Widdershins (42 page)

“I don’t much hold with the courts,” he said.

So he was one of the solitary fairies. He probably spent the majority of his time in the otherworld.

“That’s cool,” I told him.

He gave me a confused look.

“I mean, I understand. The courts can be a pain. Even a casual one like Mother Crone’s has all these levels of hierarchy, and it’s a total pain keeping track of them all.”

He nodded.

“My name’s Geordie, by the way,” I went on. “Not that I expect you to tell me your name,” I added quickly, knowing how fairy felt about being asked that kind of thing. “And I’m kind of stuck here. You wouldn’t know a way out of this world, would you?”

“That seems to be a common problem lately.”

“What do you mean?”

But he ignored my question to ask his own. “How did you get here?”

I started to give him the abbreviated version, but as soon as I mentioned Jilly and Lizzie’s names, he interrupted me.

“I know how this story goes,” he said. “I’ve met your friends.”

“You
have?
Where are they? Can you take me to them?”

“Yes, it’s hard to say, and no.”

It took me a moment to realize he was simply answering each of my questions in turn. I focused on the middle response.

“Why is it hard to say where they are?” I asked.

“Are you familiar with the term
croi baile
?” he replied. “It means the home of one’s heart.”

I nodded slowly. I’d heard my brother and Christiana talk about them in the past.

“Those are the places in the otherworld where you’re most comfortable or something, isn’t it?”

“It’s a little more thorny than that,” the little man told me. “A better way to put it would be that your
croi baile
is that part of the otherworld that most closely reflects what lies inside your heart.”

I nodded to show that I understood him so far.

“But your friends are in a place that seems to reflect the opposite of that. The place where they are mirrors Jilly’s darkest and oldest fears and is peopled with those who brought such hurts into her life. What makes it confusing is this place shouldn’t exist. At the heart of each of us, no matter how desperate or bleak our lives might seem to be, is a flicker of light and hope—a small echo of the Grace working its light against the dark. That is what our
croi baile
reflects, and only the dead are without it.”

I felt my pulse quicken.

“Wait a second,” I said. “You’re not telling me she’s—”

“No, no. She’s not dead.”

“But—”

“I can’t explain it,” the little man said. “Even by the capricious laws that govern the otherworld, I wouldn’t have believed that such a place could exist, because we all carry the blessing of the Grace inside us—even those of us with the darkest hearts. And your friend Jilly carries a bright reflection of the Grace’s light. But still, given that bounty of light, this place exists inside her. I think because she believes it does.”

“She’s inside her own mind?”

He nodded. “The three of us were trapped in there until I was pushed out by one her phantoms. And before you ask, I can’t get back in.”

I hardly heard the last thing he said. I was too busy trying to work through the concept of being physically trapped in your own mind.

“Is that even possible?” I found myself asking. “Being physically trapped in your own mind?”

Just because it was nothing I’d ever heard of before didn’t mean it couldn’t be true. I knew next to nothing about magic, even after having hung around in a fairy court for a couple of years. I’d just played music there. I’d never gotten into the philosophies of magic. But still. You’d think something this odd would have come up in conversation before—with my brother, with
somebody.

“Somewhere,” the little man told me, “anything is possible.”

“Why is that not comforting.”

“And less so for those I was forced to leave behind. Your friends are in a terrible place. The things Jilly told us about her childhood . . .”

I nodded slowly. “Yeah, she really had it rough.”

The little man gave me a shocked look.

“You knew?” he said. “You knew and you did
nothing?”

“Hey, I was just a kid myself at the time, and I hadn’t even met her yet. We didn’t meet until we were in our twenties, and all that crap was behind her.” I hesitate a moment, then add, “Well, it seemed to be behind her. You had to know her to understand that it was always going to be an issue.”

“I don’t understand you people—how you can let such things be.”

“I don’t understand why we treat each other the way we do either, but right now I don’t much care. I’m more concerned about how we can get to wherever it is that you left Jilly and Lizzie.”

“There is no way back to them,” the little man said.

But I could hear Jilly’s voice in my head, repeating something I’d heard her say a thousand times . . . to me, to herself, to anyone who came up against the wall of “I couldn’t ever do that”:

“There’s no such thing as impossible; there’s only not trying.”

I repeated it now to the little man.

He shook his head. “It’s a pretty sentiment,” he said, “but one can’t do what can’t be done. That brother of hers has changed the two of them back into children and closed the road into her mind. There’s nothing we can do. Only she can stop him, but she has to believe that she can.”

“Changed them into children?” I asked. “You mean physically?”

The little man nodded. “They might be children in their minds, as well—I wasn’t there long enough to tell. I tried to tell them that he doesn’t have the magic himself—that he only has it if they believe he does—but I don’t think it took. And then I was cast out.”

“But you said you had to believe he has the power. If you didn’t, how could he cast you out?”

“I don’t believe, but she does. So long as Jilly believes, he
does
have the power.”

“And there’s nothing we can do?”

The little man shook his head.

“This sucks,” I said.

He gave me another of those blank looks that told me he didn’t catch the idiom, but I didn’t bother to explain it to him. My mind was too busy trying to figure out a way out of this mess. Then I had a thought.

“You know where they are, right?” I asked. “I mean, you can’t get to them, but you do know
where
they are?”

“Yes, much good that it does us. As I told you, I can’t get back to them.”

Maybe he couldn’t, but we weren’t completely alone in this.

“That’s okay,” I told him. “I’ve got a friend that might be able to take it from here.”

I was thinking of Joe. If anybody could get to Jilly, it would be him.

So I explained to the little man how I’d gotten here and who we needed to find if we were going to help Jilly and Lizzie.

“This is the man who left you here?” he asked.

“No, that was Walker, the deer man. And I don’t think he did it maliciously. He was just looking off into I don’t know where and then started talking to someone I couldn’t see. The next thing I knew, he was gone and I was stuck here.”

“I wonder what he saw,” the little man said.

He got that look in his eyes then that Joe so often had, that Walker’d had just before he vanished on me, as though he was seeing into an entirely other world—which, come to think of it, was probably exactly what they were doing.

After a long moment, the little man’s gaze cleared and he focused on me.

“This isn’t good,” he told me.

I was
so
not ready for more bad news.

“What is it?”

“See for yourself.”

I was about to tell him that I didn’t have access to whatever trick he knew that let you look out of one world into another, but before I could, he laid a hand on my arm and suddenly I could
see.
See and hear.

“I don’t understand,” I said as I studied what he showed me. “What does it mean?”

“War.”

Grey

Corin—the guard that Tatiana brought
to where we’re waiting with Mother Crone and her little treekin—really is a mess. One eye’s almost closed and there’s a cut above the other. The left side of his face has swollen, rounding out his once-chiseled cheekbone. His suit’s torn and dirty, he cradles one arm that’s obviously giving him pain, and he’s favouring his right leg.

It all becomes clear when he tells how he and his men tracked the bogans down to a funeral in the Tombs. Vastly outnumbered, they still tried to bring Big Dan and his boys in and got the crap beat out of them for their effort. I feel bad for him, but my heart sinks for an entirely other reason as he tells his story. I look at Jack and I know he’s thinking the same thing I am: This isn’t good. It’s not just that Tatiana’s guard was routed and the bogans have now scattered from here to who knows where. It’s that when Joe finds out about it, there’s going to be all hell to pay.

Corin’s voice trails off and for a long moment nobody has anything to say. Finally, Jack turns to the queen.

“So, basically, you’ve got nothing,” Jack says.

“It’s not like we didn’t
try,”
Tatiana tells him. “I sent a dozen guards
and
a gruagagh.”

Jack nods. He starts to roll himself a smoke and looks at the guard.

“How many died?” he asks.

The guard and Tatiana are seriously taken aback by the question.

“None,” Tatiana says. “Fairy don’t kill their own.”

Jack just looks at her, then he gives a slow nod.

“That’s right,” he says. “You save the killing for my people.”

“We don’t condone—”

“Yeah, yeah. But you don’t do much to stop it, either.”

Jack lights his cigarette without offering it to Tatiana first. I’m not sure she picks up on the insult.

“I’ve gotta say,” he goes on, “I’m surprised at how this turned out, though if I’d stopped to think about it, I guess I wouldn’t have been.”

“You’re not being fair . . .”

“And your people aren’t dying. No offense, Tatiana, but we’ve played it your way about as long as it’s going to go. We’ll handle things from here on out.”

“You can’t just—”

“But I’ve got to tell you,” he says, cutting her off, “you’d better hope we find Jilly in one piece or you’re going to have more to worry about than what we’ll do with a few renegade bogans.”

“Threatening me won’t get your friend back any more quickly.”

“I’m not threatening you. It’s just a friendly warning because you just really don’t want to be in the firing line when Joe gets this news.”

He glances at Mother Crone and tips a finger to his brow, then turns to me. “You ready to hit the road, Grey?”

I nod, but before we can go, we’re interrupted by the sudden appearance of an odd little man who comes running in through the door. He’s the first of the aganesha I’ve seen here in the court that actually looks the way I’ve always imagined fairies did—I mean, before they showed up here and started mimicking human clothing and mannerisms. He’s a wizened little fellow with sharp features and pointed ears, dressed in a pale blue robe, the hem of which he’s holding in his hand to make it easier to run. His hair’s a pale cloud of frizz and his eyes are that steely blue of chicory flowers.

“Your Highness!” he cries as he bursts in the room. “You must come and see . . .

His voice trails off when it registers that we’re here, a pair of cousins. He stares at us wide-eyed. The hem of his robe drops from his grip and his bony ankles are hidden under its folds.

“It’s all right, Muircan,” Tatiana says after a moment’s hesitation. “You can speak freely in front of our guests.”

Jack and I exchange glances. Muircan waits another beat, plainly unhappy—either with his news, or his queen. Probably both.

“You must look into the between,” he finally says.

So we all do. I’m expecting some kind of fairy business, something of major concern to them, and I guess it is, but it’s really a big deal on all fronts: fairy, cousin, and maybe even human, depending on the fallout.

The first thing to hit me is the sound, because all that’s initially visible is an indistinct ocean of brown. I can’t make out what it is we’re looking at. But the sound . . . the sound is huge: the boom of a multitude of drums combined with hooves stamping on the ground, dancing in place, pounding like thunder when it’s rumbling directly overhead, playing a heartbeat rhythm—a single, cadenced pulse that immediately awakes an echoing response in my own chest.

At that moment, my brain separates the ocean of brown into individual shapes and I realize we’re looking at an enormous gathering of buffalo. I’m talking multitudes here. There are thousands upon thousands of the horned cousins assembling there on an open plain, drumming and dancing as more, and then still more, join their already swollen ranks.

Jack gives a low whistle.

I know he saw this coming—we were just talking about it not that long before Tatiana came in—but the actual moment seems to have come upon us way faster than I ever thought it would. And on a far larger scale.

“There must be thousands of them,” Tatiana says in a quiet voice.