Chapter Twenty-Four
Twenty-Four
There was a famously good pie shop on the corner at the bottom of Crawgate.
By the time Duncan got there, the ovens were going full blast. The door was propped strategically wide, leaking warmth and rich gravy odors into the lunchtime street.
Trade was brisk, working men ducking in, carrying paper packages out.
Duncan walked by, caught a whiff, and his stomach growled.
He’d had coffee and a single hastily eaten muffin at the Doorbell Club that morning, nothing else since.
He retraced his steps, went inside and ordered.
Stood at the counter, still brooding over what he now knew about Mimi Rush’s mother, her intersection with Hardy and the Forestry Commission, and, it seemed, the interests of the Order of Sword and Orb.
What the fuck have you gotten yourself into?
Crammond’s question last night, near enough.
Duncan still didn’t have any good answers.
The Huldu took small children, always had.
As future iron thralls, as playthings, as the slaking of some momentary spite or thirst, a possessive passion-on-sight whim that seemed to manifest in mortals only among the truly deranged.
(Were the Fae mentally ill? He’d heard it argued, by Russell Maynard Dalton and others, that a species so long-lived could not possibly exist in a mental state humans would recognize as sane.) But there seemed no more method to it than that.
Abductions were local, opportunistic, reversible if you moved fast enough and with enough grit.
The Fae mostly lost interest in their acquisitions in short order, or at least didn’t often seem prepared to fight very hard to keep them.
And like spoiled children with a new puppy, they ended up treating their captives with increasing detachment and cruelty, as the demands of raising a human child made themselves felt.
Legend had it they were drawn especially to beauty or precocious intelligence, but as far as Duncan knew, there’d been no attempt, amid the epidemic of abductions since the Unbinding, to see if this was borne out in the statistics.
There was, as always, a lot of campfire talk and opinion, and very little hard evidence for anything.
But evidently there was something about Mimi Rush.
Mebhuranon had come hundreds of miles north to take her. And even before that, her own father apparently had her earmarked for some departure or other…
Faithless fuck.
He saw the girl’s face again—grimy, eyes wide, tear-fringed lashes as she tried so very hard to be brave.
He remembered the way she’d cannoned into him in the driver’s cab of Thunder Child, tried with all her might to hug him.
The delight on her face when he blew the first Kegg bomb at the fallen oak, the disappointment it hadn’t made more of a bang.
The way she’d walked, hour after hour, along the haunted nighttime tracks without complaint…
“Here you go, man.” The piemonger took two paper bags, wrapped them up into a single richly reeking paper package, and handed it over the counter to him. “One steak and kidney, one witch’s. I marked ’em S and W. You going up the hill with those, eh?”
Duncan gave him an in-no-mood look, paid, and got out.
He started up Crawgate at a brisk walk. The odor of the wrapped pies plucked strings in his stomach, grease soaked through the paper at the bottom of the package and coated the hand he held it with.
He reached Number 37 in dire need of a cloth.
He hit the buzzer and the door did its creepy new open-by-itself trick.
“Come on up,” murmured the witch in his ear.
He grimaced and went up the stairs. No cats or bats today, and Wolfbane Sally was waiting on the next-floor landing, leaned indolently on the banister rail in voluminous black silk pajamas, peering down at him as he climbed.
“Oh, you brought lunch! Delightful!”
He handed her the packet as he reached the landing. “Pies,” he managed, out of breath. “Got something I can wipe my hands on?”
“Of course.” She pecked him on the cheek, pulled back with a grimace. “You might want to wash your face, too, while you’re at it. You stink of pussy and cheap perfume.”
“Jealous?”
She guffawed. “I’ve had you, darling. Once was enough for me.”
She led him into the apartment, through the lounge and off into the narrow kitchen.
She ushered him into a seat at a rickety round table in the corner, tossed him a tea towel for his hands, plated the two pies without taking them from their separate bags.
She sat down opposite him with a motherly smile.
“Don’t really like their witch’s pie,” she said, prodding the pencil scrawled W on the bag in front of her. “Too much horseradish and nonsense, not enough meat. Not sure why they do that. You mind if I swap you for the steak and kidney?”
Wordless, Duncan shoved his plate across at her.
“Too kind.” Sally tore the greasy paper open and lifted out the pie. She breathed in the odor with evident pleasure. “So what can I do for you this time, Duncan?”
“Look at me,” he said.
“I’m looking.” She bit daintily into the pie. “Devilishly handsome as ever. What is it I’m supposed to see?”
“I think you know.”
She chewed and swallowed, wiped pastry crumbs off her lip with fastidious fingers. “I’m a witch, darling, not a telepath. I’m afraid you’re going to have to—”
“I ate his fucking heart, all right?”
The witch sat utterly still. Her eyes widened.
“You told me I would have to eat his heart. To lift the curse, you told me. So I went into the Forest, and I killed him, and I ate his fucking heart, all right? Now—is the curse lifted?”
“Oh…ye…gods.” Setting her pie carefully aside, eyes now fixed on Duncan, as if on a long-lost beloved. She brushed her fingertips briskly together to rid them of grease. “Can I just…”
She reached across the table, took his hand in both of hers. Hooked a couple of long-nailed fingers over his wrist to feel for his pulse. She leaned in to peer at his eyes like an oculist. He half expected her to ask him to stick out his tongue.
“You knew, didn’t you?”
“Knew what, Duncan?” Absently, still staring intently into his eyes without meeting his gaze. “This? That you’d achieve something only known to have ever happened half a dozen times, and those in legend?”
“You gave me spells and told me they were enough for a barnyard squabble. And that’s where I fucking killed Stordalen, in a barnyard. So don’t tell me you didn’t know!”
“Duncan, I didn’t know!”
She let go of his arm. Sat back in her chair, still looking at him, but now with some new dancing thing in her eyes.
“Listen. I won’t say it’s coincidence. There are”—raising her hand in a curiously helpless gesture—“powers. Processes. Streams and currents in the dark. And we sip at their edges. We are granted glimpses, if we’re lucky, echoes of what’s coming, hints of what might be downstream.
Maybe I…I felt something, chose my words on a whim, informed by some intuition I barely—”
“Oh, come on!”
“No, this is the truth, Duncan, like it or not.” More intense, more serious than he’d ever known her to be.
“I—I think I can help you with this. I think I can. The curse will be lifted, for sure. Utterly blown out. Ellie will be fine. But this…this is untrodden ground. It’s the stuff of myths, of actual legend.
The once and future king! The master of Lyonesse.
Only Arthur ever—Duncan, they say he was able to command legions of the Fae in battle! ”
Duncan grimaced, flash recollection of the flight to Maltby Ferry in his head. “I think that’s out the window, Sal. Number of Huldu I’ve left in bits these last couple of days, I don’t see them lining up to enlist under me.”
“Well, not right now, but—”
“Sal.” Almost snapping at her. He tried again, more gently. “Honestly, Sal—I don’t have time for this. They’ve taken the child, the mother. And they’ve taken Niamh.”
“They’ve taken…? What, your little Irish chippy? Who’s taken her?”
“The police. The Forestry Com— Look, it’s complicated. Forget the fucking once and future king. This is the real world come calling.”
—
He ate his pie—she was right, far too much horseradish—and laid out the story for her, the same version he’d given Crammond, with the added detail on Stordalen’s heart, the reaction of the Huldu, and the hallucinations it seemed to induce.
The witch grunted in apparent recognition: Yes, well, you’ve crossed over, haven’t you, only reasonable you’d see with their eyes now.
She bustled about the kitchen space—I’m listening, I’m listening—made tea for them both, poured it out into the same well-worn mugs she’d used last time.
Then she sat and let him finish, watching him from over the rim of her mug with an unnerving, beady-eyed intensity, until he finally ran out of words and story to tell.
They sat looking at each other in the slow silence it left. In the walls, Duncan heard pipes gurgle and stammer, a sudden long rush of water pouring somewhere else in the tenement. Mumble of indistinct voices, oddly like chanting, and what sounded like the mewl of an unfeasibly large cat…
“So you want me to do what, exactly?” the witch asked him.
“First off, I have to find out where they’ve taken Niamh.” He dug the keepsake from his shirt pocket—an Irish lace handkerchief she’d used, one sweltering August night early in their entanglement, to wipe the sweat from her face and cleavage, then gifted to him with a giggle. “This is hers, it…”
Trailing to a halt at the look on Wolfbane Sally’s face.
“I’m not a bloodhound, Duncan.”
“No, but can’t you—”
She sighed. “Give it here, then. Let me have a look.”