Fire Touched (28 page)

“How often,” said Adam dangerously, “are we going to be discussing how many of your people have been killed by their own stupidity before you stop them instead of making me do it?”

“We have discussed this very thing,” said Beauclaire grimly.

Goreu pushed back his chair and sighed. “As well as a whole rotting cesspool of other things.”

He sat in silence a moment, examining Adam without meeting his eyes—and avoiding any kind of dominance game. Finally, he leaned forward, and it was as if he peeled off a glamour without changing his form at all. When he spoke, his voice was still tenor, but it had softened and lost the squeak. Instead of a parody, he became . . . someone who might once have ridden beside Arthur. “Some old king,” Goreu said, “some old time or other proclaimed that if the Welsh had all started fighting one enemy instead of each other, they would have conquered the world—that goes double for the fae. Still, we did passably well for the past couple of hundred years, protecting the weak and reining in the strong and vicious.” He flashed a humorless smile. “Coexisting, you could call it. Then Underhill opened unexpectedly—on one of the reservations, then on all of the reservations, thousands if not tens of thousands of miles from the nearest old door.”

“Unexpected by some,” murmured Beauclaire.

Goreu nodded gravely at Beauclaire. “You were behind the drive to create the reservations. I followed your lead because it made sense to have a place of safety to keep those who were too frightening or too frightened. I don't know five fae who thought that you'd be right about Underhill, that she would follow us.”

He looked at Adam again. “While we were still debating what should change, what could change—this one killed a human for the sake of Justice.” There was a capital letter starting that word; I could hear it in his voice. “And then he issued a recall, and all of us were penned up in the reservations.” He pinched his nose and gave Beauclaire a pained look. “There were probably less . . . eventful ways to handle it.”

Beauclaire pursed his lips. “Are you sure that we should spill our secrets here?”

Goreu smiled, a smile as sweet and innocent as sunshine. “And what do you think they will do with our secrets, this warrior and his softhearted coyote mate? If our side in this battle prevails, it won't matter—if not, well then, we'll probably be fighting on their side anyway.”

Beauclaire gave a reluctant nod. “Point.”

Goreu's smile widened a little, then died. When he spoke again, it was to us. “Afterward, we thought for a while that we could stay on our reservations. No humans could get in, not with their fighter jets or tanks. A bard might have managed, but your bards are not given to wandering in the wilderness in this era. We had, after all, Underhill to live in. Underhill exists in a different space and time. Infinite space.”

He and Beauclaire exchanged a glance. Beauclaire snorted abruptly and threw up his hands.

“Why not?” he said, and it was Beauclaire who continued. “But Underhill is different. I will spare you the dozens of explanations we've thrown at her and had thrown back. No one knows why. She's volatile. Unpredictable. We lost four selkies on one of the other reservations. They apparently had found a doorway—” Here he paused, and said, “A doorway is not, strictly speaking, a doorway as you would think of it, though it can be. Some of the doors to Underhill are invisible and impossible to detect unless you happen to stumble through one.”

He sighed, which didn't bode well for the four selkies, I thought. “They found a place where there was a big salt lake, cold and clear, a fifth selkie told me, that they could see to the bottom of, though it was a hundred feet down. They disappeared for a couple of weeks—which would not normally have been a concern because time can pass differently in Underhill. But the fifth selkie had gone to the salt lake and couldn't find them. We searched and asked Underhill, who quit talking to us for a couple of days. Then the fifth selkie found the skeletons of the four selkies laid out on the sands of their lake.”

“A predator?” I asked.

“Selkies are tough,” said Goreu. “And there were no teeth marks on the bones.”

“There are some of us who are very old,” Beauclaire said. “Baba Yaga is one of those. She remembers a time when Underhill killed as many fae as traveled through her, a time when Underhill was very young. She told us that Underhill mellowed with time. Five or six hundred years.”

“So you couldn't stay on the reservations,” said Adam. “There are too many of you for the land you have if you can't trust Underhill to be a home.”

Goreu nodded. “So we were going to have to resume living in the humans' world. But we would do it on our own terms.”

“We had quite a lively discussion on the matter,” said Uncle Mike with an unrepentant grin. “Not that I was a participant, mind you. But some things should be witnessed.”

Both of the other fae gave him an unamused look that bothered Uncle Mike not at all. “I have some very nice hard cider in the back room,” he said. “Would anyone care for some?”

Goreu gave him a sharp look.

“I like humans,” Uncle Mike said seriously. “I might be the only fae alive today who can say that and not mean as a meal. I want them to survive. I want to survive. I'm on your side.”

“Cider would be good,” said Adam. “This sounds like it will take a while. And, though we are intrigued with the story—I'm not sure why you are telling it to us.”

“I want you to understand that our options are limited,” said Goreu. “I want you to really, really understand why we find ourselves here in this place at this time. If we—and by ‘we,' I mean the fae, the werewolves, the humans, and anyone else who wants to live a full life—are to find our way out of it, then we—Beauclaire and I—need your help.”

Uncle Mike excused himself, and we waited quietly while he made glass-clinky and cider-getting noises behind the closed doors marked
EMPLOYEES ONLY
in bright green letters. He brought back a tray with five clear, frosty mugs, and a glass pitcher filled with a golden liquid that bubbled and sparkled like champagne.

I generally don't drink alcohol. I have too many people's secrets in my head—and alcohol affects me oddly. But to refuse it in this place and time was more of a statement than I wanted to make. I
took the glass that Uncle Mike poured and brought it to my lips—and stopped.

I set it down on the table with a shaky hand, gave Uncle Mike a tight smile. “I had a bad experience with drink and the fae.”

His eyes grew sad. “I'd forgotten that.” He touched the glass, and the liquid cleared. “It's water now, cool and sweet. I give my word that water is all it is, safe for you to drink. But if you'd rather not, I will not take offense.”

I took a sip, and it tasted like water. Goreu glanced at Beauclaire, who shook his head. Neither of them had heard that story—they could get the whole tale from Uncle Mike when we were gone. I mostly trusted Uncle Mike. But as soon as no one was paying attention to me, I set the water down on the table and left it there.

“So,” I said, as the others drank their cider. “When we left off, the fae were stuck between a rock and a hard place. Let me guess—the result of the discussion that Uncle Mike is so gleeful about was the release of a few of the nasties that the Gray Lords have been keeping a choke hold on. We had a little excitement, and some werewolf friends of mine had trouble in Arizona.” I let them see what I thought about their solution. The two that I knew about both preyed upon children.

“I was unhappy with the decision,” Beauclaire said. “I was unhappier with the way it was carried out. The fae who were released were all under a death sentence. After they had caused a stir, one of us was supposed to go out and kill them. Making us heroes of sorts.”

I gave him a sour look. The years I had spent working with Zee had given me more than the know-how to rebuild an engine: I had Zee's patented sour look down cold. “That's not what happened.”

“No,” agreed Beauclaire. Maybe he'd hung out with Zee at some point, too, because his sour look was pretty good. “I thought it was overly optimistic. I was outvoted.” He gave Goreu a cool look.

Goreu grimaced. “I had no choice. We need someone in with the genocidal bunch. Since I'm the one with the harmless look and no reputation for stuff, it's got to be me. We vote as a block.”

“The genocidal bunch?” I asked cautiously.

He nodded. “The majority of the Gray Lords want to deal with the humans from a point of strength: appease us, and we won't kill you. But there is a cadre of us who look at Underhill, look at our numbers—and at the fact that our population has dropped by half since we left Europe and traveled here—and they don't believe we can survive. They want a war, a war with the humans or a war with the werewolves that will devolve into a war with the humans. They think that if all of Faery fight, we can kill humankind and die in glory.”

I felt like someone had knocked the wind out of me.

“Are they right?” asked Adam. “Could you destroy humanity?”

Goreu shrugged. “I don't know. Maybe.”

Uncle Mike took a deep drink of his cider, and said, “The only thing that has saved us so far is that they are aware that most of the fae, the ones who are not Gray Lords, would like to live. We don't care so much about the fae as a race, we care about ourselves and our families. And there are still enough of us that we'd have a fair chance of stopping the Gray Lords who want war. Which is why they have to make the humans or, failing that, the werewolves make war first.”

Did Bran know this? I took a deep breath. Of course he did. He'd abandoned our pack so that if we failed to negotiate with the fae, they couldn't use that as the flash point for a war with all of the werewolves.
Was it better that Bran abandoned us not just for the safety of the werewolves, but of the humans, and, probably, the fae, too? Yes.

“The Widow Queen is one of the suicidal, genocidal group?” I hazarded.

Goreu shook his head. “No. She's part of her own small group of delusional idiots. She thinks that if the werewolves don't come in on the humans' side, we can actually kill all the humans who live on this continent and survive. Happily, you've just killed most of her followers. She thought she could use Aiden to gain control of Underhill as part of some further and complicated plot to destroy the other Gray Lords and take control. She likes to rule.”

“To be fair,” Uncle Mike said, “we watched the Europeans do a fair job of killing off the people who were originally on this continent.” He gave me a sly look. “You could ask your father's people about that. But she doesn't have smallpox or the black measles, so she's trying out a few other things. The last one was a troll who was nearly mindless—there are a few of them who are quite brilliant by troll standards at least, Mercy—but who had the delightful talent of growing in strength every time he ate a human and, in the water, was impossible to kill.”

I stared at him, trying to imagine that troll being stronger.

Uncle Mike gave me a cheery smile. “Happily for our side, he was too dumb to jump in the water before your pack killed him. Had he made it to the city and started killing hundreds of people, none of
us
could have stopped him.” He paused. “Well, maybe Nemane or Beauclaire. But the Widow Queen forgets how much power she's lost.”

“Our storytelling this night is at an end,” Beauclaire said softly. He got up from the table. “If you would excuse me for a few moments. Goreu will continue our conversation.”

Goreu leaned forward. “The situation with your pack has presented us with a unique opportunity. We need to negotiate with the human government—and have scared them to the point that there is no path for communication. But you killed a troll.”

He let that statement sit in the air.

“And you did it on national TV. In the past few months, several fairy monsters have been publicly taken down by werewolves.” He tapped on the table. “If we can manage to sign a nonaggression pact that would make the Tri-Cities a neutral territory, somewhere that we have agreed that no aggressive act can take place—enforced by someone the humans can trust in, trust in their honor and in their ability—then it is just possible that we might avoid a war with the humans and go back to how we have been. Coexisting.”

“Are we negotiating with Beauclaire and Goreu?” asked Adam softly. “Or the Council of the Gray Lords?”

“The Council,” Goreu said. “Beauclaire to represent the majority and I the minority opinion. It took some doing for that to happen. If they'd been able to locate Órlaith, this would have been much more difficult.”

“Goreu,” I said, “did you hurt Zee?”

He met my eyes. “No.”

“So why did you cringe from him?”

He smiled. “Because it was the action that the male who I pretend to be would have done once the wristlets had proven him weaker than the half-dead daughter of one of the Old Kings. Such a fae would know that Zee was a threat he could not face.”

“They believed that?” asked Adam. “That a Gray Lord would be so weak?”

“They remember the Old Kings,” Uncle Mike answered. “They remember what Zee can do—they fear him themselves. And Goreu
is powerful enough that the battles he fought to become a Gray Lord looked . . . like a political animal wiggling his way into power.” He smiled. “And most of them would have been afraid to share those wristlets with the daughter of the Dragon Under the Hill.”

“All right,” I said, and looked to Adam.

“You know that we would sign a nonaggression pact,” he said. “So why the story hour?”

“Because nothing is that simple,” agreed Goreu. “The humans might believe that your killing of the troll was enough to make us sign such an agreement. But those of Faery know better. It would be a loss of face—and might spell the downfall of the Gray Lords. The individuals are strong—but there are those, like your Zee and Uncle Mike”—he nodded to Uncle Mike, who grinned and drank his cider—“who hide what they are. If we appear too weak, we shall be brought down—and chaos will rule. That would not be good for anyone. So.” He stood up. “Two things. First, a show of force, something to demonstrate that it is no weakness of the fae that makes us sign a treaty. Beauclaire should be ready for his demonstration.”