Widdershins (67 page)

If you should need me
, Honey said,
you have only to call for me.

She turned and started down the trail.

“Honey!” Lizzie called after her.

The dog turned.

“I was wondering . . . how come you don’t just, you know, teleport to where you’re going?”

Tele . . . oh, I see. I understand how you got that idea, but what we have been doing is walking between worlds. It’s not quite the same thing. There are still distances that must be travelled by foot.

“Bummer. Teleporting would be cool.”

I suppose. Though I like to take the time to feel the dirt under my feet when I travel.

“Time,” Timony said, “runs differently in different parts of the other-world. Some places it passes more quickly—where a day for you would be a year for those you left behind.”

“Like Rip Van Winkle,” Geordie said. “Or True Thomas.”

The doonie nodded. “In others, your year is another’s day. It’s why the otherworld is so dangerous—for anyone unfamiliar with its reaches, but especially for mortals. But it’s even dangerous for fairy and the First People—what you call cousins.”

“Except you know your way around, right?” Lizzie asked.

“Somewhat. But I’m no expert.”

Joe is
, Honey said.

She’d been sitting through the conversation, but she stood up on all fours once more.

Until later
, she added.
And Timony
—
you might consider fetching your companions some water.

Turning, she padded down the trail and was quickly lost from sight.

“Water would be good,” Lizzie said.

The doonie smiled. He gathered a pile of dirt and bits of stone onto a stretch of flat red rock and sat down in front of it. Bunching it together, he began to speak over the tidy mound. His voice was low-pitched, but Lizzie already knew it was in some fairy language so she wouldn’t understand it anyway.

Geordie came over to stand with her.

“What’s he doing?” he asked.

“Asking the dirt if it wants to be water, I guess.”

Except it turned out that Timony wasn’t summoning water. As he continued to speak over the mound he’d gathered on the rock in front of himself, the dirt began to take on the shape of a pot. A moment later, and he had a wide-mouthed clay bowl. He grinned at them when Lizzie clapped, then cupped his hands above the vessel. This time his voice woke water that rose up to the tops of his fingers and overflowed into the bowl under his hands.

“Good trick,” Geordie said.

The doonie shrugged, but Lizzie could tell he was pleased so she clapped again.

When he offered the bowl to them, Lizzie took it first and had a long swallow. She couldn’t remember the last time anything had ever tasted so good. The water was cool and fresh, as though it had just been dipped from a mountain stream.

“Not too much,” Timony said. “At least not all at once.”

Lizzie had another mouthful, then reluctantly passed the half-full bowl to Geordie. While he drank, she walked back over to the place where Jilly had disappeared.

“I still think it would be cool to know how to—”

She didn’t get to finish. Two strangers suddenly appeared in the spot and she scrambled back.

“Whoa,” she said, then took up one of the defensive stances that her old gym-mate Johnny had taught her.

“Easy,” Geordie said.

Lizzie had time to see that the newcomers were both young women—one red-haired with a feral tangle of curls, the other dark-haired and dressed like a skateboarder. Then the red-haired woman flung herself at Geordie and wrapped her arms around his neck. They were obviously old friends.

“How could you
scare
us like that?” she demanded. “We thought you were dead.”

“I think I was.”

The woman pushed back to look him in the face. “What?”

Geordie smiled. “This is my sister Christiana,” he said, introducing her to Timony and Lizzie.

“And I’m Mother Crone,” the dark-haired skateboarder said.

“That’s Timony,” Lizzie said. “I’m Lizzie and I’ve got to say, you don’t look like a crone.”

“Oh, you’d be surprised at how old she is,” Christiana said.

The dark-haired woman shot her a look, but Christiana only shrugged and offered a sweet smile in return.

“I’m . . . surprised to see you,” Geordie said to Mother Crone.

“You shouldn’t be. I’ve never meant you any harm.”

“I know. You sure were right about the danger. But . . .”

“But I should have let you decide for yourself what to do about it,” Mother Crone said. “Believe me, I know that now.”

Okay, what was going on here? Lizzie wondered. She hadn’t even known that Geordie had a sister. Now who was this other woman going to turn out to be? His mother? Too young. But there was obviously history here.

“But I’m fine now,” Geordie said. “I guess you didn’t see that I’d get past dying and come back.”

Christiana hooked her arm in his. “I need to hear this whole story.”

But Mother Crone wasn’t done yet.

“First I owe you an apology,” she told Geordie.

“No, it’s okay. I understand why you had to keep me at the court.”

“Well, for that, too, but I meant for something else.”

Geordie’s eyes narrowed. “You had another enchantment on me?”

“Moons, no. It has to do with our relationship over the past couple of years. Or rather, the mess I’ve made of it.”

“You don’t have to explain.”

“I think I do. I want to.”

“But—”

“Hear her out, Geordie,” Christiana said. “For my sake.”

She unhooked her arm from his and gave him a little push toward Mother Crone.

“You guys need to talk this out,” she said.

She walked away from them and made a show of having a great interest in the petroglyphs on the rocks. Geordie and Mother Crone waited a moment, then moved away as well, going to stand by the edge of the mesa. Lizzie watched them talking until she realized she was staring. Turning away, her gaze went to Timony, who was still looking at the pair with big eyes.

It took her a moment to realize that he was starstruck.

“Okay, what do you find so interesting in all of this?” she asked him.

“It’s—she’s a
seer.
I wasn’t sure at first, because she looks different than I remember from the last time I saw her, and people called her by a different name, but I’m sure it’s her.”

“Which means—what?”

“Well, she’s like royalty, isn’t she?

Lizzie smiled. “So what? Do fairy have their own version of E!? Is this like the fairy version of
Entertainment Tonight?”

“I’m not sure what that means.”

“Do you like to follow the gossip of the rich and famous?”

“Well, surely. When was the last time you saw a seer? It’s like being allowed into the inner workings of one of the courts.”

“Not judge and jury, I’m guessing.”

“No, no. The fairy courts. That’s where I saw Mother Crone before. It was at the wedding of Tatiana’s daughter Saireen to the Prince of the Golden Court in Demaskendale. Of course, being a doonie, I wasn’t a member of the court, but I had a good seat in the second hundreds.”

She gave his arm a little tug. “Well, let’s get closer so we can hear what they’re saying.”

“Oh, no,” he told her. “We must allow them their privacy.” He gave a slow shake of his head, then added in a tone of voice that Siobhan might have used after meeting some admired musician such as Johnny Doherty. “When Geordie told me he was a fiddler at her court it never really registered.”

“I think there was more going on than fiddling,” Lizzie said. “Or at least fiddling that didn’t involve musical instruments.”

Timony’s eyes went wider. “Do you really think?”

Lizzie laughed. The sound of it was odd in her ears until she realized that she couldn’t remember the last time she’d been able to laugh.

She gave the doonie a hug.

“You know what?” she said. “I think everything’s going to be all right.”

“I hope so.”

He gave Geordie and Mother Crone another look that seemed wistful.

“Now
what is it?” she asked.

“It’s just . . . I never had a wife or even the possibility of one. I always thought it would be nice.”

“Oh, I don’t know. I think they’re overrated.”

Timony gave her a surprised look.

“Or maybe it just never works out for me, either,” she said. “I always seem to fall for musicians. But if they’re in my band, it usually gets awkward. And if they’re in another band . . . well then, they’re never around, because either they’re travelling, or I am.”

“Maybe you need to look for someone with a different sort of job.”

“You don’t exactly get to choose who you fall for.”

“But surely you’ve met other intriguing men,” Timony said. “What about that Grey fellow?”

Lizzie laughed. “Oh right. Hook up with a guy who hates the music that’s my life—not to mention that he hates humans, period. No, if I was going to get involved with anybody I know right now, it’d be Con—the guitarist in my band—but that would just be a big mistake.”

“Well, if it can’t work out for us,” Timony said, “I hope it works for them.”

He nodded to where Geordie and Mother Crone were still talking.

Lizzie shook her head. “I don’t know what their deal is, but did you not catch the way Geordie and Jilly were looking at each other?”

“But Mother Crone is a seer.”

“Doesn’t matter, if they don’t have the sparks.”

“I don’t know about that.”

Lizzie turned to see what he was looking at in time to see Mother Crone give Geordie a kiss that was anything but chaste.

Geordie

Galfreya and Christiana are pretty much
the last people I expected to run into out here in the middle of otherworld nowhere, but I suppose I shouldn’t have been surprised. At least not with Christiana. By all accounts—her accounts, mind you, related over lazy Sunday afternoons at Christy and Saskia’s place, or after-hours at some bar where I’ve been playing—she’s in and out of the otherworld all the time. She’s had more adventures than a character in one of those old movie serials, and some of them were seriously strange.

So it’s not such a stretch to find her here, out in the middle of nowhere. I’ve had her pop up in places almost as unexpected.

But Galfreya . . .

Galfreya rarely strays far from her court in the mall. It’s enough of a way to define her that it was certainly a point of contention in our relationship, even if I never pushed her on it. It’d just sit there in my head. A minor annoyance, most of the time, because I liked the music in the mall. I liked being with her in her own space. But there were times when I’d just want to be with her in some of my old haunts—the places that I felt defined me. The Lee Street Market. Fitzhenry Park. The clubs in Crowsea and Lower Foxville. The sessions at the Harp.

She’d always have some reason not to come with me. It got to the point where I thought maybe she
couldn’t
leave the mall. Like if she ever did, she’d burst into flame the way stories say a vampire will when it steps into sunlight. Or maybe she’d live up to her speaking name and turn into a hag, or she’d dissolve into water, or
something.

It wasn’t something she’d ever talk to me about.

Hazel and Edgan would tell me not to take it personally.

“All seers have inexplicable eccentricities and habits,” Hazel said. “It’s not something they choose, or the price for their gift. It just seems to work out that way.”

“Like pipers.”

She gave me a confused look.

“They’re all a little crazy,” I told her. “It just seems to come with the territory.”

She nodded. “That’s it. It comes with the territory. In Mother Crone’s case, she remains here, in the court.”

Edgan’s explanation was more like a parent dealing with a problem by saying “because I say so.”

“She’s the seer,” he told me. “So she can do what she wants. Who are we to question her?”

“Would it kill her to come out with me once in awhile?”

He shook his head. “That isn’t the point. The point is that this is how she is. You can either accept it or not. It has nothing to do with you. She leaves the court at no one’s bequest, and she is not required to explain why.”

“Because she’s a seer.”

He nodded gravely, obviously happy that I understood. But I didn’t. I just didn’t see the point in arguing it with a couple of treekin—especially since Galfreya herself wouldn’t discuss the matter. I had to either accept it or not.

And for the past couple of years, that’s just what I did. I accepted it.

So finding her here, this far from the court—not to mention in the company of my brother’s shadow . . .

It was confusing, to say the least.

But as she continued to talk, I realized I wasn’t about to get an explanation now either. That wasn’t why she was here.

When I did understand what she wanted, I shook my head.

“There’s Jilly now,” I said.

She nodded. “There’s always been Jilly. I know how you feel about her and I respect those feelings. But we have something special, too, and what we have can be real.”