Chapter Forty-Two
Forty-Two
One last thing.
He lay on his back in the bed next to Niamh, listening to the rasp and bubble of her breathing, watching the high, shadowed ceiling over their heads as if something fanged might come at him out of it.
Weariness was bone deep in him, but undercut by something else—a tiny, trickling electric current in his fingers and teeth and skin that seemed to press him hard into the mattress and hold him immobile.
It had taken until past midnight before Niamh settled properly into sleep, and even now, he knew, her lungs might tip her back into hacking wakefulness at any moment.
It was time.
He slid out of bed with painstaking care, padded naked across the palatial bedroom to the balcony windows and the heavy purple floor-to-ceiling drapes that curtained them off.
He slipped between the drapes, stood close up against the glass.
Felt the chill from outside coming off the pane.
He opened the catches, pushed the windows wide.
Stepped out onto the cold stone flags of the balcony beyond.
There was a waning moon high up over the Forest to the west, bobbing through wind-driven cloud that gave it a sense of rushing, dizzying motion all its own.
Soft pewter light across the lawns and gravel driveway of Capstone Park House, blotched now and again with the racing shadow of a cloud.
Cool night air from the breeze ghosted his naked skin, not quite wintry enough yet to be unpleasant, but it was getting there.
“Are you ready, Duncan?”
Echoing his thoughts as if reading them. For all he’d expected to hear it, her voice put ice water down his spine. He turned about, tipped his head back.
Mebhuranon crouched on the narrow stone portico above the window, apparently as comfortable and at ease as any raptor on a branch.
She leaned slender arms on knees, tilted her head at him, wolflike, as she stared down.
The breeze stirred her silver and dark hair, picked at the folds of her cloak where it hung down either side of her crouch.
Looking up, he could see the prehensile grip her feet maintained on the stone, could see between her legs to the delicate cleft of her sex, revealed with no more thought than the haunches it separated…
He swallowed hard. “Yes. I am.”
She executed some kind of boneless tumble dive, dropped through the four yards of night air, and landed with no more sound than a shadow. She rose upright at his side. Loomed amiably over him.
“Then show me,” she said.
He led her inside, through the drapes and into the center of the room.
She stood poised, staring at the woman in the big bed.
For just a moment, it seemed as if the grand dimensions of the chamber had been built for her, and he and Niamh were just some interloping race of smaller, grubbier beings.
She tilted her head again, seemed to be listening for something. She bared her teeth, hissed.
“Ahhh, this. The Eternal Unwarded unleashed, the Chaos Dance,” he thought she said. “This we have seen before.” The faintest crease of a frown across her broad, pale forehead. “Though not here, in the lungs. This is new. A new curse.”
A sudden terror stalked him. “Then—”
“No.” As if she had already heard his fear. “Oh no. It merely makes it simpler.”
She folded herself onto the bed at Niamh’s side—Duncan, for one mad moment, recalled Murnau’s Carmilla—floated one splayed hand over the Irishwoman’s face and breast, muttering almost inaudibly, sibilants that nonetheless bit into him like winter cold.
Niamh stirred, not restlessly, sinking languidly somehow into the pillow.
A faint smile bent her mouth at the corners. Her lips parted.
Snake swift, the Fae queen snatched her by the back of the skull.
Put her own mouth to the parted lips and breathed in hard.
Her back arched with the force of it. For a second, the seal of her lips with Niamh’s bulged and flexed impossibly, as if a dozen eels roiled around in the space between their mouths.
A grunting, growling noise emanated from Mebhuranon and her unpupiled ink-black eyes widened.
Then she whipped her hand from the back of Niamh’s skull, pressed it instead to the mortal woman’s forehead, and pushed Niamh down into the mattress.
Duncan caught, or thought he caught, a glimpse of something like a long dark ragged tongue recoiling back up into the Fae queen’s mouth…
Then it was done.
The two women, Fae and mortal, parted. Niamh turned over in the bedclothes, snuggled down into the pillow, breath suddenly inaudible.
Mebhuranon gagged, turned aside, spat hard into her hand, like a Shoreditch streetwalker voiding her mouth of come.
Her tongue came out, inhumanly long, and she scraped it back into her mouth under her teeth. Spat again, less violently.
She sat for a moment, contemplating what lay in her palm.
Duncan moved closer, but as he did, she closed up her hand into a fist, made a flexing, grasping motion, and all he saw was a splatter of viscous black dripping off her palm and fingers, dissolving into tendrils, then into threads, and then into nothing at all.
Mebhuranon wiped her hands together, palm across palm. Stood up.
“Done,” she said. “All is as you asked.”
He nodded, wordless. Did not trust himself to speak.
“We come for you at dawn,” she said. “As agreed. Oh, what now, tree thief?”
He cleared his throat. Gestured at Niamh. “Can you…is there a way she can sleep until I’m gone?”
The Fae queen raised an elegant eyebrow.
“Never bargain with tree thieves,” she muttered cryptically, and he thought from the words she used that it had the ring of proverb or cant. “Well, then.”
She gestured, peevishly, a single pass over Niamh’s sleeping face.
“There. She will not wake until the sun reaches its zenith. The rest will do her good. Now ask me no more boons, my part is complete. Only be ready to render yours.”
There’s something black and twisted following you, Duncan.
“I already am,” he said.
And felt, somewhere dark in the roots of his being, that it was the simple truth. He was tired, he was out of options, a kind of trench daze was on him for the first time since the war.
Let it all come. He could not fault the bargain he had struck.
Mebhuranon grunted, brushed past him, and then through the thick drapes at the window, almost, it seemed, without disturbing them as she passed. Duncan barely noticed.
He knew he would not sleep.
He sat beside Niamh, waiting for the hour to come around, listening to her breathe.
It was enough.
—
An hour before dawn, he put his iron rings on one by one, went down and breakfasted with Savin and Bainbridge.
Bacon and eggs, blood sausage, kidneys, buttered beans, and toast. Once again, he wasn’t really hungry, but he forced himself to eat.
The three men sat over their food in near silence, broken only by the chink of cutlery on plates and the viscount’s soft words of thanks whenever his serving staff brought anything to the table.
“No Endershall?” Duncan asked finally, when it was clear no one else would be joining them.
Bainbridge gestured with his fork. “Sir Michael prefers not to involve himself with the grubby detail of magic. I suspect he feels it makes him look foolish.”
“You’d think he’d be used to that.”
Strained smiles from the other two, but no laughter to match.
The atmosphere was too maudlin, too heavy with preparation for loss.
Savin had been increasingly withdrawn the last two days as Duncan’s inevitable departure drew near.
Are you certain, he asked repeatedly. Are you certain you must do this, man?
Is there truly no other way? And he paced restlessly as he talked, like the lions Duncan had once seen at Edinburgh Zoo, pacing out the boundaries of their enclosure, powerless to go beyond.
It was the same way he’d paced three years ago when his son was in the Forest and a mysterious, unproven woodsman called Silver his only hope of getting him back.
It was the same dreadful admission of forces beyond his command, the caged anger of a man used to calling the shots, who could now only wait and hope and pray.
It was the war, the trenches, and the waiting, all over again.
Oddly, Duncan found himself feeling sorry for the viscount.
The complications, the intricate constraint, the diplomacy and delicate patience required to navigate these things—he felt as if they were drifting away from him, distant as the sounds of fighting somewhere a long way down the line, a messy, endlessly inconclusive battle he would not now be called to, not his problem anymore.
He felt himself filling up instead with the raw, violent simplicity of the Forest’s call.
Where Savin was withdrawn, Bainbridge was merely guarded. Duncan caught him once or twice in a calculating stare when he thought no one was looking, guessed that he was checking and rechecking the forged links in this chain of undertaking he had staked his current position and future on.
“So what is it for you now, Bainbridge?” Duncan asked him. “Filling the vacuum at Whitehall, spearheading the charge at the behest of your good friends in government? They make you head of Section J yet?”
“Something like that, yes.”
Duncan saw the grimace at the corner of Savin’s mouth. He raised his coffee cup in ironic toast. “Here, then—to the man of the hour.”
Bainbridge shrugged magnanimously and reached for more bacon. “Someone has to be.”
—
They went out to the fence line and a carefully made high iron gate, in front of which Savin’s groundsmen had already built the summoning fire to Bainbridge’s instructions. The flames crackled and leapt, cheery orange against the gray-blue dawn.
“You are quite certain about this?” Savin asked Duncan one more time.