by Tad Williams
He supposed it didn't really matter, anyway: even if she could have got him into Hellebore House, he hadn't had even the ghost of an idea where to go from there. In a way, it was liberating. He still had to think of something to do about Applecore, but he didn't have to manipulate Poppy to do it. He hadn't felt very good about that.
He looked her over carefully. He wanted to open himself to her, but he couldn't quite shake the image of blithe, pretty Hitler-maidens going to lovely parties in Berlin while the SS dragged the undesirables off to camps. "Have you really left? Not just having a little moment, then you'll go back if Daddy says you don't have to marry the Hellebore kid, maybe raises your allowance?"
The tears were still rimming her eyes, but her face abruptly went cold. "Is that what you think? That I'd go back and live with those . . . murderers? For a bigger allowance?" She picked up her purse and began to stand. Theo reached out to take her arm but she shook him off. "I really am a fool," she said. "I tried to tell myself that what my father was doing was just politics. Wrong. And I tried to tell myself that I had misjudged you, that it was my fault for playing games, that you were really a nice guy. I was wrong about a lot of things, I guess."
Theo stood up as she started to turn away. His chair fell over. Other diners had begun to look at them. "Poppy, please, I just needed to know. To test you a little, I guess. Please, come back, I . . . I have some things to tell you." The fairy-folk on either side of them were whispering. Shit, he thought, if they don't recognize me, they'll probably recognize her. "Sit down, please!"
She let herself be drawn back down. He righted his chair and hunched over the table. "Tell me what?" she asked, dabbing at her face again.
"I have to confess something." What the hell, right? Her face became still and her eyes mistrustful, as though a curtain had been drawn and she were peering out from behind it. "You have a wife back home in Daisyland, right? A little suburban place in Rowan? Children? Your own secondhand hob?"
He laughed despite himself, even though he felt like he was about to jump out of a window without knowing what was on the other side. "Oh, no. Nothing like that. No, I wanted to tell you . . ." He leaned forward. The other diners appeared to have lost interest again, but there was nothing wrong with taking precautions. "I'm thirty years old, Poppy."
"What? Do you think that's funny?" She started to get up again.
"Don't! It's the truth." "Liar! How could that be . . . ?" She stopped, goggled. "Black iron, you're a mortal!"
"Ssshhh!" He took her hand to keep her close. She tensed, but did not pull away. "No. Well, sort of. It's a long story. Do you want to hear it?"
The little waiter picked this juncture to arrive with plates full of food that Theo could not even identify — ethnic cooking gone mad and then confined in a lightless cave for centuries — and began setting them out, ignoring with professional skill the abrupt silence that had fallen over the table. Theo couldn't tell what was garnish and what was dinner, and could only identify which things were plates because they were on the bottom. It didn't matter, though: he was far too nervous to eat.
When the waiter had slid off again, Theo told her everything, starting with a capsule summary of his life before crossing over to Faerie. It was tempting to glamorize things but he didn't do it, giving her instead the exact and accurate picture: thirty years old with a dead-end job, pretty fair musician, less-than-overwhelming people skills, especially when it came to relationships. He tried to gauge her mood but what he thought of as the austere Flower mask was still on her face: she sipped at her wine, picked at the food, and listened, but she kept her thoughts to herself. He told her of finding his great-uncle's book, about the sudden entrance of the sprite followed closely by the undead thing, about his startling arrival in a place he had never believed existed.
By the time he got to the part about Applecore leading him to Daffodil House, the first wash of adrenaline was gone and he was beginning to feel how hungry he was. He chose one of the least disturbing things in front of him, speared a piece on an odd, long-tined fork, and put it in his mouth. It was not too bad, although the combination of sweet and musky was a little hard to get used to at first, but the easing of terror made a very good sauce. As he told her the rest of what had happened to him, carefully avoiding any mention of Button or his plans and activities — he had no right to put the lives of the goblin and his comrades at risk, after all, no matter what he thought about the girl — he tried more and more of the kobold delicacies. The discovery of an arrangement of candied millipedes atop one of the dishes put him off for a moment, but he eventually made a mound of those things he liked best on his own plate. Eventually, almost every sentence of Theo-history was punctuated by forkfuls of food.
She was silent for a while after he finished. She drank off her wine, then picked up her purse and stood.
"Are you leaving?" The fear suddenly clamped him again. He had let himself relax too much. Was she angry enough to sell him out?
"No, I'm going to the toilet. Is that all right?" He nodded. He wanted her to assure him she wasn't going to call someone, that he wasn't going to be sitting here like an idiot when the special constables came crashing through the door, hornet-guns blazing or buzzing or whatever they did, but he knew that if he was going to keep her on his side he would have to trust her. People have died for worse principles, he thought. But I'd rather not die.
It was perhaps the longest ten minutes he'd spent since escaping from the burning wreck of Daffodil House. He sipped his water, pushed the remains of the kobold cuisine around on his plate, and did his best to appear to be someone not worth a second glance from any of the other diners. When he saw her coming back down the aisle, the mask of indifference still on her face, he had two simultaneous and completely different reactions.
So was I an idiot? Did she make a deal with her father — her freedom for mine?
She's really beautiful. Poppy settled in, not making eye contact. "I just want to know one thing," she said at last. "I have to know. Did you come here because you wanted to use me to rescue your friend?"
He suddenly wished he'd ordered a real drink, too. "Yes. That wasn't the only reason, but I hoped you could help me, somehow. She's been more than a friend . . . I mean, she saved my life. More than once."
Poppy nodded slowly. "But that wasn't the only reason, you said." "I like you, Poppy. I always did. When I saw you at the camp, I realized that I'd . . . missed seeing you."
She squinted at him. "If you're trying to weave a glamour over me, Theo Whatever-Your-Name-Really-Is, you'd better remember that you're a beginner. If you're lying to me I'll do worse to you than that lizard Hellebore could ever dream of." Her gaze dropped back down to the table again. "I can't help you, Theo. Even if I went back — and I'll never go back — they wouldn't let me onto the family floors at Hellebore House, not after the scene I made getting out of there. But I don't blame you for wanting to save your sprite friend, even if she is a snippy little bitch. So if you want to leave now, just tell me the truth and go. You don't have to worry about me — I won't betray you. But if you lie to me and pretend you care about me, thinking that you'll find a way to use me to help your friend after I've told you I can't, then I'll make you wish you hadn't ever met me. I truly will. Understood?"
He was so relieved that he almost laughed. "Did anyone ever tell you that you're pretty scary for a hundred-and-five year old? I'll bet that ogre kid still has nightmares."
She looked blank. "Ogre . . . ?" "When you threw me out of the car, back when I first came to the City." His smile began to feel uncomfortable. He still didn't feel very good about that day. "You'll be happy to know that Applecore told me I was a jerk about the way I treated you."
"Jerk?"
"Sorry. A mortal expression that doesn't translate, I guess. An idiot. An inconsiderate fool."
Poppy nodded. "Then I hope you do save her. At least she's got some sense."
"What is it with women? You can hate each other's guts but you al
l still band together to agree that men are pigs." "Because men are pigs." A little bit of a smile had crept onto her face now, but as if she too felt she wasn't quite ready to deploy that particular bit of her arsenal, she grew serious again. "So does this mean that you believe me when I say I can't help your friend?"
"Yeah. I'm trying not to think about that too much. It makes me feel like the lowest scum in the world. Here I am, sitting in a nice restaurant, and she's in a bottle."
"But if they want you, they won't do anything to her. She's just a sprite. She doesn't matter."
"Do you believe that?" "I used to, I suppose. But I meant she doesn't mean anything to them. Hellebore is cruel but mostly he's about power. His son and . . . and that other creature, well, they might do anything, but he won't let them have her until he doesn't need her anymore. Which means when he has you. As long as you're free, she's probably more or less all right."
Theo sighed and sat back. "It all makes me feel sick. Let's talk about something else. What are you doing? Where are you staying? Are you going to go back to school?"
"Do you really want to know?" Her neediness scared him a little, but he remembered that there was steel in her, too, that he shouldn't underestimate her. That street-punk ogre probably did still have nightmares.
"Yes, really. And I think I'll have a glass of wine, too." She was staying with a friend named Drusilla, it turned out, a girl she'd known from school who had dropped out to get married to a young fellow studying to be a chirurgeon. The two of them were living in a little house in the rundown Forenoon suburbs at the city's extreme southern end — "Practically on the moon, but it's a sweet house and Drusilla and Donnus are very happy," she explained. She didn't know what she was going to do about school. "It's my last year and I hate the place. They don't want you to ask real questions, they just want you to learn enough to make polite conversation at dances with the boys from Dowsing Academy." She shook her head. "That's not for me, Theo. I've been trying to help out with some of the organizations like the Daughters of the Grove that are doing things for people who've been hurt by the fighting — it's the least I can do, considering my monster of a father started it all — but I don't think I can stick with that either. Most of those women are more worried about getting seen doing these good things than just getting them done. Yesterday, when you saw me, we were half an hour late starting because they wouldn't unload the truck until the scribes and the other mirrorpeople were in place. It's like the Young Blossoms, except that everyone's surrounded by a cloud of youth-charms so thick you could choke. I hate that."
He had finished his wine and despite feeling more relaxed than he had for days he was beginning to worry about staying in one place too long. "Could we go for a walk? I'd like to get out of here."
She gave him an appraising look. "A walk? Like on our legs? Sure." She paid the bill by, apparently, waving her fingers over it. He wondered how easy it would be for her father to track her down by her purchases. Rich girls, he suspected, didn't often think about things like that. He hadn't known many, but the few whose acquaintance he had made before Poppy hadn't led him to believe otherwise. There had been Sandra, for instance, a famous musician's daughter he had met at a club and briefly dated. She would simply walk out of restaurants and bars without paying, not intending to cheat anyone, but simply assuming — usually correctly — that everyone knew who she was and would bill her father. Or bill her father's manager, to be more accurate, since the eminent bass player and sybarite who had sired her didn't take care of his own accounts any more than did the Queen of England.
The Chamber of Congregation was less than a mile from the dockyards and the smell of Ys was very distinct outside, much more like an ocean than it had seemed to him in the muddy flatlands next to the Old Fayfort Bridge. She led him down some of the narrow lanes of Eastwater where the leaning buildings and dark alleys felt like something out of the mortal world's early 1800s — New Orleans, perhaps, or the backwater districts of Naples. Strange music, as strange as that of the goblins but undeniably different, drifted down from some of the upper stories.
"Kobolds?" he asked, thinking of the restaurant. Poppy laughed. "You really are the ultimate out-of-towner, aren't you? You couldn't get a kobold to live on an upper story if you gave them the flat for free. No, most of the people around here are regular working fairies, but that sounds like nixie music. There are more than a few of them out here, but most of them live right down in the dockyard area or even on barges and houseboats."
Theo liked the music and he liked walking, feeling almost normal. He liked Poppy, too. He considered for a moment then took her hand, knowing that he was crossing a sort of Rubicon, no matter how small the gesture might seem. They continued for a while in silence, the two of them for this moment moving effortlessly through the warm, damp night like dolphins slipping side by side through tropical waves.
She pulled him to a halt against a shadowy wall, just outside the will-o'the-wisp gleam of a streetlight. For a moment he thought she had seen someone she knew in the crowd of young men laughing and talking loudly as they spilled out of a tavern across the street, but when they had vanished into the night he realized that she had not stopped him out of fear at all. He put his arms around her, felt her fitting herself against him with the careful absorption of someone building something important. "I'm glad you called me," she said. "I thought about you a lot."
He didn't want to say anything stupid. He didn't want to say anything at all. He had got himself into trouble in the past by struggling with the question of what to say in these situations and he was even less certain now. But he hadn't told her a lie: being with her was enough, for now. So what else needed saying?
She was a very good kisser. She went at it with fierce determination — not in a hurry, but not playing games, either. There were only a few moments when he could concentrate enough to wonder why fairy kissing was so similar to human kissing, or to ask himself whether all fairy-folk kissed each other like it was the most important thing to do in the entire universe, or was it just Poppy Thornapple? The fact that she was technically a schoolgirl, which had worried him ever since she had first made her feelings clear, began to seem less important. However she might fit into her own society, by the chronology of his world she had been living her life since somewhere before Teddy Roosevelt was in office, and that meant if anybody was jailbait around here, it was him. By fairy standards Theo was probably in kindergarten or first grade.
Her work in assembling their connection had not been in vain: she was molded against him so closely that it almost felt as though they were growing together, and every small movement she made seemed to touch him in several places at the same time. He was beginning to wonder if he might not just be blasted out of his mind on that single glass of Faerie wine: his head felt quite floaty and the rest of him warm and pleasurably itchy. Was it love? Now there was a staggering thought. It was certainly lust, but there seemed to be more.
He pulled himself free, just a little, and laid his face against the side of her head. Her hair smelled like vanilla, like honeysuckle, like other things he couldn't even name but which he wanted to keep smelling for the rest of his life. Half an hour ago he had been arguing with himself about whether he was leading this girl on, but now he was beginning to feel that he was the one in danger of falling hopelessly and helplessly. Could she have used some charm on him? He didn't believe that — maybe when she had first met him, but after she had screwed up her courage to give him that ultimatum, leave or stay, but be honest about it?
God, I think it's real. I think it's . . . real. Lost in the warm night, leaning against the wall and holding Poppy so close that he kept forgetting which way was up and other important things, it took him half a minute to notice the shape at the far end of the street. She was breathing in his ear and kissing and nibbling on it at the same time, and it was the most amazingly, distractingly nice thing that had happened to him in some while, but there was still something about the movement of t
he distant figure as it staggered from pool of light to shadow and then out into the light again that seized his attention. It lurched into another wash of light from a streetlamp, perhaps a hundred feet away from them, and he saw that it was wearing the armor of a police constable.
His heart suddenly froze into a lump in his chest. He stepped away from the wall, almost knocking Poppy over, grabbed her arm and began to walk away so quickly that she stumbled.
"What is it?"
"Behind us. That police . . . that constable. You can look, but for God's sake keep walking."
"But we'll make him suspicious, dashing away like this . . . !" "Not unless it's a real constable — and I don't think it is. I told you about that thing that was after me. The last body it took was one of the constables at Daffodil House. Walk faster. When we get around the corner we're going to run."
"I'm not going to run from some . . . bugbear, Theo. I have a protection charm in my purse . . ." "You don't understand, Poppy. This thing is bad, bad as it gets. Unless you have a charm that's the equivalent of a small-scale atomic bomb, we're better off just getting the hell out of here. Is it running?"
This time she sounded a bit more disturbed. "It's . . . it's walking fast. It moves really strangely."
"It probably has some pieces missing by now. How did you get here tonight? Please tell me you drove."
"I borrowed Drusilla's runabout. I hate trying to get a hired coach back from Eastwater at night." "How far away is it? Never mind — we don't have any choice. I don't think even going into a place that's full of people is going to stop it. It just doesn't care. Here comes the corner." He squeezed her hand hard. "You'll have to lead us. Wait until we're out of its sight . . . now . . . run!"
They did, pelting up the street, heading back across Eastwater toward the restaurant. A few older fairies coming out of another building had to jump out of their way and shouted genteel imprecations after them, but Theo had no time to waste on someone's hurt feelings.