Whiskey and Water (17 page)

Jewels rubbed the sponge down her left
arm, shoulder to fingertips, and started to cry.

The Fae stayed with the human a little
while, concerned by the trembling shoulders, the flushed skin, the mucous
slicking her face and dripping into the bath-water. It stroked her hair back
with tender fingertips. Maybe the human was injured. It had never heard an Elf
make noise like that, but animals did. They howled when they were hurt,
squeaked and cried.

Shuffling splayed feet on spidery limbs,
it retreated, found the door, and slipped into the corridor, as the raven cawed
twice and flapped and the human sobbed into her hands.

The Prince liked changelings, humans,
mortals. Iron things.

The Prince might know what to do.

But the Prince was with the Queen, and by
the time the Fae came back with the Elf-page Foxglove in tow, the mortal girl
was floating in the water with her long hair drifting around her, eyes closed,
serene as a flower petal.

Matthew wasn't about to surrender his coat
or his clothing, and after a first hard stare when a crackle-faced servant like
a garden gnome in a mud mask tried to undress him, none of the Fae asked. There
was a washbasin on a stand, and a mirror behind it, and once he'd shown his
would-be assistant to the door and propped the handle with a wooden chair, he
crossed the carpeted floor to stare into the looking glass.

His ponytail was coming unbound, strands
falling loose around his face. It gave him a bad moment: there was symbolism in
that binding, just as there was in Carel's braids and in the iron oxides and magnetite
in the pigments tattooed under his skin. But after an entire day, it was far
more likely simple entropy at work than any malign force picking at his
defenses.

A simple, logical reason. Which didn't
help the sick terror, sharp as a fist clenching his heart. He'd rather have
walked into a killing zone than back into Faerie again.

But he couldn't allow it to matter. He was
here for Althea.

Deliberately, with willed-steady hands, he
peeled his glove off and reached behind his head and unbound the twisted wire
and elastic bands holding his hair back. The strands swung forward, ends beveled
even with a prominent jaw, releasing a headache he hadn't even noticed he had.
He frowned at his hair. It needed washing, but he wasn't about to strip down
and climb into a tub. Still, that didn't stop him from scrubbing hair and
hands in the washbasin, using hard yellow soap scented with civet musk, and
cold water from a crackled blue pitcher that never seemed to run dry. He wasn't
sure he wanted to smell like a harem, but he desperately wanted to be clean,
for reasons of comfort as well as thaumaturgy. And it was this or the steaming
bathtub in all its vulnerability, a thought that was enough to make him happy
he hadn't eaten: his stomach heaved just thinking of it.

He compromised and laid his coat over the
back of a chair before struggling out of his T-shirt, which smelled rather like
he'd spent the night in a police station, even though he hadn't been wearing it
at the time. He washed his face as well, and then his chest and armpits, grimacing
when a trickle of cold water wet the waistband of his jeans.

He did smell like a whorehouse. An
expensive one. And he needed a clean shirt.

There was a wardrobe beside the narrow
canopy bed. If the pitcher never ran out of water—yes, shirts and suits, shoes
and underthings. He picked the plainest shirt out of the pile and pulled it
over wet hair, unbuckling his belt to tuck in the tails. When he combed his
hair back into the ponytail and resecured it—there was a trick to it, with only
one working hand and a half—he noticed that the linen was translucent, and the
dark edges of his tattoos showed through it as plainly as knife blades pressed
to the other side of stretched leather.

He slid his topcoat back on, contemplated
his glove before stuffing it in a pocket, and then picked shed hairs off the
comb and out of the washbasin. He wadded them up with his discarded T-shirt. A moment's
thought, and he pitched the lot onto glowing coals in the fireplace, wondering
what he'd missed.

Greeny-yellow flames were licking over the
cotton when someone tapped on the door. He remembered he'd barred it before he
called "Come in," and went to move the chair.

It was Carel, and she held out her hand
with an empress' grace, wrapping ringed fingers around his left biceps to draw
him into the corridor. "You smell much better now. If your taste runs to
small predators in lust."

"I feel more like Shere Khan at the
end of
The Jungle Books,"
he admitted. " 'Brother, I go to my
lair—to die!' "

"Mmm," she said, and squeezed his
elbow before she led him downstairs. "Go get 'em, Tiger."

Mage and Merlin proceeded down the spiral
stair hand in hand, and from there she led him to a back hall with an air of
spotless desertion, as if people passed through only to clean. Carel's steps
were firm, though; she knew this place well.

The palace was not built for defense. The
walkway they followed was ranked with bow windows as wide as the span of a
man's arms. Some of the window bays held love seats, or dwarf fruit trees—persimmons,
lemons, quinces, and more exotic things—in pots. The prospect revealed an
expanse of gardens lining white-graveled paths below a broad verandah, if
castles had verandahs. Matthew heard plucked strings and voices blown on a gust
of wind, and recognized Ian, Cairbre—and Morgan le Fey, her laugh like a
dagger point pricking his sternum.

He licked his lips, then glanced guiltily
at Carel, who didn't seem to have noticed. The Merlin craned her neck,
footsteps eager enough to set her beads swinging, skipping like a schoolgirl.

They came through a fluted Gothic archway,
the golden stone around the opening fretworked into a trellis that dripped
blue, fuchsia, and violet morning glories. Their pale herbaceous scent colored
the air.

On the broad patio below, Ian MacNeill
lounged against white stone balustrades beside two women who took their ease on
benches, a small table between them. The woman on the right, the Queen, was dark
and tall, broad-shouldered, sharp-chinned. Morgan, on the left, was as tall but
didn't hang so sparely on her frame, and her hair was a plain ribbon-wrapped
braid trailing heavy over her shoulder, a gold-shot red so glossy in the
sunlight it should have been leaving stains soaked into her blue man's shirt. Two
leggy hounds lolled at her feet, the silver one raising her chin in unison with
Morgan's as Morgan took note of Matthew and Carel coming down the steps from
the trellised arch. The knife-prick in Matthew's gut turned into a pulse of
heat, but he disciplined himself. Unicorn. Magic. Sacrifice. Carry on.

Cairbre sat a few yards away, his layered
cloak furled over his shoulders to puddle on the flagstones, a mandolin with a
beautifully inlaid face resting on his knee. He ran his thumbnail across the
strings, provoking a clean rill of notes.

Carel gave Matthew's arm one last squeeze
before floating down the steps, leaving him behind. Her scent, tea tree oil and
ylang-ylang, surrounded the Queen when she leaned down and boldly kissed her
on the mouth. And the Queen kissed the Merlin back, shameless and smiling.

Card's mouth was resilient, and
bittersweet with fennel and myrrh from toothbrushing. Her lips were softer than
other lips the Queen had kissed, and the Queen's cold heart warmed a little at
the brush of the Merlin's lashes across the velvet of her cheek.

Only a little, though. Love, like shame,
was not something the Fae were made for. This was the memory of love, the
memory of shame. A love someone else had known.

Carel kissed her anyway, for the breath of
humanity that might warm that Fae chill. Because mercy and hope and faith were
not Fae things, either. The Fae did not love, and they did not forgive. They
owned.
But sometimes, the Queen could be coaxed to remember what it had been like,
when she had a human heart. Could be coaxed to remember mercy, and love.

Once upon a time.

There were worse things than loving a
dragon.

The women leaned together, Carel's hand
brushing the Queen's hair, her braids fallings around them like a beaded
curtain. Matthew swallowed and averted his eyes . . . and found his gaze
transecting Morgan's. The witch smiled at him, a teacup lifted in her
sharp-tendoned hand, watching his reaction, and treacherous memory suddenly
superimposed — over the image of Carel and the Queen kissing — the tactile
sensation of Morgan's body in his arms, her clinging lips, the molding
softness of her breasts against his chest.

He gasped, remembering too well, and then
saw the witch's smile, the curve of her lips and the creases beside her eyes,
and knew it for a glamourie.

It didn't ease the heat that flickered
through him, imaginary tongue-tips over imaginary skin, or the tightness in his
throat. It had only been one kiss —

—but it was the only kiss he'd known, in a
chosen, monkish existence.

And she was Morgan le Fey, whose love and
whose lovers were legend. "Hello, Matthew Magus," she said.
"Welcome back to Annwn. We've missed you here."

Ian's tilted head and the ripple of notes
from Cairbre's mandolin disagreed, but the Queen's son at least smiled a
little before he looked down at his hands.

"So what have you brought us,
Promethean?" the Prince asked in a courtier's murmur as Carel leaned away
from the Queen.

"Mortal children," Matthew said.
"And I come to complain of a murder, Your Highness." The Queen was
listening, but he had been addressed by Ian, so it was to Ian he responded.
"A mortal girl was killed in my city, and I think the murderer was
Fae."

"The others claim kinright?"

"They're what kin she had. There are
blood relatives." Matthew dismissed
them
with a turn of his crippled
hand, and he saw Ian's eye snag on his rowan-wood ring. Rowan, and not iron.
The Prince's eyes flicked up to Matthew's, and Matthew was glad of his
spectacles—which
were
steel.

Best to get this part of the conversation
completed before Geoff and Jewels arrived. "They don't want payment."

Carel moved behind the Queen's chair and
leaned on her shoulders with a friendly familiarity. The Queen was content to
watch and sip her tea, the sleeves of her gown swaying under the stiff weight
of pearl- and crystal-studded embroidery. She said, "Have you asked them
what they want? Or are you just speaking for them?"

Touché.
The charms strung across Matthew's chest jangled
counterpoint to Cairbre's soft-picked melody when he spread his arms.
"Your Majesty," he said. "Tell me you had nothing to do with the
death. Tell me you know nothing of it, and Whiskey's presence in New York was
coincidence."

The Queen didn't answer at first. She set
her cup down on the saucer so softly that it didn't click, and folded her beringed
fingers together. And then she brushed Carel's hands from her shoulders and
stood, one slippered foot and then the other, the gown's weight making her rise
very straight. She looked at the Mage, his earnest eyes, the frown lines that
hadn't been at the corners of his mouth when last they had met. When last they
had met, in the dappled shadow of a willow on the bank of a man-made pond, and she
had won Carel away from him.

Or rather, when Carel had permitted
herself to be won.

In the days when the Queen was the Seeker
of the Daoine Sidhe, and when she dressed in jeans and boots and wore chained
souls braided into her hair. She smiled, and saw the recognition in his eyes,
and wondered if he knew what it had cost her to beat him, in the end. Him, and
all the rest of them, the Magi with their iron rings.

"Do you remember what you said to me,
Matthew?"

"When?"

"The last time we spoke."

"You told me there are three chances,
in Faerie." His gaze slid sideways, to Carel, who had stepped back and to
the side. She folded her arms, equidistant between them. Morgan stayed in her
chair, and the Queen saw her lay fingertips on Ian's wrist when he started
forward. I did. And this is the third time we meet."

"Third, and last?"

"Third, and decisive." She
reached forward, imperious. "Show me your hand."

Silently, he held it out, three fingers
curled useless against the palm, stiff and frail as sticks. Like Kelly's feet,
after Kelly had danced himself nearly to death in Faerie. She touched him
lightly, and teased his fingers open, against their rigor, prickling gooseflesh
over his shoulders. Severed tendons had hardened, clenched, bunched. He
shivered where she touched him, flesh quivering in isolated places like a horse
flicking away a fly. It hurt, what she was doing, and the rowan ring on his
thumb was useless to hurt her in turn. Matthew Szczegielniak had laid his hands
on a unicorn. They had no power to do harm.

She lifted the hand and pressed it to her
cheek, and his heartbeat rose dizzyingly, adrenaline humming through his veins
like a plucked harp-string. He hadn't been afraid of her, before. He hadn't
been afraid of a lot of things.

Carel fell back without speaking. Ian
watched as silently.