Stone Song by D. L. McDermott

pockets. It was a sinuous vessel of wrought silver, and it rang like a bell when he set it on the bare table.
    “Fetch us glasses,” said the Prince.
    Tommy rose, clutching his bleeding hand and Sorcha watched him shuffle to the bar, her heart in her throat.
    “Let Tommy go,” she said. “I’ll take the ring out.” It was difficult but not impossible to remove.
    “Soon,” said the Prince. “You’ve engaged my interest, Sorcha, with your hidden iron ring and your determination to thwart me.” He grinned wide. “I like you.”
    But he didn’t mean he liked her . He meant he wanted to own her, like a pretty toy, and she suspected that, unfortunately, he was not careless of his toys as Keiran had been. Now she began to think she had been lucky in that gilded house, to be treated as an object, ignored unless her master was in want of music. The Prince wouldn’t be content to just possess her like that. He wanted to play her, like an instrument, and see what noises she would make.
    Tommy shuffled back to the table, his injured hand tucked up under his arm, a pair of blood-streaked drinking glasses clutched in his other hand. He placed the gruesome goblets on the table.
    “Sit,” said the Prince, as he would to a hound, and Tommy dropped to the floor once more.
    “That’s cruel,” she said. “He did what you asked. There’s no need to humiliate him.”
    The Prince reached out and ruffled the hair on Tommy’s head like he was a Labrador. “You mistake the fiddler for a member of your own race, but you are no more human than I am. Your fiddler is like the rest of his ilk, happiest when he is under the yoke, when he doesn’t have to think for himself.”
    “He doesn’t look very happy now.”
    “That is because he has not been properly trained.” The Prince removed the stopper from the bottle and poured a clear fluid into one of the goblets. Pale mist rose from it.
    He pushed the brimming glass across the table.
    “Drink,” he said, “to seal our bargain.”
    Gran’s warnings rang in her head, along with the lore the old men who taught her to sing had shared. “Even children know better than to accept drink from one of your kind,” she said.
    “They know better than to accept drink in one of our dwellings,” he replied. “But this is not my dwelling.”
    She didn’t find that reassuring. That was one of the things the old men had warned her about—the Fae proclivity for making statements that contained deceptive half-truths. It was dangerous to bargain with them unless you set the terms, and even then . . .
    Sorcha knew well the story of the fairy nurse, the midwife called to a humble cottage to attend the birth of a child, who was given ointment to rub in the babe’s eyes, and chanced, when she was tired, to rub her own. When she next looked at the humble cottage, it had become a glittering palace. And she was never allowed to leave, with her eyes open to the influence of the Fae.
    “What’s in the goblet?” Sorcha asked.
    “It is wine,” he replied smoothly.
    “Then why do you want me to drink it?”
    “To seal our bargain. Is that not a human custom as well?” He poured the other glass and raised it to his lips.
    She watched him drain the cup. He set it down on the table, with no visible ill effects. “Drink, to prove your good faith,” he repeated. “Otherwise I will have to assume that you plan to renege once I let your friend go. And I would find it tiresome to have him always at my heels. Drink, and he can go free.”
    She didn’t trust him. The only thing she was certain of was that the liquid in the silver flagon wouldn’t kill her, because the Prince wanted her alive. Whatever else the stuff might do was impossible to guess.
    And if she wanted to save Tommy, impossible to refuse. Tommy was blameless, and he ought to have the chance to lead a normal life. Sorcha had destroyed hers, she now realized, the minute she’d ignored Gran’s warnings and taken up her father’s