Hunter's Oath

by Glynn Stewart

  Flinging Inga Strand into the air, however, allowed me to see just what had earned the Valkyries their reputation as flying warriors. Her own telekinesis caught her in midflight, correcting her stance and allowing her to drop back to the ground only a handful of feet from me, back in combat position.

  “Good,” she told me brightly. “That’s even faster than I hoped. Can you do it again?”

  I took a deep breath, focused on the sensation I’d just unleashed, and thrust my right hand toward her.

  This time, she was waiting for me with a shield, catching the blow of telekinetic force and channeling it safely into the ground, but she was grinning.

  “A beginning,” she told me. “Crude, forceful, but a beginning. You will need to be more efficient with your energy—you don’t have the strength to overwhelm my defenses, but you should at least be able to make me sweat, Jason.”

  “So, what, we get to that point?”

  She chuckled.

  “Exactly. Fire, Force, and Between, these are your Gifts, boy. They are powerful, powerful Gifts among the fae, and if you have the strength behind them that I suspect you do, you will serve your Queen well.”

  “What do you mean, ‘the strength behind them?’” I asked.

  “You are a changeling,” she noted. “The type of child your people once abandoned in human homes to keep from being enslaved by your own kin. You should be weak. Your gift of Fire should barely suffice to light a candle.”

  “That’s about where I was until recently,” I admitted.

  “And were your father a will-o’-the-wisp, that would make sense,” she said. “However, you draw that gift from your grandfather, possibly one of the most powerful wisps I’ve ever met.”

  “You’ve met my grandfather?” I asked. I hadn’t. I barely knew anything about my family beyond my mother.

  “Met him, fought alongside him, dragged him out of half a dozen battles…failed to drag him out of his last one,” Inga said quietly. “For a supposedly subtle type like a wisp, he didn’t have it in him to walk away from a fight or someone in need. You remind me of him. And…”

  She trailed off.

  “And who?” I asked.

  “That’s neither here nor there,” she told me sharply. “Your Gifts are strong, Jason, stronger than any changeling has a right to. That gives you an advantage, as your enemies will not suspect your strength until it’s too late.

  “You must learn to use them to their maximum efficiency, to use Force and Between to make up for the strength and speed your body lacks when compared to a Noble or a Lord.”

  “Last I checked, fighting Nobles and Lords isn’t exactly in my purview,” I noted.

  She laughed at me.

  “And what, pray tell me, Jason, is Maria Chernenkov if not a Noble?” she asked. “No, my boy, if you are to survive as a Vassal of the Queen, you must be prepared to fight any foe short of the Powers themselves…and if I could train you to survive fighting a Wizard, I would.”

  I shivered.

  “I saw Kenneth MacDonald end a battle with a gesture and wipe the minds of three hundred men and women with a thought,” I pointed out quietly. “I don’t think fighting Wizards is in anyone’s cards.”

  “No,” she agreed. “Even Lord Calebrant, who was a Power in his own right, hesitated to challenge the Wizards.”

  I parsed that and paused. “Aren’t all of the High Court Powers?” I asked.

  “Mostly,” she confirmed. “Not always. The Lord of the Wild Hunt and the Seelie and Unseelie Lords are… political titles, not ones of power. They are usually Powers, but Ankaris is not. Karos was close enough for anyone who wasn’t a Power.”

  She shrugged.

  “Karos willed Calebrant much of her strength at her death, which did make him a Power,” she noted. “Calebrant…” Inga sighed and shook her head. “Calebrant didn’t die in a way that made that possible.”

  “So, the Hunt doesn’t fight Powers, then?” I asked.

  She laughed aloud.

  “My dear boy, nobody fights Powers if they can avoid it.”

  That conversation was still hanging in my mind as I arrived at the new Unseelie Court. Before Mabona had insisted on my acquiring a vehicle, I would have had to arrive with Eric—my normal sources of rides for fae events were Talus and Robert, neither of which were options tonight.

  My Queen, as per usual, had more than one string to her bow when she insisted I do something. Not only had the Escalade been needed for meeting Andrell at the airport, it gave me independent mobility without appearing to be beholden to the Seelie Court.

  Andrell—or more likely, a scouting agent—had chosen the warehouse for the new Court with care. It was an older building in one of the smaller industrial parks in the northeast quadrant of the city, almost exactly the opposite corner of the city from the hotel Oberis’s Court resided in.

  Despite its age, however, it had an underground parking garage—what the Canadians around me called a parkade. Anyone paying attention might still notice the unusual parade of vehicles arriving at a warehouse on a Friday night, but we at least wouldn’t have the blatant sign of a full parking lot at eight PM on Friday.

  During Stampede week, especially, that would have stood out. The entire industrial park around us was dead, without a human to be seen as I maneuvered the wheeled boat into the ramp.

  The guard standing at the entrance was Bryan Milligan, the Unseelie Gentry who’d helped us hunt Chernenkov, and he threw me a cheerful salute as he leaned into my window.

  “It’s a two-floor parkade,” he told me. “Top floor has been reserved for specific VIPs; one of the stalls has your name on it.” He pointed several rows over and I nodded my thanks.

  Most of the time, old rules and tricks around fae and gratitude didn’t apply anymore—blame Hollywood; it’s as influential on us as anyone else—but at formal events like tonight, no fae would audibly acknowledge debt.

  I found the sign, probably illegible to a human in the same position, and parked the big SUV. Whoever had been picking the stalls, I noted, knew perfectly what I drove—and what Eric drove. They’d carefully marked a new dividing line that turned three parking spots into two: one for my Escalade and one for Eric’s Range Rover.

  The gnome wasn’t here yet, but looking at the space set aside for the two cars Eric had picked out for the city’s neutrals, I couldn’t help but chuckle.

  No one would ever suggest it to his face, but it did rather look like the Keeper was compensating for his lack of height with size of vehicle.

  I had no idea what the warehouse had been built to house. About all I could be sure of was that the lack of fridges meant it hadn’t been food, which only narrowed it down to just about any variety of equipment or raw materials.

  It had unquestionably not been built to house the mix of social event space, administration office, and royal audience room that made up a Fae Court…but then, few spaces were. The warehouse had originally been built with an office in one corner, and the lights flickering through the newly glazed windows suggested it was in use for that purpose.

  The rest of the space had presumably been filled with racks upon racks of shelving and at least some internal dividers. All of that was gone now. Whether it had been removed by the previous owner or by the Unseelie was irrelevant, but its absence turned the warehouse into a single vast, empty space.

  There was no carefully grown moss on the floor there. The ground was concrete, stained ebony-black with a combination of paint and magic. Massive swathes of heavy black cloth had been turned into curtains that covered the exterior walls, blocking sound from traveling either way. The massive artificial fluorescent lights had been upgraded, traded out for massive arrays of LED bulbs that neatly approximated the early evening sunlight outside.

  Dark red cloth hung over what were probably folding tables laid out across the immense void of the floor, with speakers positioned carefully amidst a neatly designed pattern to make sure everyone could hear the speaker
s from the main stage.

  And it was a stage, too. Not just the slightly raised dais that Oberis held Court from, but an honest-to-Powers four-foot-high stage built of black stone of some kind.

  The whole effect was so goth, it hurt—but the fact that they’d turned an empty void into this in under a week was impressive. Like Oberis’s Court, magic and Power had gone into building the space, but there were no glamors to it. What you saw was what was there.

  For all its scope and scale, however, the room was over half-empty. I wasn’t the last guest to arrive, but I was far from the first, and I recognized many of those present. A small contingent of Kami had taken over a table tucked away at the edge, chattering away in Japanese.

  The Calgary Police Service officer Aheed Ibrahim, the patriarch of the city’s only Djinni family, lounged at the back, nodding to me in recognition. We’d worked together once, and he was a very smart man.

  Other representatives of Calgary’s smaller supernatural communities were scattered around the room, but the two largest clearly matched sets of tables were for two groups: the Seelie and the shifters.

  Lord Oberis sat rigidly straight in the center of the table where his fae were gathering, with Talus at his right and the city’s other two Seelie Nobles, including Robert, in front of him. There were perhaps a dozen other Seelie, all Gentry or Greater Fae, with them—in a group of tables that could have held a hundred.

  Even for me, it was hard to say who was insulting whom there.

  The shifters had been given an equally large set of tables and were occupying a larger portion of it. Enli Tsuu T’ina, the Grandfather and Speaker of the Shifter Clans in Calgary, had made sure enough of his people came along to be respectful.

  He was surrounded by the city’s other seven Alphas, each of whom had brought an escort of their own. All told, thirty shifters—not, I noted, including Mary—were gathered. None of them were of Mary’s power level, I realized. This was a collection of wolves and cougars and bears, the strongest of the shifters.

  No one had come here expecting a fight, but everyone had brought a contingent able to fight. Most of the Unseelie members of the new Court, a good seventy people, were seated at the front of the room. Only Andrell and his Nobles were missing from the Court who’d called us together.

  I hesitated for a moment as to where to sit. I wanted to sit with Oberis, but that was a violation of my neutrality. Instead, I crossed through the tables to an empty table sitting in front of the stage and took a seat. There was space for Eric and Tarva to join me there once they managed to get free of Friday night at a bar.

  I would be neutral until and unless Andrell gave me a reason not to be. That was my job.

  At least the Unseelie Lord was being a reasonable adult about the whole thing.

  So far.

  Eric arrived shortly after me, in the middle of another pulse of various guests. He brought Tarva and Zach to my table and joined me while watching the others filter into tables across the room.

  “The party is looking pretty empty,” I noted under my breath.

  “That’s probably intentional,” he replied. “Andrell wouldn’t want to be outnumbered by the guests tonight…which is what makes who’s missing interesting.”

  He flicked a stubby hand toward the front tables, where the Unseelie were gathered. “There’s over a hundred Unseelie in this city. Where are the rest?” he asked. “Andrell will have kept a suitable escort with him for his grand entrance, but that’s not forty-odd people.”

  Eric was right. It wouldn’t take many more guests before the Unseelie were outnumbered by the people they’d invited to witness Andrell’s inauguration. That…wasn’t a good look for the new Lord.

  “I know Tamara got out of town to take over Talus’s role at Fort McMurray,” I said. “But the rest?”

  “At least a dozen are standing by their personal fealty to Oberis,” Eric admitted. “They came to me to affirm that. The rest…” He shrugged. “Waiting to see which way the wind blows. Or playing all sides against the middle; that’s not unusual for Unseelie.”

  Zach shifted uncomfortably, the young changeling as out of sorts at this type of event as I would have been a year before. I sympathized with him—a lot.

  Hell, I was more out of sorts there than I was pretending. There was a reason I was hanging on to everything Eric was saying. There was a new layer of politics in my city, one that was going to affect me more than I liked, and I wasn’t entirely sure I understood it yet.

  The old Keeper, however, had seen all of this before. I was willing to be shown the way right now.

  “So, what do we do?” Zach demanded nervously.

  “We wait,” Eric replied. “There’s one more guest missing. Either he isn’t coming, in which case Andrell has to wait to be sure because he’s been dangerously insulted, or…”

  A rustle of movement and sound rippled through the crowd, and Eric stopped in mid-sentence, turning in his chair to see who had arrived.

  I turned with him, and I doubted I was the only one. The rustle of movement was everyone turning to see who had come in last, fashionably late, and drawn every other eye in the room. From Eric’s comments, however, I wasn’t really surprised.

  Magus Kenneth MacDonald was always the center of attention in any room he was in. He was of only average height, completely bald, and seemingly unimposing in person…and yet. Today, he wore the formal robes of his title, an ancient Persian garment that predated the European colonization of North America by a millennium or two, over a modern business suit.

  Even for me, that would have been painfully hot. I suspected the Wizard’s clothes were enchanted past any such mundane concern. I could feel Power radiating off him from halfway across the warehouse, in a way that only my Queen had ever matched.

  Two companions escorted him, but as the doors to the stairwell swung shut behind them they rolled back the hoods of their rain jackets to reveal completely featureless haziness instead of faces. They were constructs, not men, though their being this obvious was a message all of its own.

  There were rules and protocol for where the Wizard, as a guest, should sit in this kind of Court opening. Being a Wizard, of course, MacDonald ignored them all. He and his constructs crossed to the Seelie portion of the gathering, where he embraced Oberis with a swift kiss and took a seat beside his lover.

  Kenneth MacDonald, after all, didn’t need to worry about appearing neutral. If he wasn’t neutral, well, there was no one else in the city who could make him be.

  He was a Power, after all. For all intents and purposes, the average-looking man holding Lord Oberis’s hand under the table was a living god.

  It wouldn’t have been appropriate, of course, for Andrell to come out the moment the Wizard had sat down. On the other hand, no one was going to pretend too hard that he hadn’t been waiting for MacDonald, so the lights dimmed slightly, and new spotlights appeared on the stage less than five minutes after the Magus arrived.

  Andrell came out accompanied by the same four Nobles he’d had with him when I picked him up. He was smiling as he gestured, floating a microphone to his hand as he looked down over his guests.

  “Good evening, everyone, and welcome,” he greeted us. “Be welcome at the opening of Calgary’s Unseelie Court. I know that it has been decades that Calgary’s fae community has been run under a single Court, and the new structure will take some getting used to.

  “Nonetheless, the divide between Seelie and Unseelie exists for a reason,” he told everyone. “We have different cultures, different attitudes, and joint Courts risk confusion and conflicts that are not necessary.

  “Like Lord Oberis’s Court before us, we accept the existing Covenants of this city and acknowledge the authority of the Magus Kenneth MacDonald.” He paused. “I do note that the Covenants speak of the Magus’s Enforcers, who…do not appear to be a factor anymore.”

  He might have meant it as a joke, but discomfort rippled across the room. There would only be a few pe
ople in the room who hadn’t lost friends in the conflict that had resulted in the dissolution of the Enforcers—and all of us had known Enforcers, if no one else.

  There were no Enforcers left. Many were dead, and those who had survived had been stripped of their memories by MacDonald for their rebellion against him. An Enforcer might have been your dearest friend, but now they wouldn’t even know you existed.

  “My Court now stands as the point of contact for dealing with Calgary’s Unseelie population,” he finally said, resuming from a gap I didn’t think had gone as he expected. “Justice and law for the Unseelie now come through me, as they have always done with Lord Oberis before. If you have conflicts with my people, come to me and we will see it made right.”

  He surveyed the crowd.

  “I have arranged some light refreshment while we mingle,” he told us. “I hope to meet with each of you personally before the night is out. We have much to discuss to lay the groundwork of what is to come. Our future together is bright, and we must all work together to bring it forward!”

  The speech had been surprisingly short, and the food and drinks carried around by manifested-glamor servers were surprisingly good for having been prepared in a warehouse. Soft music played in the background, and I could see people getting up and moving around to mingle.

  There weren’t that many opportunities for the supernaturals of the city to see each other at all. This kind of large formal cross-community gathering was extraordinarily rare. Looking around, I could see one of the Seelie Greater Fae in quiet conversation with the Djinni Ibrahim, while two high-ranking members of the Shifter Clan Fontaine were talking to the Kami.

  Business wouldn’t be concluded tonight. But many deals and projects would be begun tonight, even ignoring the projects that the quietly circulating Unseelie Nobles would be aiming to kickstart.