The Iron Sword (The Fae War Chronicles Book 1) (13 page)

I glanced around and saw the grimness written on the faces of every Sidhe at the table. “But how would he gain anything from that?”

“No dreams for mortals,” said Bren sadly. “No more
taebramh
…I think in Doendhtalam you call it magic.”

“Magic?” I repeated, frowning.

“It’s a simple word for a complex power, and one that has been used wrongly for many years in your world,” Emery clarified.

“And without a way to the mortal world, without a Bearer…none would be able to destroy Malravenar. He would hold our world in thrall,” added Ronan darkly. He took out a dagger from its sheath at his waist and balanced it on its point upon the table.

“The Iron Sword is powerful enough to do that?” I received no answer. The dismal silence twisted my heart. From what I had seen, the Sidhe were a proud, noble, valiant people—or most of them, anyway—and I could see what it cost them to admit their danger, especially to a young mortal. I actually thought of myself in those terms, I realized, with no surprise now.

“And so the Queen,” said Bren, “sent the Vaelanbrigh into the mortal world to find the half-mortal child. The Prophesied One.” She looked at me. “Both the Queen of the Bright Court and our Queen almost killed your friend, you know, before she was even born, to satisfy the High Code. But one of the Scholars found a prophecy, and stayed their hands, so they bound her Fae half and let her live in the mortal world.”

“She was marked for this her whole life?” I asked.

Bren shrugged. “Who can say what wisdoms lay in the old scrolls? Some might call it her destiny. In any case, she is here now, to bear the Iron Sword in the battle against Malravenar.” She saw my thoughts behind my eyes—Molly was still half-Fae. The power of the Iron Sword traveled through its Bearer, and the Sidhe could not be Bearer for a reason. Bren smiled sadly. “It will probably kill her, Tess,” she said gently. “We cannot even come within a few feet of it, when it is unsheathed, or so the legends say.”

“Why didn’t the Queen choose a mortal to do this?” I asked, feeling the furrow in my brow.

“Because, Tess,” Bren answered, “the Queens are bound by the Code as much as us, and they could not knowingly call a mortal, especially when mortals now have no loyalties to the Courts, and most do not even believe in Faeortalam except in their dreams.”

“Except in their dreams,” I repeated.

“And we do not know how far Malravenar’s reach has grown,” Bren continued. Her voice wavered a little when she said the Enemy’s name, but she raised her chin. “He has probably poisoned the dreams of mortals, so that even those are not safe anymore. Mortal minds are strong, but we cannot take a chance with the power of such a weapon.”

For a few minutes I stared into my silver cup, the sounds of the ongoing celebration flowing around our pocket of silence like a river flows around stones.

“It is much to think about,” Emery said with surprising gentleness, the cool aloofness leaving his voice for a moment.

I took a breath and cleared my throat. “It is. And I’m sure I’ll have questions…later, when I’ve thought it all through.” I looked up at them. “Thank you, for trusting me.”

“You passed the Queen’s test,” Emery said by way of explanation. “If you were unworthy, she would have killed you.”

I couldn’t help but smile wryly. “Always good to know that you have confidence in me, Emery.”

A ghost of a smile crossed Emery’s lips, and Ronan grinned.

“Now,” I said, “we can talk more about this later. But tell me,” I asked with a grin, “do you know any drinking games?”

Emery, Ronan and Donovan looked at me blankly. Bren’s eyes twinkled and Ramel grinned.

“All right then,” I said, “who’s got a coin? There’s a game called quarters that I think you ought to know…”

Chapter 13

A
n insistent booming roused me from a deep, dreamless sleep. With a groan I rolled over, realized with perplexity that I was somehow in a bed when I hadn’t remembered getting there from the celebration….Well, damn. It had been awhile since I’d drank so much I had trouble remembering the end of the night. I sat up and rubbed my eyes before going to the door, not caring that my hair was probably a mess and I was barefoot.

Ramel tried unsuccessfully to hide his amusement as he took in my appearance. I scowled at him.

“I’m never playing drinking games with non-mortals ever again,” I groused. “It’s just not fair.”

“We do have uncanny coordination,” Ramel agreed seriously, his eyes sparkling with suppressed mirth.

“Did you wake me up for a reason, or just to gloat?” I asked, rubbing the back of my neck. Thankfully the
vinaess
didn’t seem to induce hangovers, or I would have had to crawl to the door instead of walking.

“Gloating is all well and good,” he grinned, “but I came to get you for your lessons.”

“Lessons?” I stared at him blankly.

“With that long sharp object we call a sword?” prompted Ramel, arching one eyebrow and making a thrusting motion with an imaginary blade. I saw he wore his own blade at his hip.

“Thank you, but I’m not
that
thick-headed.” I scowled at him again for good measure. “Really? No day off after the celebration?”

“A warrior must always be ready to fight,” he replied with entirely too much vigor and enthusiasm.

“Ugh,” I responded. “What time is it anyway?”

“Almost noon.”

“Great,” I muttered. But as my head cleared I thought that it wouldn’t be so bad to break a sweat with a blade in my hand. One lesson and I was hooked, I thought ruefully. Ramel helped me adjust my sling—I’d only have to wear it for a few days more, much to my relief. I changed into suitable clothes while he waited outside, pulling on my boots and grabbing my sword hastily.

“No practice on an empty stomach,” he said as I came out into the passageway, handing me a little bundle of food wrapped in what felt like some type of wax-paper. He carried my sword and I discovered that the bundle contained a hearty piece of slightly sweet, nutty bread and a slice of cheese.

“There was another piece of cheese,” he said as we headed toward the gymnasium, “but I got hungry while I was waiting for you to change.”

I laughed and shook my head. Once we reached the gymnasium, Ramel sent me right into warm-up drills, and the session lasted longer than the day before, ending in a short sparring session. He slid edge-guards over our blades—thin little sheaths that made our swords into sparring blades. “Better than using the clumsy wooden sticks,” he explained. “You can still feel the balance of your weapon this way.” I knew Ramel was only going half-speed, if that, but I still felt a spark of triumph when I spotted an opening in his defense and snaked my blade through, touching the blunted point to his chest.

“Good,” he said with a grin. Then he launched into a full-speed attack that made me lurch backward in surprise. I managed to recover and desperately blocked his blows, the shock of his blade hitting mine running up my wrist and into my shoulder, making me gasp. After blocking four or five of his swings, he lunged and cut at my side. I couldn’t move my sword to block in time, and his blade hit my ribs hard. I went down on one knee for an instant, then stood again, using the tip of my sword against the floor as support as I tried to catch my breath through the pain.

“You’re doing well, Tess,” Ramel said in his teaching-voice, not even winded, “but remember that if you’re ever in a real battle, that is what you’ll have to deal with, so you must learn fast.” Then his eyes darkened as he realized how hard he had hit me.

“I’m fine,” I said, brushing off the question before he could ask. “I do need to learn.”

“Well met,” he said with a nod and a small smile. “We’ll make a warrior of you yet, pretty one.”

I felt a small nudge of curiosity at Ramel’s flirtatious pet-name as I balanced my sword against my leg and wiped the sweat from my brow. But I’d seen him interact with other ladies at the Court and I told myself that it was just his personality, nothing more. “So,” I said. “will you tell me more about the knights that were killed?”

Ramel’s face darkened for an instant, and I glimpsed his face devoid of his good nature. His expression became purely Fae, smooth and bleak and terrifying, his eyes glowing with that light to which I hadn’t yet put a name. It was the Fae-spark, I decided, suppressing the customary chill that tried to crawl down my spine. I was getting used to glimpsing the inhuman aspects of the Sidhe. Before I knew it, I spoke again. “What’s it like?” I heard myself ask in a soft, intrigued voice. “When your eyes are alight like that…and it seems there’s a door shut on all your emotions…”

Ramel took a shuddering breath and ran a hand through his coppery curls. “Far from it,” he said, shaking his head. “You mean when it seems as though our faces show no expression. That is because there is no expression suitable for what we’re feeling. There’s a poet in your world, Bren doesn’t particularly like her but I have read some of her works…she describes a particular emotion by saying that she feels as though the top of her head’s been taken off.” He smiled at my surprise. “Yes, we read mortal poetry still. We cannot help ourselves when it comes to things of beauty. In the time before the High Code, poets were often the favorites at both Courts. Some were even lovers…some say to the Queens.” He lowered his voice at that last bit, as if it were a piece of particularly juicy gossip, which it was, I supposed, discounting the fact that it was hundreds of years old. I couldn’t help but smile.

“So…it’s not that you’re not feeling anything at all,” I said, stretching my legs. “It’s that your emotions are too intense to be expressed.”

Ramel paused and then nodded. “I suppose that’s as good an explanation as any you’ll hear.” He gestured. “Let’s sit, and I’ll tell you about the knights.”

After Ramel took the edge-guards from my sword, I sheathed it and we went to sit on one of the low benches that lined the wall of the gymnasium. A few other pairs were practicing, scattered across the great space like pebbles thrown at a handful into a pond, the ripples of their practice-sounds overlapping and muddling as they reached Ramel and I. Finnead and Molly weren’t there.

Ramel must have seen me scanning the rest of the gymnasium. “You know,” he said, “if it’s your friend you’re looking for, they moved her quarters to the North Wing. That might be why you haven’t seen her.”

“Oh?” I said, readjusting my sword so I could lean back against the wall without it digging into my hip.

“If,” Ramel said, drawing the words out, “that’s who you were looking for.”

I chose not to reply, thinking that silence was probably the best response. Let them all think what they may, I thought, surprising myself with the vehemence surfacing in my mind.

Ramel leaned forward and put his elbows on his knees. “So you’d like to hear about the knights that were killed.”

The heavy sadness in his voice made my chest hurt. “If it’s too hard to talk about…”

He shook his head. “No. The best way to honor the dead is by speaking of them as they would have liked, with honor and respect.”

“You knew them,” I said.

“Yes.” Ramel looked across the gymnasium as he spoke, his eyes unfocused. “Haldrian was killed first. We’d been hearing rumors, whisperings on the wind about dark shadows creeping from the Deadlands. But there have been whispers before, and nothing ill came of it, so we didn’t pay it much heed.”

“I didn’t know the Sidhe…” I stopped, unsure of how to phrase my question.

“You didn’t think we could die,” Ramel said.

“Yes.”

“It is very hard to kill a Sidhe,” he said, staring straight ahead again. “There are only a few…methods…that truly work. There are more ways to hurt, but to kill takes a special knowledge and certain amount of…talent.”

“And Malravenar knows how to kill.”

“He enjoys pain more,” said Ramel darkly. “He has been known to… torture. Draw out suffering. But now it seems he is turning his attention to death.”

“Why the change?” I asked softly.

Ramel shook his head. “I would not want to know the motives of the Enemy. I would not want to see the workings of his mind.” He took a breath. “In any case, Haldrian was a young knight. He’d completed his task only about five years ago, and was knighted by the Queen on the Winter Solstice of that year. Most of the young knights are assigned to patrols along the border, for their first few decades.”

I smiled a little. Decades.

“Besides Darkhill, there are Glemhdin and Maeltan, and then on the far Southern border Queensport. Those are the largest holdings, and then there are countless small castles and manors between. The patrols are mostly a formality, just to teach the greenest knights how to live on the road. Every now and again there’s a troll that wanders down out of the North or a dragon that awakes in the Edhyre Mountains that has to be convinced not to go about pillaging.” He smiled mirthlessly. “To think I’d actually be grateful to be assigned to a patrol now.” Shaking his head, he continued. “There was a patrol passing by the Mordland Woods—those are just south of the Edhyre, about as far as we go on patrols. And they were ambushed during the night by fell things that they couldn’t see—or so they said. Swords and arrows worked against them, but it’s hard to fight an invisible enemy. When the fray was over, Haldrian had an arrow in his side. That would be painful but not fatal if it were any normal arrow.”

“But it wasn’t a normal arrow,” I said, almost in a whisper. The sounds of swords clashing rang across the gymnasium as one of the practicing pairs launched into a skirmish with uncovered blades. I watched their swords glitter in dizzying arcs and feints.

“It was tipped,” said Ramel. Then he checked himself and took in a sharp breath, his face draining of what little color it had.

“Tipped with…?” I prompted, though I knew the answer already. The horrible burnt smell of the iron sizzling through the flesh of the
garrelnost
rose in my memory, powerful enough to make my stomach turn a bit. I swallowed hard.

“That…is not for me to say,” Ramel replied, saying the words with some difficulty. “I cannot tell the weakness to a mortal.”

“Can’t?” I asked. “Or won’t?”

He glanced at me, and I noticed he looked rather gray. “Cannot, Tess…I cannot. The Queen’s power enforces the High Code on this point. It has been so…even before the Code itself…” He closed his eyes for a moment, grimacing slightly. “Even now, just thinking about it…I can feel it pressing down on me.”

“So you’ll burst into flames or something? Spontaneous combustion?” I asked mischievously, unable to restrain myself.

Ramel gave me a long-suffering look. “If you are going to insult me at least try not to do it…with horrible clichéd notions.” His skin had passed from gray to a pale blue, and sweat that hadn’t been there a moment before gleamed on his forehead.

“For goodness’ sake,” I said quickly, “if it hurts you that much, don’t even think about it.”

He took in a struggling breath. “But, Tess…” And he looked at me with an emotion I didn’t want to understand written on his face. “You should know, so you can….” He shut his eyes again without finishing his sentence, sweat rolling down his face.

“No,” I snapped, grabbing his shoulder as he wavered, swaying on the bench. “Stop it.” I leaned forward and whispered furiously in his ear, “Stop it, because I already know. I know that iron is the great weakness of the Fae.”

Ramel glanced at me in confusion. “But…the Queen…”

“I kept it from her,” I said, still in a whisper.

Ramel blinked, and took in a breath, and some of the blueness left his face. All of a sudden I was very aware that our faces were scant inches apart as Ramel turned slightly toward me. A tense moment hung between us as he stared at me. Then I cleared my throat and sat back, taking my hand from his shoulder.

“You kept it from
her
?” he repeated in a low voice.

I nodded, smoothing out the edge of my tunic with my palm. “Yes.”

Ramel sat back and was silent for a moment. Then I jumped as he laughed, his voice echoing out into the wide space of the gymnasium.

“What’s so funny?” I asked.

“You,” he said.

I stared at him, stung by his words. “I fail to see what is so amusing about me.”

Ramel shook his head. “Tess, if I didn’t laugh, I think I’d be running away from you instead.”

“You’re joking.” I scowled at him.

“I swear to you on the Queen’s honor that I’m telling the truth,” Ramel said seriously. “You had the strength to shield a part of your mind from the Queen of the Unseelie Court. Aside from Titania, she is the most powerful being in Faeortalam.”

“Except for maybe Malravenar,” I pointed out, and then I immediately wished I hadn’t said it.

“Do not ever say that again,” Ramel said, his voice deadly soft. “For your own safety.” He shook his head. “You are brave, and strong, my dear, but you need to learn to temper your words, or think more about them before you say them.”

I nodded. “Sorry. I will.”

“Good.” Ramel leaned back again, a grin splitting his face. “You are full of surprises, my pretty mortal.”

“And you are full of superfluous compliments,” I answered back. Ramel just grinned more. I hated to make his smile fade, but I felt an insistent curiosity, a burning need to know the stories behind the three murdered Sidhe knights. “So Haldrian…he died from the arrow?”

Ramel sobered. “Yes. When one of us…when
that
is used…” He shook his head. “It takes a very strong knight, usually one of the Named Knights, to even come close enough to the injured to carry them from the battlefield, if they can’t move themselves. And it takes a very strong Sidhe to even remain conscious when they are wounded like that.”

The beginnings of an idea tickled the back of my mind. “You can’t even try to help them?” I asked quietly.

“That’s the worst part of it, Tess. Haldrian died alone, confused…probably afraid, when he should have been surrounded by his comrades.” Ramel stopped and took a breath. “They couldn’t even bring his body back to Darkhill for proper honors. They had to light his pyre by flame-arrows.”

I grimaced, realizing that I had underestimated the severity of the damage that iron could do to the Sidhe. It made sense that they would guard that knowledge closely; and I knew now that I had casually mentioned a very apt comparison when I’d compared the Iron Sword to an atomic bomb. “And the other knights?”