Blade Dance

Finn passed the cell phone to Miach. “The Druid has her. She’s in a mound,” he said. His voice sounded far away.

Miach shot him a look and took the phone out of his hand. “This is not the fall,” he said, reaching for a pencil and bending over the map on the table. “Ann is not Brigid. We will get her back.”

Finn understood the words, but he didn’t believe them. He had survived too much, traveled too far, to lose Brigid that day. In the years since he had wondered what he could have done differently, how he could have come to her rescue sooner.

His own captivity, he later estimated, had lasted a little more than a year. He had been one of the first that Miach and the Prince had come for, because his was a famous name and his freedom would rally others. They had already freed too many Fae whose spirits were as broken as their bodies, and they needed fighters if they were to turn the tide quickly enough to destroy the Druids.

The advantage belonged to the Druids. They had planned their revolt so carefully over so many years and with such precision that the Fae were taken almost without a fight. Iron, of course, was their weapon of choice, and they had been forging it in secret, devising ever more grisly ways to use it.

The Prince, Finn, Miach, and Elada had known that the key was to move quickly. If they took out Druid mounds one by one, if they left no survivors, if they could keep ahead of word of their escape, they would be able to take each cluster unawares.

It was the marks that made them most vulnerable. All but the Prince, whose skin would not scar, bore them, carved into their flesh while they were incapacitated by iron dust. The marks compelled obedience to the Druid voice. The only way to counter them was to have a sorcerer cast a silence.

Every raid took the same shape. The Prince would enter the Druid steading first and draw their attention while Miach cast a silence over the entire community, with Elada at his side to protect him.

Then they would start killing. They did it efficiently, but Finn was ever on the lookout for high-ranking Druids who might be spared for interrogation. Because he was searching for his wife.

He’d wanted to go immediately south when he was first freed, because he’d hoped that Brigid and their children might have escaped. She was a formidable swordswoman, his wife, and resourceful. If anyone could evade capture, she could. The Prince and Miach, though, convinced him that their defeat had been utter and complete. No Fae remained free. The Queen and her Court were beyond the wall. Everyone else was dead or captive in the mounds.

But Finn knew Brigid was not dead. She was his other half. They had been together too long. He would have known if she had departed the earth. He would have followed her into death; they were that closely bound.

Finn had known Miach and the Prince were right, but when they had neared his old lands in their campaign, he’d been unable to resist the lure of home. Finn had slipped away in the middle of the night to search for his family.

He’d found his children left to rot in the fields and the house where they had been born. The Druids had killed them, and his horses, too, slashing their throats, as though Fae and beast were all livestock.

Miach had come upon him there, sitting in the empty shell of his manor where nature had already begun to reassert herself and saplings grew in cracks between the floor tiles.

“She isn’t here,” he’d said to his oldest friend.

“Then she may still live,” had said Miach.

“She lives.” He’d been sure of it then.

They had found Brigid in a mound in the west. She lived for three days after Finn carried her out, and Miach worked that whole time to save her, pouring life into her until his lips were cracked and his hair fell out, and still she died. The Prince had stood by, silent for once, but Finn had known they risked the unraveling of their whole enterprise by staying there, because as soon as the Druids became aware of their escape, they would not be so easy to best.

He was holding her when she died. It was not a peaceful death. It was out under the open sky, a small consolation, but she convulsed twice and struggled to breathe and went still, her eyes glassy and unseeing. Blood, more than seemed possible, had poured from her open mouth.

He had wanted to bury her. He had wanted to take her home and bury her under the house where they had been so happy. He had wanted to wash her body in running water and anoint it with precious oils and wrap her in fine cloth embroidered with gold. There was no time for it. He knew that. They had already tarried too long. So they burned her on a pyre, and let the fire cleanse the blood from her desecrated body.

It was decades before he could remember her any other way, before he could recall what she had looked like in life, beautiful and vibrant and strong.

“There is nothing there,” Miach said, recalling him to the present. “It is a spot in the middle of the Irish Sea.” He drew an X on the map to mark the spot.

“She said it was an island,” said Finn.

“One cloaked in magic and not by me,” said Miach.

“Give me the phone,” said Finn.

Miach handed it over. “She is a berserker and unmarked, and she is with the only Fae born before the fall who is not subject to Druid command. Chances are good that we can save her and the boy.”

Chances were good, but they were not certainties, and so he typed his message out and said a silent prayer to Dana that Ann saw it: I love you.

Ann tried to take a step toward Davin, but the pain from the Druid’s knife cuts hit her all at once. She crumpled to her knees.

The little boy screamed.

The Druid sighed. “I grow weary of such caterwauling,” he said.

Ann watched through a haze of pain as the Druid passed. He flickered out of sight, but there was no doubt where he would reappear. As Ann watched with held breath, the Prince stepped in front of Davin, dropped to his knees, and pulled the child into his arms, just as the Druid materialized at his back. Ann saw the Druid’s knife move in a smooth arc, intended for the boy, but blocked by the Prince’s body. It went in through the Prince’s shoulder blades, and the point came out through his chest.

Davin’s eyes, level with Prince’s pierced heart, went wide with horror. The wound glowed silver.

“Don’t be afraid,” said the Prince.

The silver traveled from his pierced heart to his shoulders. Davin’s eyes followed its progress as it ran down the Prince’s arms—and up his own. It flowed over the fresh tattoos and up his face, freezing the child’s features in an open-mouthed expression of wonder.

The Druid circled the frozen pair, tapped the Prince’s silver shoulder with a dirty fingernail, then turned his bloodshot eyes on Ann.

She was going to die. Finn wasn’t going to get there in time. She was on a remote island with a psychotic killer. The Prince was incapacitated. But Davin was safe in his unexpectedly heroic uncle’s silver embrace, and Finn was on his way.

And she wasn’t going to see him again.

Something burst inside her. Anger, cleansing and bright, washed over her, and the pain in her arms and across her belly faded. She stood up and faced the Druid, who was as stupid as Sean Silver Blade. He just stood there, waiting for her to do something.

He thought she was weak. He thought she was powerless. He was wrong. She was pure strength, pure power. She could feel it in her fingertips, at the roots of her hair. For a second she enjoyed the potentiality, the feeling of being released from long captivity.

Then she launched herself at him.

And crashed headlong into the table full of computers. It went skidding across the floor and hit a shelf full of glass jars that toppled to the ground and shattered, blood and other strange fluids exploding on impact.

She felt a wet, hot line of pain across her back and screamed in frustration and fury, but the sound died on her lips. Her ears popped. She whirled to find the Druid there, knife in hand, smiling.

And then Finn was there in the room, standing behind the Druid, sword in his hands, and he stabbed the creature through. The Druid opened his mouth but no sound came out. He dropped to his knees, raged silently, and then vanished.

Finn threw his sword down and rushed to Ann, and she cried out when he took her in his arms, but there was still no sound. There was a cotton wool quality to the silence, as though she had been deafened by an explosion or her ears were plugged from altitude. Then something popped and sound came rushing back: the hum of the computers and the tones of Finn’s voice speaking soothing nonsense in her ear.

Pain came rushing back, too. Blood was still flowing from the wounds in her arms and across her stomach and back, and she suddenly felt cold and light-headed. The room spun, and she felt Finn lowering her to the desecrated floor.

She registered the arrival of more Fae: Sean and Garrett and Miach and Patrick and Iobáth and several of the Fianna she did not know by name.

“What is this?” asked Sean, standing over the effigy of his brother and son, locked in a silver embrace.

“He saved Davin,” said Ann. “I think.”

Miach was kneeling beside her, pushing back her sleeves and peeling her sweater off, and everything hurt. “They’re going to be fine,” he called over his shoulder to Sean. “But Ann won’t be unless I give her my undivided attention. The Prince can wait.”

“But my son,” said Sean.

“Is alive, and somehow, your brother shared his enchantment with him.”

“Did you know he could do that?” asked Sean.

“No,” said Miach. “But I am not surprised. The Silver Skin was the Queen’s greatest accomplishment, an enchantment unexcelled by any Fae.”

“We’ve got to get you outside, as soon as I can stop the bleeding,” said Miach.

“Fine by me,” said Ann. “But there are things I need to show you, in the passageways, and there are iron bars in our way.”

“We’ll pass to get outside,” said Finn. “Just sit still and let him work.”

Miach’s hands were examining her wounds, pressing on them in a way that made the pain sharp and fresh, and it was all she could do to stop herself from curling into a ball. She shut her eyes tightly against the sight of the gash in her tummy. Then she felt a buzzing warmth where his hands touched her. It felt a little better, gradually, the way the cramps from her period slowly receded after she downed a bunch of painkillers. It didn’t feel better enough for Finn to be lifting her into his lap, and she protested in language that was definitely not suitable for the classroom, but he ignored her and then suddenly they were outside, and she could hear the ocean and see trees overhead and smell the pine sap in the air.

The cold, damp air felt good. It felt clean. It flowed into her lungs and gave her new life. Or maybe that was Miach’s hands, which had folded her bloody turtleneck back over her stomach and ripped open her sleeves to get better access to the wounds there. Now his touch was firmer. The cuts burned for a second, then the skin of her arms seemed to stiffen and stretch, then she felt a surprising amount of relief and realized that all of her pain was gone and all she now felt was the warmth of Finn’s embrace.

She looked up into his face.

“What the hell were you thinking?” he asked.

“I love you, too,” she said.

“Right,” said Miach. “I am going to drain a few trees and then, Dana help me, I’m going to restore the Prince Consort to life.”

“What about Davin?” Ann asked, starting to sit up, then thinking better of it. Her head spun when she lifted it.

“You’ve lost a lot of blood,” said Miach, “and it’s not practical for me to replace all of it here. You’re going to have sit this round out. You’re part Fae, so you should be able to draw a little strength from the trees and underbrush here. Davin will be fine. Unfortunately, so will the Prince, once I pull the knife out of his heart. And not even I’m hardhearted enough to thrust it back in before the eyes of a seven-year-old.”

“You might change your mind,” said Ann, “when you see what’s inside the mound.”

Finn didn’t care what was in the mound. He didn’t care about the Prince Consort. He was glad the child was safe, but if Ann had died . . .

“Whatever it is can wait,” said Finn.

“There are plans for the wall,” she said, sitting up like the stubborn little berserker that she was. “We found them in a chamber on the way to the Druid’s lab. There’s a whole room where the walls have been cut and inlaid with glowing lines, and the Prince said they were like blueprints for the wall between worlds. He said he would study them until he found a weakness.”

“Destroy them,” said Finn.

Miach sighed. “I doubt they can be destroyed. If they really are plans for the wall between worlds, they’ll exist, just like the wall does, in both planes.”

“Then seal the mound,” said Finn. “Blow the damned thing up. We have C-4 on the docks in Charlestown. Bring the mound down and let the Prince dig through a hundred tons of earth if he wants to study them.”

“That may not be practical,” said Miach. “I don’t know what kind of effect the Silver Skin enchantment will have on the boy. I have to release them both from it now or risk lasting harm to the child. Even if you left this minute and brought back explosives and allies, the Prince would have time to do the same. He would bring back his courtiers and his Druids. Or, if he was smart, he would bring back a high definition camera and photograph the plans and laugh while we dynamite the mound.”

“Then there’s no putting the genie back in the bottle,” said Ann.

“Probably not,” agreed Miach. “But if the Prince can study the plans for weaknesses, we can study them for them ways to strengthen the wall.”

“There are wards in the tunnels,” she warned him. “And there’s iron dust in some of the passages.”

Miach nodded. “We’ll proceed with caution. And I’ll check in on you at Finn’s house this evening.”

He passed, and Finn was left alone with Ann. Her clothes were in tatters and soaked in blood, and her hair was wild.

“You’re so damned beautiful,” he said to her.

She laughed and hauled herself to sit up a little straighter against the tree at her back. “I look like hell,” she said.

“You look like a berserker, bloody from battle, and that’s beautiful to me. To any Fae, really. But I wish to Dana you hadn’t come with the Prince. When I think what might have happened . . . Never again, Ann. Promise me that we’ll make decisions together. That we won’t keep secrets from each other like that.”

“I promise,” she said. “As long as you promise never to forbid me from coming with you again.”

“I can’t promise you that. I don’t want you anywhere near a creature like that Druid ever again. Or the Prince Consort, for that matter.”

“So does that mean you’ve retracted your invitation to join the Fianna?”

He sighed. “No. It means that I can’t lead them effectively if I’m worried about you. And I will worry about you until I know you can summon your power at will.”

“You mean with Fae ink.”

“I mean with training, and, yes, with some ink from Miach.”

She bit her lip and looked away.

“Ann,” he said. “Your gifts, the berserker inside you, that’s what kept the Druid occupied long enough for us to get there. That’s what saved Davin. If you hadn’t been able to keep him busy, he could have pulled the knife out of the Prince’s back and killed the child. Why don’t you want to embrace that power?”

“Because I’m afraid of it,” she said.

“But why?” he asked. “You’ve never hurt anyone who didn’t deserve it. I’m sure of that.”

“But my mother did,” she said.