Hunter's Oath

by Glynn Stewart

  “His allies have to know about this safehouse,” she told him. “We’ll need to relocate.”

  “Yeah,” Andrell agreed. “I’ll organize resources. I’ll have somewhere for you all to stay by tomorrow night.”

  “That’s your part in this,” Chernenkov agreed, kissing him again.

  He chuckled.

  “Among other things, yes.” Andrell sighed. “I have to go. I can only be away so long without drawing attention.”

  “Gráinne and I will take care of everything,” she promised.

  “I know. You two are amazing. Thank you.”

  I tried to stay conscious to follow the rest of the conversation but the pain was too much. Blackness slipped over my vision and I was gone again.

  I woke up the second time to the sound of water and a strange bobbing sensation. It took me a moment to realize I was on a boat…which was probably a bad sign.

  However, I realized I also had some, if not much, feeling back in my lower body—and someone had locked a neck brace onto me to keep my broken neck in position while it healed. That was a good sign.

  “’e’s awake,” a guttural lower-class British accent growled. “How you doing, guv’nor?”

  I slowly opened my eyes, finding myself face to face with a broad-shouldered man wearing a bright red Make America Great Again trucker cap and a wide grin.

  Redcap. I was on a boat with a redcap who’d been ordered to dispose of my body. And I was still alive?

  “I feel like I broke every bone in my body from my neck down and somebody stabbed me,” I noted carefully. Talking hurt less than I expected.

  “That would be about right,” he said cheerfully. “When I saw you lived through being stabbed in the chest with a cold iron knife, I went, ‘That’s one lucky fucker, Percival.’ And he’s the Queen’s Vassal. Deserves hisself a second chance and can pay for it, right guv’nor?”

  “There’s a USB key in your pocket,” another voice added, this one definitely Bryan Milligan. I shifted my head, carefully, to see the boat. “It contains the details of several Swiss bank accounts Percival here has access to, right?”

  “’Xactly,” the redcap confirmed cheerfully. “Now, fuck the Masks, six ways to Sunday. Boss knew when we hired on, di’n’t tell the rest o’ us till it was too late. I’m out. Next plane to Dublin.

  “Now, if it so happens there’s a million or two euros in those Swiss accounts by the times I lands in Dublin, the Masked Bitch ain’t going to be any wiser about you still being in the land of the breathing, if you follow my drift. If those accounts are still lookin’ sparse and lonely, well, even secure and encrypted disposable email addresses are cheap these days.”

  “We figured you’d be good for it,” Milligan noted. “Or if not you, the Queen. Now, we’re out here to dump your body in the river, which all three of us know isn’t happening. The Mask’s people wrecked your phone, and I’m guessing you should probably let them continue thinking you’re dead for a while yet.

  “That said, where do you want us to dump your ‘corpse’ and who should I call?”

  I sighed.

  “Anywhere, I suspect, and call Talus,” I told them. “He’ll know the best plan.” I trembled as a wave of exhaustion swept over me. “I…think I’m going to just sleep here, though. That sounds gre—”

  I woke up with a warm damp cloth over my eyes, a lack of neck brace, and feeling restored throughout my body.

  Not that said feeling was pleasant or anything. My legs still felt like someone had stabbed swords through them, my arms still felt like they’d been broken, and my chest still felt like I’d been stabbed.

  It had been a rough day. I was, at least, actually on a bed this time. After a couple of moments, I even registered that someone was holding my hand, and squeezed gently.

  “You’re awake,” Mary said softly. “You, my love, need to stop terrifying me. How do you feel?”

  “He feels like he’s been beaten into unconsciousness and almost killed,” her brother said in his best clipped doctor’s tones. “You’re lucky to be alive, Jason.”

  “I worked that out, thanks, Clem,” I said to the shifter doctor. “I got stabbed in the heart with a cold iron blade. How? One-quarter human, but…”

  “Your armor,” Clementine Tenerim told me flatly. “You were stabbed in the heart, yes. But while the knife broke your skin and pierced your heart, the cold iron didn’t actually touch your flesh and, most importantly, didn’t leave anything behind.”

  He sighed.

  “I’m going to remove the cloth over your eyes,” he told me. “Let me know if it’s too much.”

  The warm cloth slid aside and I looked through a dimly lit room to see the two shifters. Considering what my sight was like, there were no lights on in the room at all.

  I squeezed Mary’s hand again and turned to face Clem.

  “I’m okay,” I told him. “Or, well, as okay as I can be. And I will be okay.”

  “Any of my usual patients would already be healed,” he reminded me. “But yes, I agree with your assessment. The armor vest didn’t break under the blade, but whoever stabbed you was strong enough that it was dragged into the wound with the knife.

  “I’m…not entirely familiar with the type of wounds you have in your legs, but I can guess,” he concluded. “And the arm breaks are mostly healed already. You’ll want to stay in bed for at least a day to make sure everything is in order, but after that, you’ll be fine for…whatever you need to do.”

  I exhaled, closing my eyes.

  “Where am I?”

  “The goblin colony,” Clem replied. “Talus called me after someone—he wouldn’t tell me who—called him. He said to tell you he couldn’t be seen to be involved, not yet.”

  Which was…fair, if frustrating.

  “He also told me to let everyone think you were dead. I decided that didn’t apply to Mary,” my girlfriend’s brother noted dryly. “The colony will protect you, but…seriously, Jason, what happened? You were stabbed through the legs with a fucking battle glamor.”

  “I noticed,” I replied. “Fae politics, Clem. The kind where people who get dragged into them end up dead. I should never have involved the Clans.”

  “Yeah, well, someone fucked with a Clan-friend and my boyfriend,” Mary told me. “The Clans are involved now.”

  “They can’t be,” I said harshly. “Seriously, Mary, I know how you guys take oaths and loyalty, but you can’t get involved in this. This is part of a Powers-cursed fae civil war that’s being going on since before I was before born.

  “Regardless of how deep Andrell has dug himself, I can’t pull shifters into this. I need to reach out to the Queen.” I winced, remembering the USB key. “And I need to make sure someone gets paid.”

  “Talus had me pull the USB stick from your pocket and send him the contents,” Clem told me. “Whoever needed money got paid. He swore on his life.”

  I sighed and nodded in relief. Talus was a better friend than I deserved…and richer than I tended to remember.

  I’d still make sure the Queen paid him back. But if that was handled, I had time.

  “And you, Sir Vassal, Sir Kilkenny…my brother, you need to rest.”

  Clem might be a weakling as shifters went, but he was more than strong enough to pin my exhausted self to the bed with one hand. “Sleep, Jason. You can call the Queen in the morning.

  “Everything will get sorted.”

  25

  By the time Clementine was willing to let me get out of bed, I was about ready to go crazy. I didn’t heal as fast as, say, Gentry or shifters—or goblins, for that matter—but I healed most injuries in a few days. With proper medical care, and Clementine was very good at his job, I could recover from being nearly stabbed to death in a day or so.

  Not that that recovery made me any happier about the situation. The goblins cheerfully put me up in one of the spare units in the condo townhome complex Talus had bought for them in the seventies when he’d brought them
to Canada. There were a hundred or so units in the complex, and the colony had a total of maybe forty families and two hundred-ish goblins.

  Honestly, if goblins were more able to go out in human society and less insular in general, they really should have been a bigger player in the city’s supernatural politics. They were almost a quarter of the supernaturals in the city, but most of us didn’t even know they were around.

  Fortunately, they felt they owed a debt to Talus and seemed to like me. Theino showed me into the plainly furnished apartment and checked in on me carefully.

  “We will conceal your presence here until you are ready to reveal your location,” he told me. “I do not know what the best choices for you are. Despite our oaths to Talus, we have little involvement with your people.”

  I sighed and massaged my still-aching chest.

  “Believe me, Theino, you’re better off that way,” I replied. “The more I learn about my own people, the more I think that no one should get involved with us.”

  He smiled, baring his tusks.

  “If we had not been involved with your people, we would have died,” he pointed out. “Talus rescued my grandfather and our families from the war. Without our involvement with the fae, this colony would not exist.

  “You do your people a disservice.”

  “Perhaps,” I allowed. “On the other hand, one of ‘my people’ just stabbed me in the heart. I think I’m allowed a few disservices.”

  Theino laughed and pointed me to the fridge.

  “There’s food in the fridge, and pop,” he said. “None of it is particularly amazing, but you should be able to sustain yourself.”

  “Thank you,” I told him. “I owe you.”

  The basic thanks was no longer as much of a promise of a debt from a fae as it had once been—we were hardly that separate from humanity—but I owed a debt to Theino and his people. Someday, I hoped to repay it.

  “Is there a way for me to make contact with my Queen?” I asked quietly. I knew the goblins didn’t have anything connected to Fae-Net, but I needed to call home.

  “Talus made arrangements,” the Speaker to Outsiders told me. “There is a laptop on the table with the appropriate connections.” He bowed to Mary and me. “I leave you now. If you need anything, do not hesitate to ask.”

  He bowed himself out and I turned my gaze to my lover.

  “I’m fine,” I assured her.

  “I know,” she admitted. “But you’re going to call your Queen and charge right back into it, aren’t you?”

  “That’s the job I took, the oath I swore,” I admitted. “And…” I sighed. “They were saying something about destroying Oberis’s Court. I can’t let that happen. I won’t.”

  “I know,” she repeated, and kissed me. “I need to go check in with Grandfather. May I tell him you’re alive?”

  I closed my eyes and sighed.

  “I think we must keep that secret for now,” I admitted. “If you must tell him to prevent the Clans challenging Andrell or something similarly terrifying, do so.”

  “That may be necessary,” she said.

  “The Covenants forbid the Clans’ getting involved in this kind of mess,” I reminded her. “Remind Enli of that if you must. This is my fight. I should never have dragged you all into it.”

  “We would have dragged ourselves into it,” she told me. “I can restrain Grandfather for a time, but understand this, Jason Kilkenny: we know Oberis. We trust Oberis. If Andrell moves against him, the Covenants can be damned.

  “The Shifter Clans will not watch the Seelie Court burn.”

  “Somehow, Jason, I’m unsurprised to find that you have nearly managed to get yourself killed. Again,” Mabona said as the screen resolved into a videoconference. “You are all right?”

  “Thanks to some friends and a mercenary-feeling redcap, yes,” I confirmed. “Speaking of which, we’ll need to find out just how much Talus paid said redcap. I don’t think that’s a debt we want to have outstanding.”

  “Agreed,” she said instantly. “I’ll have my people reach out to him. That’s secondary, however. What did you learn?”

  I leaned against the plain kitchen table and considered how to organize everything I’d seen in the safehouse.

  “Andrell’s Court is concealing Maria Chernenkov,” I told her. “I wasn’t sure, initially, if Andrell knew himself—the safehouse was being run by Gráinne, one of his Nobles. After I arrived, they used what I think was a gnome-forged device to trap me when I tried to escape Between.

  “At which point I was attacked by one of the Masked Lords.”

  Mabona was silent for several long seconds.

  “You are certain.”

  It wasn’t a question.

  “I’ve never seen one before,” I admitted. “But…cold iron mask with orichalcum runes powering one of the strongest concealment glamors I’ve ever encountered? I’m guessing that only belongs to one group of people.”

  There was an edge to Mabon’s expression I’d never seen before. Was it…fear? Was the Queen of the Fae afraid?

  The Masked Lords had almost killed her once. Had killed three Powers of the High Court. Fear was…reasonable, even on her part.

  “The description fits,” she finally said. “Do you know who was behind the Mask?”

  “I do,” I admitted. “Gráinne, the mistress of that safehouse and servant of Lord Andrell. She believed I was dead, thanks to a redcap who was less than impressed with his new employer. She spoke with Chernenkov afterwards, speaking of being the one to fight me.”

  “You don’t understand how grievous this accusation is,” Mabona told me. “If Andrell conceals a condemned woman and a Masked Lord, the fallout in the High Court will not be minor. The Lord of the Unseelie backed Andrell’s play for this new Court himself.”

  I sighed.

  “It’s worse than that,” I replied. “Up to that point, I believed Gráinne was doing this herself…but then Andrell arrived. We knew Chernenkov had a fae lover in the city.

  “We didn’t know it was Andrell himself.”

  “He knows she is condemned and her crimes,” my Queen said levelly. “What is he thinking?”

  “They are planning to destroy Oberis’s Court,” I said. “Some plan of the Masked Lords. Andrell serves them, if he isn’t one of them.”

  She was silent. Someone else might have cursed by whatever gods they served, but it was hard to blaspheme when you were the closest available equivalent to a god.

  “My Queen, I see no choice but to summon the Wild Hunt.”

  My words hung like anvils in the apartment the goblins had lent me, and they struck her like a blow.

  “We…cannot,” she finally told me. “I do not command the Hunt on my own. I must take this all to the High Court…and if I do, Andrell will be warned. I can trust the High Court, but they have assistants, friends, staff…and at least of one those will betray us.”

  Now it was my turn to be silent. I’d assumed all along that if I could prove Andrell had betrayed his oaths, the High Court would deal with him. My job had been to find the evidence to summon the Wild Hunt, not to stop him myself.

  “My Queen…what do I do?” I finally asked.

  “You must capture either Chernenkov or Gráinne,” she told me. “Both are now condemned by my word and my authority. You must capture them, and you must bring them to me. I will take them to Ankaris and they will tell him the truth.

  “Then…and only then, can we unleash the Wild Hunt upon Andrell without going to the entire High Court.”

  I swallowed. Gráinne had just obliterated me. Chernenkov had nearly killed me, two Gentry and a Noble when we’d fought. And my Queen wanted me to capture them?

  “How?” I asked.

  “Strand will fight with you,” she told me. “The Valkyrie may have retired, but she knows her enemy. You have friends in the city, ones the Covenants say should not get involved.… Use them as best you can.

  “But understand that this is a fae b
attle. The shifters and others can help you lure them out, but you and Inga must capture the Masked Lords’ servants yourselves.

  “If you have need of arms or armor, speak to Eric. Use your supposed death to deceive them. You are my Vassal, Jason Kilkenny. I know you will not fail me.”

  I spent the day thinking, trying to see a way through the task laid before me. I hadn’t yet reached out to anyone, but I was still completely unsurprised when someone knocked on my door. It was a relief to see Shelly Fairchild…and a surprise to see Lan Tu.

  “May we come in?” Shelly asked. “We didn’t arrive together, if that’s what you’re wondering, but since we’re both here, I figure we may as well all chat.”

  I chuckled and waved them in.

  “I’d say my house is yours, but this is more Lan Tu’s house than mine,” I told them. “What can I do for you ladies?”

  “My trùm sent me with a package for you,” Lan Tu told me, the young goblin woman taking a seat at the kitchen table and laying a long, narrow box on the laminate in front of her. “He said to be clear that it was…” She paused, clearly trying to remember MacDonald’s exact words. “He said it was ‘a gift, not a boon.’ And that you would understand what he meant.”

  I nodded slowly. Whatever was in the box, the Wizard did not regard it as payment of the boon he owed me for saving his life. It was a gift, offered without strings—a rare thing in the supernatural world.

  I opened the box, completely unsure what I was going to find. Whatever I’d expected, however, it wasn’t a sixteen-inch-long rod of black wood, laced with orichalcum runes along its entire length.

  A baton?

  “Why would the Wizard send me a baton?” I wondered aloud.

  “He said you would ask exactly that question,” Lan Tu told me with a small smile. Even with her tusks, the young goblin woman managed to be utterly adorable. From what I knew of the goblins in Calgary, assuming that adorable meant harmless would be unwise.

  “He said to tell you to remember that he has seen you fight.”