“The Gruagagh had a window there, on the third floor,” she’d told him. “A window through which he could see all of Kinrowan and some of the borderlands as well. It’s there that the droichan will be. Like a spider in its web, hoping to catch a fly. But this fly will come in through the window, not by the door. I’ll need that moment’s edge, Johnny. I’ll need the edge and the Moon’s strength that your music will borrow for me. Luck in every note, liquid as her light, Johnny.”
So he played the tune and called down the Moon as he could, watching with open-mouthed amazement as Jemi went up the side of the house, finding finger-and toeholds in between the bricks where there shouldn’t have been any. He didn’t know if the Moon was answering his call, but he felt a quickening inside him that had nothing to do with the rush of adrenaline that danger had called up in his body.
He could hear bagpipes in the music and harping, a hundred fiddles, and the sound of Jemi’s own pipe. The music was a soaring chorus, but at the same time, it was filled with the sounds of leaf rustlings and wind, tree boughs groaning, houses settling, distant traffic.
“Don’t let her be hurt,” he whispered against the music that his bow drew from his grandfather’s fiddle.
She had just reached the halfway point between the second and third floors when the sky suddenly went dark.
Christ, Johnny thought, forcing himself to concentrate on his music. I sure hope this isn’t a sign from the Moon that she’s got better things to do than help us.
Hard on the heels of the darkness, thunder boomed directly above him and the vast bank of clouds that had appeared to darken the sky loosed a downfall of rain. In moments, Johnny found it impossible to see more than a foot in front of himself. The wet hairs of his bow slid against the strings and the music faltered, then died. He tried to peer through the rain, up to where he’d last seen Jemi, but his eyes filled with water faster than he could clear them. A sheet of lightning tore across the sky. In that instant he saw that she had almost reached the third-floor windowsill that she’d been aiming for, then the darkness fell again.
“Screw this,” he said.
Fiddle and bow still in hand, he raced for the front door, damn the consequences. He barely got into the hall when a strange little creature that seemed to be made all of twigs ran up to him. Johnny kicked at it and it fell to pieces as his boot connected with it. A grunt came from down the hall and a bogan peered out of a room and spied him.
Johnny bolted up the stairs. Behind him, he could hear the bogan scrabbling around the corner and starting up after him.
When the sky darkened and the rain hit, Jemi echoed Johnny’s thoughts, but for a different reason. The blast of rain very nearly succeeded in knocking her from her precarious perch. For long moments it was all she could do to hold on, little say continue up the side of the Tower.
But she refused to give in. Inside was her sister’s murderer. Inside was a creature determined to drain Faerie of its luck and leave a wasteland behind it as it moved on to yet another Court. Well, he was going to be stopped, she vowed, and stopped here.
Squeezing her eyes shut against the downpour, she lifted a hand, found a minuscule hold for it, and drew herself up another few precious inches. One bare foot went up, found a hold, then the other. She pulled herself carefully up, flung out a hand, and could have kissed a bogan, for it closed on the windowsill she’d sought.
Cautiously, she went through the whole process with her feet once more, first one, then the other. She started to pull herself the rest of the way, moved too fast, and her hand started to slip. She didn’t even think of what she did next. As the one hand slipped, she concentrated on maintaining her balance, hugged the wall, and caught a firmer grip with her other hand.
Then it too started to slip.
She tensed her hand and her grip held. A moment later she got her other hand into position and pulled herself the rest of the way up until she was crouched, wet and bedraggled, on the sill.
She peered down, trying to spot Johnny, but she couldn’t see far enough. She listened for his music, but the rain drowned it out if he was still playing.
Oh, don’t get brave and rush in after me, she prayed. Bad enough that one of us is probably going to die don’t you get hurt too, Johnny.
Then she turned her attention to the inside of the room. She’d moved with the utmost quiet and had been helped by the downpour so she wasn’t surprised that no one inside had noticed her. Now that she was looking in, she understood why.
A trow and a hob were being held to the floor by a pair of the shadow-creatures that had pursued her. A young woman with curly hair lay by one wall, a book clutched in her hand. And then, as Jemi turned her head, she saw the droichan, slamming another woman against the wall.
Jemi wanted to help the woman the droichan was attacking, but she had to think first. Where would his heart be hidden? She’d get just the one try if she was lucky and no more. So where? On him, probably, but what would it look like? Would it be a ring, a charm, a pendant, a coin in his pocket, a button on his shirt, a thread in his cloak? Or would it be hidden somewhere in this room?
She looked around again, saw that the woman clutching the book was sitting up now, eyes wide as she saw Jemi perched outside the window. Jemi put a finger to her lips, but the woman merely opened her book and held it out so that Jemi could see the curious drawing on the page. When she shrugged her shoulders, the woman touched the drawing, then pointed at the droichan.
Jemi’s teeth bared in a sudden grin.
Arn above, she thought as she swung into the room. She’d just been given the droichan’s secret.
Henk sat uneasily on his borrowed pony. He had the concertina resting on one knee and he stroked the pony’s shaggy mane while he stared across the park at the gathered Host of the Unseelie Court. Nothing seemed real. At the same time, everything seemed more real than anything he’d ever experienced before.
“They make an awesome sight, don’t they?” Dohinney Tuir said quietly, edging his own pony closer to Henk’s.
Henk glanced briefly at him, then returned his attention to the Host.
“They’re my night fears,” he said. “I thought your friend the kelpie was one, but now that I can see those creatures, I know I was wrong. I’ve never really faced them before. I’m not always scared of them hardly ever, really but they still come back to me, just like that” he snapped his fingers “and when they do, they cripple me. Now that I know they’re real
I’m not any less scared of them, but somehow it makes it easier to face them. To know that I wasn’t crazy all those years.”
“We might all die,” Tuir said.
Henk nodded. “I know. But it beats getting run over by a truck. At least this means something.”
“Does it?” Loireag asked, stepping closer to his left side.
She smiled as he glanced at her, but he wasn’t sure if the bared teeth were mocking him, or if she just generally wore a sardonic air.
“To me it’ll mean something,” he said.
Before Loireag could reply, the sky went dark. Thunder cracked above them, impossibly close, and a sheet of rain engulfed the park, immediately drenching them. Lightning flickered like snakes’ tongues through the dark.
“This is it,” Loireag said. “They’ll attack under cover of the rain.”
Henk started to lift the concertina, wondering how he could play it in this kind of weather, but the little hob on the other side of him touched his arm. When Henk looked at him, Tuir shook his head.
“Not yet,” he said. “This is some working of the droichan’s his rage manifesting itself in the weather. It means he’s angry. Perhaps Jemi’s reached him.”
“He can cause this just by getting angry?” Henk asked.
“When you speak of droichan, you speak of power,” the hob replied. “But they pay a price for such displays. They lose their souls, Henk. They lose the chance of all the lives that are to come. And, in the end, they lose the green
promise of the Region of the Summer Stars.”
“Uh, right.”
“They can live forever, unless their heart is destroyed. But destroy it, and they no longer exist not on any plane of existence.”
Loireag pawed at the ground with one hoof, the rain waking a dark sheen on her skin.
“I want his blood,” she hissed into the night. “For all our kin that he slew. For Jenna. I want his blood.”
“Patience,” the hob said. His voice worked like a salve on her, reining in her anger. “You will get your desire all too soon.”
Henk looked from one to the other, then shivered. He was soaked to the bone, cold and scared. He couldn’t see the enemy anymore and that just made things worse. He thought of the creatures and the hellish banner unfurled above their ranks. The Host could be creeping up on them right now. They were already outnumbered.
His fingers touched the buttons of the concertina without pressing down on them, recalling the opening bars of “O’Neill’s Cavalcade.” Would the instrument still play in the rain? Would some enchantment make it work?
“How will we know when it’s time?” he asked, his voice sounding weak and high-pitched to his ears.
“We’ll know,” the hob said grimly at his side. “Don’t fret, Henk. We’ll know.”
“But what are they waiting for?”
Tuir shrugged. “The droichan’s word? Some chief to lead them? I don’t know. Perhaps they wait for courage.”
“But they outnumber us three to one.”
“To an Unseelie creature,” Loireag said, “those are poor odds. They prefer the sure thing.”
Henk shivered again and settled down to wait with the silent ranks of the sidhe. The kelpie might feel that the Host facing them was afraid, but he didn’t have any such false hopes. He’d seen the creatures for himself. There was no way monsters like that could be scared of an army that was just a third of their own size.
“Christ, I hate waiting,” he muttered.
Neither of his companions replied. He hunched his neck between his shoulders, uselessly trying to keep out the rain. He didn’t know why he bothered. He was already as wet as it was humanly possible to get.
“Christ,” he muttered again, then fell silent as well.
All he could do was wait.
Sixteen
When Jacky freed Kate from the machinations of Colorc’s spell and brought her back from the void, some part of that empty place stayed inside her. Colorc’s invisible grip lost its hold on her and she was dropped to the floor, but once freed, Kate’s muscles were all slack and rubbery. She couldn’t lift her head. She couldn’t even open her eyes.
Memory of that empty place lodged inside her like a dark needle stuck straight through her heart. She wasn’t relieved at her escape. She didn’t feel anything, only a bleakness that was made worse by the sudden sensory overload as sound and smell and feeling all returned to her in a rush. She curled herself around Caraid, trying to escape it memory of that place and the return of her senses all to no avail.
She squeezed her eyes shut, willing her surroundings to disappear, but they flickered open almost of their own volition. Her nostrils stung with the reek of sluagh and other Unseelie creatures. Sound was worse. The sound of Jacky’s struggle with the droichan. The whispering hiss and snick of the droichan’s shadow-creatures. The rough rasp of a tongue against Gump’s skin. Finn’s moans.
But when she opened her eyes, she saw none of that. Her gaze settled on the window overlooking Kinrowan to see a wet, pink-haired figure balancing on its sill.
Slowly, Kate sat up. Her every bone and muscle ached at the movement, but she knew she had to help the newcomer. One look in the bedraggled figure’s eyes told her that this was no creature of the droichah, nor one of the Unseelie Court. She opened Caraid to the page showing the curious image that she and Gump had found in that house in the Glebe, and showed it to the small woman in the window.
The woman shrugged, so Kate pointed at the drawing, then at the droichan. Understanding woke in the woman’s eyes and she grinned fiercely, swinging down from the sill.
Kate leaned weakly against the wall, not really sure what the symbol meant to the woman, only that it meant something. That had to be enough, didn’t it? But the void still fingered her heart, threatening to overcome her again with its empty bleakness.
The woman moved across the room towards the droichan, whose back was towards them. Kate watched her go. What did the symbol mean? What would the woman do? And suddenly Kate fueled by the fear of what lay inside her, what the droichan had put inside her felt that the knowledge she’d passed on wouldn’t be enough. She got to her feet.
“No,” she whispered to the woman.
Jemi froze at the sound of Kate’s voice. The whispered word rang loud in her ears too loud. It sounded above the tumult of the storm outside. The droichan paused, too, turning with Jacky still held upright by one arm. He saw the Pook.
“You,” he said.
“My God!” Kate cried. “He’s wearing it around his neck.”
The droichan blanched. His free hand went to the medallion hanging from his throat, but he didn’t move quickly enough. Jacky yanked what she saw as only a bright blur of metal on his chest and gave a sharp tug that broke it free of its chain. With what strength she had left, she tossed it towards Kate, but Jemi reached up and snatched it from the air.
The droichan threw Jacky aside and woke a spell. Invisible fingers plucked at Jemi’s body and started to lift her into the air. And then Johnny came thundering up the last few stairs and burst into the room.
“Jesus Christ!” he said as he took in the scene.
His appearance distracted the droichan. It took only a fraction of a second for him to turn to see who it was, then return his attention to the Pook, but that was all the time Jemi had needed. She slipped free of his invisible grip with a sidhe sidestep into the world of men, back into Faerie and then she dropped the medallion onto the floor and ground it under her heel.
It had the look and feel of old gold, brassy and worn, but it was the droichan’s heart and under the stamp of her heel it splattered as a human organ would have. The sting of its blood and bursting tissue burned the bottom of Jemi’s foot and the floor hissed and smoked where the fragments landed. But Jemi could endure the pain. She had only to think of her sister and all those the droichan had killed. She had only to look at his anguished features.
A wail of despair left his mouth, then all the years he’d stolen fell upon him in a rush. His flesh grew lined, hard, brittle. It flaked and turned to dust. In moments, an empty sack of clothing fell to the hardwood floor in a shower of dust. The storm outside the Tower ceased as abruptly as it had begun.
Kate leaned back against the wall and slid weakly to the floor. The droichan’s death had come too suddenly, looked too much like the last reel of an old B horror flick to seem true. Real beings, magical droichan or not, didn’t just dissolve into dust, did they? But the sliver of the void was gone from her heart and while the blood still thundered in her veins, the realization hit home that the cause for all their terror was gone.
She looked slowly around. A strange young man with a fiddle and bow in one hand was crossing the room to hold the pink-haired woman. The shadow-creatures were gone and both Finn and Gump were sitting up, the trow clutching the side of his neck, blood leaking through his fingers. A bogan came barreling into the room, but Gump knocked it senseless with one blow of his free hand. Jacky lay against the wall where the droichan had thrown her, weakly trying to rise.
“Is
is it really over?” Kate asked.
The pink-haired woman shook her head.
“The droichan’s gone, “she said. “But there’s still a war to be won.”
The bogan Groot was the proud bearer of the Unseelie Court’s standard. He held it aloft, grinning as it flapped in the wind, still grinning when the rain came and it clung wetly to its shaft.
Such a standard. A w
iddyman hob had stitched it over long nights, sewn every stitch widdershins. Such an unsainly emblem to lead them. And the droichan. He promised to be a better leader than any Big Man, hot damn. Kinrowan would bleed under their heels. But first there was the sidhe host to feed on.
He could see only their vague outline through the rain and wondered how long it would be before either Greim or the new boss himself would send word for the charge. He could already taste sidhe flesh. Just thinking of the toadsuckers made his mouth water.
“Come on, come on,” a troll muttered beside him. “Spike ‘em what’s taking so long?”
Groot nodded. Maybe he should lead the charge himself. He had the banner. The Host would follow. Wouldn’t the boss reward him, hot damn, at the victory Groot would give him?
But then Groot frowned. Maybe not. The new boss demanded utter obedience a hard thing for a bogan to buckle under but he promised much to those who served him well. Human flesh, as well as Seelie. Though human flesh was luckless, it was sweet. Could he risk the boss’s wrath?
“Whadaya think?” Lunt asked, joining him at the front of the Host.
“Think about what?” Groot asked the other bogan.
“Is Greim going to send the word, or did he run off and get spiked?”
“Don’t talk like that,” Groot warned. “Not unless you want to spend the rest of your life as a heap of shit.”
“Bah!” Lunt spat in the muddying sod. “I think”
Groot never got to hear what he thought. From the Tower behind them came a piercing wail, and then the storm suddenly stopped. The night seemed almost bright as the clouds vanished from above. Groot stared across the field at the long grim line of borderfolk, and an uncertain shiver went through him. It didn’t matter that his own army outnumbered the sidhe three to one. It didn’t matter that the Unseelie Host had a droichan leading them.