Silver and Salt(13)

And then he goes and stabs you in the chest. Where had I gone wrong?

I woke up to a night sky. Hazily I counted ten lonely stars. Not long now. No, not long. I coughed against a dry throat and asked hoarsely, “Are my boots on?”

“No.” Scotch’s voice was beside me. I turned my head to see him squatting by a small fire to add another chunk of dried manure. “Just in case you were weak and useless enough to die, I wanted you to wander what lies beyond eternity in your socks cursing my name. My real name.”

I was lying on a sleeping bag, covered with two blankets, but I could see my toes. I wiggled them. Nothing but socks was right, the bastard. Not that I didn’t like socks. That was one thing humans had done right. Thick, warm socks beat striding black marble floors in silk hose and knee-high boots…oh, damn, and a crimson lined cloak that was be-spelled to drop blood-tipped black thorns in my path. I really had been a f*cking douche-bag. I didn’t know what a f*cking douche-bag was, but a human had spat it at me before I gutted him. I took that to mean it was a fair enough insult.

“And why aren’t I dead? With the silver and then you helpfully stabbing me in the chest, I expected something less in the living realm.”

“I didn’t stab you in the chest. I cannot believe all the Seelie that you bested in duels. Swatting pixies should’ve been beyond you. You whine like a satyr who’s lost his nymphs and his cock.” He sat beside me, stirring a can of beans. Another human invention, less appreciated than the socks. “I didn’t stab you. I cut only as deep as needed to remove the bullet.” He had his gloves off and I could see the silver-burns on his fingers where he had plucked it out of me. “Unfortunately it wasn’t deep enough to discover if you in fact have a heart. Now none will ever know.” He ate a bite of beans. “Then I stitched you up with a few of Pie’s tail hairs.”

I was alive. Shit. That was damn near unheard of. Human speech, bad habits—easy to slide back into when you can throw all that grand ‘leave your partner with a good memory’ fairy princess crap out the window. “They’ve tried taking silver bullets out before. They go too deep. Nobody lives. The poison of the metal spreads too fast.”

“Guess I’m a helluva sight damn faster than any other sumbitch ‘round these parts.” Scotch grinned.

I laughed, groaned and held my chest, and laughed again. Ten years to bring a Seelie down to my level or at least half way between. It was worth the wait. “Hungry?” Scotch spooned up some more beans and hovered them in front of my mouth. I growled that I wasn’t an infant and reached for the spoon. I managed to get at least one third of the spoonful in my mouth, the rest on my chin and blanket.

“So,” Scotch said as I mopped my face with the blanket, “I’m still waiting on that story. Why are you called Seven?”

I had threatened to kill and had killed one or two who had been foolish enough to say my birth name aloud in the Dark Court. I had been known as nothing but Seven since I could heft a sword, but if I owed anyone, it was my partner. Wasn’t this a bitch?

“It’s short for seventeen,” I gave in and grumbled. “When I was born my father was drunk. Well, he was always drunk, but he was drooling drunk this time. When he stood at my mother’s birthing bed to name me, he became, they told me,” I winced and it wasn’t because of a bullet wound, “caught up in the moment. He declared I’d be called Prince of Shadows, he who rides among the storm clouds and will forge the blackest and mightiest of swords to strike down the White Army, spilling their blood as a river…by then he sobered up some and remembered my mother had slept with his three brothers, his archenemy and I think Titania. Mom always liked to mix it up. That’s when he added Born of a whore who would rut with any barnyard boar that would have her. And then he passed out or I wouldn’t be Seven. I’d be Twenty or Thirty. Seven is short for seventeen which is short for seventeen syllables. He thought I was a cretin because I couldn’t memorize my name until I was fifty.” Which to give me credit was about a human child of four. “There. That’s your story. Happy now?”

He leaned back against the rock wall we were camped again, beans forgotten. His smile was as wicked as any Unseelie could hope for. “Actually, I think I am the most happy that I have ever been in my life. Let me bask in it for a moment.” Tilting his head back, he looked up at the ten stars and for once wasn’t, as we always did, counting them—the sand trickling down the hourglass. This time he was seeing them simply as stars. I could see by the softening of the stubborn jaw. He might not be a portrait of joy and rainbow farting bunnies, but he wasn’t grim. For a moment I could see home in him, see the magic lost.

Looking back down, he leaned over to search in his saddle bags to hand me a bottle of his precious scotch and lift one of his own.

I was shaky, but not so much I couldn’t clink my bottle against his with the peal of a bell. It sounded the same as the ones they rang at most of the outposts—a habit the Fey who ran them had picked up from the humans.

Last call.

Not yet perhaps, but soon. Close enough to be draining your glass and ordering that last round. There was no one I’d rather drink that last round with than a Seelie Fey. Who could possibly have known?

“You were the worst of the best,” I said and meant it for the compliment it was.