Blade Dance (A Cold Iron Novel Book 4) Read Online Free

no one was more trusted than their leader’s son. They would not accept another substitute easily, if Finn could even find one.
    A shadow detached itself from the darkness beside the entrance. Finn reached for his knife, then stopped. “What are you doing here?” he asked.
    Nancy McTeer stepped into the light. She was petite and black haired, with the porcelain pale skin so many Irish women had, but it was marred by a black bruise across her cheekbone.
    He didn’t like to see it, but he could not say he was surprised. Sean was a good enforcer because he was a violent and unpredictable Fae. He hadn’t always been that way. Finn had known Sean since before the fall. Since before the Druids had imprisoned and tortured them. Sean had been a poet then, but he’d left all that behind on the hillside where the Druids had chained him. Afterward he had joined Finn’s band. The surviving Fae all bore scars, the spells of control that the Druids had carved into their flesh, but some of them bore deeper, graver wounds. Sean was one of those.
    That, though, didn’t excuse the bruise on Nancy McTeer’s cheek.
    “You wouldn’t see me at the Navy Yard,” she said. “And I need to talk to you about Sean.”
    “If he did that,” said Finn, indicating the bruise on her cheek, “you should leave him.” Easier said than done, as he well knew. Mortals often became addicted to the Fae. Some pined and died when their Fae lovers abandoned them.
    “I don’t want your help for me,” she said. “It’s for my son, Davin.”
    Finn remembered Sean bragging about the boy. The Fae were extraordinarily long-lived, but they had always bred fitfully. A child was a triumph, even one gotten on a human woman—provided she survived the experience. The children of the Sídhe grew quickly and unpredictably, and births were rarely easy. Nancy McTeer had born Sean Silver Blade a brawler of a baby, a healthy rambunctious boy he was proud—if critical—of.
    “Sean’s son is his own affair,” said Finn. The boy was half-Fae and strong. He would be able to take almost anything his Fae father could dish out. Almost. A slip of a girl like Nancy McTeer, though . . .
    He wanted to interfere. He wanted to step between his captain and this pretty girl with her tear-stained face and black-and-blue cheekbone. If he did, he would lose the few followers he had left, who respected him because he still practiced the old ways, who chose him over Miach because he hadn’t gone native and become more human than the local population. And if he lost the Fianna, he would never get his son back. He would have nothing to offer Garrett, not compared to Miach, who could teach him secrets and give him a large extended family on whom to practice his skills.
    “Stay out of it, Nancy. Sean is the boy’s father. He is high, middle, and low justice in his own family, and I cannot protect you from him.”
    It seemed wrong to him—that he could not exercise the power he still had and keep it.
    “He brought a man to the house. Some wild-eyed bastard who inked my son. And this creature who wielded the needle was not one of the Good Neighbors.”
    Finn froze on the doorstep. “No one,” he said, “inks the Fianna but my son.”
    Sorcery was tricky stuff, and sorcerers, in the main, were untrustworthy bastards. Unfortunately, they were also necessary evils. Fighters like Finn needed mages to ink or carve their spells of protection and enhancement, their vows and their oaths, the gaesa that defined them, but a duplicitous mage could leave out a crucial word or symbol, or add in some chicanery of his own. That was why a band like the Fianna needed their own sorcerer, and why Finn had encouraged Garrett when his talent had first manifested. But when Garrett had left them to join Miach’s banner and sleep in Miach’s daughter’s bed, he left the Fianna with no mage of their own and his father with a heavy burden.
    Until they recruited a new sorcerer they could trust,