Widdershins (50 page)

Saskia was the first to put a name to what I’d lost. Her anguished gaze met mine.

“It’s Geordie,” she said.

As soon as she said his name, I knew she was right. That was what I’d felt—Geordie pulled out of the world. This world, the otherworld,
any
world. The little subconscious fishhook of connection I kept attached to him was gone. The line holding it tethered to him, severed.

Christy got up from behind his desk and hurried over to us, worry plain in his eyes.

“Are you okay?” he asked. “What happened to you two?”

Saskia looked up at him.

“It’s Geordie,” she repeated. “He’s just . . . gone.”

“Gone? What do you mean ‘gone’? Gone where?”

“I don’t know. It’s like he doesn’t exist anymore.”

Christy dropped to the floor in front of us.

“I don’t understand,” he said. “What’s happened to him?
Where
has he gone?”

Saskia wore a pained expression. “There’s no way I can tell.”

“But I can guess,” I said, getting to my feet. “This stinks of magic, and magic means fairy is involved. I
told
her to leave him alone.”

“Told who?” Christy asked.

“Mother Crone.”

“But she’s—”

“His girlfriend? Don’t kid yourself, Christy. Fairy don’t have relationships the way we do. It’s all about how useful we are at a given point in time.”

“But she wouldn’t have . . .”

“Hurt him?” I said. “That’s what I’m going to find out.”

“Christiana!” Saskia called before I could step away into the between.

“What?” I asked. “Don’t beat the crap out of her?”

“No,” Saskia said. “Don’t lose your temper.”

I didn’t realize how tightly I was clenching my fists until she said that. I forced my hands open and took a steadying breath.

“Okay,” I said. “I’ll let her tell her side of the story.”

“Thank you.”

“And if she’s to blame,
then
I’ll beat the crap out of her.”

“You’ll have to wait in line,” Saskia told me.

We held each other’s gaze for a long moment. I saw everything that was boiling away inside me reflected in her eyes: my worry, my love for Geordie, the fierce need to protect those I loved. Then I nodded my head to her and stepped away.

Galfreya

Tatiana’s court lay one step sideways
from the Harbour Ritz Hotel in the world of men, but this afternoon the court’s council was in one of the small conference halls of the hotel itself, its members gathered around a large round table set in the middle of the room. Guards stood on either side of the door to keep outsiders at bay. Inside, the small group sat around a table uncluttered by paperwork or any of the paraphernalia one would find in the business meetings of men. The only commonality was a plastic bottle of spring water in front of each individual.

We’re like Arthur’s knights, Galfreya thought, except while everyone gathered here could certainly fight, they were none of them warriors. And perhaps, it could also be said, they weren’t nearly so selfless and clear of heart as those knights of old. Or at least as the knights were remembered and revered in legend. Humans always fared better in Story than they did in real life. Story allowed them time to polish their better traits and cover up their baser ones with a glitter of words and edited takes on truth.

Fairy were probably more particular than humans when it came to their reputations, but they were only concerned with how they were perceived in the ever-present now, in the footprints they left on the world itself, rather than how they were remembered in Story.

Fairy were rarely interested in participating in Story. When it caught you up in its pages, especially here in the real world, it was a messy and dangerous business. And there were no guarantees for a happy ending. It was too much like History, dusty volumes stuffed away in some dark corner of a library, and fairy had no patience for anything so cut and dried.

No, Galfreya decided, their only resemblance to the Pendragon’s men was how they were gathered at the sacred circle of a wooden table to consider the fate of their world. In their company, they had no knights errant, no ambitious purveyors of their place in Story. All they wanted was for this crisis to be over and done with so that they could return to their normal lives.

Except that wasn’t going to happen. Not unless they came up with a miracle.

Looking around the table, Galfreya didn’t see the makings for such in the grim faces of her fellow councilors.

When she’d first come into the room, she’d been surprised at the small size of the council Tatiana had called. Were they really so few now? she’d thought. But then she realized exclusions had had to be made.

They couldn’t have most of the gruagaghs present today because too many of the court’s wizards had some long-standing personal quarrel with one or another of the local spirits. For that reason, only Muircan and Kimiad were at the table, neither of whom spent enough time outside the court to have become embroiled in animosities.

The bogans and their various trollkin were absent for the very good reason that it was individuals from among their ranks who were the source of the problem now at hand. Arguing rights or wrongs, or attempting to assign blame, was an impossible task when it came to the Unseelie fairy. Even the most evenhanded of bogans immediately became impossible in what anyone else would consider a reasonable discussion.

Though they
could
fight, Galfreya thought. Perhaps Tatiana had been hasty in excluding them. It was far too late now for the pointing of fingers. First they needed to survive, and whatever else they might be, the Unseelie fairy were survivors.

But the queen, it appeared, had another course of action in mind.

“As queen of these courts,” Tatiana said, “this is my responsibility. I never condoned the hunting of the local spirits, but I should have done more to keep the hunters in check.”

“Your Majesty,” Kimiad argued,
“no one
can keep bogans and their like in check.”

Unlike her fellow gruagagh Muircan, whose garb wouldn’t be out of place for a wizened little wizard man in some nursery tale, Kimiad was a tall, attractive woman, sensibly dressed—considering the circumstances—in jeans and a cotton shirt. A worn leather jacket hung from the back of her chair. If they needed to take to the field, she’d be ready, unlike Muircan in his robes and silly pointed hat.

“Regardless,” Tatiana told her, “I must take full responsibility for what they have done.”

Kimiad shook her head. “We’re beyond simply taking responsibility. Those cerva want blood.”

“Which is why I will deliver myself to them for judgment. If the moon is with us, perhaps that will be enough.”

For a moment, no one could speak. Then Swanson, Captain of the Queen’s Guard, stood up from his chair and banged a fist on the tabletop.

“This is madness,” he cried. “I won’t allow it.”

“You
won’t allow it?” the queen said.

“Please, your Majesty. Reconsider this—if not for your own sake, then for that of your people. They will take your life, then still fall upon us. But we will have no leader, no rallying point for our people.”

At two o’clock from where Galfreya sat at the table was another of the court’s seers: Granny Cross, young, black-haired and even-tempered, her speaking name no more representative of her appearance than Galfreya’s Mother Crone.

“I see no good coming from this,” Granny Cross broke in before Tatiana could respond to her captain. “There is only darkness ahead.” Her dark gaze went to Galfreya. “Can you pierce it, sister?”

Galfreya looked down into the small scrying bowl set in front of her on the table. She spoke a word and the water began to eddy, but before an image could form, she felt as though a knife had been plunged into the back of her head. She cried out, falling back into her chair, her hands going to her temples where the sudden flash of pain had lodged.

Tatiana was closest to her. Rising quickly, she put her arm around Galfreya’s shoulders.

“What is it?” she asked. “What did you see?”

Galfreya grimaced and massaged her temples.

“It’s not anything I saw,” she said. “It was . . . it was Geordie.”

“Geordie?”

“The human fiddler at my revels.”

Tatiana nodded. “Oh, yes, him. Your lover.”

“He’s not my lover.”

“But you’ve—”

“Yes, we’ve been intimate on many occasions, but his heart belongs to another. It belongs to a woman he thinks he can’t have.”

“I see,” Tatiana said, although she obviously didn’t.

“That woman is Jilly Coppercom, one of the women Joe Crazy Dog is trying to find.”

Tatiana returned to her seat and said nothing for a long moment.

“Tell me what just happened,” she finally said.

Galfreya wasn’t given the chance. A figure appeared on the conference table directly in front of her—a small red-haired woman, sitting on her haunches. Swanson rose so quickly his chair fell behind him. Two throwing knives appeared from under his jacket, one in each hand. By the door, the guards lifted their crossbows, aiming at the woman. It took Galfreya a moment to recognize her as Christiana.

Christy Riddell’s shadow. Geordie’s sister.

Christiana pointed a finger at the guards without ever taking her gaze from Galfreya.

“Don’t even think you can use those on me,” she said, her voice conversational and pleasant. She pointed with her other hand at Swanson. “Nor you—the big boy with his knives. The first person to try is going to find out just how hard it is to walk around with his weapons up his ass.” Then she smiled at Galfreya. “See how calm and reasonable I’m being? Did I come in here kicking ass? No. But I warned you what would happen if you screwed around with Geordie, and unless you’ve got a damn good explanation for what just happened to him, you’re going to find out that there’s a lot more to a shadow than some bit of darkness you can roll up into a corner and forget about.”

“Your Majesty?” one of the guards by the door asked Tatiana, looking for direction.

“Do you know this woman?” Tatiana said.

Galfreya nodded. “Unfortunately, yes.”

“Then stand down,” she told her guards.

Galfreya wasn’t so certain that was the best idea. Not with that dark look in Christiana’s eyes.

Christy’s shadow turned a little and studied the queen from over her shoulder.

“Now I see where your people get their fashion sense,” she said. “How old are you? A thousand? Two thousand? And you’re dressing like a teenager?”

Tatiana regarded her coldly. “You do understand that I have but to say the word, and you’ll be dead.”

“Well, you could give it a try,” Christiana said, as though she were Joe’s sister, not Geordie’s, “and we’ll see how it works out for you.”

“I will not have yet another—”

But Christina turned her back on the queen and focused her dark gaze on Galfreya.

“I’m still waiting for an explanation,” she said. “I know something just took out Geordie and there was the stink of fairy in the air when it happened.”

As soon as the words were spoken, Galfreya realized their truth. There
had
been the sense of a fairy present at the moment of Geordie’s—she found it too hard to consider the word death—disappearance from the world. But whether it had been a Seelie elf, or some Unseelie bogan, she couldn’t tell from her fleeting memory of the moment.

“Would someone please tell me what’s going on here?” Tatiana demanded.

Christiana shook her head without looking in the queen’s direction.

“Uh-uh,” she said. “This is between me and your little skater seer.”

“We’re in the middle of a crisis here,” Galfreya told her.

“You betcha. And if you don’t start coming up with some answers—”

Before she could finish, Galfreya opened a view into the between, and the thunder of drums and hooves pounding on the dirt filled the air. Christiana stared at the gathering cerva clans, her face expressionless.

Galfreya was unable to resist a dig: “Didn’t you even
see
them on your way here?”

“Didn’t come that way,” Christiana said after a moment. She turned to Tatiana and added, “What did you do to them?”

“What did
we
do?”

That damned shadow girl just lifted an eyebrow.

“I know the cousins,” she said. “Sure, you’ll get the odd hothead, determined to right all the old wrongs, and everybody agrees, but it never really comes to much of anything. Getting cousins to agree to something is just about as hard as getting fairy to dress their age. But this . . . “ She pointed to the ever-growing herd of buffalo soldiers. “To get that many of them riled up, all at the same time, you had to really piss them off.”

Galfreya let the view into the between close, but didn’t respond. Around the table, the others remained silent as well, waiting for Tatiana to speak or not.

Christiana gave the queen a considering look before turning back to Galfreya.

“So, does this have anything to do with what happened to Geordie?” she asked.

“What makes you ask that?”