Whiskey and Water (32 page)

He opened his mouth and unfolded his arms,
and the question that emerged was not the one he had intended. "How can I
stop being a Mage?"

Mist laughed like waves breaking on rocks.
Her tail writhed, rattling, over gold. "Die. Matthew Magus, ask
again."

His scars twinged and Matthew stopped.
Just stopped. He pressed the balls of his feet to the floor and admonished
himself to courage. Cold fear-sweat was lost in the dripping heat.
Stupid,
he
thought, and
Answer me, these questions three.

One down.

Two more left.

He pushed his hands into the pockets of
his topcoat and thought, while the Dragon smiled at him through sulfur-stained
teeth as long as his arm.

Morgan le Fey had told him what to ask.
And the Queen of Faerie had too. Leaving him one question of his own. A wasted
question, now.

Think like a Mage, damn you,
he told himself, and closed his eyes. The
Dragon was too much, too present, too real. He couldn't think and look at her,
both. She filled him up, slammed him against his own edges like Water in the
vessel into which is dropped a stone. He held his breath to dear the scent of
her from his senses; the hot iron was gone and now all he could smell was
summer, roses and jasmine and fresh-clipped grass. Morgan and the Queen had
told him what to ask.

And what if he didn't want to ask their
questions?

Well.

That had been his problem all along,
hadn't it? Being too biddable. So he knew the answer to the Queen's question,
and to Morgan's. What he
wanted
was his freedom, his life untouched by
Prometheus.

Kelly back, hale and sound, as they had
been when they were boys and Matthew had worshipped him. Things that, short of
a deal with the Devil, he could not have.

What he
needed
was to want
something else. Something attainable.

Except—and here was the true irony—having
identified his problem as one of being too obedient to the whims of others,
Matthew now couldn't think of anything else to ask.

Amazing, the clarity one could obtain
while standing on the doorstep of a dragon.

He opened his eyes.

She waited still, fire pooling in her maw
as she yawned elaborately, wreathing her nostrils like a dancer's transparent
veils when she closed her mouth again. Her vast eyes gleamed with planes of
color, blue and green and a lucent, vitreous vermilion like fire opals. She
smiled at him, and didn't speak, and her heat stung his skin like too much sun.

And then he grinned.
What the hell,
he
thought, pulling his hands out of his pockets. He hooked the topcoat tails back
with his thumbs. He knew when he was beaten. If he was just going to stand here
and vacillate, he might as well play to type.

"What do you think I should
ask?"

A pause, as if the Dragon considered. She
bowed her neck, her whiskered chin resting on the stone by Matthew's feet, her
pupil level with his face as she turned her head. The heat was a pressure,
pushing him back, and whatever numinous strength rolled off her was the only
thing that allowed him to stand his ground. His breath rattled in and out; he
heard himself whimper.

"What should I ask, were I Matthew?
" she asked, mildly as a woman, modulating her choir of a voice. "Is
that your question?"

"Nearly," he said. "Answer
the question you wish I would ask. I commend myself to your mercy."
"A dragon's mercy is a fickle thing," she said, the echoes rolling
around him.

He shrugged, falsely insouciant. "So
is a unicorn's."

"Yes, that." She didn't draw
back, but she did appear to hesitate. He waited, sweating until his shirt clung
to his chest and back, showing no impatience as he cycled a mantra through his
head. Perhaps no one could outwait a dragon, but he suspected that a show of
impatience would provide no advantage.

He was a Mage. He could stand up to a
Beast. No matter how it terrified him.

He was still waiting when she drew
back—not far—and opened her mouth. He prepared himself for the reeking heat of
her breath, but what followed was a summer breeze, as redolent of flowers as
the Queen's garden, ruffling his hair and soothing seared skin. "You were
close the first time," she said. "Close, but too limited in your vision.
It is a failure that will much afflict you."

"It's a failure that already
does," he said. "Your Merlin said you would probably eat me."

She chuckled. He
did
step back from
that, echoes shaking dust into his eyes. Dust, but no pebbles: the tunnel was solid
enough for a Dragon, at least. He blinked furiously, sliding his fingers under
his spectacles to wipe his streaming eyes, leaving dabs of skin-oil smudging
the lenses.

I probably will. I eat most things,
eventually." Translucent fire curled up her muzzle. "Do not ask how you
can be free of your magic, Matthew Magus, for you cannot be free. Ask rather
how you can encompass it, how you can learn to use your gift so it no more
cripples you."

Matthew nodded, and hunkered down on his
heels. He reached up, left-handed, and tugged his hair loose of the ponytail.
It fell about his race in sweaty tangles, cloudy droplets spattering from the
soaked ends. No wonder the cavern seemed to swirl around him. He put his hand
on the wall for support. "Tell me, then," he said. "How can I
encompass it?"

The Dragon's tongue flicked, forked tips
fluttering inches from his race, as if she could taste his sweat. "I have
never said this to a Mage before," she said. "But you are too much
surrendered, Matthew Szczegielniak. You have given yourself over to the magic,
to the voices of your city. You have kept yourself soft, receptive, as you were
taught, accepting even where it wounds you. And it has availed you; the
strength of your city fills you. But if you do not rule it, it
will
rule
you."

Her voice was plain, matter-of-fact,
suddenly unornamented. It shocked him. He had expected a lecture on meditation,
on openness, on feeling the flow of the power and letting it direct him.
"I can do no harm," he said.

"Control is not harm. Matthew, you
are a man and a Mage. Your destiny lies not in surrender, but in struggle.
Kick, claw. Stand
up."

He stood, bootheels gritting on stone.
"Mist," he said, carefully. "Are you telling me to go out and
get laid?"

A dragon's shrug was an epic undertaking.
"It couldn't hurt," she said, and folded her wings. "Now leave,
as you have your answers, and may you have pleasure of it, Matthew Magus."

He bowed and backed away. It didn't seem
right to turn his shoulder to her until he was around the corner and out of
sight.

The path up was easier. He was climbing
toward light.

When he pushed aside the hanging vines,
Marlowe was still waiting for him, and from his glance at the sky—where the sun
was still hidden by clouds—Matthew's descent had taken less time than Marlowe had
anticipated.

The poet folded his arms. "She didn't
eat you?"

"Apparently not."

"What did she tell you?"

Matthew wiped the sweat from his face with
the back of his glove, and stuck his hair behind his ears. It remained
plastered there. "She told me I'm insufficiently phallocentric," he
said, filling his lungs with a deep breath of cold, misty air. "Come on,
let's get some lunch. And then I'll take you to Rossville."

An Englishman in New York

W
hiskey slipped the shadow from the Queen's pocket and
into his own while she wasn't watching. He brought her shift to her, folded
over his arm, and once she'd struggled into it he combed his fingers through
her hair to pick the worst of the twigs out. "You're going back to New York?" she asked, without looking at him. The sunrise gleamed cold on her
near-black hair.

I will." He planted his forelegs,
hands hardening to hooves, and leaned his head on her shoulder so she might
feel the weight of muscle and bone. His mane spilled over her, coarse hair
streaked white and black, as long as her arm. "Since my Queen will not
hear me, I will defend her as best I may."

If your Queen heard you, she would not be
your Queen for long, lit-tale treachery."

Ideally." He backed a step and
snorted, shaking his head as if a fly buzzed around his ears. "I'm not hunting
Jane Andraste now."

You'll be there when Marlowe takes the
fight to her." She might have been talking to her shadow, for all the
attention she paid him. There had been a time when she wouldn't have turned her
back on him, in fear for her life.

Oh, aye," he said. "That I will.
But I'll confess myself curious that something Fae stalks mortals in New York City. I'd have a look and see if I can trace the hand behind the killing."
Who do you suspect?" He didn't answer for a moment. The sun inched higher,
warming their shoulders, two white-clad figures in stark relief against gray
stone and scrubby trees. "I suspect everyone," he said. "Thou
art a popular Queen with some, and thus the more hated by others. A conqueror
sleeps not easy."

"No. I've noticed that." She
turned, quicksilver, and smiled at him. "Whoever acted got their will, wouldn't
you say? Faerie and Magi in open confrontation?"

"No," he said. "I don't
think they got what they wanted. Your throne is in no danger yet."

"Only from you."

He shook his mane and pawed. A spring
trickled from cracked stone where his hoof hammered, a thin line of water pure
as rain. She closed the space between them and reached up to drape an arm over
his withers. He turned and lipped her hair. His whiskers tickled, and she
pushed his head away.

"You think my throne is the
target."

"I think you are, so long as you sit
that throne."

"Proclaim me no false mysteries,
then, Whiskey. You think it's Àine stalking me."

"I think it's logic and sense to
abdicate, lady, and accept my vow that I will neither harm you nor see harm
come to you, once you have reclaimed that which you forced on me."
"And feed Ian to that thing."

"He wouldn't mind," Whiskey
said. "He's a wolf. He'd survive it." The Queen sighed. When she closed
her eyes, the sunlight lit her whole world red, silhouetting the capillary
patterns in her eyelids. "And! if Sir Christopher and Matthew manage to
overthrow Jane Maga, and they grant me an alliance anyway? We'll ferret out our
enemy then — "They'd grant one to Ian too."

"Probably," she said. "But
would he know how to manage it?" For that, Whiskey had no answer. He stood,
tail stinging his flanks, and regarded her with high-pricked ears. And she
shrugged and dismissed it. "Majesty," he said. "What if Ian is
the enemy?"

"All the more reason to keep him off
the throne." Said with a tight, bitter smile. And then she shrugged, and
passed her hands over her body—shift and tangled hair and bare feet—and stood
before him in riding breeches and a white button shirt, her hair braided back
over her ears. "Go on," she said, with a dismissive gesture.
"I'll make my own way back."

He didn't argue. He whirled and plunged
down the steep side of the hill almost on his haunches, brush abrading his
chest and belly, a bramble scraping a thin raw line across his foreleg. He
splashed into the rocky stream and the cold water stung the cut.

Spray dashed around him, flashed and
shattered in the light. Whiskey reared, warm sun and chill water on his hide,
and let himself collapse into the cold immaculate stream, his blood and bones
melting. He crashed down, an unexpected waterfall, wetting the banks, and then
slipped away, free, running downhill to the sea, his father and his flesh, and
from there to the wide ocean and all its tributaries.

When he stood up again, it was in New
York. And Kadiska was waiting for him, at a shady bench on the sere, autumnal
banks of the Central Park boating pond.

"You've been watching for me."
He settled on the bench beside her, his white raw silk suit dry as if he hadn't
walked out of the lake, wearing the shoes he hated even in winter.

"I asked the shadows," she said.
She wore a quilted coat today, red and gold and crusted with embroidery, and
she was throwing crumbs of popcorn to the fish in the lake. Their mouths made
popping circles on the surface, ripples spreading faster than the iridescent
discs of grease that diffused from each bit of waterlogged grain. "Just
got here."

She looked like she'd been there for
hours. She leaned against him, bursting her paper bag with her palm. "Did
Elaine tell you about the Bunyip?"

I already knew about the Bunyip," he
said. He put an arm around her shoulders. She turned and sank filed teeth into
his wrist, above the bone, blood blotting the cuff of his suit jacket. A quick
nip, piercing the skin, leaving her mark like a ring of red pearls on dark
flesh. He tugged sharply, left hand in her braids shaking until she opened her
mouth and drew back.

She turned, smiling, her mouth lipsticked
with blood. He gave her one last rattle and let her go. She snuggled back
against his side. "You are too thin."