Chapter Fourteen
Fourteen
Garner gaping at him from the side—Duncan was only vaguely aware of the man’s presence now. His gaze and whole focus was hooked on the tree line beyond the drystone wall. His pulse, once ebbing from its combat high, built back once again to a slow, steady pounding…
And out of the trees they came.
From the formality of it, he knew the fight was on.
Two Huldu, emerging from the darkness like wan candle flames in still air, taking up flanking station at the gaping gateway to the farmyard.
Farther back, he saw more figures gathering, perhaps a dozen, a dozen and a half, hard to tell.
Some could have been the trunks of the silver birches they’d passed among on their approach to the farm.
A crowd, however you looked at it. An audience. Witnesses to the challenge.
“Here we fucking go,” he heard himself mutter.
“What the bloody hell are tha doing, lad?”
He drew a deep breath in over teeth set tight. “Getting somewhere, looks like. You stay in here, Garner. You need to sit this one out.”
“Tha conner mean to—”
“You’ll be fine.” Getting fully to his feet now, showing himself above the dresser barricade, fears fading out to make way for something more insistent. “That’s a noble-blood Huldu I just called out. I’m going to set terms for this. Safe passage for you, whatever happens. They won’t touch you.”
“That’s not what I meant!”
He turned to look at the other man. Aware he was grinning now, in a way that probably just confirmed to Garner that he’d gone barking mad. He tried for calm, could not suppress a bubbling black hilarity beneath it all.
“It’s fine, old man. It’s destiny. A witch saw this coming.”
Into the space between the first two Huldu, he saw a third figure step out.
Bigger, taller than the others, richly cloaked, but something not quite upright or symmetrical in the way he moved.
Duncan felt his grin tighten into something more feral as he saw it.
Hot leap of joy in the pit of his stomach.
The small grape’s iron had done its work, left lasting harm.
The Huldu had healed badly. The fight was already tilted, however infinitesimally, Duncan’s way.
“Stay put,” he told Garner one more time, eyes fixed on his opponent.
Then he took the McCulloch one-handed by the barrel, swung his legs over the barricade, and dropped both booted feet to the ground on the other side. He slung the trench gun casually in the crook of his arm and walked out to meet the Fae.
They saw him coming. He saw them bare their fangs. Felt his own lips peel back from his teeth in response.
He stopped, about ten yards off. The Huldu noble tilted his head, wolflike, as if listening to some sound beyond the range of human ears.
His eyeballs were featureless pitch, not enough light to put even a gleam on their surface.
Duncan made himself meet the blank stare.
As if he were facing no more than the next flat-capped Erlsley street thug.
The fanged mouth opened. The longing, musical voice floated on the night air. “Oh, Duncannnnnn. You should rejoice. Your dishonor ends tonight. Your return to the Gray is at hand.”
“At your hand?” Duncan forced a chuckle, licked the lips of his grin. “It’ll take more than a nameless tree pixie like you to put me in the ground.”
He saw the pitch-black eyes narrow, saw the outraged pride. Stomped on any response before the Huldu could utter it.
“Terms,” he said, slipping into the ornate utterances of the challenge. “I am Duncan of Stac Dubh, I bring blade and body only to the glade. Before the eyes of the Forest, the roots of life, I offer myself. But my companion walks free.”
“He has until sunrise,” snapped the Huldu. “This is the word of Stordalen, line of Drasundva, ordained of the Final Isles. Lay down the speaking iron, face me, and it will be honored.”
For just a beat, Duncan felt the slither in his gut, the shock and jolt of a missed step.
I don’t think you realize who I am.
It had always been a safe bet the Huldu was noble born. Duncan knew it in his bones at the time. Wolfbane Sal had confirmed it when he told her the tale.
But the Final Isles…
He masked his sudden disquiet. There was opportunity here as well.
“That’s not all,” he said.
“Not. All?” The Huldu showed the tips of his fangs in a smile that was almost friendly.
“You mistake yourself, ingrate. Do you think your mud-puddle human rank, your pitiful, limping line of cattle-rustling ancestors camped out in a pile of hacked stone less than a hundred years old, entitles you to face me as an equal? Did you not hear who I am?”
Duncan let it sit for a moment. Saw the Fae faces on either side of Stordalen grow avid with anticipation.
“This is not the Final Isles,” he said evenly.
“And I claim no rank here, human or otherwise. I did not need rank to cripple you this spring past; I will not need it now to send you back to the Gray. And if I do this, these are my terms—I best you here, your word and bond will release to me the human child Miriam, taken by Mebhuranon.”
As if the whole Forest abruptly held its breath.
They stared at each other, human and Fae. Duncan tried to staunch the sensation that he was falling into the Huldu’s eyes, the effervescing panic that came with it.
“That is not within my gift.” Stordalen, matching him for even tone, for all that it visibly cost him to keep his cool. “Mebhuranon…walks her own path.”
“Really? You came quick enough when her cairn was defiled.”
“That—you—it was a desecration!” Fanged mouth biting down on the word.
Duncan grinned. “It was a message. I want the child back. If you don’t want the Forest on fire from here to the Final Isles, you’ll give her to me.”
Stordalen, hissing now. “I said, it is not within my gift!”
“Then what are you good for?” Feeling the antique rhythms and depth in the Skogurtal phrasing, the way it piled cadence on cadence like the incantations it so often served to enable.
He had, he remembered, spoken it insanely well for a human.
“What are you, Stordalen of the line of Drasundva? Some useless misadventure by-blow of vatnalfr dalliances? Some swamp-end bastard? The word of the Final Isles is the law. So say the stones at Dun Ringil and at Dartmoor, at Estelanon and Erl. Will Mebhuranon not obey the law?”
And then he heard it—the rustling whisper of commentary among the Fae at Stordalen’s back. The curious, bright speculative word let loose.
Stordalen heard it, too.
“You do not command us, ingrate!” he snapped. “You will not speak to a scion of the Final Isles this way!”
Duncan shrugged. Shifted his hold on the McCulloch. “Then I go back into the house there, and we see how many of your kind the speaking iron will converse with tonight. You can watch from the rear.”
He made as if to turn and go, saw Stordalen’s mouth open, the bite reflex triggered. Held in check. He waited.
“Your terms are irrelevant!” the Huldu snarled. “You will die by my hand, here, tonight!”
“Then you’ll have nothing to lose by granting the price.”
Another long pause. The Fae were silent, but Duncan saw the glances run between them, like the scurry of rats through undergrowth. He smiled at Stordalen. They both knew.
“Bring me the saemdil blade,” Stordalen said softly. “This ingrate mortal has breathed Forest air too long.”
—
The saemdil blade. The duel-for-honor knife.
He’d seen one maybe a dozen times in his life; seen it in action twice.
The Huldu had little use for bladed weapons when their own physical strength and shape-shifting capabilities provided all the close combat tools they were ever likely to need.
Observing humans over the millennia, they had, of course, seen innovation in armament as in all other things, could probably have copied much of it if they chose.
Instead, save for the arrows, they shunned the changes it implied.
To the immortal mind, the timescales human invention happened on looked headlong, reckless, probably best avoided.
Fae society was intensely clannish, self-referential, hierarchy bound.
Tradition was honor, change disruptive, the deep-rooted Forest all.
When rising human technology turned on the trees, burned them back, chopped them down, turned them into objects of deadwood at the thousandfold level, existing misgivings were only reinforced.
This could not be the way. A deep melancholy seeped into the Faerie consciousness—a possessive, defensive, seeping rage. But nothing much else changed.
Or so he’d been told.
A young Huldu male brought the weapon forward, held reverently on both palms like an offering.
Over a foot long from its jeweled pommel to the point, the blade glinted bluish in the low light.
Its surface was puddled and uneven, as if it had once been subjected to great heat and melted a little.
More than any metal, it resembled some kind of smoky glass.
Thin white runes were scratched in it along both sides of the runnel, in no script Duncan had ever learned how to read.
Stordalen took the weapon by the hilt, lifted it, hefted it handily back and forth a few times in the quiet gloom. It made a subdued whoop on each stroke, seemed to leave bluish lines in its wake, as if somehow slicing into the air itself.
“Your terms are met,” he said, distantly now, eyes seemingly fascinated by the puddled glimmer of the blade. “Set down the speaking iron, show us your weapons. Prepare yourself, ingrate, for the death you earned long years ago.”
For the flicker of an instant, the last words put a ripple on Duncan’s pulse-pounding calm, a faint shiver of doubt. Long years ago?