Stone Song

by D. L. McDermott

The knife reappeared in his hand and he tossed it high in the air and said, “Catch!”

  Tommy dove to the floor and caught the knife, clumsily, blade first, his fingers closing around it convulsively, blood running down the blade.

  “No!” Sorcha cried. If the blade cut his tendons, he might never play again.

  “No?” asked the Prince. “Perhaps Mr. Carrell should try again.”

  Another blade winked in the Prince’s hand.

  “I’ll do whatever you want,” said Sorcha. “Just leave Tommy alone.”

  “You will consent to let me train you as a Druid?” he asked.

  “Yes.”

  The Prince nodded, crouched to retrieve his blade from Tommy’s bleeding fingers, and wiped it clean on the fiddler’s shoulder. Tommy sat huddled at the Prince’s feet, clutching his injured hand.

  “Now,” said the Prince, “show me this piercing.”

  “I don’t see how that’s related to training me as a Druid.”

  “Iron is a Druid weapon against the Fae. So long as you wear it, I won’t be able to trust you. And I won’t unleash the power of a Druid I cannot trust.”

  “You mean a Druid you can’t control.”

  The Prince shrugged, as though they were one and the same. “Show it to me, so I can determine what kind of threat it poses, or we have no bargain.”

  And he would go on hurting Tommy.

  She reached for her collar. Her fingers felt numb, the silk of her blouse slippery. She started with the hook and eye at the top and unfastened every single button below, hoping the Prince would lose interest. Instead, his interest only grew.

  She had not anticipated that the Prince might find her appealing in that way. Keiran had favored models, the smooth perfection of youth, girls of fifteen and sixteen he picked up from photo shoots and parties. Gazelle-like creatures with the coltish slenderness and dewy skin of adolescence. Not women like Sorcha.

  Evidently the Prince was different. It wasn’t the slow striptease that aroused him, she realized. There was nothing sexy about the goose pimples beading her pale skin, nothing sensual about the frayed elastic strap or the worn nylon cups of her bra, thin and glossy with age. It was her humiliation that turned him on, that held his eyes riveted on her breasts.

  Her nipples were hard from the cold. She could see them—and the Prince could see them—through the threadbare fabric of her bra. The iron ring was clearly visible as well, tucked up under her left nipple, a hard outline beneath the cloth.

  The Prince reached out and traced her offending aureole, careful not to touch the iron ring even through the cloth, making a complete circle and then sliding his palm beneath her breast to lift and test the weight of it.

  He sighed. “These,” he said, handling her breasts, “please me, but cold iron is an ugly metal. I could rip it out, and see if you scream as prettily as you sing, but that would damage you permanently and make it impossible to replace the ornament with silver, later.”

  Her skin crawled at the thought.

  “For now, though,” he added, “there are other ways to motivate you.”

  He drew a small, stoppered bottle from one of his deep pockets. It was a sinuous vessel of wrought silver, and it rang like a bell when he set it on the bare table.

  “Fetch us glasses,” said the Prince.

  Tommy rose, clutching his bleeding hand and Sorcha watched him shuffle to the bar, her heart in her throat.

  “Let Tommy go,” she said. “I’ll take the ring out.” It was difficult but not impossible to remove.

  “Soon,” said the Prince. “You’ve engaged my interest, Sorcha, with your hidden iron ring and your determination to thwart me.” He grinned wide. “I like you.”

  But he didn’t mean he liked her. He meant he wanted to own her, like a pretty toy, and she suspected that, unfortunately, he was not careless of his toys as Keiran had been. Now she began to think she had been lucky in that gilded house, to be treated as an object, ignored unless her master was in want of music. The Prince wouldn’t be content to just possess her like that. He wanted to play her, like an instrument, and see what noises she would make.

  Tommy shuffled back to the table, his injured hand tucked up under his arm, a pair of blood-streaked drinking glasses clutched in his other hand. He placed the gruesome goblets on the table.

  “Sit,” said the Prince, as he would to a hound, and Tommy dropped to the floor once more.

  “That’s cruel,” she said. “He did what you asked. There’s no need to humiliate him.”

  The Prince reached out and ruffled the hair on Tommy’s head like he was a Labrador. “You mistake the fiddler for a member of your own race, but you are no more human than I am. Your fiddler is like the rest of his ilk, happiest when he is under the yoke, when he doesn’t have to think for himself.”

  “He doesn’t look very happy now.”

  “That is because he has not been properly trained.” The Prince removed the stopper from the bottle and poured a clear fluid into one of the goblets. Pale mist rose from it.

  He pushed the brimming glass across the table.

  “Drink,” he said, “to seal our bargain.”

  Gran’s warnings rang in her head, along with the lore the old men who taught her to sing had shared. “Even children know better than to accept drink from one of your kind,” she said.

  “They know better than to accept drink in one of our dwellings,” he replied. “But this is not my dwelling.”

  She didn’t find that reassuring. That was one of the things the old men had warned her about—the Fae proclivity for making statements that contained deceptive half-truths. It was dangerous to bargain with them unless you set the terms, and even then . . .

  Sorcha knew well the story of the fairy nurse, the midwife called to a humble cottage to attend the birth of a child, who was given ointment to rub in the babe’s eyes, and chanced, when she was tired, to rub her own. When she next looked at the humble cottage, it had become a glittering palace. And she was never allowed to leave, with her eyes open to the influence of the Fae.

  “What’s in the goblet?” Sorcha asked.

  “It is wine,” he replied smoothly.

  “Then why do you want me to drink it?”

  “To seal our bargain. Is that not a human custom as well?” He poured the other glass and raised it to his lips.

  She watched him drain the cup. He set it down on the table, with no visible ill effects. “Drink, to prove your good faith,” he repeated. “Otherwise I will have to assume that you plan to renege once I let your friend go. And I would find it tiresome to have him always at my heels. Drink, and he can go free.”

  She didn’t trust him. The only thing she was certain of was that the liquid in the silver flagon wouldn’t kill her, because the Prince wanted her alive. Whatever else the stuff might do was impossible to guess.

  And if she wanted to save Tommy, impossible to refuse. Tommy was blameless, and he ought to have the chance to lead a normal life. Sorcha had destroyed hers, she now realized, the minute she’d ignored Gran’s warnings and taken up her father’s fiddle.

  They’ll come for you.

  She grasped the stem of the goblet. It felt cool to the touch, unnaturally so. The silver rim burned her lips with cold. The wine washed over her tongue, tasteless at first, then with a fruity sweetness that filled her palate, and finally with an intoxicating rush she felt through her whole body.

  Somehow, before she could understand what had happened, she was staring into the bottom of the cup.

  The effect of the drink was immediate. Her skin tingled. Her vision swam. She shook her head to try to clear it, but the lights in the room blurred.

  Only one object remained fixed: the Prince. He stood, then came around the table and took the goblet gently from her hands. “Very good, Sorcha,” he said, praising her as t
hough she were a child. “We’re going to have fun together.”

  Whatever came next, she doubted she was going to like it.

  “Let Tommy go,” she said. Warmth was spreading through her, making her breasts tingle and the place between her thighs throb.

  “You may go,” the Prince said to Tommy with a dismissive nod.

  Tommy stood on shaking legs. “Leave her alone,” he said to the Prince, with more courage than sense.

  “Go, while I am feeling generous,” said the Prince, his voice vibrating with tension.

  Tommy shook his head and launched himself at the Prince.

  The Fae held up a hand, another dismissive gesture, but this one with deadly force. He put no more effort into it than Sorcha would have done to swat a fly. He struck Tommy a blow that sent him ten feet across the room to crash into the bar.

  Sorcha sobbed.

  The Prince turned his full attention to her.

  “Hush,” he said, stroking her cheek with his slender, perfect hands. She tried to push him away but her limbs felt heavy, languid.

  The Prince took her chin in his hand and tipped her head back. His touch was light and impersonal and disturbingly arousing.

  “What did I just drink?” she asked.

  “A Fae intoxicant. Its effects on other races are . . . entertaining. And useful. I made a mistake with the earlier Druids I trained, trying to bribe them with trinkets or terrify them into submission. Seduction, I think, will work better. Far more rewarding for both of us.”

  He parted the silk of her open blouse. She tried to push him away but her movements were clumsy and weak. The throbbing between her legs increased and turned painful, begging for release.

  She shifted in her chair and the Prince smiled. He pressed his sculpted knee to her center and, horrifyingly, she moaned.

  “Good girl,” said the Prince, pressing harder with his knee and sliding her bra straps off her shoulders. Cool air met the tops of her breasts. Her nipples were already hard from whatever the wine was doing to her.

  The Prince looped a finger inside the left cup of her bra and pulled the lace there down. He fingered the taught nipple. Then he did the same with the other breast, revealing the cold iron ring that pierced her.

  “A base metal,” said the Prince, lifting her breast. “And one I cannot touch without untoward effects.” His thumb circled the nipple coming close to, but never touching the ring. “Would you like me to touch you, Sorcha?”

  She did. More than anything. The incessant circling was driving her mad. She’d never felt such powerful arousal before. It didn’t matter that the Prince was cruel and soulless. It didn’t even matter that he’d tortured Tommy, that her best friend and sometime lover was lying in a broken heap across the room. Nothing mattered except need. A Fae intoxicant indeed.

  “No answer?” said the Prince. “Perhaps you can’t imagine what it would feel like. Let me show you.”

  He bent his head to suckle her unadorned breast. The wet contact of his mouth was exquisite. Her head fell back, her hips slipped forward in the chair, her hands threaded through his silky hair and held him to her breast. When he started to pull away, she tried to hold him close, but he broke from her with ease and she sobbed in disappointment.

  Then he stood back to survey her and said, “What do you want, Sorcha?”

  “You,” she said. Blindly, and without reason.

  “Then remove the ring.”

  If she’d listened to the Fae who had approached her earlier tonight—Elada—this wouldn’t be happening. If she’d listened to Gran when she was alive, she might be safe.

  But she wouldn’t have her music, and even here, in this predicament, she wasn’t sure she could live without it.

  She reached for it now, the high, pure notes that had killed the Fae in New York, that had threatened to burst forth in the alley earlier that night, but they didn’t come. Now as then, she had no control over the strange power inside her.

  Elada had said that Miach would teach her. And she had attacked him.

  Elada. When she thought of him, with his ordinary clothes and his earnest attempt to convince her of his sincerity, she wanted to cry. When she pictured his handsome, open features, so different from the Prince’s face, which now looked made of secrets and cunning, she knew that the attraction she had felt to Elada had been real. And this . . . this was not. This was raw physical need, a kind of torture, like being deprived of water in the desert. The Fae wine had made her so parched, she was willing to drink gasoline.

  Her fingers found the iron ring in her nipple, and began twisting the tiny ball that fastened the ends together. When she felt it slide free, she said, “They won’t just let you take me, Elada and this sorcerer. They want to use my power, too.”

  She pulled the ring out and laid it on the table beside her.

  The Prince smiled and reached for her, saying, “They wanted your power, but you attacked Miach MacCecht’s right hand with cold iron. The sorcerer will never forgive you for such a transgression. His gaze will already have turned to other potential Druids. And even if softhearted Elada wanted to be your champion, he has been allied to that mage for two thousand years. He will never cross Miach MacCecht.”

  Chapter 5

  Miach had been right, Elada thought. Having his ribs mended hadn’t been pleasant. Magical healing, the fast burst of energy that forced bones to knit and cells to grow, was unsettling in the best of circumstances. And sometimes it was pure agony.

  Like now.

  The experience left him exhausted but whole. Miach’s granddaughter, Nieve, fussed over him afterward. Normally he wouldn’t like that kind of attention, but it had been so many months since Maire had broken up with him, so long since anyone had given a thought to his comfort, that he found himself enjoying it.

  He had no amorous designs on Miach’s granddaughter, of course. He had known her since she was a babe. And she was married to a full-blood Fae from another house, to the son of Miach’s greatest enemy, in fact, so her care for Elada was that of a fond niece.

  He enjoyed it all the same.

  He wished Maire had not ended things with him the way she had. He hadn’t loved her, but he had cared about her, and his position as Miach’s right hand had allowed him to give the South Boston widow comforts, financial and physical, that she could not afford for herself. For the last fifteen years he’d shared her bed and helped raise her sons, who had been left fatherless when her marine husband had been killed in action.

  They had been good years. And for her, they had been the prime of her life. He owed her something. So when Miach had severed their connection—released Elada from two thousand years of fealty because he thought he might die and did not want to take his right hand with him, did not want their magical bond to drag Elada down into death as well—Elada had offered Maire the one thing he had not been free to propose before: a commitment.

  When a Fae committed himself to a human, he shared not just his life, but the force that animated him. Human partners of the Fae, rare as they were, shared some of the Fae’s longevity. And the Sídhe gave up some of theirs. Had she accepted him, Maire would have lived centuries, seen her grandchildren and great-grandchildren grown to adulthood.

  She’d refused. Not just refused, but broken things off with him, because no one could ever take her husband’s place. “I don’t love you,” she had said. “And you have a chance now for something more.”

  Now, she meant, that Miach no longer had to come first. Bound sorcerers and their right hands weren’t supposed to make commitments to partners outside that union, because the death of one could mean the death of all three.

  After Miach had released him and Maire refused his offer, Elada had been free to explore his interest in Sorcha Kavanaugh, free to discover whether there was more to it than physical attraction.

  He had not gone to the
Black Rose immediately. Somehow he felt that would have dishonored what he had shared with Maire. But he’d stood outside the bar on more than one night and just listened to Sorcha sing, as beguiled by the power of her voice as humans were by the Fae. And he had imagined what it might be like to live with such a woman, to have music always in his house.

  He’d confided his fantasies to Nieve, who had teased him, gently, about the unsuitability of a two-thousand-year-old warrior having a crush on a singer. Because Miach’s truce with Nieve’s husband’s family was still delicate, Elada often accompanied her on visits to her in-laws. He even, for her sake, deigned to drive the hated armored minivan. And when no one was around to hear, she called him “fan boy” and prodded him to act on his feelings.

  The moment Miach had placed Sorcha’s file into his hands, everything had changed. He had waited too long. And the fantasies he had spun in his head about Sorcha Kavanaugh, of courtship and companionship unshadowed by the conflict brewing, had died. Every man, every woman, every Fae, every Druid who joined the fight to keep the wall between worlds standing placed themselves in mortal danger.

  If Sorcha Kavanaugh was a Druid, the things he had been able to offer Maire, the financial support and the protection from crime and violence, would be meaningless. A Druid bard would be forced to learn to take care of herself. Elada, in short, would have nothing she wanted or needed.

  He knew of only one other such bond. Helene’s best friend, Beth Carter, was a Druid archaeologist who had become bound to the Fae warrior Conn of the Hundred Battles. Beth would tell him that this was no impediment, that it allowed them to meet as equals. Beth had long since learned to defend herself from the Prince Consort and others who wanted to force her to bring the wall down. And still, she had remained with Conn.

  But Conn was the most renowned Fae champion of his age, a fit helpmeet for a powerful Druid. Elada had no great fame as a champion. His skill lay in fighting in partnership with another, in a particular kind of close combat strategy that was only useful when battling beside a magic user like Miach. No one sang songs about the right hands of sorcerers.