Chapter Twelve #2
No passed drinks or mocking laughter at the telly, but Antonio hadn’t started to squint as if surrounded by blinding amounts of magic. So perhaps just as real as memory, if far more hunting lodge-esque.
The beithir, Zyr, was a hulking blonde man in a sweater vest, comfortably settled on one of the large chairs.
A third entry for Antonio’s hot, blond, white guy scale, as he admitted to dubbing Wyte and Nimai.
This one came equipped with a set of curling silver horns and metallic blue scales down his neck and over his shoulders, punctuated with a barbed, snakelike tail. No fluffy ears or insincere smiles.
In fact, the beithir made no noise at all. Merely kept his eyes on his book. Declan exchanged a look with Antonio, an eyebrow arched. The silence stretched, taut and near deafening.
“Well?” The beithir hadn’t looked up. His voice was a low rumble, like the thunder outside. He turned a page in his book with a surprisingly careful claw. “Did you come here to stare or do you want something?”
“A bit rustic, precious,” Aisling had said back at home, pushing an old, warded scroll wrapped in oilskin at him. “He’s not a people person. A little brusque. Be polite. Don’t touch his things. Zyr isn’t a friend, hummingbird. He’s a colleague. Don’t treat him as one of your peers.”
“Mother raised me with a healthy respect when it came to interrupting someone with a book,” Declan said, ignoring Aisling’s advice.
He stepped around a sculpture and a small side table to be within reach of the man, offering him the scroll.
“She sends her regards and appreciation for speaking with us.”
“Ah. A bribe.” Zyr raised his gaze at last, setting his book aside. A worn, old pulp novel with a garish cover. A silver ship. A leering monster. A screaming woman clutched in its grasp.
He took the wrapped package, uncovering the scroll without opening it. A sigh, somewhere between awe and regret, before he rewrapped it and handed it back to Declan.
“Aisling must be fond of you, pup, to call in a debt while inviting another.”
“I go by Declan. This is Antonio, my bond.” Declan gestured to Antonio, and the human stepped closer, his shoulder bumping Declan’s in solidarity.
His approach must have caught the beithir’s attention, because Zyr looked away from Declan–or, more pointedly, the scroll–to focus on Declan’s bond. Lightning danced in his pupils with the study, nostrils flared.
“Didn’t come to be stared at, either,” Antonio said into the too-long silence, short. His fingers chased the shape of a bracelet, following it around his wrist.
“How interesting,” Zyr murmured, sounding as if he spoke mostly to himself. “You reek of iron. Iron and glass.” The beithir shook his head, looking between them. “What idiot promises led you to bond your soul to a sluagh, Hollow?”
Antonio bristled, his indignation a coarse, sweet burn in the bond. When he spoke, the hostility in his voice was clear. “Ones I don’t regret.”
It took everything in Declan to not reach out and drag Antonio into a kiss. Inappropriate, when face-to-face with a prickly unseelie almost as old as the convergence itself.
And yet.
His fingers nearly twitched with the want of it. Antonio, fierce and spiky on behalf of Declan and his own decisions. Declan warmed with it. Sun scorched iron and bold, even when afraid.
It was…
He couldn’t name it. The only thing Declan knew was that defensive lack of regret, and he needed to hold himself back from being ridiculous.
“Nor do I,” he added, the only answer he could give. “Antonio knows his own mind and business. As I do mine.”
Antonio bumped his shoulder to Declan’s, silent acknowledgement, and it made the world feel all the more solid.
Zyr looked between the two of them, his mostly impassive expression turning thoughtful. Almost curious, for a second. Then he picked up his book, flicking back to his page with careful talons. Human and sluagh exchanged a glance, quiet, until he stopped flipping and raised his gaze again.
“Why did Aisling send you to me?”
“Precedent,” Declan replied. “I’ve records on human and fae bonds, but nothing in depth on what they did. It’s easier to find information on changeling prophecies than whether or not a human-fae bond ever had a seat of relative influence.”
There had to be some way to make an entry onto the Council, after all. Short of reestablishing the courts, there was only the Council.
“Dangerous questions,” was the answer, as thunder rolled in the distance. Or perhaps only in the beithir’s voice. “And stupid ones. Tell me what you want, hound. And don’t play games. I dislike being fucked with.”
“We need a seat on the Council. It’s as simple and complicated as that.” Declan raised his hands, palm up, at Zyr’s bone-shaking growl. “We have no voice on the Council. They’re looking into making that permanent by requiring a majority vote of the entire Council for new appointments.”
Zyr looked back to his book, the very picture of disinterest save for the agitated flick of his tail. He curled it around the foot of his chair after the second flick.
“You intend to speak for all of ‘us,’ do you?”
“Someone bloody has to. There’s talk of humans corrupting the unseelie.
The Council attempted to tell the head of a House their bond wasn’t valid due to him having been previously bonded, and the new bond a human.
Precedent was needed. And yet, they put an oathbreaker in a seat after he attempted to damage the mortal’s mind.
It’s bleeding into everything.” Declan let out a sharp, harsh breath, head shaking.
Antonio’s warm affection hit like a freighter on the heels of Declan’s little tantrum. Impassioned, emotional dramatics were apparently the way to his heart. Declan would … He would feel a lot of things about it. Later. Soon.
“What he said,” Antonio added, stubborn. “With a side of, ‘sticking with the guy who asked instead of the one who tried to kidnap me.’ ”
“Something needs to change. The unseelie need a voice before the whole thing blows up again.”
“Unseelie?” Zyr asked, no longer pretending to read. Challenge lurked in his tone, too front and center to be anything but intentional. “We’re all one court now, I’m told.”
“So say the people making the rules,” Declan agreed, no less edged. “All of them would belong to the same court if there were two. They were allowed to keep what they were. ‘Seelie’ isn’t treated as a curse. Isn’t synonymous with monster.”
“Hard to fight for something you’re not supposed to name,” Antonio added, a bitter sort of humor to the words. “‘Word-we-don’t-say pride’ isn’t exactly catchy.”
Declan laughed, quiet and quick and near soundless. Antonio was a rough, morbid man, swimming in dark humor. And Declan would never stop being grateful that this was his bond.
Zyr bared his teeth. A smile? Perhaps, if one were to be both very generous and optimistic. His teeth were nearly identical to Declan’s, and Declan typically didn’t smile that way with goodness and light in his heart.
“The other you mentioned with a human bond. Seelie or unseelie?”
“Kelpie.” That, from Antonio, his voice short but with another nudge at Declan’s shoulder for it.
“And the Council attempted to dissolve their bond?”
Antonio glanced at Declan. Declan returned the look with a thin smile, then turned back to Zyr.
“Aye. Trials, then coercion, when the trial failed to prove their bond invalid. It seems that while being unseelie is distasteful, bonding to a human, beyond propriety. The heirs to your House were a great help in the attempted coercion, I hear.”
“I fail to be surprised. No long view.” The words said absently, Zyr’s scaled fingertips tapping his book with care. “Idiots. Drive all the unseelie to seek human bonds, and they’d be rid of us in a few hundred years. More efficient than breeding us out.”
“Fat chance. That’d mean letting however many humans cross the veil.”
“Most with access to magic,” Declan added. “Fair to presume the few hundred years lifespan was well known?”
“Of course. People had eyes, pup. And the ability to count. But short-lived or not, the Monarchs aren’t fond of your kind.” A beat, and something that was, once again, not quite a smile. “Any of our kind.”
Our kind.
Something in those words, at least. In the chill of them, too, of breeding us out, and the inevitable fate of fae bonded to humans. Their lifespan. The fact there was one, and the Monarchs knew of it.
Declan had resolved to do more in those four hundred years bonded than in an eternity without. He’d all but promised Antonio as much. Four hundred years, and then they’d be dead, but with something to bloody well show for it.
“You mentioned breeding us out,” he heard himself say, cursed curious in the way that always got him in trouble.
Sent him down the rabbit hole, not in Aisling’s library, but in the mortal realm.
Dark cruelties, there in the mortal history books.
“A sudden surge in seelie-unseelie pairings after the convergence?”
The sharp, dark stare Zyr leveled at him gave Declan pause. Had Antonio shifting his weight, a little, pressed firmer to his side. Tense, or more so, as Antonio so often was.
“Did I ask a very silly question?” Declan asked after a stretch of silence, during which Zyr’s expression grew steadily more flat. “Mother’s expertise isn’t in the time period immediately surrounding the convergence. If the answer is obvious, I don’t know it.”
Those teeth again. Certainly not a smile, this go around.
“In the early days, yes. So many seelie were suddenly smitten with an unseelie mate.” Zyr answered, voice chillingly flat. “And they all had such pretty babies. Good little seelie to raise in the new order.”
It took Antonio’s low noise of disgust for the meaning behind Zyr’s words to sink in. Declan stared. Zyr met his gaze and held it, shockingly patient while Declan found the words that weren’t something out of Bo’s repertoire.