War For The Oaks Part 46

The thunderhead was low, low in the sky, and the rain would come soon. They had better take the cloud itself and ride above the storm. She leaped into the air, legs tucked up. Was that a tugging at her ankles? Gravity, or pulling hands? A laughable bond, weakening with each second. She kicked it off.

When her feet came down they hit the cool mounded white top of the cloud, and it crunched like snow.

The dancers laughed and yelled, sprang aboard without missing a beat. In the dark blue alt.i.tudes it was easier to dance, easier to whip through the thin air. They would never be tired now. Even gravity, with its dark shrouding hands, had slipped off them. Eddi pulled the wind into her lungs and laughed, felt tears pouring down her face. They were the dancers' tears, too, who cried with joy because there was too much of everything. She wept fiercely and her voice never wavered with it. Whatever was coming up from underneath, whatever made the growing thunder, was almost upon them. Dan and Hedge and Carla opened up the golden net they'd made and let it through.

Ears tuned to the sounding stars, Wings stretched to catch the wind, Here comes the jet to cut the clouds, To take us home.

Silver flas.h.i.+ng up from beneath, through the whiteness-so fast, but not too fast to reach out and touch. They all did, brus.h.i.+ng their fingers against the cold, wet metal in wonder. Eddi's face burned with the salt on her cheeks.

The song was free, rising above them as they rose. It filled everything with its roaring, it pushed the walls down around them and walls for as far as thoughts could range. The silver shape above them changed, widened, climbed through blackness and the unshuttered stars on a pillar of fire. The cloud was gone, but they didn't need it now.

The dancers sang without words, Carla, Hedge, and Dan sang with them, and Eddi weaved like wildfire in and out of the voices. And though they'd left the room behind, she could still see the Lady and her Consort at the foot of the stairs, bright as the stars around her, singing. She could still see the balcony where the Dark Lady, a tattered shadow, hid her face in her hands, where the phouka tore his wrist free from the railing, flung his head back, and added his voice to Eddi's.

She was on her knees at the edge of the stage, still crying, and people were pressed forward to touch her, laughing and crying just as she was. Carla pulled her to her feet and flung her arms around her. Eddi reached out to Hedge and hauled him into the embrace, and Dan, too. Then the phouka was there. She fell against him, too weak to stand without her friends' arms around her. They had to carry her off the stage.

There was no magical change in the city; what they'd fought for, after all, was the city the way it was, the way they loved it. But the air seemed cleaner, the light stronger, the colors more certain. If it was only that they'd taken them a little for granted until then-well, that at least was different.

It was not a concert to be walked calmly away from. They could not pack the car, go to their separate homes, and fall asleep. So they went to the Ediner, and when that closed, they went to Denny's, and when they couldn't stand that any longer, they went to sit on the sh.o.r.e of Lake of the Isles. A park police car cruised past, but Eddi pretended that they weren't there, and it never slowed down.

Carla shook a cigarette out of her pack, lit it, and paused, staring at the glowing end. Then she stubbed it out in the gra.s.s.

"That some kinda symbol?" Dan teased her.

"Nah. But just for tonight..." She rolled over on her back and grinned at him. He leaned across and kissed her nose.

Hedge sprawled on his stomach, playing kazoo on a gra.s.s blade between his thumbs. He looked pleased and sleepy. Though he didn't speak, he looked up and smiled at Eddi now and then, and she smiled back.

"And so it's done," said the phouka softly. No one seemed to hear but Eddi.

"Is it really? What about all the things you wanted to see changed, all the things in the Seelie Court?"

He smiled down at the gra.s.s. "I'd intended to plant a seed or two, and wait to see what grew there.

Things grow slowly in Faerie, my beloved."

"So you're just going to see what happens?"

"I don't know. I'd thought in terms of seeds, you see, and never dreamed that what I had loosed on the Court was a madwoman with a crowbar."

"What, me? I'm flattered."

They watched the moon dance on the lake and listened to Hedge play his blade of gra.s.s. "Well," Eddi said at last. She thought irritably, Why is it that at times like this, every sentence starts with 'Well'? She bit the inside of her lip. She wanted to ask him if he would stay, if he could stay. Where he would go if he didn't, she wasn't sure, but she knew it was someplace she couldn't follow. She remembered his words at Midsummer-"What will you do, when our war is done, and we withdraw from your life?" She still had no answer.

He stood up, crossed the gra.s.s to her side, and sat down again next to her. "I've been instructed to give you this," he said, and pulled a packet out of the inside pocket of his jacket.

She unfolded the white silk and found a silver maple leaf-the earring the Lady had worn in Loring Park. Her eyes burned. She knew a parting gift when she saw one.

"I think you did her a world of good," she heard the phouka say smugly above her. "Though Earth and Air know I would never say it aloud in her hearing."

"When are you going?" she said softly.

"Going where?"

She looked quickly up. He was smiling, and that soft, adoring look was on his face.

"I was just about to ask you," he said, "if you thought we ought to tour."

appendix "That Would Make a Great Movie!"

Ever since War for the Oaks came out, people have said to me that they'd love to see a film version. (The War for the Oaks casting game goes back at least to Peg Kerr and me playing it at the book-signing party at Uncle Hugo's Science Fiction Bookstore: "Anjelica Huston for the Queen of Air and Darkness!") So my husband, Will Shetterly, and I wrote a screenplay based on the book, which I think was the first screenwriting either of us had done.

When a friend expressed interest in optioning War for the Oaks, we pulled out the screenplay. It was... okay. But that early draft relied too much on the way I'd told the story in the book.

Novelists and screenwriters use a slightly different set of tools to tell stories. We knew we couldn't describe Eddi's thoughts or feelings, for instance, as I had in the novel. But we hadn't really taken advantage of the screenwriter's tools; we relied more on talking than on showing. The scenes that involved magic seemed pretty flat in consequence, and the characters felt more pa.s.sive, less emotional, than they did in the book.

And our agent pointed out that point of view in film is more flexible than in novels. In the book, Eddi is the point of view character, so the reader sees and knows only what Eddi does. But in the screenplay version, we could move away from her a little, and give the audience a sense of the forces gathering around her.

Suddenly we were free to see the screenplay as a story of its own-still telling the same story as the novel but sometimes in a very different way. We changed the names of the two fey armies to the Summer and Winter Courts. (Seelie and Unseelie are traditional in Britain, but the Folk are in America now, after all. And we wanted the names to reinforce the character of the two groups: one concentrated on growing, the other on dying, but each essential to the other's existence and part of the natural world.) We took Danny the keyboard player out of the band; he was necessary to Carla's story but not to Eddi's. Taking him out gave extra room to Hedge, who's a more interesting, complicated character. And Will and I were able to fill out Stuart's story and give it more resolution, something I couldn't do when I was writing exclusively from Eddi's point of view.

Just because a script exists doesn't mean there will ever be a film version of War for the Oaks. As of this writing, no one who's said, "This would make a great movie!" has been in a position to actually make the movie. But that could change. It's always been a lucky book.

Following are three scenes from the screenplay, scenes that aren't in the novel. They're the work of Will and me and owe a lot to the excellent suggestions of Josh Schechter, Rachel Brown, and Janine Young.

Oh, a note on screenplays: sounds and special effects are usually capitalized, as are characters the first time they appear. This may drive you nuts, but it's a big help to a producer or director who wants to be able to tell at a glance how many elements have to be juggled in filming a scene. INT. and EXT. just mean that a scene is either an interior one or an exterior-outdoor-one. Everything else you'll pick up pretty quickly.

This first scene happens after w.i.l.l.y and Stuart scuffle on the balcony at First Avenue (page 117). Eddi and w.i.l.l.y leave the club, but Stuart remains, brooding.

The Bodach first appears in the script as the a.s.sa.s.sin who attacks Eddi outside the New Riverside Cafe.

In his human form, he's pale with dull skin and sunken, dark-circled eyes. In his true shape as the Dark Queen's lieutenant, he's a gray-skinned, bony-faced creature with white eyes and way too many pointy teeth.

INT. FIRST AVENUE MAIN ROOM-NIGHT.

Stuart, at the bar, tosses back a shot gla.s.s of scotch. He carries a bottle of beer to the edge of the dance floor and stares, unseeing, at the crowd.

The Bodach, in human form, comes up beside him.

BODACH.

Did you make him bleed?

STUART.

f.u.c.k off.

BODACH.

No matter. I know those who can do more hurt than any little knife can.

STUART.

I just want to show her...

Stuart's face crumples. He drains his beer. The Bodach touches his shoulder.

BODACH.

You shall. Come.

The Bodach leads the way through the crowd, up the stairs to the second floor. Stuart shoves through behind him.

At first the people he pa.s.ses on the stairs are ordinary CLUB-GOERS. But as he gets closer to the second floor, they become gradually strange and scary, though hard to see in the dark room: .

A tall, bald, PALE-SKINNED MAN with a red flash in his eyes.

Two WOMEN connected by a fine gold chain attached to their tongue rings.

A scrawny TEENAGE GIRL with cataract-white eyes and dead twigs caught in her uncombed blond hair.

A MAN whose head is flat, like a fish's, with bulging eyes on either side.

A GRAY-HAIRED WOMAN, thin as a bundle of sticks, who holds a cigarette in her foot-long, pencil- thin fingers.

A MINOTAUR with human eyes in his heavy bull's head.

Stuart pa.s.ses them as if he's afraid they're hallucinations, but he doesn't want anyone to know he's seeing things.

At the end of the balcony overlooking the stage, the Bodach stops and turns. He's in his needle-toothed monster form.

Beyond the Bodach, a slim, elegant FEMALE FIGURE stands in silhouette against the video screen light.

She leans on the rail, her back to Stuart. Her voice is rich and musical: .

QUEEN OF AIR AND DARKNESS.

Stuart Kline. Have you come to make your dreams come true?

Next excerpt: Hedge has agreed to serve as a double agent and plant misinformation with the Queen of Air and Darkness, as part of Eddi's plan to rescue w.i.l.l.y (page 282). When he does, we get to see the Queen of Air and Darkness's lair.

People still ask me, "Why the Twin Cities?" I'll give you a hint: there really were nightclubs built in the caves of the Mississippi River bluffs overlooking St. Paul in the twenties and thirties-speakeasies that were favorites of the Chicago mob. Ruined or restored, they're still there.

EXT. MISSISSIPPI RIVER BLUFFS-NIGHT.

Hedge hurries along the rocky bluffs. He glances nervously around, and jumps when WIND rustles the bushes. He comes to a high chain-link fence with a sign: "DANGER-KEEP OUT."