Whiskey and Water (23 page)

He doesn't think he's the only one at
fault." She shrugged, and found herself dry and warm. "He has his
pride."

"And pride goeth before a fall."
Michael peeked at the swanmay sideways, and accidentally met her eyes.

She didn't flinch. She smiled.

The angel's eyes flared warm and green
through the tangled briars of her hair. "Pride is the one thing He won't
contend with," Michael said. "His word is law. He doesn't
compromise."

"I know," Fionnghuala answered.
Under the shelter of Michael's wing, she lifted her hair from the collar of her
cloak and spread it out to dry in netted tangles. The couple were still kissing
in the street, as if they enjoyed the storm and the cold. "And the
Morningstar has never mastered the art of humility. You know, though —He'd get
on better with people if He negotiated once in a while."

"That's what the stories are
for," Michael said. "You may tell the Prince of Lies that his message
has been received, and will be considered." Reaching out, she darkened
the streetlight over the lovers' heads with a
pop
and a shatter of
glass.

Matthew had never seen the Dragon
face-to-face. On television, on the news in the days leading up to the Promethean
assault on Faerie, he had seen the images over and over until, like an Escher
print, they lost their value as representation and only the pattern remained.
But by the time the Dragon descended on Times Square, he had been in Faerie.

If he had stayed in New York, it would
have been different. If he had stayed in New York, with Jane, he would have
been in Times Square. He would have seen the Dragon.

If he had stayed in New York, Faerie would
have fallen, and Wey-land Smith's hammer could have done nothing to prevent it.

He watched Morgan walk away—toward the
woods rather than toward the Queen—her dogs trotting at her heels, and her
raven winging ahead, and he sighed. Geoff waited until the sound of gravel crunching
faded, and rubbed his nose with the back of his knuckle. "You two've got
history, I take it?"

"No," Matthew said, without
looking away from the witch's retreating back. "Not as such. Do you hear
that?"

Whatever it was, Geoff didn't. But he
followed Matthew anyway, as the Mage set off in pursuit of Morgan le Fey like a
hound on the trail or a rabbit. "What are we listening to?" he asked,
hustling to keep up. Matthew wasn't particularly tall, but he could move when
he put a mind to it.

They hastened along the pale gravel path
side by side with their coats belled out by their speed. What Matthew had
heard—hoofbeats crunching gravel —was soon clear enough to everyone in the
garden, as a man's head and a horse's ears appeared over the hedges and flower
beds. They came into the clear a little beyond Morgan, who paused in the path
with arms spread wide as if to make wings of the sleeves of the gown she was
not wearing.

Old gestures betray us.
Matthew caught up to the witch and her
dogs before he stopped, Geoff just a step and a half to his left. He knew the
horse, but not the man in a bard's bright, waterlogged cloak — although the
ring on his left pinky finger was familiar, and something about the cast of his
features was more than accustomed, like the face of someone known as a child
grown to manhood.

Morgan let her hands fall just as Matthew
added another thought:
She makes it seem that we heel like the bounds.

"Kind Kit," she said, reminding
Matthew of an emissary of Hell named Murchaud and a conversation on a sidewalk
in New York. He knew who this had to be—thinner, ten years older than in the
famous portrait, his beard redder than his hair.

"Morgan," Christopher Marlowe
answered, and bowed stiffly from Kelpie's back. "And thy companions, my
queen?"

Morgan glanced over her shoulder, an
artless turn of her head shifting hair that had come unbraided. "Sir
Christofer," she said. "May I present Matthew Szczegielniak, a Magus
of the Prometheus Club. And Geoffrey Bertelli, a mortal man. Matthew and
Geoffrey—"

Sir Christopher Marlowe," Matthew
said, swinging wide around Morgan's red hound. "The knighthood came in
Faerie, I presume? And you wearing one of the archmage's rings."

Are you her second, then?" Kit said.
He pushed damp hair from his eyes before swinging a leg over Whiskey's rump and
sliding down his side. He dusted his hands on his soggy cloak and extended the
right one to Matthew, cautiously. Whiskey stood silent and stern as a blue-eyed
statue behind him, his knees oozing blood from a hatch-work of shallow cuts.
Kit continued, his hand hovering in midair, "You arrived in better time
than I had anticipated. My apologies, sir Mage, to have kept you waiting. I
made what haste I could."

Second? No," Matthew said. He held up
his right hand by way of apology and saw Marlowe's eyes widen. It was a measure
of his day that he found himself standing in a garden in Faerie, making small
talk with Kit Marlowe, and his chief thought was embarrassment that he could
not shake the man's hand. "I've had nothing to do with her in years. . . .
Sir Christopher?"

"Aye, Matthew Magus?" The poet
took his hand back, tilting his chin up to examine Matthew with a wicked humor
in his squint. He turned briefly to Geoff, but whatever he saw didn't hold him,
and his gaze settled on Matthew again.

"You're implying you've challenged Jane
Maga? To a duel?" Marlowe smiled, sharp and sweet and utterly
disingenuous, and Morgan le Fey began to laugh. "And neglected to arrange
for seconds, I take it? Where are you going to find one on such short notice,
Kit?"

Marlowe looked down at his hands, and then
gave her a wider, slyer grin. "I'd thought to ask a certain sorceress of
my acquaintance."

She was going to refuse. Matthew knew it
as clearly as if it were spelled out in city signs and portents. With a sick
sense of inevitability, he stuffed his hands into his pockets and said,
"I'll do it, Sir Christopher."

Kit jerked as if shocked. "You know
me not." "Only by reputation," Matthew said. "But I know Jane."
They regarded one another. The gaze stuck, and held, and Marlowe nodded once.
"So be it."

"Well," Morgan said briskly,
"that would solve the Promethean problem. Welcome back from Hell, Kit."
Stepping forward, she leaned down and kissed him quickly on the mouth. Then she
settled back on her heels, crossed her arms, and glared up at the piebald
stallion. "And you, water-horse? What
have
you done to your
knees?"

The animal nickered, ears settling
forward. "You should see the other guy," he said, a strange deep mellifluous
voice to come from an animal's throat. Matthew bit his lip hard against comparisons
to Mr.

Ed, and when he looked down, he saw Geoff
doing the same.

Until Marlowe slapped his hands on his
thighs and said, "Aye, she walked away without a scratch," and gave
them both an excuse to laugh.

He was a man who knew his audience too. He
waited for the chuckles to die and turned back to the witch, and crossed his
arms over his chest. "Well, Morgan," he said, "aren't you going
to introduce me to our Queen?"

For the second day in a row, Lily woke up
smug, clean, and not the least bit sorry. Christian's white cotton sheets
smelled of copal and frankincense. She rolled over and slid an arm around his
waist, pressing her face into his disarrayed hair, inhaling his aroma: salt,
sweat, and warm human animal.

He murmured something unintelligible and
leaned into her arms, turning his head to face her. "Good morning,
sunshine," she answered, and kissed him, trying to spare him her morning
breath until he wrapped his arm around her neck and pulled her down for
something a little more lingering and thorough.

"How did I get so lucky?" she
asked, when he let her go.

"I don't think it's luck," he
said, arranging himself to make a pillow of her shoulder. "I think it's
power finding its time. I think we were looking for each other."

"Okay, Faerie magic is one thing. But
do you really believe in all that giggly new-age stuff?"

"I own a magic shop," he
answered. "I'm not a
complete
hypocrite. Yes, I really believe. And
I can show you some of it too. You have the potential to be very
powerful."

Another time, and she would have laughed.
But there was a certainty in his voice that was different than Moira's cloying
need to
be
somebody special, or Jason's pedantry. So she stroked his
hair off his forehead and said, "Then show me."

The sun drifting through Christian's batik
curtains seemed to dim a little as he sat up, the sheets sliding down his
belly. Light trickled through his hair, haloing the edges gold. He turned,
cross-legged, and the house encircled and drew close around them, as if leaning
in.
Interested.
It had seen other lovers in its weary mortal years, but
these two, with their secrets and the runnels of life so vivid under their skins—they
were intriguing.

Christian laced his fingers together,
palms out, backs toward his chest, and exhaled a painstaking breath. And on
that breath, the sheets slithered off her body and Lily floated into the air.
"Christian!" she yelped, and thrashed and clutched at his hands. He
caught her, steadied her—sitting tailor-fashion in midair now, nude as an angel
— and held her hands lightly, firmly, in his own. "Breathe. Think about breathing."

She obeyed, focusing her attention away
from the tickle of vertigo in her belly and the cool air currents caressing her
buttocks and thighs. "I'm flying." Her voice was self-consciously level,
but her hands grew sweaty in his grip.

"You're levitating," he
answered. "Flying requires wings. Do you believe me now?" "Will
you drop me if I say no?"

She
did
mean it as a joke, a
transitory smile breaking through her lip-bitten concentration. "Now do it
on your own," he said, and loosened his grip but didn't pull back his
hands.

"Whoa!" she yelled, and grabbed
again when she started to rock in midair. "Don't
do
that."
More giggles followed hard on the demand, bubbling out of her depths, only
slightly hysterical. He already felt the strength in her answering, the core of
energy learning by his example, ready to follow, ready to
Learn.

He smiled.

He hadn't had one like this in a long
time.

"How?" she asked. The air was
cold. Her hair was cold on her neck, still a little damp where she'd slept on
it, and gooseflesh bristled the hairs on her arms and legs so she felt the
breeze more now, the air stirring over her skin.

"Relax," he said. "If you
fall, you fall on the bed, and I won't let you hurt yourself. Okay?"

"Okay." She shivered, but held
herself steady. She closed her eyes and took three deep breaths, and without
opening them again said, "I'm as relaxed as I'm going to get,
Christian."

"All right," he said. "What
you need to do is feel that power in you. That euphoria. Do you have it?" "I
think so."

"Do you
know!"

Lily listened. The sunlight glowed
flesh-red through her eyelids, her body rocking on air currents and the force
of Christian's will. She remembered his kiss, the rain pouring over them that
should have chilled her to the bone and had felt like a baptism instead,
washing her skin, washing her soul. There was something like that down there,
something potent as the sunlight and cleansing as that rain, a restless energy.
"I know," she said, because she did.

"Then know this," Christian
said. He almost didn't sound like Christian; his voice was deeper, more mellifluous.
She leaned toward it, sightless in the radiance. "That power is your
birthright, Lily. Thou art God, and it doesn't take a sevenfold kiss to make
you so —only your own decision as to which rules you will and won't choose to
abide by. And the law of gravity is one of those rules."

She cracked an eye, squinting through her
lashes, her face laced with shadows from the wild snarls of her hair.
"Roadrunner physics, Christian? Magic's one thing.
God
is
another."

"Why do you think the Church forbids
it?" he said, his voice mocking and reasonable, all at once. "If you
knew what you were, you wouldn't need them to talk to God for you. You'd know
where to find him whenever you wanted. But there's a price. And so you choose
to accept their judgment that you are poor little children. Not gods, not
angels. Sheep in need of a shepherd, and about as smart and moral as sheep, as
well: can't even be trusted to do what's right because it's right. No, it's God
and the Church holding the devil over your heads like a housewife on Valium
squeaking, Wait 'til your father gets home!'

"Christian!" She swayed,
shaking. A draft rustled through the gabled bedroom, and she rocked in midair,
her breath quickening to a moan. Her hands flexed, big hands that creaked his
knuckles as he held on tight. "Don't
yell
at me.

I wasn't yelling," he said, but
softened his voice. "I was explaining. if you want this power, you have to
take responsibility for it. You need to put that
childishness
down right
now. You have free will. You have freedom of choice. 'Do as thou wilt shall be
the whole of the law.' can you be trusted to make your own bed and take out
your own trash, or do you need God shaking his stick at you?"