Summoned to Tourney (6 page)

Faire season was going to keep them together.

Eric donned his helmet and mounted up behind Beth, his heart completely light for the first time in months. It was going to work. They were going to work.

And now was truly time to party!

CHAPTER 3:
My Feet Are Set for Dancing

Eric’s elation lasted as long as it took them to get to the highway; then it turned into terror. He’d forgotten that the three of them were going to have to make some serious time to beat the others back to the Bay—and that Beth and Kory knew very well that all the cops were going to be babysitting the crowd pouring out of the Faire and would have no one free to see to the back roads.

He wasn’t afraid they were going to break the posted limit; he knew they were going to shatter it.
He
was afraid they were going to break the speed of light.

He just kept his head tucked down, his legs tucked in, and held onto Beth’s waist. And kept his eyes closed.

To distract himself, he replayed the Celt show in his head, trying to figure out why it was he had so nearly gone into full Bard-magic mode.

It wasn’t the other musicians; that just helped after I got there. It wasn’t the songs themselves; we’ve done them a million times. Was it the crowd?

That had something to do with it, he decided. But why
this
crowd, when they’d played for crowds just as big on the Wharf and he’d never had that happen before?

What was different about a Faire audience?

Finally, he decided there was only one thing it could be. Attitude. The crowds on the Wharf were not looking for anything, they had no expectations, and they were not ready for the unusual. The travelers at the Faire were
expecting
things; expecting to be surprised, to be entertained, expecting to enjoy themselves with something entirely new and different. They were even willing to suspend their disbelief and pretend they had been magically transported back in time.

They were ready to believe in magic.

And that readiness to believe had helped him give them magic. He could have done all kinds of things by accident if he hadn’t recognized what was happening and put a lid on it.

Christ, that’s what happens with a classical audience too; they sort of put everything mundane on hold and let their imaginations go. It’s just that I haven’t done a concert gig in so long, I’d forgotten it. That must be why I was able to bring up those nightmare things when I was a kid.

It made him wonder what would happen if the travelers ever got wrapped up enough in something that they
did
flip over into full belief. The idea was a little frightening; he’d had trouble hanging onto the tiger’s tail as it was.

But if there ever came a time that he would need that belief, and the power that came with it, well, it was a good idea to know what it could do.

They can’t work magic themselves, but they can give me the power to do it. Wonder if that was why Perenor was trying to get them and the nexus under his thumb, to harness all that creative energy for his own use…

That sent him back to thoughts of Ria Liewellyn. She was not a good person to be around if you were weaker than she was, that was for sure. She’d drain you dry, and throw away the husk with a little shrug of regret. Eric suppressed a shiver; he’d come darn close to becoming one of those used-up husks. When he’d stomped off to Ria, mad because Kory and Beth had—well—done what was natural, she’d taken him into her home. Now he wasn’t so sure that where she’d taken him hadn’t also been partly Underhill; like the old ballads where someone goes Underhill for a day, and when he comes back a year has passed, he didn’t think he’d spent more than a couple of days with Ria, but it had been
months
in the real world. Time enough for the Fairesite to be bulldozed, for the nexus there to begin to fade, and for Kory to give up in despair and go off by himself to die.

And when Ria had taken him Underhill, he’d been different. He hadn’t been able to compose; he’d barely been able to play, and when he did, it was with none of the “juice” he’d become accustomed to having.

Ria had been draining him; of that he was certain. No, she was not a good person to be around when you were something less than she was.

But if you were her equal—

He played with that notion a while. It was dangerous, but intriguing. She was a very sexy, very capable lady. And there was a soft side to her that he was pretty certain she hadn’t let anyone see but him: a vulnerable Ria who had been hurt over and over by an indifferent mother and a manipulative father.

What if they
could
meet again as equals?

Hell, and what if a boat could fly? One is about as likely as the other. Her brain’s fried, and that’s the bottom line. Hopefully whatever Happy Home Elizabet has her in is careful not to hire abusive attendants. Otherwise they’d have themselves a sure-enough sex doll, ‘cause she wouldn’t know or care what was happening to her.

He cracked an eyelid open and took a peek; sighed with relief. They were just coming down off the mountain and San Francisco lay before them, like a jeweled crescent pin around the Bay. Kory and Beth would have to cut the speed now; they were about to hit traffic.

The lights were on when they pulled up to the house; Eric felt Beth’s muscles tense under his hand, but Kory brought his steed to a halt and pulled off his helmet, shaking his hair loose. As Beth pulled up beside them, he grinned.

“’Tis Arvin, Pelindar, Treviniel, and some of the others. They have hasted ahead to help us. Oh, and Greg is here as well, but they have chased him from the kitchen—”

“My microwave!” Beth bleated, and abandoned the bike, leaving Eric to balance it precariously from the passenger’s seat. It hovered for a moment, until he could get control, fortunately. He managed to keep it from falling over, scooted forward to grab the handlebars, and got off. Kory shook his head, and led the way to the garage.

Funny how that bike kind of balanced itself for a minute. I guess my luck-factor has really kicked in today.
They walked the bikes to the garage, locked them in, and came up through the gardens.

There were two elves—Eric could see their pointed ears if he looked really closely, the way he did if he suspected illusion—already in the hot tub. They waved indolently at Eric and Kory as they passed, but didn’t move. By the stature and the fact that they looked like adolescents, Eric guessed that they were Low Court elves, the kind that were tied to specific oak groves and couldn’t leave them without a lot of magical help from their High Court relatives. The Low Court kids—he always thought of them as kids, even though they were usually hundreds of years old, since that was what they looked like and often acted like—tended to hang out in shopping malls a lot. They’d use their magics to copy or snitch whatever hot fashion items took their fancy, replicate just enough cash to buy themselves endless meals of junk food, sneak into the movie theaters, and play video games that lasted for days. No one ever noticed them, since they looked just like all the other kids in the malls. The kids—the real, human kids—seemed to instinctively know the difference, though, and they tended to keep away from the elves.

The sole exceptions were the occasional misfits—usually girls, nerdy, bookish, and usually very lonely—who would be taken up by one or more of the elves over the course of a summer. At the end of that summer, the girl would return to school, transformed by her brief fling with magic and by the subtle touches of the elves. Sometimes they stayed misfits, sometimes they became very popular—but the end result was that they had usually found out what magic there was that lurked within them, and were much happier than they had been before.

They would never remember anything more than a summer romance with someone really incredible that centered around the mall. The elves took care that any memories more than that never stayed, and the one who had chosen the human lover would change his or her face so that it would never be recognized again.

Eric often wondered if that was what Kory had originally intended to do with him and Beth. If so, he had changed his mind at some point. And Eric got the feeling that some of his kin did not approve.

Yeah, these mixed-species marriages never work…

Oh well, if they didn’t approve, at least they were being civilized about it. They weren’t shunning Kory or his human friends, Which was more than you could say for—oh—the average Italian-Catholic getting involved with a Lebanese-Arab.

Much less two, though the elves seemed a lot less hung up on the mathematics of sex than humans. He’d seen them going around by twos, threes, and mobs. Hell, Arvin usually had a whole harem.

He followed Kory up the stairs, into the kitchen. Beth was nowhere to be seen. Arvin was in charge of plates of little somethings that looked incredibly fattening. He was idly filling tiny cups of pastry with something from a big bowl—not touching either, of course. Eric liked Arvin, a lot. The elf looked like a dark blond version of Tim Curry, and had a wicked sense of humor. One of the Low Court elves, a gorgeous girl in full punk gear, except it was pink, was doing something with the microwave. Evidently she knew what she was doing; she was setting the time, putting trays of sausages in, and nuking them until they sizzled, then dropping them into a warming-pan to stay hot. She grinned saucily at Kory, who only sighed. There were two other elves Eric didn’t recognize; one, a real fairy-tale princess type who looked like she wouldn’t know how to file her own nails was cutting up veggies with brisk efficiency and arranging them on dip plates. A vast set of trays of cold cuts and cheese already completed bore mute testimony to her expertise. A second, another Low-Court, this one a surfer-duuuuude complete with tan, glaring Hawaiian shirt and baggies, was running the trays out to various locations in the living and entertainment rooms.

Arvin looked up from his work. “We have things well in hand,” he said mildly. “Revendel and Lorilyn cleaned e’er we arrived, so there is nothing of that for you to do. I sent them to soak in yon human boiling-pot. Greg is below also, making certain the outdoor speakers function still.”

Eric looked around. “I can’t see anything else for anyone to do,” he said, gratefully, as Kory nodded agreement. “Look, I don’t know how to thank you guys—”

“A trifle.” Arvin dismissed his thanks with a wave of his hand. “Enough that you have built us a trysting and dancing ground below.” His eyes glittered wickedly. “And we
shall
be using it, take heed.”

“Just don’t take it into the street and scare the neighbors’ kids,” Eric advised. “Okay? Kory, we might as well get a quick shower and change.”

“Aye. The mob will be here soon.” Kory tossed his helmet into the air, where it promptly disappeared, and ran up the stairs. Eric put his away more mundanely, and followed.

Beth was already out of her clothes and into the shower; they joined her. It was a tight squeeze for three, but they’d done it before. There wasn’t as much horseplay as they usually indulged in, but they were still breathless with laughter when they tumbled out, now clean, to scramble into clothes.

Kory and Eric opted for comfortable versions of their Faire outfits: soft, baggy cotton pants instead of the tight leather, and bare feet instead of boots. Beth was doing something she had seldom done before the hair-change; she was wearing a dress Kory had made for her. Soft black and silver, silky and floor-length, it looked vaguely period, but Eric couldn’t pin it down to a particular style. Kory had one of those peculiar smiles when she twirled around in it, though, so Eric suspected that it was a copy of an elven design. Whatever, she looked terrific, straight out of the Kevin Costner
Robin Hood
.

The master-bedroom overlooked the front steps; the window was open to the glorious breeze coming in, and there were voices right below. Beth blew both of them a kiss and flew down the stairs to open the door as the doorbell rang.

After that, the guests began arriving in herds, and someone was always answering the door. At least half of the guests were elves, who had chosen, to keep from revealing themselves to the humans, Eric suspected, to enter the normal way rather than just popping into the garden. Most of the rest were the Faire folks who were in on the secret identities of Tom Lynn, Janice Lynn, and Kory Dell—or at least, they knew Kory Dell was a friend of theirs. No one knew about the elves’ existence except Beth and Eric—even the former members of Beth’s old rock-group Spiral Dance seemed to have put the Battle of Griffith Park out of their minds. There were other humans who knew about elves, like the bunch over on the East Coast Arvin referred to now and again—but the elves themselves had not seen fit to introduce Eric and Beth to them. Maybe they would, someday.

There were more of their Faire buddies than Eric had realized. The Celts alone filled a room. Of course,
one
Celt was perfectly capable of filling a room all by him/herself…

In no time at all, the party was in full swing. There was a group in the entertainment room, laughing, talking, and munching away while cutting-edge rock played in the background. There was a second group in the living-room, watching a videotape someone had made of the Celtic show today, commenting sarcastically and making jokes. A spillover group of costumers in the kitchen were trading project rehashes, to the fascination of the punk-elf in pink. And Greg might just as well not have bothered about the ground-speakers; no one was using them. The clear spot in the garden, just big enough for dancing, held a tiny band of buskers who hadn’t gotten their fill of playing during the day—and dancers who hadn’t gotten their fill of dancing.

Oh—the buskers are dancing, and the dancers are husking. That explains it.

The hot tub was as full of people as it could be. Eric had a notion that the little nooks and corners made for privacy were full too, but he wasn’t crass enough to check them out.