War For The Oaks Part 41

"Have a seat, guys," Eddi told them. "The news is pretty strange."

She told them about her meeting with the Lady. Dan looked grim. Hedge looked pale and sick. "They're gonna let him die?" Carla wailed, as if the Seelie Court had failed to consider the consequences of the decision, and by sheer volume, she could remind them.

Eddi paced once to the windows and back. "If we do anything about this, guys, it could be us, too."

"'S enough."

It was Hedge who'd said it; they all stared at him. He unfolded from the floor and faced Eddi.

"Can't listen. Wouldn' want me to, if y'knew. May's well leave." He shot a glance at all of them, out from under his hair, and turned sharply to go.

"Hedge!" Eddi's voice stopped him, though it wasn't harsh. "If we knew what?"

"Nuthin'," he muttered, his back to her. "'F I go 'way, won' matter."

"Tell me."

The phouka sat at the edge of the couch. His eyes were on Hedge.

Hedge took a step toward the door, and Eddi said, "Please?"

It was too much for him. He spun around, his face snarled with pain, and said, "Awright! 'L tell ya! Been talkin' to th' Dark Court, that's what!"

It was a moment before any of them realized what that meant. Then, "All along?" the phouka asked, almost gently.

Hedge nodded. "Didn't think it'd hurt much. Didn' care, at first. Just some human, make e'rybody die- who cares wha' happens to 'er?" He looked up at Eddi, his brown eyes big with anguish. "I didn' know!

Didn' know you!"

The phouka rose, and it was a dreadful coiling movement. Don't, don't, don't, Eddi thought at him.

"Does this have to do with w.i.l.l.y?" she asked Hedge, though she thought she knew the answer.

Hedge squeezed his eyes shut, as if they hurt. "Wanted me t' help get w.i.l.l.y. Wouldn'. Too late, though.

Already told 'er enough t' do it. 'S my fault."

"You told them who and where she was," the phouka said at last, slowly. "You would have tossed her life to them and thought nothing of it." Eddi realized that he was talking about her. She put her hand on his arm, squeezed it, and he stayed quiet, but only barely.

"Just at first! Wouldn' after a while, just told 'em little stuff, nothin' 'bout Eddi, 'r th' band even. Last week, decided t' shut up 'bout all of it, f'rget th' whole thing. Knew you guys'd say it was wrong t' talk.

An' then she asked me t' get w.i.l.l.y."

"Why didn't you tell somebody?" Carla snapped.

Hedge scowled at her; then the corners of his mouth crumpled, and he turned his face away. "Scared to," he muttered.

The room filled up with silence and tension in the seconds that followed. The phouka stood poised for some action, if he could only decide which one. Carla stared at Hedge as if she wasn't sure he was a good idea. Dan looked puzzled and hurt and shaken, and Eddi realized for the first time how much he loved this band, how much like family they had all become.

She took the few steps necessary to reach Hedge, and put a hand on his shoulder. "Do you want a chance to help fix things?" she asked him.

He looked up swiftly, his face intent.

"Did you break with the Unseelie Court yet? Did you tell them you wouldn't spy for them anymore?"

Hedge winced at the word "spy," but shook his head. "Scared to," he repeated.

Eddi breathed in deep. "Are you too scared to make up for it?"

She watched him as he covered his face with both hands. She felt far away, and calm. There was a bright spot in the back of her head, growing steadily, and the more she looked at it, the more it seemed to be the beginning of a plan. She decided to speak some of it aloud and see what happened to it. "I need somebody to feed bulls.h.i.+t to the bad guys, and get a little information out of them, besides. If they think you're still on their side..."

Hope made Hedge look young and frail, as if light would s.h.i.+ne through him.

"It's dangerous-you know better than I do what would happen to you if they found out. But I'm going to bust w.i.l.l.y loose. Somehow. And I need all the help I can get."

"All right," said Dan, his voice low and fierce. Carla whooped and flung her arms around him. Hedge just smiled. But it was one of those smiles, the kind that radiated like heat from a stove. He stuck out his hand, and Eddi shook it. At the corner of her vision, she saw the phouka; his face was full of love and something like awe.

chapter 19 When the Generals Talk.

The weather turned suddenly to damp heat, the kind that settled on the shoulders and made people walk as if they were twenty pounds too heavy. It pointed tempers and blunted energy, and gave despair a great seductive power. But they had only three days; they couldn't wait for the heat wave to break.

Eddi primed Hedge with rumors of disarray in the Seelie Court, disaffection in the band, and unwillingness in either group to deal with the other. He offered his cautious opinion that these were falling on fertile ground. Eddi hoped so; if the Dark Queen believed them capable of organizing a counterstrike, she might do something about it. But Hedge had no luck finding out where w.i.l.l.y was held.

Eddi abandoned the faint hope that he might be a prisoner somewhere other than Faerie, that they might attempt a rescue before their deadline. At the Conservatory, the Queen of Air and Darkness would be most on her guard.

Dan and Carla hunted for equipment to rent. Eddi and the phouka went to scout out the terrain. It was only as they were negotiating the gracious sweep of parkway toward the Conservatory that Eddi realized her mistake.

"OhmiG.o.d," she said, and stopped the bike. "There's bound to be a critter or two from the Unseelie Court around here. If they spot us, they'll know we're up to something."

The phouka c.o.c.ked his head. "Is that all? There's an easy remedy for that, my sweet."

"Hightail it out of here?"

"Not a bit. Turn your s.h.i.+rt wrong way out, and put it back on."

"What?"

He was already stripping off his jacket (raw silk, in tangerine) and pulling the sleeves inside out. When she sat and stared at him, he grinned. "Once you would have thought this an elaborate practical joke."

"What makes you think I don't anymore?" she asked weakly.

"Because you trust me." He looked wickedly pleased, and as if he might leave it at that. But he relented.

"I have told you that magic has much to do with symbolism. This is more of it. When you turn your coat, you are wearing your recognizable self face inward. To those who see the magical surface of things, you are invisible."

"Good grief. Will you still be able to see me?"

He met her eyes in a way that made her s.h.i.+ver pleasantly. "I see you in a great many ways. It would be hard to blind me in all of them."

She was wearing a s.h.i.+rt over a tank top; she shrugged and took the s.h.i.+rt off. "Won't people stare when they see a couple of weirdos with their seams showing?"

The phouka only raised an eyebrow at her.

"You're right. So what." Eddi b.u.t.toned the s.h.i.+rt over her breast as if it were armor, and drove the rest of the way to the Conservatory.

She'd been there once many years before, with college friends on a picnic. She remembered only a splendid gla.s.s building without details. The decaying grandeur of the thing that rose before her now left her staring, wondering how she could have forgotten it.

The center was an immense double-curved dome of gla.s.s, the Moorish fantasy of some early twentieth- century Minnesotan, topped with a gla.s.s cupola and a stubby spire like a playing piece from a game of Clue. Gla.s.s wings stretched out from it on either side, one with an arched roof, one with an angular one.

The entryway was itself a little greenhouse, with a pointed roof and gla.s.s between the white-painted pillars. The wide, shallow steps up to it were studded with tubs of petunias, purple and red and white.

The scent of them was thick in the hot air.

Inside, the Conservatory was as hot and damp as the outdoors, and the air could not be called perfumed. The smell was of moist earth and peat, fertilizers, wet bark, and plants that weren't grown for their fragrance. But it was a rich, intoxicating smell. Eddi was disoriented by an impression of living things, so many of them, full of small motions. She realized after a moment that the phouka had taken her elbow and was looking at her closely.

"I think it's the heat," she mumbled.

"No. It's not. This is a place of power, my heart, leashed and tended and concentrated to a fearful degree. Magic breathes under every leaf here, and mutters to itself." He stared at the base of an enormous palm tree beside them, as if it were much farther away. "I should be able to tell you the character of this magic, whether it serves the Dark Court or the Light. And I cannot. This is a wild power. She is rash to do her business here."

Eddi was glad of his distraction. It gave her time to catch her breath, to feel her heart slow down.

Whatever had overwhelmed her had retreated to background noise. "Let's go. We've got work to do."

There were only a few people in the Conservatory; a gardener pa.s.sed them once, and two women with babies in strollers wandered the paths, absorbed in conversation. After studying them suspiciously for a moment, Eddi decided that they were what they seemed.

The central domed room of the Conservatory was given over entirely to palms. In the middle, on a raised, paved area, was a wis.h.i.+ng fountain with a bronze sculpture of a woman dancing on the crest of a wave. Dolphins poked startled-looking faces out of the curl beneath her foot. The woman's beauty, her unselfconscious grace, reminded Eddi of the creatures of the Seelie Court.

Would the Dark Queen hold her meeting here? For such a large room, it had little open s.p.a.ce, only widened spots on the flagstone path for benches. It seemed like the wrong sort of room for her.

They peered at the walls and ceiling, looking for anything they could put to use in rescuing w.i.l.l.y.

There was infuriatingly little. "I don't suppose the Unseelie Court melt if you squirt them with a garden hose," Eddi said sourly.

"No, more's the pity. Garden hose does seem in plentiful supply."

"Maybe we can trip them with it. Let's see the next room."

The next was the north wing, with its angular roof. It was oriental and exquisite. There were citrus trees and bamboo, holly and oleander and magnolias, pine trees and one extraordinary California redwood.

At the heart of the room, like a close-kept secret, there was a pool where water dripped musically from a source somewhere in the roof. The end of the wing was a j.a.panese rock garden fronted with stone benches.

"Maybe here?" she said.

The phouka looked thoughtful. "Perhaps. There are things here that are hers-vervain and pomegranate and myrtle. But..."

"Right. But. It's too... secretive, or something."

He eyed her for a long moment. "She can be secretive."

"I bet she can. But she wouldn't stage this like a KGB spy exchange. She'd want to make a production of it. Wouldn't she?"

"Hmm," he said, and they went on to the next wing.

It was the fern room, and even more unsuitable than the rest. It was a long, narrow corridor. The ferns grew thick and high, and curtained the view from anywhere in the room. If, indeed, w.i.l.l.y's release was to be a production, there was no place to put the audience.

"I feel like I'm trying to find a site for a concert," Eddi grumbled as they came back to the palm house, the hub of the wheel.

"For what it's worth," said the phouka, "I favor the north wing."

Then they turned right through a set of double gla.s.s doors and stopped.

"May I change my vote?" the phouka asked.

They stood on a terrace at a wrought-iron railing, looking out over a formal sunken garden. A keyhole- shaped pond ran most of its length, the water almost hidden by water lilies. Boxwood and laurel, pruned in stately shapes, marched along the gla.s.s walls. At the far end six Italian cypress rose tall and thin, like great dark sentinels. They stood guard over an arched alcove. It was too far away for Eddi to see what was in it.

Steps led down from their terrace on both sides. Beside each flight a bay tree grew, the s.h.i.+ny dark leaves ma.s.sed in a spreading mushroom-cap shape. The flagstone path traced the shape of the pond, from one flight of steps to the alcove and back to the steps on the other side. Lamps hung from the ceiling down the center of the room, made of leaded panes of gla.s.s in the shape of many-pointed stars.

The plantings blurred before Eddi's eyes, turning into streaks and pools of color. Then they came into abnormally sharp focus: gloxinias and begonias, mounded geraniums and chrysanthemums, coleus and baby's breath, tall nodding roses in red, white, yellow, pink, and clear orange. The lily pads in the pond stirred at the edge of her vision; then she saw the red-fire streaks of the goldfish sheltering under them.

For a moment, the whole gla.s.s room seemed to be dancing. But she blinked, and everything around her was formal and still again.

The phouka frowned at her, but stayed silent.

"This is it," Eddi said. "If it isn't, my last name's Van Halen. Come on, let's get serious."

They walked slowly down the stairs and along the path. They found things, though they weren't sure how to make use of them. There was a watering system, a network of tubes like capillaries that fed each potted plant. There was a reflecting ball on a pedestal at the end of the pool. There was another paved terrace before the alcove, and a fountain in it.

The phouka dropped down on one of the benches on that terrace. "Little to work with, I'm afraid."

"Oh, I don't know. I've got some ideas. What are those things under her feet?"

The phouka looked at the fountain, where another bronze girl was dancing. "Frogs, I think."

"Yuck."

"What are your ideas?"

Eddi shook her head. "The snapdragons have ears. Tell you later."

She woke early the next morning. She unwrapped herself from the warm coc.o.o.n of the phouka's arms, and he was awake at once, though she'd been gentle. He came out of sleep quickly and alert. She won- dered if he always did, and felt a moment's terror that she might never know.