War for the Oaks (44 page)

The Dark Queen looked at Eddi, her face full of growing amazement and delight. "Splendid! The challenger has set the terms. Now it's the challenged party's right to name place and weapons."

Eddi had a dreadful certainty that matters had been wrenched from her hands. Then she heard the phouka's voice from behind her.

"Indeed it is. They must, of course, be in agreement with the challenger's terms, but I'm sure you'd no intention of ignoring the words, 'fair fight.' Had you?"

Eddi turned to look at him, and he gave her a pale, drawn smile.
He was still holding his left shoulder. A little blood leaked between his fingers.

The Dark Lady frowned at him, shrugged, and said, "Me? Certainly not. I shall, in fact, be more than generous. Does your band play again soon?" she asked Eddi.

Eddi was suddenly cold and sick. Willy was dead. There was no band.

"First Avenue, July Fourth," she said with a toss of her head.

"Excellent. And would you say that you're better at music than at anything else?"

Eddi could only nod.

"Then surely no one will object to the conditions of my proposed contest." She regarded the phouka coldly. He stared back. She returned her attention to Eddi and smiled. "You will use your music to sway the crowd in your favor. I will use my magic to try to sway them away from you. All right?"

"My God. No. A whole club full of innocent bystanders—"

"I don't propose to maul them. They will be our unwitting, unbiased judges, no more than that."

Eddi's mouth was dry. "If I win, you pack up and leave without a fight?"

"I do." She smiled.

"What happens if I lose?"

The Dark Queen looked past Eddi and raised her eyebrows. "I doubt your allies would consider your loss theirs, would they?"

They were the center of a tight ring of fey folk, Eddi realized. It was Oberycum the queen had glanced at as she spoke; he stood behind Eddi in his battered green-and-gold armor. He shook his head slowly, as if it was a hard thing to do.

"Then I cannot ask the Seelie Court to give up its claim if you lose," the Dark Lady continued. "We'll simply take up where we left off, fighting for our 'poker chips.' I'll be angry, of course, over the waste of time and energy. And if my anger prompts me to some immediate, vengeful act . . . well. No need to worry over that now."

Eddi rubbed her eyes and thought frantically. It was madness to do this. The Queen of Air and Darkness wielded more of the magic of Faerie than anyone but the Lady herself. How could she expect to go up against that power and win?

But she was not going up against it, not really. She had only to
match it with power of her own, of a different kind. The phouka had said that nothing would bind the Dark Lady but superior strength, or her own word. She had been offered that word, if she could win it.

"It's a deal," Eddi said. She heard the murmur of reactions go around the circle, and wondered what they were. "I'll see you on the Fourth." She turned her back, knowing it was an insult. The phouka held out his hand, and they walked out of the circle.

Carla stood just outside it.

"How much did you hear?" Eddi asked.

"Too much. Are you crazy? We can't play First Avenue. Goddammit, Willy is
dead
!"

"We've got bass, drums, keyboard, and guitar," Eddi said savagely. "We've got four good voices. More than a lot of bands have. We're still Eddi and the Fey. And we're going to do this. If you want out of it, get out now."

It was only then that she realized Carla was crying, had been for some time from the looks of it. "If you want me out, you better throw me out," she said, hurt and proud and stubborn.

Eddi shook her head. She started to say several different things at once, and none of them came out. Instead she put her arms around Carla, and Carla put hers around Eddi. They stood in the mud and wept, while the phouka watched over them, and the hosts of Faerie counted their wounded and their dead.

The phouka found someone to tend his shoulder. The outward sign of his injury was a prosaic white sling, but Eddi saw more than that. There was a tension around his eyes and his generous mouth that was not so much pain as the recent memory of it, the fear of it.

"How do you feel?" she asked.

He smiled, a pale version of his usual one. "Disinclined to shrug, but otherwise well enough, considering. We
do
heal quickly."

Eddi heard what he didn't say: "When we heal at all." She looked involuntarily toward the trees, then pulled her gaze away. "Do you feel strong enough to ride for a while?"

He raised his eyebrows. "That depends, my wild heart, on what you want to ride into."

"I just . . . if we go home, I'm going to look around and remember Willy sitting in the living room. And I don't want to do that."

The phouka looked up at the sky. It was still overcast, tarnished silver from the city lights bouncing off the clouds. "I've a fancy to stay out of doors, if you've no objection."

She didn't. They drove aimlessly for a while, making slow progress toward the river. She felt as if she needed to see and touch everything in town, to prove to herself that it was still there, unchanged. Surely something had changed. Unthinkable that she could leave Como Park and find no mark of what happened there on the rest of the world.

They cruised from St. Paul into Minneapolis, through downtown, until they found themselves on the parkway around Lake of the Isles. The grand houses that fronted it were quiet and dark, but their gardens made the air sweet. Eddi was aware of the mud on her, the prickly feeling of dried sweat on her skin. She turned off the parkway on Franklin Avenue and made her way through Kenwood, over the railroad tracks, and onto a half-wooded dead-end street.

The phouka looked around. "Are we lost yet?"

She felt guilty suddenly for dragging him around town. "Would you rather go home?"

He shook his head. "If you're worried about me, love, then be at ease. The open air is better for me than anything else."

"All right. But if you want to leave, tell me."

Eddi led him down a dirt track into the woods. Maybe the world had changed, after all. There was nothing threatening about the darkness under the trees, no menace in the night. It was full of the quiet comfort of silence between friends. It was full of sorrow, too. But that was a bearable ache here, not the sharp anguish that left no room for thought.

Or maybe
, Eddi decided,
it's just me
.

At the end of the track they came out from under the trees, and onto a sand beach. Cedar Lake lay before them.

"Ah," said the phouka softly. Whether it was recognition, pleasure, or something else, Eddi couldn't tell.

They sat on the sand, watching the dull light catch on the windripples until the lake looked like gray corduroy. In the weeds along the shore, frogs and crickets made music. More rarely, a fish would rise and add a watery pop to the mix.

"I want to go swimming," Eddi said.

"Then you should."

She was about to tell him that there was a law against swimming nude. He must have known what she was thinking, because he threw back his head and laughed.

"Ah, my heart, my heart. If you wish to remain unseen, you have only to will it so. You are a creature of Faerie, after all."

She was too tired to question him, and the lure of the water was too strong. She took off her clothes, dropped them on the sand, and walked into the water.

She floated on her back, staring up at the winter-colored sky. The water soaked the dirt from her, tugged at her hair until she could feel it fan out around her head. She wished it could wash her thoughts away as quietly. Memories of Willy kept rising in them. There he was on the edge of her bed, playing her guitar; swaying at the edge of the stage at the Uptown Bar in an ecstatic trance, fiddle under his chin; falling with a studied lack of grace into the couch in the practice room.
We're all immortal until we die
.

Finally she paddled back to shore. The phouka lay on the beach, propped on one elbow, watching her.

"You
are
a creature of Faerie," he said as she stood up in the water. "You're very beautiful."

"What's that word that Meg says at times like this?"

"Havers. But it's not." His voice was soft. "You look more fey than I do—all pale and shining with water, your hair streaming with it, rising from the lake. Yes. You're very beautiful."

She lay down next to him, and the sand stuck to her wet back. Any other time it would have been annoying, but tonight it felt pleasantly abrasive, like a back brush. The phouka rested his head on her stomach, and she stroked his hair.

"Phouka?"

"Mmm?"

"When Stuart . . . when Stuart shot the two of you. I took the gun away from him. What was he so scared of? Why didn't he shoot me, too?"

She felt a shiver go through him. "I'm not certain of the answer to the second question. The answer to the first is, 'You.' "

"He was scared of me?"

"For those few moments, beloved,
I
was afraid of you. But he was not only afraid. Perhaps," he continued, more thoughtfully, "that is the answer to your second question. You shamed him, and he couldn't shoot you."

"Shamed? What do you mean?"

"He saw in you what he might have become, had he been stronger."

She thought about Stuart as she'd last seen him. "What'll happen to him?"

"If you mean, at the hands of the Dark Court, nothing. But I think he's crumbled away inside. What happens to mortals with broken minds?"

Eddi looked down at the phouka. His eyes were open, staring at the sky, and he seemed sad and restless. She asked, "Could he have been stronger? Could it have been him, instead of me?"

"I am not an oracle," he said heavily, "and I'm glad of it. I cannot tell you."

That left silence hanging around them, and a collection of thoughts that neither of them wanted to be alone with. The phouka changed the subject. "Why here?" he asked.

"What do you mean?"

"The city is full of lakes. Why this one, this place?"

"I'm not sure. I guess . . . all the other lakes are so public and civilized. Even this one is, in places. But sometimes you can forget you're in a city at all, here."

"Tell me about it," he said. "Or about anything, I suppose. Chase away the silence for me, love."

She knew what he meant. So she told him, as best she could, about Cedar Lake. She described the quiet, almost rural lawns that bordered one bank. She told him about drifting in a canoe under the summer sun, past white, pink-throated water lilies the size of coffee mugs and wild iris hiding in the weeds like beautiful feral children. She remembered for him the red-winged blackbirds that dived at her when she got too close to the cattail thickets that sheltered their nests. She told him about the turtle she'd watched, soaking up sun on a floating log. It had let her get within reach before it dropped into the water.

As she talked, she felt him relax, saw his eyelids droop. "Asleep?" she said softly.

"No." His voice was low and drowsy. "I was pretending I was a turtle in the sun."

"Good. What kind of bodyguard falls asleep on a beach at night?"

"An out-of-work one."

Eddi raised her head and frowned at him.

"You are entirely safe until you have played First Avenue. Who in the Unseelie Court is fool enough to harm you before then? It would rob the Dark Queen of her sport."

Eddi felt the dropping sick feeling of fear in her stomach. "Phouka," she said, her voice unsteady, "am I going to lose?"

He sat up, winced, and scowled at her. "If you thought you would lose, why did you propose the contest at all?"

That was no comfort. He shouldn't have to ask that, surely. "Because I had to."

"Because we might all die?"

"No. Because we might either kill or die, and neither one was any better than the other. And I had to do something to stop it. All I could think of was to fight her by myself, in some way that I wouldn't have to kill her to win."

He looked out over the lake for a long time. "The Dark Lady is as much a paradox as any of us. She would not have suggested the form
of the contest if she did not think she could win at it. Yet if she thought she could not lose, there would be no sport, and she would not bother to venture a contest at all. How your enemy judges you may tell you more than the judgments of your friends. Your enemy's opinion of you seems to be a good one."

Eddi stood up and began to brush sand off her skin. "I suppose you couldn't just say, 'Of course you'll win'?"

"That would be too close kin to lying," the phouka said apologetically.

They had a week, and Eddi and the Fey spent it practicing. They were mourning; they were building a memorial; they were honing their revenge.

The hole that Willy's death had made in them could not be mended. They missed the sound of him, and the sizzling energy of his presence that they'd looked to more than they'd known. It was a different band without him—but they didn't dare believe it was a weaker one.

Dan and Hedge elaborated on their arrangements, filling up the space that Willy had occupied. Hedge sang more. Eddi played guitar more often, and flung herself into every song as if she didn't expect to come out again. Even so, some of the band's best material was not as strong as it had been. To construct the set list for the Fourth of July, they had to rebuild each song as if they were starting over.

The fierce heat that sometimes took possession of Minneapolis in midsummer had settled in. For long, nightmarish hours they worked in the oven that the rehearsal room became, trying to keep the equipment from overheating and their own sweat off the instruments. Sometimes in the middle of a song, Eddi would remember vaguely that there was magic in the world, that she had some of it, and that she needed it for this. But magic had to come second to the music, and the music took everything out of her.

When they were done, they were again the best band they could be. None of them wondered aloud if that was good enough.