War for the Oaks (33 page)

Road noise on the night street,
See the taillights through the blinds,
Out there where your dreams slide
Toward the night side,
For it all
.

Eddi launched into the chorus looking for the effects of her magic. She saw, heard, felt nothing. A quick glance at the phouka, where he sat on the dilapidated couch, gave her no clues.

For it all, for it all,
What you're aching for,
Where the magic's real and you're like a fire in the sky,
when the deal calls for a sacrifice
And you know you cannot die.
For the edge the best ones live on,
For it all
.

You want to be a hero
With the axe about to fall,
You'd buy it for the love and for the glory,
For it all
.

You want to dress in black
And lose your heart beyond recall,
Hunt a dream through rain and thunder,
On your honor
For it all
.

Would
she feel it? Would there be a tingle, or the stinging feeling she'd had when the Seelie Court's power swirled around her? Another chorus, and the bridge:

In your head, no car is fast enough,
In your heart, no love is true.
Will it ruin all your solitary fancies
If I tell you that it isn't only you?

Keep your ankle off the tailpipe,
Keep your bootheels off the street;
We'll hit the throttle, hit the redline,
We'll find the edge,
We'll make it sweet,
We'll go for it all
.

Properly, the song would fade out, with Hedge's bass the last thing to go, roaring off into distance. They simulated it with instruments dropping out one by one, Hedge leaning on his volume pedal, then backing off slowly. Carla added a tattoo on the bell of one cymbal, very soft, at the end.

"Good," Eddi told her. "Keep that. Willy, not so much early Pete Townshend on the lead break."

"Aww."

"Next pass we add harmonies." Eddi looked around her microphone at the phouka. "Well?" she asked him.

He said, "Lovely."

"I didn't mean the song. Did I do anything weird?"

"No," he replied, grinning.

They did the song twice more, taking it apart and putting it back together. After each one, Eddi stole a look at the phouka, who shook his head. "Break," she declared at last, in disgust, and went to sit next to him.

"What am I doing wrong?"

"Nothing, my primrose. It's an excellent song, and it's taking shape wonderfully."

Eddi stared at him sternly until he began to laugh.

"Oh, my heart, my heart. You want magic to dance at the end of a stick for your pleasure. Tell me, are you performing? Are you gathering up the music and flinging it out to your audience, as if it were a truth you wanted them to believe?"

She was furious with him for laughing, and refused at first to follow his logic. But he grabbed her wrists when she moved to stand up, and shook them gently.

"Willy's words to the contrary, matters are not at so desperate a pass. Pay no attention to making magic, Eddi. Make music, and let the magic come when it will."

"What if it never comes?"

The phouka looked down at her hands, released his grip, and glanced quickly up again. "Then perhaps you'll never need it."

Whether or not she would ever do magic, she did none that afternoon. Once, during the last verse of the new song, she felt the narrowing of her concentration that she often felt onstage—as if the song, and the space in which it echoed, and the duration of it, were the whole world. But when she noticed, wondering
Is this it?
, it was gone.

It was a long, hard practice, and the breeze through all the windows that would open was warm. When she called a halt at seven, Eddi felt like a damp bathroom rug. "Go home, guys," she said. "We've got a party to go to tonight."

"Tower Hill Park at dusk?" Carla asked.

Willy shook his head. "Not dusk. Wait until full dark." His smile had little amusement in it. "The truce begins at sunset. Don't risk getting there too early—you might tempt fate."

Dan stole a glance at Carla. "Oh my. What'll we do to pass the time?"

"Let's go home and soak your head," Carla said, blushing. "We're gone, guys."

Eddi heard them giggling as they went down the stairs, heard their voices, though what they said didn't reach her. Hedge put his equipment away and nodded to Eddi. "See ya," he said, almost clearly, and went down the stairs.

She moved around the room, unplugging the coffee pot, closing windows. Willy, to her surprise, made no move to leave; he sat on his amp, angled over his guitar, playing softly. She recognized the melody after a moment, though she couldn't name it. A folk song, about a woman who swore she'd never marry because her lover was drowned at sea. . . . "Quitting time," she told him gently.

He smiled, but didn't look up. "I'll lock it. You go on home."

Eddi studied him a moment, then looked over his head at the phouka. She nodded toward the door. He frowned. But he went out, and she heard his boots banging on the metal stairs.

"Something wrong?" she asked Willy.

He stopped playing for a moment. "No, not really," he murmured. He began to play again, and she found she knew that song, too.

"There was a battle in the north," she sang softly, and he joined her for the rest of the verse:

And nobles there were many.
And they have killed Sir Johnny Hay
And laid the blame on Geordie
.

He shook his head. "Do your people ever write songs about anything besides love and death?" A thread of impatience ran through his voice, side by side with something else.

"Now and then."

"Couldn't prove it by me." His hands were still again, and he looked away, out the window. "And sometimes it seems as if I know them all. Funny, no?"

Eddi studied his profile, sharp as a paper cutout against the lengthening shadows. An earring swung from his left ear—Eddi recognized it as the device on his armor, the three interlaced crescent moons. The silver gleamed like liquid against the dark side of his face.

His shoulders moved with a shrug, or a sigh. Then he turned back to her. "They're in love, aren't they?"

It took her a minute to figure that out. "Carla and Dan?"

He nodded, intent on her answer.

"It looks like it, anyway."

His mouth got tight, and he frowned. "Isn't that enough?"

Eddi began to see what the conversation was about. "It's not that easy, Willy. Only they know if they're in love—and I'll bet that neither of them knows for sure yet if the other is."

Willy stared at her. Then he laughed, as if it was forced out of him. "Oh, Oak and Ash." He looked away again, this time toward the muddle of the band's equipment. "They make each other happy," he said at last.

"It's not that easy, either. They make each other angry and sad, too. If they don't, then it doesn't go as deep as love."

After a long and thoughtful pause, he said, "Were you in love with me?"

"Not . . . really," she said finally, and knew it was true.

"Well, that's something solid to go on, at least." He laughed again, with barely a lungful of air. "After all those damn songs, I thought I ought to understand either love or death. And I'd rather study love."

Eddi wanted to say something comforting, but the conversation made her nervous. She found herself waiting for Willy to suggest they try again, to ask if she couldn't forgive his mistakes and fall into his
arms once more. She was completely unprepared for what he actually said.

It was, "And the phouka?"

Eddi stared. "What?"

"Do you love him?"

Her legs had turned either to stone or to Jell-O; the effect was the same. She wanted to stand up and couldn't. And whatever had done it to her legs had affected her mouth as well.

"You tell me that I can't judge by appearances. But if I had to gamble, I'd bet that the phouka is in love with you. And you were very different with me than you are with him." Willy spoke with the intensity so characteristic of him, and his green eyes searched hers as if hunting through them for the truth. "Tell me what all that means."

Her legs did work, after all; she got up and paced to the windows and back. "If you were just a goddamn guitarist, I'd tell you to mind your own business."

Willy shrugged. "Maybe you ought to, anyway."

"Well, as long as you're feeling insightful, what should I do about him?" She heard the edge in her voice and regretted it.

"I think . . . what you did about me."

"Namely?"

His face looked young, innocent, and not at all human. "What you think is right."

The low sun cast hot bars of butter-colored light through the windows. Dust swung slowly through each beam.

"I'll try," Eddi said. She walked across the room to the door, making the dust motes leap and churn. "Don't forget to lock up."

As she stepped out on the stairs, she heard his guitar begin again on "Geordie."

The phouka stood at the bottom of the stairs, his face turned up to her. His brown skin glowed copper in the late sun, and his eyes were round and dark and enormous. The look in them made her chest ache.

"Nothing amiss?" he said when she was close enough, and he could speak softly. "I don't know.

I don't think so." Which was the truth, after all. She hoped.

It wasn't easy to ride a motorcycle in a great deal of skirt. Eddi had tucked most of it under her knees or sat on it. But the two top layers
slipped free, and the night wind caught them, until she and the phouka seemed to be riding in a levitating mist of sheer midnight blue, enhanced by the silver crescent moon and embroidered stars that spangled the chiffon.

"Where did you find this enchanting whimsy?" the phouka said at a stoplight, staring bemused at a drift of skirt across his knee.

"D'you like it?"

"Very much."

"You could try it on."

"Pestilent flower," he smiled.

"I found it at a vintage clothing store. I think it must have come from a dance company or something." She was pleased that he liked it, and embarrassed that she was pleased. "You said I should wear something I can dance in."

"Not precisely. I said you should wear something you
like
to dance in. I think highly of this velvet thing you're wearing on top, too." At that point the light changed, and it wasn't until the next stop sign that he could add, "But the low back—unfair of you, my primrose, decidedly. And me with one arm around your waist, and the other around your guitar."

She let the clutch out a little too fast, and the bike leaped away from the stop sign. "I beg your pardon, I do." He laughed next to her ear. "You needn't toss me into the street. I shall behave."

"Hah!" Eddi replied, but she wasn't sure he heard.

They were past the university campus, very close to Tower Hill Park. Something like stage fright scrabbled across Eddi's stomach. She had shared a battlefield with the creatures of Faerie, but nothing else. She was the Angel of Death. What possible place could she have in their celebrating?

Tower Hill rose up from the middle of the park like a gem from its setting. Green-fire lace edged the sidewalk and the curbing. Inside that barrier Eddi could see lights in subtle hues, and mist like colored veiling lit from within. Each tree was outlined in luminous gold; each leaf was a pale green lamp. At the summit the witch-hat tower that gave the park its name rose against the night-blue sky, and each of the arched, glassless windows around the top gleamed with faint silver.

"Good . . . God," Eddi gasped. She found she'd pulled over and stopped the bike, which was probably wise. "What the hell do the neighbors think?"

The phouka laughed. "Silly primrose. The hill is dark and quiet tonight—not even lovers abroad. And if any should venture by, the place will have no appeal for them."

"And I can see it all." She turned suddenly to the phouka. "Or is all of that illusion?"

"No. It's quite real. Tonight, the dark is illusion." His voice was charged with something she couldn't identify. She revved the bike and swung out from the curb, toward the glittering hill.

Eddi pulled in to the curb on Malcolm Avenue between the park and an old school. "Can we cross that?" she asked, nodding at the green border.

"Come and see," the phouka replied. She followed him across the sidewalk.

Now that she was closer, Eddi saw that the barrier of light was not the same as the one that had circled Minnehaha Falls. That one had been a curtain of deep emerald. These were dancing flames of delicate golden green, with faint lavender showing at the edges. The phouka set down her guitar case and dropped to one knee before the barrier. With a murmured word, he touched a stone that lay just outside the line. The blaze sank and drew back, like courtiers bowing and withdrawing before a king. They stood at the foot of a path that climbed the hill in front of them.

"O most admir'd of mortals," the phouka said, grinning up at her. "If it please you?"

"Silly nit," she said. She took his hand and pulled him to his feet, and inside the barrier of light. It leaped up again behind him.

He looked shy suddenly, which made her feel, unaccountably, the same. His hand was warm in hers, the skin very smooth. She let go of it. "So," she said quickly, "you said you'd change when we got here."

"What would you like me to become?" he said, blandly innocent.

"Hah hah. Dressed up."

"Ah. Turn your back then, my sweet."

After a moment, she did. The taffeta layer of her skirt whispered coolly against her calves in the night breeze, and strands of her hair patted her face. Moonlight lit the slope before her, and streetlights, and a certain lambency of the grass blades themselves. She felt weightless.

"Very well," the phouka said carefully, and she turned around.

He stood across the path from her, his chin up, his hands playing
unconsciously with a blade of grass. He was transformed. No, he was still himself. But to say only that he'd changed his clothes—it wouldn't explain his air of elegance, or his sudden reserve.

His coat was of dark green brocade, embroidered with flowers and strange creatures in dim, subtle colors. It looked like a garden seen at night. The sleeves had deep turned-back cuffs of black, ornamented with silver buttons. He wore it open, over a black waistcoat and tiers of heavy white lace at his throat. More lace spilled out from under the cuffs and frothed over his fingers, where the silver of rings glittered. His pants were black satin, close-fitting and embroidered with silver down one outside seam.