Bad Boy's Bard, page 17
He turned and walked straight out of the hall, well ahead of the guards when he passed through the door.
“Master.” At Peadar’s whisper, Niall’s stride faltered, but he recovered before the guards could notice. “Your cloak. And—” He thrust a leather pouch, heavy with gold, into Niall’s hand.
Niall took the cloak, but closed Peadar’s hand around the pouch. “Hold on to this.”
“But, master, you will need it.”
Niall gripped Peadar’s shoulder and grinned down at him. “You may need it more. Besides—an adventure! I could ask for nothing better . . . although I appreciate the cloak.” He flung it around his shoulders and fastened it with a copper oak leaf brooch. Take care of yourself, my friend. Go to Eamon if you need anything.”
Niall clutched the edge of the mantel until his knuckles whitened, the scene still fresh in his memory. “It was ridiculously easy to track Gareth to the eisteddfod.” He released his grip and faced the two men again, smiling crookedly. “His reputation was . . . shall we say . . . formidable?” :Rock star!:
“So you destroyed Gareth by making him fall in love with you and then leaving him?” David’s eyes clouded like a storm over a lake. “Really?”
Niall shrugged. “No. I fear the joke was on me. I’d intended to find his weakness, get him to indulge it until it consumed him, just as I’d done with so many other corruptibles. But with him, I found I didn’t want to. Instead, I was the one who fell.” He touched a picture on the mantel, Gareth and Mal flanking David and Alun at what must have been their wedding, judging by their clothing. “My weakness, as it turns out, is Gareth.”
“But he says he saw you leave with Eamon. If you didn’t intend to destroy him, then why not come back?”
“Ah, but you’re forgetting the terms of my banishment. I needed Eamon’s help to get back into Faerie before I’d fulfilled them. I couldn’t return until I’d rid the Seelie Queen of her bard.”
Bryce’s eyebrows shot up. “You were going to keep the letter of the order, not the spirit?”
“Got it in one, Sir Druid. The way I planned to rid the Queen of her bard was to propose that I be allowed to take him as consort. Then he’d no longer be Seelie. Or at least, not entirely.”
“I take it,” Bryce said, his tone dry, “that the King didn’t see that as a brilliant policy decision.”
“No. Not one for subtlety, my dear father. He considered it a betrayal of family, King, and court. He ordered me to kill Gareth outright. Ordered me to bring him to the Stone Circle and slit his throat on the altar.” Niall closed his eyes, the horror of that notion twining thorns around his heart. “I refused. He swore I’d follow his orders—that Gareth would die and that mine would be the hand to do it. When I refused, he—well, he sentenced me to serve at the underworld forge as a slave to Govannon until I repented and carried out my task.”
“Wait a minute.” Bryce leaned forward, the light of a druid in pursuit of knowledge in his eyes. “When Eamon deposed the king, he took him and Rodric to the underworld. You’re the one he rescued that night.”
“Yes.”
David frowned. “But why were your wounds so fresh? Had he . . . beaten you?”
“He didn’t. He wouldn’t sully his royal hands with any weapon less exalted than his sword. But he ordered Govannon to do it. Every year, on the anniversary of my folly, Tiarnach showed up at the forge and asked me if I’d repented. When I said no, he’d have Govannon flog me.” Long habit made him curl his shoulders forward, as if anticipating the first blow. “Later on, he’d have the flogging first and the question afterward. He wanted me to beg, you see. Beg to kill Gareth.”
David was solemn. “But you didn’t.”
Niall glared at him in disgust. “Of course not.” He scrubbed his face with both hands. “Two weeks before Eamon released me, Tiarnach told me he’d tired of waiting. After the beating, he said he’d killed Gareth himself.”
“Ooohh.” David’s eyes shone with unshed tears. “You must have . . . wow. I don’t even know how you must have felt then.”
“I felt like Tiarnach was damn lucky I was still shackled to the rocks,” Niall growled, “or I’d have strangled him with my own chains. Since they were forged by a god, they’d have had half a chance of doing the trick, too.”
“That must have been one hell of a beating, considering the state of your back when you arrived.”
“Oh. That. That was actually the accumulation of all the beatings that I’ve received since I last escaped into the Outer World. The underworld is a place out of time, out of space, you understand. Anything that happens there—well, it has to happen again when you leave, unless you’re escorted by someone with proper authority. It’s supposed to discourage prisoners from escaping.”
David leaped up. “You have to tell Gareth. The whole story.”
Niall retreated behind a wingback chair, in case David decided he needed comforting again. “He doesn’t want to hear anything more from me. Besides, how would ‘I was sent to kill you but decided to fuck you instead’ go over? Doesn’t make me sound like an honorable kind of man, does it?” He spread his arms and took a bow. “But I’m Unseelie. I don’t know what honor is.”
“Stop it. You fae are just . . . augh!” David clutched his hair. “You’re so fixated on your stupid tenets, and how everyone has always followed them in the past, that you never think of how open to interpretation they are. I’m surprised your heads haven’t all exploded from the contradictions.”
“Well, I can’t say I haven’t tried to skate on the edge of them myself.”
“Everybody does. They have to. But it’s easier to follow other people’s patterns and paths than to make one of your own. That’s why fae have such a hard time with change. Personally?” David crossed his arms and stuck his nose in the air. “I think you’re all just lazy.”
Niall was surprised into a laugh. “You’ve never seen how hard the lesser fae work to keep up with the capricious orders of the courtiers.”
“Not physically lazy. Actually, I think inaction is one of the problems. I mean you’re all so freaking ancient that you can’t think outside your own little box. Don’t you see? You sacrificed everything for Gareth. Don’t you think he’d appreciate that?”
“Not with the way he feels about Unseelie.”
“Gah!” David clutched his hair. “Why are you fae so freaking stubborn? The reason he feels that way about Unseelie is because of you. Because he thinks they abducted and brutalized you.” David squinted one eye, releasing the death grip on his hair. “And actually, they did. Well, one of them did, but not in the way he thinks. If you explained to him—”
Niall folded his arms across his chest. “And make me sound even more pathetic than I am? No, thank you. Besides, I don’t want him to come to me out of gratitude or obligation or pity.”
“Well, I think he has a right to know.”
“No!” Abandoning the chair’s dubious protection, Niall dodged around it, palms up in supplication. “Please. Don’t tell him.” He dropped his arms to his sides. “If we’re to find our way through this, we’ll have to do it with our eyes facing forward, not back.”
“Weeeellll, I still think you should tell him. I mean, look what hiding information from him has gotten you so far. You think keeping this from him will make him happy?”
“I think what would make him happy,” Niall said, baring his teeth in the mockery of a smile, “is if I disappeared again.”
“You are sooo wrong. If there’s one thing I’ve learned in my nurse’s training—the psychology part—you can’t take away someone’s cause without giving them something in its place. He’s been focused on you and your fate for so long—what’s he going to replace that with?”
Niall looked away from the sympathy of David’s gaze. “Whatever it is—whoever it is—it’ll be better for him than I am. I should go.”
But where? He had no home here, no clothing, no money, no acquaintances other than Gareth and his family and friends—who, when given a choice between an Unseelie con artist and the one true bard, would probably make the right choice.
:Trust us!:
Ah well. The ethera were on his side. But he rather doubted they could run to a stiff drink, let alone a getaway car.
David apparently reached the same conclusion because his eyebrows shot up. “Go? Where?”
“I don’t know. Somewhere . . . else. So it’s not awkward when Gareth comes home after the concert.”
“Oh, that’s not an issue. He usually gates back to LA after—d’oh! He can’t. No gates. Hmmm.” David screwed his mouth up, thinking. One more person who has to solve the problem of Niall O’Tierney.
“You can stay at my place.” Bryce had been so silent in the shadows that Niall had forgotten he was there.
“Really?”
“I’d rather have you than Gareth. Besides, I have a feeling there’s a hell of a lot more you can tell me about the spell, and our time is running out.”
Gareth should have known better than to try to play while rage was banging around in his head like a fourth-rate drummer. Neither of his guitars would stay in tune during the sound check—and his instruments were always in tune. It was one of the perks of being a bard.
Unless the bard was so off the rails that he could barely remember a G7 chord, let alone the intricate finger-picking of most of their songs.
“Shit on a pogo stick, Gareth.” Hamish threw his drumsticks on the stage. “Do we have to do this whole thing a cappella? Bad enough your guitar sounds like a panther shifter in heat—”
“Watch it, kangaroo.”
Hamish ignored Tiff, which never happened. “Whatever’s eating your ass is bleeding over to the rest of us. Josh’s violin. Spence’s rig. I mean can an electronic keyboard even go out of tune? Even my drums sound sour. If this is what getting laid does for you—”
“Shut the fuck up, Hamish!” Gareth hurled a cable across the stage, where it slid along the deck, causing one of the roadies to jump aside.
“Oho. So you didn’t get laid. Shite, I thought the way you and Niall were eye-fucking each other during the show last night—”
“I said shut the fuck up. Goddess strike me blind, you never know when to quit. No wonder Tiff won’t give you the time of day.”
Hamish surged up off his stool as if he were about to leap over the drum kit. Given the power in his legs, it wasn’t beyond possibility. Gareth bared his teeth and bunched his fists, ready for the fight—craving the fight. Hells, he’d have welcomed the gods-bedamned Voices if only to have someone to argue with, but they were silent. Probably off gloating in their spectral pub, the arseholes.
Someone touched Gareth’s shoulder, and he whirled, fist cocked, only to meet Josh’s eyes, wide with shock and hurt. Gareth didn’t know whether he’d have thrown the punch at his best friend—he’d like to think he was better than that—because Spence caught his wrist.
“If it weren’t for the fact we’ve got a show in an hour, I’d break your fucking arm,” Spence growled, his eyes taking on the reddish glow of a werewolf about to shift.
Gareth met his furious gaze. “Do it.” The pain in his body would be a thousand times easier to bear than the pain in his heart. It was building inside him, a vast angry sea of red, threatening to burst through breakwater and swamp him, drown him.
“Spence.” At Josh’s gentle tone, Spence’s eyes faded from red to brown. “It’s okay.”
“It’s not.” But Spence let go of Gareth, only to snake his arm around Josh’s waist and pull him halfway across the stage, well out of Gareth’s reach. “Nobody threatens you. Especially not some asshole who’s supposed to be your friend. Who’s supposed to be a friend to all of us. What the fuck, Gareth?”
This was worse than when Niall had left. Then, he had only his own grief for love lost. But now? He’d always imagined himself better than Gwydion, more compassionate, more moral. But he’d taken his grief and turned it into a bludgeon to pummel his brothers, his friends. Even his music had been warped by it.
Gareth turned away and hunched over his guitar again, trying to bring it back into tune. “Never mind. Let’s just get this done.”
“Done?” Hamish smacked his high hat with a clang. “I’d say we’re overdone if we can’t even manage a fecking sound check.”
Josh pulled away from Spence, who tried to catch him but fell back at the fiercest look Gareth had ever seen on Josh’s face. He approached Gareth so warily, Gareth discovered a blue undertow of sorrow in the red sea of his anger. Josh had never been afraid of him before.
He pressed his lips together, holding in the venom, beating back the tears, and allowed Josh to take his guitar from his unresisting hands.
“Gareth, I’m not sure what’s going on, but for this show, I think you’re on vocals only.”
“But Josh—”
Josh cut a glance at Spence, and he subsided into glowering silence. “I’ll handle lead guitar. Spence can pick up rhythm with the synthesizer. We’ve done it before.”
Hamish slumped on his stool, arms crossed. “Not for years. Shite, this show is gonna suck.”
Tiff, who’d been silent, watching them all with the not-wary gaze of a hunting cat, hung her bass around her neck. “You telling me you can’t handle a change in our set list, kangaroo? I thought you had more balls than that.”
Hamish glanced between Spence and Gareth, and for once, he didn’t goad anyone. When was Hamish ever subdued? “Bring it, kitty cat. I’m game.”
“All right then.” She signaled to a couple of the roadies. “Repatch the amps and strike Gareth’s instruments. He’s on mic alone tonight. Josh, draw up a new set list. Songs that don’t depend on the violin arrangement.”
Gareth let them hustle around him as he fought the urge to scream at the top of his voice. Maybe he’d channel a little early Roger Daltrey tonight. Add in a “Won’t Get Fooled Again” scream. Yeah. That was it. His music. He’d use his music to channel his feelings, just as he always did.
“One thing,” he said, his voice rough and scratchy. “‘Lover’s Reel’ is off the list.”
Josh met his gaze for a long minute. “Of course.”
As it turned out, they should have canceled the show anyway. Josh was perfectly competent on guitar—bordering on brilliant, actually, if Gareth wanted to admit it. But he should have known better than to sing when his own emotions were running so hot and dangerous.
He was a fucking bard, for shite’s sake. His voice amplified emotions in his audience. He prided himself on playing those emotions as precisely as any instrument, but tonight, he hadn’t been able to separate his own feelings from the performance. He channeled his rage, his betrayal, his—yes, his hate—into every word, every note.
And the audience picked up on it.
Instead of dancing, fights broke out in pockets throughout the crowd. Even the ones who didn’t turn on their neighbors sported angry expressions, fists punching the air when they weren’t punching each other.
He’d stormed offstage at the end of the show before any of the rest of the band. They’d all been on edge too, responding to the unbridled passion in his vocals. Even the dampening effect of the electronics couldn’t rob his voice of its bardic power.
He rushed down the hallway to his dressing room and slammed the door behind him. Sweat dripped down his face and soaked the back of his T-shirt. He leaned against the door, chest heaving, unable to catch his breath. This wasn’t the usual postconcert adrenaline rush. This was something else. He should have felt some kind of catharsis after a release like that, but he didn’t. If anything, the red swirled higher until his very gaze was tinged with it.
He stumbled forward to stare at himself in the mirror. He looked exactly as insane as he felt, his hair in sweaty clumps. He laughed mirthlessly. Niall had always loved his hair. That’s why he’d never—
Fuck that. Fuck Niall. Fuck everything.
He dug in his case and pulled out a belt knife, then grabbed a hank of his hair and started sawing at it. “Fuck this. All for—” He winced as the blade caught on his hair, pulling at his scalp. “Nothing. All for nothing.” He dropped the handful of curls onto the floor and grabbed another handful. “I could have been there for Alun. For his real grief.” More curls joined the growing pile on the floor. “I could have—”
Hamish burst through the door. “I don’t know what the hell that was, Kendrick, but— Jesus fuck, what are you doing?”
Gareth glanced at himself in the mirror. Half his hair was gone, leaving a ragged mess on the top and sides. “Getting a haircut.”
“Yeah? Well if you’re going for mullet-nouveau, I don’t think it’ll ever catch on. Gimme that.” Hamish grabbed Gareth’s arm. They grappled, Hamish woofing when Gareth landed an elbow in his belly. But then Hamish dug his fingers into the tendons of Gareth’s wrist, and Gareth dropped the knife with a cry.
Gareth backed away as Hamish scooped the knife off the floor. “You’re not going to—”
“Stab you? Get real. Although if I were you, I’d steer clear of Spence for the next little bit.” He dug in his pack and pulled out a pair of shears. “Good thing for you I never travel without my scissors.”
“You what? Why?”
“I’m always shaggy after a shift, so I give myself a trim. Come here.”
Gareth choked on a hysterical laugh. “You think I’m going to let you cut my hair?”
Hamish raised an eyebrow. “A baboon with a lawn mower would do a better job than you’re doing. Give over.”
Gareth made himself hold still—or as still as he was able—while Hamish approached and started snipping at his mangled curls. Tremors still racked his body from time to time, and when they did, Hamish would pause.
“You need help, Gareth. Whatever happened, you need to get over it. If this is coming from me—I mean, I’m the first guy to say yes to a little fracas, right? So if I’m saying you’re over the top, you know you’re really over the fucking top. You need to come down.” He tossed his scissors in his bag. “There. Not exactly GQ worthy, but at least you won’t scare any children. Although . . .” He pawed through his bag, pulled out a knitted beanie, and tossed it at Gareth. “Here. Best not to take any chances on that.”
