Blade Dance

Iobáth was glad that Nieve offered to drive. He didn’t know Boston’s twisting streets and didn’t like relying on a GPS to get around. He was less pleased when he saw her vehicle.

“It’s a minivan,” he said, stating the obvious. It was, in fact, a silver-gray minivan, American made, and there was cereal ground into the carpets and the seats.

“Try getting a car seat in and out of a sedan,” said Nieve.

“I thought Elada Brightsword was normally your driver,” said Iobáth.

“He used to be. But he’s traveling with Sorcha Kavanaugh, Grandfather’s stone singer, searching for others like her.”

“I do not believe that Elada Brightsword would drive such a vehicle.”

Nieve looked at him sideways. “When was the last time you had a beer with Elada Brightsword?” she asked.

“Before the fall,” admitted Iobáth.

“People change,” she said, brushing crumbs off the passenger seat. He hoped the pale, crusted stains on the upholstery were applesauce or some other innocuous substance, but her husband was a sorcerer, so Iobáth wasn’t entirely certain.

“The Fae aren’t people,” he replied, laying his sword across the floor of the backseat.

“Why are you here, Iobáth?” she asked, putting the car in gear.

“To glamour librarians on your behalf,” he said drily.

“I mean, why are you in Boston?”

“Your father-in-law invited me.”

“I guessed that much. I mean, why did he invite you? And no more cryptic answers. I don’t put up with that nonsense from Granddad. I won’t have it from you.”

“Miach raised you to think of yourself as equal to the Fae,” observed Iobáth.

“Granddad makes no distinction between Fae and half-bloods in his family,” said Nieve. “You’ll notice that all of his children and grandchildren speak to him.”

“Miach has always gone against the grain. Even before the fall. It is not as easy as he makes it look.”

“It’s not as hard as Finn MacUmhaill claims.”

“You’re very quick to judge your father-in-law,” observed Iobáth.

“Only if you think ten years is quick.”

“For the Fae, it is the blink of an eye.”

“He encouraged Garrett to cheat on me.”

“But only after Miach extracted a geis from him that he would never see you again. And celibacy does not come easily to the Fae.”

She looked at him sideways. “They say it comes easily to you, though.”

“Not easily and not without lapses. And Finn’s last marriage took place while the Queen still ruled. His understanding of love was molded by a world that has been gone for two thousand years.”

“They say he loved Brigid,” said Nieve, wistfully, “but I’ll never believe it. Everyone knows she was the Prince’s lover.”

“It was a different time,” said Iobáth.

“Are you defending him because you think the way he does or because he’s paying you?”

“He isn’t paying me,” said Iobáth. “I am not a sword for hire.”

“Then what are you doing here?”

“I came because Finn told me there was a threat to the wall.”

“My father–in-law has never cared about the threat to the wall. Miach has been trying to convince him of the danger for years, and he won’t see it.”

“But he does see the danger to his son, if he fights alongside Miach with no right hand. If he remains married to you.”

They were speeding along a road that hugged the Charles River, and Nieve pulled over suddenly and killed the engine.

“Is that why you’re here? To get rid of me, so Garrett can have a right hand?”

“You insult me, daughter of the house of Cecht. I have never raised my hand to a woman. I have spent two thousand years in penance for allowing others to do so.”

“Then why are you here?”

“Because Finn hoped I would act as Garrett’s right hand in the fight that is coming. He thought I would agree to do so as a hired hand, without entering into the formal bonds that your marriage forbids.”

“And, will you?” He could hear the hope in her voice, so open and human. It reminded him of another woman, in another life.

“No,” said Iobáth.

“Then my husband is going to die, isn’t he?” she asked. “Because this isn’t a fight that he or Granddad can walk away from.”

“What your husband and your father-in-law and even you have failed to recognize, Nieve, is that he already has a right hand. You have only to take up your place at his side.”

“Me? You must be kidding.”

“No. I’m not. You were raised by the most powerful sorcerer the Fae have ever known and trained to arms from childhood by one of our most formidable swordsmen. Miach raised you like a Fae. It’s time you started acting like one.”

“I’m a mother, and I’m pregnant again,” she said, as though he was unaware of that fact.

“All the more reason for you to stand at your husband’s side. You know what will happen to you and to your half-blood children if the Queen returns. And there is no one on this earth who would fight more valiantly for your husband’s life than you.”

She shook her head. “I’m not good enough. I’m not as good as Elada.”

“Hardly anyone is.”

“But you are,” she insisted.

“I’m better, actually, and I’d be happy to repair any little deficiencies in your technique that you may have picked up from Brightsword.”

“Is that supposed to be funny?”

“Yes. I make jokes, from time to time.”

“I think you might be out of practice.” She started the car again.

“Think on it, Nieve,” he said.

“Finn will never agree to it.”

“People change,” said Iobáth, parroting her words.

She looked at him sideways at that but didn’t reply.

Iobáth had never been to Harvard Square before but he found it too congested for his liking. Nieve seemed to know her way around and drove straight to a miraculously empty parking space in a lot tucked away at the center of a block of Georgian buildings affiliated with the university.

“How did you know about this spot?” he asked.

“Granddad bought it for Liam. He’s in law school here.”

“That is surprising. Miach has always had a reputation for keeping his family close.”

“Helene convinced him that it was a good idea.”

“His human consort?”

“Wife,” said Nieve. “He calls her his wife.”

So Miach MacCecht had pledged himself to a mortal. Interesting.

Nieve led them through the campus to the wide steps of the library. He liked the contemplative atmosphere of the university. Once, he had considered retreating from the world to reflect on his sins, but he had always been a swordsman, never a scholar, and he reached the conclusion that meditation would not atone for what he had done. Only his active penance, the righting of wrongs, could do that.

Still, he wished that in his long life he had been able to spend a few years in a place like this, removed from violence, nurtured by words and ideas.

Nieve used her brother’s identification card and Iobáth used his Fae voice, the glamour that all his race possessed, to talk their way past the guard. It occurred to him that he had never before been in any place with such a staggering number of books.

“How are we to locate a single volume in this vast place?” he asked, as students bustled by with their laptops and notebooks.

“It’ll be in the Celtic library,” she said. “Granddad took me there once. He endowed a fellowship of some kind. I didn’t realize that he’d donated books as well. He gave a bunch of paintings to Helene’s museum, but they weren’t Fae artifacts.”

“You think he had some hidden agenda in donating this tome?”

“Granddad always has an agenda,” said Nieve.

The Celtic library was a pleasant enough space and removed from the bustle of the main library. There was a long table with seats for a dozen readers, but only two desultory graduate students occupied them. Nieve sat down at a computer kiosk and performed some kind of search, then bobbed up and marched across the room to a shelf by the window.

“It’s not here,” she said.

“Perhaps someone has borrowed it,” said Iobáth.

“No. This isn’t a circulating library. Maybe it’s on reserve at the desk.”

Iobáth had missed the librarian’s desk tucked away beside the door. Nieve presented the student worker seated there with the book’s call numbers on a piece of paper, and they both watched as the young scholar searched his records.

“It’s here,” he said, pushing his glasses back up onto his nose. “But it’s on reserve for a dissertation project. Have you checked the student carrels?”

“What are those?” asked Iobáth.

“Graduate students have assigned carrels. They’re allowed up to have up to sixty books from the collection checked out to their name and kept in their carrel at any one time.”

“Where?” asked Nieve.

They turned out to be along the far wall, jammed in between rows of shelves. Iobáth found the carrels to be touchingly homey little affairs, with photographs of sweethearts and children pinned to the wood laminate sides. There were bags of treats tucked in between the books: chocolates, peppermints, homemade cookies. There was even an erotic novel, a stack of comic books, and a row of painted miniatures of Celtic heroes lined up along the top of one. He picked up a figure that bore more than a passing resemblance to himself, although the scale and proportion of the sword would have made it ten feet long in life size.

“Put that back,” scolded Nieve.

Chastened, he replaced the figure.

She was halfway down the line of carrels when she said, “Found it!”

“Excuse me,” came a cool feminine voice down the aisle, “but that book is mine. I’ve got it checked out to my carrel for the semester.”

Iobáth turned to look at the woman. She was young, but not so achingly young as many of the students they had passed on the way. She was dressed for the autumn chill and fitful heating of the library in tall leather boots and a corduroy skirt topped with a printed blouse, the tiny floral pattern faded and stretched slightly over the breasts, as though she had outgrown the shirt but couldn’t stand—or afford—to part with it.

He didn’t mean to stare at her. He supposed it had been too long for him. A Fae couldn’t go that long—years now—without a woman. It reached a point where it became a distraction, where he couldn’t talk to a female like this without imagining taking those full round breasts into his mouth. The fantasy spun out in his mind for a second, of telling Nieve that he had a small errand to run, of beckoning this appealing creature into the stacks, and having her, legs wrapped around him, a hand over her mouth to muffle her cries, up against a bookcase.

He’d decided long ago that as long as he did not seduce, did not exert his glamour, allowed women to come to him, then it was not the same as what had been done to his love. And if he only had a single encounter with the women, if he did not learn their names, if he did not think of them beyond the sweetness of their touch and the slickness of their thighs, then it was just another necessary act to keep the body together while he executed his penance, like eating and drinking and bathing.

But she was not offering herself to him. He would find a bar, later, after the child has been recovered. The kind where young people went looking for anonymous hookups. He would wait until a woman who was sober enough to know what she was doing fixed her intent on him, and then he would go home with her, or better, to a car or an alley, where nothing but bodily fluids could be exchanged. It was all he would ever have.

It was all he deserved.

“We need to borrow the book for a time,” he said, trying to focus on her eyes, which were a rich dark brown, like fresh brewed coffee.

“I’m sorry,” she said, “but that isn’t possible. I need the book for my dissertation.”

Nieve cast him a look. He knew why. He was no sorcerer, but his Fae voice should have persuaded an ordinary woman.

“We only need it for an afternoon,” said Iobáth. “I’d return it in the morning.”

She raised her eyebrows at this. They were pale and golden, lighter than the hair tied at the back of her neck, which was the color of honey and pin straight. “What department are you with?” she asked, suspicious at last. That was the peculiar thing he had noticed about human institutions. They could be vast, but once you were inside them, everyone assumed that everyone else belonged.

“We’re law students,” said Nieve. “I’m working on a journal article. I just need to check a reference, and you can have the book back.”

“If you can do that here, in the reading room, then it’s no problem.” The challenge in her tone told Iobáth that not only did his voice have no power over her, but that she could see through his glamour. The rest of Harvard’s student population saw a man, taller perhaps than average, handsome by their standards, no doubt, but ordinary enough. They did not see the white-blond hair that swept to his knees or the sword on his back.

This woman did.

“The book,” Nieve said, losing patience, “isn’t yours. It’s my granddad’s, and he donated it to the library.”

“That doesn’t mean he can have it back,” the woman said.

“How much of the book have you read?” cut in Iobáth.

“All of it,” said the woman, “several times.”

“Then you can read the language of the Tuatha Dé Danann, and you can guess, I think, what I am.”

She bit her lip. “If you are what you appear to be, you could just take the book, and I wouldn’t be able to stop you,” she said.

He didn’t want to do that. “I will take a geis, make an oath, to return to you the book.” And to see her again, which was wrong. His penance did not allow for such things. “Tell me your name and I will swear it.”

“Diana Seater,” she said, looking him in the eye. “Who are you?”

“They call me the Penitent,” he said.

Her eyes opened a fraction wider. “Swear it, then, that you will return the book to me tomorrow or be weakened by it.”

He swore it, with Nieve looking at him sideways. Then they were leaving with the book, and Nieve was muttering an aggrieved litany that continued the whole way to the car.

“She’s a fucking Druid,” said Nieve as soon as they were alone the minivan.

“Not quite,” said Iobáth. “She has Druid blood, but she doesn’t have the voice. She’s untrained. She won’t become a true Druid until she kills.” She was still a puzzle. “Miach must have donated the book to the library for her use. Why not train her himself, if he knows of her existence, as he obviously must?”

Nieve sighed. “Because she’s young and pretty and he can’t keep bringing lovely young Druids home to his new wife.”

“He may have no choice if he wants to keep her and her potential out of the hands of the Prince Consort.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Because the Prince Consort followed us.”