by Jeffrey Cook
Gilroy looked oddly exhausted for a faerie, while also looking reasonably pleased with the ruckus, making Megan wonder just how accidental his stage whispering had been.
“Does this have something to do with Balor's officers and stuff?” Megan asked her father.
“Balor?” As she echoed the name questioningly, the Seelie Queen no longer looked merely startled. She attempted to look at Riocard with her usual intense expression, but her head tilted at a strange, nervous angle.
“Ah. Do excuse me, Majesty,” Riocard said sedately. “I must not have sent you the memo.”
“What does … he ... have to do with a problem at the sealed lake?” Orlaith asked.
“I have no idea, or even if he does. There's just been some minor trouble about some of his hangers-on and souvenirs recently.”
Megan tried not be too blatant about her annoyance at hearing it called 'minor trouble.' She knew Lani was doing the same. Justin never seemed to struggle, his face professionally blank. She often wondered just how bad 14th-Century politics were, that he could get that good a poker face at his age.
Inwar was giving orders in a language Megan didn't understand, but his lieutenants clearly did, leaving one by one to relay the messages to their own troops. Inwar moved a hand to the Queen's shoulder, and her expression calmed somewhat as he continued to focus on sending his people out to handle things for him beyond the concert hall. As soon as he'd sent out everyone he dared risk while the concert hall was still on the verge of chaos, he leaned in, speaking quietly to the Queen, while she answered in the same hushed tones.
Finally, another messenger sprite flew over the not-quite-panicked crowd. This one reported to Riocard. “Some people to see you, Majesty. The dullahan and some others.”
The Unseelie King nodded and stood up on the dais, gesturing for Megan to do the same. He indicated the sprite could go back about his business, then turned to Ashling. "Can you go guide the dullahan and his crew to the little blue tent across the way? I think we'll meet them for tea.” Ashling nodded her understanding, then climbed on the crow's back. They took off to bear the information and directions, while Riocard simply stepped down the stairs of the dais. “Megan, Miss Kahale, Sir Justin, you're with me.”
The Seelie crowd control and partial evacuation was continuing. Riocard spared no glance for them. Some of the Unseelie were still agitating. They nevertheless stepped aside as Riocard walked calmly into the crowd, the way simply parting before him. Megan and Lani followed much less casually, hurrying to stay close. The girls looked back to see Justin following closely behind them, his hand still on the hilt of the sword. Behind him on the dais, Orlaith was staring, quite possibly at the back of Megan's father's head, as he didn't turn to look at all.
Riocard led Megan and her friends to the quiet little blue tent, which somehow seemed to contain an entire Japanese tea-house on the inside, wooden structures, carvings, and all, despite the humble appearance outside the flap of the tent.
As soon as they'd been seated, kneeling around a low table with tea, with the chaos sounding very far away, Megan finally confronted her father, now that she was certain they were away from the Queen and her entourage, and the other Unseelie hadn't arrived yet. "Aren't you going to, you know, do something?" She managed to avoid yelling, but only barely. Even when it wasn't his season, her father had to finally realize something was serious, right?
Riocard paused, glancing at his daughter with a smile. "I already have. Inwar and the Queen have order. Their people need commands. They need regimentation. They'll listen, as long as someone appears to take charge. I have monsters. They don't like orders. They don't like to feel constraints. They don't want to hear about what's necessary.”
“But it is necessary.”
“It's all about the phrasing, dearest.”
An odd-looking crew entered the house, including a few sprites that Megan didn't recognize, the figure with the rabbit ears, two leprechauns, three redcaps, a snaggle-toothed troll, and then the man in black with the removable head. The sprites took places atop the table. The others, after a brief pause, knelt at places around the table, some looking very much out of place in the quiet surroundings, and some looking uncomfortable doing so, but none argued with the choice of venue or Riocard's example of following the establishment's customs.
The headless man, dressed in colonial-style black clothing, complete with a cravat that met empty air at the neck—the dullahan, Megan supposed—took the most prominent position among the newcomers, directly across from Riocard
“So when the note got passed around yesterday,” a voice began, from under the man’s arm, where the head was tucked with a grin that would fit in with the redcaps. “We got to thinking about those officers.”
Then the dullahan whipped off his 'cape', folding over his arm what Megan now recognized as another shroud. Then he removed a bag from his waist, opening it, and removing a severed head from the bag—a head, Megan realized, with the same nearly skeletal thinness and empty eyes of the wights they'd fought, once they were rendered dead a second time.
“My grandad fought against one, used to take us on family picnics 'round this time of year to the tomb.”
“You'd have family picnics at the booby-trapped grave of someone who'd tried to kill him?” Megan asked, before covering her mouth, looking to her father to see if she'd spoken out of turn.
The dullahan shifted his own head into his hand enough to show her that his eyebrow was raised. “Yeah. How does your family do festive? Anyway, the wight was a bit holed up in the place—behind barricades, working on fixing his siege engines—but you know how my horse and I are about making our way past gates.”
The dullahan briefly juggled the two heads and the shroud with a performer's flourish. “So if there's some kind of wight scavenger hunt,” he said as the cloth and the wight’s head landed right in front of Riocard. “We're in.”
Megan couldn't help staring. “Whoa,” she said.
“Indeed,” her father's rich, dark voice concurred. “Two asymmetric spheres and a cloth are always harder to juggle than three objects of a kind. Well done, sir.”
When the Unseelie crew left, Riocard smiled at Megan again. “We don't want to hear about necessary. But if we hear we're being hedged out, or out-monstered, we certainly won't stand for it.”
Megan considered that, as her father re-wrapped the head, keeping it, before folding the shroud and offering it to Megan. "So, you just put word out, act like it's no big deal, and someone goes wight hunting. Nice,” she said. “So, what now?"
"Now, someone said the B-word around Orlaith. She'll have more questions for me, and as it's her season, I'll answer them. It would be best if you were in Seattle when that happened."
"Balor?" Megan tried.
"Orlaith remembers Balor every time she forgoes looking in the mirror."
Chapter 23: At Home
"Do you think they'll get the rest of the wights?" Megan asked as they drove away from Fremont.
"I doubt it,” Justin answered. He was staring out the window with the sheathed sword in his lap, not willing to stop being on watch yet. “They won't all spend time getting their siege weapons together. The last two are likely out of their tombs by now.”
“At this point,” Lani said, “I think they're the least of our worries."
Megan raised an eyebrow. “Because ancient undead officers aren't a big deal?"
"Not what I mean. Sure, they're bad, but they're just one part of something."
"Okay, so we need to find the Butterfly Collector. I mean, if Dad's people don't find him first. They'll probably bring his head in next, right?"
“Won't that be nice, eh?” Ashling interjected with a smile that Megan knew should be disturbing her more. That it didn't was enough to make Megan worry about herself.
Lani sighed. "I don't think so. I think Ashling seeing him in the market is about as close as the fae are going to get on their own."
"What makes you say th
at? I mean, they've done okay for themselves a lot longer than we've been around, right? They have to have dealt with stuff like this before. Cassia even talks about the undead rising and stuff."
"Yeah, she does. And they probably have. But the Butterfly Collector has help on the inside."
"Robin Goodfellow, you mean?"
"Yeah, think about it,” Lani said. “He's an expert in chaos, right?”
“Original Prankster,” Ashling said. “Except without the part where 'pranks' imply harmless.”
Lani nodded. “So the guy probably got some help and information. But that's not what's really bothering me."
"Let me guess, that would be your trigonometry homework for next year?"
Lani sighed. "Smartass. Okay, first, I already took trigonometry last year."
"Of course you did."
"I'm really looking forward to differential calculus."
"Of course you are."
"Second, and more importantly, it's not just that Robin Goodfellow is involved. Sure, that's bad. In fact, if a mortal has something that will get that kind of help, it's probably really big, but let's think smaller. If you have one of the world's most famous and apparently most powerful faeries on your side, and you have big plans to cause chaos, what do you do?"
"I hadn't really thought about it, why?"
"Because he has. He's thought this through, every step. If what he was doing was easy, the standard wouldn't have stayed there for so many centuries, and the wights would have gotten up before now. Yes, they've had undead incursions, but not these particular undead. It takes research and planning. I mean, how do you even get a hold of Robin Goodfellow, anyway? I've lived around this my whole life, and I certainly wouldn't know."
"Okay, so he's like you would be if you were a mad scientist or something."
"Mad engineer," Lani said.
"I'm sorry, what?"
"Most mad scientists aren't really scientists. They're not testing any theories. They're just building death rays. They're mad engineers."
"Okay, okay, so I stand corrected. Now, what were you saying before?"
"Okay, so he has Robin Goodfellow working for him, or with him, or something. And as soon as a wight gets away, Robin is right after us. Why?"
"Because he thought it would be fun?"
"On Robin's side, maybe. But with the market on, there must be a thousand fun things he could be doing. I think it was more intentional than that. We're wild cards. He thinks he has everything else planned, so he had to mess with us."
"You really think so?"
"There's plenty of people more powerful than us out there. Someone that careful isn't going to go mess with Balor's stuff if he doesn't have something to cover himself. He obviously knows how to get into Faerie, and he knows pixies and their ways of finding things.” Lani looked vaguely apologetic as Ashling shuddered. “Maybe sprites too. If he couldn't counter those, they'd have found him already."
"Now I'm way more worried than I was. Why do you need to figure these things out in so much detail?"
Lani took one hand off the wheel, a rare gesture for her, to lean to the side and give Megan a one-armed hug. "Because, if I don't, you don't come up with brilliant plans to save the world."
When Space Ship! pulled into Megan's driveway, there was still plenty of time to disable the alarm clock in the hallway. Her mother seemed to have indeed gone straight to bed with a new kind of exhaustion. Megan urged Ashling to be quiet, and to just enter via her bedroom window, just in case, while Ashling urged Megan to remember her lessons about sneaking, before she climbed onto the Count, and they flew directly to Megan's room.
Megan found a snack, took her vitamins, and then got to her room without waking her mother. She sat down on her bed, managing to be too worried to fall asleep, despite physical exhaustion. "So, what now?"
"Now," said the pixie, cheerfully, "We make some music."
"Ashling, we can't wake my mom up," Megan hissed.
Ashling sighed. "First, your grammar is atrocious. Yes, we most certainly can wake your mother. It would be pretty easy. But we shouldn't. We have important work to do. Where is the music book?"
Megan dug around for a bit through her things to remember which hiding place she had it in, finally pulling out the book. "Right here, but I don't see how this is going to help. I can't go... I shouldn't go singing at this hour."
"Who said anything about singing? Well, except Aerosmith, Sesame Street, Bob Seger... the list goes on and on, but no matter what you've heard, you shouldn't be listening to Steven Tyler, except when you should. But not in this case."
Megan sighed. "Okay, okay, so not singing. Then what are we doing with the music book?"
Ashling smiled, wide-eyed, turning pages until she found one of the songs Megan had struggled with. "We're making music. Or rather, we're unmaking some music, so we can make others. Then, at some point, you can sing. But not right now."
Megan stared at the notes to the song, eyes homing in on the F-Sharps in particular. "Will that actually work?"
"I don't know. I've never unmade music before. Okay, okay, so there was one time, but I was drunk, and that tavern song was dangerously non-offensive. But no one remembers that song now, so it's okay. But I've never unmade music and expected it to work for a bard the new way. Nothing to do but give it a shot, though. Good thing you've got a lot of blank paper for recopying on.”
While Ashling spoke, Megan was flipping through the music book. “Ooh! The storm-calling song hasn't got any F#s in it.”
“That's good. The one you tried to use to save all our lives recently does, so break out the pen collection.”
Megan worked with Ashling until she was too exhausted to keep her eyes open, worry or not. Between them, they retooled the counter-magic song, replacing parts of the melody that contained F#s with elements of other songs Ashling knew with similar effects. They planned tests to see if the songs would remain consistent without the original notes as written. Regardless, they weren't able to test the new composition while needing to be silent.
While it had felt like a lot at the time, when she woke up and double checked the music books and her extra paper, Megan found rather less progress, and a lot more doodling in the margins, than she'd remembered. Still, it was something.
Megan had breakfast with her mother, a much less ambitious effort than the day before, with her mother apologizing and citing a headache. Megan assured her that cereal was still perfectly good for breakfast most days and concernedly but chipperly recommended seeing a doctor if the headache went on.
She quietly hoped a reasonable doctor might take her mother off the extreme dosage of the green pills, if her moods had been steadily improving. When they were done with breakfast, including discussion of the concert, Sheila excused herself to get some work done, and Megan headed for the back yard to test the changes.
Ashling practiced moving small objects around, while Megan sang from the new songsheet to see if she could counteract the magic. There was no effect. Megan tried improvising. When this failed, Ashling tried a few suggestions as well. Whether she was basing them on long experience with bards and knowledge of the theories behind magic, or just trying to make Megan test her range with odd notes, sounds, and scales, Megan wasn't sure.
After what felt like a hundred failures, even if it was probably far fewer, Megan finally sat down to catch her breath, while trying to figure out what she was missing.
"Hey, don't look so depressed. We'll get it." Ashling offered, moving up to pat Megan's knee comfortingly.
"We will, but we're kind of in a hurry, and it would be good to maybe be able to do something more helpful."
"You were a lot of help. Think of all the things you did in those fights."
"Sure, but it took forever. Someone could have gotten a lot more hurt while I figured out the right song. And maybe I could have done something about that illusion."
"Maybe, maybe not. But remember what I said about trying too hard and faerie ma
gic? If you keep trying to fret over every detail, the magic won't want to work with you. So, let's try this again. Breathe in, breathe out. Repeat as necessary."
Megan took a few deep breaths, reviewing the original song in her head. Every time she approached the troublesome notes, though, she lost the thread of thought, as if she couldn't even conceive of the sound of an F-sharp, much less sing it. "So, shouldn't it have gone really easily when I was all sleep-depped last night?
"Don't worry, you'll get it. But you need to relax and quit frowning so hard. My Cousin Nessa always had this technique for dark moods, see, she'd—"
Megan jumped up. "That's it!"
Now it was Ashling's turn to look confused. "Yes, it's really helpful, but first, I haven't even said it yet, and second, where are we going to get a horse-drawn carriage and a repeating crossbow?"
Megan blinked, mind going straight to thoughts of medieval drive-bys, before she got it back on track. "No, dark. Like, you know those songs we listened to on the internet, where they take a song, and change the key, and they sound all mournful and creepy, but awesome?"
Ashling nodded. "Not very danceable most of the time, though."
"Sure, but Faerie things do it all the time."
"Dance? Yeah, those are really popular."
"No, I mean that, say, when a guy is wearing a red cap, he could well be a healthy, normal American boy, even if it is '49ers gear. But if it's actually a magical cap dyed with blood, it takes on a much darker tone. Can we do that? Not the blood, the darker parallels. Like, keep the whole song, but put it in a completely different key to get rid of the sharps. Can you help?"
"Can I help drag a millennia-old, rousing Celtic ballad into the internet age and make the part where the prince rescues his true love sound like he's a creepy stalker? You bet!"
Chapter 24: Returning
Space Ship! was back in the driveway at lunchtime. Megan came out with a few pieces of paper in her back pocket. Ashling and the Count entered through one of the back passenger windows, while Megan said goodbye to her mother.
