Midnight's Daughter(29)
“Temporarily.”
He tried widening the smile, but it trembled on his lips and he soon gave it up. “It has, er, been a long time, Dorina.”
“Dory, and yeah, I suppose so.” I thought for a minute. “Let’s see, World War II was still on. I remember because you were bitching about the Krauts sinking some ship with a bunch of your stuff on it—”
“The blockade, you know, around Britain.” He gestured helplessly. “Such a bother. Some of the rarer herbs simply aren’t available anywhere else.”
“Right.” I glanced around the room at the rows of shelves holding valuable ingredients. “Bet there’s no problem getting unusual stuff now, with you working at MAGIC.”
There was no earthly reason for Radu to jump slightly at that comment. The Senate had used him for the last century as one of its brain-trust weirdos, hanging around the lower levels, concocting God knew what. There was nothing new about it, so his reaction interested me. But since I knew I had about as much chance of getting information out of him as of being voted most popular by vamps worldwide, I switched subjects.
“I’m working with Louis-Cesare now—did anyone tell you?”
He nodded vigorously. “Mircea said something about it. How are you two getting on?”
“Famously. Until Jonathan showed up.”
I watched Radu carefully, but there was no sign that he recognized the name. And if he had, there would have been. It never ceased to amaze me that he and Mircea were full brothers. “Who?”
“Nothing.” I gave him my sweetest smile, and for some reason, he blanched. “I’m glad I caught you, Uncle. I need a favor.”
“There are three great houses of the Light Fey,” I was told by the nondescript little vamp Radu had dug up. He smelled like old, musty books and dust, and was gray all over—hair, eyes, clothes and teeth. But the bookworm knew his stuff; for once, Uncle had come in handy. “The Blarestri, or Blue Elves, are the current ruling house, but their grip is less than firm because their king has no heir. Or, rather, he does have a son—Prince Alarr—but he cannot rule.”
“Why not?” I perched on the overflowing desk, an enormous rolltop like something out of Dickens, that filled most of the tiny office. The vamp was one of Marlowe’s beetles, a group attached to the spy network who acted less as operatives than as librarians. He was one of those responsible for keeping track of info on the Fey, and Radu had called in a favor so he’d allow me to pick his brain for half an hour. So far, it hadn’t yielded much.
“Alarr is half-human, and the ruler must always have a majority of Fey blood,” the beetle explained. “But there are those who doubt that he intends to follow the old ways if they deprive him of a throne. People fear civil war should the king die, for there is another claimant. The king’s sister married a Svarestri noble, and bore him a full-blooded Fey son with royal Blarestri blood. They call him ?subrand—it means the Sword of the ?sir.”
“I understood about one word in seven of that,” I told him frankly. “Back up. Who are the Svarestri?” The cram course on Fey politics was already giving me a headache. And I couldn’t even complain because I’d asked for it.
“The Black Elves, as they are known, are the second great house of Faerie. And because the Alorestri, the Green Elves, have never shown much interest in politics, it is the Svarestri who pose the greatest threat to Blarestri rule. In fact”—he paused to light a pipe—“according to legend, they did rule once, long ago, when the ?sir walked the earth.”
“The who?”
“How can you have lived so long and be so ignorant?” he asked tetchily.
“The ?sir were the lords of battle,” Radu put in.
The beetle glanced at him approvingly. “Quite. Said to love war more than the very air they breathed—Odin, Thor and the like. They displaced the Vanir, the older fertility gods, and banished their followers, the Blarestri, from Eluen Londe—”
“What?”
“Eluen Londe.” I looked at him blankly. “Faerie!” he clarified impatiently. “They gave its rule into the hands of those who pledged themselves to their service—the Svarestri—who ruled it until the ?sir departed.”
“Departed for where?”
“But that’s the great mystery, isn’t it?” Radu asked excitedly. “No one knows. One day, poof. They simply weren’t there anymore.”
I raised an eyebrow but didn’t question it. I really didn’t care where some probably mythical beings had gone on vacation. “Okay, how about more modern history? What’s the situation now?”
The beetle looked vaguely perturbed. He hemmed and hawed for a while, but the upshot was that the vamps didn’t know squat. There were rumors of turmoil in the Fey capital, and no one had seen the king for weeks, but whether that signified a coup, no one could say. I’d sat through that whole history lesson and learned absolutely nothing useful.
“All I want to know is why a party of Fey wanted to kill me,” I said heatedly.
The beetle’s lips twisted enough to show fang. “Doesn’t everyone?” Radu hustled me out the door before I could find out if the vamp’s plump little carcass would fit into his overstuffed desk.
Radu escorted me back to Marlowe’s digs, then made his excuses and disappeared into his lab. He closed the door, waited a few seconds to see if I’d follow, and continued toward the blank wall he’d been facing when I’d stopped him. I knew this because I’d left an Eye of Argus charm looped around the back of a nearby chair. As soon as Radu disappeared through the wall, I slipped back into the lab, retrieved my little eyeball cluster and put it back on my key chain. Time to find out what had Uncle so jumpy.