Whiskey and Water (19 page)

The stroke of her finger down his beak
said,
Tell me later.
She found a bit of cake on the table and held it up
for him, and turned to watch the young mortals and the page Foxglove progress
down the stair. The Queen, flanked by her son, went to meet them.

"I am but an attendant lord,"
Morgan said, mostly to the raven, but it was Matthew who gave her the curious
glance.

"A little modern for you."

"One tries to keep up." She
grinned at him again, and he blushed and turned back to the newcomers, pushing
the tails of his patchwork coat aside to shove his hands into his pockets.
"Mallory's so dreary, after the first two hundred years."

He laughed, of course, and shot her a shy
sideways glance that landed on her mouth more than her eyes.

She almost felt sorry for him.

Jewels' heart hadn't stopped beating
staccato since the alder-twig Fae had returned with a slender page—this one
unmistakably an Elf of the storybook sort, if a young and furtive one—and they
had dressed her in suede trousers and boots that didn't chafe her sore, scraped
feet at all. They'd put a blouse with wild full pirate sleeves and a brocade
bodice on her, and they had combed her wet hair halfway dry in the sun and
braided it in two tails down her back, with copper and verdigris ribbons and
tiny dust-blue sprigs of rosemary woven through, so it smelled thick and sweet
and resinous.

Geoff, when they brought him to meet her
in the hall, was dressed as he had been, except his hair was wet and his shirt
was clean. He still had his backpack slung over one shoulder, and the Fae
avoided him and all the steel he wore.

Despite the bulky jacket and the
every-which-way elflocked hair, he seemed diminished, like a wet cat. His
elbows pressed to his sides, denting the leather of his jacket, and the light
reflecting from it cast blue shadows under his chin. He breathed out as she
came to him, his shoulders lowering. "You're okay?"

"Yeah." She patted his arm.
Geoff was a funny creature, big-eyed and skittish as a lemur, so phobic about
blood he couldn't watch Jewels tend to her implements, but all lashing tail and
claws when he needed to be.

They followed Foxglove through the castle
corridors—the alder-twig Fae stayed behind—and down a different flight. The
castle seemed deserted. Jewels would have expected a bustle of servants, but other
than the pitter-patter of a brownie in ragged coveralls, rose briars pinning
the side seams, she didn't hear a footfall.

"It's quiet in the afternoons,"
she said, and Foxglove gave her a small soft smile.

"It's quiet always," he said,
tossing his head so his silvery hair broke in locks across his forehead and around
his ear points. "There are not many of us left." A peridot gleamed
near the tip of the left ear, a citrine lower in the right. Geoff took Jewels'
hand.

They walked through a long sun-dappled
gallery and out into the day. The Merlin waited there, the Mage beside her:
also, the men who had met them on the road, and two women.

She recognized the beaked nose and blowing
dark hair of the Queen of Faeries, though she couldn't have guessed that the
stern, wickedly beautiful redhead behind her was Morgan le Fey, two dogs at her
feet and that crooked-winged raven on her shoulder. Still, Jewels caught her
breath.
This is real.

Steps gritted under Jewels' boots as she
stepped down them, chin up, forcing her hands to hang naturally at her sides.
The Queen came forward, her dark boy beside her, her train and sleeves spreading
on the marble of the patio to glitter in the sun. It seemed she rose from the
same substance, a sculpted plinth with a living woman trapped within. The bard
on his chair never looked up, though disapproval stiffened his neck.

Jewels swallowed and glanced at Geoff. He
winked—he must have been waiting for her to look — and it made her feel better.
And then she saw Foxglove stepping away from them and stooping before the
Queen, his hair sliding over his bead-sewn shoulders. Trousers made a curtsey
stupid, so Jewels tugged Geoff's hand and went down on one knee too, as they
issued from the stair.

She held her breath, suede stretching
across her seat and thighs, sun-warmth prickling the nape of her neck, her
streaked ashy braids sliding over her shoulders, still damp. "Your
Majesty," she breathed, as Geoff ducked his head.

"Juliet," the Queen said, when
Jewels was sure she was going to faint from lack of oxygen. "Geoffrey. Rise."

They did, hair haloed in sun, the thready
sweetness of the gardens cloying in their throats. Geoff regretted his coat,
but he hadn't been sure of leaving anything in the room. He didn't think it was
wise to assume, in Faerie, that one could return to get anything one left
behind.

The Faerie Queen watched quietly, her
dress translucent with the sunlight behind it, her lips twisted in an odd and
very human sort of moue. She reached out with a bony graceful hand and touched
the silver in Jewels' ear, then tapped the pointed tip. Her own ears were
barely slanted at all—no more than anyone's might be, and her features were not
Fae. Ian shifted beside and behind her. "Oh, kid," she said, in broad
Midwestern English. "You don't want that, you know."

Jewels squeezed Geoff's hand for courage.
His palm had gone clammy, his pulse trembling under the skin as hard as her
own, but he didn't let the fear reach his eyes.

"Can you see my heart?" Jewels
asked, her voice very clear considering how dry her mouth felt. "No,"
the Queen said. "I can't see your heart, though I'd bet Morgan could, or
Cairbre."

She angled a smile over Geoff's shoulder,
and Cairbre responded with a soft trill. It was a fierce smile, and Ian
transferred his weight from one foot to another at the bard's answer. This
time, in discomfort. "Mother—" She stopped him with an upraised hand.

"Let her speak for herself."

Jewels cleared her throat. "Then how
do you know what I want? Your Majesty," she added, belatedly, and winced.
This was not, she suspected, how one spoke to queens.

"I know," the Queen said. She
turned her back, the white gown twisting around her legs, and drew her hair
forward over her shoulders with a swanlike lift of her arms. She slipped the
buttons down the bodice and let the whole glittering assemblage slide off her
shoulders and breasts, taking her chemise with it, baring her to the waist.

Even Jewels gasped.

The Queen's skin was a golden olive,
fine-grained and flawless over smooth muscle and bone. Except for the
patternless scars that crisscrossed her back in meandering lines, thick and
white and stiff as worm-tunnels through the green meat of a leaf, so there
"was scarcely the span of two fingers between them. They chipped her
entire back into facets, and Jewels could see that they extended below her
waist and the length of both arms in beaded keloid lines.

The Queen turned to look over her own
shoulder, and pushed her hair out of her eyes. She showed the scars on her
breasts and belly too: they weren't so dramatic, the pierced puckered stab
wounds of an old hart's tines, but they were enough that the Queen saw Matthew turn
his head and flinch, his undamaged hand clenching—in empathy, rather than in
horror, she thought.

'This is Faerie," she said. "No
one who enters comes away unmarked."

She saw the girl swallow, her slender
throat convulsing. And then Jewels raised her own hands, unlaced the borrowed
bodice she wore, without speaking, and shrugged it down her arms. She pulled her
blouse out of the waistband of the trousers and jerked it over her head, then
threw both to the stones. And turned, arms folded over a narrow chest, colors
glowing on her skin over the rise and hollow of her ribs and spine. I was born
in the otherworld," Jewels said. "Don't you think it's already
marked me enough?"

The Queen sighed and slid her chemise up
her torso again, worming her arms into the sleeves. Foxglove came to help her,
and Carel did her buttons up, smoothing the gown below her collarbones, the air
even more full of Carel's rosewood scent than the scent of flowers.

Jewels had turned back before Carel
stepped away, arms still crossed over her breasts defiantly, without modesty.

That would serve her well. The Queen
turned for a moment and found Matthew frowning at her. He'd angled his head so
the light glinted off his spectacles, hiding his expression, but the curve of
tense biceps under his coat and the pin-scratch between his eyebrows gave him
away.

"On your head be it," the Queen
said, twisting to look the half-nude mortal girl in the eyes. No Faerie mix of
shifting colors there: they were clear and brown as brook water. "It may
kill you, child. But you can stay."

"Elaine!"

The Queen smiled at Matthew, and made sure
he knew how false it was. "What about the boy?" she asked.

"Oh, I'm just here with Jewels —
" Geoff sputtered.

The Queen talked right over him, watching
Matthew's folded arms tighten across his chest. "Can't you feel the power
in him, Matthew Magus? Don't you want him for your very own?"

Matthew coughed, but if he would have
answered, it was lost under Jewels' protest. "He's not Otherkin."

"Otherkin is
a joke,"
Matthew
said, sharply. "Do you want to know what changeling children look like?
Elaine is one," he said, jerking the back of his hand at her. "There.
Look at Morgan. She's one too. An Elf-knight's bastard. If you were a
changeling, Jewels, somebody would have come to kidnap you by now—" He
blinked, as if suddenly awakened to his tirade, and settled back on his heels.

Morgan stepped in. "Geoff's a Mage. A
Mage-in-waiting, anyway. He could be like Matthew, is what the Queen
means."

"Gee, I can hardly wait," Geoff
muttered under his breath, and Matthew couldn't blame him.

Babylon

E
rnie Peese waited for Don after the briefing.
Predictable, but not anything Don wanted to deal with when the remnants of the
nightmare headache still scratched at his temples, and before his second pot of
coffee. Even when Ernie was smiling.

Especially
when Ernie was smiling.

"And?" Don said, before Ernie
could start the guessing game.

It didn't, unfortunately, deflate him
much. But Don would cheerfully use his own height and bulk as a weapon against
bullies, and he did so now, closing the space between them and forcing Ernie to
tilt his head and look up at him as he said, "Those kids you let go aren't
answering their cell phones. Service unavailable. The girl's mailbox was full
this morning, but I guess nobody ever calls the boy."

So maybe they went to the beach. We've got
addresses for both of them, right?"

For what
that's
worth. Do I
actually need to tell you there's a lot of people unhappy about this,
Don?" Peese sighed and unfolded his arms. He turned to open up the space
between them—a tacit invitation for Don to walk on. He took it, and Ernie kept
pace.

Peese was a thoroughly odious human being.
Unfortunately, he was also a pretty good cop. Don hated moral ambiguities.
"Yeah, I'm getting my ass kicked too."

From the mayor to the chief and on down
the line, everybody adding his little teaspoon of shit to the avalanche. I got
a call from a Christian Bergstrom last night." Peese shook his head, just
once, an irritated twitch. "Guess what he is?"

"Dare I?"

"Personal assistant to former
lieutenant governor Andraste. You wanna tell me what the hell
she's
doing
involved in the case?"

Don stopped. "Dammit. That
Szczegielniak guy is one of Andraste's pets too. What did Bergstrom want?"

Peese drew up short half a step after Don,
and turned to stare at him, sucking his uneven teeth. "He wanted to know
if there was anything Mrs. Andraste could do to help with the investigation.
And if there was any chance that it wasn't a Faerie murder."

"So what if it turns out not to be
Fae? What else would it be?" Don stuck a stumpy finger in his ear and
scratched absently.

"Something that will fuck us up. I
dunno — it goes to Washington anyway. If we rule out a mortal agency. And —
"

Don's heels clicked on gray-flecked
linoleum tile, worn paler under scarred wax near the center of the corridor.
The woodwork was old, the floors new—on a system that considered 1950
new.
"Have
we ruled out a mortal agency? Or is that why you wanted to keep a leash on
those kids?"

"If it's a Fae crime we're off it.
The mayor wants the city to have it. It doesn't do him any good if it goes to
DC."

Of course Ernie knows what the mayor
wants.
Don kicked an
imaginary can. "What, you studying law nights? Going to run for DA? That's
not a collar you can
make,
Ernie. They have their own rules. The faster
we hand this uphill, the better."

Peese sighed and stuffed his hands in his
pockets, and stopped. Don slowed down and turned around, walking backward.