Drink Down the Moon (13 page)

“Oh, they’re quite different. For all their enmity to us, the Host gets its luck the same as us— as a gift from the Moonmother Arn.”

“But they’re evil

.”

“Oh, they’re bad all right, but not much different from our own Court, really. We’re like two of your countries in a constant war, Kate. The folk of both countries need to eat the same food, need to sleep at night and relieve themselves. It’s the same with faerie— only our ideologies are different. But droichan

“They turn widdershins to Faerie. In the old days, they started out mostly as shargies— changelings that one or another of the Courts took in. Sometimes they’d just go bad, and no one knows why.”

“Caraid says they could be giants or ogres, too, but that they’re mostly gruagaghs.”

Finn shrugged. “Don’t know enough about it myself. But a droichan usually becomes a gruagagh in the end— there’s no argument there.” He looked at Caraid then. “Now, that book of yours— isn’t it a skilly thing!”

Kate smiled. “I feel like I’ve had it all my life.”

“That’s a true gruagagh’s use of magic, making that thing. I couldn’t stitch a spell like that if my life depended on it.”

“I just used a wallystane.”

“But there’s a good and a bad way to use a wallystane,” Finn said. “As you well know from the first time you tried yourself.”

He grinned suddenly. Mostly his eyes had a cunning, almost sly look to them, but when he was in a good humour, they sparkled with a light all their own and left others wondering how they could ever have seen him as other than a cheerful hob.

“And see,” he added, “what you spelled just goes on. It’s not a one-time thing— useful as that can be. This wee book of yours will give you knowledge, Kate. Maybe even turn you into a wisewife or gruagagh yourself. You’ve already got the name— the only Crackernuts in Kinrowan, that’s for sure, though once the name was a bit more common. You’re clever enough, by far. All you need to do is learn a few tricks and a bit of magic, and away you’ll go. I didn’t know you were looking to learn, or I would’ve taught you some stitcheries myself. It’s not too late to start now.”

“There’s the droichan to be dealt with first,” Kate said.

“Oh, yes,” Finn said grimly. “There’s not a light in the sky that a cloud can’t cover. Spike the damn hound for breathing.”

“Finn. What are we going to do?”

“I don’t know. Rescue Jacky. Look for help.” He sighed, staring at the last embers of the fire. “What does your book say?”

“Just that we have to find the droichan’s heart.”

“And that won’t be easy. Let’s see that book a moment, Kate.”

She passed Caraid over. Finn took the stub of a pencil from his pocket and opened the book to a blank page. He sucked on the end of the pencil, thinking, then wrote:

Where do we start?

Kate leaned forward to see what Caraid would answer, but the book made no reply. She had the sudden fear then that it would only work in the Tower, in the Gruagagh’s study.

“Oh, Finn. Does this mean—”

“Only that you spelled it to listen to you,” the hob said. “To you and no one else.” He handed the book back to her. “You ask it.”

“I wish I could just talk to it and it could talk back to me,” Kate said. “Could that be done?”

“Well, now

I can’t make it speak to you, but maybe I can let it hear you.”

He got up and fetched a silver needle and a spool of red thread from the hutch. The spool for the thread was a thick chunk of a rowan branch. He took the book back from her and with quick deft movements, stitched an embroidered ear onto the front of the book.

“Ask it something,” he said.

Kate started to reach for the book, but Finn shook his head.

“Just speak the question,” he told her.

Kate cleared her throat. “I feel silly— talking to a book.”

“There’s sillier things. Try chasing a spunkie into a marsh like some mortals do. The sluagh just grab them and that’s not nice at all— at least not for the one that’s caught.”

“I suppose.” She cleared her throat again, then gave it a try. “Uh

hello, Caraid. Can you hear me?”

Under the four words that Finn had written earlier, her question appeared, in her own handwriting.

Hello, Kate, the book replied.

“Can you just hear me, or can you hear everything that goes on around you?”

Everything. But I’ll only answer to you. You’re my only friend.

“That’s the thing with names,” Finn remarked.

“What should we do?” Kate asked the book. “Where do we start? The droichan’s caught Jacky and I can’t just leave her to him while I go off looking for his heart. I might never find it.”

Her words appeared on the page as quickly as she spoke them. Kate watched them take form, fascinated.

“We need help, Caraid,” she added.

Rowan will break the droichan’s spell on the Jack— unless he had blooded her. But you must be careful. The white wood or the red berry are only effective against his spells. If he was to catch you, neither will help you then.

“What does ‘blooding her’ mean?” Kate asked.

It made her stomach feel a little queasy as her imagination brought up images of what she thought the phrase meant.

“Luck flows like blood,” Finn answered. “To free the luck from a body, the droichan will have to cut it open.”

“Oh, God!” Kate stood up quickly. “We’ve got to get back to the Tower.”

“First we need a plan.”

“A plan? Finn, this is Jacky we’re talking about!”

“Yes. But if he catches us as well, then what hope does she have? And there’s this to think about as well: A creature like a droichan will gather the mean-spirited and evil about, simply by his presence. Bogans and other Unseelie folk.”

“But wouldn’t he just feed on their luck as well?”

“Not if he has all of Kinrowan’s luck at hand— and that’s what the Tower gives him.”

“But—”

“The Host will gather to him, Kate. They have no leader at the moment.”

“Caraid,” Kate said to the book. “Jacky’s my best friend ever. I can’t let her die!”

I will still be your friend, the book replied.

Finn caught Kate’s arm before she could respond.

“Don’t make it jealous,” he mouthed silently.

Kate looked at him, bewildered.

“That’s the danger of names,” the hob added, still just moving his lips but uttering no sound. “A skilly-born thing like your book here can take what it hears too literally.”

Then Kate understood. It wasn’t as if she hadn’t had forewarning about this kind of thing.

“My best friend next to you, of course,” she told the book. “— Won’t you help me rescue her?”

I’ve told you all know, Caraid replied.

“But there must be something else.”

Find allies, the book told her after a few moments. Others that the droichan has harmed. Perhaps, with their help, you can find his heart and free your next-best friend.

“The fiaina sidhe,” Finn said.

Kate looked at him. “Are they related to the Pook?”

“They are all kin of a sort. Perhaps they could help us.”

“Perhaps! But that doesn’t do anything for Jacky now.”

“Kate, there’s nothing else we can do.”

“Oh, yes, there is. We can go back to the Tower with as much rowan as we can carry and get Jacky out of there.”

Finn regarded her mournfully. His eyes plainly said, Why won’t you listen?

“Kate,” he began.

“If I can get to the wallystanes, couldn’t I just use one of them on him and turn him into a toad or something?”

Unlikely, Caraid replied. Wallystanes are a Jack magic. They wouldn’t be strong enough for such a task. Especially not with the droichan fighting the spell.

“Jack magics work subtly,” Finn explained. “And remember how much you had to concentrate to make them work properly. Just imagine the droichan’s will opposing you at the same time. You’d never have a chance to collect your thoughts.”

Kate nodded. “Okay. But I’m still going. I have to, Finn.”

“I know,” he said. “But at least let us find what help we can close at hand. Crowdie Wort left Gwi Kayleigh in charge of his bally before he left. Why don’t we at least find her first?”

Ottawa South was known as Crowdie Wort’s Bally to the faerie of Kinrowan, Crowdie Wort being its Chief. Like most of the Court, he was in Ballymoresk for the Fair, and like the other Chiefs, he’d left a few foresters behind to keep watch over the acres under his care.

It’s unlikely that a forester could stand up to the droichan, Caraid offered.

Kate ignored the book.

“Where can we find her?” she asked.

“She’ll have left word at the bridge as to her whereabouts.”

Kate closed Caraid and stuffed it in her pouch.

“Then let’s go,” she said.

Finn gave his comfortable home a longing look, then hurried after Kate, who was already outside and striding west to Billings Bridge.

Her predicament was the most terrifying thing that Jacky could imagine. She could hear and see and smell and feel and think, perfectly well. But she had no control over her body. Her lungs still worked, drawing in air, letting it out. The blood kept moving through her veins and arteries. All the automatic functions of the various systems that kept her alive still worked. But she couldn’t get up out of the chair. She couldn’t turn her head. She couldn’t even blink.

The gruagagh had paralyzed her and she was as helpless as a newborn babe.

She heard footsteps. As she listened, she remembered Kate appearing in her range of vision earlier, moving a hand in front of her eyes. She hadn’t been able to warn Kate. Hadn’t been able to do a thing. But these footsteps weren’t Kate’s. They belonged to the gruagagh, who sat down across the table from her and regarded her with a smirking expression on his handsome face.

How could she have been so stupid as to have let him capture her? Kinrowan was her responsibility and she’d as good as handed it over to him. She thought of what Bhruic would say if he could see her now, what the Laird’s Court would say when they returned from Ballymoresk, and hated Cumin of Lochbuie with a vengeance.

“There’s a thing or two about this Tower,” Cumin said, “that I don’t understand. The smell of Bhruic Dearg’s enchantments are very strong. I know the luck of Kinrowan is bound up in this place. But he’s hidden the workings of the how of it from me. I think it’s time we took a walk upstairs and you showed me the lay of things.”

Dream on, Jacky thought.

Cumin smiled. “I know you’re raging, locked in there behind those glazed eyes, but it makes no difference, Jacky Rowan. You’re mine now. And you’ll show me what I want— don’t doubt it for an instant.”

To Jacky’s dismay, her body lurched to its feet and, whether she wanted to or not, the gruagagh set her to walking across the floor and up the stairs. She moved like a marionette in an amateur puppeteer’s jerky hands, but she moved. And there was nothing she could do about it.

As they reached the top of the stairs, her gaze touched briefly on her room, before the gruagagh moved her on. There were a pair of bogans in there now, rooting through her belongings. Bogans in the Tower! There was a boggy smell in the air, too. The whispery sound of sluagh voices.

The gruagagh moved her up the next flight of stairs before she could see more, up to Bhruic’s study, up to his books of lore and the window that looked out on Kinrowan and showed the criss-crossing network of the moonroads that gave the realm its luck.

Kinrowan was doomed, she knew. And it was all her fault.

“There’s nothing so satisfying,” the gruagagh said from behind her, “as learning new lessons, discovering how things work. Perhaps when you’ve shown me Bhruic Dearg’s secrets, little Jacky, I’ll take you apart and see how you work.” He laughed. “Would you like that?”

I’ll see you dead in hell first, Jacky thought, but how she was going to manage that, she didn’t know. The way things were going, she’d be lucky to make it through the next half hour, little say take her vengeance on her captor.

The door to the third floor loomed before them. Her hand— directed by the gruagagh’s will— moved to the knob, twisted it, and then she was leading the gruagagh into the heart of Kinrowan.

Ten

Johnny couldn’t find Puxill.

What he did find was Vincent Massey Park on a Wednesday afternoon, late in the summer. There were no sidhe, pink-haired or otherwise. No crowds of strange faerie creatures. Just the odd jogger— perfectly human— in jogging suit and running shoes. Once another cyclist passed him by, seriously bent over the handlebars of his ten-speed, stretchy black thigh-length shorts half-covering muscular legs, gaze fixed on the path ahead. Black squirrels were busy burying nuts. Sparrows and crows watched him from the trees.

But there were no magical beings.

No faerie.

He chained his bike to a tree by the railway bridge, and hiked up to the spot where Jemi had led him into her hollowed hill. The glade lay still in the afternoon sun. He walked slowly up and down its length, trying to remember just how they had approached it, until he was sure he had the right stone. Kneeling beside it, he studied it carefully. After a few moments, he lifted his hand hesitantly, then knocked on it the way he remembered Jemi had done.

Two quick knocks, pause, another knock.

Nothing.

He lifted his hand to try again, then turned away. What was the use? He sat down on the grass beside the stone and stared out through the trees to what he could see of the university.

He had to be crazy to have taken any of last night seriously. Something had happened to him— he didn’t doubt that— but it hadn’t been real. Whatever her reasons, Jemi had slipped him something and then his own imagination had taken over, peopling the park with the weird beasties and beings from his grandfather’s library.

They had appeared to be real— very real, oh, yes— but then hallucinations usually were.

Illusions. Delusions.

Why was she— Jemi, Jenna, “whatever her name was— doing this to him?

He pulled the bone carving from his pocket and fingered its smooth surface. The bone gleamed in the sunlight. He remembered the bone flute carving in Jemi’s room on Sweetland, the attraction he’d felt between the two artifacts