Drink Down the Moon

  “But wouldn’t he just feed on their luck as well?”

  “Not if he has all of Kinrowan’s luck at hand— and that’s what the Tower gives him.”

  “But—”

  “The Host will gather to him, Kate. They have no leader at the moment.”

  “Caraid,” Kate said to the book. “Jacky’s my best friend ever. I can’t let her die!”

  I will still be your friend, the book replied.

  Finn caught Kate’s arm before she could respond.

  “Don’t make it jealous,” he mouthed silently.

  Kate looked at him, bewildered.

  “That’s the danger of names,” the hob added, still just moving his lips but uttering no sound. “A skilly-born thing like your book here can take what it hears too literally.”

  Then Kate understood. It wasn’t as if she hadn’t had forewarning about this kind of thing.

  “My best friend next to you, of course,” she told the book. “— Won’t you help me rescue her?”

  I’ve told you all know, Caraid replied.

  “But there must be something else.”

  Find allies, the book told her after a few moments. Others that the droichan has harmed. Perhaps, with their help, you can find his heart and free your next-best friend.

  “The fiaina sidhe,” Finn said.

  Kate looked at him. “Are they related to the Pook?”

  “They are all kin of a sort. Perhaps they could help us.”

  “Perhaps! But that doesn’t do anything for Jacky now.”

  “Kate, there’s nothing else we can do.”

  “Oh, yes, there is. We can go back to the Tower with as much rowan as we can carry and get Jacky out of there.”

  Finn regarded her mournfully. His eyes plainly said, Why won’t you listen?

  “Kate,” he began.

  “If I can get to the wallystanes, couldn’t I just use one of them on him and turn him into a toad or something?”

  Unlikely, Caraid replied. Wallystanes are a Jack magic. They wouldn’t be strong enough for such a task. Especially not with the droichan fighting the spell.

  “Jack magics work subtly,” Finn explained. “And remember how much you had to concentrate to make them work properly. Just imagine the droichan’s will opposing you at the same time. You’d never have a chance to collect your thoughts.”

  Kate nodded. “Okay. But I’m still going. I have to, Finn.”

  “I know,” he said. “But at least let us find what help we can close at hand. Crowdie Wort left Gwi Kayleigh in charge of his bally before he left. Why don’t we at least find her first?”

  Ottawa South was known as Crowdie Wort’s Bally to the faerie of Kinrowan, Crowdie Wort being its Chief. Like most of the Court, he was in Ballymoresk for the Fair, and like the other Chiefs, he’d left a few foresters behind to keep watch over the acres under his care.

  It’s unlikely that a forester could stand up to the droichan, Caraid offered.

  Kate ignored the book.

  “Where can we find her?” she asked.

  “She’ll have left word at the bridge as to her whereabouts.”

  Kate closed Caraid and stuffed it in her pouch.

  “Then let’s go,” she said.

  Finn gave his comfortable home a longing look, then hurried after Kate, who was already outside and striding west to Billings Bridge.

  Her predicament was the most terrifying thing that Jacky could imagine. She could hear and see and smell and feel and think, perfectly well. But she had no control over her body. Her lungs still worked, drawing in air, letting it out. The blood kept moving through her veins and arteries. All the automatic functions of the various systems that kept her alive still worked. But she couldn’t get up out of the chair. She couldn’t turn her head. She couldn’t even blink.

  The gruagagh had paralyzed her and she was as helpless as a newborn babe.

  She heard footsteps. As she listened, she remembered Kate appearing in her range of vision earlier, moving a hand in front of her eyes. She hadn’t been able to warn Kate. Hadn’t been able to do a thing. But these footsteps weren’t Kate’s. They belonged to the gruagagh, who sat down across the table from her and regarded her with a smirking expression on his handsome face.

  How could she have been so stupid as to have let him capture her? Kinrowan was her responsibility and she’d as good as handed it over to him. She thought of what Bhruic would say if he could see her now, what the Laird’s Court would say when they returned from Ballymoresk, and hated Cumin of Lochbuie with a vengeance.

  “There’s a thing or two about this Tower,” Cumin said, “that I don’t understand. The smell of Bhruic Dearg’s enchantments are very strong. I know the luck of Kinrowan is bound up in this place. But he’s hidden the workings of the how of it from me. I think it’s time we took a walk upstairs and you showed me the lay of things.”

  Dream on, Jacky thought.

  Cumin smiled. “I know you’re raging, locked in there behind those glazed eyes, but it makes no difference, Jacky Rowan. You’re mine now. And you’ll show me what I want— don’t doubt it for an instant.”

  To Jacky’s dismay, her body lurched to its feet and, whether she wanted to or not, the gruagagh set her to walking across the floor and up the stairs. She moved like a marionette in an amateur puppeteer’s jerky hands, but she moved. And there was nothing she could do about it.

  As they reached the top of the stairs, her gaze touched briefly on her room, before the gruagagh moved her on. There were a pair of bogans in there now, rooting through her belongings. Bogans in the Tower! There was a boggy smell in the air, too. The whispery sound of sluagh voices.

  The gruagagh moved her up the next flight of stairs before she could see more, up to Bhruic’s study, up to his books of lore and the window that looked out on Kinrowan and showed the criss-crossing network of the moonroads that gave the realm its luck.

  Kinrowan was doomed, she knew. And it was all her fault.

  “There’s nothing so satisfying,” the gruagagh said from behind her, “as learning new lessons, discovering how things work. Perhaps when you’ve shown me Bhruic Dearg’s secrets, little Jacky, I’ll take you apart and see how you work.” He laughed. “Would you like that?”

  I’ll see you dead in hell first, Jacky thought, but how she was going to manage that, she didn’t know. The way things were going, she’d be lucky to make it through the next half hour, little say take her vengeance on her captor.

  The door to the third floor loomed before them. Her hand— directed by the gruagagh’s will— moved to the knob, twisted it, and then she was leading the gruagagh into the heart of Kinrowan.

  Ten

  Johnny couldn’t find Puxill.

  What he did find was Vincent Massey Park on a Wednesday afternoon, late in the summer. There were no sidhe, pink-haired or otherwise. No crowds of strange faerie creatures. Just the odd jogger— perfectly human— in jogging suit and running shoes. Once another cyclist passed him by, seriously bent over the handlebars of his ten-speed, stretchy black thigh-length shorts half-covering muscular legs, gaze fixed on the path ahead. Black squirrels were busy burying nuts. Sparrows and crows watched him from the trees.

  But there were no magical beings.

  No faerie.

  He chained his bike to a tree by the railway bridge, and hiked up to the spot where Jemi had led him into her hollowed hill. The glade lay still in the afternoon sun. He walked slowly up and down its length, trying to remember just how they had approached it, until he was sure he had the right stone. Kneeling beside it, he studied it carefully. After a few moments, he lifted his hand hesitantly, then knocked on it the way he remembered Jemi had done.

  Two quick knocks, pause, another knock.

  Nothing.

  He lifted his hand to try again, then turned away. What was the use? He sat down on the grass beside the stone and stared out through the trees to what he could see of the university.

  He had to be crazy to hav
e taken any of last night seriously. Something had happened to him— he didn’t doubt that— but it hadn’t been real. Whatever her reasons, Jemi had slipped him something and then his own imagination had taken over, peopling the park with the weird beasties and beings from his grandfather’s library.

  They had appeared to be real— very real, oh, yes— but then hallucinations usually were.

  Illusions. Delusions.

  Why was she— Jemi, Jenna, “whatever her name was— doing this to him?

  He pulled the bone carving from his pocket and fingered its smooth surface. The bone gleamed in the sunlight. He remembered the bone flute carving in Jemi’s room on Sweetland, the attraction he’d felt between the two artifacts

  . He kept rubbing the little fiddle with his thumb, only now his thoughts turned to Tom.

  It was hard to believe the old fellow was gone. That didn’t seem real either— never mind his being so sick this past while. The world didn’t seem the same anymore, knowing Tom wasn’t in it.

  Sitting there in the sunlight, this was the first time Johnny had thought of his grandfather without wanting to cry. The sadness was still there— the empty place inside him hadn’t been filled, or gone away— but it was different now. He found himself remembering good times— long nights spent talking. Times when they played tunes, the two fiddles singing in unison until Tom suddenly went into the perfect harmony, underlying the original tune with a resonating depth that made it sound like far more than a simple two-or three-part fiddle tune. There were times when the music bridged something between them and some mystery that lay just beyond their reach.

  Tom had talked about it a few times. Johnny wondered now if what his grandfather had been talking about was Faerie. Was that where he’d gone? Was Tom some ghostly fiddler in a fairy hill now? Johnny’s fingers yearned for the instrument that wasn’t in his hands. If he played a tune now, would it reach to Tom in that otherworld?

  Johnny turned once more and, using the bone fiddle, rapped on the stone again.

  Twice, pause, another rap.

  Nothing.

  “Goddamn you!” he cried. “Just give me back my fiddle! Give it back, or I swear I’ll come back with a shovel and dig you out

  .”

  His voice trailed off as he sensed someone behind him. He looked up from the stone. In the meadow between the bike path and where he sat stood a skinny man in shorts, T-shirt and running shoes, watching him. The curiosity in his eyes turned to guilt when he realized that Johnny had caught him staring. He began to back away, then simply vanished.

  “Oh, Christ,” Johnny muttered. “Let’s not start this disappearing shit again.”

  “It’s not him,” a familiar voice said from higher up the slope. “It’s you that’s been moved into Faerie.”

  She was crouched above him, something feral in her stance and in the look in her eyes, her pink hair standing up at all angles from her head. She was wearing calf-length trousers and a tunic-like shirt, both tattered and of an old-fashioned cut. Their greens and browns gave a first impression that she was wearing clothes made from twigs and leaves. Her face was washed out and pale without its makeup.

  Beside her, its head on a level with hers as she crouched, was what Johnny first took to be a dog. Then he realized it was a small wolf.

  “Listen,” he began.

  He wanted to just grab her and shake her, but he found his anger had just drained away again. Instead, he felt close to something rare, something wondrous, and he didn’t want to lose it. He wanted to comfort the hurt he saw lying behind the fierce look in her eyes. He wanted to run away from her and never see her again.

  “I know you mean well,” Jemi said. “And we’ve given you nothing but grief.”

  “It’s just

  I don’t

  I’m not sure what’s real.”

  Jemi moved suddenly, scuttling down the slope towards him. The dog, or wolf, turned and loped off into the trees. Johnny watched it go, then looked at Jemi. Her face was very close to his.

  “Oh, we’re very real,” she said.

  She lifted her hand to touch his cheek in that curious gesture that both she and her sister had.

  “Your sister,” Johnny said.

  Her eyes went bleak.

  “I just wanted to say I’m sorry about what happened to her. I know how you’re feeling

  .”

  Jemi looked away, past his shoulder, into unseen distances.

  “I won’t let them get away with it,” she said. “Whoever killed her— they’ll pay.” Her gaze went to him, the feral light fierce in her eyes. “Will you help me, Johnny Faw? I want to call the sidhe. I want to ride on Kinrowan. Something in Kinrowan killed my sister, and not just her alone. The Seelie Court has to pay for what they’ve done.”

  “What can I do?”

  Here I go again, Johnny thought as he spoke. Believing it all again. But it was impossible not to— not with her sitting so close to him, radiating her otherworldiness.

  “Be my strength,” she said. “I’ve never called a rade— never led the fiaina. But I’m all that’s left with Jenna gone. I’m the Pook now.”

  “But what would I do?”

  “There’s power in music, Johnny. We both know that. We’ve both made people smile, made them dance. Now we must gather my people from all their hidden places. Summon them with skilly tunes. Lead them against our foe.”

  She was using words that made no sense to Johnny. Rade and Kinrowan and skilly.

  “How will you find this— foe?” he asked.

  “We’ll ride on Kinrowan, and if the Court doesn’t deliver up the murderers, we’ll take up our quarrel with them. Will you help me?”

  “I

  “

  Johnny looked away from her. It was hard to think with her sitting so close. She smelled like apples and nuts, freshly harvested. She radiated heat, presence.

  He didn’t want to promise what he might not be able to deliver. He wanted to help her, wasn’t sure he could, wanted her

  .

  And that was another part of the problem. He was drawn to her, as surely as the two bone carvings were drawn to each other, and he was afraid of that. He was also afraid of it all turning around on him again. Of accepting that this was real, then finding himself alone once more. In a glade. Or on a riverbank. Without her. Thinking he’d imagined it all again. Thinking he was crazy.

  He caught hold of her hand.

  “They say that faerie can enchant mortals,” he said. “Is this

  have you laid a”— he searched for the right word— “a glamour on me?”

  Jemi shook her head. Her fingers tightened around his.

  “I’ve felt it too,” she said. “With you. I might ask you the same question. But I didn’t spell you, Johnny. All I know is that together we can make a skilly music that’ll set our world a-right again. Heal its hurts. That can’t be wrong, can it?”

  “No.”

  He turned to her, lost himself in her eyes again, and had to look away. He remembered her anguish last night. The dead face of her sister, so like her own. The dislocation from reality that he’d been feeling ever since he’d escaped the crowd of faerie creatures that had been pressing around him

  .

  “I’ll help you,” he said. “Or at least I’ll try. Just don’t disappear on me again.”

  For a long moment neither of them spoke. Then Jemi put a hand on either side of his face and turned his head until he was facing her once more. She rose slightly off her heels and kissed him once on each eye, her tongue licking the lids.

  “Now I have enchanted you,” she said. “But only so you can see into Faerie on your own.”

  She smiled. The sadness, the fierceness in her eyes, eased slightly. She kissed him on the lips, a brief, brushing contact, then rocked back onto her heels, hands on her knees.

  “Just

  just like that?” Johnny asked.

  A simple nod was her only reply.

  Johnny sighed. He wanted to
reach for her.

  Instead, he said, “I was in your room on Sweetland. I was looking for my fiddle.”

  “It was a bad night,” Jemi said softly. “I’m sorry you were pushed from Faerie the way you were.”

  “That’s okay. I just wanted to tell you. I wasn’t snooping, you see, but

  ” He opened his hand. The bone fiddle lay in his palm. “I saw a flute pendant that looked— no, that’s not right. It felt like a twin to this.”

  Jemi looked down at the carving.

  “I’d forgotten about the flute,” she said. “It was Jenna’s, but she gave it to me a long time ago. The Bucca gave them both to her. I think he got them from my mother, but he might well have given them to her in the first place.”

  “Do they mean something?”

  “I’m not sure. Maybe there is some glamour involved here after all, though it’s neither mine nor yours.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “We fiaina aren’t like the Courts, Johnny. We don’t get our luck in the same way they do. We need our rade. The Bucca led the rade until Jenna learned it well enough to take his place, and then he left. It’s always been a Pook or a Bucca or someone like that who leads the rade, but old tales say that a mortal leads it best. Man or woman, it doesn’t matter. It depends on the Pook at the time, I suppose.”

  “What’s a Bucca?”

  Jemi smiled. “An old and very wise being, Johnny. He’s been gone for a long time now. We’re a restless folk, we fiaina sidhe. Me, not so much— I think it’s my human blood— but the others, oh, how they like to wander

  .”

  “And the two carvings?” Johnny asked. “Where do they fit in?”

  “They shape a bond between mortal and sidhe.”

  “Is that why your sister gave it to me? So that I’d meet you? Not that I’m complaining or anything, but how could she know that we’d like each other?”

  The sadness washed over Jemi again.

  “I don’t suppose we’ll ever know,” she said.

  Johnny reached for her and held her head against his shoulder, but she didn’t cry. She pressed against him, then slowly sat back.