War for the Oaks

by Emma Bull

  “Do it,” Eddi told the phouka.

  There was a dark sparkle all around him, the preface to his change, and Eddi wished she could stay and watch. No, she had to leave the phouka with the job of convincing Dan. Her problem was Willy.

  She caught up with him at the other end of the cavernous room and grabbed his arm. She would have liked to take him by the shoulder and spin him to face her, like something from a Clint Eastwood movie. But the effect was the same. He rounded on her under his own power, teeth bared. He was suddenly the person who, the night before, had pulled himself out from under that horse, blood fresh on his lance.

  Eddi poked him hard in the breastbone, before he could speak. If she let him speak, she would never get him under control again. . . .

  “Don’t you dare,” she said, low-voiced. Any louder, after all, and her voice would shake. “Don’t you ever fucking dare show that kind of contempt for anybody in this band. Do you play guitar better than Dan plays keyboards?”

  After a moment, he shook his head angrily.

  “Do you play better than Carla plays drums, or Hedge plays bass? No, I didn’t think so. Then you better not care if they’re fey, human, or little box turtles. They’re your equals here, and you’ll treat them that way.”

  “And what about you?” he said at last, through clenched teeth.

  Now there was a question, indeed. “I’m the one who had to tell you this. I’m the boss. I keep the whole thing together. And don’t you forget it.”

  He breathed like a man in a fight—which, she supposed, he was. And so many things to fight against, no matter which way he turned: Eddi, the Sidhe, the music in his hands that demanded an outlet. In an instant, he’d choose sides. She had to make him choose the right one.

  So she stepped back. “I’m sorry. I’m assuming things. There’s no reason for you to put up with this.”

  He looked startled. Good.

  “Nobody can force you to be in this band,” Eddi told him gently. “I won’t. Your queen can’t, because if your only reason for being here is her orders, I won’t take you.” When he looked dubious, she added, “I won’t. She doesn’t rule here. This is my band. She can get down on her lily-white knees and beg me to take you, and I won’t do it. But if you want to play rock ‘n’ roll with these guys, and you’ll take di­rections from me and leave the Seelie Court out of it—” Eddi shrugged. “Up to you.”

  Willy inhaled, let it out. “What about us?” he said, and his voice had something in it that made the meaning clear.

  Eddi bit her lip. “You knew the first night that whatever happened between us had nothing to do with the band. That’s something else you have to accept, if you stay.”

  Willy dislodged himself from the wall where she’d pinned him, and paced the length of the room. His head was down, and Eddi couldn’t see his face.

  At the opposite wall he turned, as if at bay, and said, “All right. It’s a deal.”

  Eddi let out her breath at last. As close as she would ever come to her dream band . . .

  The rest of the dream band watched them fixedly and in silence. The phouka, in his black-dog-from-hell form, sat in the middle of them like a statue of Anubis from an Egyptian tomb. He cocked an ear at her.

  “Convinced?” Eddi asked Dan.

  Dan looked thoughtful. “Hell of a piece of evidence,” he said, point­ing a thumb at the phouka.

  “Am I not?” the phouka said, sounding pleased and furry.

  Eddi frowned him into silence. “So you believe me?”

  “Guess I gotta. But jeezus, girl. . . !”

  Carla giggled. “Yeah, that’s how I felt.”

  “Do you mind it all?” Eddi asked, since someone had to.

  He looked down at one of his synthesizers, ran a finger across its display. “We’re a good band,” he said finally.

  That, it seemed, was all that needed to be said. Eddi flexed her fingers, startled by the feeling of power in them, the current of elation that made her lightheaded. She picked up her guitar. “Let’s make some noise, then,” she said softly. The microphone filled the room with her voice.

  chapter 14 – Shall We Dance?

  After three weeks of practice, they were better than any band Eddi had ever worked with. She suspected, half-elated and half-afraid, that by the end of the summer they might be better than any band she’d ever heard. If they all lived that long.

  She stood in front of the bathroom mirror, putting on eyeliner. Her hands were inclined to shake. She wore skinny white jeans and a vin­tage beaded sweater with padded shoulders. “Jesus,” she muttered at her reflection. “I look too pale. I look dead. Oh, godohgodoh—”

  “That’s enough,” the phouka’s voice came from the living room. “You’ll be fine. You will, in fact, be exquisite, since I have never seen you otherwise.”

  Eddi felt as if she had a flock of sparrows loose in her ribcage. “Did we pack the guitar tuner?” she called.

  “It’s in the case with Willy’s effects switches. Which is in the back of Carla’s rolling horror of an automobile. Now that’s something worth worrying about,” he said, sounding thoughtful. “If Carla’s horror chooses tonight to stop rolling, you’ll be reduced to whistling through the set list.”

  She wailed, flung herself out of the bathroom, and threw a bar of soap at the phouka. He dodged it placidly. “Does that mean you can’t whistle?” he inquired.

  “You’re an idiot.” Then she saw him properly. “A good-looking idiot, though.”

  And he was. He wore a black suit with very narrow pants and a waist-length double-breasted jacket. His white high-collared shirt was open at the throat. He’d finished it off with black high-heeled boots and a white silk opera scarf. His black hair shone in short curls around his face, and hung to his collar in back. What might have been a ruby winked in one ear, a tiny point of scarlet fire.

  He shrugged off her praise, but couldn’t keep from blushing.

  “You need a red carnation,” Eddi told him. “You could get some cute art student to paint one on your lapel. MCAD girls have a secret fetish about men in suits, you know.”

  “Where is that bar of soap?” the phouka frowned.

  “Gonna throw it at me?”

  “Or wash out your mouth. I hadn’t decided.”

  “It’d ruin my makeup.” She took a deep breath. “Time to go?”

  “I’d say so.”

  She put on her denim jacket and tucked her helmet under her arm. Door keys, wallet, a cache of extra guitar picks . . . She went out the door as if stepping into the deep end of a pool.

  The Triumph growled them through the twilight. The air was crisp and cool as clean bedsheets, and Eddi took long breaths of it. Would the evenings be like this, if the Unseelie Court ruled in Minneapolis? Would the wind feel as good, smell so much like a promise of summer?

  She circled the clustered facilities of the College of Art and Design and the Institute of Arts. At last she found a spot to park the bike, a little further from the campus than she would have liked.

  “Is the protection of Faerie in effect here?” Eddi asked the phouka.

  “Such as it is, my sweet. Why?”

  “Because if the bike gets stolen, I want to know who to blame.”

  “For shame,” the phouka replied. “I shall remember, in the future, that stage fright makes you testy.”

  “Get stuffed.”

  “You see?”

  They would be playing in the new building, in the midst of a show­ing of students’ paintings. Eddi wasn’t sure if the band was intended as dancing or background music, but she’d decided that they would play what they liked, regardless, and play softer if they had to.

  The stage was a platform set up at the end of the gallery, with double doors, now open, behind it. To Eddi’s relief, Carla and Dan were already there, and the wagon was backed up to the doors. Carla was setting up her drum kit. Dan’s keyboards, stand, and miscellaneous intriguing junk were in a daunting heap just off the platfor
m.

  “What’ll I carry?” Eddi asked.

  “Nothing,” the phouka said, before Dan could answer. “I take my duties as roadie very seriously, my heart. I will bring you your axe, and you may tune it.”

  Carla stared after him as he went out the double doors. Then she sighed, tossed a drumstick in the air, and caught it. “Why can’t I find one like that?”

  Eddi wrinkled her nose. “Act your age, DiAmato, not your stick size.”

  “Besides, they wouldn’t take you,” Dan told Carla. “The Pook says they only dig cute girls.”

  “You wanna walk home, Northside?”

  “Who you callin’ Northside, Northside?”

  Eddi smiled indulgently upon them, and wondered how the hell Dan and the phouka had come to discuss any such thing.

  The phouka came back with a load of equipment and Willy, who was likewise burdened. They both looked serious and a little preoc­cupied. Eddi relieved the phouka of her amp.

  “Who died?” she asked them.

  “What?” said Willy, startled.

  “Something’s up, yes?”

  The phouka nodded. “I’ll let Willy tell you, my primrose. My strong back is needed elsewhere.”

  “All our strong backs are needed. Tell me while we set up.”

  Willy shrugged, and trailed after them.

  It was the dinner hour, and the gallery was sparsely populated. Eddi located the nearest electrical outlets and began to run extension cords. Willy followed in her wake, plugging in equipment. As he worked, he talked. Carla, Eddi noticed, was listening with a frown, Dan with a wondering look.

  “Council of War last night,” Willy said. “The whole bloody fight will last well into fall, if last night’s discussion is typical.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “Everyone’s stalling,” Willy said. “After the bloodbath at the Falls, nobody’s willing to set the next battle until one Court or the other thinks it has an advantage.”

  “Wonderful. But what advantage are they waiting for?”

  Willy sat back on his heels and regarded her skeptically.

  “Oh, come on,” Eddi sighed. “I’m pretty quick for a human, all right?”

  “True enough,” Willy said with a rueful quirk of an eyebrow. “All right. There are certain days associated with magic. Halloween, May Eve, the solstices and equinoxes, a few others. Some are more favorable to one Court than the other. The next big event is Midsummer’s Eve, which is a good one for the Seelie Court. The Eve itself is a truce period. But the Sidhe would like to hold off and fight soon after that, when we’re still strong.”

  “But you said that both sides are stalling?”

  “The Dark Court is pressing for a battle on June first—hoping that our weakness will be worse than theirs, I suppose. If they don’t get that, they’ll delay as long as they can. And I doubt they’ll get June first.”

  Eddi stared at him. “They negotiate times and places for these things? How do they get anything done? How did they agree on Min-nehaha Falls?”

  “If it’s something both sides want, they manage. And both sides want this war, and the spoils from it. One Court will accept a less favorable time in exchange for a site that offers them some advantage. It’s not very different from rival mortal nations.”

  Eddi sighed. “I guess I’m used to self-propelled wars. This all sounds too reasonable to be believed.”

  Willy smiled crookedly. “Oh, yes. All very gentlemanly and fair. With assassinations and guerrilla tactics between times.”

  “I thought you were one of the guys who made the rules,” Eddi said, very soft.

  That brought his black eyebrows down, made his hands stop. Then he tossed her the power cord for her amp, and she plugged it in.

  “I don’t like it,” he said finally. “I’ve never seen anything like what happened on May Eve. I don’t look forward to seeing it again, and sitting around waiting for it doesn’t make it any better.” He rose sud­denly and walked away, went to the edge of the stage to unpack his guitar.

  The phouka watched him go, looking thoughtful. Hedge had arrived sometime in all that, and was watching as well, slouched and silent. His chin was tucked—a protective pose—and his eyes followed every­thing from behind the veil of his ragged brown hair. There was hurt in the lines of his body, and fear. Eddi wondered what the battle at the Falls had been like for him. But before she could go to him and draw him aside, he shuffled away to set up his bass.

  They did Rue Nouveau’s “I’m Not Done Yet” for a sound check; the phouka alternately adjusted the mixing board and paced the room to check the results. The first chord startled the few bystanders in the room. But none of them left, and by the end of the song all of them were tapping feet or swaying in place. Willy plugged in his fiddle, and they did some blues improv in A. People began to accumulate in the room, multiplying from nowhere in the fashion of crowds-to-be.

  At last the phouka gave Eddi a thumbs-up, and she called a halt. “Showtime in five, troops,” she told the band.

  Eddi stepped off the stage and turned to study it, ticking things off mental checklists.

  “You’re fretting,” said the phouka over her shoulder.

  “Was that supposed to be a pun?”

  He smiled. “I refuse to say. But I’ll repair the damage: You’re wor­rying.”

  “Of course I am. It’s my job. Keeps everyone else from having to do it.”

  “I’d spare you it, if I could.”

  Something in his words, so lightly spoken, sounded like more than merely band matters. “When I’m so good at it?” she said with a little laugh.

  He let the subject turn, and Eddi told herself she wasn’t sorry. “As long as your heart’s set on worrying, then, tell me how you think it will go tonight.”

  “I think . . . good. We’ll be a little raggedy in places, but not much. And we’ll be a little cautious, maybe, but not as much as some bands that have been together for two, three times as long as we have.”

  He looked pleased with his thoughts. “Tell me—does the reaction of the audience affect your performance?”

  “Hugely. Why?”

  “Curiosity, sweet. What sort of effect does it have?”

  Eddi frowned. “Well, about what you’d expect. You feel better in front of a crowd that’s enjoying what you do. You work harder. Playing for an audience that hates you is like wading through swamp water up to your chin.”

  The phouka made an appreciative face.

  “And sometimes,” she continued, “on a good night, there’s a . . . I can’t explain it properly. Something that happens between the per­former and the audience at the best times. Both sides get a little wired.” She flourished her hands. “I really can’t explain it very well. But you can feel it when you get it, and it makes you crazy.”

  He watched her intently through all this, a little smile at the edges of his mouth. “May you get it often,” he said at last, and touched a forefinger delicately to her chin. “Now, go call your band—I believe it’s time.”

  The band came on without fanfare or theater. Eddi slid the Rick over her shoulder and wiped her hands surreptitiously on her jeans. Carla snapped out four counts of rim shots on the snare, then four more seasoned with the sharp tsk of her high-hat cymbal. Eddi and Hedge began to pound their low strings, and Dan swelled the synthe­sizer up under them in a growl almost too low to hear. Dead stop, then Carla swatted her big drums. Willy flung out a trail of high guitar notes like stars—not cold points of light in the dark, but suns, the burning and beginning of everything.

  They sailed into Richard Thompson’s “Valerie” and Eddi could almost see the sound of it, a broad arc of light that unrolled over the crowd, wound around and under them. . . .

  It was a good opening song. Eddi would tell herself that when the night was over, and she could look back and be rational. But now the music had her, and the playing of it. She traded wild low notes and vampy looks with Hedge until he, by God, laughed. She posed an
d danced with Willy like his short blond shadow. They all leaned into their microphones at once, and Eddi heard in their voices the same open-throated power that she felt in her own. As they split into har­monies, she climbed for the top one, until she was an octave above Willy’s tenor, out on the edge of her own range.

  People in the crowd were starting to dance, more of them as she watched. That, too, was an observation she would examine only later. There was no time now for anything but the music. That was a train that wouldn’t wait for her. Doors open, closed, gone—no. The music wouldn’t wait, because she didn’t want it to. She was herself the power to the wheels.

  They spun another song from the threads of the last, one Eddi had written. The dancers would quit, of course—it took more dedication than most people had to dance to a song they’d never heard. But she couldn’t stop now, even for them.

  Drinking coffee,

  Have to stay awake and think of you.

  Aching awfully,

  Knowing my perceptions aren’t true.

  If you were what I’ve made you

  Not as your acts betrayed you

  How could I keep away?

  But things still lead me on,

  A word, and then it’s gone.

  What lives here, and what’s stray?

  Tell me, please, what’s signal and what’s noise?

  A brown-haired girl near the front of the stage spun like a ballerina; Eddi saw delight in her open mouth and closed eyes. Her partner, a blond boy in a painted T-shirt, grinned and bit his lip, dancing with narrow-eyed concentration.

  She spotted the phouka near the mixing board, the glow from its meters adding underlight to his dark face. He watched the crowd, and his eyes moved in quick, restless patterns. She knew what he was doing. Give it up, phouka. Nobody can touch me now. Not now. His gaze, in its travels, met hers, and he smiled as if her thoughts had reached him.

  Dan played crackles and pops with one keyboard, a string quartet from space with another. Then he grabbed a fistful of brass, and Willy made his axe chatter and whine. Eddi went back to the mike with lyrics swelling in her throat.