Whiskey and Water (3 page)

The city noticed their coming.

The train watched them climb, calm in its
long steel body, and the sidewalks took their weight in knowing silence when
they ascended into the indirect brightness of a New York morning.

The eldest of the three was Althea
Benning, who bought a white T-shirt from a vendor. It was marked in black and
red and blue with a map of the New York subway system that stretched across her
breasts when she pulled it over her tank top.

The boy was named Geoffrey Bertelli; his
mouth twitched side-ways when he was amused. It was twitching now, as he raked
bony, beautiful hands through his matted, matte-black-dyed red hair and said, "Everyone
will know you're a tourist."

"Everyone will know I'm a tourist
anyway, and this way, if we get lost, all you have to do is stare at my
tits." Althea checked her reflection in the shopwindow; Geoff laughed at
her, shifted his knapsack, and dropped an arm around the third companion's
shoulders.

She only smiled.

She was the one who might have seemed most
Fae, at least to someone who had never seen the Fair Folk. She was called
Juliet Gorman, known as Jewels, and she was scarred and tattooed and pierced through
fair freckled skin, her ears altered to points and a terrible homesickness in
her flinching gestures.

She wasn't Fae. She was Otherkin, a
peasant child dreaming she was a stolen princess . . . who knew that her real
parents—who loved her — would be along any moment to reclaim her from unkind
but temporary mundane bondage.

Jewels slid from under Geoff's arm and stood
atop a subway grate, the warm wind swirling her skirt around her ankles. She'd
braided her hair and pinned it so it covered her ears, mostly at Geoff's insistence.

"Look at me," Althea said,
spinning in place, colliding with a hurried pedestrian whose fluffy lemon-yellow
skirt hung low on her hips, two sunflowers with gnarled stems wrapped in a
plastic supermarket bag dangling head down from her left hand.

Althea skipped aside and laughed.
"Sorry."

The city girl tossed her a look like acid,
and the city breathed in hope and breathed out dreams, and the dragons rumbled
under their feet in the long darkness of Penn, jointed snakes in oil-slick
squalor. "Where to first?" Althea asked, dropping her chin to stare
down at the map across her chest.

"I don't care as long as we're in the
Village by six to see the parade," Geoff answered.

He glanced at Jewels, who cocked her head
and pursed her lips. "Times Square. I want to see where the war
started."

Whiskey in the Jar

W
armth slid from the stallion's withers as he entered
the shade of willows. His coat gleamed white over stout muscles; black
streaked his mane and spotted his face and his richly feathered feet. A rivulet
of water as silver as his moon-shaped shoes led him deeper into the wood and
higher upon the hills; he wrote in hoofprints on its verdant bank, a line that
would tell any who cared to look,
The Kelpie wad here.

He could have passed without a mark. But
this was hallowed ground, sacred enough that when he came to the place where
low hills tangled the willows' roots, he cantered to a halt and stood for a moment,
tail stinging his flanks as he swiveled an ear at
something
borne on
that breeze.

Singing.

A song.

He'd come to air his pain, his un-Fae
sorrow and the low, slow, un-Fae ache in his belly. To stomp, and paw, and kick
things under the grieving willows. To let his anger at his beloved Queen and on
his beloved Queen's behalf fly. To
feel,
as he was not yet accustomed to
feel, having been Fae for millennia and having borne a mortal soul but seven
years.

Irritating to have his grief interrupted.
The stallion drew a great bellows breath
and folded
into the angular
form of a man, tugging his silk suit into place and reaching up to tip a hat at
the right rakish angle. He was barefoot. Silver rings glinted on his thumbs and
each great toe, pale against skin dark as loch water.

More silent than a breeze rustling the
lancelet leaves of the willows, Whiskey chased the song between graveyard
trees, the living rememberers of battle. The trees stroked him with trailing
branches, stole his hat and caressed his hair. They knew who he was, other than
the son of Manannan and the god of the wide man-murdering sea. They knew why he
carried a pain like a bright spark in his chest, a pain no Faerie should have
known, and they honored his unwilling sacrifice. Softly, as trees will.
Implacably, as trees will. They remembered.

The stallion halted among them, wishing he
had a tail to swish in perplexity. A small slight man sat beside the spring
halfway up the hill, wrapped in a bard's patch-work cloak of colors, leaning
against a tree as he half sang an old rhyme. " 'Ellum do grieve, and Oak
he do hate, and Willow he walk if you travels late.' Good afternoon,
traveler."

"Good meeting, Sir Bard. I do not
know you." The stallion stepped from the shelter of laurel and scrub oak.

The singer gestured, the layers of his
ragged cloak falling from his shoulders. Underneath he wore black, a silk shirt
with silver buttons tucked into narrow trousers. "It's changed."

"The hillside?"

"That too." He had fine
golden-brown hair in well-brushed waves, a neat beard, and dark, deep-set eyes,
whoever he was, and as he leaned forward between bent, spread knees his
bootheels furrowed the earth. The stallion saw nails wink in their soles and
tossed his forelock from his eyes. Iron nails, and not silver.

The bard was a mortal man.

"What manner of creature are
you?"

"Kelpie," the stallion answered.

"You're a servant of the new
Queen." 1 am.

"Bound servant?"

"This Queen makes no bindings."
The stallion came uphill, relaxing into his own shape now that he need not fear
startling the singer. In horse-shape, his eyes would not sting with unshed
pain. He stamped and snorted, shaking his mane over his ears. It didn't help.
"But I have a soul."

"I as well," the bard said.
"I am sorry."

"One grows accustomed."

The man had an accent the stallion knew of
old, although time had faded it. "You're English," Whiskey said.

"I was. Of Canterbury, and then
London."

"Ah. Have you a name, mortal
man?"

Which netted him a strange sort of smile
in return. The bard stepped from the shadow of the trees, sunlight gilding his
dull hair auburn. "In fact I do not. But I will come to what you call me.
Given a little warning, of course, what that may be —Thomas will do if you are
not otherwise inclined. Does Morgan le Fey still roam these hills?"

"Roam
is perhaps not the proper word — "

"I beg your pardon. Dwell here, then?
And the new Mebd, the new Queen — "

"—whom I serve."

"To whom you owe service, yes. She is
Morgan's granddaughter."

"By Morgan's son, Murchaud. Got on a
mortal Mage."

"Ah, I see. And Murchaud is buried
here." Thomas glanced aside, his voice losing its trained fluency.

The stallion lowered his head and cropped
a bite of grass, releasing its rich green scent. It tasted of nothing, of
straw. There was no blood in it. "Yes. As are many Murchaud, Duke of Hell,
Prince-Consort to the previous Queen of Faerie, son of Morgan and Lancelot. He
is buried here."

"I brought flowers," the bard
said, producing a bundle of iris and eglantine from his cloak. "Show me where?"

"Were you friends?"

"In Hell."

"Ah." The stallion cropped grass
again, tail swishing. "I know your name."

"I haven't got one — "

"I know who you were. You wish to see
the grave."

"Yes."

"Yes," the stallion answered.
"And I shan't even bid you climb upon my back."

The bard paused, and then grinned up at
him. "Just as well, pony," he said, his voice ringing empty as a tin
cup when you drop a penny in it. "You wouldn't like my spurs."

"Doubting Thomas." The stallion
arched his neck to hide unease, flirting with the poet from under long lashes.
"Call me Whiskey. For that is also not
my
name."

The poet who wasn't named Thomas knelt by
the grave of a Prince of Faerie and didn't shed a tear. It wasn't precisely
unmarked, that grave, bowered as it was by branches and cradled between roots,
beribboned with sunlight trailing through leaves. Thomas dug his inkstained
fingertips into the greens-ward and uprooted a tuft of grass, turning it over
in his hands. Two waxy grubs shone. He touched one idly and closed his eyes to
feel it writhe against his skin.

The grief pressed like a stone on his
breast and would not be moved. He said, "Your Queen's mother is a mortal
woman."

"Our Queen's mother is a Mage,"
Whiskey answered. "High in the counsels of their Promethean Society,
so-called, who were the other side of this war—you've heard of the
Prometheans?"

"Known with some intimacy," the
bard replied, in a tone that suggested it hadn't been a pleasant knowing. He'd
been in Faerie long enough to learn Fae ways: never show soft emotion, should
you feel it. Never sorrow, nor affection, nor fear. No matter that the grief
came up from his belly like wine sickness, painful and sharp, stinging his eyes
and burning his sinuses. He kept his face placid, his voice mellifluous and
mocking.

Unlike Whiskey, ruined by the soul he'd
been tricked into accepting, the Fae did not admit pain.

The bard turned the turf in his hands,
careful not to shake the grubs loose, and tucked it back into the wound he had
made over Murchaud's grave. He scrubbed earth-stained fingers on his trousers,
and then rubbed them across his face. His fury came out in the softness of his
tone. "What is her name, this Maga?"

"Jane Andraste, Sir Thomas."
Whiskey didn't mind saying. Didn't mind at all, when he felt the wind blow
across his ribs and lift his mane, and smelled the sunlight of Faerie on it.

"I'm only a knight in Faerie,"
the bard said, standing, and tugging his cloak about him as if the warm air carried
a chill. "That honor was never conferred for all my service to mortal
queens." When he angled his head in the sunlight, it caught more coppery
sparks from his sand-colored hair, and his right eye was brighter than his
left.

"You're in Faerie now, Sir Thomas."

"Whiskey, that I am." The bard
glanced down at the grave, and then shook his head at the earth between his
shoes. "And your Queen, who knows all names but has none of her own —
"

"Aye?"

"Does she know her mother killed her
father? "

"The Dragon killed her father,
Thomas. He died in the rubble of Times Square, these seven years since, on
Hallow's Eve. 'When the Faerie court do ride.' "

"I know that song."

"Too well, I judge."

A spark of pain as bright as Whiskey's
infected the bard's voice. "But her mother started the war."
"The war is older than the Queen. And older than her mother too."

"It's not older than I am . . ."
The bard sighed, and came and stood beside the stallion, staring down at one
grave among a row of graves that stretched until the trunks of the willow grove
occluded sight. "Is there a tree for every fallen Fae, Master Whiskey? And
one for every Promethean Mage who laid down his life in this battle?"

"There are not so many trees as that.
Or the wood would go on very far indeed. Murchaud was more than your
friend."

"He was the breath in my lungs and
the marrow in my bones."

Whiskey sidestepped closer, and the bard
took that invitation and leaned a shoulder on horsey solidity. The stallion
smelled of sweat and tide pools, brackish, salt, fertile rot. His warmth eased
the ache that threatened to close the bard's throat, and after a moment he
could speak again.

His fingers curled as if they cradled a
dagger hilt. There was always revenge.

Contrary to myth, it really could help one
feel better.

The poet glanced sideways, meeting the
stallion's ice-blue eye. "I went to Hell to be with him, and I had been in
Hell before. I did not go twice blindly. A question for a question, stud. Do
you prefer your new Queen to your old?"

"I had no Queen before this one,"
Whiskey answered, the trickle of pain in his unwanted soul like the trickle of
water that spread under his hooves. The warmth of the day chilled on his neck,
now, too, and the bard threw an arm over his shoulders. Whiskey endured it, and
felt the better after all. "I was a Wild Fae, and unbridled. Now I am
tamed."

"And?"

"—and?"

"She who tamed you. Is she a good
Queen?"

"I would see her unQueened, Sir
Thomas. Because I love her. Because I carry her soul, and her soul makes me to
love her, and were she to abdicate I would no longer be bound to that burden —
I would see her unQueened."