Chapter Thirty-Four #2
“Don’t you worry about Bainbridge.” Sal flopped onto the sofa beside her colleague.
“He’s your typical belle epoque upstart—pushy bourgeois aspiration laced with delusions of aristocrat grandeur.
He’s too self-satisfied by half to be much good at magic.
Or, more important, to believe he could ever be penetrated.
” Seeing the other witch’s smirk. “Oh stop it, what are you, twelve?”
“Annie.” Duncan, hurriedly quelling his own smirk. “Do you have weapons you can carry?”
“Weapons? Well, there’s this.” Annie split her long lace skirts demurely, sat forward, and spread her legs akimbo. Strapped to the top of her right thigh, a six inch serpentine-edged iron blade topped with ornate ivory grip molded for the fingers that would hold it. “Will that do?”
“In a clinch, it would.” She’d been right about her legs, he saw. “If we get into a serious fight, or a chase, not so much. I was thinking more of a gun.”
“Oh, I don’t like guns, Duncan.”
“No one likes guns,” he said irritably. “But they clear a path when you need one in a hurry. Maybe Sal’s right and Bainbridge is an arrogant prick with shite magic and he won’t realize we’re there. But if he does spot us, I want to be able to punch holes in whoever he sends out to get us.”
Nimble Shanks Annie put her legs away, smoothed her skirts over again. She gave him a secret smile. “Oh, I think you like guns a lot more than you let on, Duncan. I think you like the damage they do. I’d watch that if I were you.”
“Annie.” An oblique warning note in Wolfbane Sal’s voice.
The thin witch sighed. “All right, all right, yes. The hero of the hour come round, he must carry thunderbolts of course. Doesn’t mean I have to. I really thought you were too old for this nonsense, Sal. I thought we both were.”
“He ate the heart,” said Sal quietly. “And is still standing.”
Nimble Shanks Annie pulled a face. “You know as well as I do that could mean any number of things.”
“Oh, come on!”
An elaborately innocent look. “Come on what?”
“You’re digging your heels in, Annie, and you know it. A live Huldu heart, fed on in the moment of freeing it from the chest. Look at every rooted legend we’ve got. Look at the lore. You know what it says.”
Duncan, with an effort, stopped himself switching back and forth on the exchange like a cat watching lawn tennis.
“What does it say?” he asked.
“It says you should be dead,” said Nimble Shanks Annie shortly.
Sal tutted. “It says you are probably from a mixed bloodline. There are only a handful of figures in legend who were apparently able to do what you did and survive. Arthur Pendragon is the most celebrated, but there are a few others—Weylund, Beowulf, Havelok the Dane. In every case, there’s reason to suppose they were Faerie kin.
The legends hint at it, or sometimes just claim it outright. ”
“See, we’re not the only ones who fuck Faeries, Duncan.” Annie’s eyes glittered with sardonic humor. “It’s just not as fashionable as it used to be, that’s all. Fallen out of favor. But never fear—the weird sisters keep the flame of tradition alive.”
Duncan frowned. “Bainbridge said something about this. He said Mimi Rush—the child I went to the Forest to get last week—he said she was a direct descendant of a Fae noblewoman, and that’s why they took her.”
The witches exchanged a thoughtful glance.
“He’s dug deeper than I’d have thought, then,” said Annie. “Not bad for a—what was it, Sal?—a belle epoque upstart. Maybe we’ve underestimated Bainbridge after all.”
“He’s guessing, Annie. Stabbing in the dark.”
“Could it be,” Duncan, slowly, working the concept through, “that all the children they take have Fae blood to some extent? I mean, they’re long-lived, right?
Eternal, some of them. Thousand years is nothing, gone in an instant.
They still blame us for the trees our ancestors cut down and burned in the Neolithic.
Are they just trying to claim back something they think we took from them? ”
“Does it matter?” asked Annie.
“Well…”
“She’s right, Duncan. Would that make you feel better about your years in the Forest, about what they did to you? They held you as a thrall, after all.”
He felt the old rage simmering. Held it down. “It doesn’t change how I feel, no. But it’s like the war. If there was some way to understand the whole mess, to make it make sense…”
He petered out. Gestured helplessly.
“Might make it easier to deal with,” he said.
The two witches looked at him. Nimble Shanks Annie made a soft shape with her mouth, the awwwing of a mother to a flustered baby. Wolfbane Sal shot her a warning glare and cleared her throat.
“If you’re looking to me for an opinion,” she said slowly.
“I’d say Bainbridge likely has something there.
But it’s nothing you could build a house on.
Did the Huldu steal babies because they were of Fae blood?
Probably. Some of the time. It’s pretty clear we have interbred with them, time and again—all the legends talk about it, and there’s sisterhood lore from last century, too.
Recent cases, unreported, where they called a wise woman to help sort out the mess.
The odd comely milkmaid goes missing, comes back pregnant, and when the little bundle’s delivered, it has eyes of ink or fangs.
Although, from what I know, I think it’s probably not that easy to conceive across the species line. ”
“Not for want of trying, eh?” Annie, grinning.
Sal rolled her eyes. “So when it comes to reclaiming what they saw as their bloodline descendants, maybe centuries down the line, yes—it makes some sense. But over time? I think it’s just become custom, something they do out of habit, because they always have—because they can.
In the end, what might have started in ritual and purpose ends up just another whim, an urge to be satisfied. ”
“You’re as well not looking for too much sense from the Fae,” Annie muttered. “It’s not exactly their stock in trade. Magic seals them off from the need to be rational, the need to behave, and what’s left is just a whole lot of dark abandon.”
“Dark abandon,” mimicked Sal, evidently amused. “First time I’ve ever heard you say it like that.”
“Nothing wrong with a bit of dark abandon now and then.” Annie flashed the grin again. “Within reason, as long as you can get away safely afterward. But creatures who live by it?”
She shook her head, oddly sober again. The grin decayed into a kind of wince.
“You can get hurt,” she said.
“It’s what that prick-obsessed idiot Bainbridge doesn’t get,” Sal said, “with all his the will is divine and all of the law bollocks. Humans aren’t built for that manner of abandon.
They shrivel in the force of it, or they rise up as tyrants.
I tell you, Duncan, seriously—you open the door fully to what the Fae and the Forest represent, it’ll make what you went through over in France look like a picnic on Blackpool beach. ”