He was very quiet for several seconds, and then Gupta dropped cups of steaming milk tea in front of each of us.
“Tell him, Raja,” he ordered. “I arranged this meeting. I’m not explaining your situation for you.”
“We were betrayed.”
His words were very soft. I’m not sure a human could have heard them.
“Betrayed?”
“The contract to kill you was a trap. They knew we would not succeed and would concentrate too much of our forces here to complete it,” he continued. “Then, when half our warriors were here…they attacked our home.”
Okay, so I could see why the contract was void now.
“They stole Asi, Lord Kilkenny,” he told me. “They murdered our brothers and sisters who remained to defend the fortress. They murdered our spouses and children. Our order, our mortal allies, our families…all dead. The fortress-temple of the Asi Warriors is ash and dust.”
“Sacred Powers,” I swore. “Wait, Asi?”
“The first sword,” Raja Venkat Asi told me. “The weapon I and our order are named for. An ancient weapon of immense power we were sworn to defend into eternity. Now your Masked Lords have it…and I and my strike team are all that remains of its defenders.”
The description of Asi lined up disturbingly closely with the description I’d been given of Esras. I didn’t know enough to be sure, but it sounded like the Masked Lords might no longer need the spear that was bonded to my blood.
That ruined the plan around me being bait.
“I appreciate the warning, Raja Asi,” I said slowly. “But you understand that you murdered innocents to kill me. My sympathies for your own plight are limited. I will permit you to leave Calgary and return home, but that is all.”
He sighed.
“I cannot return home,” he said flatly. “My wife. My children. My grandchildren—and beyond, even. I am old, Jason Kilkenny, and seventeen generations of my descendants served the Order.
“They are all dead. I cannot return home. I must avenge them before I no longer can.”
“You share an enemy now, Lord Kilkenny,” Gupta told me. “I would not turn aside his aid if I were you.”
“I am no lord,” I replied. “And I have no need for murderers.”
They would be powerful allies, but…there was too much blood on their hands.
Asi rose and sank to his knees in front of me.
“I owe you a debt of honor and blood,” he whispered. “My family is gone, but my enemies are your enemies, and I have done much harm in my pursuit of you. I could blame others, and I lay the lion’s share of the blood guilt on the Masks, but I owe you a debt.
“I would pledge you my service and that of my asura,” he told me. “I would swear fealty and place my arm at your command.”
I stared at the kneeling asura.
“You have to go back to India, don’t you?” I finally asked. “Without your sacred waters, don’t you get weaker?”
“I will.” He held my gaze. “But I will remain in the West, and diminish, and pass into legend. The last of the golden-handed warrior kings. I cannot go home and look on the ashes of all that I loved.
“But before I fade, your enemies are my enemies, and I cannot fight them alone. I will pledge you a sword that has rarely known defeat, a power that has known few equals, and all that remains of my order and my blood.”
I sighed.
“I can’t make that decision right now,” I told him. “This is all very fresh.”
“You must,” Asi said flatly. “Three times, Lord Kilkenny. I pledge you Fealty, my life and sword and gifts, yours to command.”
Three times. Yeah. Raja Venkat Asi knew the fae, all right.
“Thrice offered, I cannot thrice deny,” I said slowly, the formal words coming to me almost instinctually. I rose from my chair, laying my tea aside as I placed my hands over his.
“You and your asura understand that among fae, this pledge cannot be undone?” I asked. “If I command your Fealty, you are mine. There will be no more innocent blood shed. No more mercenary contracts. I cannot take you to the sacred waters. I cannot even promise that I will find the Masked Lords.”
“But you will try.” His voice was soft.
“I will try,” I confirmed. “There are other debts to be paid here, Raja Venkat Asi. If you pledge your Fealty, you will follow me to a hundred wars, only one of which will be yours.”
“I swear it,” he told me. “I pledge you Fealty, my life and sword and gifts, yours to command,” he repeated. “Unto death. Unto eternity. Until I diminish and pass into myth.”
“So be it.”
My hands closed around his and power flared in that room.
I was a Noble of the fae. He was a warlord of the asura.
Beings such as us do not—cannot—swear oaths lightly.
15
“You have got to be fucking kidding me,” Coleman exclaimed.
He, Mary and I were sitting in his front guard-post office in the house as I explained the situation.
“You want me to just…blithely allow these asura to join us? To trust them?”
“Damh…they owe me Fealty,” I said quietly. “Technically, you don’t owe me Fealty. And that’s as meaningful and unbreakable an oath for them as it is for us.”
I shook my head.
“I understand, for all that, and I don’t expect you to trust them,” I continued. “I’m assuming we can pull some prefab barracks or something out of storage and set them up on the lot? Keep them outside the house, at least initially.”
Coleman continued to look at me like I was crazy, then looked desperately over to Mary for support.
“Don’t look at me, Hunter,” she replied. “Shifters don’t do the fealty thing. We do clan and oath and loyalty, though, and even I know that a fae swearing or accepting fealty is a big deal.”
“Thrice-sworn Fealty,” I told Coleman. “Asi wants his revenge. The Masked Lords wiped out his order. The twenty-two asura here in Calgary are all that’s left of the Asi Warriors.”
“I understand Fealty,” he allowed. “I’ll make it happen if you insist. I may not owe you Fealty, but you are my chain of command. I answer to you regardless.”
“I appreciate the faith, Damh,” I said. “And trust me, I want you to keep a close eye on them. I’m reasonably sure Fealty means much the same to them as it does to us, but I can’t be certain.”
“I’ll check in with Eric, get a barracks set up, and then you can get them over here.” He shook his head. “We’re going to need a damn motor pool if this keeps up. The garage attached to the house only holds five cars.”
“Set it up with Eric,” I told him. “We need more than just my Escalade and a couple of sedans. Once the asura move in, we’ll have over forty people living on the lot.”
“It’s a big house and a big property, but that’s going to start attracting attention,” Mary pointed out. “Not to mention getting crowded.”
“Don’t worry about the crowding. I’m going to do some expanding on the lower level before we move the asura in,” I promised. “Oberis has been promising to train me on that particular trick for a while, and now we need it.”
It was apparently an odd merger of the Gift of Force and the Gift of Between, creating space where there hadn’t been space before. Oberis also possessed the Gift of Glamor, which meant he could literally create entire invisible wings to buildings, already decorated and furnished.
I was pretty sure all I was going to be able to create was space, but even if we had to install floors and walls ourselves, the house was going to need expansion.
Apparently, being a Fae Noble came with multitudes.
“That’s…so damn weird,” Mary told me. “I kind of want to watch.”
“Apparently, there are shifter shamans who can do it, but they’re few and far between,” I said.
She chuckled.
“You just described shamans in general, Jason,” she reminded me. “There aren�
��t any in Calgary. At all.”
“I could give suggestions there, but I know when I’m outside my bailiwick,” I said with a grin. My understanding, backed up by the High Court’s files, was that the potential to be a shaman was more common among shifters than they thought.
But unlike most fae powers, there was no instinctiveness to the use of that set of Gifts. Another shaman had to find the potential and train them. Which meant that so long as Calgary didn’t have any shamans, Calgary would continue to lack shamans.
“And what about this sword?” Coleman asked. “That strikes me as concerning.”
“More than concerning,” I admitted. “I’m going to need you to double- and triple-secure meeting room one. Cut off from all non-magical communications, blocked off from Between access if you can manage it.”
He swallowed.
“Just…who are you contacting?” he asked.
“I need to talk to the High Court,” I said quietly. “I think the Masked Lords just did an end run around our entire plan.”
When I say “the High Court,” I usually just mean Mabona and Ankaris, and this time was no exception. There were seven other members of the High Court, but I’d only met the Unseelie Lord.
The Seelie Lord, the Ladies of the Seasons, and the Puck were strangers to me—and I didn’t want to get tangled up in the affairs of more Powers than I had to.
Mabona was my Queen, however, which meant reaching out to her was easy. As her Vassal, we had an almost unbreakable link. I could contact her through it, though it wasn’t great for communication of any level of detail.
As a Noble of the Wild Hunt, I had a similar but weaker connection to Ankaris. I could let both of them know that I needed to speak with them without so much as picking up the phone. Videoconferencing and telephones were great, but sometimes the most secure way of communicating was to step entirely outside the mortal world.
The mystical connection apparently carried at least some of my urgency with it. A projection of Mabona appeared within moments, and Ankaris’s projection arrived before she’d even finished saying hello.
“Kilkenny,” Ankaris greeted me, with a nod. “Mabona. I presume there is a reason that we aren’t having this conversation via the internet. What happened?”
“The Masked Lords have stolen Asi from the order of asura who guarded it,” I told them. “I don’t know enough about that weapon or about the ritual they used Esras for, but I can’t help feeling they would only have stolen it if they had a reason.”
“The Asi Warriors guarded that blade with their lives, inside a temple-fortress with everything from swords to tanks ready for its defense,” Ankaris said slowly. “How?”
“The Masked Lords hired them to kill me and I was too stubborn to die,” I replied. “So, they’d lost too many and deployed too many over here. I don’t know what they hit the fortress with, but according to the asura, the order of the Asi Warriors is no more. The only survivors are here in Calgary.”
“And have sworn you Fealty,” Mabona realized aloud. “I wondered who, when I felt you receive those oaths.”
A Vassal never truly kept secrets from their liege. I was still surprised to realize that my Queen had felt me receiving the asuras’ fealty.
“So, the Masked Lords now have Asi, the first sword of the deva.” Ankaris sighed. “That’s…that’s bad. You’re correct, Jason. Asi is just as old, just as tied to power, as Esras. The hands that wielded it were Adityas, not Powers of the High Court, but the end result is the same.”
“They can use it to fuel their ritual,” I said.
“Exactly. Our attempts to keep you out of their hands just became redundant.” He turned to Mabona. “We need to gather the Court. If the Masked Lords now possess another artifact of that potency, then we must prepare for true war.”
“Damn them.” My Queen’s voice was tired. “Arrange it, Ankaris. I will attend.”
“What about Jason?” Ankaris turned his attention back to me.
“You are no longer the target you were,” Mabona told me. “But your power and rank remain the same. I will lend you my guards for a while longer, but I suggest you begin recruiting your own retainers.” She smiled. “The asura are a good start, though they have their vulnerabilities as you’ve seen.”
“You remain a Noble of the Wild Hunt,” Ankaris said with a sigh. “Coleman and his troop will remain with you. You may have insight or opportunities we have not realized—but even if you do not, know that you will be called to war.
“If the Masked Lords wish to take down the High Court, then they will face the Wild Hunt. That is our duty. That is our purpose.”
“I am sworn to serve,” I told them both. “What do you need of me?”
“For now, keep your head down,” Mabona told me. “Just because the Masked Lords have one artifact doesn’t meant they won’t prefer to have two!”
16
My lunch meeting was surprisingly quiet, with the collection of locals and imports I’d gathered staring into the cups of coffee that Coleman had made for us. The pasta dish Mary and I had put together was growing cold, but no one was really feeling up for food.
“So, that’s it?” Oberis asked finally. The city’s Fae Lord was looking unusually informal, lacking anything resembling a suit jacket or tie with his slacks and dress shirt. “Now we know the Masks have an artifact, you’re basically left to your own devices?”
I waved a hand at Coleman and Kristal.
“Coleman’s troop is apparently sticking with me, though I’m on notice that Kristal’s team will be moving on sooner or later.”
“If it’s war, then we have other battles to fight,” she agreed. “I can’t imagine you’ll be sitting on the sidelines for long either.”
“A Noble of the Wild Hunt?” Coleman snorted. “No, you’ll be in the thick of it soon enough, Kilkenny. And my troop and I will be right beside you. You have my oath on that.”
“And I was told that, too,” I confirmed. “The High Court has no choice now but to prepare for war. If the Masked Lords have an artifact that can fuel their ritual, then our Powers are vulnerable.”
“And since they’re the only target we’ve ever known the Masked Lords to be after, everything goes to hell now,” Oberis agreed. He swallowed his lukewarm coffee and passed the cup to Robert. “Grab me some more coffee?”
The young Noble nodded and rose to obey.
“War.” The word hung in the room like an anvil as the youth passed the cup back. “What does that even entail when it’s fae against fae?”
I looked over at Oberis.
“I don’t even know, myself,” I admitted. Robert and I were roughly the same age, as young by human standards as we were by supernatural. “Given that, apparently, the last one was literally right before I was born.”
“It’s quiet and it’s ugly,” Calgary’s Fae Lord told us. “We’re talking assassinations and small-squad ops. We’re at a disadvantage since we don’t even know who our enemy is. Our own right-hand people could turn out to wear a Mask. Lord Andrews’s reputation and power base were shaken by the revelation of Andrell’s treachery.”
Lord Jon Andrews was the Lord of the Unseelie, the highest-ranked member of that group and their voice on the High Court. Andrell, who had been tasked to create an Unseelie Court in Calgary and blown a lot of things open along the way, had been one of his chosen troubleshooters.
“So, what happens now?” Mary asked.
“Well, for one thing, we bring Raja Venkat and his people into our fold,” I told them. “They swore fealty to me. I don’t know if I trust them yet, but I have to honor that.
“They’re in my service with the intention of fighting the Masked Lords, so I’ll be keeping my own eyes open. There has to be an answer we’re missing, some way we can use the link between me and Esras against them still.”
“I don’t suppose the Asi are sufficiently linked to the sword to track them through it?” Robert asked. “That should be possible, shouldn’t
it?”
“They’d need a far closer link than anything they have,” Oberis replied. “For me to track the sword through them, one of them would have had to have carried it for months. Possibly years—and recently, too.
“A Mage might be able to do more with less, but…” He shrugged. “We don’t have that kind of link to work with.”
His words rankled in my brain like a loose tooth. I was going to have to think about that.
“More than anything, I think we need to start going over global news,” I told my team. Oberis and Robert were guests, not subordinates, but they were also smart enough to know I wasn’t giving them orders.
“The destruction of the Asi’s temple-fortress made the news; it was a big terror attack. I don’t think any of us registered it as relevant to our interests…so what else have we missed?”
I grimaced and sigh.
“Who else have the Masked Lords killed without us realizing they were coming at us from the side?”
“It wasn’t your duty to see this coming, Jason,” Oberis pointed out. “You were tasked to lay a trap and be bait, and you did so quite well.”
“Well enough that our enemies used that trap to their advantage,” I said. I shook my head. “They used me to set this up.”
“And it was Ankaris’s job, not yours, to see that coming,” Coleman told me. “Your task was here. The grander war was his responsibility.”
“Well, right now, the Court I am sworn to defend is vulnerable and my father’s murderers are running around free,” I reminded them. “So, I am making this mess our responsibility, do you understand?
“I may not have been given a task, but I have authority and I have resources, and I will be damned if I let them go unused now!”
Raja Venkat Asi looked more than a little out of place amidst the blowing snow. Despite the subfreezing temperatures and the snow beginning to pile up on the driveway to the house, the asura warlord was still shirtless underneath a long leather trench coat.
Noble's Honor (Changeling Blood Book 3) Page 9