Whiskey and Water (8 page)

Morgan took the tea and set it down, and
gave her attention to selecting a slice of lemon. The sharp scent overwhelmed
the heady sweetness of sunlit flowers. Behind a row of yews, someone's foot crunched
on a gravel path. "—and Murchaud's."

"I gathered."

"You've met him?" Morgan glanced
up sharply, and Elaine permitted herself a smile.

"Not precisely." She took her
time with the sugar tongs. It was always a minor victory to know something in
advance of Morgan—an advantage best used quickly, because Morgan inevitably
found out. "He's snuck off' with Whiskey to New York."

Morgan stirred, and set the spoon aside,
and glanced up through her hair. Her eyes were like the Queen's, gray that was
green or green that was gray, a changeling's lichen-colored irises catching sun
on copper shimmers buried deep. The little hitch in her breath said she knew
already, but she played the line the Queen gave her. "Toward what
outcome?"

"The death of Jane Andraste. Whiskey
seeks what he always seeks, and your Marlowe wants revenge." "That's
Kit for you." The witch sipped her tea, holding her hair out of her face
with the back of a freckled hand. The tendons stood out across it, taut as the
strings of a lute over the bones. "What do you plan to do about it? Would
you like me to intervene?"

"Other than wish them luck? I sent
Kadiska to keep an eye on them. And I can truthfully say I had nothing to do
with the arranging of it, if they succeed."

"Cold words, for the death of your
mother."

The Queen shrugged, her eyes shadowed. "Someone
told me once that if I were to be Fae, I should learn ruthlessness."

"And if it fails, and Jane comes back
with another war?"

"With what forces?"

Morgan soaked a biscuit in her teacup,
borrowing time. "She's had seven years. And I heard Arthur say something
similar once."

"Let's not hear from Dragon Princes,
just this once, shall we?" The Queen drank her tea quickly, as if she
wished she were tossing back liquor, and set the cup down with a click.
"You've a look in your eyes, grandmother."

Morgan smiled. "Your Marlowe?"
Not mine. But out with it."

You said you did not wish to speak of
Dragon Princes." Aye, and he was born between Vlad and Keith, was he not?
One Prince in five hundred years, thank what there is to thank for it. And
Marlowe a century too late — "

Aye," Morgan said, and finished her
tea with a bit more decorum than Elaine had shown. "But you need to know
that his return precipitates a situation I'm not sure has ever occurred
before. He was born between Princes, aye. And his tenancy was complicated by
other factors—the rise of the Prometheans, a captive angel, the heavy hand of
the Morningstar — "

The Queen leaned her elbows on the table
like a child, not a queen, and rested her chin on steepled fingers. A shadow
caught in the furrow between her brows. "But."

"But he was a sorcerer and a poet
both, Elaine. And there were some who wrote his name as
Merlin,
even
then."

Merlin the Magician taught Geology 102 at
a public university in northeastern Connecticut. Weekend nights, she played
keyboards in a prog-rock bar band. Her name was Carel Bierce, and her office
was on the third floor of a sprawling, subdivided, slate-roofed academic
building. The office was shaped in an unequal trapezoid, the result of decades
of temporary dividers that had turned the enormous old brownstone into a rabbit
warren for academics: musty, fusty, stuffy, and difficult to navigate. The
office was cluttered, overcrowded, inefficiently wired and four floors from the
mass spectrometer, but the wide, heavy, old-fashioned casement window
overlooked the sweep of the chemistry building lawn and the long smooth curve
of Horsebarn Hill, and the play of sugar maple tawny and vermilion over that backdrop
ensured that the Merlin clung to her space ferociously every time her colleagues
provoked the administration into shuffling office assignments.

All Saint's Morn, a Monday, had dawned
cold and crisp with pale curls of frost delineating those dag-edged maple
leaves and every blade of grass. It had melted into Indian-summer heat by nine o'clock,
when Carel left her office, bounced down the stairs amid a cataract of
students with her skirt swirling heavily around her ankles, trotted through
Beach Hall's partially enclosed rear courtyard, and headed up the walk toward
the nearest roach coach for a second large cup of coffee better than the stuff in
the lounge. She hurried back ten minutes later, gravel crunching under slouchy
boots, shoulders pulled back and head held high under the weight of beaded
braids.

The beads rattled around her shoulders
when she jerked to a halt, scalding coffee—white, no sugar—spattering her
knuckles. Matthew Szczegielniak stood before the door, gaudy in a white
T-shirt, jeans, and a red patchwork tailcoat that
gleamed
with power.
Two nondescript young persons huddled behind him and off to one side; Carel
spared them barely a glance.

"I haven't seen you in a long time,
Matthew Magus," she said quietly. She transferred her paper cup to her
left hand and shook her fingers. They stung, still wet under her rings. She
sucked the remaining coffee off her skin. "What brings you to my humble
place of work?"

"I brought some friends to meet
you."

They didn't look like Matthew's friends.
They looked like a couple of Carel's students, slightly Gothier than the norm,
and scared out of their wits. They huddled together with a hunched-in
self-effacing aspect that Carel associated with abuse survivors. "I see
that." She sipped her coffee. "You're a ways from New York City,
Matthew."

"I know," he said, and tossed a
glance over his shoulder at the heavy wooden door. It had been a long drive,
nursing his dowager Volkswagen— the only car he could drive anymore, old enough
that it had no trace of a computer and warded to the spark plugs against his
erratic magic — up the Merritt Parkway to 91. "It's important, Carel.
Aren't you going to invite us in?"

More than a polite request: it was an
offer of trust, and one he'd refused before. Stepping into a wizard's tower
meant stepping into her
power,
and it wasn't the sort of thing one did
lightly. Carel cocked her head so her braids splayed over her shoulder, tasting
confusion and bittersweet and blood, sensing a lance of white strength and pure
light that hadn't pierced him before, the way it did now. A lot can happen in
seven years. Something happened last night." Someone died," he said.

In New York? On Halloween? Someone died?
And you come to me for that?"

I come to you for this," he said, and
reached out slowly, with a right hand that hadn't been twisted in such an ugly
fashion the last time they met. A lot can happen in seven years.

Apparently.

His hand brushed the hair of the girl in
the dirty gray sweater. The girl didn't flinch as he tucked strands behind her
ear, but Carel did. Flinched, then stepped forward, frowning at the delicate
curve of the ear. "She's not Fae. Otherkin?"

"Yes." Then his voice took on a
singsong formality, though he tilted his head so his eyes caught the light.
"Dr. Bierce, this is Juliet Gorman, called Jewels, and Geoffrey Bertelli.
Jewels, Geoff, this is Carel Bierce. Merlin the Magician, for the
uninitiated."

The children gaped. Carel sighed and
pursed her mouth, studying the girl's startled pale eyes behind fair lashes.

Carel propped her free hand on her hip and
shook her head. Authority figures could be comforting, in a crisis, and she
knew how to cock that hat. "Girl, what were you—no, never mind. We'll talk
about that later. Matthew Magus, a girl who wants to be a Faerie when she grows
up is
not
enough to drive all the way up here to see me."

"No." He pulled a manila
envelope from the inside front pocket of his vulgar morning coat, left-handed.
"This was."

She knew what she would see before she
opened the flap. She knew it from the bruised light around Matthew's fingertips
where they touched the envelope, from the black-clad boy's quick breaths and
the way he looked down at the gravel, one hand on the girl and one hand on the
brownstone wall. She opened the flap anyway, juggling her coffee, and fanned
the contents like a hand of cards.

She'd seen worse, but not recently.
"You think it's Fae."

"We don't have wolverines in New York
City," he said.

She thumbed the amber ring on the second
finger of her right hand and considered the way the light fell through it,
looked past the photos in her hand as much as at them.

She stuffed the photos into the envelope.
He took them, expressionless, and she met his eyes through the clear glaze of
his spectacles. "Come up to my office."

They followed her up the stairs in
silence. In the middle of the class period the old stairwell — dingy despite a
few dozen coats of interior latex—was empty except for the four who climbed,
two women and two men. The Merlin's hand was on the door to her office before
she spoke again. "It's cramped."

"We'll manage." Matthew took the
door from Carel and held it open for Geoff and Jewels while she preceded them.

She paused before her desk, dropped off
the cup, and fussed papers, then scrubbed her hands together as if the
photographs had left a stain. Matthew shut the door, the atmosphere creaking
with the pressure change, and their eyes met over Jewels' head, adults deciding
on safe conversation in front of the children.

Carel went to prop the ancient window open
on a piece of board. "You think it was Gharne."

"There weren't footprints in the blood."
He shrugged. His red coat jingled. "And the Kelpie was in the city last
night, not far from the scene. So I don't know what to think. But
you
don't
think it was Her Majesty's familiar demon, do you?"

Slowly, Jewels looked from face to face,
and then moved from between them. She licked her lips and stood by the wall.
Geoffrey fell back beside her, took her hand, and clung.

"What purpose would Elaine have to
hunt your city, Magus?"

"I thought you might know."

The Merlin laughed, low in her throat, and
put her back to the window. The morning light gilded her high serene
cheekbones and burnished her fine-grained skin. She flicked her beads behind
her shoulder and examined his impassive face, the tiny lines pulled taut
against the corners of his mouth, and wondered if he even knew how much hurt he
was sheltering, or if his denial was complete.

Hell of a thing to have happen to a Mage.
Lying to yourself was still lying, and their magic wasn't the sort that liked
self-deception. "Who was the girl?" she asked.

"Ask these." His gesture
included Geoff, who flinched, and Jewels, who stared back. "I don't know, myself."

The Mage's eyes met the Merlin's, a brief
contest of wills. Matthew pushed his spectacles up his nose with one
forefinger, and pretended a calm compassion he didn't feel.
Fake it till you
make it.
Or until you forget how an honest reaction looks.

Carel glanced at the young couple.
"Not yet. But I will."

You could ask the stones what they
remember . . . Merlin."

"Matthew."

The irritation in her voice was genuine
enough to bring him up short. I don't know." This time she heard the
honest worry and pain that underlay challenge and sarcasm. "I don't know.
What you saw, gutted and eaten, the soft parts first — "

Geoff whimpered. Jewels took his arm with
a rustle of cloth and leaned against him, warmth comforting warmth, but the
Dragon could smell the fear and grief that rose from her pores, and what the Dragon
could smell, so could Carel.

"—Jane's going to flip. Jane's going
to start the whole damned war all over again. She's already had one of her
watchdogs calling me."

Carel closed her eyes and let her head
fall back against the window frame with a sound like a thumped melon. Autumn
filled the room, cold and crisp, rich with the smell of leaf mold like the musk
of serpents. For a moment, it seemed a shadow fell over Carel, like the
overhang of an enormous head, a head too vast to fit in her tiny office. The
children stopped breathing. Matthew felt his own heart clench, icelocked, at
the Presence who came among them.

The Merlin extended her hand, silver
bangles clashing. "Let me see the photos again."

Matthew handed her the envelope without
comment and crossed his arms, keeping his eyes on her face as she swept the
glossies across her blotter in an arc. "What could it be besides
Gharne?" "Werewolves," Matthew supplied promptly.

"You know better than that."
Carel tapped the top photo. "Could it have been done with a knife?" "There
aren't any Fae in New York," Jewels said, lifting her head from Geoff's
shoulder. "The city is warded against them. No Fae, and we are mostly
scared to go there."

Matthew laughed, a flat unresonant sound.
"You can't hang iron and rowan over an entire city, Jewels."

"There aren't any wards?"