Whiskey and Water (51 page)

"May you be in heaven half an hour
before the Devil knows you re dead," Felix said. "If you must use
morbid invocations, why not go whole hog?"

"Pardon?"

"Oh, how about—here's to us and those
like us. Who's like us? Damn few, and they're all dead!" Matthew answered,
and clicked Felix's glass.

"That's Scottish."

"So? You're not Irish, either."

They drank together, the whiskey
unpleasant with a chemical tang, the orange flames searing their fingertips.
Matthew swallowed and rattled his head to shake the taste of the ink off his
tongue. Feathers brushed him when he closed his eyes.

Feathers. His ears were deafened by the
beat of wings, his skin assaulted by the rush of pinions. Green wings, white
wings, wings of gold barred black as an oriole's. Swan wings and heron wings
and the wings of sparrows and of sparrow hawks, and behind them all, like
thunder, the broadest blackest wings of all, the primaries tipped white,
hammering the sky like fists hammering the bars of a rusted cage. An assault
of angels.

And the sky rang like a gong.

Matthew opened his eyes. Blisters swelled
on his fingertips as Felix snatched back his own scorched hand. They stared at
one another, and Felix dropped his chin. "Well, that was ambiguous."

Matthew leaned forward and set his glass
down on the bar cart. "Right." He swallowed again, the astringency
lingering. "Thank you, Felix. Good luck. I'll see you at the war."

Dirty Water

T
he Queen of the Daoine Sidhe held out her hand. She
beckoned her page, the bow of her mouth stopping just short of a smile, and he
placed a goblet in her grasp.

"Thank you, Wolvesbane." Water
bulged over the brim. "Now leave us."

He scraped, and scampered. She palmed the
moist silver weight of the cup and watched him go.

She did not sit upon her throne.
That
bloodthirsty
animal glowered over her shoulder, sharp-clawed and ready to lend her its
strength whenever she might be moved to pay the cost. That power—be it ever so
fleeting—had won her her very first war.

She turned the goblet over in her hand and
cast the water on the stones. "Uisgebaugh."

He answered. Just a little precious fluid
—and his name—and he rose from the floor in a pillar of water, filling her
throne room with the tear-sharp scent of the sea. The column crested like a
breaker, threatening to splash, but when it toppled, all that washed the floor
were Kelpie's flowing hairy feathers. His fetlocks left scarlet brush-marks in
their wake; he was crimson from hoof to throttle, and dabbed with blood all up
his face. "Mistress," he intoned. "You rang?"

Painful, but it made her laugh. "The court
needs a jester, Whiskey. Are you auditioning?"

"If that is the only use you can
think of to put me to." He braced his legs and shook out his mane, spattering
blood like a wet dog spattering mud, and then arched his neck at the resulting
mess in satisfaction. "Ask me what I killed."

His gratification was a chill stone on her
breast. "Jane Maga," she said, her voice as level as it should have
been.

"A peryton named Orfeo." He spat
a bloody feather on the stone. "In New York. And who do you suppose held his
binding?"

"Fetch me my Merlin," she said.
"And my Seeker as well."

He began to bow again, halting when she
held out her hand, the empty goblet swinging loosely from her fingers.
"Who do
you
suppose, little treachery?"

"Madam," he said through red
teeth, "I know you don't truly care to have that answered."

"Indeed." She let the cup slip
through her fingers. It rang down the steps of the dais, denting as it bounced,
some half-precious stone set on the rim cracking like a shot. "Go on with
you, then. Oh, except one more thing — "

"Mistress?"

"Keep the monster's shadow for now,
if you like. But I want it back. Eventually."

Queens in Faerie do not mourn. So it is
storied; so it must be true. As is the way of things.

So Àine of the Unseelie Fae could not be
walking the strand with burning eyes, the windblown petals of embroidered
sunflowers trailing the green sleeves of her gown, her hands folded inside
them, her long black hair all tumbled down her back. Sand nor stone was
suffered to touch her dainty foot. Her brocaded slippers floated a finger's
width above.

Once m a while, a breaker taller than the
rest would comb the beach under her feet, overturning shells that glinted like
chips of skull among the stones. She took no notice. She was following the
rain-fine tracks of cloven hooves.

The sandy margin soon gave way to tumbled
cobbles, and a bluff—a cliff, nearly—humped itself up beside the sea. The rocks
she set no foot upon were slick with rime, as if colder air pooled here,
trapped by some trick of the wind.

Atop the cliff perched a cottage, no more
than one room or two and dark behind window shutters. Àine drew her sleeves
tight against the wind. The air carried no warmth, no homely breath of peat or
coal smoke: just the tang of the sea, and a distant peal of whinnied laughter.
The house was shut up tight and cold. Its mistress had business, and did not
know when she'd return.

That whinny echoed from the cliff, which
faced the sea. Whatever voiced it did not walk on land.

The boulders heaped at cliff-bottom were
slick and gritty underfoot when she let her shoes find them. She picked over
rocks mucous with algae, festooned with rubbery green-black tentacles of
bladder wrack that popped underfoot, adding their own fluids to the mix. Àine
hiked her skirt about her thighs and crouched amid the folds.

Among scattered tide pools, she found what
she hunted: scraped rock, bare and scarred white with fresh marks the sea would
wash dark soon enough. The marks of something running, over stone and moss and
terrain that would be a gamble for a mountain goat. Not her cloven-hooved
quarry. This was another beast, much heavier and without the thoughtless grace.

Àine dipped a finger in the sea and
tasted: brackish water, acidic and musky, a taste so concentrated that it
filled her sinuses and clung to her palate, overwhelming.

Every drop of the ocean lives. To say it
teems
is insufficient. It is an ecology, an orchestra, a cosmos unto itself,
thick with algae and bacteria, luxuriant with amoebas, populous with diatoms
cheerfully engaged in the biogeochemical cycling of carbon, oxygen,
phosphorous, iron, and silicate. Every sea is alive, and every man is a sea.

"Nuckelavee," Àine said, her
fingertip still pressed against her mouth.

The water lay flat as a sand garden, only
rippled by the wind, as the Queen rose and put her back to the bluff. The wind
flattened her gown over her hips, flagged the skirts in long streamers behind
her, unsettled her on the stones. Cold like a film of ice crept between her
scalp and her skull, and she reached into her sleeve for a comb.

Satiny wood, sweet with absorbed oils,
slipped through her hair. She sang into the sea breeze as she combed and
waited. Her hands paused, uplifted, when the ocean again lapped her toes. Spray
polka-dotted her flower-colored slippers.

Crimson and horrible, Nuckelavee rose.

The monster looked peeled, yellow
putrescence forging through manifest veins, a sheen of lymph glossing its
flayed surface. It might have been a chimera stitched from half-dressed
carcasses, bits of a man sewn to bits of a horse and a sheep and some
fin-footed benthic behemoth; it stood with arms folded over its pulsing chest,
bony clawed fingers wrapping its biceps.

The lower head—projecting from the
monster's abdomen on a ewe's neck frilled by a stingy clotted mane—could have
been a horse's skull, the flesh desiccated over the bones, a single great
rheumy red eye leering in the center of its face. Long yellow teeth met at a
chiseled angle in the lipless maw. Àine could hear them grinding like rocks in the
surf from her place on the shore.

The upper head was a round glaring thing
with gnashing teeth and a nose no more than two flat holes in its center, so
huge it rolled from one of Nuckelavee's raw shoulders to the other, trailing
mucilaginous strings. Steam bellied from its nostrils before it spoke.
"Had you waited," it said, "I would have come on my own. Winter
is on us, and I run free."

She did not speak, or lower her comb. The
wind brought its scent like a dying ocean, thick enough to make her gag, though
she was a Faerie and a daughter of Manannan, though she wore no dread for any devil
of the sea.

"Speak," Nuckelavee said.
"Little queen."

Dàcheannach,"
she said, knotting its name into her hair.

The house was already filling with the
good smells of Gypsy's cooking when Carel heard the familiar rap on her front
door, so when she opened it to reveal Kelpie on the porch she sighed in
resignation. "She wants me?"

'Why else should I come?" His grin
bared all his teeth. He glanced at the horseshoe nailed over the door.
"Unless you care to invite me inside."

Wait here." She vanished within, to
fetch her jacket and boots and tell Autumn where she was going and with whom.

Autumn just paused over her cutting board,
not even laying her knife down, rolled her eyes and said, "You have your
phone."

Carel kissed her on the cheek and hurried
out the door. Earning Autumn's forgiveness was half the fun.

"Up on my back," Kelpie said,
when she joined him by the steps. He'd shifted to equine form, and now dipped
his head to meet her eye to eye.

"You promise to put me back down
again on dry land, on my own two feet, legs unbroken?" "My lady
Merlin," he said. His tail slapped his flank. "Legs nor anything
else, neither."

He dipped a leg so she could mount, and
she grabbed a hank of mane and swung onto his back.

"There's blood in your mane."

"Is there? I thought I got it all
out."

She clung with both hands. "Maybe
it's catsup."

He gathered himself and sprang. A gentle
canter through the tree line took them downslope. There was a stream at the
bottom of the property. Not big, but big enough. He splashed into it, fetlock
deep, feathers belling about his ankles as the chill water numbed his hooves.

He dropped away under her like falling
water, like an amusement park ride. She knew better than to brace for the thump
of striking the ground, and couldn't prevent it, anyway.

And so they came to Faerie.

He arrived in the courtyard fountain and
clambered out unceremoniously. His hooves had long eroded the beveled stone
rim. When his shoes clicked on the paving stones, she slid down. "Thank
you, Whiskey."

"Twas nothing," he said, and
meant it. "She's in the throne room. I go to fetch the Seeker now."

He bowed his horsey bow, and stepped into
the fountain. And Carel retucked her shirt, straightened her collar, and went
before the Queen.

The Queen was waiting, and Carel almost
didn't recognize her. She wore a simple shirt and ice-gray corduroy trousers,
Western-style riding boots to match —nacreous gray, with ivory
stitchery—tucked into the cuffs. And her thick mahogany hair, which had not
been cut in seven years, and had trailed about her like a cloak of secrets . .
. was gone: clipped tight up the back of her neck, softly shadowing the pale sunless
skin of her nape, revealing the delicate and beautiful hollows between the
muscles. Carel could have reached out and laid her hand on the Queen's neck,
felt the stretch of the
longus capitis,
arising on either side from the
third through the sixth cervical vertebrae, inserted under the inferior surface
of the occipital bone. If Carel peeled back the skin, she could have seen the
pearly tendons hand-clasped on bone, the long muscles relaxing as the Queen's
chin dropped forward and clipped bangs brushed her forehead. The stretch of her
neck revealed ice-needle scars that marked the blood she'd fed, over and over,
to Faerie and her throne.

So Carel laid her hand on the Queen's
neck, and soft hair shirred against her palm. "You cut your hair."

What could she say that would be less
necessary? But the Queen smiled at her and pressed into the touch, tilting up
her chin. "I always hated it." She carded fingers through the
remains, stepping away. "Think of it as removing temptation," she
continued. "What did you expect to see?"

Carel let her hand fall to her side and
scrubbed the palm on denim. A woman grieving in a chair."

"That's over. The Queen clasped her
hands and smiled, strong and straight, her big capable fingers rippling against
each other. "Seven years is enough to mourn. Tell me, Merlin, how to kill
the Summer Queen."
"Àine?"

Was I unclear?" Arch and merciless.
"My predecessor took her own life. I've never had to kill a Faerie
Queen." She turned and gestured to the heap of bony knives that was her
throne. "We're not so easy to kill, you know. I could ask Morgan — "