Whiskey and Water (50 page)

Morgan grinned into her wine, her gaze
never leaving Matthew's pale bowed head. "You know" she said lightly,
"I knew the Bunyip's name, once upon a time. There's always the chance I
could remember it. If you
really
cared to know."

Black swans fly by night. They travel in
secret, in darkness, and during the day they rest along their migration routes,
in brackish tidewaters and wide rivers, their long necks curving valentine
hearts reflected in smooth water. During the breeding season, they are the most
social or the swans, filial and devoted, their gatherings teeming with cygnets,
cobs, and pens. They nest in tribes, whole villages of swans, coal-black but
for the flight feathers, peaceful under the sun.

This is because they remember their
ancestors and the punishment Bunyip wreaked upon them when they were men. And
that he charged an entire village for the offense of one young man. Prejudice
breeds a certain unity in the face of misadventure.

Swans remember. Cities remember. Events,
and lessons learned. The slow accumulation of wisdom piled stone upon stone, as
experience accretes like verdigris and smoke stains in stonework creases and
on facades. Cities remember every hand that touches them, though the touches
seem fleeting to stone, though subsequent inhabitants strive to eradicate the
marks of their predecessors. London recalls Londinium. New York recalls New
Amsterdam.

Swans and cities are wiser than Faeries
and men. Because where men remember, they often do not learn. Men haul their
rancor down generations, bequeathed father to daughter, mother to son,
until—the causes beyond recollection—a grudge becomes a nationality, and a
quarrel becomes a war.

By the emerald heart set in the filigree
streets of New York, Matthew Szczegielniak stood under bare trees, looking up
through the scratched lenses of a spare pair of glasses, and remembered a
quarrel.

It was a cold Saturday afternoon and no
one else was standing. They hurried past, heads ducked against the wind, hands
balled in pockets. Paper cups skittered over oil-stained sidewalks and plastic bags
enshrouded the bases of sign poles. A few thousand starlings preparing to flee
the winter rustled and chattered like self-propelled leaves in a stand of maples,
bending exploratory parties—black solar flares—out, and back into the body of
the flock.

Matthew pulled his hands from his pockets,
grateful to be back in his own clothes. He crossed against the light. The cop
on the corner happened to look in the other direction. No taxicab came close
enough for him to feel the wind of its passage.

He was sick, wobbly. Recovering—it hadn't
been
that
much blood, a pint or two, by the angel's mercy—but not his
best self. He was a fool to walk into Jane's tower unaccompanied, when the
wards she had wound into it, stone and iron, made his heart race over his
breathing from across the street. He was putting himself in her power.

And he was charmed.

Again.

His own power answered Jane's incumbency,
a cold sea surging in his belly, his fingertips fizzing with energy. The thing
awakened in his anger at Morgan had not ended. It crouched under his heart,
blinking like a great mad cat.

He knew it by its eyes.
You are too
much surrendered, Matthew Szczegielniak.

He turned away and brushed past the
doorman, unremarked. There was a code pad by the penthouse elevator. Jane had
changed the combination, but this was within Matthew's damaged abilities.
Technology wouldn't keep a Mage out. It told him its name, whispered when he
stroked his fingers across the keys, and he whispered it back. The elevator
doors whisked open. Jane would know he was coming. He had entered her lair. He
put a hand on the walnut paneling and listened to the cables, the motor, the
simpleminded computer that controlled it all, eavesdropping for a Mage's voice
whispering of metal fatigue, failure, slipping gears. He didn't think Jane
would drop him. But if she surprised him, he might still convince the elevator
to let him down softly.

It was a long enough fall for a little
fast talking.

If he wasn't so damned wobbly, he would
have taken the stairs. Instead, he was gambling that Jane wanted to talk to
him even more than he wanted to talk to her—perhaps
wanted
wasn't
precisely the right term? —and that she would stay her hand.

The doors opened again, and he entered an
atrium so freshly remodeled that he could smell the mortar under the marble
tiles. They were finely laid, but not yet resigned to their fate, and the
mutter of their discomfort made him step quickly. Their voices would mellow in
months and years, as they made their peace with the building, and their voices
merged into the choir that was the city: Italian marble, Connecticut
brownstone, Pennsylvania iron, Japanese bamboo, the yellow bricks paving Stockholm
Street from the Kreischer Company on Staten Island.

For now, Matthew stepped quickly across
the floor. And stopped, his sneakers squeaking on the tile. The door across the
atrium was open, the space all white beyond a silhouetted figure. Jane did not await
him. But Felix Luray did.

"Hullo, Matthew. Are you here on
behalf of Kit?"

"I'm here to speak to Jane,
actually."

"She's out. Any business can pass
through her second." He paused, coyly. "It is business, I
presume?"

"Still so jealous? What is it, Felix?
Sibling rivalry?" Matthew shrugged and drew his foot across the floor,
provoking a wince-inducing squeal. He set it, and began to turn, only to be
stopped by Felix's voice again.

"Matthew."

He turned back.

Felix could have been his calculated
opposite. Matthew wore sneakers, jeans, a plain white T-shirt under an
unconstructed fawn corduroy jacket. Felix hadn't even unbuttoned his suit. His
hair was slicked in polished waves, fine silver coils woven through a blackness
as glossy as the toes of his shoes. Matthew hadn't bothered with his ponytail;
his hair swung against his jaw, narrowing his field of vision to the waiting
Mage.

With a certain exertion, Matthew avoided
folding his arms.

"Come in," Felix said.
"Maybe we can have a conversation without insulting each other."

He stood aside. Matthew walked past him,
into the enormous room, and managed not to flinch when Felix shut the door.

The twisted iron hulk in the center of the
room dominated Matthew's attention. He went to it slowly, past plants and artfully
grouped furniture as if he did not see them at all. His shoes fell silent now
on inlaid wood and scattered carpeting.

Felix waited by the door, feeling
foolishly as if he should be stamping his heel.

But Matthew's reverence was hypnotic.

He paused arm's length from the ruined
stair, and reached out to it with his ruined hand. His thumb extended, the
dinged and chipped ring of rowan wood clicking dull iron. The metal was not
cold. Its warm surface was rough, pitted. He ran his hand up it, to where the
banister ended, sheared off and twisted, at the height of Matthew's head.

He stood for a moment and held it, as best
he could, arm raised like a child holding its mother's hand, until the silence
stretched too sharp to bear. Felix chuffed like a lion. "Don't you want to
know how it ends?"

In the big room, it echoed. Matthew waited
until it died. Still gripping the rail, and said, "What makes you think I
want it to end?"

Not in it to 'win it? Good news for the
good guys, that."

Matthew let his hand fall. He turned to
face Felix and leaned against the stair, crossing his ankles. "I don't
believe it's ever over, is all.'

"What do you want, Matthew?"

"You asked
me
in."

"Come back to us."

"You don't want that."

"No," Felix said. Matthew's
presence by the stair was a weight in the room, a gravity well. He struggled
against it, walking upstream, until he reached the bar cart. "Jane
does."

Matthew's silence hung like the moment
between the lightning and the crash. It hung there while Felix poured whiskey
and doctored it, a few drops of water in the glass.

"Oh, Felix," he said, at last.
"Loyal as a dog. I'd hope she'd treat a damned dog better."

Felix shrugged. He didn't drink, just came
back with the glass in his hand: a frosted crystal tumbler, heavy as a stone, the
surface textured with knowing owls. Lalique, and suited to Jane's whimsy.
"She has what I want."

"It could be Kit." He uncrossed
his legs and straightened. "What if you left Jane?"

"Christian would stand her
second."

"Christian's no Magus," Matthew
answered. "He's a devil. Answer me."

"No."

Matthew wasn't sure which question Felix
was answering, unless it was both of them. Felix climbed, and sat down on the
fourth step, two from where the hulk ended, kitty-corner to Matthew. Shoulder
to shoulder, but not side by side. "That's not what we're for."

"What we're for is
over
—"

"And who's at fault for that?"
He sighed. "Reinvented, anyway. He set the tumbler down, lead crystal clicking
iron. "Are you sure you don't want to know? I can tell you. There's a lot
Jane didn't teach you."
"Worlds,"
Matthew said. He was
grinning, painfully. Felix didn't see. "At least I'm not the one who has
to fight her. I'll give you the damned city, Felix. I can do that—"

"You cannot."

The Dragon twisted in Matthew's breast.
Bitch.
It was your idea.
"Which one of you is working with the Fae?"

Felix sipped the drink. Lagavulin. Not his
favorite. "You can't
give
me New York." "Why not? You
blamed me for taking it for long enough. Fine. Fuck it. I'm giving it
back." "Oh. If only. What would it cost me?"

"Leave Jane. Save her life. She can't
duel without you — "

"Save Christopher's life, you mean.
If Jane doesn't default, she'll destroy him. It's
Rossville.
What's an
Elizabethan poet going to do with that?"

"That too," Matthew said.
"What do you owe Jane?"

"Nothing. What do I owe you?"

"Nothing."

"Well then," Felix said.
"Thirsty?" He held the whiskey up beside his head. Matthew didn't
take it. Felix sipped again, and let the silence hang.

"Why?" Matthew said.

Felix thought it over, rolled the question
like a jewel in his hand. "Because I believe in humanity," he said.
"Because Faerie and magic are about being
born
special, being born
gifted, like you. Being chosen. Not about what you do, but who you are."

"I wish it wasn't," Matthew
answered.

"And Prometheus could be the
opposite," Felix continued, rolling over him. "And Christopher won't make
it that."

This time, Matthew took the glass out of
Felix's hand.

The whiskey tasted of ancient waters and
thoughtful decay, rich, sweet, fiery all at once, layered with smoke and mist
and soil and life and the faint tannic tickle of bitterness. He rolled it over
his tongue, and drank it down.

Don't worry," Felix said, getting up
to fetch another glass. "There's more where that came from." Believe
me, I know." Matthew breathed out across his tongue. "All right. How
does it end?"

Felix unstoppered the decanter, which did
not match the glasses. “ ‘And they all lived happily ever after.' "

Matthew snorted into the tumbler. His
breath rang like wind through a bell. "Right, Felix. You, and your little
dog Toto too. Seriously. You wanted to tell me how it ends. I'm asking."

Felix turned around, the whiskey in his
glass glowing like amber in the sun. Aeons, trapped in resinous light. Ancient
history in his hand. "Have a pen?"

"Not on me."

"I've got one, then."

Matthew watched Felix set the glass on the
bar cart and carefully uncap his fountain pen. It was a Waterman, not very
expensive, a practical rather than an ostentatious choice. It wrote like
gliding silk across your hand.

He dipped the nib in the whiskey, slowly,
and lifted it from a translucent blue coil as bright as a swirl in a
blown-glass ornament. Matthew came to him, put his glass down, and stretched
out his left hand to take the pen, careful not to shake it. A thick cobalt
droplet shivered at the tip. His handwriting was awkward now.

He wrote his name on a card, while Felix
struck a light. A white candle's wick flared against the match, and then Felix
shook it out. He took the Waterman from Matthew's hand and signed his own name
before capping the pen. The ink was pale, diluted, wetly feathering into the
card.

Felix poured half the tinted whiskey into
Matthew's tumbler. Together, they took up the card—Matthew pinching a corner
painfully, Felix supporting his hand —and set the edge in the flame. They held
it up, rills of brightness lapping the paper as the edge curled into soot, and
each hefted his glass. Matthew's eyes never left Felix's face.