Drink Down the Moon Read online

  So it was that she made her decision to look for help— not from the Courts, for like all the fiaina, she wouldn’t pay their price. The Laird of the Seelie Court would demand allegiance in return for his help, and the fiaina would never give up their independence. As for the Unseelie Court, no one knew if they had a new chief to approach in the first place, and if the Laird’s folk would demand allegiance, the Host of the Unseelie Court would take their souls.

  So it was to their own that the fiaina must turn— a skillyman or wisewife of the sidhe. The first that had come to Jenna’s mind was the Bucca who’d taught her the way that the rade must follow, who’d untangled the skein of old tracks and moonroads and given her their proper pattern.

  “A Fiddle Wit would help us,” Dohinney Tuir said after a while.

  “If we had one,” Jenna said. “But Johnny Faw’s a tadpole, not a Fiddle Wit.”

  “He could learn.”

  “He could,” she agreed. “If he wanted to. He has the music— I won’t deny that. But wit takes more than music, more than luck and a few tricks as well. From what little I’ve seen of him, I don’t know if he has what’s needed.”

  “It’s hard to learn something,” Tuir said, “when you don’t know it’s there to learn.”

  “But if we led him every step of the way, it would mean nothing. He’d be no closer. The wit needs to be earned, not handed to any tadpole who looks likely— if it even was the sort of thing that could be handed out.”

  “Still. You gave him the charm.”

  “I did. I owed him that much— for Old Tom’s sake.”

  “So you’ll go off, looking for the Bucca,” Tuir said, “while—”

  “It’s not my fault the luck’s gone!”

  “No. But only a Pook can lead the rade, and the closest we have after you is your sister, who—”

  “Half-sister.”

  “It doesn’t make that much difference. She had fiaina blood and—”

  “Not to hear her tell it.”

  “—she’s the closest to a Pook we’ll have if you don’t come back.”

  “I’ll be back.”

  “Yes, but—”

  “Don’t forget,” Jenna said a little sharply. “We have no rade as it is— whether I go or I stay.”

  “I think it’s the Gruagagh that’s to blame,” Loireag said firmly. “It’s always a gruagagh that’s to blame when there’s trouble in Faerie. A wizard never knows to leave well enough alone. They’re as bad as humans— always taking a thing apart to see how it works.”

  “The only gruagagh we’ve had near here was Kinrowan’s,” Jenna said. “And he’s gone now.”

  Loireag frowned. “It’s a new one then— one who hasn’t made himself known yet.”

  “What I want to know,” Tuir said, “is this: Gruagagh or whatever, it has your scent. When you go, will it follow you, or will it chase down your sister, or some innocent like your tadpole whose only crime is that you gave him a charm with your scent upon it?”

  “You’re too soft-hearted,” Loireag told the little man before Jenna could reply. “It’s just a human we’re talking about. Better the enemy goes sniffing after him than follows our Pook. At least she’s doing something to help us.”

  “Johnny Faw will be in no danger,” Jenna said. “The charm will sain him from evil influences. And as for my half-sister, she goes her own way— as we all do.”

  Tuir nodded and kicked at the turf with the pointed toe of his boot.

  “I just wish you didn’t have to go,” he said.

  “Or that you’d at least not go alone,” Loireag said.

  “The Bucca will be hard enough to track down as it is,” Jenna said. “I’ll never find him with you in tow. He’s never been one for company— two’s a crowd, so far as he’s concerned. I don’t doubt he’s hiding away in an Otherworld of the manitous and I’ll have a stag’s own time chasing him down.”

  There was nothing the other two could say. They’d been through this argument before— too many times since Jenna had announced her intentions to leave a few days ago.

  “When do you go?” Tuir asked.

  “Tonight. Now. Johnny Faw’s calling-on tune strikes me as a sign of sorts. Giving him the charm was like completing the last piece of unfinished business I had. So I’ll go now with my own calling-on tune

  for the Bucca.”

  Loireag nodded and stepped close to her, enfolding Jenna in a quick embrace.

  “Luck,” she said gruffly, and stepped back.

  Jenna found a smile, but Loireag had already turned and was making for her home in the river. Halfway between the water and where Jenna and Tuir still stood, the running figure of the ebony-skinned woman became a black-flanked horse. She reared at the edge of the river, hooves clattering on the flat stones, then the water closed over the kelpie’s head and she was lost from sight.

  “Don’t worry so much,” Jenna said to her remaining companion. “I’ll be back before you know it, and then I’ll lead us all on such a rade as we’ve never seen before— high and low, we’ll follow more roads than a spider has threads in its web.”

  Tuir nodded, blinking back tears. In his eyes, Jenna could see the same foreboding that had been in the kelpie’s. She watched him swallow uncomfortably, his Adam’s apple bobbing, as he obviously tried to think of something cheerful to say. Finally, he gave her a quick kiss and a tight hug, then hurried away, following the bicycle path that Johnny Faw had taken when he’d left earlier.

  Alone now, Jenna stood for long moments, breathing the night air. Everything had a clarity about it in the moonlight, a sharpness of focus that kept her standing there, drinking in the sight of it, the smells, all the sparkle of the moment. Then she shook herself, like a person who’d caught herself dozing. Fetching a small journeysack from where she’d left it by Loireag’s river, she shouldered it and set off, crossing the river and heading north.

  It was the quest itself that was as much to blame for what happened, as anything else.

  After long weeks and months of fretting and danger, of losing the rade and its luck, of being hunted but not being able to strike back

  to finally be doing something

  Jenna let her guard down as she ran at a pace-eating lope that she could keep up for hours.

  She was thinking of the road before her and the Bucca at its end, not about what had driven her to set off on this quest. Her heart felt lighter than it had for a very long time, for she’d always been a doer, not a thinker. She even hummed a tune to herself, a fiddle tune— not one of Johnny Faw’s, but one that Old Tom used to play in the old days.

  A mile or so north of where she’d left her friends, after speeding through city streets to the landscaped lawns that the National Capital Commission kept neat and trim along the Parkway that followed the Ottawa River, the enemy found and caught her.

  It came like a pack of dogs, spindly creatures, with triangular goblin faces, that ran on all fours, but could clutch and grab and tear with fore and hind legs. They made no sound as they came up from behind her, rapidly closing up the distance between them. When they struck, she never knew what hit her. She never had a chance.

  Attacking, they were no longer silent. Snarls and high-pitched growls cut across the night as they circled her still body to slash, dance away, then slash again. By the time the brown-cloaked figure arrived to drive the pack from its prey, there was only a heartbeat of life left in her. The figure bent over Jenna, pushed back its hood to look into her eyes as her life drained from her. When the moment passed, the figure rose, its pale eyes gleaming as though it had stolen the Pook’s life force and taken it into itself.

  Tugging its hood back into place, the figure stood and walked away, leaving the broken body where it lay. Of the pack that had taken Jenna down, there was now no trace, but the sharp sting of magic stayed thick in the air.

  Two

  Henk Van Roon was sitting on the stairs of Johnny’s porch when Johnny arrived home, the octagonal shape of his lacquered wo
od concertina case on a step by his knee. He was a few years older than Johnny, having just turned thirty the previous week— a tall, ruddy-cheeked Dutchman who seemed, at first glance, to be all lanky arms and legs. His long blonde hair was tied back at the nape of his neck with a leather thong and he was dressed in jeans and a Battlefield Band T-shirt, with a worn and elbow-patched tweed jacket overtop.

  “How’re you holding out, Johnny?” he asked.

  Johnny sighed and sat down beside him, laying his fiddle case on a lower step. “Like I’ve got a hole inside me— you know?”

  “You want some company?”

  Johnny didn’t answer. He looked across the street, thinking of how many times he’d sat on these steps with Tom, playing tunes sometimes, or talking, or sometimes just not doing anything, just being together. He turned slowly as Henk touched his shoulder and found a weak smile.

  “Yeah,” he said. “I could use some company. C’mon in.”

  Grabbing his fiddle, he led the way inside. The house was an old three-story brick building on Third Avenue of which he rented the bottom floor. He unlocked the door to his apartment and stood aside to let Henk go in first, closing the door behind them.

  “You want something— coffee, tea?” he asked.

  “You got a beer?”

  “I think so.”

  Johnny left his case by the door and went into the kitchen. Henk stood for a moment, then lowered his long frame into the beat-up old sofa that stood under the western window. There was a fake mantelpiece on the north wall, snugly set between built-in bookcases that took up the rest of the wall. The bookcases were filled with an uneven mixture of tune books and folklore collections, the remainder made up of paperbacks of every genre, from mysteries to historicals and best-sellers.

  The mantel was covered with knickknacks, most having something to do with fiddlers or fiddling. There were wooden gnome fiddlers and ceramic ones; a Christmas rabbit complete with a red and green scarf and a pig standing on its hind legs, both with instruments in hand; pewter fiddles lying on their sides; even a grasshopper, playing its instrument like a cello.

  Two old Canadiana hutches stood against the south wall, holding Johnny’s stereo and record collection. The west wall didn’t exist, except as a hall that led from the front door to the rest of the apartment— a kitchen at the end of the hall, two bedrooms and a washroom. A door at the back led from the kitchen to a storage shed that was set snug against the rear of the house. The walls of the living room and throughout the apartment were covered with posters and pictures of folk festivals, Irish crofters’ cottages, Scottish landscapes and the like.

  “All I’ve got is a couple of domestics,” Johnny said as he returned with a can of Labatt’s Blue in each hand.

  “No problem,” Henk said.

  Johnny gave him one of the cans and took the other to one of the two chairs that stood opposite the sofa. There was a low coffee table between sofa and chairs, covered with magazines and a coffee mug that was half full of cold tea.

  “You going to pick up Tom’s stuff tomorrow?” Henk asked.

  Johnny nodded.

  “You want a hand with it?”

  “There’s not that much— but thanks.”

  “I was thinking more of some moral support.”

  “Well, I could use that. Thanks, Henk.”

  “Hey, no problem.”

  They sipped at their beer, neither speaking for a while. Just when Henk thought he’d better come up with something to pull his friend out of his funk, Johnny looked up.

  “I had something weird happen to me tonight,” he said.

  “Weird curious, or weird spooky?”

  “A little of both, I guess.”

  He related what had happened to him.

  “She was touching my hand,” Johnny said as he finished up, “giving me the bone carving, and then she was gone. Poof. Just like that. Now, I know I’ve been a little out of it lately, what with Tom and everything, but there’s no way she could have just slipped away from me. She vanished, and I can’t figure out how she pulled it off. Or what it was all about in the first place. Does it make any sense to you?”

  Henk shook his head. He picked up the bone fiddle from where it lay on the coffee table between them and turned it over in his hands as he had when Johnny first showed it to him.

  “Do you believe in ghosts

  or fairies?” Johnny asked.

  Henk smiled. “Only when I’m stoned.”

  “Know anybody who does?”

  “I’d’ve figured you— with all those books.”

  “Those are— were mostly Tom’s,” Johnny said. “And besides, they’re not the same thing. They all talk about old farmers seeing things— country stuff. Old country stuff at that. I mean, some old guy living in the Shetland Islands, maybe, or the Black Forest— who knows what they’d see. But this is the city— or at least a park in the city.”

  He sighed, staring at the carving in Henk’s hand.

  “And I don’t believe in them either,” he added. “I’d like to, I guess. But

  you know.”

  Henk nodded. “It doesn’t make sense.” He laid the bone fiddle back down on the coffee table. “Did she really seem to know Tom?”

  “We didn’t talk that much, but she seemed to. Except she acted like she knew him when he was young, and she didn’t seem any older than you or me.”

  “And she really just vanished?”

  Johnny nodded.

  “Somebody’s playing games with you, Johnny. I don’t know how, or why, but that’s what it’s got to be.”

  “I guess.”

  Talking it over with Henk made it all seem different. When Fiaina had stood there talking to him, when she’d just vanished

  it had seemed very real. Or very unreal, but actually happening.

  He picked up the bone fiddle and rubbed his thumb against it. “This thing’s old.”

  “Seems to be.”

  “What if she really was what she said she was?”

  “Uh-uh. You’re setting yourself up for a bad fall there. Somebody’s playing a scam on you and if you start taking it seriously, you’ll be playing right into their hands. Don’t go with it, Johnny. The best thing you could do is put that carving up on the mantel, with the rest of your fiddle collection, and forget about it.”

  “But I’ve got a feeling

  .”

  “Yeah. Me, too. And it’s a bad one.”

  Johnny gave him a curious look. “What makes you say that?”

  “I don’t know. I wasn’t there, so I didn’t see what happened. But I know you, Johnny. You’re a pretty straightforward kind of a guy. You’ve never chased phantoms. We both know there’s no such thing as elves and goblins and all that kind of thing, so why start believing in them now?”

  “That’s a pretty lame reason,” Johnny said. “But I know what you mean.”

  He glanced at the wall of books, not at the paperbacks so much as the hardcovers that Tom had collected over the years. Douglas’s Scottish Lore and folklore. Alan Garner’s The Guizer. The Folklore of the Costwolds, by Katharine Briggs. Evans’s Irish Folk Ways. There were over a hundred of them, all collections of old stories and anecdotes, country customs, and the like. Johnny had read through some of them, liking the connection they made with his music— just liking them for what they were, really. Even those that were a little heavier going, like Graves’s The White Goddess or Baughman’s index of folktale types and motifs.

  “But I like the idea of hobgoblins and little people still being around,” Johnny said, looking back at his friend. “I never liked the idea that we’d chased them away to some Tir na nOg, you know?”

  “If,” Henk said, “and remember I’m saying if they ever existed, I don’t see any reason why they couldn’t adjust to the way the world’s changed.”

  Johnny smiled, his first real smile since he’d got the phone call late one night last week, telling him that his grandfather had died.

  “See?” he sa
id. “It’s beginning to intrigue you now.”

  His smile widened at the big “Why not?” grin that came to Henk’s features.

  “Can you see punk elves?” Henk asked.

  “Disco dwarves!”

  They both laughed.

  “We’ve got to have a plan,” Henk went on. “Whoever that woman was, we’ve got to track her down.”

  “How are we going to do that?”

  “Go back to the park tomorrow night.”

  Johnny shrugged. “I suppose.”

  “You’ve got a better idea?”

  “No. It’s just that she gave me the feeling that she wouldn’t be showing up there again.”

  He glanced at the books again.

  “It’s too bad,” he added, “that there’s no one collecting contemporary folktales. Citylore. There’s got to be stories.”

  “You hear about that kind of thing in a place like New York,” Henk said, “but Ottawa? What’ve we got? Anyway, what good would that do?”

  “It’d give us a place to start looking, for one thing. Maybe there’s a certain part of the city that’s got more weird stories about it than another. We could go check it out

  ask around.”

  “If we asked most people about fairies, they’d think we were looking for gays.”

  “Cute.”

  “No, really. We can’t just go around and do what? Talk to winos and bag ladies?”

  Johnny nodded. “Now, there’s an idea.”

  “Oh, come on. You can’t seriously expect we’ll find your mysterious fairy queen by chatting up bums?”

  “No. I’m not really thinking about her, to tell you the truth. It’s the idea that intrigues me now— of elves and the like living in an urban environment. Not that they really are— just what sort of perception people have of them in the city.”

  “What?”

  “You know. What kind of odd little stories or unexplained incidents people talk about.”