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They have teetered on the brink of war before, and sent a phouka hunting.
During the first war of Willy Silver's lifespan, he was still called Will, a child with a child's high, clear singing voice. He was too young to fight, but old enough that they brought him to witness the ceremony beforehand.
She was the first human he saw up close, with long, plaited hair and glazed eyes that fixed upon the Lady. There was a remnant of unskilled, habitual grace in the way she knelt, but mostly he remembered the way her mouth hung open the whole time. When they put the wafer on her tongue, the Lady had to reach out one finger to the human's jaw to close it, so she would chew and swallow.
His guardian let him stay up late, until one of his uncles came to tell him that they had been victorious that night, a gleam of satisfaction in his eyes. He sketched out the story of the battle, how they had driven the Unseelie Court back, how they would surely do so for the remainder of this season of war.
But just days later, their war was over after a sneak attack, the blood of their bound human used to deepen the hue of the Redcaps' hats. Will's guardian brought him to witness the punishment of the phouka who had failed in his duty to protect, to watch as the Lady bound him to one form and banished him from Faerie.
Will never did let himself think about it too much, the old dog with his fur streaked gray running away with his tail low. But the words of banishment had been voiced as a song, and Willy found himself strumming it absently more than once, never quite accurately, as if he were trying to draw something different from it than defeat.
***
Willy missed the second war of his lifetime. He was traveling through Europe at the time, old enough to travel alone, young enough that others had given him a course to follow, with directions to meet distant relatives and learn more about their traditions, to soak in the depth of the power of their sacred sites.
The ambient magic was different enough that it made him restless, almost always. His relatives treated him with great courtesy and very mild curiosity; and he could not escape the impression that he felt as subtly wrong to them as their land did to him, and that they wished him gone from them. Whatever it was about him, it jarred the Unseelie Folk in Europe even more than his own relations. When they encountered him, they inevitably snarled and tried to rush him without any sort of strategy. He had learned the art of war from his tutors, but he became adept at harder fighting in Europe, sending them off sullen with their clothes crisped, howling at him to go away.
At first he held to his itinerary out of stubbornness, and learned music where he could. He had plans of returning home close to Midsummer's Eve and performing for the first time. It would not be a victory to do only well: he wanted to be splendid, extravagant, and unique, and none of the music that came to his ears or spilled from his fingers was sufficient.
Then, one day, he went with a woman with whom he spent much of his time (she seemed to find him as jarring as the rest, but she sought that sensation as a new amusement) into human London and a music hall. "A bit boring," she said later, yawning delicately and running her nails lightly across the back of his neck as was her habit; he suspected she wanted to scratch more deeply, as if she could peel his American qualities out of him. But he kept going by himself back into human London, which was packed and strange and full of iron that made his palms prickle and mortals, mortals beyond counting, whose rhythms and smells and noises were often ridiculous and shallow and ignorant--but they did not feel wrong, and some of their musicians threw themselves into songs as if they were immortal, or as if they simply did not care if they came out of the music unscathed.
Willy stopped holding to the planned course after that, and wandered through the human portions of Europe's great cities. He took his first human lover in Paris. He found he liked the way she shivered under the least touch of his fingers, her fascination with his skin. She hummed the next morning, something light and simple that sounded sweet and mellow when he laid his bow across his violin and recreated it later.
He was in Prague when he felt a distant pull, a thread's worth of binding placed lightly upon him. Across an ocean, his closest family was placing their spirit under mortal will. Willy went to the local Sidhe and requested from them the services of a water-seer. That one looked as if she would rather drown Willy than aid him, but she showed him the parts of the battle she could scry, and a light word to the local Sidhe would ensure that her insubordination was addressed after she had served her purpose. The battle in progress turned into a rout, and Willy felt a savage delight in watching the Unseelie ranks break and run.
He was nervous in the days that followed, given his vague childish memories of what had happened before, assassination in the aftermath of battle. He was working on a piece on his violin that was meant to be elegiac and slow, but came out rough and jangly instead. He later decided he rather liked the dissonant effect, but at the time it was unnerving. When his correspondents sent word (letters forming themselves from the steam on his mirror), the news was good. The Lady had set a whole pack of phouka as bodyguards, and though almost all of them had fallen in the assassination attempt, the bound human had lived and the Queen of Air and Darkness had sued for peace.
Willy returned home a few years later, when it seemed likely that a human war would come to Europe. His first steps onto home ground were everything, a pure sustained note of joy in his bones. It only deepened as he went westward to the location of the current Court.
The specific Faerie presence he felt when he grew close to home was less satisfying, especially when he saw that the person waiting for him was a phouka. Willy felt a sharp jolt of anger; he had managed on his own in foreign territory for a decade now, and they intended to set a dog to monitor him as if he were but a child? Nor did the phouka himself help. His posture was properly deferential but his eyes held something that indicated that he found Willy amusing in some way. Willy was travel-tired and his clothes were travel-worn, and he was not pleased to feel himself less-dressed than a phouka with airs above his station. "If they sent you to fetch me," Willy said coldly, stopped in front of the phouka, "I know my own way home."
"Lord," the phouka said, sketching out a very perfunctory bow, "Unseelie riffraff have been haunting the borders lately; it would have made a poor welcome home."
"Ah, I see, so we set our riffraff in the place of theirs," Willy said softly, precisely, and the phouka's eyes flashed with anger before he smiled and said mildly, "Just so: you must at least admit we're more fashionable."
"I'll find my own way home," Willy said, but he knew that a black dog was staying just out of sight range as he made his way to the Lady.
He made his splash at Midsummer's Eve with a dance from human Russia--though he was not completely satisfied himself. That the song was new to his people did not make it original. He did have the satisfaction of seeing the phouka, whom he'd caught regarding him with a measuring glance more than once since his return, dancing instead of watching the stage.
The land felt right again, but he still felt a restlessness that could not be quelled. Maybe it was simply because these were not the lands of his birthplace. Willy went back East, to New York, in search of a human luthier with a solid reputation. Once there, he saw no reason not to stay there for a time.
New York to Chicago to St. Louis to New Orleans, ragtime and swing and jazz and one constant, bitter pill: he could make music better, but he could not make it up whole cloth. "Is that yours?" people would ask after he'd performed some song in his repertoire that was his, yes, but only because he'd made it his own. He never could say yes outright.
***
It wasn't that Willy was cagey about telling stories of his travels when he returned home to Faerie, so much that people did not care to hear them, though they lapped up the music he brought back. But there was one story Willy never told anyone:
Once upon a time in California, he walked into a hotel bar to listen to a woman with a voice full of sorrow singing a love song. She was nothing to look at: older, dumpy, and she had deep lines around her eyes and mouth. But her voice caught at him and pulled him to find her afterward. When she saw him she backed away, hands to her mouth and fear in her eyes as she pleaded, "please, no, please, no, please, no." He stopped advancing, for he took no pleasure in frightening humans, but she kept backing away, until she had backed herself into a corner.
"I'm sorry," he said, in his most soothing voice, "I think you're mistaking me for someone else. I mean you no harm. I only wanted to say that you sing beautifully."
She laughed in her beautiful deep, cracked voice. "I know what you are," she said. "But I'll die, I will, I'll kill myself." A spark of anger in a sea of fear: "You won't drag me into your war this time."
And he realized who she was, who she had been during their last war.
She saw the realization in his face and laughed again, incredulous, "You didn't even--you didn't know, did you? You didn't even recognize me. Oh, god, you bastards, you utter bastards, all these years I've--and you've forgotten me, you don't care for anyone but yourselves."
He could, he supposed, have told her that he hadn't even been on the same continent during the war. He could have snapped out that they had lost some of their own staunchest fighters in the service of protecting her. But it was not for the Daoine Sidhe to explain themselves to humans. He said instead with exquisite politeness, "Whatever your fears, madam, you have no need of them: you are no longer of interest to us," which struck her silent and brought her hands back over her mouth, and he walked away from her aged hands and her ruined face and her still-magnificent voice.
***
Rock 'n' roll. He had to walk out of concerts sometimes, because it was too much, too large. He thought this must be how humans in the old days felt when they wandered into Faerie circles and were given Faerie drink, knocked over the head by beauty. When he started to play himself, it felt like a clean burst of fire leaving his hand.
***
Willy returned to Faerie sometimes, of course, for festivals and ceremonies and upon occasion to play his part in the power games of the Court. The Lady and her Consort did not quite know what to do with his extensive travels, he could tell, but he had not exactly fallen out of favor, and did not intend to do so.
Occasionally denizens of the Dark Court would begin to creep past the agreed-upon boundaries, and Willy was pleased enough to spend a few weeks or months in Faerie to take part in the shows of force that drove them back. He would have been happier if the Sidhe were riding out themselves, but this was not true war; they mostly sent out the lower ranks. The only major irritation was that Oberycum had assigned the phouka who Willy found annoying to his command. The phouka was fierce in skirmishes and quick in delivering messages and able to think on his feet and overall quite valuable; and his glib tongue had Willy considering a muzzle. He ordered the phouka to silence once, for the space of a day. It didn't help, when the dog’s eyes could express mischief just as well.
Willy had, perhaps, spent too much time with humans, too much time making music with humans who felt free to tell him bluntly that an improvised riff wasn't working or that an arrangement wasn't quite hanging together. The phouka acted like those humans, acted like his unsolicited insights on strategy might be worth something. In the service of music, Willy had trained himself to evaluate for truth even when it came out of the mouths of lesser beings garbed in sarcasm and teasing; he found it hard to break the habit now.
***
The third war of Willy's lifetime crept up on him, crept up on all of them. He'd been away for several years, going southeast to keep his hand in on the bluegrass side. When he got the summons back to Minneapolis, he went expecting to spend a month or two there in the usual fashion, re-establishing boundaries against the encroachment of the Dark Court.
When he arrived, the Court was abuzz with rumors. "They say we go to war," Percevane told him, eyes bright with it. "To true war. There will be a council tonight." And when Willy passed by the forge, he could hear a bustle of activity.
Willy felt the bright spark of that longing for war himself, but it was yet a spark, not the tide of eagerness he saw in the faces of some of the others. Nor was everyone pleased, he noted as he watched faces at the council that night, as the Lady made the pronouncement of the long list of encroachments and insults the Unseelie Court had visited upon them.
When she had finished, there was silence, before she said in ringing tones, "Come forth," and the phouka walked through the assembled ranks. His face was still and faraway as he went to his knees. Willy saw a measure of faint distaste on more than one face, but there was no other choice. A phouka’s role in this was traditional, and after the last war, this was the only phouka unless they wanted to pull in an outsider from the West Coast. At least he was showing an appropriate measure of solemnity tonight.
"Mortal flesh and mortal doom be one, and mortal will may rule them," the Lady said. Her voice was quiet now, pitched to the one in front of her, although it carried to the first few rows of the Folk. Willy did not have to strain to hear her. "It has been the duty and privilege of your kind in times past to seek out a worthy mortal, and to protect that mortal from all harm during the season of war. Will you take up this task again?"
"I will so do." The phouka had pitched his voice to hers, and it was as impassive as his face, carrying neither eagerness nor reluctance.
"We charge you with that task," the Lady said, and Willy felt the power of it from where he stood, the binding settling over the phouka before the Lady bid him rise.
"You are given leave to ask aid from others as you see fit," Oberycum said when he had, "but this is your role and your privilege, and failures in those you trust will be your failure and your doom." He raised his voice to address all of them, "While we wait, we prepare for war."
***
The songs stuck in Willy's head were marches and dirges, and he found himself impatient with them, and with the phouka's terse messages to the Court about his choice for the binding and the predictable attempts on her life, and with the machinations of court intrigue in general, and with the wild skeins of gossip that didn't mask the fact that the Sidhe at the highest levels were taking much care with what they said, and to whom, and for good reason.
It wasn't quite a whim; he did ask Oberycum for leave, and was given it, before he took his guitar and went to an audition. And though it was beneath him, he took some satisfaction in unnerving the phouka quite so obviously; that one was not thrown off balance easily.
Eddi. She was small, trim, and did not do so badly at keeping her head when he turned his attention toward her; he’d expected all of those qualities from the phouka's reports. But the music. Willy had not quite expected that. He should have, since the phouka for all his flippancy would hardly have chosen a bad musician, but good musicians came in a wide variety. Willy had not expected one whose music would go to his head so quickly.
Even after they stopped playing, it curled into a knot of light behind his breastbone that lasted through the trip for coffee and the evening afterward, and Eddi's laughter and the touch of her hands kept it warm. The next evening, when she spoke of Hennepin Avenue and her love for it, he felt that warmth again. She had a love for place that would serve her and them well.
***
The first evening when Willy left Eddi's apartment, the phouka was in dog form outside. He did not shift back, and Willy gave him a nod and did not pay attention to the very soft snarl he could hear when he was almost out of hearing range. The second night, the phouka was in human form, a still sentry at the end of the hallway, and his head snapped up even as he scented the air. His flippant façade was down completely, and there was dread in his eyes.
"My blood, not hers," Willy told him, "and not caused by any from the Dark Court. A run-in with an ex-boyfriend." He still felt a little giddy from it.
The phouka's face didn't ease. "Stuart," the phouka said, and spat, "fuck," at Willy's nod.
Willy raised his eyebrows. "You take to human curses easily," he said, and that, for some reason, made the phouka shrug himself back into glibness.
"You are not the only one who's traveled among mortals," he said lightly. "Though until recently, it was almost guaranteed that our paths would never cross." It took a moment, and the phouka holding up brown fingers in a quick visual, for Willy to unravel that statement. "What happened to Stuart?"
Willy raised his eyebrows again at the tone of demand, long enough to establish that he was granting a favor in answering. "I let him go," he said, "It seemed inadvisable to involve Eddi in legal complications on the day before the battle. And I would hardly want to overwhelm you with another burden."
"I do appreciate the consideration," the phouka said. His gaze kept returning to the bandage on Willy's arm, as if in fascination. He shook his head, a dog shaking off water, and beamed at Willy. "Next war," he said, "I shall have to remember to choose someone with better taste in men." Mock embarrassment crossed his face, as if he'd blurted out his statement and only just realized its implications instead of calculating its impact first. He added hastily, as if trying to mitigate that impact, "Though it could be that Stuart was an exception and not the rule."
There were lines. They had been blurred by the camaraderie of the band, and by the need to feign equality in front of Eddi and Carla and Dan, and by the dark hush of the hallway, but there were lines. Willy almost let out a burst of laughter at the sheer effrontery, and he almost knocked the phouka to his knees.
He restrained both impulses, just held the phouka's gaze until he bowed his head. "Watch yourself, dog," Willy cautioned, hearing the snap of power in his voice, and walked past the phouka down the hall. From behind him, he heard the phouka opening Eddi’s door to enter the apartment.
"Ah, but my Lord, watching ourselves has never been part of our job description," the phouka said, and closed the door behind him.
***
And then it was the day of battle. Music was a good outlet for the anticipation, and Willy felt his spirits lifted despite the phouka's gloominess and Hedge's refusal to meet his eyes even as he responded wholeheartedly on bass to wherever Willy went. Eddi seemed anxious but determined to throw herself into the music, and Willy felt himself fond of her as they wrestled with her song, with her lack of ego and her willingness to open the song to the rest of them. Willy still yearned sometimes to be the type of musician who could lay down the skeleton of a song, not just help flesh and clothe it--but it was a joy to do the part he could. By the time they broke for coffee, Willy even felt himself in charity with the phouka, who didn't weigh in with critical comments but sometimes would give an approving nod to someone else's suggestion as he paced the room.
"She's worn the waiting well," Willy commented when he and the phouka stood at the bottom of the stairs after Eddi had sent them away to talk to Hedge.
The phouka gave a bark of startled laughter but then said, "Yes, actually, as well as any mortal--though I don't know if you'd say that if you'd been the one to bear the brunt of her temper these last months." He directed a sidelong glance Willy's way, and for once the target of the amusement in his eyes wasn't Willy. "I'll grant to provoking it upon occasion." His gaze went past Willy and he frowned, examining something in the distance. He shook his head when Willy tilted his in question: false alarm, but it had knocked the laughter out of him and sunk him back into gloom.
"Do you think they will try something, so close to tonight?" Willy asked, genuinely curious to hear the phouka's reasoning, and willing to take advantage of this rare serious mood.
The phouka shook his head, then shrugged. "Truth: no. I think we've repulsed enough attempts for them to know that she's not easy prey, and that their time is better spent preparing for tonight. But I'm not so eager to risk playing the fool that I'll count on it."
"And after the battle?" Willy asked, and watched the phouka's face go still.
"That particular gambit failed, last time," the phouka said quietly. "And she is not particularly fond of revisiting her failures."
"No," Willy said, and the invocation of the Dark Queen cast a pall over both of them until Carla and Dan came back with coffee.
When they departed, Eddi said, "Good practice, see everyone tomorrow," with feigned casualness and real determination. For some reason her level gaze brought to mind the woman in California, bitter and afraid; Willy could not imagine Eddi becoming that. He did not particularly want to. He wondered if the choice of that woman had fallen to this phouka, or to one of the phouka's kinsmen who had fallen in that final attack. The war before that…he frowned a bit, thinking of Eddi as she would be later that night, eyes glazed and face slack and will subsumed to the Lady’s. It couldn't be helped, but it was not an image that brought him joy, either. He was pleased that she had been the phouka’s choice, pleased to have met her, but he could almost wish that the phouka had chosen someone else and that he’d only met Eddi as a musician on her own ground.
***
The night was shock upon shock upon shock, mental and magical and physical, and perhaps the greatest was when they all felt the battle end, Eddi crossing off the battlefield and leaving them with the aftermath of slaughter. The scents of anger and fear were heavy in the air, theirs and their enemies, heavy and stifling.
For one of the first times in his life, Willy had no music in his head at all.
He went to Eddi’s that night for many reasons, voiced and unvoiced, but one of the deepest was that she had seen him first and foremost as a musician, and he wanted that right then, or to see if it was ruined. When she asked forthrightly, "Will you still be able to play?", it quieted some of the noise in his head.
The words were a comfort during the long stillness of the night, when the aftermath of anger and fear was settling deep and cold into his bones. He peered into Eddi’s bedroom a few times. She slept deeply, but he could sense the restless magic around her, clinging in some spots and dancing away from her in others. He thought he understood now how his lover in Europe had felt, alternately fascinated and repelled.
When the phouka awoke an hour before sunrise, Willy was unwrapping the bandages from his hands, and Eddi had not yet stirred.
"I suppose I should be grateful," the phouka murmured as he rolled into a sitting position, "that you didn't simply skin me alive while I slept." He did not seem particularly worried.
"Has it occurred to you that if this goes badly," Willy said carefully, having considered his weapons while he slept, "you and Eddi will not be the only ones to answer for it? Hedge, anyone else you've used to arrange protection: your actions could ruin them as well, and I'll wager that none of them knew what you had planned." He himself would be paying in status for this, which they both knew, for letting the phouka plan something so outrageous under his nose.
The phouka examined the ceiling and huffed out a breath. "Yes," he said, "it has, in fact, occurred to me." He faced Willy, spreading out his empty palms like he had the previous night, and Willy felt the gesture in his stomach like an unexpected chord of music in a still room. What can you possibly get that's worth that? / Nothing that you'd want. He could almost set those words to music.
"I need to go to Council. Is there any message that you would relay?" Willy asked, rising stiffly to his own feet. Reduced to acting as a messenger boy for a phouka: delightful.
The phouka winced and scrubbed his face with his hands. "Would you believe me if I were to apologize for my part in what you're about to face?"
"I’m to believe that you don’t delight in making fools out of your betters?"
"Less than you would think," the phouka said. "And no, no message other than our survival through the night--and that if consequences fall, they should fall to me."
"Beyond your hands, now," Willy said, and left the phouka sitting with bowed head.
***
The magic had settled in Eddi overnight; when she walked out of the practice building and past him, tossing off a joke about speakers, he saw the sheen of it on her. She seemed in a remarkably good mood, and he felt a moment of reluctant admiration. No fear in her, and no docility, and after the tangle of carefully voiced anger and fear and blame at Council, he appreciated her clarity.
When she offered him music, laying out her terms and challenging him to accept it, he could not help but reach for it with both hands.
They played long into the night, giddy with it. Hedge left first, grunting his goodbyes and giving them all a radiant smile. Carla and Dan got up to leave next. "So what’s next?" Carla asked, gaze veering between Willy and the phouka. "When does Eddi have to do this again?"
Willy reflexively stiffened at being asked about fey business by a mortal, but Eddi would need to know, and even on relatively short acquaintance he knew Eddi would tell Carla. Eddi herself was braced for the answer, and it would be cruel to draw it out by a refusal. "It hasn’t been set yet," he said finally.
Both Carla and Eddi frowned before Carla lifted her chin and said, "Ugh, I don’t mean to complain, but it does kind of make it a bitch to plan gigs. 'Sorry, I know you booked a five-piece, but three of our members are out frolicking with elves, so it's just us,'" and Eddi laughed and said, "best keyboard-drum duo in the business."
***
Willy was no coward, but in the weeks that followed he went gratefully away from every Council of War to rehearsal. Within the boundaries of the practice room, it felt like they were building their music, sometimes into a fortress where each chord was a defense against the memory of the slaughter on May Eve, and sometimes into a river that carried them further away from it. His anger died sometime when they were building a set list for the first scheduled performance; there wasn’t room for it. The fear stayed, but it felt less like a living, toxic thing and more like a glass prism that he knew the slick parameters of.
He had grown used to the faint shimmer of magic in Eddi. It was, in fact, difficult to remember what she had looked like without it.
"Are you teaching her?" he asked the phouka about a week out from their first performance, watching Eddi and Carla as they huddled in a corner to hash something out while the rest of them took a coffee break. Something had eased in the phouka since May Day, when no immediate repercussions had come and the band had decided to stay together; the barbs in his comments had gentled. In this past week, they'd been able to have conversations with a minimum of sparring.
The phouka shook his head. "She's holding the performance in front of her," he said, "and all her energy goes to that."
"And that fits in with your plans?" Willy asked.
He expected an insouciant non-response, but the phouka replied ruefully, "I think you overestimate the amount of detail included in my plans." He gestured with his chin at Eddi. "Besides, you know how she sets aside lyrics sometimes to let them grow in peace; I suspect that magic will grow in her the same way. And it seems we have time." It was true that no one seemed eager to rush into planning the next battle. He glanced sideways at Willy. "Would you wish for events to move faster?"
"I would wish…" Willy began, then paused and shook his head. He would wish the Unseelie Court gone without another slaughter. He would wish for a long string of performances with this band without the threat of loss hanging over them. "What would you wish?" he asked instead. "Are you eager to have this done?"
"I'm learning patience in my old age," the phouka said, drawing up one knee and resting his chin on it. "Though I would wish…" he was still watching Eddi, and there was something in his face that caught Willy's attention, the way he seemed almost surprised by her, or by whatever response the question had provoked in him. "I think I would wish to dance to this band's music," he said finally. The statement rang true, though Willy thought it a small part of the truth.
***
Eddi blazed with music and magic both on the night of their first performance. Willy was immersed in the music himself at the time, wrapped in it and basking in it and throwing it out as far as it could; he did not have the time to reflect on what this meant. It was only later, after the coldness that the Queen of Air and Darkness had brought (and he could have killed her for that, for making that the aftermath of his band's first performance), that he could think about what Eddi had become while they played.
"I couldn't have done better myself," the Dark Queen had said to the phouka on his choice of Eddi, intending it as a jab. But Willy thought some understanding was growing in him, the shape of what the phouka had planned, and what he hadn't planned at all but that Eddi might bring them. "I'm the bandleader," Eddi had said, and the Dark Lady had turned her attention to a human as if that human was worth reckoning with, and Eddi had not come off the worse in the encounter. Even their new band name might well be seen as a proclamation of alliance (if the obligations of friendship are constraints…)
"You did well in dealing with her," he said a few days, quietly, over the riff he was playing. "You acted bravely."
Eddi said, "Well, she wasn't the monster under my bed, growing up. I didn't know enough to be scared properly."
"I don't know what the phouka's been telling you, but it would be rather beneath her dignity to crouch beneath a bed," Willy said, but smiled unexpectedly at the image.
Eddi sent back a string of notes in response to his and said, "Was the invitation for Midsummer's Eve from her?"
"No, each side plans its own entertainment. Truce only extends so far," Willy said. "But it may have been partly because of her." Eddi didn't look up from her fingers on the strings, but the next string of notes she played was a question. "Her visit to you was of import; the phouka and I could hardly fail to report it. And once it was known...it's not meet, that she should have seen you in your element and we had not."
"Your people's rules," Eddi murmured. She didn't sound upset, but neither did she sound especially happy.
Willy admitted quietly, "I'm pleased by it, but the thought of playing for my people and showing them what we can do. And I think you'll find us a responsive audience." That, at least, made Eddi smile.
Willy thought the invitation would have been extended anyway, so that the Court could judge what mortal will was doing with their magic, but he didn't say that. He did not let himself think of it too much. It felt safer to let his understanding of what Eddi was becoming grow underneath his skin with each performance they did, with the lights and the heat and the lines the bodies of their mortal dancers made. The music was flourishing; it felt safer to focus on that.
***
If the hope he placed in Eddi grew, coiled with it was unease about the battle that would follow close behind the truce. He had stopped talking about it with anyone in Faerie, after he'd realized that the conversations were repeating themselves. "You will get to dance to our band's music after all," he said to the phouka one day during a practice break, and it was a substitute for other things he wanted to say and questions he wanted to ask.
"Yes," the phouka said absently, his eyes and attention on the two humans, Carla standing behind Dan with her chin on his shoulder. He said to Willy abruptly, "I have no idea what she's planning. Will you see Carla and Dan home after Midsummer’s Eve?"
"Yes," Willy said without thought, because looking at them he felt the same sense of their vulnerability that he could hear in the phouka's voice. He had a moment after that where he almost laughed at himself: a Lord of the Sidhe, set to play bodyguard to mortals by a phouka. "You think she would take that direction?" he said, because it didn't feel right to him.
The phouka huffed out a breath. "No. Yes. As a nice, malicious sideline if it amuses her. As the main thing, no. Strategically--" he bit off his words. "It would make little sense," he finished finally, and added, quiet and vehement, "Oak and Ash, I wish I knew what she was planning." Willy heard what he didn't say, that killing Carla and Dan would make little sense only because their deaths would make little difference; the Seelie Court would not be moved by mortal death and Eddi would only be determined to avenge them. He shifted, uncomfortable suddenly with thinking of his band mates in those terms, of reducing their bravery and talent to that.
Eddi bounced up from where she was working out something with Hedge and said, "Let's get back to it." She was clearly pleased with whatever they'd come up with, humming with energy in a way that tugged Willy closer and back to his guitar. "I'll...," he started to say, in parting to the phouka. But the phouka was watching Eddi too, and there was open yearning in his expression, and Willy's words trailed off. The phouka shuttered his face and tilted his chin up, waiting.
Willy wasn't blind, and the phouka not as subtle as he thought he was; this wasn't a surprise, but it had always been safely ignorable before. There were several reactions that Willy could have given, but what came out of his mouth was a surprisingly mild, "You do like to complicate things for yourself, don’t you?"
The phouka blinked in surprise, and then laughed, scrubbing his face with his hands. The laughter, muffled by his hands, had a thread of pain in it. When he lifted his face again, he said, "It's more, my lord, that they get complicated whether I will or no." For once, the use of Willy's title was without irony.
"Are you guys discussing fey business or can we get our guitarist back?" Dan called impatiently, tapping at a key repeatedly. Willy said what he'd started to say, before, "I'll see them home," and went back to his band.
***
Practice each day was an oasis, turning himself over to someone else's direction, letting himself be distracted by Carla and Dan's budding romance, by whatever was happening between Eddi and the phouka, by the music. When he was alone, all the songs that came to mind were melancholy and wrong.
All these human songs about love and death, and none of them had words to express the inchoate tangle of yearning and fear in his heart. "I'd rather study love," he told Eddi on Midsummer's Eve, but that wasn't really true; it was only the better of the two options. He wanted a song for Carla and Dan willing to enter Faerie tonight, for the rough edge in Hedge's playing as they drew closer to battle, for the phouka's loyalty, for Eddi with no idea for how she blazed gold when she sang. He wanted, he wanted, he wanted.
***
Fetid air, and darkness, and all the music in his head stilled.
***
Three days later, light, and faces he thought he'd lost fighting for him, and the sound of Eddi's human heartbeat louder than the roar of the motorcycle, and fear for the phouka, and a lance in his hand and his heart in his throat until he saw them coming back, safe. The notes running through his head sounded like the bare bones of a song that would turn into a victory march.
He couldn't place them, and after a moment he realized it was because they were something he'd never heard before, something new.