Stone Song

by D. L. McDermott

  “So did Conn die?” she asked through chattering teeth.

  “No. He was the finest warrior the Fae had ever produced, and the Druids had a different use for him. They struck a bargain with Conn. They freed him from the mound, but they bound him to a sword. The Summoner. The wall between worlds has many gates, but they can only be opened by the most powerful sorcerers. The Summoner was forged to be both a blade and a wedge. It supplies the necessary leverage for a young mage to open the gate. It was a failsafe, so that if the Druids ever needed to reach the Otherworld, they would have the power, whether their most skilled mages still lived or not. The Druids placed a geis on Conn that compelled him to protect the sword at all costs from his own kind.”

  “He must have come to hate the Druids,” Sorcha whispered.

  “Well, he’s married to one now,” replied Elada, “so I suppose he is either unusually forgiving, which is unlikely, given he betrayed his whole race for revenge, or she is a very special Druid. Do you feel any better now?”

  “You mean after story time?”

  He smiled. “Well, it always worked on Maire’s boys.”

  Sorcha recalled the Prince’s threat to Elada, that his bleached-blond colleen and her litter would suffer, and she felt a flare of jealousy. “Is she your girlfriend? Maire?”

  “She was, but we parted amicably. And we were talking about you. How do you feel now?”

  “Not great.” Really, really bad. “But I don’t think you can die from unsatisfied lust,” she added.

  Elada didn’t crack a smile.

  “Please tell me that isn’t possible.”

  “Honestly? I don’t know what happens if you drink Fae wine without . . . dispelling its effects in the time-honored way.”

  • • •

  The girl was shaking, as though she had a fever and chills. Muscles spasmed and twitched in her arms and legs. If there was an antidote to Fae wine, she needed it.

  “I’m cold,” she said. “I think I need to get into bed.”

  Elada watched her climb out from under the breakfast bar. She stood on shaky legs, leaning on the counter for support. Her first unaided step was unsteady. Her knees buckled on her second and Elada caught her.

  He finally had Sorcha Kavanaugh in his arms, but not the way he had hoped.

  There was no way around it. He was going to have to call Miach, and he had no way to predict how the sorcerer would react. He’d promised to bring him Sorcha Kavanaugh, willing acolyte, not Sorcha Kavanaugh, poisoned Druid.

  “Where’s your room, Sorcha?” he asked.

  “Upstairs,” came her feeble reply. Then she closed her eyes and turned her head in to face his chest. “I like flannel,” she said, rubbing her cheek against his shirt. He supposed that was as much sense as he was likely to get out of her in her current state. He’d have to navigate the twisty old house and find someplace to tuck her up warm for sleep on his own.

  He carried her through the kitchen, which took up most of the narrow projecting wing, and into the parlor of the main house. It was an old-fashioned room with furniture that managed to appear overstuffed and uncomfortable all at once. So much for bundling her up on a capacious sofa.

  Elada found a narrow stair separating the parlor from a similar room on the other side, fitted out as a dining room cum stillroom. He didn’t think the dusty assortment of jars and dried herbs and tied branches belonged to Sorcha. The grandmother, more likely. Elada had his suspicions about her.

  Upstairs were three bedrooms. The first appeared to belong to the fiddler. There was sheet music spread across the bed, an unstrung fiddle bow lying on the desk, and a package of catgut tacked to the wall above.

  So Sorcha and the fiddler were not living as man and wife. Elada took some satisfaction in that. Tommy Carrell might share Sorcha’s bed on occasion, but they didn’t share the same bedroom. He had been right. They shared friendship and sometimes bodies, but not passion.

  The second chamber he found contained a narrow single bed, and for a moment he thought it might be Sorcha’s, but the room was too girlish for a grown woman. The painted white furniture and pink walls were the sort of thing a parent—or a grandparent—might choose for a young child. It was difficult to imagine Sorcha sleeping under the frilled canopies or over the ruffled bed skirt. And there was nothing of the musician at all about the room.

  If he’d had any doubts, Sorcha dispelled them by stirring in his arms and opening her luminous brown eyes, the pupils so dilated they appeared almost black, and rasping, “Not here. I hate this room.”

  So much for that, then.

  The third room must have belonged to the grandmother, and was clearly Sorcha’s now. There was a large standing harp in one corner, and several smaller stringed instruments on the dresser, the kind itinerant bards used to play, neat and portable. There was a chair strewn with vintage dresses and crumpled pink plastic bags from the giant vintage clothing store in Cambridge that she must frequent. And dominating the room was a wide black iron bed, four posts nearly touching the ceiling and topped by an iron tester with rails.

  He supposed it had been dressed with curtains and a canopy once, but the cold iron was naked now and to Elada it looked like a cage. He debated setting her down inside it. It would weaken him slightly, but so had crashing through the window earlier. And Sorcha was clearly in a bad way.

  He laid her down on the coverlet, careful not to brush against the bedposts or headboard and debilitate himself more than necessary. Sorcha was still shivering, so he pulled back the blankets and tucked her under them. A second later she cried out and flung them off. Then she curled up into a trembling ball and whimpered.

  “What is happening to me?” she asked.

  “I’m not sure.” Although he could guess. “I’m going to call Miach. Rest if you can.”

  He crept back down the stairs and called Miach on his cell.

  The sorcerer answered on the first ring.

  “I suppose it was you who put my wife in a cab,” said Miach.

  Not off to a good start, unfortunately, but Elada had no regrets about that particular act. “Would you rather I’d let her walk down Broadway and get on the T?”

  “I wouldn’t have let her leave at all,” said the sorcerer.

  “Then you would have lost her for good. You know I’m right, even if you can’t admit it now.”

  “That remains to be seen. Where is Sorcha Kavanaugh?”

  “Safe. Someplace the Prince Consort can’t get to her.” Once the iron muntins in the kitchen window were repaired. But he wasn’t going to mention that part to Miach.

  “But he did get to her tonight. At the Black Rose,” said Miach. “Did you really think that news wouldn’t reach me? You left a fiddler with a broken hand in the emergency room at Mass General telling anyone who would listen that the Good Neighbors are abroad tonight and the Prince of the Fae stole his woman.”

  “No one except those who already know what we are will believe him. And his woman,” said Elada, though the words tasted wrong in his mouth—Sorcha was Elada’s woman, or would be soon if he had anything to say about it—“brained the Prince with a Dutch oven. I think you’d like her if you met her.”

  Miach sighed into the phone. “You’re determined to keep this girl alive, aren’t you?”

  “Yes,” said Elada.

  “Then bring her here. I will see what can be done with her.”

  Elada tried to imagine moving Sorcha Kavanaugh in her present state. “I can’t,” he told Miach. “Not right this second, anyway.”

  “Why not?”

  “She’s drunk.”

  “Sober her,” said Miach. “Before Donal and Finn find you.”

  “It’s not that easy. She’s drunk on Fae wine.”

  “Ah,” said Miach.

  Ah indeed. “What can I give her to counteract the effect?”<
br />
  “Do you really need me to spell it out?” asked the sorcerer.

  “Don’t be crude.” Elada found he was extraordinarily touchy when it came to Sorcha Kavanaugh.

  “I’m not being crude. I’m being honest. Give her a long, slow—”

  “That’s not an option.”

  “Why not? She’s pretty enough. You’ve already announced your intention of binding yourself to her. You’re no celibate. And unless I very much mistook your reaction when I first showed you her photo, you find her attractive.”

  “I do find her attractive, but an all-night sex marathon is not how I had hoped to woo her.”

  “Then find someone else to do it,” said Miach, as though he were talking about a broken garage door and not a scared young woman.

  “There aren’t any other promising candidates,” replied Elada acidly. “The Prince, of course, wanted to do the honors, but then, he’s the one who dosed her in the first place. Now she’s burning up with fever and twitching like a cat and she can barely stand up, let alone begin the bardic training she needs to keep her safe from the bastard. And if we stay here long enough, Donal and Finn are bound to scry us. The house is ironbound, but I see no evidence of wards on the windows and doors.”

  “There is an elegant solution to the problem at hand,” said Miach. “Sleep with the girl tonight and bring her to me tomorrow. Acquit yourself well, and she’ll be likelier to align herself with us.”

  Miach was his oldest friend and closest ally and he could be a total ass at times, like now. “You’d like that, wouldn’t you?”

  “It’s not about what I’d like. It’s about what’s best for the people who depend on me, who depend on us.”

  “How long before the effects wear off?”

  “That is . . . unpredictable.”

  “Make an educated guess,” said Elada.

  “A week. Possibly. It’s like any other intoxicant in that sense. Much depends on the amount she drank, her body weight. Several days at least. During which you’ll have to force her to eat and drink. Dehydration is the real danger, and psychological damage is almost impossible to prevent if it goes on more than a few days.”

  “I can’t move her like this and we can’t stay here a week. The Prince will almost certainly come back. There has to be something you can do,” said Elada.

  “There is,” drawled the sorcerer. “I could see to the pretty bard’s needs myself, but Helene wouldn’t like it. So you’ll have to cure the black-haired bard tonight, and worry about how to woo her in the morning.”

  Chapter 7

  It was cold in Sorcha’s room. She knew that, but she couldn’t feel it, and that was a bad sign. She had to be burning up with fever to feel warm in a room as chilly as hers.

  As a musician, she made enough to eat and pay the taxes on the house, which were as much as rent would have been in a studio apartment, only studio apartments didn’t generally come girded with iron to keep out the Fae. But musician’s wages, even with tips and private gigs, weddings and retirement parties, didn’t leave a lot of money left over for luxuries, like heat. She kept the thermostat on the ancient boiler dialed down to the minimum to prevent the pipes from freezing.

  Of course, she could have made more money at her trade if she’d been willing to play gigs in the Irish strongholds, in South Boston and Charlestown. Tommy took those jobs sometimes, because a lanky bearded hipster had less to fear from the Fae than Sorcha did. The jobs tended to pay in cash and even modest affairs held in church basements usually came with generous tips. Tommy never pressed her to join him, but he did pay her rent for the bedroom he used at the house, and the money helped.

  Sorcha had heard so many warnings about the Fae while growing up that she couldn’t remember them all. And at some point, when childhood had given way to adolescence, the message had changed and gotten mixed up with other dire admonitions. When she was a child, Gran had told her never to talk to the Beautiful People. Never accept gifts from the Fair Folk. Candy from strangers. Invitations from the Good Neighbors. Then it had become rides from boys. And flattery from the Gentry.

  Maybe the warnings would have made an impression if she’d actually encountered one of the Fae as a child. Maybe not. But once Sorcha was old enough to date, Gran was full of warnings about boys in general and the Fae in particular, that somehow always put the blame for anything that might happen squarely on Sorcha’s shoulders.

  Sorcha wasn’t to “court trouble” by “casting lures” or “tempting fate.” She wasn’t to “show too much skin” or “dress like a tart.” If Sorcha had been born thirty years earlier, no doubt she would have picked up an unhealthy attitude toward sex and all things male, but she’d been fortunate enough to be born in the era of mass communication and the Internet. So much of what Gran said sounded crazy that Sorcha had chalked Gran’s fear of the opposite sex up to general lunacy.

  And once Sorcha started having sex, she was unable to fathom what all Gran’s fuss had been about. Sex was . . . nice. Sometimes pleasant, sometimes disappointing. But it had never been an all-consuming need.

  Until tonight.

  Unfortunately, the Fae downstairs didn’t seem to find her very appealing. She knew she wasn’t sexy by contemporary standards. She had milk-pale skin that never tanned. A day in the sun resulted in a bright-red burn, a week of peeling, and a return to bone-white pallor. Her black hair only exacerbated the problem, throwing her complexion into stark contrast. If she’d been partial toward tattoos, piercings other than her cold iron ring, and goth style, she might have been attractive to men with those tastes, but evidently not to this Fae.

  She heard him coming back up the stairs, and her body reacted to his proximity. Before she knew what she was doing, she’d crawled to the edge of the bed and was waiting for him, leaning toward the closed door in longing and anticipation.

  He knocked before entering, and when he put his head in the door, he looked, astonishingly for a Fae, uncertain.

  “What did your friend have to say?” she asked.

  The Fae hesitated. “Miach said that the effects of Fae wine are unpredictable.”

  “How?” she asked.

  “They might last a few days . . . or possibly a week.”

  “No.” She couldn’t stand feeling like this for a week.

  “No,” he agreed. “Even if you could endure it without ill effects, the Prince is hunting you. It isn’t safe for you to be . . . distracted like this. And there is one obvious solution to hand.” He grimaced and sketched a bow. “I put myself at your disposal.”

  She wanted, needed, him. Badly. But something inside her cringed at the idea of Elada Brightsword making love to her as a favor.

  “You don’t have to do this if you don’t want to,” she said, but her eyes were focused on the warm skin of his neck above his T-shirt, and if she saw much more of him, she doubted she would be able to control herself. “I mean if you don’t want me.”

  Elada froze. “Why the hell wouldn’t I want you?”

  “I’m not exactly the Fae type.”

  “What is?”

  “In my experience? Tanned, leggy, seventeen-year-old models with designer clothes and eating disorders. Not twenty-five-year-old musicians with split ends and a thrift shop wardrobe.” Although now that she said it, she found it difficult to picture Elada with the kind of girls Keiran had favored.

  “You’re beautiful, Sorcha. You can’t possibly not know that.”

  Little old men often called her beautiful. Sometimes they caller her a “looker” or a “peach.” They’d admired her complexion and her curves. But she didn’t have the physical qualities prized by her own generation, the sharp features that photographed well in a camera phone or the coloring that reflected how much time she spent outdoors. Or the boyish slenderness that looked good in jeans.

  “I don’t dislike how I look, but I know
it isn’t exactly in vogue right now.”

  “Fashion is fairly meaningless to creatures who live as long as the Fae. Style, on the other hand, endures, and I like yours.”

  “You don’t have to say all this just to make me feel better about the situation.”

  “Sorcha,” he said. “I’ve . . . admired you for months, and I want you very much. I’ve fantasized about being with you—but not like this. Not because you need a man and I’m the only candidate available.”

  “Oh.”

  He took a step toward the bed, then stopped himself. “I have wanted to talk to you, to introduce myself to you, every time I walked into the Black Rose, but I was too worried about frightening you away. I used to come and listen to you between jobs for Miach. We locked eyes once across the crowd, and somehow I knew that if I approached you, there was a chance you would bolt. And now I see this,” he went on, gesturing at the iron latch and bands on the door, the bars on the windows, the cage-like structure of the cold iron bed.

  “This was my gran’s house,” she said. “The iron was hers. She was terrified of the Fae.”

  “And so are you, Sorcha. I saw it in your eyes earlier tonight at the Black Rose. I want you, but I can’t bear the thought of seeing that same terror in your eyes when I’m inside you.”

  She had never seen a Fae so . . . vulnerable.

  “You won’t,” she said, “because you’re different. You’re not like him.”

  “No one is like the Prince Consort. He is singular in every way. The only Fae beautiful enough to please the Queen, the only Fae callous enough to endure her cruelty, and, unfortunately, the only Fae inventive enough to hold her attention. He is clever and nearly impossible to kill.”

  “I didn’t mean the Prince,” she said.

  “Who, then?”

  She had never told anyone the whole story, not even Tommy.