War for the Oaks (40 page)

Eddi went into the bedroom to dress. The phouka's costume from the night before was gone.
I'll never have to pick up his dirty socks
, she thought. Then she noticed that her clothes were gone, as well. She opened the closet and found them there, the skirt clean and pressed, the black velvet blouse unmarked by last night's rain. Meg, of course. She fingered the velvet and nodded.

She pulled on a jade-green boat-necked T-shirt and baggy trousers of white cotton, and went to see what the phouka was doing.

He was just coming out of the kitchen with a plate and two forks. He'd conjured up a pair of tight paisley jeans but no shirt. Eddi paused to admire the shape of him, compact and slender, wide-shouldered and narrow-hipped and muscular without bulk.

The plate was full of omelette. "Eat hearty," the phouka said and handed her a fork. "You won't regret you did."

She paused over the food, stabbed by a little blade of guilt. What did Willy have for breakfast today? The phouka looked up at her swiftly, as if he'd seen her hesitation and understood.

"Eat," he said. "It's all you can do, just now."

She nodded and took a bite. "Did Meg leave this?"

"Mm-hm."

"But it's still hot."

"I know," he said, with wicked amusement. "It's magic."

"Phooey." Then she realized that the centerpiece on the table was a little paper airplane, light green. "What's it say?"

"It says that our presence is requested in Loring Park, at the fountain, in half an hour. So eat up."

"Hmph," she said, but she did.

The day was clear and hot, and owed nothing to the past night's thunderstorm. They walked the few blocks to Loring Park. It was a shallow, grassy scoop of land with a meandering ornamental pond in the bottom, an arched wooden bridge, two pretty stuccoed park buildings, a couple of tennis courts, an unroofed bandstand—and the fountain. It bloomed at the edge of the park like a white dandelion head made of water. There were no old men on the benches there, no kids playing on the wall—an unnatural state. Then she saw three figures on the other side. The details were blurred by the curtain of spray, but she knew them by their bearing, and by the uncanny air that was always a part of them. She stepped forward to greet the Queen of the Seelie Court and her honor guard.

The queen wore her customary pale green in a short tank dress, with a wide white leather belt studded with silver. A silver maple leaf, the size of the real thing, hung from one of her earlobes. Her bloodred hair was loosely clubbed at the nape of her neck. Oberycum was dressed in a beige linen suit and a dark green silk T-shirt, and looked as if even so elegant a compromise chafed him. Nothing about him was quite appropriate to modern dress. The other member of the queen's company, a man of the Sidhe with striking deep-gold hair, wore a black muscle shirt, camo-print parachute pants, and mirrored sunglasses. Eddi wanted to ask him where he'd left his Uzi.

The queen gave them a stiff nod as they came up. The phouka showed no inclination to kneel; perhaps the meeting was informal.

"Good afternoon," Eddi said, not knowing what else to do. "How did you manage to get the place all to yourselves?"

"A work of no great moment," the queen said, and gestured to Oberycum. He raised one hand, as if signaling a waiter. The wind
changed direction, grew stronger, and water from the fountain spattered the benches on the opposite side.

"Uh-huh," said Eddi. "I'll remember that next time I'm on a crowded bus." She wondered at her own rudeness, and tried to subdue it.

"You urged us to decide quickly on the matter of Willy Silver," the queen said, her face and voice composed. "We have done so. You need concern yourself no longer."

Eddi blinked. "Does that mean you're going to give up Como Park after all?" She was dismayed, but it was the sort of grand gesture she'd come to associate with Faerie.

"No," said the queen. An expression, or the shadow of one, crossed her face and was gone, before Eddi could tell what it was. Beside her, the phouka shifted his weight nervously.

"What
are
you going to do?"

"You have not the right to question us," the queen replied, too quickly. Eddi felt a flutter in her nerves, and knew she was hearing bad news. "Your choices are not ours, you have responsibility for no one but yourself."

All the pieces fell together in Eddi's head. They must have done the same for the phouka; there was dread and denial in his face. "You're going to give him to her, aren't you?"

"Do you censure us for that? Is it not the judgment of mortal rulers, that for the good of the greater number, the few must sometimes suffer? I have but taken my example from your kind. Do you say that it is a bad one, an unjust one?"

She had seen the queen in the grip of anger. This, too, was anger, but with something else in the mix—a core of pain. Eddi felt no fear of her, no awe. If anything, she pitied her. So bound by the past, by her heritage, that she was half-blind . . . "Someday," Eddi said, fighting the distraction of her own thoughts, "I should talk to you about mortal rulers. Have you sent word to the Unseelie Court yet?"

"It is not," said the queen in a glacial voice, "your place to ask."

Eddi made a fist and took a deep breath. "What if I told you I could do something about it? Would it be my place then?"

The phouka looked quickly at her, then looked down. The queen studied her narrowly. "And
can
you do aught to mend this? Be warned, we'll not countenance idle talk now."

"In other words, put up or shut up? If you've already told the Unseelie Court that you won't deal with them, I can't do anything at all."

"We have sent no message," the Lady said grudgingly.

"How many of your people know you've decided this?"

"All who know stand within this circle now."

"Good. Make sure it stays that way." In the back of her head was a horrified voice telling her to behave in the presence of the Lady, but she hadn't time to listen. "If anyone asks, say that you haven't decided yet. Will you promise me that?"

"To what purpose?" asked the queen.

"If you tell her you won't give her the park, she'll kill Willy. Boom. She's got no reason to keep him around."

"She will kill him all the same, in the end. What can you accomplish by the delay, but the extension of his suffering?"

Eddi looked into that cold, proud face and saw a strange thing: not hope, not quite yet, but a plea for some reason to hope.

"I'll tell you as soon as it's safe," Eddi said. "Do you promise not to send any word to her?"

The queen lifted her chin. "You have my promise."

Eddi turned to Oberycum and the Sidhe in the sunglasses. "How about you two?"

Oberycum raised one eyebrow, but finally nodded, and the other man followed his lead.

"Right." She was grinning and wasn't sure why. This was akin to the mania that often grabbed her on stage, that sometimes led her astray. "I'll be off, then."

"Send us word immediately you are able. You will risk our displeasure else. You are dismissed."

Eddi and the phouka bowed and backed away, a performance that the queen did not stay to watch. She and her retinue strode off toward the trees.

"Come on," Eddi said, and started across the park at a fast walk.

"Mmm." The phouka kept pace with her easily. Not until they'd retraced their route back to the edge of the park did he say, "Very well, my primrose. Will you tell me now what you're up to?"

"Sure. You're going to get word to Hedge that we're meeting at three, and we're getting the bike and going to the rehearsal space."

"Eddi . . .
do
you have a plan?"

"Hell, no."

"Then what, by seven leaves from seven holy oaks, was all of that?"

He was as exasperated now as she had ever been with him, in their early days together. But she didn't have time to enjoy that properly. "No, I don't have a plan. Yet. But I'm damn well going to have a plan, if I can keep the Lady from cutting her own throat first. If I told her I didn't have any good ideas, but would she please do this as a favor to me, do you think she would have listened?"

"No," the phouka admitted.

"Tell me what's happening with Willy right now." The phouka frowned, and she added quickly, "I don't mean gory details. Where's he being held? How do they manage to hold him at all, given that he's got all the powers of the Sidhe?"

For a moment he was silent, thinking. "The difficulty, beloved, is in the 'where.' Faerie is outside the boundaries of this world. And even if you could cross into it without the heavy price such a crossing entails, you would have to find him still."

"Could you find him?"

"No, worse luck. In Faerie there are layers of being and place. There are lands encysted in other lands, undiscoverable. Somewhere in all of that she holds Willy prisoner, and not the Lady herself could find him without the Dark Queen's cooperation."

"Then he won't be in reach again until Como Park, when she pops back in at the Conservatory. Damn. What else? How does she hold him?"

He glanced at her, and she saw some of her excitement in him. "The Dark Queen's power is greater than any in Faerie save that of the Lady. Her magic can control Willy's, and her strength can keep him weak."

"What if you don't want to go head to head with her? Is there anything you can use against her?"

"Several things, depending on the circumstances. Rowan, salt, various herbs. But none of them will hold her long. All that can truly bind her is superior power, or her own sworn word."

"We may not need very long. We'll see."

"Tell me, love—you're determined to make no mention of any of this to the Lady?"

Eddi stopped in the middle of the sidewalk and shook her head at
him. "You're the one who said there's a security problem in the Seelie Court."

"Yes, but—the Lady and her consort?" He raised his eyebrows.

Eddi shrugged. "What she doesn't know, she can't veto. Now, how do we get hold of Hedge?"

He looked smug. "I attended to that this morning."

"You're good, did you know that?"

"Oh yes."

Eddi cleaned up the signs of what had happened in the practice room. The phouka had offered to do it, but she'd turned him down; he watched, concerned, while she went about it. The brisk progression from task to task helped her restlessness. She bundled up the sheet, took it downstairs to the parking lot, and stuffed it in the Dumpster. She set the mike stand up and tested the mike in it. She opened all the windows to blow the burnt smell away. And she changed the broken string on Willy's guitar.

The replacement came from Willy's guitar case, though opening it seemed like an invasion of his privacy. Were she to look in Hedge's case, she knew, she would find the plush unmarked and barely crushed, the hinge on the inside compartment still stiff, and nothing in it but, perhaps, an unopened set of spare bass strings. Willy's guitar case had more character.

The lining was torn down one side and threadbare in most places. It held a litter of dog-eared papers written over in a compact, ornamented hand that Eddi knew must be Willy's. She couldn't resist looking at them quickly. For the most part they were song lyrics and the accompanying chord progressions, with notes on the lead parts. Some of the songs were Eddi's. On one of them, in the margin next to a verse, there were a pair of exclamation marks. Symbolizing what? Amusement? Surprise? Pleasure? On another there was a quickly drawn staff with three measures' worth of notes on it. She played them in her head and found they were the lead riff she'd suggested for that spot. Next to it he'd written, "Yes."

There were guitar picks scattered throughout, some of them broken. In the accessory compartment she found a jumble of strings in their paper packets; two empty packets, crumpled but never thrown out; a yellow newspaper clipping about a bluegrass festival in West Virginia;
an address in Detroit written on a napkin in blue ballpoint; a chrome bottleneck; three dimes; a rhinestone earring; and a battered bluejay feather.

"What have you found?" asked the phouka over her shoulder.

"Mostly that I don't know anything about him." She sighed, chose a string that seemed like the right gauge, and closed the case. She pulled Willy's guitar into her lap and stripped off the broken string.

The phouka dropped onto the couch. For a while he seemed absorbed in studying the ceiling; when he spoke, he sounded pensive. "Sometimes I think he's the best of a bad lot. He's the youngest of the Sidhe, you know, and one of the very few native to this country."

"He told me things about himself, when we first . . . Were they true?"

"I don't know what he said, but I imagine so. He has spent a long time out of Faerie, traveling, living alone or among humankind. For the Sidhe, he is a puzzle—not a disgrace, but full of things that seem alien to them. They think his concerns are too much those of mortal folk."

"Shows you how much they know about mortals," Eddi muttered.

The phouka smiled. "It's true that Willy has learned the surface of mortal life, and missed much of the substance. But not all of it. He is hunting something, and he doesn't hunt it in Faerie. However much that may distress his kin, I've taken it as a hopeful sign."

Eddi tuned the new string to her guitar, and tried a few chords. Willy's axe was an excellent one, with good electronics and action. Other than that, it was a perfectly ordinary guitar. "You mean, that the next generation will rule better than this one? Just because one of 'em is restless and hangs out with mortals?"

"If the failing of this generation is complacency, yes."

"I wouldn't say your queen is complacent right now."

"Now," he said softly, "neither would I."

They heard people on the stairs. It was Carla, Dan, and Hedge, all at once. Eddi saw Carla look around the room for things out of place.

"Have a seat, guys," Eddi told them. "The news is pretty strange."

She told them about her meeting with the Lady. Dan looked grim. Hedge looked pale and sick. "They're gonna let him
die?"
Carla wailed, as if the Seelie Court had failed to consider the consequences of the decision, and by sheer volume, she could remind them.