Finally, Lord Oberis rose.
“I agree,” he ground out. “I hope we can work together to get through the inevitable teething problems. There are, as always, ongoing issues, Lord Andrell, and I would invite you to meet with me tomorrow to discuss them in a more collegial setting.”
From the Seelie Lord’s body language, I figured a boxing ring or underground fight club was definitely inside the category of “collegial setting” in his mind.
“For now, know that you are welcome to Calgary and I look forward to us building a new future together, two Courts bound as one race.”
“As do I,” Andrell promised. “We have much work to do, you and I, Lord Oberis. We shall help our people thrive.”
The formalities concluded, Andrell returned outside. I gave Oberis and Talus what I hoped were friendly please-don’t-blame-me-for-this nods and followed him out.
I found him leaning against the back wall of the hotel studying my car, looking tired.
“Jet lag is a bitch,” he told me as I approached. “But even I could pick up that there was more tension than I expected. What happened, Mr. Kilkenny?”
“I don’t know what you mean,” I admitted.
“I’ve played bodyguard for this kind of mess before,” he said. “And I know Oberis. There were a lot more angry people in there than I expected. Which means, I judge, that an Unseelie just managed to cause trouble.
“So, I repeat myself. What happened?”
“Ah.” I sighed. “We had a Pouka attempt to gas the Stampede. I don’t know why—I’m guessing that dying terrified and screaming makes humans taste better or some shit?—but it happened. And rumor suggests she might have survived us stopping her.”
He closed his eyes and exhaled.
“I see,” he admitted. “Presumably, that’s part of what Lord Oberis wishes to brief me on. That’s a headache my new Court doesn’t need, but we’ll deal with it.”
His bodyguards folded in around him and he gave me a tired smile.
“I’m sure it’s no surprise I’m not planning on staying at the Manor under succor,” he continued. “May we impose, Jason, for one more ride? We’re staying at the Palliser downtown. Drop us off there and your duty to our shared Queen is done for tonight. And you’ll have my gratitude.”
“I can manage that,” I replied. It was easy enough, and I had no more interest in aggravating the city’s new Unseelie Lord than I did in aggravating our Seelie one.
6
Dropping the car off at Eric’s and bussing home after delivering Andrell left me getting in well after midnight. Mary was already home and asleep, and I carefully closed the door to keep the light out of the bedroom as I booted up my computer.
For once, my email didn’t have any metaphorical wriggling snakes lurking in it. Experience suggested that would change by the time lunch had rolled around in Ireland, but for now I only had one email that was expecting me to take any action at all.
That email could easily have been taken for spam, too, if Fae-Net suffered from such a thing. It was titled simply Begin Your Training with an address and a time.
The time was early the next morning and the address was relatively nearby. That would be helpful when I needed to meet whoever my Queen had arranged to take over my training—Mabona hadn’t given me any more information on that than she had before. Most of my communication with her over the last few days had been around Andrell’s arrival.
Clearly, she’d found time to arrange for someone to arrive in Calgary and take over the task of training me in my gifts from Oberis. Another wedge driven in between myself and the Seelie Court of the city, who had, until today, been my friends.
I sighed and jotted off a quick email to Talus, asking if we could meet up for a meal before he left town. I’d be damned if the need to stay neutral meant I had to give up on my friendships in this city. I couldn’t train with the Seelie Lord, I could accept that, but I wasn’t going to lose all of my friends, either.
I was tired and frustrated enough that even my senses missed Mary coming out of the bedroom until she wrapped her arms around my neck and kissed my hair.
“Rough night, huh?” she asked.
“Politics were bad enough when we had one Fae Court,” I replied, leaning back against her. “Now…now I don’t know if I’m going to find time to breathe, let alone sleep. Being the local neutral is sounding like it’s going to be a pain in the ass.”
“You’ll manage,” she told me assuredly. “However bad it gets, it can’t get as bad as it was when you first got here. Nobody is poking at the soft spots.”
I chuckled and turned to face her. For her part, Mary slipped into my lap and cuddled against me. This was the point where I realized she was wearing a flimsy silk robe and not much else.
“In any case, it sounds like you need to actually come to bed and sleep, not stress over things,” she pointed out with a small wicked grin. “I have some ideas to help with that!”
The address I’d been given turned out to be a closed kung fu dojo in a strip mall twenty minutes’ walk from my house. That was helpful, seeing as how the Escalade was still with Eric and, well, I was used to getting around on foot.
Stepping Between was something I still reserved for events of greater urgency than “I don’t feel like walking today.” It wasn’t really uncomfortable for me, not like it was for someone with no control over their own trip, but it was still a little nerve-wracking.
Thanks to the wonders of modern smartphones, I arrived precisely three minutes before I was supposed to be there and stood outside the boarded-over windows, studying the space carefully. I’d ridden past it on the bus a few times, and the dojo had only closed a month or so before.
The old signs were still up and there was no sign that anything had changed, but I doubted that someone had sent me that email just to make me look like an idiot. I walked up to the paper-covered door and knocked.
The door swung open instantly, and I found myself face to face with one of the most imposing women I’ve ever met. She was several inches over six feet, towering over even me, with dark skin that suggested African ancestry somewhere, and blond hair braided into a tightly fitted crowd around her skull.
“Kilkenny,” she greeted me in a vaguely Scandinavian accent. “Come in.”
She stepped back, allowing me to enter the dojo, and then closed and locked the door behind me.
Someone, presumably my hostess, had cleaned the hardwood floors and cleared out the small office. I was pretty sure I spotted a cot hiding behind the desk in the office, which told me a lot about where my new teacher was sleeping.
“The landlord was desperate,” she noted as she led me into the space. “He thinks I’m setting up a new dojo, but I suspect he knows I’m sleeping in here, too.”
“Are you setting up a dojo?” I asked carefully.
She shrugged.
“I will think about it. I am supposed to be here for some time, and it may prove to be a useful distraction.” She turned to loom over me. “I am Inga Strand, of the Aesir.”
I blinked at that. I was vaguely aware that the Aesir were, basically, Nordic fae, but that was all I knew. From the Power Inga radiated, she was a Noble or Greater Fae at least.
“My Lady said she was sending a Hunter,” I said carefully. “I’m guessing that is you?”
“‘A Hunter,’ the boy says.” Inga laughed. “Kilkenny, I have trained Hunters and the children of Hunters for two centuries. I have ridden with Ankaris, who leads the Hunt today. I rode with Calebrant until his death. I rode with Karos until his death. Before Karos recruited me, I rode with the Valkyries.”
The Valkyries.
I was standing in a room with a Valkyrie.
The Wild Hunt were basically the special forces of the Fae High Court, the only organized “military” the fae had. They’d once been one of several, but all of them had been absorbed by now.
The Valkyries had been one of the ones they absorbed. Like the Hunters themselves
, the Valkyries were a subspecies of fae. Where the Wild Hunt had other fae in their ranks, drawn through Between by the Hunters who led them, the Valkyrie had ridden alone.
They were Hunters, able to step Between, but they were also legends.
“I am honored, my lady,” I told her.
“Get your jaw off the floor,” she instructed bluntly. “From what the Queen has told me, you are one of the strongest Hunter changelings to ever cross my path. The Wild Hunt cannot afford to have you running around half-trained, even if your Fealty to the Queen means we cannot claim you as our own.”
She shook her head.
“The Aesir would be Noble if they wielded the glamors that define that caste,” she noted. “We have their strength and their gifts of Power otherwise, but we lack the glamors they claim as their own.
“The Valkyries are Aesir who can walk Between. Nothing more. Nothing less. You claim the gifts of Force, and Fire, and Between, but lack the strength of a Noble. If you are to survive at the tasks our Queen has set you, you must learn to use the gift of Force to make up for that lack; do you understand?”
“I think so,” I said slowly. I didn’t even know what gifts I commanded yet, but her list sounded about right. “I am prepared to learn. I must learn. I swore an oath.”
“Good. You recognize that much,” she agreed, then pulled a silver-hilted sword from nowhere.
“Then we shall begin.”
Inga started with basic exercises, movement and stretches that would have been familiar to any student of martial arts, mundane or supernatural. Without much in terms of training or aptitude, I had the strength and endurance of an Olympic-level athlete, so I was used to this sort of thing being easy.
Except today I was being put through the “basic” exercises by a Valkyrie. If there was a drop of mercy in Inga’s training methodology, I wasn’t aware of it after the first twenty minutes. Peak human endurance or not, I was dripping with sweat by the time we’d finished her “warm-up”.
“All right,” she told me, picking up the sword again. It was only slightly reassuring to me that the silver-hilted weapon had a scabbard around its cold-forged iron blade. “Knock the sword from my hand.”
I stared at her.
“Are you kidding me?” We’d already established she was faster and stronger than I was—and more skilled.
“No. Knock the sword from my hand.”
Well, we both knew how this was going to end. I charged at her, trying to fling my entire body weight against her wrist to knock the weapon free.
I didn’t even manage to register individual blows. The next thing I actively registered, I was flat on my back on the other side of the room, breathing stiffly past a crushing pain in my chest.
“What part of what I am supposed to be teaching you led you to think I meant with your hands?” she asked acidly. “You have the Gift of Force, child. Use it.”
A gift I had used once, while under deadly threat. But that was, as she said, the whole point of this lesson. I slowly levered myself to my feet, letting my body heal the bruises as I regained my breath.
Inga faced me, her eyes grim as she studied me. She held the sword firmly in her hand and I returned her assessment.
This time, I started with fire, hoping to tie Force into the abilities I’d always had. A whip of flame flashed out from my left hand to try and wrap around the sword and yank it away. The Valkyrie grinned widely and dodged sideways, the sword dancing away from my whip.
I tried to adjust, to curl the line of fire out to grab the blade despite her movement…but that was more control than I’d ever attempted before. I lost control and my whip smashed into the wall. For a second, I thought I was going to set the damn building on fire!
Inga had clearly been at least half-expecting the problem, however, as her own Power snuffed out my whip before I did more than scorch the wall.
“Good,” she told me, then laughed. “Well, atrocious, actually, but it’s a good start. Did you feel the Force in your flame?”
I shook my head.
“That’s what I was aiming for, but no, I didn’t feel it,” I admitted.
“That’s fine,” she said. “I did. That’s a beginning, anyway. We’ll get there.”
“How long are you here for?” I asked carefully.
She laughed again.
“As long as you need,” she admitted. “I’m retired, Jason. For two centuries, I trained Hunters, and for two centuries before that, I rode, as Hunter and Valkyrie alike. Four hundred years is enough to sacrifice to anything.”
Inga shook her head.
“I’m here as a favor, nothing more. I’m no longer a member of the Hunt and was never a Vassal to anyone.”
“I appreciate it,” I told her quietly. “I’m surprised the Queen called in a favor from a Valkyrie on my behalf, however.”
“I never said I owed the favor to the Queen,” she said sharply. “Now, let’s try that flame whip again. It’s a good starting point, so let’s see if we can refine it!”
Inga worked me over for roughly two hours before I had to call a halt to our training. It was hard for me to say if I’d made any noticeable improvement, though I was certainly glad that I had enough of the rapid healing abilities of the fae to make the bruises and exhaustion tolerable.
Regardless of my need for training, however, I had scheduled meetings and appointments. There was a Pouka Noble loose somewhere in the city, which was at least partially my responsibility, and the thousand other things that the Queen’s main representative in Calgary had to handle.
“Acceptable progress,” she told me as I checked my phone to make sure I hadn’t missed anything critical. “You’ll be back here at the same time every day, for two hours, until I think you are worthy of being called a Hunter. Understood?”
“You realize I do have responsibilities?” I asked dryly. One of my emails wasn’t quite a bomb. It was more of a ticking time bomb, the kind I couldn’t do anything about yet but was going to explode in my face in a day or three.
That was how my job went. I kept an eye on arguments and “discussions” in the fae community and acted as a mediator. I wasn’t even the fae equivalent of Interpol. I swear I was the fae equivalent of a nanny.
“Of course,” Inga agreed instantly. “But you will be far more able to carry them out once you are ready. Right now, your fealty and oaths make you a target, and you lack the skills to survive what your enemies may throw at you.”
She wasn’t wrong. I sighed and nodded, then paused at the doorway.
“You said you didn’t owe a favor to the Queen,” I noted. “Who did you owe it to?”
Inga chuckled.
“I’ve been asked not to tell you that,” she told me. “That silence is a favor to the Queen—but also to you.”
“I’ve heard that before,” I replied. It was as ominous from Inga as it was from Mabona. A lot of the more powerful fae around me kept referencing a secret that would be dangerous for me to know.
It was pissing me off, to be honest.
“You will understand,” Inga said. “For now, however, I will see you in the morning. Shoo!”
7
When I arrived at the Manor, Tarva quickly directed me out behind the bar, in the not-quite-alley between Eric’s bar and motel and the strip mall facing the major street one block over. There, I found the Escalade suspended in the air on a car lift I was relatively sure wasn’t normally there.
Eric was just cleaning his hands on a blue strip of disposable shop towel as I approached, and he gave me a firm nod.
“Kilkenny. How’s your day going?”
“Training, so far,” I told him. “And I have a mediation in about two hours, which I confidently expect to consume the rest of my day.”
And, given the way mediating disputes between fae sometimes went, potentially my evening and night, too.
Eric chuckled.
“You have no idea how happy I am to have someone else to off-load at least some of those
on to,” he told me. “Part of why I spent the morning poking at this girl.”
The gnome pointed at the Escalade. The car lift descended as he pushed buttons from a distance, allowing the big SUV to slowly drop onto the ground.
“There’s only so much I can do without taking her apart,” he continued. “A bit of work on the chassis and glass, some standard enchantments and parts in the engine system. I don’t recommend trying to drive her through a building—mostly because it would attract too much attention.”
There was a faint sense of Power around the Escalade that hadn’t been there before.
“That tough, huh?” I asked.
“She’ll stand up to small arms fire without a problem,” Eric explained. “Most light Power-based attacks will actually strengthen the defenses, though most supernaturals who realize what’s going on can overwhelm that.
“Mundane heavy arms or strong Power attacks will give you problems,” he continued. “The enchantment will probably stop an armor-piercing grenade or anti-tank rocket, but I wouldn’t bet on it stopping two.”
He shrugged.
“Otherwise, you don’t have to pay for GPS updates, the windshield will protect you from sun glare without impeding your vision, and your gas consumption is a fifth of what it should be. Normal tricks.”
“Normal tricks,” at least, if you were a gnome War Smith qualified to forge swords that could kill gods.
“I appreciate it,” I said. “If She is going to insist I have a vehicle, I may as well have one that will keep me alive.”
“You’ll probably need it, given your proven abilities at making friends,” Eric reminded me. “There, grab that.” He pointed at a folded-over leather pouch sitting on top of his toolbox.
As I approached the pouch, I could feel the cold iron radiating from inside it and shivered. I trusted Eric, though, probably more than was reasonable. So, I picked up the pouch and opened it.
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