Blade Dance

Ann struggled up the dune behind the Prince. She had misjudged the distance to the mound. It was more than a mile, with every step a slipping, sliding fight. Even the Prince’s supernatural grace was challenged by the rough terrain. They scaled one side of a dune, only to find themselves slithering down the other to begin another, higher, more torturous ascent.

“Keep up, little berserker,” said the Prince, turning to offer her a hand as they emerged at last onto the grass-covered plain. “The best part is yet to come.”

Up close, the mound had a sinister aspect. Ann couldn’t put her finger on it, but there was something about the site, the proportions of the structure, the angles of the slope, that made her feel deeply uneasy. She didn’t like the standing stones one bit. They were set up in pairs every thirty feet or so, towering roughhewn monoliths covered in whorled carvings. There was enough space between each pair for three people to walk abreast. Drawn to and repulsed by them at the same time, Ann approached the nearest pair and walked toward the opening, only to be struck by a blinding pain behind her eyes and a horrific vision.

She knew she wasn’t seeing the present, but the scene before her was so vivid, so real, that her gorge rose and her eyes watered. Ann saw two black-robed figures in front of her dragging a third between them. They passed through the standing stones, robes fluttering, their backs to Ann, but the body they carried was facing her way—and the poor wretch was alive. Naked, bleeding from dozens of wounds, their victim was Fae, or at least part Fae, and male, and somehow he seemed to be staring straight at Ann, his eyes entreating her for help.

She knew then what he was and why she could see him. Berserkers. Her people.

The figures faded and vanished as they drew near the mound, and Ann swayed from the horror of the vision.

“Ann!” barked the Prince, snapping her back to the present. “What are you looking at?”

“Ghosts,” she said.

He cocked his head and raised his hand to her face, brushing moisture off her cheek. She hadn’t realized she’d been crying.

“Save your tears,” he said. “The Fae who suffered here are long past caring. We did not know of this place. No one here was rescued.”

“Not just Fae,” she said. “Berserkers. I saw one of them.”

“An echo, no more. He is two thousand years dead.”

She did not want to go inside. Even if it was only an echo, it was an echo of pain and suffering shared by people like her. She could feel the despair clinging to the place. It made her chest tighten and her throat constrict and her stomach revolt.

She went anyway, because she was here to get Davin out.

Up close the granite wall was dirty and weathered. Three massive stones framed the entrance to the mound, with a light box above to let a shaft of wan sun into the passage.

The shaft sloped down into the earth. The temperature dropped almost instantly as soon as they crossed the threshold, and the damp seemed to penetrate her clothes and make her bones ache. She could feel the crushing weight of so many tons of earth above, pressing down on her. A dozen feet inside the passage Ann felt a wave of nausea and halted, pressing her head to the cold damp stone to relieve the dizzy churning.

“Don’t stop,” snarled the Prince. She felt cruel hands grip her wrist and shoulder and thrust her forward along the passage. She stumbled, fell to her knees. The Prince dragged her another twenty feet, and suddenly the nausea broke and she lay panting on the dirt floor as the walls and ceiling stopped spinning.

She sat up slowly. Only dim light reached this far into the passage, but she could see the Prince’s pale face, streaked with blood. It ran from his eyes and his nose, trailed from his ears down his neck.

“What just happened?” she asked.

“We passed through the wards. Very nasty, very Druid wards. Let me see your wrists.”

“My wrists? Why?”

“Look down,” he said.

She did. The stone floor was patterned with some kind of writing beneath a thick but much disturbed carpet of iron dust.

“The floor is inked,” explained the Prince. “We passed over a geis. My skin won’t take ink, but yours has no such protection. If the wards were active after all this time, very likely the geis was, too, and it will have found purchase on your skin somewhere.”

Ann pushed her sleeves up. There was nothing on her wrists.

The Prince reached for the hem of her sweater, but she stepped back.

He held his hands up. “Suit yourself. But if the Druid marks found purchase on your skin, you might not like the consequences.”

“What sort of geis would it be?” she asked.

“Impossible to say without seeing it. Druid ink can rewrite itself. It might leap onto one Fae’s skin and become a means of tracking him, or controlling him, or robbing him of his voice or his ability to cast. The sophistication of such a trap depends on the skill of the Druid that laid it.”

“I don’t like the sound of that,” said Ann.

“There isn’t much to like about Druids.”

“How is it that you’re bleeding?” she asked. “I thought you couldn’t be cut.”

“Cut, no. Poisoned, yes. Iron filings, most likely, scattered on the floor. Our passage probably disturbed them. The wards slowed us down enough for me to breathe in more than is good for me. We should proceed cautiously from here. I won’t be able to pass any great distance until the iron leaves my body.”

“How long will that take?”

“A few hours, as long as we don’t encounter any more.” He climbed to his feet and hauled her up with him. “Did you bring a weapon?”

She shook her head. He produced a silver knife from one of his pockets and handed it to Ann.

“Now the real fun starts,” he said. “Stick close to me. I don’t want to waste energy lighting our way, but these passages can be tricky. The Druids didn’t like mortals interfering in their business, so they made their chambers as inaccessible as possible. And of course they didn’t want their prisoners getting out, on the rare occasions when they weren’t chained to the walls.”

“I’d rather not hold hands.” She fished her cell phone out of her pocket. “Here,” she said, turning the flashlight application on. Two bars of signal flashed briefly at the top of the screen, kindling her hopes, only to disappear again a moment later. She handed it to the Prince. “It’s not doing me much good as a phone; it might was well be a torch.”

“Useful,” he admitted. “But next time, I advise you to bring a blade.”

There wasn’t going to be a next time. If she got out of this alive, Ann vowed that she would never even set foot in a basement again, let alone an evil Druid mound.

The Prince led the way. They passed dozens of dark openings, some disturbingly shaped, others impossibly narrow, some just strange channels cut into the earth. The Prince ignored them all until the passage forked and they were faced with a choice: left or right.

“Left,” said the Prince. “Druids always choose the left-hand path.”

She kept her eyes on the Prince’s back, because she didn’t want to think what might be down the strange passages that kept opening to her left and right. One was no more than a foot wide but taller than the Prince, and Ann couldn’t imagine the horror of shimmying down such a narrow space.

They walked perhaps another dozen yards, and finally the passage opened into a large chamber. The ceiling rose high above them, and wan light filtered through an opening cut into the rock. Somehow that glimpse of the world above should have comforted her, but the tall chimney only reminded her of how deep underground they were, how buried in the earth, and the light from it failed to illuminate the shadowy corners of the room.

The Prince used her cell-phone light to strobe the space, and Ann didn’t like what she saw. The walls were covered with the same whorled carvings as the standing stones outside the entrance, but they had deep shelves and wide niches carved into them, filled with corroded iron boxes and heavy earthenware vessels. There were smaller glass jars as well, with things floating in them. But they weren’t the worst part. The worst part was the chains hanging from the walls and black iron trestles pushed up against them, crusted with something that looked an awful lot like old blood. That, and the instruments. The air had a burnt, chemical tang that seared the back of her throat.

“What was this place?” asked Ann. Part of her knew but didn’t want to believe it.

“A prison, a laboratory, a repository,” said the Prince. “The question is, why was this one so hidden? So far, this is no different from a hundred other Druid mounds in the British Isles.”

The thought turned her stomach.

“What did they hope to accomplish with all this?”

“Power,” said the Prince. “The Druids started out human. We gave them a little magic. They taught themselves to acquire more. Their ultimate end was to surpass the Fae, to discover what set us apart from other races on the earth and take it for themselves.”

Ann peered at the grisly jars. “This doesn’t look like research. It looks like dissection.”

“Vivisection, actually,” said the Prince. “That was their favorite method. It has proven difficult to wean even their descendants of the practice.”

“You say that like it’s a minor inconvenience. This Druid has your nephew.”

“Yes,” said the Prince. “And you’re here because you think I’ll place killing the Druid ahead of rescuing the child. Now you understand why I might make that choice.”

“If they’re so dangerous, then maybe you shouldn’t be seeking out their descendants and training them to be sadists.”

“The sadism is a side effect of the training, not the goal. It’s difficult to find Druids young. The ones who survived our revenge went deep into hiding and their descendants forgot entirely their power.”

“Maybe that’s for the best. Who would want to be this?” she said, gesturing at the horror around them.

“Not all Druids develop a taste for blood, but unfortunately it’s difficult to predict which ones will survive their training with sanity intact.”

“Once they learn their history, once they learn that you want to bring down the wall they built, why on earth do they want to work for you?” she asked.

“They don’t. That’s why I never tell them their history.”

“But this one found out,” guessed Ann.

“This one found out,” agreed the Prince.

It occurred to Ann that he was only telling her this because he assumed that eventually she would be on his side. She couldn’t imagine that outcome. The Druids had been evil, but the Fae hadn’t been much better, and she didn’t like the idea of living under the Queen’s rule.

The passage continued on the other side of the chamber. They walked in silence until they reached another turn, this one leading into the heart of the mound. It widened and spilled out into a chamber of shocking grandeur, roughly circular, with a diameter of at least fifty feet. The ceiling was domed in jagged rock, and at its center a stone chimney admitted light and air.

The Prince switched Ann’s cell phone light off, and she realized that the chamber had its own subtle illumination emanating from the walls. Some of kind of pattern, distinctly different from the whorls and dots in the rest of the mound, was etched into the stonework, and the lines were filled with a substance that glowed softly. Ann followed the carvings for a stretch, trying to decipher the strange design. She had seen something like it before.

“They look like architectural drawings,” she said. “Like blueprints.” Only she couldn’t quite figure out what they were blueprints of.

“They are,” he said, his voice resonant with wonder, as he ran his slender fingers over the lines on the wall. “The Druids only ever built one thing of note. These are the plans for the wall.”

In the dim light she could make out his smile of delight. It made the hair on the back of her neck rise. “Your Druid didn’t find this by accident, did he?” she asked. “You had him searching for it.”

“Among other projects. Yes. It’s one of their particular skills, related to scrying, but different. They can feel Druid and Fae sites through maps and images. My Druids have been at it for decades, with no success, and I gave them nearly unlimited resources. But I’d long since given up hope of finding this. When we started, I sent them to steal the rarest and most obscure charts and drawings from the greatest libraries in the world. They spent years poring over ley lines and longitude and latitude, but all they ever came up with was trinkets or old mounds, long since pillaged and abandoned. The trouble with maps drawn by human hands is that human eyes have to see the places first. Satellites don’t. I started giving my Druids access to real-time maps as soon as the technology made it practical, but evidently my devious acolyte did not feel the proper gratitude and decided to keep this from me.”

Now that she knew what the plans were supposed to represent, Ann started to understand what she was seeing. The wall wasn’t just a barrier between the worlds. It was a machine, an engine of sorts. The etching was two dimensional—it had to be; she knew that—but the lines created an impression of infinite depth, as though the towers and pillars that supported it stretched to infinity. It was impossible to determine what the defenses were intended to be built out of, but there was an undeniable sense of texture created by the rendering, as though the thing had both been carved out of the heaviest elements and was light enough to float away on the air. If she looked too long at any one detail, her teeth started to ache and her vision blurred.

“For some reason,” she said, “I didn’t think that the wall was a physical thing, a wall made out of bricks and mortar.”

“It’s not,” said the Prince. “It’s a magical construct with physical foundations in both worlds.”

“Finn says that you have been to the other side.”

“Briefly,” said the Prince.

“What was it like?”

He turned to look at her and his eyes gave the impression of seeing her, really seeing her for the first time. “You are the first to ask,” said the Prince.

“I have a hard time believing that.”

“That’s because Berserkers are part Fae and part human. The human side of you is curious. The human side of you indulges in empathy. You wonder what it is like for the Court, exiled from the world they once ruled, imprisoned for two thousand years. You wonder this even though they ruled with consistent cruelty.”

“I suppose I do wonder. I don’t want them back. But I’m not sure I want them to suffer eternally, either.”

“That is your human side again.”

“It must have been terrible there,” said Ann.

“Why do you think that?”

“Because you don’t want to tell me. When something is terrible enough, you don’t even want to think about it. You try to forget it. Talking about it just makes it real again.”

“Did you read that in a glossy magazine at the supermarket checkout, Miss Phillips? Standing there with your basket of groceries after totaling up the bill and realizing you couldn’t afford to indulge in a gossip rag and eat meat that night? That’s when the rage inside you is hardest to control, isn’t it? It’s not when you watch some bully take a swing at his wife or child. It’s when you stand there at the supermarket checkout knowing that you are better than all the sheep in line in front of you. That you have the proud blood of ancient warriors in you. That you’re more than everyone else around you, but that by sheer force of numbers, with their craven rules and laws, they’ve made you small. That’s what it feels like on the other side of the wall. And that’s why I’m going to bring it down.”

He was right. She had felt like that, but she didn’t like that about herself, and she didn’t like that he could see inside her like that. “Even though the Queen hates half-bloods, like your nephew?”

“If the boy favors me, she’ll want him as a pet. And she’ll delight in your survival. She always loved berserkers. If Finn plays her correctly, she won’t come between you.”

“He won’t let the wall come down.”

“He won’t be able to stop it. He knows that. It is only a matter of time. The wall wasn’t built to stand forever. And if it has a weakness, it will be in these plans.”

“Then you’ll have to study them later. We’re here for Davin and the Druid,” she reminded him.

“So we are,” said the Prince. “These will keep. They’ve kept for two thousand years.”

“You mean you’ll come back for them,” she said.

“Of course. I will study them to find the fatal flaw in the design, and Miach will come here to search for some way to shore the wall up. The laws of nature and physics, though, favor me. Nothing lasts forever, not even the wall.”

“If the end of the wall is inevitable, why work so hard to hasten its destruction? Why not wait for it to fall on its own. Do you love the Queen that much?”

“I love her almost as much as I hate her,” mused the Prince, “but that isn’t why I’m impatient to have the wall down. I am heartsick of the human world, of your pale imitation of life. I miss the beauty of the Court. You could not even imagine it. Our architecture, our painting, our sculpture, our music, even our stories were more vibrant than anything humans have ever devised. I want to live again, truly live, as the Fae lived before the fall. You would want that, too, if you knew what it was like. And you can know. Let me show you.”

He took a step toward her. She backed away.

“We’re here for Davin,” she said.

“And he is here because the Druid found these. It will take but a moment to show you what it is you are giving up, the sublime beauty that is your birthright.”

He held out a hand.

“What is it you want to do?” she asked.

“I want to let you look back in time, to let you catch a glimpse of what you could have if the Court returned.”

“I’ve already heard about life under the Fae. It was unending human misery.”

“Do you really think humans are any happier under their own tyranny?”

“Yes.”

“And does your own experience bear that out? Were you any happier before you discovered what you really are? Before you entered our world?”

“You have a way of twisting logic,” she said.

“You weren’t, were you? What did it feel like, suppressing all of your true urges and desires, knowing that if you gave them free rein, you’d be shunned, or imprisoned? But you were already in a sort of prison, weren’t you? Bars were only the next step. And never very far away, if you slipped, just once.”

“But I didn’t,” she said. “I made a life for myself.”

“You made a half life,” said the Prince. “Deny it if it makes you feel any better about your choices, but why compound the same mistakes? Do you really want to live in the human world now that you’ve had a taste of ours?”

“I think your world is best experienced in small doses,” she said.

“Finn MacUmhaill is not a small dose of our world. He is the most charismatic, the most purely Fae leader we have ever produced. A true chieftain, who has drawn thousands to his banner. If you don’t understand us, you will never understand him.”

She was afraid he was right. She didn’t want him to be right. “We don’t have time for this,” she said, heading for the other end of the hall where a dark doorway beckoned.

He grasped her wrist as she passed, swung her around, and said, “I can show you a lifetime in a second. And I will not make this offer again.”

She hesitated. She ached to truly know Finn. The Prince saw, and he smiled in triumph. “Close your eyes.”

She did. She felt a hand brush her cheek, his thumb sketch her jaw, and then the darkness took on shape and sound and she was seeing. With her eyes closed. There was wind in her hair and fresh air in her lungs and she was moving forward, her body one with the mount beneath her.

For a second she wondered what she was doing on a horse. She didn’t know how to ride. But evidently she did. That wasn’t quite right, either. It wasn’t a matter of knowing. Knowledge was for Druids. Feeling was for the Fae, and she felt the power in the mare’s shoulders. She was perfectly attuned to the dip and rise of her gallop, as natural as the tide.

She was part of everything around her. Of the earth beneath her horse’s hooves, soft and carpeted with pine needles, of the sweet leaves that canopied her way through these woods, of the branches she could anticipate as she flew past. She buried her face in the mare’s mane when one swooped low and then leaned over the side of her saddle to avoid another.

The speed was thrilling. And they were catching up to their prey. She could hear the other riders crashing through the trees to the left and the right, the music of their laughter, their shouts, their excited cries carried on the wind.

They broke through the trees and into a field of waving grass, and the beauty of the hunt appeared to her like the sun on a cloudy day. Her own mount was caparisoned in silver with gilt inlay, and rubies winked at her from the saddle. Ann’s hair was woven with silk ribbons that fluttered in the breeze, and it was blond, not red, but that was fine, just a discordant detail in a glittering, lovely dream.

Because Finn was there and he had no scars. He was smiling, his hair as long as her own, his silk robes embroidered with red roses, his horse’s mane embroidered with the same ribbons that adorned her own blond hair.

She could see the boar, haunches steaming, one spear already sticking out of its hide, but it was still moving, and she was glad for that because she didn’t want the hunt to end. All around her the Fianna were breaking from the trees, laughing and calling to one another, even Miach, their sorcerous guest, and his right hand, Elada.

Brigid had never trusted Miach. She didn’t trust magic. Neither did Finn, but he had uses for it. She had none. And none for the Druids living on their land. She didn’t like the way they, particularly the head “priest,” looked at her and she did not like them around her sons.

Miach, though, was a Druid lover. He had even brought a party of them with him on this visit, and Brigid had seen them with her own Druids. Plotting. She was sure of it.

The boar was down, and Fion, her eldest, was butchering it with deft hands. Finn dismounted, and the rest of the band did likewise, already spreading bright cloths upon the ground.

“Let’s go into the woods,” he said.

“We have guests,” she reminded him.

He bristled. “And were you thinking of admitting them to your bed?”

“You’re the one who calls that sorcerer a friend.”

“We’ve been friends since boyhood. It isn’t his fault that he turned out to be a sorcerer. Are you thinking of bedding him?”

She shuddered at the thought. “A sorcerer? Never. Elada, though . . .”

Finn sighed.

“A joke,” she chided him. “Nothing more.” She wished sometimes that she had refused the Prince, but she had known that their sons would pay the price of the Queen’s displeasure. “I love you,” she said.

But she said it softly, so that not even a sorcerer could hear, because the Fae understood lust and they respected desire, but they scorned love. Love led to weakness, and the leader of the Fianna could not afford to be weak. It would get back to the Queen. Everything always got back to the Queen.

Still, she said it whenever she was sure they were out of the hearing of others. He rarely said it but he always acted on it, as he was acting on it now, casting a glance over his shoulder and pulling a blanket from the pack at her saddle, taking her hand and leading her into the trees.

“Why is Miach really here?” she asked as the forest closed in around them.

“We passed a clearing a mile or so back,” he said, ignoring her question.

“I know you are keeping things from me.”

“Court gossip,” said Finn. “You hate Court. It will only upset you. And it does not touch on our lives.”

“Court intrigue touches everyone’s lives. Tell me.”

“The Queen became displeased with her champion. And the perfect warrior proved himself less than perfect. Conn of the Hundred Battles insulted the Queen by spending too much time with his human mistress.”

“The Queen should understand infatuation well enough. The Prince Consort is forever infatuated with something new.”

“Something new she could understand, but the obsession of long duration, or at least long as regards a mortal. He’s been keeping the woman for twenty years. She is no longer young, no longer surpassingly beautiful, but still he prefers her stone hearth to the Queen’s silvered halls. And he has been hiding something there. A daughter, with all the loveliness his faded mistress once possessed, gilded by his own Fae appeal.”

A half-blood daughter. Only a fool would love a half-blood child. But Conn of the Hundred Battles had ever been a fool. “Not so very well hidden, this daughter, if you know of her.”

“The whole Court knows of her. And she is dead, along with her mother.”

It was not the same thing but, still, Brigid thought of her sons, Fion and the rest. She and Finn would not be able to keep them away from Court forever. At the very least, the Queen would encounter them the next time she demanded Finn’s hospitality. Monogamy was not a Fae virtue. Variety helped to renew love over the centuries. Her own parents had separated and reunited many times through the long years, and there had been true joy in her childhood home. Finn would never have felt threatened by some young member of the Fianna. She would not have been jealous if he bedded some Court beauty when called to wait upon the Queen. It was the Prince Consort who was the problem.

“Conn should have foreseen such an end to the affair,” said Brigid. “He should have taken better care to keep them out of the Queen’s eye.” As Brigid tried to do with her sons, with her husband, whom she loved.

“It is done now,” said Finn. “But Miach does not think it is finished.”

“Such things always blow over,” said Brigid. “Conn will find another woman to install in his cottage.”

“Conn has disappeared, but not before swearing vengeance on our whole race, apparently.”

“He is one sword,” said Brigid. “And though he is unequaled in single combat, he does not have the wit for plotting.”

“I’m sure you’re right,” said Finn.

“I’m always right,” she said.

He laughed. “Only the Queen is always right.”

“I’d rather not be compared to her,” she said.

“But you are a queen among women,” he said. “My Brigid, my wife.”

It was the closest he got to saying he loved her and it was close enough.

“You ought to know better, war leader of the Fianna. A Fae can only have what he holds.”

She took off, running, a game that they played. He would have caught her sooner, but he was wearing armor better suited for sitting a horse than racing a smaller, lighter woman, and she ran on past the clearing and all the way to the banks of the little stream.

He used his weight to his advantage then, tackling her and knocking her to the ground. She rolled out of his reach, but he managed to catch her ankle and drag her back, and then he got hold of her hair. He used it like a rope to haul her onto her hands and knees, right where he wanted her, and she was held that way in helpless, tortured anticipation while he shed his armor.

It was too good. It was always too good with him. Never as good with anyone else. Never as sweet, never as salt.

Afterward he spread the blanket on the ground and pulled her into his arms. “Don’t fall asleep,” he warned her. “We have guests to entertain, and I’d rather not have them come looking for us.”

She dozed.

And when she opened her eyes again, she was Ann Phillips once more, and she was beneath the earth with the Prince Consort, inside that cold, damp Druid mound.