Something was wrong.
“What was that?” Lunt said.
“Guess the boss spiked that Jack,” a voice said from the crowd.
“I’d like a bite of her myself,” someone else added to a general laugh.
“I don’t think that was it,” Groot said. “There’s a bad feeling in the air right now.”
A moment later a shout came from the Tower.
“The boss is dead!”
Pandemonium broke loose in the unruly ranks of the Unseelie Host.
When the rain ceased, a stir of anticipation went through the long line of the waiting sidhe. They were wet and cold. Hands and backs were stiff from the unfamiliar weight of weapons and armour. It had been a long time since they’d gone to war. But with the rain gone now, they could see the ranks of their foe once more and backs straightened from slumped postures, weapons were readied again. Their gazes drifted from the Unseelie Host to the mortal who would lead them when the time was right.
Henk was uncomfortably aware of their attention. He could sense Loireag’s tension beside him as she pawed the muddy ground. On his other side, Tuir sat glum on his small pony, knowing what was to come and regretting it. Mactire, resting in wolf-shape near the hooves of Henk’s pony, rose to his feet.
“What are we waiting for?” Loireag demanded.
Henk stirred and glanced at her.
“It’s not time yet,” Tuir told her.
“Damn time and damn waiting,” Loireag returned sharply. “I’m sick to death of them both.”
Just then they heard the cry making the rounds of the Unseelie army. The droichan was dead.
“By the stag’s own heart,” Tuir murmured. “She did it.” He turned to Henk, grinning. “Jemi did it!”
“Now let’s finish the night’s work,” Loireag said.
“No need,” the hob replied. “They’ll disperse soon enough on their own.”
Henk wanted to agree with Tuir, but he was looking at the house that they all called the Tower. Rising up from behind it impossibly huge, at the wrong time in its cycle was an enormous full moon. As he looked at it, something jumped inside Henk. Some part of him recognized that there was more to that orb than a dead asteroid floating in orbit around a blue-green planet. It was the wrong time of the night for that moon to rise. It shouldn’t have been that full at this time of the month. So he knew that what he saw now was the Moon of Faerie.
And it was calling to him.
He touched the wet concertina on his lap and found that it was dry. He put his hands into both of its side straps. The Moon filled his sight, touched places inside him that he’d never known existed before. He wet his lips. He glanced at Loireag, urging him to play them to war, at Tuir, pleading for peace. Then at the Moon again.
It mourned the loss of its Pook.
It mourned the loss of so many of the borderfolk.
“Awake the music,” Loireag hissed. “Send us to war.”
“I beg you,” Tuir said in the same breath. “Don’t.”
But Henk put his fingers to the buttons of his instrument and the music spilled forth.
Loireag gave a cry of joy. Tuir bent his head across his pony’s neck in defeat. But the music Henk played was what neither of them had expected. He played the tune that the Moon woke in him, the music to call down her luck for the thirsty sidhe to drink, the liquid light of her luck that they’d been denied for so long.
As the music grew in strength, the Unseelie army began to moan. The bogan holding the unsainly banner with its crucified swan-man dropped the flag onto the muddy grass and fled. The whole of the Host broke their ranks and fled in all directions. Underfoot, radiating out from the Tower, grew a webwork of gleaming moonlight ribbons. The Tower was their center, like the center of a spider’s web, and the moonroads spun out, through Kinrowan and out into the borderlands.
One by one, the fiaina sidhe dropped their weapons, and armour on the wet green grass. They looked to Henk. He stared at the swollen Moon that hung over the Jack’s Tower, then dropped his gaze to the field before them. The Host was gone. Only the banner remained, trampled into the mud. The Moon spoke to him and gave him the secret pattern of its luck.
Still playing the music, Henk put his heels to the sides of his pony and led the sidhe out onto their rade.
The borderfolk fell in behind him as he took a moonroad that led away from the Tower, into the lands that were their own. They went, hobs and skinwalkers, a tall troll and waterfolk, little twig-men and tall willowy women, all the sidhe, until only Loireag and Tuir were left.
The hob looked at Loireag, but didn’t speak. Loireag frowned. She tried to deny the tug and pull of the music and the Moon’s rade, but she couldn’t. At last she sighed and nodded to Tuir.
“This is the right way,” she said. “We went back and forth, Jemi and I first the one of us raising the banner, then the other but it took a tadpole to stop the war.”
She gazed after the last figures of the rade, almost lost from sight now.
“I’ll still miss her,” she added in a gruff voice.
“How could you not miss Jenna?” Tuir asked.
Tears brimmed in his eyes. He touched Loireag’s shoulder, then touched heels to his pony and set off after the rade. Loireag waited a moment longer.
“Goodbye, Jenna,” she whispered to that swollen Moon.
Then she took the shape of a dark horse and together the kelpie and hob joined the rade that Henk led through the borderlands in a pattern that the Moon had taught him when she moved inside him.
“You have faced your fears,” Arn had told him as he first woke the music. “Now is the time to heal the scars they left behind. The night is for the strong and you have earned the right to take joy in its shadows.”
As he led the winding column of the sidhe along a complicated pattern of moonroads, Henk understood what the Moon had meant. Whatever else this night left him, he would always look forward to the hours between dusk and dawn.
Jemi and Johnny stood at the window of the Tower’s third-floor study and looked out over Kinrowan and its borderlands. It was Finn who had dissuaded the Pook from leading the sidhe into a charge against the Unseelie army.
“There’ll be no need,” he’d told her simply.
And, as they watched the Unseelie Host disperse in panic at the death of their leader and the waking of the Moon’s music, as they saw Henk lead the sidhe away on the first rade the borderfolk had known for many a month, she had understood. So she stood by the window now, her arm around Johnny, his around her, and watched a quiet fall across Kinrowan.
In the room behind them, Bhruic’s study had appeared once more between the four barren walls. The bogan that Gump had knocked down had woken and, after one look at the droichan’s empty clothes, fled both the room and the Tower. Gump sat by the door, a bandage around his neck. Finn perched on the worktable, his legs swinging in the air. By the reading chairs, Jacky and Kate were sitting on the floor. They were both bruised and shaken, Jacky more so than Kate. They sat with their arms around each other, needing the comfort of their friendship to heal the fading memories of the void and everything that they’d so recently gone through.
It wasn’t time to talk it through yet. It was just time to know that the other was there.
After a while, Jemi sighed and turned from the window.
Kate looked up. “When I warned you,” she began. “When I said no
“
“I know,” Jemi said. “The picture alone wouldn’t have been enough. But the Moon was with us.”
Finn nodded. “She has her own ways of dealing with droichan. I can see now that she used each one of us to do the task for her.”
“Do you have a broom?” Jemi asked.
Kate nodded. “In the kitchen closet,” she said, “If the bogans haven’t eaten it. Why?”
“I thought I’d sweep up that mess,” Jemi said, pointing with her chin at the heap of clothing and dust that lay in the middle of the room.
r />
Seventeen
A month or so later, All Kindly Toes was playing a combination Halloween/farewell dance at the Glebe Community Centre. The four younger members of the band were finding that they needed more time for their university studies, Greg already had a new project lined up for the winter, and Jemi Pook had plans of her own. There was talk of re-forming in the spring something similar had happened the previous autumn but for now it was a time of playing their very best, because who knew when they’d all play together again? So the band was in fine form running through their favorites. “Shoo-de-poo-poo,” “Mr. Big Stuff,” “Love You Anyway,” “B-A-B-Y,” “Poison Ivy.”
One tune followed the other, and the dance floor stayed packed.
Henk and Johnny were both there, Johnny standing on the sidelines, Henk dancing with Jacky or Kate, though more often the three of them danced together. Johnny just enjoyed watching them move and taking in the band especially the pink-haired sax player who kept shooting him grins from the stage. When the long night finally wound down, the four of them helped the band pack up, collected Jemi, then they walked south down Bank Street to the Tower.
Gwi Kayleigh had returned from Ballymoresk in a day and a half, rather than the two she’d promised Finn, with a company of Seelie foresters in tow. She was relieved to find them all well and the threat over, though somewhat chagrined that she’d missed it all. She and the Laird’s foresters were busy for a week or so, driving the last few Unseelie creatures from Kinrowan, but thereafter things settled down.
Once again it was possible to walk the streets of Kinrowan without spying a bogan or sluagh, though they all knew that wouldn’t remain so. The Unseelie Court never changed. Sooner or later another boss would rise from their ranks, and they’d be dogging the folk of Kinrowan once more. But for now, it was quiet.
The damage to the Tower had been mended, though it was weeks before the boggy stench of sluagh and bogans was entirely erased. The trees in its yard snuggled close to its walls once more and the browning of its garden was due to the season now, rather than the presence of unsainly creatures.
When the five of them reached the Tower, Kate went to make tea for them all, while Jacky put on a Kate Bush record and they all made themselves comfortable. Just as Kate was bringing in the tea, Finn arrived, so she had to go back for another cup and dig up some donuts for the hob’s sweet tooth.
“So you’re really going?” Kate asked Jemi when they all had their tea.
The Pook nodded. “The sidhe have Henk to lead them on their rade and I never really wanted that anyway. I’ve lived most of my life outside of Faerie and I’m just as happy doing that.”
“But looking for the Bucca?” Jacky asked. “That seems like it’ll just take you deeper into Faerie.”
“Maybe. But it’s something I have to do.” She touched a bone flute that hung in the hollow of her throat. “I want to ask him about these charms. Tell him about what happened to Jenna. And Johnny’s coming with me, so what more could I want?”
“Jemi’s promised to show me the fairer side of the borderlands on this trip,” Johnny added. “And I want to learn more about what music can do in Faerie how it fits in, and why.”
Jemi grinned. “I’ll make a Fiddle Wit out of him yet. Or if I don’t, you can bet Salamon will.”
“I almost wish I could go with you,” Jacky said. “It sounds like it’ll be fun.” She shot Kate a quick glance. “If you should happen to run into Kerevan or Bhruic
“
“We’ll give them all the news,” Jemi said. “Shall I tell them you’ve got plans to become a skillywoman?”
Jacky laughed. “Not likely. I had three wallystanes left after that night and I ended up wasting one trying to make myself a book like Kate’s Caraid, only all my book does is tell me stories and try to play the odd trick on me. I guess I’m stuck being a Jack. But that’s okay. Every Court needs one. Still you can tell them that Kate’ll be a gruagagh before you know it.”
“I’ve wondered about those wallystanes,” Henk said. “They seem
Well, I know if you’ve got a certain headset, all of Faerie seems impossible. But once you get into it, it begins to make a certain sense. Except for the wallystanes. If they can do just about anything
?”
“Hardly,” Jacky said. “You should try using one.”
“They’re a rare magic,” Finn explained, “and make for the basis of all those fairy tales of three wishes and the like. You won’t find many these days, though. The nine that Jacky won from Kerevan are the first I’ve seen in a hundred years.”
“Did you ever think of using one to wish for a hundred more wishes?” Henk asked.
Kate and Jacky laughed.
“God, no!” Jacky said. “Who knows what would happen if we did. They backfire enough as it is. If we tried that, they’d probably backfire a hundred times worse.”
The record ended and Jacky replaced it with an lan Tamblyn cassette.
“When will you be going?” she asked Jemi as she sat down again.
“Tonight.” The Pook drank down what was left of her tea. “Now.”
Johnny stood up with her. “We’ve our packs to collect and that’s it. Thanks for letting me store Tom’s stuff here. I couldn’t think of a better place for those books.”
“We collect books,” Kate said.
“And hey,” Jacky added. “We sure needed the furniture.”
They said their goodbyes then, Henk leaving with Jemi Pook and Johnny. He was going to see them on their way as far as the Ottawa River. Finn left a little later, but not before reminding Kate to be on time for her skilly lessons.
When they were all gone, Jacky and Kate stood out in the back yard of the Tower and looked at the sky for a while.
“You don’t think it was just the bone charms that brought Jemi and Johnny together, do you?” Jacky asked after a bit.
“What does it matter?” Kate replied. “They’re happy enough now.”
“Oh, I don’t know. It’d just be nicer if it was only true love, that’s all.”
“God, you’re such a romantic, Jacky.”
“I guess.” She turned to Kate. “We should go on a quest ourselves.”
“What for?”
“Boyfriends.”
“I take it back,” Kate said. “You’re not a romantic. You’re just an incorrigible flirt.”
Jacky gave her a slight punch on the arm, then sighed. “Maybe. But when you see something work the way it does for them, it kinda makes you want to have that for yourself, too doesn’t it?”
“Are you thinking of Eilian?”
Jacky nodded. “I’m not being very fair to him, am I? It’s on-again, off-again, until neither of us knows what’s going on. I keep getting afraid that one day I’ll know for sure that he’s the right one, but that by then it’ll be too late. He’ll have gotten himself married off to some Laird’s daughter.”
“So why don’t you talk to him about it?”
“It’s hard, Kate. My brain gets all tangled up and muddy when I try.”
“Good things never come easy.”
Jacky shook her head. “Trust you to come up with such an original thought.”
She paused, looking as if she had more to say, but then stayed silent.
“But?” Kate prompted her.
Jacky gave her back a grin. “But I’ll give it a try all the same.”
“That’s my Jacky,” Kate said. “Ready to go in now?”
“Um-hmm.”
Arm in arm, the two of them went back into the Tower to clean up the tea mugs and then to their respective beds. Above the gable peaks of the Tower, the Moon traveled west across the sky, and all of Kinrowan, and the Borderlands beyond, drank the bright luck of her light.
Charles de Lint, Drink Down the Moon
Thank you for reading books on BookFrom.Net center>Share this book with friends