Summer (17 page)

“Water’s getting louder,” Dan said when they stopped to rest. The path was just wide enough to sit if Summer didn’t mind soaking her jeans completely through. She hated the idea of wet denim clinging to her thighs and butt. Her feet hurt so badly she caught herself eyeing the carpet of spiny plants, wondering if she could possibly somehow crouch without getting pierced.

Lolo peered over the side of the cliff. “Are we getting closer?” he asked wistfully. “Summer, send your light down. I want to see. We’ve got to be getting nearer to the bottom.”

Summer started to say she wasn’t sure she could keep starlight Gathered at a distance, but then she didn’t have to because Hannah sent her own glittering orb twice around Lolo’s head and then darting over the side of the hill and down. Lolo gasped in delight and Summer had to suck her tongue to keep from doing the same. Hannah showed her pointed teeth in a mocking grin.

“It’s easier, here, don’t you agree?” the changeling said. “Like sparkling wine in my head, in my lungs. If not for the sword I’d be bursting with it.”

Summer didn’t respond. Her own lungs ached with too much walking. The beginnings of a stress headache itched behind her nose. Her magics felt as unreliable as always and she knew she didn’t have the practice needed to make starlight dance and pulse and whirl the way Hannah had.

Frowning, she turned her back on the changeling and joined Dan and Lolo at the edge of the cliff, standing sideways so as not to smack them both with
Buairt’s
unwieldy length.

“Oh,” she said. “Is that the bottom?” It still seemed very far away.

“Treetops,” Dan decided. “We must be above a forest. And, look, there, that sparkle? There’s the river we’re hearing. Not a large one, I think. Still, it’s water. Hopefully fresh.”

“Oh,” Summer said again. “Water.” It hadn’t occurred to her before then, even as she’d licked her dry lips and sweated. She’d been too worried about the bones in the grass and the blisters on her feet to pay attention to her growing thirst. “We’ll need water.”

“And food,” Lolo agreed. “Willa’s rolls and bacon won’t last us forever.”

Hannah’s starlight bobbed up and down against the sheer hillside, tracing the switchback ahead.

“We’re walking a tributary,” the changeling said. “Look. It gets steeper and faster before the end. It will be slippery, dangerous. Summer had the right idea. Better to wait until the sun comes up.”

“We could be standing here forever,” Lolo protested. “It’s just a little waterfall. Where’s your sense of adventure?”

“Dawn’s near,” Dan said. “Moon’s gone down behind the hill. Hannah’s right. For all we know the water gets deeper as we go. Too difficult to tell in this light. We’d be smarter to wait.”

“No way,” Lolo groaned. He looked at Summer, a challenge.

“We wait,” Summer decided, not only because she knew Hannah and Brother Dan were right, but because she thought if she had to walk any further right that minute she’d start to cry. “We’re going to get wet, aren’t we?”

“Soaked,” Hannah replied. She sounded viciously pleased.

“At least the air’s nice and warm,” Summer said. Then she sat. Cold, dirty water immediately trickled over her ankles and swirled up the legs of her pants. She had to hold
Buairt
in both hands up at chest height to keep it from getting wet. But her miserable feet practically gasped in relief.

Ignoring Lolo’s giggle and Dan’s sigh, Summer closed her eyes and waited for the sun to rise on
Tir na Nog
.

At first she wasn’t impressed. Dawn came to fairyland slowly and in stages of gray and pink. They heard the birds first, before even the first faint light crept across their hillside. Summer, who was sitting still in the muddy stream,
Buairt
balanced safely on her bent knees, opened her eyes at the first piercing birdcall. She was prepared to be frightened or impressed by alien plumage or even a gigantic specimen, but the fat grey birds cooing and roosting on the bromeliads looked an awful lot like Central Park pigeons.

Brother Dan was still standing. He saluted the sunrise by sketching the sign of the cross in the air: spectacles, testicles, wallet, watch. Then he took a deep breath of morning air and let it out in a slow hum. Lolo grunted from where he sat on his heels almost on top of the bromeliads but didn’t open his eyes. Hannah hugged herself tightly and shivered even though the air was heating as early morning broke.

The pigeons made a racket as they roamed the hillside. Summer gave up on dozing and staggered upright. Mud and water clung to her jeans and threatened to drag them down off her hips. She tugged them into place and adjusted her sword and then joined Dan, blinking. Her feet squished unhappily in her shoes.

Together Summer and the friar watched the light spread. Dan was right; there was a forest beneath their mountain, green treetops as far as Summer could see. And there was the waterfall, scarlet in the new day, frothing merrily as it fell toward the forested valley.

“We’re in a bowl,” Summer realized. There were more mountains across, and on either side. They were high and sharp and dangerous looking, capped with white.

“Yes,” Dan agreed. “Although it’s difficult to tell for certain from here. Distance, like moonlight, tricks the eye.”

“It’s just forest,” Summer said.

“Did you expect skyscrapers and highways?” Hannah squelched through the mud and looked down into the valley. She made a rude sound. “The fay Court is always moving. You’ll not find it rooted in one place for long.”

“Then how are we supposed to find it?” Summer demanded. “How are we supposed to know where to look?”

Hannah shrugged. Brother Dan pulled on his lower lip and regarded the treetops without expression. Summer felt panic swelling like vomit in her gut. Then Lolo pulled himself upright with a curse and a groan.

“How do you find your way around any place when you’re a tourist?” He hoisted his backpack from its perch atop a cluster of bromeliads and swung it over one shoulder. “You ask.”

“Ask?” Summer wondered. The sun hadn’t yet shown itself but dawn was almost a solid thing, a pastel brush bringing the tiniest details to attention. The pigeons, she saw now, had iridescent beaks and red-tipped tail feathers. “Ask who?”

“Them.” Lolo pointed away and to the left where the waterfall settled and widened into a blushing ribbon and disappeared into the trees. A plume of white smoke rose between the water and the forest, orange against blue and green. “Whoever’s down there, frying up breakfast.”

“There’s someone down there!” Hannah’s mouth made an ’oh’ of surprise. Then she whirled away and started down the path, slipping and splashing as she went. Lolo tossed Summer an excited grin and trotted after her, backpack slapping against his spine.

“Well,” Dan said, resigned. “He’s got a point.” He nudged Summer gently forward. “But better stop those two before they give us away.”

He needn’t have worried. They were still miles above even the waterfall. Lolo and Hannah tired quickly, eagerness muted by the downward slope and the water rising around their ankles. The light grew stronger and the sun finally burst into view between the eastmost curve of the mountains. As if on cue the pigeons stopped warbling and began to call in an eager, purring chorus, wings flapping. Summer watched the birds out of the corner of her eye, amazed. The fat pigeons in Central Park never spent so much energy on anything.

The sound of the waterfall had grown to a low roar when morning finally slanted across their hillside, flashing on the stream and on the beads in Lolo’s hair and the rubies on
Buairt’s
scabbard. Summer couldn’t hear the pigeons anymore, not past the sound of falling water, but she noticed when the birds took flight all at once, a startling disruption of gray and scarlet.

The bromeliad carpet was blooming, plump red flowers swelling, reaching on great funneled stalks toward the sky, petals opening as if to drink in the new day. The stalks swayed in the still air, twisting of their accord toward the light. The flat, broad leaves rustled, thorns scraping.

“Shit.” Lolo froze and then backpedalled toward Summer. “What the hell, Summer? They’re waking up!” He looked so honestly terrified Summer giggled. “Jesus, don’t laugh. What if they’re—” He lowered his voice to a whisper. “What if those bones—what if the plants—what if they’re
carnivorous
?”

“Keep moving,” Brother Dan suggested. “If they are hungry, you’d make a perfect mouthful.”

Lolo yelped and clutched at Summer’s fingers where they rested on
Buairt’s
hilt. She knew she shouldn’t laugh. His wounded scowl said she’d managed to hurt his feelings. Even Hannah slowed her step as the living carpet continued to wake and stretch, blooming red against the lightening sky.

“Disgusting,” the changeling said. “Worse than Darlene’s specimens.”

“I think they’re gorgeous,” Summer argued, because they were. Alien and dangerous-looking and not like any other flowers she’d seen and that was why, even though their sway and whisper made her heart race and her knees go weak in fear, she thought the stirring bromeliads were the most wonderful thing she’d ever seen.

Five days before Richard’s eighth birthday Bobby was hospitalized for a bedsore gone bad. It was Richard who phoned 911 after the pain of the thing got so impossible that even Bobby’s best narcotics couldn’t provide more than an hour of peace. Bobby spat and swore and threatened to sue the paramedics if they dared lay a finger on his wheelchair but even that little rebellion left him shaking and sweating. So he gave in and let the three men hoist him onto a stretcher, then down the steps to the street, and into the back of their ambulance.

Richard followed the stretcher into the van and curled himself in a corner out of the way, between rattling equipment and the folded jump seat. He propped his chin on his bent knees and wrapped his hands around his ankles and watched as Bobby fussed and groaned. Richard spent the short ride to St. Luke’s trying to guess whether the cords and tubes and beeping machines were of any good to a man with a weeping sore on his ass and too much oxy already in his blood.

The ride-along medic didn’t notice Richard because Richard didn’t want to be noticed. Neither did the ER attendant with the tired face and pictures of puppies on her blue scrubs. A busy doctor and her young assistant eventually took a brief look at Bobby’s coccyx and a longer look at his blood work and soon after that Bobby had a room in Detox.

Richard tagged along because he was curious and reluctantly hopeful, but it became clear when he saw the hospital room that Bobby would do a runner once he could sit in his chair again without pain. First, there was a painting of Jesus on the wall beneath the silent television, and Bobby had no place in his life for Jesus. And second, it wasn’t a private room: there was an old man sitting in a chair by the window, hooked up to a placidly beeping machine.

Bobby hated people even more than he disliked Jesus.

There was a tray of food on a rolling table near what must have been the old man’s bed, because the nurses lifted Bobby into the other cot, the one closest to the door, before they pulled the separation curtain. Bobby yelped and whimpered as the nurses turned him on his side so as to protect his recently bandaged ass. Richard waited until Bobby settled into heavy breathing and a light doze and the nurses went off to do more exciting things. Then he took a square of Jell-O and a carton of OJ off the forgotten tray.

He had to slip past the curtain to do so, but the old man in the chair by the window didn’t notice. Instead of crossing back to Bobby’s side of the hospital room, Richard sat on the floor with his stolen dinner. He ate the Jello-O slowly, savoring each cherry-flavored bite. When he was finished with the square he sipped juice out of the cardboard container. While he ate he eyed up the old man and tried to guess what he was in for: pills, like Bobby, or booze, like Derida from the corner market? Eventually Richard noticed the purple marks and old scars up and down the man’s right arm, not the arm attached to the IV machine but the other one, the one resting limp in the old man’s lap, and decided two things: the man was scram-handed, just like Richard himself, and he was the kind of addict who liked to shoot up.

Eventually Richard grew bored. He closed his eyes and recited pi in his head as far back as he could remember and then he dozed. When he woke again he had a stitch in his neck from sleeping against the wall. Bobby was snoring and the old man was reading a book.

Richard only really paid attention to the book because it had what looked like a drawing of a very old train, or maybe parts of a very old train, on the cover and Richard liked trains, especially the above ground trains that groaned as they hauled freight past Virginia Avenue.

The book was called
Simple Model Steam Engines.
Richard knew about steam trains from television cartoons. Just from the title and cover Richard thought the book might be even more interesting than Thomas the Tank Engine. He’d outgrown cartoons just a year earlier. Books were quieter and easier to squirrel away. Richard was learning to love books, so long as he could sound out the long words.

Eventually the old man with needle holes in his left arm shuffled to his cot and went to bed. As soon as the man was asleep, Richard stole
Simple Model Steam Engines
and took it with him to the hospital cafeteria.

Thanks to the
draiochta
William kept secured in a flask in his pack, pain was a distant irritation. Richard knew agony lurked on the edge of awareness, a monster waiting to pounce and shake and rend, but the sickly-sweet concoction the wright made him swallow at regular intervals kept that threat at bay. William was careful with the draught, either because too much of the drink would send Richard into a complete stupor, or because the medicine was too dear to waste.

Richard thought it was the latter because as it was he spent more time drifting in Water-Bearer’s grasp than climbing under his own power. They hadn’t managed to sever his forearm without blood loss, and with the blood loss came shock, and it seemed even
sidhe
magic couldn’t prevent that entirely.

Richard lay with his ear against Water-Bearer’s chest and stared between dark feathers at the ceiling. He counted steps by the lurch of the
sluagh’s
hips. The ceiling brushed the tips of Water-Bearer’s wings. The passage was more tunnel than corridor, the walls smooth and the steps shallow. Aine’s lamp shed an orange bubble six steps up and six behind, and beyond that the world was black. Water-Bearer hadn’t bothered to try and conjure more light and Richard was glad of it.

He didn’t have two hands to cup and grow the light, not anymore.

As he watched the ceiling drift by Richard knew fury lurked along with agony in that distant, muffled corner of his head. If not for the lassitude of the
draiochta
in his system he thought he would have tried to kill Water-Bearer and William twelve times over, rip them apart with his one remaining hand and his teeth together, kicking and clawing and screaming until they had no choice but to end him.

He wanted to howl now but his body betrayed him with hiccups and giggles, little mirthless squeaks of laughter that reminded him of Bobby on a bad day.

Fifteen hundred steps and they stopped to rest. Water-Bearer’s heart was pounding against Richard’s ear. Aine was breathing in shallow pants. Only William seemed unaffected. The wright took Aine’s lamp and held it over Richard and Water-Bearer. Richard looked away from the ceiling and into the flame.

“Not still bleeding, at least,” William sighed. “Cautery’s holding, for now. I’ll check under the bandages next time we rest. He’s lucky. Any longer and we’d not have gotten it all.”

“He’ll never forgive you,” Aine said between breaths. “He’ll never forgive us. Richard works with his hands. He builds things, beautiful things.”

“As do I.” William moved away, taking the lantern flame with him. Richard blinked. “He’ll adjust. If he lives.”

“If he lives,” Water-Bearer said. “If they catch us, he won’t. None of us will. Keep climbing.”

Richard wanted to ask what they’d done with his arm, whether they’d left it behind for the
sluagh
Prince to find, there at the bottom of the Long Stair. He wondered if the Prince and its army would stop and look and guess at that lonely severed limb or whether they would sweep past and over Richard’s lost flesh and bone without a backward glance, trample it with claw and tentacle.

He shivered and giggled between clenched teeth. Water-Bearer adjusted Richard’s weight against its front and began to climb upward.

Two thousand more steps but then Richard began to lose count because pain was waking to agony in the stump of his elbow and each jolt of Water-Bearer’s body was lightning through his left side. Richard clenched his jaw. He stared hard at the ceiling, but he couldn’t keep silent tears from overflowing, nor move to wipe them away. Eventually Water-Bearer noticed and called a halt.

They arranged themselves as best they could on the steep stairs. Water-Bearer crouched sideways between two risers, spreading its great wings for balance.  The
sluagh
cradled Richard between foul- smelling thighs as William rummaged in his pack for
draiochta
. Aine sat on the step above Richard, lantern extended. She wouldn’t look at what remained of Richard’s elbow, but she eyed Water-Bearer’s rotting feet with honest fascination.

The
sluagh
hissed at her attention and curled its toes but couldn’t hide its ruined flesh away without the use of its wings. Richard felt a twitch of embarrassed sympathy and quickly squashed it with remembered hatred.

“Drink.” The wright tilted his flask against Richard’s mouth. The
draiochta
was sweet and thick as honey and gritty against Richard’s teeth. He wished he had the courage to spit the medicine back into William’s face, but the growing agony in his side frightened him into swallowing eager gulps.

“Slowly,” Aine cautioned. She set a light hand on Richard’s brow, petting gently like one might soothe a dog or a child. She liked him well enough, Richard knew. He thought she even considered him a friend. He supposed she was grateful he’d come after her through Winter’s Gate. But as he met her concerned stare he couldn’t help but feel a gulf stretched between them.

For all she was human Aine had grown up in the fay Court, had thought of herself as
sidhe
for most of her life. D.C. had shaken her, Hannah’s appearance had filled her with self-doubt, the
sluagh
army had frightened her, but here on the steps beside Water-Bearer and William she seemed to grow straight and solid, more herself than Richard had yet seen her.

She was comfortable, Richard realized. Water-Bearer and the wright didn’t alarm her the way automobiles and apartment buildings and the Metro trains had. Even as she petted his brow and made sounds of sympathy, he thought she was remembering he was a lesser being, mortal and fleeting.

William took the flask away and scraped missed droplets of medicine from Richard’s chin with clockwork fingers. Richard turned his face and closed his eyes so he wouldn’t have to see Aine’s pitying expression.

“Another hour,” William said. “Maybe two, until we reach the spire.”

Water-Bearer shifted beneath Richard’s cheek, feathers rustling.

“They’ll climb quickly,” it said. “I’ll need time, once we reach the top.”

Richard could feel the wright looming, blocking the light of Aine’s lantern. The gears in his fingers clicked in the silence. Richard cracked one eye and saw William was tapping that unnatural hand against his pack in absent thought.

“It’s the Long Stair to the spire or no way at all,” William muttered. “Block the Stair, you’ll have time.”

Water-Bearer coughed in dry amusement. Its wings shifted in pointed reminder. William wasn’t deterred.

“Even if your brothers and sisters are yet strong enough to reach the very top of
Reilig na Rí
on tattered pinions—which I much doubt—last I stood in the spire there was a distinct lack of windows. In fact, the space is remarkable for its paucity of view.”

“So?”

“So, you’re not thinking clearly. Or you’re thinking of only one thing.”

Water-Bearer shifted again. Its feathers tickled Richard’s brow. Richard was growing used to the
sluagh
’s pungent perfume. His stomach no longer rolled when the tentacles in the monster’s empty eye socket twitched. If Richard squinted past the obvious horror of Water-Bearer’s mutations, the features behind the mottled flesh were sharp and fine, almost lovely.

It licked its lips, wormy tongue rolling, and then said: “Oh. Aye, of course. We seal the Stair.”

Aine lifted her lantern and looked between the wright and the
sluagh
. “You said that magic was lost to you.”

“Not lost,” Water-Bearer said. “Only lesser. Weak and dying, as we are.” It shifted and straightened, forcing Richard to sit more upright against its chest. The
draiochta
was working its magic, muffling his pain, so Richard didn’t protest. It took an effort but he managed to open both eyes wide and watch as the
sluagh
set three talon-tipped fingers on Aine’s step and whispered.

The surface of the step stretched upward when Water-Bearer lifted its hand, thick strings of dark taffy clinging to each finger. Then the
sluagh
hissed and grunted, and the strings stopped growing and turned brittle. At last they cracked away to dust.

“Useless.” Water-Bearer snorted in disgust.

“Without blood,” William corrected.

Aine set her lantern on the step and reached for her knife. “Use mine,” she said. “It’s what you’ve meant to do all along.”

“To open the Gate.” Water-Bearer’s one eye blinked. Its wings shifted again. “Whatever my Prince believes, you’re very small, and human, and the Mending magic is fading in your veins. Even with Richard beside me I’m afraid to use you up entire before the Gate is sprung.”

William scoffed. “You’ve grown cowardly and cautious. And also forgetful, old man. My blood is as good as any for a small task such as this. Come. We’re wasting time and I don’t want to die on these steps.” The smith dug again in his pack. He pulled forth one of the bowls he’d used to feed Aine and Richard stew. “Hold this, lass. Steady, now.”