Fire Touched

by Patricia Briggs

  Baba Yaga had not slowed down her patter, though. “More to the point,” she said, then giggled. “Point—tooth, do you get it? I am so funny. But as I was saying, I am civilized now. Tamed for the sake of the others, you know. A fine handsome man as you? Now I take him home for other things.” She licked her lips hungrily.

  Adam growled at her.

  “Stop it,” I said to her, because I was afraid that if she kept talking, someone would make a stupid move and get themselves killed. “Everyone’s on edge, there’s no use pushing them over. What do you want?”

  “Who are you?” asked Margaret.

  The witch, who was a Gray Lord, took the sides of her sundress, one side in each hand, and curtsied. “Baba Yaga, at your . . . well, not at your service. That would be a lie. Say rather I’m not opposed to you—or not as opposed to you as I am to some others who were in the hotel tonight.” She dropped her skirt and held up a hand, displaying a business card with a cartoon Baba Yaga figure on it and a phone number. “For if they bother you, dearling. Just give us a ring. They being the other Gray Lords, of course.” She dropped the silliness for a moment. “Margaret, I owed your father, and he cannot collect. Take the card. Put it in the bottom of a drawer somewhere, but remember it. When you need me, you can call the number or rip the card in half, and I will come to your aid, once.”

  Margaret put her hand on Thomas to steady herself and walked a few steps forward so she could take it. “My father told me stories about you,” she said. “He spoke well of you. Mostly.”

  Baba Yaga smiled, her teeth white and straight. “How good of him. I speak well of him, too—mostly.” She looked at me. “I like what you’re doing, Coyote girl—even though you had to kill my favorite troll. That’s not your fault, though. I know who sent him. They are claiming they forgot how strong the call of water would be on him—that it was an accident that they lost control. You and I know better.” She held out another card, this one poison green.

  “You don’t get to call upon me for a favor,” she said when I took it. She glanced at Adam and licked her lips again. “Not unless you want to share the Russian wolf.”

  “No,” I said, closing my fist on the card so it crumpled into a ball.

  She cackled again, and said, “If you rip that one up, it will just be harder to read. You should call me for information—I think you might need advice soon. And I will call upon you from time to time. No obligation on either side, of course. You don’t have to tell me anything, nor do I have to tell you anything. But I don’t want a war with the humans, and some idiot among us—or more properly, some idiots among us—are determined to start one. If I know trouble is coming your way, I’ll tell you. Keep that card—you’ll need it soon.”

  “All right,” I said slowly. “No promises implied or given.”

  She smiled. “Just so.” And she disappeared. No mortar and pestle this time, she was just gone. Her scent lingered behind her.

  “That’s all right, then,” said Margaret. “We needed a finale.”

  “Don’t trust her,” Zee told me. He looked at Margaret. “You’re probably all right, if you’re cautious.”

  “I am,” she said, tucking the card into the small handbag she’d been carrying. “And if I’m not cautious enough, Thomas is happy to point it out.” She looked at me. “Mercy. I really would like a chance to talk to you. Would you mind driving our car?” She gave her hands a rueful look. “I’m getting better, but my hands aren’t trustworthy to drive yet. Thomas, would you mind riding with Adam?”

  The answer I saw on Thomas’s face was that he minded very much, but he said, “I can do that.”

  “Sure,” I said. “We’ll have a girl’s car and a guy’s car. It’ll be fun.”

  Thomas picked Margaret up and put her in her seat, and watched gravely while she belted herself in. He shut her door and handed me the keys.

  “Drive carefully,” he said.

  “I will,” I promised.

  He gave me a stiff nod and strode over to Adam’s SUV.

  I didn’t have to adjust the seat to be comfortable. Thomas wasn’t very big to be that scary. I took a moment to familiarize myself with the car, so I wouldn’t have to do it while I was driving.

  “Thank you,” Margaret said.

  I gave her a startled look, because, as a rule, the fae don’t thank you—and you’d better not thank them, either. “Thank you” implies debt, and most fae will hold you to that. Margaret laughed.

  “I’m not that old, Mercy,” she said. “About a hundred years, and most of that was spent in the Heart of the Hill—underground, imprisoned in a forgotten chunk of mine tunnel.”

  She’d said that she’d had no food, no drink, no light. I tried to imagine what going without food and water for almost a hundred years would have been like. A werewolf would have died, starved to death like a human in that situation, maybe even faster than a human. There were degrees of immortality, some more terrible than others.

  Unaware of my thoughts, Margaret had kept talking. “My father thought that it was important that we blend with the normal folk, so I don’t have a lot of the taboos the old fae do. ‘Thank you’ means just what it would to you.”

  Adam’s SUV lit up, and I rolled down the window to wave them ahead. I didn’t spend much time in Walla Walla. If I’d been alone, I could have found my way out to the highway, but why bother when Adam could lead the way? He flashed his lights and took point.

  “How did you survive?” I asked her.

  “Not very well.” She held her hand up and moved it. “It’s taken me years to get this far—and the first year I spent as a total bedridden invalid. But I am better now, getting better almost every day. A month ago, I would not have been able to stay on my feet as long as I did tonight.” She paused. “That’s sort of what I wanted to talk to you about. You are human.”

  “Half,” I said apologetically. “My father is . . . not human.” I wasn’t up to explaining my complicated parentage to her, likeable as I found her. Besides, I was pretty sure my bloodlines weren’t what she wanted to talk about. “I can change into a coyote, and I have a few other tricks up my sleeve.”

  “But your husband is still far stronger than you,” she said.

  I nodded. “He is.”

  “How did you get him to stop treating you like a fragile thing that might blow away in a harsh wind and take you to bed?” she said.

  Holy cow. The girlfriend talk. I tried to remember the last time I’d done the girlfriend talk. Char. It had been with Char, when I’d talked her out of the very handsome but not very bright young man who would make a lovely date for someone else. That was all the way back in college.

  I smelled Margaret’s sudden embarrassment. “I had a much more tactful way to ask that,” she said. Then she let out a frustrated growl. “We’ve been living together for two and a half years, and the most passion I get is a kiss on the forehead. And I don’t have anyone but Thomas to ask about it. And I can’t ask Thomas.”

  “Obviously not,” I said. The reason I hadn’t had the girlfriend talk with anyone in a long time is that I sucked at it. I could barely talk to Adam about our relationship, and I loved Adam.

  “Right?” she said.

  I liked Margaret. I wanted to help her if I could, even if only as a sounding board. But. I couldn’t forget what Margaret was. Despite the easy way she’d thanked me and how she’d just established that she was not under the power of the Gray Lords, she was still fae. If there was one thing I’d learned about the fae, it was that being in their debt was only a little more dangerous than having a fae in my debt. If she wanted my help—I’d ask for her help, too.

  “I have a proposition for you,” I said. “I’ll try to help you—as much as one clueless person can help another—if you’ll give me some intelligence on the people in the room tonight.” Like, say, the name of the middle-aged woman in sal
mon who had tortured Zee. “I could ask Zee—but he tends to hate everyone uniformly.”

  It hadn’t been an accident that Tad had been the one to talk to Adam and me about the Widow Queen. I could call Ariana, maybe, but she was in Europe, and she hadn’t been in that room tonight.

  “Deal,” she said promptly. “What do you want to know?”

  “Don’t you think I should go first?” I asked. “I see your problem, but I’m relationship-challenged. Since Thomas sounds like he’s relationship-challenged, too, you might be better off talking to Adam, who has experience dealing with stupid people.”

  She leaned back in her seat and smiled sweetly. Unlike when Zee smiled sweetly, it didn’t send the hairs on the back of my neck up with nervousness. “I’m not in the inner circle of the Council, either. All I know is the stuff my father drilled into my head. But he was pretty sharp. I have to tell you, that if all you do is listen to me whine, it would help me a great deal. Let’s do politics first. I have a feeling it will be less depressing. What do you want to know?”

  “Let’s start with the woman in the salmon-colored suit,” I said.

  “Órlaith,” she said. “She is the sister of Brian mac Cennétig.”

  I frowned because she said the name of Órlaith’s brother as if I should have known him. “Who?” I asked.

  “He was the high king of Ireland,” she said. “He defeated the kings of Ulster.”

  I only knew one of the high kings of Ireland named Brian. Okay, I only knew the name of one of the high kings of Ireland, and his name was Brian.

  “Do you mean Brian Boru?” I asked tentatively. “The one who united all of the Irish against the Vikings?”

  She let out a huff of air. “And a good thing it is that my father died before he heard you say that. Boru is a nickname given him years after he died by people who didn’t know him. And the Vikings weren’t driven out, they were assimilated . . . not that it is important to our current conversation.”

  Not being an expert on Irish history, I didn’t feel the need to argue. “Okay. So Brian Boru was fae?”

  “No. His father married a fae lady who saw to it that he thought her daughter Órlaith was his. She soon grew bored of him and went on her way, but she left her daughter behind.” Margaret huffed. “But that’s not what you need to know, is it? Still, despite her chosen appearance, Órlaith is very young for a Gray Lord. Even so, my father said she is too tied to the glories of the past. Her greatest strength is in her ability to persuade people to follow her. My father liked her a great deal.”

  “I think she tortured Zee,” I said. “I don’t think I’m going to like her.”

  She smiled, but it was a sad smile. “My father did not like your Zee. The Dark Smith was not, even by the flexible standards of the fae, a hero.”

  I knew that. I knew that. But I’d worked side by side with him for most of my adult life. I’d seen him do a lot of small kindnesses, and I suspected that there were some I’d missed because he was embarrassed by them. He was not petty, and I’d never seen him be cruel.

  I decided it would be safer to change the subject. “So the Widow Queen?”

  “Neuth?” Margaret focused her gaze on the dark beyond the windows of the Subaru. “She’s not a nice person. Dangerous. She takes pleasure in the misery of others. She despises humankind—despises those weaker than her, and most people are weaker than she is.”

  That dovetailed with what Tad had said about her.

  “Goreu,” I said.

  She looked at me. “My father didn’t know him well. Goreu didn’t take an active role among the fae until after my father died. Much of what I know of him comes from the research Thomas did for this trip.” She smiled, as if at some memory. “The vampires follow fae politics for entertainment. Thomas gathered a lot more information about current politics than the Gray Lords would be comfortable with if they knew.” She tapped a finger on the dash. “So Goreu. King Arthur wasn’t a king, really, and the stories of the knights of the round table are only very loosely factual. But Arthur was a hero, and Goreu rode with him. He killed a giant. The troll you killed was but a rabbit to the wolf that a giant would have been.” She paused. “But that was a long time ago. Goreu has done nothing important since except for his selection into the Council of the Gray Lords. I wouldn’t have thought one of Arthur’s men would have stooped to the foulness of those slave bracelets.” She hummed a little; it was on key and pretty. “I also wouldn’t have thought a Gray Lord would have been so easily defeated.”

  “Nemane.” Her name seemed to hang in the air longer than sound should have. Suddenly it was very dark in the car, the dash lights only a candle in the night.

  “The Carrion Crow,” Margaret said slowly, and for the first time I smelled fear rising from her skin. “One of the three fae who could be Morrigan, the goddess of battle. She is smart and very old. And very, very clever. My father respected her—and feared her. The only one of the fae he truly feared. She is capable of playing a very long game. She is patient.” Margaret swallowed. “And bloodthirsty.”

  Maybe if we hadn’t been in a dark car, driving through the dark, her words wouldn’t have been so . . . frightening. Like how a story told by firelight has more power than one told in the light of day. But I hadn’t been afraid of her back in the hotel. Neuth, yes, but not Nemane.

  I could just be affected by Margaret’s fear, but it felt like more than that. Maybe it was just that we spoke of someone who was a Power and had been a Power for longer than I could imagine, and we spoke of her in the loneliness of the night.

  “Okay,” I said. “Now that you’ve scared us both . . .” I had the sudden conviction that Adam and I were in way over our heads. We had just met with five of the Gray Lords—but those weren’t the only Gray Lords on that reservation.

  “When I saw her sitting there . . .” Margaret said. “I was very grateful for Thomas at my back.”

  There was still one we hadn’t spoken of.

  “Beauclaire,” I said. I knew him best of the Gray Lords and liked what I knew.

  She smiled and relaxed. “My father said that Lugh’s son likes to be underestimated. It helps him that so many of the fae remember his father, Lugh, and judge the son from that scale. Lugh . . . Lugh was everything they say he was. Sometimes the humans called him a god, and they weren’t far wrong.” She didn’t exactly stiffen, but she eyed me. “He was good, glorious, and kind—and your Dark Smith killed him.”

  I knew that. Zee had killed him because Lugh had, like many very old creatures, started to become a monster. It was why Zee and Beauclaire did not deal well together—and another reason I’d been surprised when he helped Zee escape.

  “Beauclaire and Nemane are allies,” she said. I’d picked that up from tonight’s meeting. “From what happened when Adam spoke, I think that those two have a use for you and your pack. Zee distracted Órlaith and Neuth. Goreu was still recovering from the slave bracelet. But Nemane and Beauclaire could have responded to Adam when he spoke. By not doing so, they gave legitimacy to Adam’s claim—unless they rule against it out loud, all of Faery must respect the borders of your territory. That tells me that Adam’s claim played right into whatever those two have planned.”

  “Okay,” I said. Being part of any fae’s plans wasn’t a good thing. I’d have to warn Adam. And speaking of warning . . . “You should know that Edythe didn’t have any trouble seeing through your glamour.”

  Margaret frowned. “Edythe?”

  “There were two guards the Gray Lords brought with them,” I said. “She was the one that looked like a girl.”

  “They weren’t guards,” she said. “The Gray Lords don’t use guards. They were servants, to be sent to fetch food or whatever else was required.” She frowned. “She saw through the glamour?”

  I nodded.

  “There are some who see truth,” Margaret said. “But it is
a rare gift. It may be that gift was the reason they brought her to the meeting. Interesting that she didn’t speak when she saw who accompanied us.”

  “I’m not a threat,” I said. “And I’m the only one she looked at.”

  “Okay,” she said. She dusted her hands on her thighs and took a deep breath. “So tell me how you got an Alpha werewolf to treat you like a partner instead of a princess who needs protecting.”

  I pursed my lips. “I can tell you that, but I don’t think it will be useful in your situation. By the time I’d met Adam, I’d spent my whole life proving myself, Margaret. I knew who I was and what I could do—and I didn’t let anyone make me less.”

  “Damn it,” she said. “I hoped that you could give me some useful advice. I don’t know many women—have never known many women. And your situation seemed so similar.”

  It hadn’t been, really. Not the beginning of Adam and me—but . . . “A couple of months ago, this volcano god—a great manitou—came after Adam’s ex-wife,” I told her. “We defeated him, but in the process, I was badly injured. Our pack doctor told Adam I was going to die.”

  “But you didn’t,” said Margaret.

  I drew in a breath. “I was dying, no question. Only by the weirdest circumstances ever did I survive. Not quite dumb luck, but unexpected enough that it was worse really.” Coyote counted as weird circumstances—and he was unpredictable.

  “It took a while for me to recover completely. Adam, who has been very, very good about not indulging his wolf’s need to be overprotective, has had to deal with his perceived failure to protect me. Sometimes he wakes up in the middle of the night to listen to me breathe.” I didn’t tell her about the nightmares, or the times when he pulled me close to him to listen to my heart, and his skin was damp with the sweat of fear. Or that sometimes, in the darkness of our room, he cried. Those moments weren’t for public consumption. “But Thomas didn’t fail to keep you safe, so the situation isn’t completely analogous.”