Blade Dance

“Now that does make things interesting,” said the Prince.

Ann knew she needed to be close to him for her plan to work, but the glittering Fae terrified her. She hoped that he couldn’t see the fear on her face. She hoped that no one could see her hand shaking, see how the iron blade trembled.

She’d expected it to be cold, the little black knife. It was forged from a single piece of iron, handle and blade, and it felt strangely warm in her hand, as though it held some life of its own. Perhaps it did. To cut the Prince’s flesh, it had to be made for that purpose, Nieve had told her. And once used it would never hold an edge again, such was the enchantment that protected the Queen’s lover. Half-bloods, fortunately, could handle cold iron.

“I’ll do it,” said Ann.

“No,” said Finn.

The Prince smiled. Their discord pleased him, showed them to be at odds when they should be united, and it gave him the upper hand.

“Yes,” said Miach. “Ann has ties to the boy. Nieve doesn’t. If Ann is the one to draw the Prince’s blood, it will add force to the oath.”

“I don’t like it,” said Finn. It was plain to see that he wished the Prince didn’t know of Ann’s existence at all.

“None of us likes any of this,” said Miach, “but this is the predicament we find ourselves in. Threatened by Druids. Something I have been trying to warn you about for years now.”

“It wouldn’t be a problem at all,” said Finn, “if you and I had done a thorough job of it two thousand years ago.”

“It’s two thousand years too late for that,” said Garrett. “And the clock is ticking. Ann is willing, Dad. Let her do this. Ann cuts the Prince. He takes the oath. We hand over the photos.”

“Photos?” asked the Prince.

“I took photographs of Davin’s tattoos, the ones the Druid inked,” she said.

“Clever,” said the Prince. “Have you ever cut into a living being before?”

He was trying to undermine her. She mustn’t forget how dangerous this creature could be.

“I teach second grade. I’m not afraid of the sight of a little blood.”

“This isn’t quite the same as a skinned knee,” he said.

“No,” she said evenly. “I expect this is going to hurt a lot more.”

A perverse smile flitted across the Prince’s face. “You should have accepted my offer, Ann Phillips. Finn doesn’t deserve you.”

“Enough,” said Finn. Ann could hear the anger and the jealousy in his voice. She hated doing this to him, but he was focused on the danger from the Prince, and that meant he wasn’t thinking clearly—and that he wouldn’t be able to anticipate her plans. “Draw his blood and be done with it.”

The Prince stepped close to Ann. Far closer than he needed to. His black hair fell around her like a curtain. He held his wrist up between them and folded back the fine silk sleeves to reveal porcelain pale skin veined with blue.

“Cut deep,” he said. “And twist the knife.”

A wave of nausea swept her at the thought, but she fought it back and laid the knife against the Prince’s arm. She ran the blade in a straight line from elbow to wrist. It sliced his skin open, but the edges of the wound turned silver and closed and he was whole once more.

The Prince looked into her eyes and grasped her wrist, plunged the knife, still gripped in her hand, into his own flesh.

There should have been more blood. It was like cutting into meat, into a plucked chicken or a tied roast, already long since bled dry. Only the faintest gloss of crimson coated her knife.

The Prince’s face was set in hard lines. “Twist the blade,” he said.

Ann twisted. A single fat drop of blood flowed down the handle. Miach was suddenly there at her elbow holding a silver vial. He caught the drop as it fell. Ann twisted again and made the mistake of looking up into the Prince’s face. He was smiling at her now, and she experienced an unsettling insight. He was enjoying the pain. The way she had enjoyed the kiss of Finn’s belt.

And he knew. The Prince knew. Somehow he could see into her. Or maybe he just knew her kind. An affinity born of long acquaintance. It was Ann who hadn’t known herself, but that was changing already.

“We’re ready,” said Miach.

Ann withdrew the knife. The Prince’s flesh closed, leaving his pale skin unblemished. Magic. It was still difficult for Ann to credit the evidence of her own eyes, but there it was.

Miach dipped a silver pen—ingeniously wrought to look like a quill—in the silver bottle of blood and handed it to the Prince. A piece of paper, the linen rag edges rough and unfinished, lay on the table in front of them. The top half was written in a shimmering ink that seemed to dance and move, the characters from an alphabet Ann had never seen before but that somehow seemed familiar.

“Copy it out,” said Miach to the Prince, “word for word. No elaborations or omissions. If you deviate from the text, the paper will burn itself to ash, and we will have no bargain.”

“Ingenious,” said the Prince. “And unnecessary, in this case. But if it pleases you . . .”

Ann watched him copy out the text. He wrote in a bolder hand than Miach, his pen moving briskly, each character finished with an elegant flourish. Ann knew that Japanese calligraphy, when painted by a master, could be an art form. She suspected that the Fae language, in the hands of someone like the Prince, could be the same.

Ann didn’t stray from his side. No one seemed to notice that. Even Finn had finally taken his eyes off her, intent on watching the Prince, alert for any sign of a double-cross.

Finally he was done. “There.” The Prince handed the pen back to Miach. The sorcerer examined the document. His face betrayed nothing. The silence in the room was absolute. Finally Miach passed the blood contract to Garrett, who studied it just as carefully, just as expressionlessly. At last he nodded.

“Satisfied?” the Prince asked.

No one spoke. Garrett left the room and came back with the photographs. He spread them out over the table in front of the Prince.

Everyone stared at the pictures. They couldn’t help it. Ann understood that, because she’d felt the same way when she’d first seen the tattoos running from Davin’s shoulders to his elbows, the inky leaves twisting around his small limbs: stricken. But Ann was inured to the effect of the images now, and she chanced a look up at the Prince.

His face was unreadable, and that chilled her. “When were these tattoos done?” he asked.

“Last week,” said Sean.

“They may have been altered by now,” said the Prince. “It shouldn’t matter, since I’m tracking the maker, and not the recipient, but it would help to have something of the boy’s as well.”

Nancy McTeer pulled the little Bruins hoodie out of her handbag. The Prince took it, but he said nothing about the obvious bloodstains inside the sleeves, brown and crusted, where Davin’s scabs had bled.

Ann almost missed the sign when it came, the slight shimmer in the air around the Prince. She was distracted by the way he carefully folded Davin’s hoodie and put it in his pocket, then ran his hands over the photographs. Where his skin touched the images, the paper became blank, as though he had absorbed the ink into his body. She felt the hair on the back of her neck rise, as though electrically charged, and knew that this was it. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Finn realize a moment too late what she intended. He moved to grab her. She threw herself at the Prince and wrapped her arms around his waist.

And passed with him.

It was far, far worse than with Finn. For one thing, no one was holding her. She had her hands clasped together behind the Prince’s back but she felt as though a gale force wind was trying to tear them apart. Without Finn’s sure and steady embrace she met the full horror of being buried alive, drowned, and entombed. It lasted longer than when she had passed with Finn, as though they were traversing a greater distance and hurtling through a wider variety of substances, and every few seconds they seemed to emerge, only to be plunged back into the maelstrom again.

Then the world exploded around her, chill and wet and too bright for her tortured senses.

They were standing on a beach. A gray, chilly beach, hard and rocky. Ann had never stood upon a spot so desolate. There were no buildings or people in sight. The surf pounded relentlessly. The water was dark and forbidding and it stretched unbroken to the gray and cloudy horizon. Her cotton sweater did nothing to stop the wind, and her trouser cuffs were quickly becoming sodden from the damp sand.

Ann shivered and turned to find the Prince sitting up against a dune, head back, eyes closed. “That was very stupid,” he said, without bothering to open his eyes.

“Probably,” she agreed. She slipped her hand into her pocket, tapped her cell phone to send her text, waited for the whoosh that would tell her that her message had been sent.

It clanked instead. Not the sound she was hoping for.

“I was wrong about you and Finn,” said the Prince, opening his eyes but not moving. Ann thought he might look even paler than usual. “He does deserve you. I’ve been trying to kill Finn MacUmhaill for centuries, but a woman like you will get the job done in a decade. You tried to text him our location, didn’t you?”

“Yes.” Ann pulled her cell phone out of her pocket. “But there’s no signal.”

For a second a single bar appeared on the screen, but it winked out almost instantly, and her message remained unsent.

“Good,” said the Prince. “The last thing I need is your lover and my insane brother to blunder in while I’m trying to kill a Druid.”

“You don’t look up to killing a fly,” she said.

“No thanks to you,” said the Prince.

“I don’t understand,” said Ann. “I know passing can be difficult, but Finn carried me across Charlestown and it didn’t have this kind of effect on him. What’s different about what we just did?”

The Prince opened his eyes and examined her. “Passing is an act of will. It requires focus. It is the conquest of matter by magic. The transmutation of the body from one place to another. Very few Fae can carry anything with them when they pass. Distance adds to the energy required. Clarity of mind is paramount. Suddenly discovering that you have a passenger is not, to put it mildly, ideal. Tracking adds another layer of complication, because I’m following the signature of another living being blindly, and this Druid laid traps for us. He has never come here directly. We followed him through a number of intermediate points, all intended to tire and confuse me. He might not have gone to so much trouble if he’d known I was carrying a mad berserker with me.”

“I didn’t realize that coming with you would make it harder for you to track the Druid.”

“So Finn did not approve this little hitchhiking expedition.”

“No. This was my idea.”

“Why?”

“Because someone should be looking out for Davin, and you have some hidden agenda.”

“One that does not conflict with saving the child,” he said.

“If you had to choose between saving Davin and concealing whatever this Druid was up to, which would you choose?”

The Prince sighed. “If you had asked me in Finn’s house, I would have said Davin, but now that I see where we are, I might be forced to answer differently.”

“Where are we?”

“An island in the Irish Sea.”

“Does it have a name?”

“Maybe it once did, or perhaps it never had a name. It doesn’t have one now, and it’s not on any map. This place is cloaked in magic, and with good reason, because of that.”

The Prince nodded at the slope behind them.

At first Ann thought she was looking at a grassy hill. The dunes stretched inland a mile, climbing steadily to a green plateau. The grass was unnaturally verdant and lush. Atop the plateau stood a mound faced in small white chips of sparkling granite, ringed by elaborately carved standing stones, and topped by a manicured grassy dome. The structure had to be several hundred feet across. Ann couldn’t conceive of how such a massive thing had been built in such a remote place.

“What is that?”

“A Druid mound.”

“You mean one of the mounds where they held the Fae captive?” asked Ann, feeling a shiver run down her spine.

“Yes. The Irish called them fairy forts, long after they had forgotten what they really were. They were where the Druids held us captive, where they conducted their experiments, where they cultivated their dark arts. We thought we had found all the mounds,” said the Prince. “Miach and Finn and I. We thought we had destroyed their laboratories and workshops, burned all of their libraries and shattered all of their implements of torture, but evidently we were wrong.”

“How did your Druid know about this place?”

“Some of them have an ability to find Fae and Druid sites using maps and photographs. Miach has such a Druid working with him, but she’s never found anything like this, a mound we never knew of. One the Druids took a great deal of care to conceal.”

“But why the secrecy?” Ann asked. “If they’d already conquered you, what would they hide here?”

“I don’t know,” said the Prince. “Let’s find out, shall we?”

Finn had thrown himself across the table to get to her, but Ann and the Prince disappeared before he could reach them.

“What the fuck was she thinking?” he screamed, overturning the table and a row of chairs.

“She was thinking of Davin,” said Nieve. “It’s what I would have done, too.”

“Or maybe,” said Nancy, “she decided the Prince would make a better protector than a war leader who can’t protect his own.”

“Nancy,” said Sean in a warning tone.

He should have anticipated this. The questions Ann had asked him about passing hadn’t been about passing with him. She’d planned this, his crazy, brave berserker. He was so angry with her, he wanted to scream the house down. And her stupidity only made him admire her more.

And she might be dead, left inside a mountain, at the bottom of the sea, atop a glacier by the Prince Consort. His chest constricted. Scenes of horror reeled through his mind.

“Dad!”

Garrett was speaking to him. “We’re going to track the Prince. We’ll find them.”

“He could kill her as easily as breathing,” said Finn.

“He won’t,” said Miach. “The Prince is an ardent collector, and Ann is unique. The first berserker to manifest in two thousand years. He wants her for himself.”

“Nancy is right,” said Finn. “Everything that has happened, has happened because my leadership was lacking.” Private self-recrimination was not enough. Not for the leader of the Fianna. If he wished to avoid Cú Chulainn’s fate, if he hoped to save Ann, he had to make a full and public confession and begin carrying the true burden of his responsibilities.

“I failed my son by setting him the worst of examples. I taught Garrett to take whatever he wanted, with no thought for the consequences, and Nieve nearly died on account of it. That was not how Brigid and I lived or loved, and I’ve dishonored her memory with my behavior. If my son has grown into a good husband and father, it was his own doing, and none of mine. I failed the Fianna when I abducted Miach’s stone singer and his right hand for my own ends. And I failed Sean long before we ever came to Boston. I should have given him paper and ink and a cabin beside a lake after we pulled him out of the mound, not put a sword in his hand. If he made mistakes with his son, they are the mistakes I drove him to.”

The room was silent, but Miach looked surprised, Nieve and Garrett cautious, and his followers for the most part relieved.

He felt no different when it was over, because these were words, not deeds, but he hoped that they would turn the tide of his fate, and Ann’s with it.