War for the Oaks (35 page)

Dan had brought a Casio CZ series portable and an amp to play it through. Carla had a kobassa. "It's the only hand percussion in the house," she said ruefully. She gave it a quick slap-and-slide, rattle-and-hiss across her hand. "I could have brought the snare, I guess, but that just makes me wish for the whole kit."

Eddi shook her head. "Violent Femmes used to use a washtub."

"I don't have a washtub. Maybe I'll beat on your head, instead."

"It's a thought. I'm not using it for anything."

Carla looked curious, but Eddi turned quickly to unpack her guitar. Dan gave her an E to tune to.
Now why did I say that?
she wondered.
I didn't mean it. Did I?
She remembered suddenly, unbidden, the phouka saying that love made mortals stupid.
Damn phouka
.

She looked up to find Hedge standing beside her. He wore a black
T-shirt and clean black jeans—dressed up, for him. At his side was a big-bellied acoustic bass guitar. The finish was dark with age, the fretboard worn, and she knew that this was the instrument that had taught him to draw such fearsome music out of the Steinberger. She smiled at him. He seemed surprised by that; cautiously, he smiled back.

"Only one short, then," Eddi said. "Where's Willy?"

Carla shrugged. "I haven't seen him, but that doesn't mean he's not here."

Eddi looked at the phouka, but he, too, shrugged. "Well, never mind. If he's here, he'll show up when the music starts."

As they moved closer to the bonfire, Eddi muttered to the phouka, "Any idea what might be keeping him?"

The phouka's expression was indecipherable. "None."

"If he's still sulking in the rehearsal space . . ."

"Is that what he was doing this afternoon? No, never mind. That's no business of mine." His brows drew down for a moment, then his face was impassive again.

"He wasn't sulking. That wasn't fair of me. He's pretty confused right now, and he's not used to it, that's all."

The phouka walked with his hands in his pockets, unnecessarily interested in the turf. "I know you haven't . . . been keeping company with him. Not since May Day."

She wanted to laugh, though she wasn't amused; she wanted to snap at him, though she wasn't angry. Balanced between extremes, her voice ended up with nothing much in it. "That's over. We're both content to leave it that way."

Beyond a quick, sharp look, he made no reply. But she found she felt better for having said it out loud.

Then she realized she was at one end of a roughly sketched semicircle of the Folk, with the wood for the bonfire at its center. As she watched, a man and woman of the Sidhe approached the piled branches. The woman was one of the queen's attendants, the one with the white-blond veil of hair. The two caught each other's hands across the unlit wood, right hand to right, left to left, and drew them close together in an interlaced knot of flesh and bone. Then, slowly, they lowered their joined hands. Magic gathered in them—Eddi could feel it, could hear the throbbing silence of it.

They touched the wood. Blue-white fire ran the length of each
branch and leaped up. Cheering split the silence, from every fey throat in the circle.

Across the fire the Queen of Faerie turned toward her. In the light of the flames, her face looked warmer, softer, more beautiful still. The Lady nodded, and Eddi knew they were requested to play.

With her eyes, she gathered Hedge and Dan and Carla. She set nervous fingers to the neck of her guitar, and launched them all into a song.

She played the wailing, sliding opening notes of Dire Straits' "Solid Rock," and Carla smacked the kobassa against her hand in half time. Then Dan pounded piano out of the Casio, Carla put the rhythm into high gear, and Hedge walked a bass line with gorgeous style. The circle became ragged almost immediately with the motion of the dance.

As the lyrics rolled off her lips, Eddi almost laughed aloud. They were about living for things that were solid and true. Around her, fantasies and illusions circled and stamped and spun, in glimpses of flying hair around uncanny faces, extravagant motion of inhuman arms and legs. She threw words at them as if daring them to ignore her.

Dan bounded out of the last chord into the opening riff of Men Without Hats' "The Safety Dance." A figure broke free of the dancers, a thin, foxy, red-haired boy. He pushed a large flat drum and a two-headed stick into Carla's hands, and disappeared into the mob again. "A bodhran!" Carla squeaked, and took up the beat happily, weaving the low thrumming voice of the drum into Hedge's bass.

It was the thin, intoxicating air; it was the moonlight, or the strong beer. Whatever it was, Eddi stood in the heart of the music and the night, and she knew it. She clapped out the beat, and watched her dancers pick it up. Hers. She pushed the guitar behind her and began to work them. She brought power up from her lungs, her diaphragm, put it in her voice, and sent that into every vibrating thing in the park.

"And we can act like we come from out of this world / Leave the real one far behind." She formed her lips and tongue and teeth around the words, made them mercilessly clear and full of meaning. "We can dance if we want to/We've got all your life and mine." Her mortal life and, now, theirs. There were worse things to do with a life than dance it away. She felt feverish, her head light and her skin prickly.

This audience, these fey dancers—they were the other half of the song, as if it were a question and they the answer she'd waited for.
They lived for the music for as long as it lasted, and were ruled by it. They danced with wild grace, with all their attention on her.
Fairy food
, she realized.
Once you've tasted it, nothing else will do. Will I waste away for want of this?

They held still in the opening of Peter Gabriel's "And Through the Wire," and the notes fell on them like a shower of rain. Her voice tore across them like lightning. "And through the wire I touch the power—" Every bolt of lightning has thunder in pursuit. She felt hers up through her feet, against her ears, on the palms of her hands. She heard it in the full-throated singing of Dan and Carla and Hedge.

She didn't understand what she felt. She only knew she had to express it, pass it on. "Overloaded with everything we said/Be careful where you tread—" There was a flash when she almost knew—"Watch the wire!"—but the knowledge dispersed into the song and was gone.

When it was finished she was hot with fever, cold with drying sweat, trembling with weariness. The voice of a wooden whistle rose out of the chasm of silence. Then drums, and shouting fiddles and bagpipes. Her hosts had taken up the music.

Someone took her hands and drew her out of the circle. It was the phouka. His eyes were bright, his lips parted, his whole face molded by some outside force that was only now leaving him. Calmly, she recognized that force: it was in her, too. It had come from her. It was magic.

They went up the slope without speaking, until they reached the honeysuckle grove and the kegs of wine and beer. The phouka poured something into two cups and handed one to her. It looked colorless; if it had any tint, it might be green, but she couldn't tell in the fitful light. Streams of bubbles rose from the bottom of the cup, like champagne. The fragrance was like walking through a field on a hot day, the smell that rose from the crushed grasses underfoot. There was the fiery scent of alcohol, too.

Eddi looked over the cup at the phouka. He was so serious she had to smile. "Is this part of the initiation, or strictly for members only?"

His lips twitched. "Perhaps a little of both. No, don't drink yet, my sweet. You must wish, in silence, something concerning valor or love. Then you must drain the cup, quickly and to the last drop."

"Why valor or love?"

"Because those are the special province of Midsummer."

"What are you going to wish for?" she asked.

"I shan't tell you," he said, smiling, and his cup chimed against hers.

What was it Willy had said? She should do what was right. She wondered which that had more to do with, valor or love. She swallowed the contents of the cup.

It froze the back of her throat and half her chest on the way down. She hadn't expected it to be burning cold. For an instant all her senses were taken up in it, like a burst of brilliant light. Then her vision returned, and the feeling in her hands and feet and tongue.

"Earth and Air," the phouka said, his voice shaky. "There's a cruel pleasure." His eyes were closed, and his face had nothing in it to match his light words.

She felt . . . new, just-made. She felt as if everything she had ever done out of weakness or fear had been undone, and all of her past washed clean. Her future lay before her like the sticks of an opened fan.
Like branching paths in the woods
, she realized.
That's Faerie for you. You wish for an answer, and get fifty to choose from
.

She stepped forward and touched the cascade of lace over the phouka's chest. He took a deep, quick breath, and his eyes opened, wide and startled.

"Come dance with me," she said. She took his hand and led him toward the bonfire light.

The instruments were bagpipes and whistles, guitars, drums, cymbals and bells, mandolins, fiddles, and something that sounded like a button accordion. The music was anything the night called for. There were jigs and reels—she might have guessed that. But there was hot city blues, too, rock, jazz, funk, and bluegrass full of mountains and whiskey. It should have sounded silly, and didn't. The fusion reminded Eddi of zydeco: wildly disparate musical styles played on inappropriate instruments, all to scorching good effect. Some of the dances had steps and patterns, and the phouka led her through them.

Some of them were as seemingly formless as slam dancing. But mostly, it was just dancing.

Just dancing. For the first time, she heard the power of Faerie music, felt what her own audiences felt. The difference was that she never seemed to get tired. She was full of rhythm and obedient to it. She couldn't put a foot wrong.

And the phouka was always with her. Eddi had the odd notion that they were two complementary forms in space, like the halves of the yin-yang symbol, like the light and dark faces of the moon. That in itself was distracting. Sometimes the movements of the dance would put her hand in his, or his arm around her waist. She wanted then to stop in midstep, to have time to wonder at the warm, smooth skin of his hands, the cool brocade of his coat sleeve. She knew the shape and size of him, knew always just how far away he was, as if some mental radar bounced her thoughts off him and described him. Yet she was constantly surprised when she looked and found him there.

He was a flashy dancer—but then, so was everyone around her, tonight. Eddi danced
at
him, egging him on as she might have with her singing from on stage. He knew what she was doing, of course.
Did he always know?
she asked, somewhere in the corner of her thoughts.
Was he always quick to know what I wanted, what I meant,
what I was trying for?
It seemed like it. He grinned at her and shook a stray black curl off his forehead.

Dan's synthesizer splashed melody against a background of bagpipe drone. It was Dan playing it; Eddi could hear his touch, his voicing and embellishing of chords. Dancing was suddenly not enough for her.

"Can anybody jam at this party?" she asked the phouka.

"No. But invited guests most certainly can."

"Hair-splitter," she said, shaking her head, and whirled her way through the dancers back to her guitar.

Dan had the Casio on a strap around his neck, and boogied in place as he played. The bagpiper stood beside him: a tall, twiggy old woman with a comic Cyrano nose and a head of hair like a disturbed porcupine. She wore a man's frock coat, bottle green and frayed at the too-short sleeves, and a long full skirt of shifting pastels. She exuded a scent of apple blossoms.

Eddi watched Dan's hands for long enough to pick up the key. Then she started playing rhythm, a country-swing flat picking lick. She thought the piper smiled at her—though how she could and continue to blow like a bellows, Eddi didn't know. They played something jiggish. Then, inspired perhaps by Eddi's flat picking, Dan fingered a verse of Hank Williams' "C'est La Vie." He raised his eyebrows at her, and she took up the words.

When the lead break came around, a fiddler took it up. He reminded her of Willy; he was one of the Sidhe, and played with a similar demonic intensity, but a little short of Willy's imagination or irreverence. His hair was white-blond. He seemed older than Willy, though the Sidhe were ageless and uniformly young, to look at them.

They were having too much fun to stop, so they did "Jambalaya" and "Hey, Good Lookin'," too. When they were done, Eddi turned to the fiddler as she would have to any mortal session player. She stopped before her hand was actually extended. Then she decided to offer it, anyway. He shook it. His manner was regally friendly.

"Nice job," Eddi said.

"And to yourself, as well." His voice was deep and clear, an actor's voice. "In another time, we might have met together only for this"—he indicated the revelry with a nod—"and not for the making of war."

Eddi studied him. "It takes two to fight a battle."

"Indeed." His eyes were hooded and cool. "Did we not oppose our
enemies, then surely there would be no war. Only slaughter, and darkness."

"Is that it? Two options, either make war, or lie down and be walked on?"

His pale skin flushed—with anger, Eddi suspected. But his tone was perfectly polite. "Ah, have I been too long away from the Half-World? Have mortal men found the remedy for war at last? Tell it me, quickly, that I may never again suffer the sight of a comrade dead in battle."

Eddi winced. "I'm sorry. I . . . I think I spoke as I did . . . because I don't want them to die, either."

"These are not your people. What care you if they die, or how?"

"Some of them are my friends," she said. Then she had to fall silent. The thought of the phouka, dead on a battlefield, thoroughly stopped her voice.