Queen's long eyelashes behind the veil. “I'd rather,” she said, and Seeker could tell that she phrased it carefully as a suggestion and not a command, “that he not learn more about that blade or its sheath than absolutely necessary.”
“I understand,” she answered. And then the Mebd turned to face Seeker fully, and it seemed the cold railing fell away from Seeker's hands and the earth shifted under her slippers.
Except for a few strands woven into the fine braided circlet which held the Mebd's golden waterfall of hair back from her face, that hair tumbled unbound and combed smooth upon her shoulders. “Do you understand that too?”
“Your Majesty . . .”
“Hush. Yes?”
“Yes.”
The Mebd's mask never shifted. She touched the single intricate braid remaining. “This is not the first time I have taken this precaution. Although it proved unwarranted before. Still, there are a few who have need to know this thing. You are one. You will not speak of it. I will rebraid my hair tonight. But I will tie no knots.”
Seeker nodded, feeling the pull of the compulsion on her skin. “Do you think you can get away with this?”
“They're accustomed to obedience,” the Mebd said with a slight widening of her smile. “I am willing to risk your life, because I know I cannot trust you, else, and I have need of you. Your heart lies with the mortal men, though your family and interests lie with us, but you will learn the truth of it. Daoine and Unseelie, Elaine. Mortal and Fae. Each is less without the other. But I will not risk the lives of the Daoine Sidhe any more than I must. Or pay any prices higher than the ones I pay already.”
Seeker thought the mask slipped for a moment, slipped and then settled back into place again.
Flawless. And cold.
She wondered if there were scars, white as ice on that skin white as snow, covering the fey Queen's neck and back, her thighs and arms. The Mebd looked down, studying the way Seeker's skirts brushed the pale stone. “Pay, Your Majesty?”
“Paid,” she said, and that was all. Whatever emotion stirred behind her eyes faded and fled; she straightened and squared her shoulders as one shouldering a pack, tossing her sun-colored hair behind her shoulders. “Paid, and paid, and paid. Now go. I imagine someone must be waiting for you.”
And so the Seeker returned to her rooms.
I wonder how Nimue felt, when she bound Merlin Ambrosius under the hill through the power of his love for her. I wonder if it was anything like this.
Seeker unfolded her hands and let her fingers trail over the edge of her vanity, smudging idle letters in the wax protecting the ancient wood. Candles and oil lamps warmed the chamber with a flickering glow, making the figures in the wall hangings dance.
Did she wait for him like this? Knowing he would come to her? Knowing he had no choice?
Maybe Ian's right, and it's all destiny we can't escape.
Except she chose. And made you understand that she knew what she was choosing.
Seeker closed her eyes.
Bind the Merlin.
No latitude. Only the command. Her pacing footsteps carried her from the window to the wall and back again, alongside the drawn curtains of the bed.
I didn't expect to
like
the Merlin.
She fiddled with a candle on her desk, swirling the wax inside the thick amber pillar; her fingers dented the heat-softened sides before she forced herself to set it down.
The Mebd has freed her servants. Almost all of her servants. And I'm bound to hold that secret too.
In the back of Seeker's mind, a laughing Mist unfurled wings like the leading edge of a thunderstorm. The old Dragon's earthquake voice rasped and grated in her memory:
“These are the older rules, and even the Mebd must abide themâthat in life one may be bound or bought, but in the end you go to judgment naked, clad only in what you were born with and what you have earned, lessened only by what you have sold or given away. That which is taken by force, for good or for ill, goes unconsidered.”
When the time comes,
she recollected,
remember this conversation.
“Is it time?” She pulled her favorite chair to the fire and settled into it, stilled her jiggling toe by an act of concentration. “Mist, I wish I knew what you were talking about. At least Whiskey I understand.”
Not that I particularly want to.
Seeker shook her head. She'd had no appetite for the supper that the court was attending, as much an organic continuation of Cairbre's carefully machined “impromptu” party as it was a formal meal. Instead she waitedâpoorlyâwearing a path in the rug, a random, fussing circuit around her bedchamber while half her attention remained scattered through the shadows, castlewide.
I need to be cold for this,
she thought.
Cold and clean. Go away, and let the geas do as it will with me.
She closed her eyes.
I can't help it. There's no blame.
No blame.
No, that's not true, is it?
She was standing again, her hand tracing the bas-relief of the green man's mane of oakleaves beside the window. The glass was cold against her cheek, and outside the night was thick with stars and a crescent moon she could have sunk her heart on like a hook.
Keith had said,
“Once you would have known that.”
A moon like a horse's hoofprint.
There's blame, all right. All the blame in the world. Plenty of blame to go around. Whiskey knows it. And the Mebd knows it too. And Mist. I couldâ
She felt after it. Felt the chill of the oblivion, the machinelike automation that had held her twenty-five years. It was still there, restful as the sleep that comes at the end of the long icy struggle in the black, sucking water.
I could go back. Slip back. Lie back and drown.
I hurt less then.
Absently, she picked at the scab on the palm of her hand where the throne had bitten.
Arthur too. Dracula, Hermann.
They were heroes, though.
Seeker winced as she pulled too hard and blood welled up. She pressed her hand to her mouth, tasting blood, remembering the lingering way Whiskey had licked it from her palm.
And Morgan,
Seeker thought, in resignation and realization.
She's got her share of the blame too.
But that was what it was to be Morgan le Fey. You did what you had to do. You sent one son to die on the battlefield, and you sent another, still living, to Hell. You waited and watched and pulled the threads. You bound and enslaved and manipulated and twisted. You spilled blood like wine upon the ground, and you paid the piper, and you paid the toll.
And you never got to say
It wasn't my fault.
Seeker closed her eyes, but the eyes in the shadows beyond her door stayed open: wakeful, watchful.
That's what Mist meant.
She could take her own damnation in both hands. Claim it. Claim her own treachery, and know what it was she chose to do, and why. Because to deny it, to pass the blame . . .
The Mebd could bind Seeker. But she couldn't take her soul. And she couldn't take her name. Those were hers to keep, or to give away.
Or to destroy.
The window glass was as cold as the ice welling inside of her. As cold as the cold place in the center of her where the Mebd's sorrowing, merciless china smile had come to rest, divulging nothing, grieving endlessly.
“I'll take your heart / and make your heart / a stone.”
Seeker shook her hair back. She mouthed Gharne's name, but didn't give it breath. She imagined the little demon was hiding, embarrassed as a cat that Whiskey had caught him.
“I could,” she whispered instead, meaning,
I could crawl back into the darkness and never come out. Following orders. Don't think, don't ever think of what they mean. Be like the Mebd, cold-cast, porcelain and perfect. Above the pain. Look culpability in the eye and smile right back at it.
And then the memory of Mist's chuckle, and Whiskey's knowing glance.
Remember. Remember.
Morgan.
I had a lover. I had a brother. I had a son.
Remember.
“Oh, fuck,” she said. “All right. All right. Damn you all, all ready all right.”
She turned to greet the knock on the door a moment before it fell, the shadows already telling her who was there. Bearing a bottle of wine and a pair of long-stemmed glasses, and a tentative expression.
Carel.
“Fuck.” Seeker raked one hand through her hair. “All right. I'll do it. Eyes wide open and Devil take the hindmost. ”
She opened the door gentlyâso gently.
“I”âCarel held up the bottleâ“thought we should talk.”
“No,” Seeker answered. She took Carel by the wrist and drew the Merlin into the room, and into her arms, and into a darkness that the candles couldn't begin to disperse.
Seeker's lips moved against the other woman's throat. “Is this what you wanted, Carel? Is this your choice?”
“I don't think you're right,” the Merlin said, as the door swung shut behind them, “but I don't want to live in a world without you. But it is only an alliance I offer, and not my soul. You can't have the Dragon.”
“The Mebd will kill me,” Seeker said bitterly, smiling, and took the glasses from the Merlin's hand. The Merlin touched her wrist. “If all stories are true, that must mean that stories can be changed.”
Two wolves arrived at Morgan's cottage as the sun was going down, and Morgan met them at the door with steaming wine and clothes fit for a Faerie Queen's court. Keith didn't ask how she'd known. It never paid to admit mystification where Morgan le Fey was concerned. “We're expected, I take it?”
“My most royal sister is planning an announcement,” she said, gliding barefoot across the slate-tiled, rush-strewn floor of her cottage as Keith belted the black iron spatha over borrowed wool. “You'll want to be there.”
“Morgan.” He heard his own exasperation. Morgan graced him with a smile that seemed assembled of bent rose petals.
Butter wouldn't melt,
Keith thought, and said, “Is there anything you
don't
do out of spite?”