Soul Taken (Mercy Thompson #13)(25)

“What’s an iron-kissed fae?” asked Izzy. “And Zee is famous?”

“Infamous,” I corrected.

Zee’s history wasn’t a secret, precisely. Though I didn’t go out of my way to talk about it. But Izzy was all but family, and if she was dating Tad, she should know what she was getting into.

“Thanks,” Tad told Adam and me dryly before addressing Izzy. “My father is one of a small group of fae who can handle iron and steel. Dad made a few famous weapons back in the day under one name or the other.” He flapped his free hand airily and went on in a casual tone, “Killed a few famous kings, a saint . . .” He cleared his throat and said, “A god or two, maybe. That kind of thing. Stories get exaggerated with time. Most of the fae who are older than a couple of centuries have stories told about them.”

“He made jewels out of the eyes of the sons of a king who enslaved him,” Jesse said tightly, her tone substantially different from Tad’s breezy delivery.

I knew that story—it wasn’t about Zee. I didn’t think it was about Zee. It was about Wayland Smith, a somewhat mysterious character who appeared in various medieval chronicles. I’d done a paper on him once, in college.

Jesse didn’t read a lot of old Germanic legends, so where had she gotten it?

“And goblets of their skulls,” she continued. “And he served that king and his wife wine out of those jeweled goblets. Beguiling them so they drank from the skulls of their sons.”

The tightness of her voice told me that she’d come upon that story very recently.

“Who told you that?” I asked before Tad could.

“Tilly,” said Jesse, sending a cold chill down my spine. “She doesn’t like Zee or Tad.”

That she didn’t.

Tilly was the name Underhill had given herself when she took on the form of a child so she could play with her human toys. Aiden had been one of those until he escaped.

Tilly might look like a feral eight-year-old girl (or any other age she picked that day), but she was the personification of a land of faerie that had destroyed the courts of the fae and driven them out of her borders, locking her doors against them. The fae claimed that it had been the increasing use of iron that had closed the doors to Underhill in the old country. But I noted that the fae had been locked out, not locked in.

When Aiden had come to live with us, Tilly had installed a door to Underhill on a wall she built on the property line between this house and my old house. And apparently, she’d been telling Jesse stories.

“When did she tell you that?” Adam asked, his voice very calm and quiet.

“Since Aiden left, she’s started showing up when I go outside alone,” Jesse said, answering Adam’s real question. “I asked Aiden. He told me that there wasn’t much she could do given the rules she is constrained by. He advised me not to let you know she was bothering me, because then she’d know she was bothering me. She’d look on it as encouragement. And maybe you’d try to renegotiate the rules. He thinks that she’s as bound up by rules as she is willing to be. Any negotiations are likely to backfire. I thought I should listen to him when he talks about Underhill.”

Adam grunted unhappily. Jesse was right. Aiden was probably right. But I expected that Adam would go have a chat with Tilly the next time she showed up anyway. Hopefully it wouldn’t happen until he’d had a chance to cool off.

“She told you that story was about Zee?” I asked.

Jesse nodded.

“Your dad,” Izzy asked Tad, “can make jewels out of someone’s eyes? And goblets out of children’s skulls? And he drank out of them?” She’d let go of Tad’s arm and taken a step back while I wasn’t paying attention to her.

Maybe if it had happened in the past century, I might have had a different attitude about the story. But that tale was from the Poetic Edda, written a thousand years ago, more or less. It felt like a cautionary tale, not something that happened to real people. I couldn’t see Zee, my old friend, doing something so horrible.

Okay, I could, actually. Because he’d done something similar fairly recently.

“When people live a very long time, they have room to change,” I said, carefully not saying that Zee had changed.

Tad gave me a look that said, Thanks, but please don’t try to help.

“I warned you that my father was not just a grumpy old man,” he told Izzy. “I told you he’d done some very terrible things.”

She gave him a look that would have done credit to a kicked puppy.

I wanted to tell her that even if Zee had been terrible once, he didn’t do things like that anymore. But it would have been a lie. I was pretty sure that parts of the bodies of the Gray Lords who’d held Zee and Tad captive in the fae reservation were still turning up in unexpected places. The fae, even the powerful ones, had started to have a certain tone in their voice when they referred to Zee.

There hadn’t been, as far as I’d heard, any jewels that were formerly eyeballs, though. I hoped that Tilly had been wrong—mistaken, not lying—that that story had been about Wayland, who wasn’t also the same person as the Dark Smith of Drontheim, who had become my Zee.

But I had to admit, if only to myself, that it was altogether too plausible, given the stories I knew about the Dark Smith. One of the Gray Lords had told me that Zee had made Excalibur. There were stories that attributed Excalibur’s making to Wayland.