War For The Oaks Part 37

A silence of unreasonable proportions followed; the phouka's only response was a quick spasm of his fingers on her shoulders. "Are you in love with him, then?"

"I said so, didn't I?"

"Not quite." There was a smile twitching in the corner of his mouth.

"All right, all right." Eddi took a long breath. "I love you."

"There. Now why should that be so hard to say?"

"Because it sounds like something out of a soap opera," Eddi grumbled.

"Does it? Not to me. The best line from a favorite song, perhaps." His smile softened his whole face in a way she hadn't seen before.

"That's because you're a d.a.m.ned romantic."

He reached up and tucked her hair behind her ear on one side. "Then you're a doubly d.a.m.ned romantic, my heart, since you won't even admit it. But perhaps with my excellent example before you..."

Eddi caught at his disconcerting fingers, which were now tracing the edge of her ear, and kissed his knuckles. "You're a jerk," she said fondly. "Where were we going, when we got distracted?"

"Earth and Air, I'd forgotten! It's your fault, you know. The color of your hair in the moonlight, the curve of your waist, the-"

"You're going to forget again."

"You're quite right. But I'll try not to do so for at least a few minutes. You will enjoy this, I think." He flashed her a grin and folded his fingers around hers. "Come along, then."

When the path widened and the trees thinned into open lawn, he put his arm around her shoulders. In his heeled boots, he was a little taller than she was, and she fit neatly against him when she put her arm around his waist.

They joined a semicircle of perhaps two dozen fey folk seated on the gra.s.s. She felt the phouka beside her like a source of heat, the rise and fall of his ribcage against her arm as he breathed.

A slight, pale-haired man stood before the gathered audience, facing outward toward University Avenue. He wore a baggy leather jacket dyed and painted with many colors, and tight white pants. His ears were not the large, foxy ones Eddi had seen on some creatures of Faerie, but they came to a p.r.o.nounced point.

The watchers were quiet, and the pale-haired man stood, silent and still, as if he were alone. Then he flung his head back and slowly lifted his hands.

University Avenue disappeared. It wasn't covered up; it was gone, like a chalk drawing washed away.

What was left was a featureless gray fuzz that seemed to billow a little at the edges.

The grayness began to glitter, and light and dark formed slowly in it. Color appeared, the suggestion of pink and yellow and green. Then Eddi saw the outline, and realized what was quickly taking shape before her.

It was a castle. Not the utilitarian fortresses of the mortal past, not the marzipan-and-plaster illusions of Disneyland; this was a towered, turretted marvel, graceful with flying b.u.t.tresses, real and rich and im- possible. It leaped and twisted into the sky perhaps thirty stories, all of them polished golden stone.

Banners hung from its balconies. Clouds snagged on its spires and broke away in tatters into the night sky.

A shadowed garden of topiary surrounded its base and marched down to join the edge of the park.

The gathered watchers made noise at last-they applauded the pale man's efforts in whatever ways best suited their forms. He turned and bowed low, and his creation dissipated in a cloud of sparkling light, like fireworks burning out.

"Good G.o.d!" Eddi said in the phouka's ear. "That was all illusion? Of course it was. But there was... so much of it!"

"Mmm." The phouka raised his eyebrows as another figure separated from the crowd. "Ah hah. I thought so. See what you think of this, my sweet."

A woman stood before the semicircle of audience, much closer than the pale man had. She was tall and thin and steely-looking, with a hollow-cheeked, pleasant face. Her brown hair fell loose to her waist, and she wore what looked like mechanic's coveralls with the sleeves cut out. She did nothing to awe the watchers; she had no haughty-manners, no artistic airs. No showmanship at all, Eddi thought at first-then recognized the consummate showmanship in that.

The woman gazed vaguely off into the middle distances, not so much entranced as absentminded. Then she smiled slowly, as if at some happy memory. She turned her right hand palm upward and studied it.

There was an apple there, suddenly. It was a neighbor's-apple-tree sort of fruit, small and rosy red with a little reverse blush of green on one side, its surface misted over with the unpolished bloom that never survived the trip to the supermarket.

With a nod, the woman tossed the apple into the air. Eddi watched it spin through its arc, heard the thunk when it landed in the woman's hand again. Then she bit into it. The sound carried faintly to Eddi, the snap of teeth through the skin, the crunch of the crisp flesh tearing away. It made her hungry. Juice sparkled on the woman's lips, and a drop ran down the skin of the apple and fell on the front of her coverall, leaving a little dark spot. Slowly, with something like regret, the woman held the apple at arm's length. The white flesh shone wetly in the moon and lamplight. She blew on the apple as if blowing out a candle, and it puffed from her hand onto the night wind in a plume of red-and-white dust.

Eddi knew the stunned silence that sometimes preceded applause, that was a greater accolade than all the noise a crowd could make. That was what she heard, what she contributed to.

"I saw the d.a.m.n thing appear in her hand," she said wonderingly, "and I still forgot it wasn't a real apple."

The phouka nodded. "It put that poor boy's castle to shame."

She thought for a moment. "The apple was harder to pull off, wasn't it?" she asked the phouka.

The phouka leaned back on his elbows. "Your imagination filled in the blanks in the castle. The apple was all observation, uncolored by the wishes of the heart."

Eddi grinned down at him. "That's bad art, you know. Copying reality without interpreting it."

"Mmm. But illusion is not art. It can be a tool for art, but there is nothing of genuine creation in it." He looked distant suddenly, and a little sad. "You'll find precious little creation among us, dear one. For the most part, we are only excellent copyists."

"Why? Is there some reason why you can't be creative?"

"Habits of thought. Tradition like a weight upon the chest." He tipped his head back and stared at the sky.

Eddi touched a finger to his lips and saw them soften into a smile. "Don't be bitter," she said.

"No. Not tonight. Tell me then, sweet, if you made an illusion, here and now, what would it be?"

Around them, the knot of audience was unraveling, drifting away across the gra.s.s and up the hill. Eddi leaned on one elbow, so that she was stretched out on her side next to him. He began to stroke a finger lightly through her hair, as if it demanded all his concentration.

"Something musical," Eddi said finally. "All those sounds in my head, that the instruments I know of can't make. You'd be surprised at how clearly you can hear something in your head and not be able to reproduce it."

His fingers were motionless in her hair, and he looked into her eyes without smiling. There was meaning in the look, and the need to be understood. "You have already played a piece of the music inside you. You did it tonight."

Eddi remembered playing for the circle of the dance, remembered the feel of it, the power and confidence and exhaustion. "What did I do?"

"The very fire danced in rhythm," the phouka said softly. "There were instruments and voices where there were none to play or sing. But more, the music seemed to fly straight from your heart and mind into all those who heard it, and they understood it without words or images."

"You're sure that wasn't just you?"

He laughed, embarra.s.sed. "I think not, but it's true that I may have felt the effects more than some. You go directly to my head, sweetling, just like your dreadful brandy."

Eddi laughed, too, and leaned over him to kiss him. The feel of him along the length of her body was like fire running up the bark of a tree, and the kiss became rather more than she'd intended. His arms went round her. Her hands, without any effort from her, found their way inside his coat, where they felt his back muscles through his vest and shirt.

She had hardly any warning at all-only the phouka going tense under her. Then he was off the gra.s.s and in a fighting crouch near her head, and she had only the most muddled notion of how he got there.

Past him, she saw the cause of his quick movement. It bared its long, discolored teeth at him, studied them both with its pearly dead-fish eyes. Then it laughed; Eddi had heard Carla make a sound like that by running a drumstick down a ridged, hollow wooden block.

"So charming," it said thickly, as if its tongue and teeth were ill-made for speech. The voice itself was hoa.r.s.e and dry, and sounded like old bones and dead wood. "Young things rutting on the gra.s.s."

"Drop dead," Eddi said, rising slowly and with great care.

It laughed again. "Truce, little things." It was, in fact, shorter than Eddi, but she knew the adjective had nothing to do with size. It spread its long gray hands in a parody of benevolence. "No hostility here, yet you are without a kind word. Is it not truce?"

"It is," said the phouka, his voice perfectly neutral. "Which is why all that stealth makes me so suspicious."

"Stealth? Is it wicked to be quiet by nature? No matter." It turned to Eddi and sketched a bow. She realized that all its movements looked like parodies of human ones, as if it were a computer simulation or a very good marionette. "The Lady sends her invitation to you, to speak with her if you would."

Eddi frowned and looked to the phouka.

He said, his eyes still on the gray messenger, "Meaning, the other Lady."

The messenger laughed.

She was here? Yes, of course she would be. Sitting in the midst of it all, unwelcome but impossible to exclude. Would that please her? Hurt her? Make her angry? Eddi knew so little of her. "What," Eddi said finally, "does the Queen of Air and Darkness want with me?"

"Speech," said the gray thing. "It is truce. You will not be harmed," it rattled off quickly, like an arresting officer reciting her rights. "You will not be held against your will. You will not be gone for more than half of an hour."

Eddi looked again at the phouka. "What do you think?"

He shrugged. "I'd not venture it-though those are the rea.s.surances I'd demand. We've nothing to gain from it."

The gray thing curled its lip. "Not so. The Lady has a thing she knows, that you want to know also. A very important thing, and ur-gent."

The phouka sighed. "It lacked only that, I suppose."

"How do we know it's telling the truth?" Eddi asked.

"We don't lie," the phouka said, sounding disgusted, but not at her. "We'll shade the truth until you'd think that green was red, but we don't lie. And particularly not to each other."

"Well, it's a chance to get to know the enemy," Eddi said with a shrug. She eyed the messenger. "Where is she?"

It smiled, and with an almost graceful gesture pointed up the hill to the tower.

"Now why am I not surprised?" Eddi grumbled, and took a few steps toward the slope. The phouka started to follow-and the gray thing stepped in front of him, grinning. Eddi turned, and they were all still for a remarkably long moment.

"She will not go alone," the phouka said, his voice low and ominous.

"Then she remains ignorant," the messenger said. "Her loss."

"What difference can it make that I am with her? As long as you observe the truce, I shall as well. If you intend no harm, you needn't fear my presence."

"a.s.suredly. But you are still not invited."

The phouka's fingers curled and stiffened at his sides, and his shoulders rose with a long, slow breath.

"Why not?" he said through his teeth.

"Because the Lady has no need to speak to you."

The phouka, from his face, might have been considering breaking the truce. Eddi stepped around the gray thing-with room to spare-and touched his arm. "It's your call," she said. "You know more than I do how much they can be trusted; and how much weight to put on this piece of information. I'll go alone, if you tell me I should."

He closed his eyes and turned his face away, but she only moved around to where she could see him again.

"That makes it worse, you know," he said bitterly. "If something happens to you the fault will be mine, for sending you into their hands."

"I know. But one of us has to decide, and I can't."

Without looking away from her face, the phouka addressed the gray messenger. "Will you take me in her place?"

"No," it said.

The phouka winced, then stepped forward and took Eddi in his arms. She wrapped hers around his waist, under his coat. "Be wary," he whispered. "I shall give them their half an hour, and then to the bowels of the earth with the blasted truce. But be wary still, love."

"I will." She kissed his cheek and let him go. "Lead the G.o.dd.a.m.n way," she said to the gray thing.

It did not go straight up the hill; it followed a level track through the front of the park, until it came to a little-used thread of trail that disappeared among the young trees growing thick on the slope. Then it stepped off the path and stopped.

"Aren't you going to lead me there?" she asked.

It showed its dreadful teeth again. "Only one tower," it said hollowly. "Only one door."

So why go to the trouble of leading me this far? she thought sourly. Maybe it's seen too many horror movies. She scowled at it and started up the path, though it made her back p.r.i.c.kle to have that thing behind her. When it p.r.i.c.kled more than she could bear, she looked over her shoulder. There was nothing behind her but empty trail.

Once between the trees, the track turned steep, and was cut down its length with a washout gully.

Gravel rolled under her feet. A wind had sprung up, one left over from October. It sank its cold teeth in her until her ears and bare arms ached with it. Other than the daunting hiss of it in the trees, and her own crunching footsteps, she could hear nothing. On this path, there was no moon in the sky, no streetlight, no eldritch glow from any living thing.

Barely visible from where she stood, at the end of a corridor of darkness, she saw the bottom of the trail. The phouka stood there. His very silhouette spoke of stubborn devotion, and Eddi felt suddenly as if she were on a lifeline. When the time came, when there was need, he would reel her back to him.

In a few more steps, the trees were bare, and she was surrounded by the last bleak breath of autumn. It was an illusion. She fought against it, but it was too strongly made, or she had waited too long. The only break in its surface was a nighthawk that burst out of the trees, its white wing patches shining in the darkness. She welcomed the start it gave her; it was a summer bird.

She scrambled out of the trees at last onto the pavement that surrounded the tower. The base of it, high as anyone could reach, was covered with graffiti. Previous scrawls and slogans had been covered up with a broad band of white paint, but that had only served as a canvas for the current array. There was a cl.u.s.ter of spray-painted dope leaves, and LED ZEPPELIN, and THE MISFITS over a skull and crossbones. There was a stenciled drawing of two figures, one holding a gun to the other's head and blowing out its brains, with the caption YOU'RE IT! There was the usual collection of initials and names of high school teams, and a few pentagrams and six-sixty-sixes that probably had more to do with heavy metal bands than Satanists.

And there was the door.

It was unguarded, unattended-in fact, there was no one on the hilltop at all, that Eddi could see. She should have been able to see the lights of the city on her right, over the treetops. She saw only darkness there.

It was made of iron, strapped and barred and painted rusty red. It was set in a concrete arch at the top of a short flight of steps. A chain hung through the bars-probably the one that, on other nights, fastened the door closed. Tonight it hung loose. The door stood open by a hand's breadth.

Phouka, she thought, as if it were a prayer or a curse. She walked up the stairs and pushed through the door.

She felt her way for three paces, sliding her foot along the stone with each step and stretching her hands out before her. Then light bloomed along the walls.

They were not wall sconces. They were white living hands holding torches, and they swung to follow her progress. Sometimes the white fingers shifted a little, seeking a better grip, perhaps, and the torchlight wavered unpleasantly. "Beauty and the Beast" Eddi snapped, her voice over-loud against the hard walls.