Fire Touched (Mercy Thompson #9)(61)

“How did you survive?” I asked her.

“Not very well.” She held her hand up and moved it. “It’s taken me years to get this far—and the first year I spent as a total bedridden invalid. But I am better now, getting better almost every day. A month ago, I would not have been able to stay on my feet as long as I did tonight.” She paused. “That’s sort of what I wanted to talk to you about. You are human.”

“Half,” I said apologetically. “My father is . . . not human.” I wasn’t up to explaining my complicated parentage to her, likeable as I found her. Besides, I was pretty sure my bloodlines weren’t what she wanted to talk about. “I can change into a coyote, and I have a few other tricks up my sleeve.”

“But your husband is still far stronger than you,” she said.

I nodded. “He is.”

“How did you get him to stop treating you like a fragile thing that might blow away in a harsh wind and take you to bed?” she said.

Holy cow. The girlfriend talk. I tried to remember the last time I’d done the girlfriend talk. Char. It had been with Char, when I’d talked her out of the very handsome but not very bright young man who would make a lovely date for someone else. That was all the way back in college.

I smelled Margaret’s sudden embarrassment. “I had a much more tactful way to ask that,” she said. Then she let out a frustrated growl. “We’ve been living together for two and a half years, and the most passion I get is a kiss on the forehead. And I don’t have anyone but Thomas to ask about it. And I can’t ask Thomas.”

“Obviously not,” I said. The reason I hadn’t had the girlfriend talk with anyone in a long time is that I sucked at it. I could barely talk to Adam about our relationship, and I loved Adam.

“Right?” she said.

I liked Margaret. I wanted to help her if I could, even if only as a sounding board. But. I couldn’t forget what Margaret was. Despite the easy way she’d thanked me and how she’d just established that she was not under the power of the Gray Lords, she was still fae. If there was one thing I’d learned about the fae, it was that being in their debt was only a little more dangerous than having a fae in my debt. If she wanted my help—I’d ask for her help, too.

“I have a proposition for you,” I said. “I’ll try to help you—as much as one clueless person can help another—if you’ll give me some intelligence on the people in the room tonight.” Like, say, the name of the middle-aged woman in salmon who had tortured Zee. “I could ask Zee—but he tends to hate everyone uniformly.”

It hadn’t been an accident that Tad had been the one to talk to Adam and me about the Widow Queen. I could call Ariana, maybe, but she was in Europe, and she hadn’t been in that room tonight.

“Deal,” she said promptly. “What do you want to know?”

“Don’t you think I should go first?” I asked. “I see your problem, but I’m relationship-challenged. Since Thomas sounds like he’s relationship-challenged, too, you might be better off talking to Adam, who has experience dealing with stupid people.”

She leaned back in her seat and smiled sweetly. Unlike when Zee smiled sweetly, it didn’t send the hairs on the back of my neck up with nervousness. “I’m not in the inner circle of the Council, either. All I know is the stuff my father drilled into my head. But he was pretty sharp. I have to tell you, that if all you do is listen to me whine, it would help me a great deal. Let’s do politics first. I have a feeling it will be less depressing. What do you want to know?”

“Let’s start with the woman in the salmon-colored suit,” I said.

“órlaith,” she said. “She is the sister of Brian mac Cennétig.”

I frowned because she said the name of órlaith’s brother as if I should have known him. “Who?” I asked.

“He was the high king of Ireland,” she said. “He defeated the kings of Ulster.”

I only knew one of the high kings of Ireland named Brian. Okay, I only knew the name of one of the high kings of Ireland, and his name was Brian.


“Do you mean Brian Boru?” I asked tentatively. “The one who united all of the Irish against the Vikings?”

She let out a huff of air. “And a good thing it is that my father died before he heard you say that. Boru is a nickname given him years after he died by people who didn’t know him. And the Vikings weren’t driven out, they were assimilated . . . not that it is important to our current conversation.”

Not being an expert on Irish history, I didn’t feel the need to argue. “Okay. So Brian Boru was fae?”

“No. His father married a fae lady who saw to it that he thought her daughter órlaith was his. She soon grew bored of him and went on her way, but she left her daughter behind.” Margaret huffed. “But that’s not what you need to know, is it? Still, despite her chosen appearance, órlaith is very young for a Gray Lord. Even so, my father said she is too tied to the glories of the past. Her greatest strength is in her ability to persuade people to follow her. My father liked her a great deal.”

“I think she tortured Zee,” I said. “I don’t think I’m going to like her.”

She smiled, but it was a sad smile. “My father did not like your Zee. The Dark Smith was not, even by the flexible standards of the fae, a hero.”