Fire Touched (Mercy Thompson 9)

“To be fair,” Uncle Mike said, “we watched the Europeans do a fair job of killing off the people who were originally on this continent.” He gave me a sly look. “You could ask your father’s people about that. But she doesn’t have smallpox or the black measles, so she’s trying out a few other things. The last one was a troll who was nearly mindless—there are a few of them who are quite brilliant by troll standards at least, Mercy—but who had the delightful talent of growing in strength every time he ate a human and, in the water, was impossible to kill.”

I stared at him, trying to imagine that troll being stronger.

Uncle Mike gave me a cheery smile. “Happily for our side, he was too dumb to jump in the water before your pack killed him. Had he made it to the city and started killing hundreds of people, none of us could have stopped him.” He paused. “Well, maybe Nemane or Beauclaire. But the Widow Queen forgets how much power she’s lost.”

“Our storytelling this night is at an end,” Beauclaire said softly. He got up from the table. “If you would excuse me for a few moments. Goreu will continue our conversation.”

Goreu leaned forward. “The situation with your pack has presented us with a unique opportunity. We need to negotiate with the human government—and have scared them to the point that there is no path for communication. But you killed a troll.”

He let that statement sit in the air.

“And you did it on national TV. In the past few months, several fairy monsters have been publicly taken down by werewolves.” He tapped on the table. “If we can manage to sign a nonaggression pact that would make the Tri-Cities a neutral territory, somewhere that we have agreed that no aggressive act can take place—enforced by someone the humans can trust in, trust in their honor and in their ability—then it is just possible that we might avoid a war with the humans and go back to how we have been. Coexisting.”

“Are we negotiating with Beauclaire and Goreu?” asked Adam softly. “Or the Council of the Gray Lords?”

“The Council,” Goreu said. “Beauclaire to represent the majority and I the minority opinion. It took some doing for that to happen. If they’d been able to locate Órlaith, this would have been much more difficult.”

“Goreu,” I said, “did you hurt Zee?”

He met my eyes. “No.”

“So why did you cringe from him?”

He smiled. “Because it was the action that the male who I pretend to be would have done once the wristlets had proven him weaker than the half-dead daughter of one of the Old Kings. Such a fae would know that Zee was a threat he could not face.”

“They believed that?” asked Adam. “That a Gray Lord would be so weak?”

“They remember the Old Kings,” Uncle Mike answered. “They remember what Zee can do—they fear him themselves. And Goreu is powerful enough that the battles he fought to become a Gray Lord looked . . . like a political animal wiggling his way into power.” He smiled. “And most of them would have been afraid to share those wristlets with the daughter of the Dragon Under the Hill.”

“All right,” I said, and looked to Adam.

“You know that we would sign a nonaggression pact,” he said. “So why the story hour?”

“Because nothing is that simple,” agreed Goreu. “The humans might believe that your killing of the troll was enough to make us sign such an agreement. But those of Faery know better. It would be a loss of face—and might spell the downfall of the Gray Lords. The individuals are strong—but there are those, like your Zee and Uncle Mike”—he nodded to Uncle Mike, who grinned and drank his cider—“who hide what they are. If we appear too weak, we shall be brought down—and chaos will rule. That would not be good for anyone. So.” He stood up. “Two things. First, a show of force, something to demonstrate that it is no weakness of the fae that makes us sign a treaty. Beauclaire should be ready for his demonstration.”

I felt a slow, rolling anxiety. Beauclaire had once, not long ago, told me that he could create hurricanes and tidal waves. That he could drown cities. The Columbia was a mile wide and sixty feet deep.

12

We followed Uncle Mike and Goreu through the double doors marked EMPLOYEES ONLY. I’d expected a kitchen, but there was only a stairway that led up or down. We took the up. Uncle Mike’s shouldn’t have had an up. From the outside, it was clearly a single-story building. Apparently, that was an illusion or this was a different kind of stairway. We climbed more than one floor. I started counting on the third-floor landing, and I counted seven more. I don’t know that there is a ten-story building in the Tri-Cities—maybe the new hospital building in Richland.

Goreu said, opening the door at the top of the stairs, “We wanted you to have a good view.”

It was windy, but warm enough, as we stepped out onto a flat roof, the kind of roof I’d have expected Uncle Mike’s to have, with battered machines happily humming away, keeping the tavern a steady temperature, and a knee-high barricade to keep people from walking off the edge. Just the right height for a tripping hazard, I thought. Someone stood on the edge of the roof, looking out over the river.

I’d once caught a glimpse of Beauclaire without the glamour that made him appear human. It hadn’t prepared me for the whole deal. He was, unlike a lot of fae, almost entirely human-shaped, and his height was somewhere between tall and average, an inch or so taller than Adam and of a similar build.