Authors: Scott V. Duff
“Um, where exactly is ‘here’?” Harmond asked, obliquely looking about the room.
“Didn’t Messner or Mike explain?” I asked incredulously. “Oh, well, from the hotel in Dublin, I brought you back to the manor you drove to this afternoon, the one Gordon kicked you out of, remember?” Harmond and Morelli both nodded assent. “Middle of a field, well-lit, with a few hundred, brightly clothed people milling around, right? Then this big stone thing appeared in the middle and the grass got a little greener and the light in the field changed? That was a knowe, a part of my realm brought to Earth so people could visit it. Mike and his men let you stay in the knowe long enough to hear the translation of the monuments then they brought you here and left you in Ellorn’s care. You passed from the knowe into Gilán. So at the moment, you are in my Palace in Gilán.”
“We are…” Harmond gulped at the thought of it, “no longer in Ireland?”
I shook my head slowly. “No.” Watching them as they worked their way through the idea was quite humorous. “What did you think it meant to be a faery lord if it didn’t mean you traveled to a faery world to see him, gentlemen? And while I’m on the subject, why would you think that I wouldn’t be willing to tell the world who I am?”
“Our advisors say that the Unseelie Accords prohibit the Faery from announcing their existence publicly.”
“But as we found out tonight, the Accords cannot bind me.”
“What does that mean, exactly?” Morelli asked, his eyes squinted and thin eyebrows knitted tightly together. It gave him a severe look to his mid-fifties face.
“Hmm. I would have thought that rather obvious. If the Unseelie Accords cannot bind me, then anything that the Accords prohibit is perfectly within my discretion to do. That is precisely what that means, Colonel Morelli.”
“You have no governing body?” Harmond asked.
“I am my governing body, General. I gotta say, guys, your lack of grasp for the obvious is not impressing me.”
“It’s not impressing me, either,” Harmond said. “So basically what I’m dealing with is a seventeen year old man with extremely powerful abilities who is very ticked off at the United States government. You aren’t bound under any of the same customs and conditions as others of your kind.”
I grunted softly and said, “That last statement is more complex than you think, General. Specifically, no, I am not bound in the sense that, say, Mr. Fuller or the Faery Queens would use the word. I am however bound to customs and conditions in the same manner that you are, sir. That is the reason I do not take kindly to being treated poorly. There is a very small limit to what I can do over there because I chose to follow certain conditions and restrictions. For instance, I don’t invade people’s privacy. I don’t invade military bases and kidnap personnel just for fun. I have already paid my expected quarterly income taxes, personal as well as business. In short, I am a model United States citizen.”
I was on a roll and I wasn’t going to let up on them. “And yet, when my brothers and I just happen to look into my First’s family’s home, we find evidence of blood magic. That led us to where Pennington and his men were trying to locate my home. There was also a blood mage trying to locate us using two different spells of particular nasty violence. Now, tell me, how does this model, seventeen-year-old citizen deserve being attacked by over four hundred soldiers? What could I have done in seventeen years to have become so hated?”
“Your brothers, perhaps?” Morelli suggested weakly.
“Far too few people even know my brothers exist, even Peter,” I said. “We are becoming more well known as a group as we act together. They were after me, specifically. I have records that show three separate searches for a house in my name at the county records office. All three searches failed, though. The satellites they aimed at the vicinity could never seem to lock onto my house for some reason. They were about to just overrun the territory. Invade innocent people’s houses, just to find mine.” I looked at Byrnes. He watched Morelli closer than Harmond, barely giving him a glance.
“Wouldn’t you say that a reasonable but far too quick synopsis, Major?” I asked him, wanting to see where the distraction took him.
“Yes, sir,” Major Byrnes answered me, meeting my gaze quickly before returning to Colonel Morelli. “Details may change the tenor of individual cases on our end, but do little to change the outcome.”
“Thanks, Major,” I said curtly, not quite seeing his fascination, but I wasn’t willing to dip down into their minds just yet. “Can’t have that, General. Too many innocent lives would have been lost. Those people are mostly farmers, General, who’ve worked their lands hard for years. I’d only been there for eight, nine months, by that time. I didn’t feel that they deserved to die for that. So I stopped the forces aimed to do that.
“Now, when I complain to law enforcement officials about this, it’s by pure chance that I catch my normal sources with their pants down. Nothing bad, really, just a changing of the shifts, but unfortunately at the time, I couldn’t wait and they weren’t equipped to handle the problem I had at the time anyway. Someone else had to come in and that turned out to be quite fortuitous for me and this is where I tie the ‘bound to customs and conditions’ into all of this and bring this rant together.
“You see, after we went to the camp where our evidence pointed to blood magic, we found the owner of the land driven quite mad by the blood mage and a battalion’s equipment if not its men being unconstitutionally billeted on his land. When the attending General was confronted, he made no attempt to stand down, even when faced with complete failure of his mission. He lost his head for that right.
“That was one of my decisions to not just stand around and let my government officials do something about a problem that was occurring in my backyard. How, exactly, would the County Sheriff’s office have handled the Army? And very likely, they’d have thought me a crackpot!”
Harmond tried to say something, but I cut him off. “I’m not through yet! So I call in the two federal law enforcement groups that I have some pull with and while neither of them knows exactly what to do, both of them stepped up and come in to help. Well, one of them does, the other one is coming in to play games as I soon found out. Still, I leave these now-dependent soldiers in their hands and though I really don’t have any reason to do so, I check back hours later and find out that someone from your branch of five-sided idiots has landed there and claimed preeminence. His plan was to subsume the whole group back into the military and forget the whole thing ever happened. Does that sound like a good idea to you, General Harmond? Or you, Colonel?”
“Unfortunately, I can understand why it was considered,” Harmond said honestly.
“Yeah, I bet. It solved a lot of problems for you guys, didn’t it? Except the most obvious ones. You missed those completely. I had to point those out to Echols. So Colonel Black-Ops went for his next option, forcing me to once again choose to step outside of those customs and conditions of a model citizen, or maybe going steps beyond them. I removed the soldiers before he was able to kill them rather than stand by and let it happen.
“So, the moral of this story is to point out quite strongly that I am willing to live with the same terms and conditions as are locally invoked provided they are fairly enforced. But I will be pushed only so far before I push back.”
“So these men aren’t your prisoners?” Morelli asked, confused.
“No, they are definitely prisoners awaiting trial, Colonel,” I said. “But they are here under my protection. Once I’m certain they won’t be summarily shot before they even have a chance to say anything, I am more than happy to return them to whoever is actually responsible for them. Some of them are merely guilty of being supremely stupid, while others have more serious crimes to answer for.”
“So… you aren’t actually asking for treason on everyone?” Harmond asked cautiously.
“No,” I admitted for the first time, though I’d known pretty much all along. “I will demand treason on one case only, posthumously. The rest can be decided later on a per case basis.” Byrnes’ relief was evident, like a smoke clearing the room, the tension leaving his body and his aura was blatant.
“Look at him!” Jimmy exclaimed laughingly, pointing at Byrnes. “He’s almost a puddle on the floor!”
“He’s been worried about his men, Jimmy,” I said mildly, watching Harmond and Morelli as I spoke. It was an odd triangle of watchers, me on them, them on him and him on me. “The Army has been taking care of him for a long time and in a lot of ways, he’s been a good soldier for them. When they turned their backs on him, tried to kill him for doing what he thought he was supposed to be doing. His men still looked to him for support, though, so being the good officer that he is and staying as within the lines as he could, he kept his act together, saw to the needs of his men first, and worried about himself second. I believe the penalty for treason is death by firing squad?”
“Only in times of war, Lord Daybreak,” Morelli corrected me. “Mostly now it’s life in prison. I say that like it happens every day…”
“Besides, there was only one man trying to put his version of the United States in place,” I said firmly. “Everybody else was either just scared to death of us or too stupid to know better. Let the punishment fit the crime more appropriately.”
“That is quite a relief, Lord Daybreak,” General Harmond said, clasping his hands together on the table in front of him. Morelli mirrored his motions almost immediately and nodded, looking at me to gauge my sincerity.
“And now that you’ve gotten an agreement in principle from me, let’s call it a night,” I said tiredly, standing. “It’s later than you think and morning announces itself prominently in the Palace.” Jimmy and Byrnes both snickered at me.
“Lord?” Laston asked as he and everyone else stood with me. “May I have a word in private before you leave?”
Yes, Laston, what is it?
I sent across the link of the geas.
“Major Byrnes, would you join us in the hall, please?” Laston asked as he hopped down from the table, then answered my query with
Major Byrnes has a request that I cannot answer, Lord Daybreak. I thought it a good idea to bring the matter to your attention, instead.
“Ellorn, would you give us a moment, then escort the General and the Colonel back to their quarters, please?” I asked the attentive brownie. “Gentlemen, we can continue this, or rather restart this, in the morning with Agent Messner present to either agree or disagree with your terms. Then there’s the matter of the rest of what I want and, yes, gentlemen, I do want something out of all of this crap, but if I don’t get some sleep, I’m going to be quite grumpy and disagreeable.” Then I followed Laston and Byrnes out into the hall, glancing first at Byrnes then squatting down beside Laston. I felt him press his authority out into the hallway and seal us in, Jimmy just behind me inside Laston’s lines.
“Yes, Laston?” I asked, very curious what these incredibly adaptive creatures felt they couldn’t handle.
“Just prior to entering this meeting, Major Byrnes requested political asylum for many of his men,” Laston said plainly. “I am unsure how to proceed, Lord.” My jaw fell open. I didn’t know how to react to that either. When I looked back at Jimmy, he was staring at Byrnes in shock.
“That would, indeed, be something to bring to my attention, Laston,” I said, slowly, to give me some time to think. Not enough, though. “I’m afraid I don’t know how to respond or proceed on that, myself. Let me think about it for a while, perhaps speak with Major Byrnes about it.” I stood up staring at the man as he watched me, nervous and scared, but unflinching. “Jimmy, would you grab the brandy and some glasses and follow us, please?”
I shifted Byrnes with me to a small alcove in my office with three facing comfortable chairs and a coffee table between them. “Bathroom’s that way if you want it,” I said, waving in an off-hand way behind him as I fell into the cushions of the biggest of the three chairs. He turned and disappeared without a word. Blissful silence reigned for three full minutes before Jimmy shifted in. He set three glasses down on the table and poured all three slightly too full, then put the nearly empty bottle on the table behind them. Glancing at me, I pointed one way and he went the other, heading for one of the other bathrooms.
The warmth of the first sip of brandy was just setting in when they returned simultaneously. Jimmy had less time and a greater distance so he must be feeling protective. As they picked up their glasses and sat, though, it gave me a chance to view the uniform that Byrnes wore and see that it was styled intentionally off of Jimmy’s.
“Perhaps, Major, we should start with what you asked Laston,” I said politely and calmly. “Ask me the same question so I am making no mistake about what you’re asking of me, please.” I took a sip of Richard’s fine brandy then, letting it sit on my tongue a moment and evaporate slightly like Peter taught me. Then I let it wash down my throat. It was a wonderful brandy. The addition of elven powers had excellent effect on my palate.
“When he came to me to tell me that there would probably be visitors this evening in reference to our cases, I asked him if you would consider giving my men political asylum,” Byrnes said coolly, meeting my eyes the entire time. I let the question sink in for a moment, considering it and wondering just what the implications might be.
“Just your men?” Jimmy asked, dropping his glass before drinking. “Not for you as well, but just for your men? Why, Major?”