War For The Oaks Part 24

w.i.l.l.y came to join her at the table. He limped a little when he walked, and there was something stiff about his carriage. He must have noticed her scrutiny. "Takes a little of the spring out of your step, when a horse falls on you," he said. He closed his eyes tightly. "Air and Darkness, I can't believe I lost a horse.

Those horses are worth more to the Court than I am."

"You're exaggerating. Aren't you?"

His smile was sad. "I wish."

Eddi picked up the salt shaker from the middle of the table and studied it blindly. "Well. Who won?"

"At the Falls?" w.i.l.l.y made a noise too weak to be a snort. "I suppose, strictly speaking, they did."

"Strictly. What do you mean?"

"They did what they meant to do. They pushed us over the creek. When you left the field and everyone stopped dying, we were backed into the cliffs and making last stands at all the bridges. If it had gone on..." w.i.l.l.y shrugged stiffly.

"So they won," Eddi said, feeling something heavy inside her.

"Mmm. But from what I saw of the casualties, it was a Pyrrhic victory."

Then Eddi realized what made his movements stiff. "Why are you keeping your hands in your pockets?"

He looked surprised. "I don't know. Maybe because they hurt." He drew his hands out of his trouser pockets at last and leaned his forearms on the table. Both his hands were neatly bandaged; only his fingertips showed. w.i.l.l.y stared at them as if they belonged to someone else.

"Good G.o.d. What... what happened?"

"They're burned," he said with great detachment.

Eddi remembered the smoldering remains she'd seen on the bridge, and decided that she didn't want to know. "Will you still be able to play?"

As soon as the words left her mouth, she felt like an idiot. This was not her lead guitarist sitting across the table. He had been an illusion. This was a prince of Faerie, and someone else entirely. Someone who might not care about music at all.

But he answered as her guitarist. "We heal fast. I'll be a little stiff, but I can play tomorrow."

"You're still in the band, then?"

"That's up to you, isn't it?"

"Is it?"

He raised one eyebrow. Eddi studied his face and wondered if he was laughing at her. No, whatever that expression meant, it wasn't that.

"If none of this had happened, would I still be in the band?" he asked.

"Of course."

"Well?"

"But the whistle's been blown. The jig is up. Is there any reason for you to be hanging around playing rock 'n' roll?" That was dangerously close to asking why he'd played his d.a.m.n charade in the first place. So she did. "Were you just keeping an eye on me, or what?"

w.i.l.l.y asked a question with his eyebrows.

"When you walked in and auditioned-" Eddi swallowed the words "under false pretenses," "-why did you do it?"

"To play guitar," w.i.l.l.y said with a little edge to his voice. "I do, you know."

"That wasn't all glamour then?"

"Not a bit."

"But still... why didn't you just have the phouka bring you in? Why pretend to be human, to..." She stopped then, because she wanted to accuse, to scream about lying, about playing her for a fool- in short, all the things that he'd expected when she came in the door. She hated the thought of fulfilling his expectations.

"First," he said coldly, "I don't ask a phouka to make my introductions."

"Beneath your dignity?" she snapped.

"Yes." He waited, but Eddi refused to rise to the bait. "Second, would you have let me into the band if you knew what I was?"

She wanted to think that, once she'd heard him play, she would have accepted him if he'd had three eyes and duck feet. But she'd fought so hard against the phouka's encroachment on her life. She'd been pleased that the band was under her control and out of Faerie hands. That memory brought a bitter taste to her mouth.

"And third," he said, just when she'd thought the discussion was over, "I wanted to meet you." The light slid across his face from the side and ignited emerald green crescent moons in his eyes. They were beautiful, powerful-but they were just eyes. If he had meant to weave illusions around her, Eddi couldn't tell it; her own eyes still wore the phouka's ointment.

"What do you mean?" she said wearily.

"When he found you," w.i.l.l.y tipped his head toward the bathroom door, "he reported to the Court. He told us what you looked like, how you sang..." He shrugged. "I decided to see for myself."

"And?" Eddi said, almost against her will. She didn't really want to hear his opinion. She wanted some clue to her value for the Seelie Court-she wanted an answer to her longest-running question: Why her?

But she didn't know how to ask that, not of this cold-voiced stranger.

"And I found out he was right."

"About what?"

w.i.l.l.y looked at the floor and seemed to be weighing answers. When he met her eyes again, his face was full of mockery, and she didn't know why.

"He said that you weren't pretty, but that you attracted attention anyway. And that you weren't the best musician he'd ever heard, not in a technical sense. But with half a chance, you were able to grab and hold an audience."

A cloud of steam and the phouka came out the bathroom door. He was wearing an extraordinary robe, a Victorian men's dressing gown in brown-on-brown silk brocade that reached the floor.

"Believe me, my sweet, w.i.l.l.y's just given you the greatly expurgated version." The phouka smiled placidly at her and stalked across the room to the kitchen, following the smell of coffee.

"I don't suppose you'd let me borrow your robe someday," Eddi called after him.

"Yours is quite nice enough, greedy girl." He came back in with two cups of coffee, set one on the table in front of her, and took the other with him to the couch. w.i.l.l.y narrowed his eyes at the phouka's back, but didn't speak.

The phouka dropped onto the couch, leaned against the cus.h.i.+ons, and sighed.

"How do you feel?" Eddi asked.

"Infinitely weary, sweet, but it's true that a quant.i.ty of hot water poured over the head is a sovereign remedy for most ills." He rubbed the s.p.a.ce between his eyebrows and smiled at her.

Eddi stood up. At the table, w.i.l.l.y stirred restlessly, and she took pleasure in ignoring him. "Let me look at your head," she said to the phouka.

"It's right here," he replied, pointing. "Look all you like."

"Don't be stupid. Never mind, I suppose that's too much to ask." She lifted his wet hair carefully off his forehead. At her touch, the phouka closed his eyes and drew a long, irregular breath. The gash on his temple still seeped blood. "What did they hit you with, anyway?"

"A big rock," he enunciated carefully. "Nothing but the most sophisticated weaponry can prevail against me."

"I'll put something on it," Eddi said, and started for the bathroom.

w.i.l.l.y said crisply, "We might all be better off if he bled to death."

"I'm afraid I can't oblige you this time," the phouka murmured.

"Too bad," w.i.l.l.y replied.

"What did he do that's so G.o.dd.a.m.ned awful?" Eddi had not, she decided afterward, so much lost her temper as set it aside. "As far as I can tell, he did exactly what he was supposed to do-namely, keep me alive. So excuse me if I'm a little unsympathetic."

The phouka smiled. "Go take your shower, my primrose."

Eddi studied first the phouka, then w.i.l.l.y, then the phouka. "No," she said finally, and sat down in the armchair. "You only want me out of the way."

"And do the wishes of a wounded man not count with you at all?" the phouka said plaintively, but he followed that with a warning look.

Eddi ignored it. "Nope."

"Well, it was worth the attempt."

w.i.l.l.y rose from his chair with a snap and strode to the window, stood there with his back to them. The phouka sipped coffee and pretended to be at ease.

"I want to know," w.i.l.l.y said, slow and soft, and he raised one bandaged hand to the blinds, remembered and jammed it back in his pocket, "I want to know why you did it. Why you gave her the ointment."

"I made him do it," Eddi said. "More or less." w.i.l.l.y fixed her with a baleful stare, and it made her falter for a moment.

"Interesting. How did you manage that?"

Eddi swallowed. "I was about to back out at the last minute. He had to offer it to keep me in the game."

She looked hard at w.i.l.l.y and added, "I guess he's figured out that I hate to be lied to."

w.i.l.l.y almost smiled. "No, no. One argument at a time." He returned to the phouka. "Is that how it was?"

"More or less, yes."

"I'll ignore how many things you could have resorted to before you got to that one. But I wonder. Did you think of the ointment of sight in the pressure of the moment? Or did you have it in mind all along?"

Eddi was about to answer that. Then she stopped. How devious was the phouka? Could he have maneuvered her into it, let her think she'd forced him to give her something he'd meant to give her all along?

When the phouka hesitated, then cast a sideways glance at her, she felt a little sick. But he said, "No. I'd intended... something else. No."

w.i.l.l.y stood in the middle of the room, tight as a string about to break. "What is worth that?" he asked, and the fury in his voice was matched with something that, in someone not so proud, Eddi might have called pleading. "You've put the keys in her hands, and taken them out of ours. You may have started a wedge into us that the Dark Court will use to split us like kindling. What can you possibly get that's worth that?"

The phouka looked down at his hands; then he raised them, palms up, empty. "Nothing," he said sadly, "that you'd want."

w.i.l.l.y looked puzzled; then his face hardened. "There's a traitor in the Court," he said. The words were placed delicately like knives.

The phouka laughed bitterly. "Did you just learn that? I would be surprised if there were less than a score of them." Then he turned a sharp look on w.i.l.l.y. "Oh, did you mean for me to take that personally?"

"The thought had occurred to me."

"Then you're an idiot," said the phouka. "Meaning no disrespect, of course."

w.i.l.l.y took a step toward the couch, and another. "If I had reason to believe you were a traitor," he said, horribly gentle, "I could pa.s.s sentence on you and carry it out, and no one would think I'd done anything but right."

I would! Eddi wanted to shout, but what was being acted out before her held her frozen in the chair.

The phouka rose from the sofa, his teeth bared. w.i.l.l.y raised one bandaged hand; but the phouka caught his wrist and snarled, "Oh, aye, you'd get nothing but praise for it! And your traitor would sing loudest of all. Have you listened to anything in the last fortnight? No sooner had I found her"-he stabbed a finger at Eddi-"than she became a target for every evil thing in Faerie. Your traitor kept the Unseelie Court informed of her every movement, until I have been driven half-mad just keeping her alive!"

Eddi felt queasy. How many attempts? she thought. And how many came close?

The phouka flung w.i.l.l.y's hand away and spat, "So put me to death, Lord, as you see fit. But you'd best find her another guard dog, and quickly, if you do."

w.i.l.l.y smiled thinly. "The only time you use my t.i.tle, you're being rude. How have you lived so long?"

The phouka blew through his lips and dropped back onto the couch. "It's my diet."

The phone rang.

Phones ringing at unreasonable hours were always alarming, but given the context, Eddi found this one positively terrifying. When it rang the second time, w.i.l.l.y and the phouka looked at her.

"Well, why don't you answer it?" Eddi snapped at the phouka. The phone rang again.

"It's almost certainly not for me."

Fourth ring. "That never stopped you before," Eddi said, and picked up the receiver. "Yeah?" she said cautiously.

"Are you all right?" Carla's voice. She sounded cautious, too.

"What? Yes. I mean-"

"I lost you," Carla said accusingly.

"What?"

"I lost you. Somewhere below Forty-second Street. What happened?"

Eddi finally understood. "You followed me?"