Whiskey and Water Read Free Page B

hurried pedestrian whose fluffy lemon-yellow
skirt hung low on her hips, two sunflowers with gnarled stems wrapped in a
plastic supermarket bag dangling head down from her left hand.
    Althea skipped aside and laughed.
"Sorry."
    The city girl tossed her a look like acid,
and the city breathed in hope and breathed out dreams, and the dragons rumbled
under their feet in the long darkness of Penn, jointed snakes in oil-slick
squalor. "Where to first?" Althea asked, dropping her chin to stare
down at the map across her chest.
    "I don't care as long as we're in the
Village by six to see the parade," Geoff answered.
    He glanced at Jewels, who cocked her head
and pursed her lips. "Times Square. I want to see where the war
started."

Chapter Two
    Whiskey in the Jar
    W armth slid from the stallion's withers as he entered
the shade of willows. His coat gleamed white over stout muscles; black
streaked his mane and spotted his face and his richly feathered feet. A rivulet
of water as silver as his moon-shaped shoes led him deeper into the wood and
higher upon the hills; he wrote in hoofprints on its verdant bank, a line that
would tell any who cared to look, The Kelpie wad here.
    He could have passed without a mark. But
this was hallowed ground, sacred enough that when he came to the place where
low hills tangled the willows' roots, he cantered to a halt and stood for a moment,
tail stinging his flanks as he swiveled an ear at something borne on
that breeze.
    Singing.
    A song.
    He'd come to air his pain, his un-Fae
sorrow and the low, slow, un-Fae ache in his belly. To stomp, and paw, and kick
things under the grieving willows. To let his anger at his beloved Queen and on
his beloved Queen's behalf fly. To feel, as he was not yet accustomed to
feel, having been Fae for millennia and having borne a mortal soul but seven
years.
    Irritating to have his grief interrupted.
The stallion drew a great bellows breath and folded into the angular
form of a man, tugging his silk suit into place and reaching up to tip a hat at
the right rakish angle. He was barefoot. Silver rings glinted on his thumbs and
each great toe, pale against skin dark as loch water.
    More silent than a breeze rustling the
lancelet leaves of the willows, Whiskey chased the song between graveyard
trees, the living rememberers of battle. The trees stroked him with trailing
branches, stole his hat and caressed his hair. They knew who he was, other than
the son of Manannan and the god of the wide man-murdering sea. They knew why he
carried a pain like a bright spark in his chest, a pain no Faerie should have
known, and they honored his unwilling sacrifice. Softly, as trees will.
Implacably, as trees will. They remembered.
    The stallion halted among them, wishing he
had a tail to swish in perplexity. A small slight man sat beside the spring
halfway up the hill, wrapped in a bard's patch-work cloak of colors, leaning
against a tree as he half sang an old rhyme. " 'Ellum do grieve, and Oak
he do hate, and Willow he walk if you travels late.' Good afternoon,
traveler."
    "Good meeting, Sir Bard. I do not
know you." The stallion stepped from the shelter of laurel and scrub oak.
    The singer gestured, the layers of his
ragged cloak falling from his shoulders. Underneath he wore black, a silk shirt
with silver buttons tucked into narrow trousers. "It's changed."
    "The hillside?"
    "That too." He had fine
golden-brown hair in well-brushed waves, a neat beard, and dark, deep-set eyes,
whoever he was, and as he leaned forward between bent, spread knees his
bootheels furrowed the earth. The stallion saw nails wink in their soles and
tossed his forelock from his eyes. Iron nails, and not silver.
    The bard was a mortal man.
    "What manner of creature are
you?"
    "Kelpie," the stallion answered.
    "You're a servant of the new
Queen." 1 am.
    "Bound servant?"
    "This Queen makes no bindings."
The stallion came uphill, relaxing into his own shape now that he need not fear
startling the singer. In