War for the Oaks
Page 14
“What, my primrose,” he said without turning, “not asleep yet? Or is it awake again?”
“How long have you been here?” She padded into the room and sat in the other chair.
“Long enough. Or perhaps,” he said, scowling at the level of liquid in the glass he held, “not long enough, after all. Pity.”
Eddi finally noticed the amber color of the stuff in the glass, and smelled the brandy fumes. “That’s for medicinal purposes.”
“I’m not surprised. I have been consuming it steadily for the last hour, and I can assure you, it was not made for the sake of pleasurable drinking.” He spoke more slowly than usual, but just as clearly.
“Then why,” Eddi asked carefully, “have you been drinking it?”
“Perhaps because I needed physicking, my heart. Or perhaps not. Tell me, what do you keep it on hand to cure?”
“Head colds.”
“Ah, that’s the problem, then. I haven’t got one.”
She sighed. “Who writes your dialogue, Lewis Carroll?”
He frowned over that for a moment, shook his head, and drained the glass.
“Are you trying to get drunk?” she asked him.
“No. I am succeeding, at least in some measure, in getting drunk.”
“I didn’t know you could.”
“Silly child. That’s your problem—you know nothing of history. You are”—he thought about it, and let the word roll graciously off his tongue—“ignorant.”
He was trying to annoy her. It made her smile. “Does it help?”
“Does what help?”
“Being drunk.”
“Not a bit.” He poured the glass half-full, sniffed it, made a face, and tossed it off. “I took care of the money.”
“What money?”
“Listen to her,” he grumbled. “I go to almost endless trouble, endure a not inconsiderable quantity of embarrassment, and all for some obscure moral position, all for her. And she’s forgotten it. For your wretched motorcycle, of course.”
“Oh!” Eddi leaned forward eagerly. “You mean it won’t change back? It’ll stay money? Oh, thank you!”
He sank his face into his hand. “I believe I warned you about saying that.”
“Shit. I’m sorry. But I. . . that makes me very happy.”
He looked up at her, and smiled slowly. “Now that I can listen to with no discomfort at all.” He held up the brandy bottle. “Would you like some?”
“God, no. I hate the stuff.”
“So do I,” he said wisely, pouring himself another glass.
Eddi folded her arms on the table and rested her chin on them. “Then why are you drinking it?”
The phouka pursed his lips, and studied the streetlights through his brandy. “There is a children’s rhyme, I believe, that tells one how many days there are in each month.”
She frowned at him.
“Recite it for me, please.”
“What?”
“I did say please.”
Eddi sighed and began, “Thirty days hath September, April, June—”
“Thirty days hath April,” he repeated, letting the words roll slowly out. “If you check the clock and calendar, you’ll find, I think, that we are an hour into April’s thirtieth and last day. And what does that make this coming night?”
Eddie felt as if, had the fate of the civilized world rested on it, she could not have opened her mouth, or moved, or blinked.
The phouka shook his head sorrowfully and took another swallow of brandy. “You are a slow pupil, dear heart. Well, I’ll give you this one, if I must, but only this one. The night to come is May Eve, my primrose. And we shall know the joy of battle.” He turned his face away from the window, turned it toward her, and nothing in it matched the lightness of his voice.
After a long time, she cleared her throat and said, “So you’re getting drunk.”
“Don’t be silly. There’s no connection at all.”
“You said there was.”
“I said no such thing. You misunderstood.”
Eddi sighed, and stood up. “Well, now I know I won’t be able to sleep.” She started back toward the bedroom.
The discordant chime of breaking glass stopped her. She turned to find the phouka staring down at the glittering fragments of the wineglass between his feet. “I’m sorry,” he said, his voice unnaturally casual.
“It’s all right,” she replied, and continued on to the bedroom.
She didn’t think he’d meant her to hear him, when he whispered, “Would that it were.”
chapter 9 – Would I Lie to You?
Eddi swung the bike into the parking lot of the building on Washington Avenue. The early afternoon sun warmed her shoulders through her jacket. She wished it would rain; she was in no mood for cheerful weather. The phouka slid off the seat, and frowned when she didn’t.
She pulled off her helmet and rested it on the gas tank. “I don’t know if I can face practicing right now,” she said at last.
“What a pity. Why couldn’t you have decided that on the other side of town and spared me a ride on that infernal contraption?”
“The infernal contraption was your idea.”
“It’s given me a headache,” he grumbled.
“Your headache came out of a bottle of Mr. Boston Five-Star. It has nothing to do with motorcycles.”
The phouka looked sullen.
Eddi gazed wearily up at the iron stairs to the third floor practice space. She had slept a little, but only enough to make her feel worse. She felt, in fact, as if every cell in her body was poisonous to every other cell. It was no condition to be in for the band’s first practice.
And she didn’t want to face Carla. Carla might read her expression and remember what day it was. Carla would want to protect her, to become embroiled in the whole bizarre business. Eddi wasn’t going to let that happen.
Unless Carla pried it out of her. Which she could do.
“Of course you want to practice,” the phouka said sourly. “This may be your last chance.”
Eddi felt her insides scramble. “I thought you said you’d protect me.”
“No one,” he glowered at her, “is perfect.” He pressed his lips together for an instant, then grinned. “Except, of course, myself.”
Eddi watched his face as she said, “Then I will be safe tonight?”
“Well,” he said slowly, “not entirely.”
She realized that she should put the kickstand down now, before her strength drained away completely and she let the bike fall on her. Killed? She put the stand down, and sat staring at the bland face of the speedometer.
Tonight? She couldn’t quite believe in dying—though if she didn’t, why did her arms and legs seem suddenly to be made of gelatin, and her mouth seem full of glue?
The phouka must have seen her distress. “Oak and Ash. Don’t mind me, dear heart. It’s the hangover speaking.”
“But it’s true, isn’t it?”
He sighed. “We could all be killed. That is, unfortunately, one of the points of tonight’s exercise. But anyone with designs on your life will be trying to go through me, and that only after going through a host of folk who fight like cornered badgers.”
“It sounds like I’m going to be more trouble than I’m worth.”
“You, my primrose, are all that raises this beyond the level of an ordinary territorial squabble. You and the sheer scale of the thing, that is.”
“There’s a difference between a territorial squabble and a war?” Eddi asked, hoping for an intelligible answer.
The phouka rubbed his temples. “A true war is one in which the blood of immortals is shed. Anything less has all the significance of a hard-fought game of football, to the Folk.”
“It sounds just like humanity to me,” Eddi broke in impatiently. “We’ll even bleed for football, sometimes.”
“As I have said, no sense of history. There’s magic in spilled blood, my child. Your ancestors knew this, a
nd on occasion even put it to the intended use.” The phouka was beginning to warm to his lecturing. “And in immortal blood, which is rather more difficult to spill, there is enormous power. In a war of the Folk, the drawing of blood, the taking of lives, forces the participants to abide by the outcome of the fight. Without that, we can fight on for years over the same issue, the same piece of ground—like mortals. But immortal blood tends to stay in immortal veins, and stern measures are needed to have it otherwise.”
He talked about spilling blood so calmly, as if it was something that happened elsewhere to others. And maybe it was, for him. He was immortal. There was nothing abstract about the subject for Eddi. She could feel panic bubbling up inside her like yeast.
“And one of the most effective measures,” the phouka continued, “is to have a mortal on the battlefield, one with certain qualities, who is bound to the fight.”
“Bound?”
The phouka closed his eyes and covered his face with one hand. “May the earth open and swallow me,” he muttered. “Immediately.”
Eddi stared at him, alarmed. “What aren’t you telling me?”
He glared. “As far as I can tell, precious little, whether I will or no!”
“Just what’s involved in being ‘bound to the fight’?”
“Bread and blood,” he snapped, “and much good may the knowledge do you.”
Eddi slid off the bike and jammed the key in her pocket. “Well, it would do me good. If you’d just tell me what’s going on, I might be more cooperative, dammit.”
“And you might not. I’ve told you a great deal more than I should have in the past weeks. I’ve flown in the face of tradition, inclination, and direct orders. You’ll cozen nothing more out of me.”
“I’ll. . . what?”
“Cozen,” the phouka said bitterly. “Trick. Beguile.”
“I’ve never tried to trick you!”
“Hah.”
She looked at him through narrowed eyes. “What if I won’t go through with it?”
“With what?”
“This . . . binding. If it was no big deal, you’d have told me about it.”
The phouka gave an exasperated hiss. “By earth and air, I’ve tried to keep you in the dark at every step of the way! Why balk at it now?”
She’d never made him so angry—she wouldn’t have believed she could. What had happened to the perfect bastard who’d taken control of her life on the Nicollet Mall? That phouka would have laughed at her, ordered her around. He wouldn’t have thought it worth the trouble to fight with her.
She said, “If I got on the bike right now, and tried to ride away—would you stop me?”
He seemed angrier still, and about to speak. Then he turned away, looking back toward downtown and, she suspected, not seeing it. A knot of muscle had leaped into sudden relief in his jaw. He lifted one hand to the side of his face, as if to nurse his headache, and Eddi lost sight of his expression.
At last he said fiercely, “No.”
A damp breeze, smelling of mud and car exhaust, fluttered his hair and hers. “You’d get in trouble for that, wouldn’t you?” Eddi said.
“Trouble.” He spat out some crisp word that Eddi didn’t catch, and might not have recognized anyway. “Yes, I suppose ‘trouble’ would cover it, if spread thin.” He swept his hair back from his face with both hands, a movement that seemed equivalent to rolling up his sleeves. It made his eyes slant even more than usual.
“Eddi,” he said earnestly, “I haven’t much taste for begging, and less skill. But I will happily beg you for this, with all the meager talent at my command. I would even bribe you, had I anything to offer. Will you please, please, go through with the business tonight?”
“You make it sound as if I have a choice.”
He closed his eyes, shut out her angry stare. “You do.”
Then he’d meant what he’d said; if she left now, he wouldn’t stop her. It made her hands shake. She stuffed them in her jacket pockets.
“You told me once that I couldn’t get away, that the Unseelie Court would come after me.”
“And they would. But they may be less vigilant now, thinking that if you meant to flee, you’d have done it weeks ago. You know more of your enemy now as well—though that may be scant help.” He paused, and when he spoke again, it might have been to himself. “And there is more of you to reckon with than I suspected then.”
Playacting! Eddi thought. Isn’t it? “What’s involved in this bind-ing?”
The phouka sighed. “If I could tell you and not make it sound worse than it is, I would.”
Eddi started across the parking lot to the stairs.
“But I can do this much,” he said at last, as if the words were dragged up his throat with a string. “I can enable you to see it all truly, so that what you do, you do by your will and not at the prompting of any glamour.”
Eddi looked at him over her shoulder. How well he was coming to know what mattered to her. . . .
“But in return, you must promise to do what is set before you to do—and you must tell no one that I’ve tampered with the process. Or I will indeed,” he grinned ruefully, “be in trouble.”
“Sounds like it amounts to the same thing.”
“Perhaps to you. Not to me.”
“Why, after all this, would you offer to let me go now?” she blurted out. “Is this some last disgusting trick?”
The expression that swept the phouka’s face was a little frightening, though Eddi couldn’t say what it meant. He turned sharply away.
From behind and above them came the sound of a heavy door opening, and they looked up. Carla was standing in the doorway at the top of the iron stairs.
“Come on, guys!” she yelled. “You’re late!”
The phouka let his breath out audibly. “Well! Had I a pot of gold to bestow . . .,” he said. “After you, my sweet.”
Eddi shook her head and rattled up the stairs.
Someone had managed to open a couple of the dusty painted-shut window sections in the rehearsal space. The hanging sheets moved in the breeze, and the room smelled of electrical power and spring.
“ ‘Bout time,” Carla said when Eddi came in the door. She nodded toward the middle of the room and added, “Much longer, and they would have wandered off into the Twilight Zone and never been seen again.”
Dan, Willy, and Hedge were engaged in playing something that might once have been Dire Straits’ ”Tunnel of Love.” It was not loud, but it was . . . well, weird. Dan was adding and subtracting synthesizer voices and dabbing in sampled sounds wherever a blank spot seemed imminent. Hedge was running the bass through a phase shifter. The bone-resonant notes wove in and out, forward and back, like the breathing of a monstrous asthmatic cat. Willy’s guitar was so unmodified as to sound naked; it would follow the other two docilely through the chords for a few measures, then, in something like musical senility, it would wander off into the lead riff for another song entirely. They were all three absorbed in each other, glancing back and forth for cues. Willy’s hair had already fallen into his eyes.
Eddi found herself grinning at them in proprietary pride. “So what are you doing standing here?” she said to Carla.
Carla blinked.
“Let’s jam, kid.”
And for a while, they did. Carla added a bass drum beat to anchor it all, then found a pattern on the toms that interlocked with Hedge’s phasing. Eddi played sparse guitar, high and stringy.
A chord progression opened like a door before her. It led toward a song she and Dan and Carla had worked on a week ago. She leaned on the rhythm, bending it to the shape she wanted. Carla noticed and followed her; Dan picked it up, then started his left-hand riff. Hedge and Willy heard the new drive and unity behind the sound, and added themselves to it.
Eddi went to the mike and heard Dan back off his improvising, just a little; Willy came back to the chords and stayed there.
Neon on the frontage road
The
red light shines on me
I only want you to be happy
I only want me to be free
Midnight on the interstate
I’m on the run from you
I’ve got a dollar says you’re lying
I’ve got a feeling says it’s true.
She gave Willy the nod for a lead break, and he snagged the melody and carried it away, ran with it as if it were a kite in the wind. Then she pointed to Hedge, Willy, and Dan, and drew a finger across her throat. Everything stopped but drums.
You look so sweet when you’re asleep,
When your mouth is closed;
The angry things all shut inside,
The kind of things you used to hide from me.
And far away from you, I keep
Pictures of you, posed,
All your good side, all well-groomed,
Chronicles of true love doomed
By what I didn’t see.
Synthesizer, guitar, and bass swelled slowly through the second half of the bridge in answer to her prompting. She heard Carla and Willy add wordless harmonies, too, and that filled her with reckless delight. The last verse was a ragged but enthusiastic climax.
Water on the motorway
The wipers beat like hearts
Why do you love me best whenever
We’re a hundred slippery miles apart?
After that, there was the rattle of critical comment that she’d already come to expect. “I think you want bass on that bridge.” Carla said.
Dan said, frowning absently, “Can we try that again? I wanna bend that last note out of shape, like a car goin’ by—is that too hokey?”
“We’d better do it again,” Willy laughed. “We don’t know how to start it yet.”
Hedge puckered up his face, studied his axe for a moment, and played a couple measures that made a very good intro.
By the time Eddi called a rest, they’d improved the chord progressions and added drum punches to the lead break. Dan had put a rush of white noise into the second verse that suggested tires on wet pavement. Willy and Carla were singing the words on the bridge. They sounded remarkably like a band.