by Emma Bull
The queen’s lovely, throaty voice carried the length of the room. “I’m afraid you’ll have to submit to a search.” She sounded amused.
The thing, which seemed to be animate pond scum, had quick, cold fingers. Eddi stood very still and tried not to shudder. There was nothing to find on either of them, and the creature seemed irritable about it.
“Very well,” said the queen. “Come in and make yourselves at home.”
They walked down the glowing path side by side, though there was barely room for it. A little snarling mud-colored creature thrust a spidery hand from beneath a coleus and grabbed Eddi’s ankle, and she stopped.
“Control yourself,” the queen said coldly, and the creature drew back.
They stood at last at the foot of the steps that led to the queen’s terrace. “So,” she said cheerfully, “what can I do for you?”
Eddi felt terribly cold; it even made her lips stiff. She swallowed and said, “We’ve come to ransom your hostage.”
“Ah, of course.” Her long dark eyes narrowed with catlike pleasure. “It is a very good joke, you know, that the pale bitch sent you as her envoy. She must hate you dreadfully.”
Eddi felt hope like a spike of flame in her. Hedge’s rumors had reached their destination, and the Dark Queen was not suspicious.
The queen looked over her shoulder and snapped her fingers. Two of the gray, milky-eyed monsters that Eddi so feared stepped from behind a cypress. They supported a figure between them, a figure in black jeans and a torn, bloodstained white T-shirt. His arms were bound tightly behind him. There was a hood over his head, but it was unmistakably Willy.
They forced him to his knees beside the queen and pulled off the hood. At first he refused to look up. Then the queen twined her fingers in his hair and pulled his head back. He saw Eddi and the phouka, and his eyes went round with surprise. He closed them quickly.
Eddi was torn between anger and relief. There was dried blood at the corner of his mouth, and blood still stained the white streak in his hair. But he could walk, and think. They wouldn’t have to carry him out.
“Do you know, I shall miss you,” the queen said to Willy’s upturned face.
“I’m afraid,” Willy said, baring his teeth, “that I can’t say the same about you.” There was a dreadful cold fire in his green eyes. With a yank, he pulled his hair out of her grip.
“Now!” Eddi snapped. And out of the infinite closet from which he conjured all his clothes, the phouka summoned his coat.
Eddi plunged her hand into the pocket of it as it appeared around him. She pulled out a handful of what they had put there, and threw it at the Dark Lady. Rowan berries.
The queen stumbled back, her face twisted with fury and disgust. Her magic unraveled for just a moment—but she was the only one in the room with the power to hold Willy, and in that moment, her hold broke. With a great wrench, he snapped the cord that held his arms. His right hand blazed with white fire. He flung that light and heat at the ceiling, at the bracket that held one of the star-shaped lamps, and it plunged, still lit, into the pond. Sparks plumed in all directions. Then he leaped off the terrace, as the phouka swatted down one of the gray things that had lunged to stop him.
The room was a scene out of hell. The tubes of the watering system had all reared out of their pots and begun to spray an extract of St. John’s Wort at random. Nice work, Meg, Eddi thought. In the pool, where the lamp was shorting out, something green thrashed, showing dreadful glimpses of limbs or tail or snake-jawed head. Creatures of all sizes and aspects dashed from the now-toxic flowerbeds toward the walls and began to climb the roof trusses.
They plunged through the chaos toward the double doors. One of the gray long-snouted horrors dropped down at them from the ceiling. Willy raised his burning hand and blasted it as it fell; it rained on them in foul-smelling cinders.
“No more of that for a while,” Willy panted. “Hope you’ve got reinforcements.”
“Not until we get outside,” said the phouka, and kicked a redcap into the pond. It shrieked as the green thing pulled it under.
They were on the terrace. Eddi turned, looked back—she didn’t know why. She felt the bay trees shaking on either side of her, reaching out and down . . . but not for her. She felt the boxwood grow thorns as if they sprouted from her own skin. The cypress breathed fragrant poisons with her every exhalation. The roses twined and tangled and tripped the fey feet that blundered among them, and she felt the pull against her own fingers. For an instant, she heard the wild and terrible music that the garden danced to. Then the phouka grabbed her and yanked her out the door.
The fight had reached the palm house. She heard a dull smacking sound, and looked round to find Hedge holding a tire iron and trotting past an enormous heap of fur that must have been an attacker before he hit it.
“I told you to stay the hell outside!” Eddi yelled. He muttered and swung at one of the little mud-colored things. She lost sight of him behind the trunk of a palm.
Carla stood at the inside door, holding a pair of black drumsticks as if they were daggers. “Graphite and epoxy,” she said. “Damn near unbreakable.”
“I told you to stay outside, too,” Eddi grumbled.
Hedge loped out of the trees, ferocious triumph on his thin face. The phouka and Willy hit the doors a moment after he did. They set their backs against them, and the phouka pulled two pairs of very dark glasses out of an inside coat pocket. He flipped one to Willy. Hedge took his out of his jeans pocket. Carla had hers on already. Eddi pulled her helmet on; the faceplate was tinted.
“Ready?” she said.
“Hell, I hope so,” Carla gasped. “Here they come!”
Before she turned toward the door, Eddi caught a glimpse of the creatures of the Unseelie Court boiling out of the undergrowth. She had no desire to look again.
They shot through the entryway and out into the night. Which became day. The first of their pursuers came through the door into the white glare of the carbon arc lamps mounted on the roof of the station wagon. Eddi watched for an instant, appalled, as one of the gray things reeled back with skin scorched black and falling away in strips.
“Move your ass!” Dan yelled from the car. “Batteries won’t last much longer!”
Eddi leaped onto the Triumph and kicked it alive. The phouka pushed Willy onto the back of it.
“But. . . !”
“I’m faster than he is,” the phouka said through his teeth. “Go!”
“Shit!” She twisted savagely on the throttle and sent the bike tearing down the hill, across the grass, to meet the Seelie Court’s assembled might.
They were ranged across a vast open lawn, their white horses stamping and tossing their manes, their banners snapping in the high wind. Eddi braked hard and slammed the bike around, skidding wildly and scraping up turf. Willy leaped off and swatted her across the shoulders.
“Go get him!” he screamed against the wind and the roar of the cycle. “Hurry!”
Eddi popped the clutch and took off back toward the Conservatory.
The phouka was backed against the trunk of a tree by a long pale woman who smiled with a mouthful of white needles. Her expression turned to terror just before Eddi ran her down.
She stopped the bike and sat shaking until the phouka jumped on the back. He held her tightly as they rocketed back across the grass. Eddi knew it wasn’t just to keep himself on the bike.
“Where are the others?” she yelled.
“They got away in the car.”
“Hedge, too?”
“He was on the tailgate. He seemed to be enjoying himself.”
Everybody does but us, she thought vaguely. “Are they heading home?”
“No. Did you really expect them to?”
“And Meg?”
“Out the back, through the growing houses. I doubt they had time to realize she was there.”
And of course, she had been there all along, a homey, unobtrusive little spirit in a back room, u
nnoticed until she became a tornado to sweep them all up. Was it she who had set the plants themselves in motion?
She wheeled the bike when she got to the assembled Court, and drove along their line as if she were reviewing it. She could see the enemy on the opposite slope, a glittering darkness. At the end of the line she let the bike idle while she hauled off her helmet.
“Hot in this thing.”
“Mm.” He kneaded her shoulder muscles through her jacket. “What do you suppose the Lady had to say when she saw you deliver Willy?”
Eddi snorted faintly. “Don’t I wish I knew. No time to ask her now, though.”
“No, I suppose not.”
Then Willy himself came toward them through the fey army. He still wore his torn T-shirt; his only concession to his place among the Seelie Court was the weapon he carried, the long white lance of the Sidhe horsemen. He saw the phouka on the back of the bike. “Good,” he said, with a quick nod.
“Good,” the phouka sighed. “I am saved from certain death, and all he says is ‘Good.’ ”
Willy tried not to smile and failed. “That and ‘Thank you.’ ”
Eddi looked up, startled. He’d said it as if it were in a foreign language—or as if the words had power. And, of course, they did.
“The bitch-queen said that Hedge had spied for her,” Willy continued.
“She wanted him to help capture you,” Eddi said quickly. “He refused.”
Willy nodded. “Something about the way she told me made me think that he hadn’t been all she’d hoped.” He chuckled softly. “And he’s a good man with a tire iron. But where did the St. John’s Wort come from?”
“Hairy Meg.”
Willy’s grin faded, and wonder took its place. “Meg the brownie?”
“Yeah.”
He looked down, then swiftly back at her. “You shame me—no, you shame us all. I hope we have the sense to recognize it.”
The phouka’s hands went stiff on her shoulders. “Showtime, my children,” he said quietly. “You’d best put your helmet on again.” When she turned to him he pointed with his chin. The black line on the other side of the field had begun to move.
Nothing that happened after that made sense. Or rather, it made perfect sense, but only within itself. They were all in a bubble of time and place where killing and dying happened and disappeared, like events passed on the roadside. She saw terrible things, had a constant nagging feeling that she was doing some of them. But caught up in the press, she was flung from one occurrence to another too quickly to be sure. She saw Stuart in the fighting, his features rearranged by fear and fury. Perhaps hers were, too. Then something hairy jumped in front of the bike, and she lost sight of him. She had to stop once to wipe drops of blood off her faceplate. She didn’t know where it had come from; that disturbed her more than the blood itself.
They gathered together gradually, finding her by the sound of the bike: Dan, wielding a baseball bat as if he’d done it before; Carla with her drumsticks; and Hedge with his tire iron. Eddi and the phouka acted as cavalry on the Triumph. They worked their way through the chaos as a very loose unit, splitting up and reforming as the fighting demanded. Then the rain began.
It fell in sheets, in blinding curtains, and the grass under them was a field of mud in minutes. Eddi dumped the bike twice before she got it to higher ground and the trees.
Trees. She looked around dully. The fighting had swept across a street somehow—she should remember driving over the curbs, shouldn’t she?—and it had all broken up into smaller engagements when they reached the wooded land. She slid off the bike and let it down on its side. It would be useless in the trees; she’d run into one and kill herself.
The phouka trotted up the slope beside her and propped himself against a tree. He looked drained.
“How’re we doing?” Eddi asked, tugging off her helmet. Her hair was soaked with sweat and sticking to her forehead.
“I defy anyone to tell from here,” he replied sourly. “But we seem to be at the eye of the storm, just at the moment.”
“It is awfully quiet.”
“I won’t dignify that with the stock reply.”
A shout and the sound of blows gave the lie to Eddi’s words. “Well, there you go,” she said, about nothing in particular, and they ran up the slope through the trees.
Hedge was in a little clearing, facing three of the enemy. He clubbed at one, a thick-limbed, thick-furred, bearlike man, and missed. It showed its teeth and drew one great clawed hand back to strike him. Then a shaft of white cut through the gloom and into the bear-man’s gut. Willy was on the other end of it. The remaining Unseelie folk fled into the undergrowth. Hedge looked startled, but Willy grinned and winked at him, and after an instant, Hedge smiled back.
Across the clearing, Eddi saw a man’s silhouette through a break in the trees. She reached out and touched the phouka’s arm. The man’s shape was familiar, his size and stance. The brown brush of his hair—it was Stuart. She saw light glance off the steel barrel—
She probably screamed, but she couldn’t tell. The sound of the gun filled up all her hearing. Why were guns never so loud in movies? She would never hear again, she knew it; she would never hear anything but that gunshot, going off forever.
A red watercolor blossom opened on Willy’s soaked white T-shirt. He stepped backward, wide-eyed, as if to catch his balance. The gun roared again, like a digital echo of the last shot. Willy sank to his knees. Eddi could see in his face the sudden knowledge of what was happening. There was horror there, but still no pain. The gun fired twice more, and Willy’s shirt was red. He folded up onto the wet grass.
The phouka was fast, always so fast—why was he only halfway across the clearing, barely ahead of her? It had happened slowly, she had seen it.
Stuart turned and fired at the phouka. So slow. Why didn’t he dodge? The bullet hit somewhere in the left half of him. Eddi heard the phouka’s sharp cry, saw him turn with the impact and slip and fall hard.
Stuart was so slow. Eddi stepped toward him, toward the little mouth of the gun. She saw it waver, saw terror cover Stuart’s face like ice over a pond. It made him pitifully ugly. What the hell was he afraid of? Hadn’t he killed everything in the clearing that could scare him? She wrenched the gun out of his frozen hands and flung it away, heard it go off when it hit. It finally sounded like a gun in a movie: muffled, someone else’s problem.
Stuart staggered backward until he bumped into a tree and slid down it. Eddi paid him no more attention. She started toward the phouka, but he had already risen to his knees. His right hand clutched his left shoulder.
“Never mind me! See to Willy!”
She crossed the clearing. Hedge was crouched over Willy, sobbing, one fist jammed in his mouth. She knelt beside the still figure on the grass, brushed the wet black-and-white hair out of his face.
He opened his eyes. The emerald brilliance was draining out of them, as the lit-from-within quality was leaching out of his pale skin and leaving it like white ashes. She was watching the victory of entropy, of mortality over magic. It made her sick.
His lips parted, and there was blood behind them. “Love and death,” he whispered, and smiled. “I guess it’s death, after all.” His eyes squinted shut suddenly, in pain. They never opened again.
She couldn’t breathe, her chest wouldn’t move, her throat wouldn’t let anything through. The rain had unaccountably turned salty. When she looked up, Hedge had rolled himself in a shaking ball on the other side of Willy’s body. The phouka stood behind him, head down, hair dripping water slowly.
“He’s dead,” Eddi whispered, because someone had to admit it.
The phouka covered his face with both hands.
Carla and Dan stood at the edge of the trees. They didn’t seem to believe it yet, not really. Stuart, on the other side of the clearing, sat propped against his tree, his knees pulled up, his hands over his eyes.
People had fought in this open space, and they had all
lost. Death had won. Death had won all night, and would do it again, on and on at every battlefield. . . .
She ran from the clearing, past the phouka, past Carla and Dan, as fast as she could through the trees to where she’d dropped the Triumph. She pulled it up, started it, plunged down the slope on it. It wouldn’t be hard to find what she was looking for. She could follow her own rage and hate, her own pain, the despair that threatened to empty her of herself. What would she do when she found what she wanted . . . something would occur to her.
The rain had stopped, and the smell of blood and smoke had risen in its wake. She knew now where the burning came from. She remembered Willy lashing out with fire in the sunken garden, and she cried out with the bitterness of the memory. They had rescued him, they had saved his life. . . .
She had nothing white to use as a flag, was not even sure that Faerie recognized the convention of a flag of truce. All she could offer the Dark Queen’s guard as proof of her intentions was an upraised empty hand. They parted before her—more out of surprise, she thought, than anything else.
The Queen of Air and Darkness waited for her, all her playacting stripped away. She was still in the jumpsuit and long coat, but they were a mockery now, human clothes on an inhuman creature. She seemed to be outlined in burning black. Eddi knew that if she had come to attack the queen, nothing would have penetrated that blackness.
She killed the engine and let the bike fall almost at the Dark Queen’s feet.
“In spite of everything, you fascinate me,” the queen said. Her voice, her commonplace tone, seemed horrible in context. “What are you here for?”
“To put a stop to it.”
The queen’s eyes narrowed. “Interesting. How did you plan to do that, by killing me?”
Eddi shook her head. “No. That’s more of the same. I. . .” The words sounded stupid in her head, but she said them anyway. “I’m challenging you to a duel. A fair fight.”