Stone Song

by D. L. McDermott

  “I wasn’t sure myself until this week,” she said.

  “Does Garrett know?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Then he never will.”

  “Granddad, I’m not giving this baby up.”

  “You have to, Nieve, for your son’s sake. He needs you.”

  “Garrett is an excellent father.”

  “But not an excellent husband, I fear,” said Miach. “You deserve better than Garrett. You deserve someone who will devote himself wholly to you and your children, not a man under the thumb of his tyrant of a father.”

  “I love him,” she said. “And you were friends with his father once.”

  “Finn changed after the Druids killed his wife. He is not the Fae he used to be.”

  “None of you are,” she said candidly. “And, to all accounts, that is a good thing.”

  “Who else knows?”

  “Beth Carter.”

  “You told my Druid acolyte before you told me?”

  “I didn’t tell her. She just knew.”

  “Which means that Conn knows as well.”

  “And Helene,” admitted Nieve. “There’s no hiding this from Garrett, and I don’t want to.”

  “So everyone in my household knows except Elada.”

  “I had to tell him, too,” she said. “And you’re not going to like why.”

  • • •

  Sorcha woke in pain and darkness. She was lying on a cold, smooth floor that felt like concrete or cement. Neither surface sounded promising. She remembered Donal striding toward her, remembered feeling the pain of the blow, and then her back striking the column.

  They had taken her voice from her. She remembered that, too. First the cuffs and the gag and then the silence. She’d panicked when the cuffs had gone on, been unable to resonate the gag and destroy it, and when she’d reached for her voice, it hadn’t come quickly enough.

  She moved tentatively. Fingers first, feeling the rough texture of the floor. Pebbled concrete, she decided. Not a promising surface. You generally didn’t lay your guests out on a concrete floor, only your prisoners.

  Sorcha tried to rise. Every bone in her body hurt and her back screamed in pain, but she could move, so that was a good sign. And the cuffs were gone. She could feel the scabbed skin where her arms, shackled behind her, had struck the pillar and scraped against it. The flesh there was raw and burned to the touch.

  The room was almost entirely dark. Sight wasn’t her strongest sense, so she closed her eyes and used her hearing instead. Without the cuffs, her abilities had returned. She was in a small chamber, underground, about the size of a generous closet or a tight bathroom. Below was earth and stone. To her sides a honeycomb of chambers, so that at first she thought she must be below a vast complex. But then a pattern emerged in the silences between cells and she realized that she was in the basement of a row house, their cellars end to end, punctuated only by cross streets for a mile in most directions.

  So the information that would save her life or doom her—and perhaps Elada as well, if he was here with her—would be above.

  She sent her hearing upstairs. The ground floor was deep and narrow, the house clad in granite. There were too many people—and Fae—moving about at first for her to disentangle all the sounds, so she started searching for the most distinctive. She found Finn almost at once, his resonance suffusing the air around him in an aura. She searched for Elada but didn’t detect him in the main structure. There were outbuildings as well, and she searched these, starting with the garages. Finn, it seemed, had a weakness for antique cars.

  She found him in the last garage, the sound of him unmistakable. And revealing. She could tell by the way his muscles strained, the subtlest of sounds, and the way his heart sped, that he was in pain.

  Footsteps approached her prison. This might be her only chance to escape, to free Elada. She retracted her senses and put all of her energy into sitting up and taking a deep breath, then reaching for her voice. She could feel it there, an angry force that was finally ready to be let out and put to purpose. When she opened her mouth to set it free, something constricted her windpipe. The harder she tried to sing, the tighter something closed around her throat until, finally, she saw stars and blacked out.

  • • •

  Elada hadn’t expected the best parlor and a glass of scotch, but being chained in Finn’s garage was too much. When Finn himself turned up, he decided that he preferred the cars for company.

  Finn wasted no time with preamble. “Disavow the Druid, Brightsword, and you may go.”

  “No,” said Elada. His arms ached from being chained overhead. His skin still burned where the iron links had rested against his flesh for too long. “You won’t kill her as long as we’re bound, and I’m not going to give Sorcha up.”

  “Then you will die.”

  “If I do, Miach will go to war over it.”

  “Then he will lose. But I doubt it will come to that. Your loyalty to Miach is unquestioned. His to you . . .”

  “I have no doubts about Miach’s loyalty,” said Elada.

  “And yet, he severed his bonds with you for a woman.”

  “A woman you wanted almost as much as he did. Helene Whitney is a worthy partner for Miach MacCecht.”

  “Miach has had many lovers through the centuries, spawned an entire neighborhood of half-blood bastards. What have you had, Brightsword? What has been your reward for putting him first?”

  “Friendship,” said Elada. “You wouldn’t understand the concept. You have no friends, only followers. Charisma is not the same thing as personality, oh mighty war leader. The Fae flock to your banner when they hear your war cry, but they do not watch your children sing in the school choir or wear badly knitted gifts like badges of honor.”

  “Miach has allowed you to be part of his family, but he has denied you your own.”

  It might have looked that way from the outside, but it had never been that way for Elada. He had never fallen in love hard enough to take on the responsibilities of creating a family.

  “I have no regrets.”

  “And yet the minute Miach releases you, you commit yourself to a Druid.”

  “Her name is Sorcha.”

  “She is an it. A Druid. They killed my wife. You were there. You saw.”

  “I saw,” agreed Elada. “And we made the Druids who did that pay. Sorcha is not those Druids.”

  “If you want a woman, Brightsword, I have many. Choose a half-blood from my own line, if you like, or I will broker an arrangement with one of the true-blood women who follow me.”

  “You want a Fae tied to you whose woman you’re planning to torture and kill.”

  “I might not kill her,” said Finn. “Disavow her, and I promise she will not die in my house.”

  “No, you would take her across the street to kill her, no doubt.”

  “I will keep her alive, under my roof, if you will sever your tie with her. More, I will offer you a place in my house. My grandson is fond of you, and my son promises to be a mage to rival Miach. He will need a right hand.”

  “He has a wife. He cannot have a right hand.”

  “He has had all he can get from Nieve. She bore him a son. She will not bear another. There is no more value in that liaison and it will soon come to an end.”

  “Have you spoken with your son about these plans?” asked Elada.

  “He knows my feelings on the matter.”

  “And he doesn’t like them.”

  Finn shrugged. “What my son likes is not important. He knows there is only one path to power for him, and that path is to tread in my footsteps. He will give Nieve up, and he will take a right hand, and confine his love affairs to women who understand their place.”

  “You make the same flawed assumption about me as you make about your son. That we c
are about power. Garrett is content with Nieve, and I am content with Miach’s friendship. Let Sorcha go and we can repair relations between our two houses and worry about our real adversary.”

  “And who would that be?” asked Finn.

  “The Prince,” said Elada.

  Finn scoffed. “The Prince doesn’t have the power to bring down the wall. He is a dreamer, and his schemes will never amount to anything.”

  “They amounted to plenty last year. Beth Carter opened a gate to the Otherworld and the Prince went through it. He is back because he managed to cross the wall between worlds again. That means the barrier is weakening.”

  “I have heard all this from my son, who parrots Miach’s dire warnings as though they are words of the goddess Dana. I do not believe any of it. The Prince has had two thousand years to plot. He will not succeed now any more than he succeeded then.”

  “The wall was new built and strong then.” Elada knew how much it had decayed, because Miach had been studying the construct’s mystical foundations. “And cooperative Druids were difficult to find. Mostly because you killed so many of them.”

  “Not enough of them,” said Finn. “There will never be enough of them. And if you are so convinced that your Druid slut in the basement has a voice that will bring down the wall, then you should be begging me to kill her.”

  “She is more valuable alive, as an ally, than dead.”

  “Not to me,” said Finn. “To me, she is most valuable as an objet d’art, a study in suffering. I will give you one last opportunity to mitigate her suffering. If you disavow her, I will limit my experiments in pain on her body and keep her as a mute songbird, a pretty little harpist who will sit all day in the corner of my parlor and amuse me when I ask, in any way that I ask. Otherwise I will begin to hurt her tonight.”

  Chapter 16

  Sorcha woke with a splitting headache and a painfully sore throat.

  “If you try to sing again, I’ll let my father kill you,” said a voice from the darkness.

  She opened her eyes to find the room lit and Garrett standing in the corner.

  “Where’s Elada?” she asked. She didn’t want them to know that her hearing still worked, even with whatever they had done to her voice.

  “With my father, discussing your fate. Brightsword is willing to die for you, which seems a waste. There’s no saving your life. He should cut his losses.”

  “What did you do to my voice?” she asked.

  “Does it matter?”

  “Yes.” If they had taken it from her completely, if that was even possible, she wasn’t sure who she would be. And that was when she understood. She’d recoiled from the world of the Fae, shrank from the title of Druid, but not until this moment did she realize that she’d always defined herself by one of their gifts.

  “It’s a geis. If you try to sing, it will choke you.”

  She reached up to touch her neck. The flesh there was raised in a pattern that felt like she had a twisted rope beneath her skin. She shuddered.

  “Is it permanent?”

  “If you like the skin on your neck, then yes.”

  “How is a creature as sweet as Nieve in love with a Fae like you?”

  “Simple,” said Garrett. “She adores her grandfather, and I’m a good deal more like him than my own father would like.”

  “What is he going to do with me?”

  “For now, he’s going to make you play until your fingers bleed.”

  “And what will he do when the Prince Consort comes looking for me?” she asked.

  “The Prince Consort uses Druids. He doesn’t rescue them. The last batch risked their necks to free him from the Otherworld, and then he left them behind to be slaughtered.”

  She could guess who had done the slaughtering.

  • • •

  Tommy Carrell was still shaking long after the room had emptied. He tried to remember how he had gotten there, how he had woken up in an abandoned mansion playing his fiddle with a broken hand and surrounded by Fae trying to kill each other.

  Sorcha.

  It came back to him in bits and pieces. He’d been packing his notes for the trip to Essex. Tommy didn’t have any illusions about his usefulness with a broken hand. He’d agreed to go to the retreat with the women and children because he was as helpless as one at the moment. But he’d wanted his music with him, the pieces he was writing now, in the hopes that soon life would return to normal and he and Sorcha would be able to book gigs and play bars without the fear of the Prince Consort turning up again. He wasn’t sure exactly what Sorcha was learning to do when she spent her afternoons with Miach, but from the way Kevin—a good guy if a bit free with his lady—spoke of her voice, he suspected it was something that was badass even by the standards of the Fae.

  He remembered his phone ringing, and he’d considered letting it go to voice mail, but a gig was a gig and he couldn’t afford to ignore it. The voice on the other end took instant hold of his mind, and he’d followed its orders like a puppet.

  And ended up here. The strange confrontation he’d witnessed seemed like a dream. There had been hundreds of Fae and half-Fae in the room, and he’d been sitting on the floor when Elada and Sorcha had come in. Something deep inside him had started screaming, help them. But the part of him controlled by that beautiful, terrible voice played on.

  Then all hell had broken loose and he’d been left behind, the control of that Fae’s voice gradually fading until it was just Tommy in a dark room where he’d once eaten curry with a pretty waitress.

  Deirdre and Kevin had come after that, and they’d been so damned kind, and all he had felt was useless. They’d asked him what he remembered, and he’d told them as much as he could, then they’d helped him out of the house and down to their waiting car.

  Miach MacCecht had insisted on seeing his arm, and he’d reset the bones there. He’d offered to make it painless, but Tommy had had enough of the Fae getting inside his head. It had hurt like hell.

  Now they were all assembled at the secret weekend house in Essex: Miach, his pretty wife, Helene, Deirdre, Kevin, Nieve, Garrett, Conn, and Beth.

  “We attack directly,” said Conn. “Storm Finn’s house and get them both out.”

  “No,” said Miach. “Finn will kill the girl before we can reach her, and that will kill Elada.”

  Tommy noticed that Miach wasn’t exactly putting Sorcha first, but he was still a cut above the other Fae Tommy had met this week. He’d never feared the Fae as Sorcha had, but with the Prince Consort and then Donal, he’d come to understand why she was so terrified of them. Their cruelty could be inhuman.

  “Do you have a better plan?’ asked Beth Carter. Tommy knew she was a Druid like Sorcha, but another kind, evidently one who couldn’t sing. She’d helped Miach set Tommy’s fingers, and she’d been the one to bring him a beer afterward.

  “He doesn’t,” said Nieve. “But I do.”

  “No,” Miach said immediately.

  “You haven’t even heard it yet.”

  “Whatever it is, your condition means you cannot carry it out.”

  “What condition?” Tommy asked, because being lost in this particular household was a dangerous thing.

  Miach smiled at him for the first time ever. “At last. Someone who didn’t find out before me. My granddaughter is pregnant.”

  “I didn’t know,” said Deirdre.

  “Yes, Deirdre, but you hadn’t left the house for a month before last night,” said Miach acidly.

  “Congratulations,” said Tommy.

  Miach’s smile disappeared. “It is not a matter for congratulations.”

  Okay . . .

  “Today is my day to visit my husband,” said Nieve, as though Miach hadn’t spoken.

  “They’ll hardly be expecting you,” said Helene, “given the events last night. They�
��re holding your father’s right hand and that right hand’s lover prisoner.”

  “Then they’ll be surprised as hell when I turn up, won’t they?” said Nieve.

  “What about a temporary alliance with Donal?” asked Conn.

  Beth Carter gasped. “You hate Donal. He was present at the torture and murder of your daughter.”

  “You all have some very twisted relationships,” said Tommy.

  “It’s a side effect of our longevity,” said Deirdre. “And a little complexity adds spice to old age,” she purred, looking Tommy directly in the eye. He still wasn’t entirely sure what their encounters in her studio had been about, and her assurance that Kevin wouldn’t mind hadn’t quite satisfied. But he’d done it anyway, because she was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen.

  “We need Donal and his followers to attack Finn,” said Conn. “He has more true Fae among his clan than we do. In a fair fight, he would prevail.”

  “Then let’s not have a fair fight,” said Nieve. “Let’s stack the odds in our favor. I can distract Finn long enough for you to find and free at least one of them.”

  “Or Finn will take you prisoner and he’ll have another hostage,” said Miach.

  “Not if I’m carrying his grandchild.”

  “Finn is crafty,” said Helene. “If you try to distract him, he’ll guess that it’s a diversion.”

  Nieve smiled. “That’s why I won’t be the one distracting him.”

  • • •

  Finn hadn’t expected his daughter-in-law to turn up. When she was announced, he considered what her presence might mean. It would be a farce to pretend that their houses were on good terms, or that he thought her good enough for his only true-blood son born in the last century. But her child was charming and called him Grampy, and the boy had been growing, as the children in Finn’s family did, like a weed. Garrett was barely three years old, but he looked a healthy five or even six, and that filled Finn with some pride. He could look into the boy’s face and see his own.

  But not Brigid’s. None of Brigid’s children had survived the Druid revolt. That he knew of. It had been a chaotic time, after the Fae broke loose and put down their former vassals. He’d searched for the boys from one end of the Druid domains to the other and found no trace of them, which meant they were either killed or exiled to the other world.