Drink Down the Moon (28 page)

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 widdyman 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.

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.

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.