Chapter Forty-Three
Forty-Three
Over his head, the great oak split apart.
Fresh, green, sappy scent.
Svalenkari—saemdil blade raised level to drive right through Duncan and into the wood behind—recoiling now in sudden shock.
The McCulloch fell out over Duncan’s crooked right arm, fell into his fumbling, half-numb grip.
Too old for fairy tales? This is no fucking faerie tale.
Almost, he dropped the gun—
This a human story! And a human’s going to fucking finish it!
Reflex from the trenches saved him—chilled fingers forced to function, to grasp. He leveled the shotgun at Svalenkari from the hip. Clamped the trigger and fired.
Slamfired three shells into the Fae lord.
The trees seem to like you. That has to count for something.
Svalenkari staggered, stumbled, dropped the saemdil blade.
Chuckling, hissing green fire at the edges of the sudden damage to belly and breast. Smoke poured from the holes the iron had made.
He gaped down at himself in disbelief. Tried to turn away, to retreat, perhaps, to the ranks of his fellow Fae.
No one else moved, the Fae queen least of all.
Duncan lurched away from the oak that was holding him up. Somehow he stayed on his feet unaided. He followed the stricken Fae lord’s stumbling progress across the clearing.
He will impale you against the great oak. Mebhuranon’s matter-of-fact words as they stood at the top of the south tower together in the cold October dawn. He will tear you apart with his bare hands. You cannot defeat him with blades, no more than you could defeat me.
No wonder he’d shivered in the autumn wind, had still been shivering when Savin came up and found him later.
But with the speaking iron, you may yet send him back to the Gray.
From Garner’s carefully instructed hand to the Fae queen on the fringes of the Forest, from Mebhuranon to the skogsra and into the bole of the oak, and now from the skogsra into his iron-ringed mortal hands.
Around the clearing, the Huldu stood frozen, staring at what had just been done.
None moved to intervene. None moved to help Svalenkari as he heard Duncan’s footfalls and turned to face his executioner.
His gaze swung wildly about, perhaps lit on Mebhuranon, where she stood silent among the others, face impassive.
“You—” He coughed, and thick smolder curled from his open mouth. “I planted spoiled seed, I—”
Duncan stared at him. “No. What you did, you and Isnorvi and all the rest of you Fae fucks, you built a machine. And you built me to last.”
He slamfired the McCulloch dry.
Watched Svalenkari torn through with the iron load, set afire, murdered where he stood. Watched him crumple in ruin and blue-green flame.
—
For what seemed like an eternity, no Huldu uttered a sound.
They stood and stared in silence at the smoldering, green-fire-eaten carcass in the center of the clearing, the hunched and shivering mortal stood over it with the speaking iron in his hands.
Until the mortal spoke.
“The word of the Final Isles,” Duncan enunciated, the recitation Meb had given him, “will not be flaunted. The old paths will not be forsaken. This is what waits, if ever they are. Mortal chaos, an Unbinding. The speaking iron will be waiting, I will be waiting—for you all.”
Angry murmuring, like a vast serpent through the gathering. Duncan clung to the emptied McCulloch and hoped they wouldn’t call his bluff.
Mebhuranon stepped forward. The murmuring ceased.
“We have all seen where Svalenkari’s path leads,” she said loudly. “And it is not our path. Will any among you still walk it?”
There was some muttering, but low, and it petered out pretty fucking fast. The Fae queen inclined her head.
“Then come. Four among you who were close with him, take up Svalenkari, for he has gone back to the Gray. We will honor his passing. Even for renegades, even for the failed and forsaken, there must be ritual and what is right to do. The word of the Final Isles, the word of the Bright Folk, the word of the Forest itself is unbroken in all things, across all time.”
After an awkward pause, four Huldu came forward, pushing through the spectating ranks. The colors in their robes were damped down and muddy, they crouched like fighters, peeled lips back off fangs as they approached Duncan.
But they left him alone.
He watched numbly as they gathered up the still-smoking corpse and carried it away between the beech and elm.
The others filed away after them, fading one by one into the twilit gloom.
Last to go was Mebhuranon. She turned at the fringes of the clearing and looked back at him. Duncan nodded at her. For a moment, it looked as if she might leave without a word.
Then her lips peeled back. She let her fangs show.
“I do not like machines,” she said.
Duncan shrugged. “I don’t like being one. But what’s done is done.”
They stared at each other.
“Your mother,” said Duncan suddenly, impulsively. “Do you—”
The Fae queen shook her head.
“I had the eilsinni,” she said. “My own face bent over me, caring for me, nourishing me, falling away to let me flourish. We are not like you, Duncan.”
“Guess not.”
“Well, then.” She stirred impatiently, looked up at the tree canopies, where the gloom was bleaching out, whatever glamour that had held here for the duel now giving way to the daylight it had denied. “You will have to find your own way out. I imagine you’ll manage.”
He swayed a little on his feet. “I imagine I will.”
The Fae queen twitched, made as if to step into the trees, hesitated a moment more.
“I remember few mortals,” she said. “They wash away like foam on rapids. But I will remember you, I think.”
Somewhere, a wren warbled from its perch, greeting the freshly unleashed day. Duncan’s gaze flickered reflexively to the sound.
When he looked back, Mebhuranon was gone.
—
He found his knives where they’d fallen, wiped them and stowed them securely.
He went and seated himself in the sunken throne arms of the old oak’s roots, pressed his back into the bark, put his knees up in front of him and rested the emptied McCulloch across them.
He thought he heard a tiny, girlish giggle trickle down from the fresh wide crack in the trunk where the trench gun had fallen out into his arms.
He waited.
But the sound did not repeat, and the skogsra, if it was there, didn’t show itself to him.
He shrugged. They were, he reminded himself, flighty, flirty things at the best of times.
In a few minutes, he knew, he’d have to get up and start pathfinding, working out compass points and the best way to get himself home.
Instead, somehow, he sat there in the oak root arms of his sunken throne and watched, unhinged from time, as filtering rays of winter sun came probing, then filling the clearing, lancing it with light, then tracking, sweeping, finally ebbing as the sun moved round between autumn branches and then sank, diminished, choked off, gone to molten embers in the black twig mesh at the limits of visibility to the west.
He watched the twilight come on once more.
—
He feels Stordalen’s blood rising in response, ticking in his veins again with the gloom, shivering his skin, itching in his fingernails and teeth.
And then, abruptly, the whole Forest lights itself for him, like a field of votive candles, soft bluish glow away between the trunks, along the ground like mist, and a warm green-gold pulse at the heart of every tree.
Presently, the skogsra emerges from the bole of the oak over his head, bark-paper skin all sticky with secretion, and twines herself about him, sprig haired and nut brown and giggly.
Treefuckah, she teases him.
The nearly wolf-sized wolf spiders come out one by one to scuttle and play around at his feet. He grins at the sight.
Feels how his teeth lengthen softly to bared fangs in his jaw.