War for the Oaks (20 page)

Deep it certainly was. As the bike idled at an intersection, Eddi could hear the rush of the water, high with spring, against the bridge pilings. And secrets? She supposed that the conflict they drove toward would become one of them. She hoped her body wouldn't end up as another.

Wind rattled the leaves above them, and the phouka's words seemed to weave in and out of that and the sound of the creek. "One might say that, less than a mile from the Mississippi, the creek reaches a precipice and plunges over it—but that would be shading the truth. The creek has made that precipice, shouldering back against the limestone and wearing it away. The Falls move up the creekbed like a child walking backward against the sun to admire his shadow.

"Once the Falls were called holy. Now its priests are the Army Corps of Engineers and the Minneapolis Park Board, but it is still a shrine, a place of power. It is the city's birthplace and its soul.

"That," said the phouka, in a voice so much more natural that it made Eddi jump, "is why it's the site of the first battle. Control of the Falls brings with it a great deal of magical leverage."

Eddi stopped the bike in the middle of the parkway and turned to look at him. "Leverage? All that loving description, all that—
feeling
—and you sum it up by saying it's got strategic importance?"

"Drive," was all he said.

They passed Lake Nokomis, shining silver-gray in the intermittent moonlight, its beaches like brushed aluminum. Just past Hiawatha, the phouka directed her down a drive and into what a sign declared was Minnehaha Park. She pulled up next to the park administration building and pried off her helmet. "Won't they notice anything tonight?" Eddi asked, poking a thumb toward the door bearing the legend, "Park Police."

The phouka raised an eyebrow at her. "No. They will not." He handed her the black beret.

The sound of running water was a low-pitched thunder; it came to her more through her bones and the soles of her feet than through her ears. The Falls, she supposed, and wondered where they were.

The phouka frowned at the sky. "Rowan and Thorn! Come on," he said sharply, and grabbed her hand. His fingers were cold. He loped her along to a stone wall that bordered the parking lot, and for a moment she wondered if he would go over the top of it. Then she saw a gap, and the top of a heavy iron handrail. They plunged down an old stone stairway, the steps slippery with last fall's leaves. The parking lot lights did nothing for the darkness on the stairs. The air was full of moisture.

They reached a landing, and the phouka grabbed her around the waist and swept her down onto the first step of the next flight of stairs. As he set her on her feet, she saw a line of green light streak along the edge of the landing behind them, climb the stone wall, and course off through the wooded land beyond. A moment later, a low curtain of trembling emerald fire rose from the stripe of green, writhing and flickering like the northern lights in miniature.

"The circle is closed," the phouka whispered. In a steadier voice he added, "A near thing, my primrose. A moment later and we would have been on the wrong side of that. And I would rather hear an Oakman curse than listen to what the Court would have to say then."

"Can't be late to my own funeral," Eddi said, meaning it to sound casual. But she couldn't draw her gaze away from the cool green sheetlightning of the barrier on the stairs. All of the phouka's power, even
his transformations, seemed sleight-of-hand beside it. Bright as it was, it should have tinted everything around it green; but deep darkness still gathered in the lee of the wall, and the woods beyond remained full of impenetrable night. "What is it?" Eddi asked finally.

"I could tell you what it's called, but I suspect that's not what you want to know. It forms a ragged circle around the valley in which the creek runs, from just beyond the top of the Falls down to the Mississippi. It will contain any forces generated here tonight, and keep even the sound of battle within its bounds. The barrier is invisible to passers-by, but they feel a profound disinclination to cross it. And if a park policeman stood on the stairs above at this moment, he would see not so much as a hair of me."

"Would he see me?"

"Yes, but in a very short time, that will be tended to. Air and Darkness, I nearly forgot! Here, face me and close your eyes."

"What? Why?"

"Your ward against glamour, my heart, as I promised you."

She did as he asked. "To begin with a broken promise," she heard him mutter, as if to himself, "that would have been a fine start to the evening's festivities." A fresh, sharp smell filled the night around her, reminding her alternately of sage and thyme and menthol. His light touch on her eyelids made her start, and left behind a trace of something that made the skin feel cool. His finger brushed her nose, then her lips, and each earlobe in turn. He took her hands, turned them palms up, and touched them, and left the tingling feeling there, too.

"A few seconds for that to take effect," he said. "That should do it. Open your eyes, my primrose." She did.

She nearly fell, out of sheer surprise. She saw color and detail around her, where before there had been darkness. But the colors were not the ones the sun brought out; these were dusky, rich, like the shadows in dark-toned velvets. The details were strange, as well. Eddi felt as if she could see the tree trunks from all sides at once. Elements she'd never noticed in her surroundings had become the definitive ones, and the elements she'd thought most important had receded into near obscurity.

"I see why you didn't want me to drive with this," Eddi gasped at last. It was difficult to finish the sentence when she heard her own voice. It sounded more like it did on tape. . . .

"This is—this is really my voice, isn't it?" she said.

"If you mean, are you hearing it as it sounds outside your head, yes. You'll become accustomed to the effects in a few minutes."

The phouka looked like himself, only more so—that was the only way she could describe it.
"You
don't sound any different."

His smile was slow and sardonic. "That, my heart, is because I have never wanted you to think me anything but what I am."

"No, you never have, have you?" She shook her head. "What is it you've done to me, anyway?"

"Do you think you can walk and listen at once?" he sighed.

"I'm not sure," Eddi said. But she found that, strange as her new perceptions were, they never led her astray. If anything, the stairs seemed less treacherous.

"What you're seeing—and hearing, and all the rest of it—is, simply put, the truth," the phouka lectured over his shoulder. "Your senses are now resistant to illusion, preconception, and willful ignorance."

"How does that account for my being able to see in the dark?"

He sighed again, loudly enough that she knew he'd meant her to hear it. "Do you want me to explain it with physics—lumens, refraction, and the components of your eye? I shall not. It is magic. For the purpose at hand, night blindness is a preconception. Will you settle for that?"

"Yes, boss," she said patiently.

"Good. Because there's a great deal I have to tell you, and no time at all in which to do so."

He stopped on the next landing, turned to her, and took firm hold of her shoulders. She couldn't see very far past the surrounding trees, but something about the slope of the land suggested that they might be near the foot of the hillside.

"Look at me," the phouka said, giving her a little shake, "and pay the closest attention, my sweet. You are about to submit yourself to a ritual of great wonder and not a little terror. You will be asked to do and say many strange things. Balk at none of them." His gaze wandered from hers, and stopped at her shoulder. He seemed to become aware for the first time that his hand was there. A little too quickly, he let go and tucked his hands in his jacket pockets.

"And try, if you can," he continued sternly, "to seem a woman under a glamour. There's no hope that such a masquerade can go undetected for long, but . . ."

"But?"

The phouka shrugged. "I have done the unthinkable in giving the ointment to you. Whether it is unpardonable as well will depend on how well you carry your part of the ceremony tonight. So please, my sweet, even if you can't pretend dazzlement, go through with it all no matter what it may be."

Eddi heard the edge of desperation in his voice, at odds with his casual posture. "I said I would, didn't I? If I wasn't going to, dummy, I wouldn't be here." Her words didn't sound as light as she'd meant them to be—or perhaps it was only the effect of the phouka's ointment on her hearing.

"Well," he said softly, "that brings me promptly to my last three bits of counsel. Tell no lies tonight, to anyone; do not give your word lightly; and do not break it. Lies and broken oaths are weapons in the hands of your enemies. And in the dance we dance tonight, there's no knowing who the enemy is."

Then he turned from her and strode off down the stairs. She settled the black beret on her head, straightened her own back, and followed him.

When she got below the trees, she saw them. They milled restlessly in the steep-sided bowl of land before her, and at first she perceived them only as the many-celled organism of an army. Then faces and bodies separated themselves from the mass.

There was a shrunken, brown figure, too lean and wrinkled to identify as male or female, who wore nothing but a knee-length tunic of rough leather. It carried a wooden cudgel as long as it was, and possibly twice as heavy, and watched her with bright, black, hostile eyes.

Eddi couldn't tell the sex of the next creature, either, any more than she could tell at a glance the sex of a cat. It had short fur the color of toffee and a long-nosed, chinless face. It was squatting on its haunches on a fallen tree, cleaning the curving edge of something that looked like a wooden sickle. When Eddie met its eyes (large, without whites, and bright blue), it ran a long pink tongue over its lips.

A quick motion at the edge of her vision was all the warning she had. Then something white the size of her hand flapped across her face and caught heavily in her hair. She stumbled backward and nearly tripped over the last step. Her hair swung in front of her eyes, and with it a feral white face with a nimbus of cobweb hair, milky wings, a long spidery white hand that reached out and pinched her nose—the thing launched itself into the air with a fierce kick to her chin, and
she recognized it as a creature like the one the phouka had summoned to her windowsill.

A trill of laughter sounded ahead of her, breathtakingly sweet and cold. It was laughter at her expense, from a slender, pale young man whose brown hair was tucked behind his pointed ears. Then he turned his head a little, and Eddi decided she'd been wrong; it was a young woman. With a last taunting gesture, the young woman looked like a man again, and Eddi was relieved when he/she turned his/her back and wandered into the crowd.

There
was
a crowd. They gathered at the foot of the hill, some perching on the few picnic tables that dotted the grass. Eddi saw bestial figures, hulking-shouldered and heavy-headed. She saw ethereal ones that glimmered like moonlight on wet grass. She saw uncounted pairs of eyes, all watching her with unfriendly curiosity, with cold fascination. She cursed the phouka's ointment that enabled her to see them all in the dark.

Even as she thought of him, the phouka was at her side. His face was immobile with the effort of keeping his thoughts off it. But his body betrayed him; there was eloquence in the way he held out his hand to her, not as a command but as a courtesy offered to an honored guest.

There's no knowing who the enemy is
, the phouka had said. Now he stood among her supposed allies, his own kind, as defiant as a prisoner of war. To the rest of the Seelie Court, she was the next best thing to the angel of death; she understood their chilly looks. She wished she could make as much sense out of the phouka. She laid her hand in his as regally as she could manage, and he guided her through the sullen throng.

As the crowd thinned, Eddi could see what the phouka was leading her toward, and the sight made her steps falter.

There were fifteen or twenty of them between the two elms that grew on the grassy mound. All of them were human-shaped and human-featured, but she would never have mistaken them for ordinary men and women. They were tall, slender, and preternaturally graceful; they radiated beauty like a blinding light that seared the eyes and scattered the wits. Their attire was splendid and fanciful. On their clothing and hands, gold and silver flashed, and the many lucent colors of faceted jewels.

A terrible longing swelled in Eddi as she watched them, like a balloon being inflated painfully in her chest. Her vision distorted with tears, and she blinked them quickly away. She had no idea what she longed
for
; but she felt as if the memory of that glittering assembly would remain with her forever, and the rest of the world would look dim and blurred beside it.

At the foot of the mound, the phouka dropped to one knee and drew her down next to him. She vaguely noticed that she'd knelt on a stone. The phouka squeezed her hand, and she turned to find him, head bowed, watching her out of the corner of his eyes. Then a clear, low voice sounded above them, speaking a language Eddi didn't know, and she looked up.

Perhaps she was under a glamour after all. Nobody could be as beautiful as this. Wide-set, sloping eyes of peridot-green, dark red hair that spilled over one shoulder in a thick waist-length plait, a white inverted triangle of a face with none of the ruddiness that should have accompanied that hair . . . Eddi remembered words that Willy had sung the night before.

True Thomas he pulled off his cap
And bowed him low down to his knee
"All hail, thou mighty Queen of Heaven,
Your like on earth I ne'er did see. "

For a giddy moment, Eddi wanted to ask this woman if she was the one in the song. But the answer might be yes, and she didn't want to know it.

The red-haired woman wore a fitted jacket of velvet and satin, in a green so pale it was almost white. It was embroidered all over with silver and pearls, and her close-fitting white pants were trimmed with silver down the seams. The silhouette was popular with avant-garde French designers. The effect was that of a padded doublet and hose. A short black velvet cape hung like a partial eclipse from one shoulder, fastened with silver and emeralds.