War for the Oaks (46 page)

Once Eddi thought to ask the question, the answer was obvious. She raised her head and scanned the VIP balcony.

The Dark Queen sat watching from a little table, ignoring the drink in front of her. She met Eddi's eyes and nodded. Behind her the phouka stood, one hand on the railing, his face set and tense. She saw a glimmer of light at his wrist, and squinted. It came from a thin cord of some magical weaving, and it bound his wrist to the top rail. Eddi stumbled over the next chord change and saw the Queen of Air and Darkness smile.

There were shadows in the sound booth, silhouetted against the second-floor bar. There were shadows on the dance floor. She would be a shadow of a different sort if the Dark Lady won, and Carla and Dan and Hedge with her. Here in this room was what she fought for, this wild human energy, this fast-burning mortality that made so much light. There was a dark cloth laid over it now, dimming, smothering. She could feel it. She could almost see it. Pull it back, shred it, smolder it away with sound and light. . . .

She lost track of what she was singing. Were they her words? She was driving them up out of the middle of her like flame from a dragon's mouth—they must be hers. Hedge stood on one side of her, braced as if against a gale, head thrown back, eyes closed. He clawed the Steinberger with eagle talons, climbing a spiral of bass notes into the hot blue air. Dan danced behind the keyboards, with feet and hands and mouth, mad and swift as a striking snake. Carla summoned up the beat of pounding water and falling stone, rhythms that had not faltered since the universe took shape.

And still the darkness lay over them all, the Dark Queen's barrier to light and noise.

Eddi shot out a hand and plucked the lights from the ceiling, fired
all the neon at once. She made it rain flash pots like falling stars. The video screens roiled with color, throbbed with beat, trembled with images that seemed to want to break their surface tension and spill out onto the dance floor.

The darkness shouldered up to meet them.

Sparks leaped and spat all over the stage, under Eddi's fingers, singeing them, bridging the beads of sweat on her face. Current crackled and arced over the dance floor, around the metal balcony railings. The room glowed blue for an instant, as if struck by lightning.

At the back of the room, near the balcony stairs, the Lady stood pale and shining. Oberycum was beside her, tall and knightly, gleaming in green and gold and his hair like bleached wheat. In that flash of blue he nodded to Eddi, the solemn salute of equals, but she had no time to nod back.

She hammered down on three chords, repeated them, heard Carla roll sticks across the snare like a forest fire. Hedge screamed down his low E string, the sound of a descent into hell, and they began "For It All." The neon lashed the ceiling again, and Eddi saw the light-dyed faces of the dancers turned up to her, flowers following the sun. She demanded their minds, then insisted that they think for themselves; stole their ears and made them fight to get them back. Their dancing bodies she did not take by force—those she sought humbly, and each one given to her was a treasure. She felt their sweat running down her skin, felt their arms cutting shapes in the air around her, her muscles aching with the motion of their dance. Darkness and light ran together around them like confluent rivers, like braided streaming hair, black and red, like tangled patterns of cloud and sky.

Her guitar was gone; she didn't know where. She thought her mike was in front of her, but she couldn't see it, hadn't the attention to spare to sing into it. She took a breath, then let her voice spill out:

Fire coming down the sky
On a horse of wind
Beckons to the naked eye
And who can see?

Carla backed the words with the thunder of deep drums, Hedge with the rolling voice of his bass, Dan with wild flying piano like flocks of birds.

Those who look up,
Hearts that hurt for height and heaven,
Those who look up see
What never falls to earth
.

The music grumbled under her voice like something large coming closer to them all, approaching swiftly through the earth toward the surface. Carla and Dan and Hedge sang up a net of light behind her, a veil of sun and shadow that trembled with the deep instruments.

On the balcony, the Dark Lady was a pillar of black fire, hands clenched on the balcony rail, face turned upward. A devouring silence roiled where she stood, pressed outward. But a powerful wave of music was rising against her.

Armies hurled against the hall
Cannot breach the outer wall
The castle built of thundercloud
Will only yield
To those who look up
Hands held out aloft and empty
. . . .

She pointed and the dancers all turned to see it, laughing with delight when it
did
look like a castle.

Thunder boiled up, from Carla's drums and the air above them. Ozone smelled bright and mind-clearing and sounded like Dan's synthesizer. Eddi pointed again to the tarnished silver sky, where the thunderheads raced toward them like flying mountains.

Tall ship on the hungry sea
An ark, a savior sent to free
Those who see the ladder tossed
And jump, and catch, and climb aloft. . . .

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 altitudes 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 flashing up from beneath, through the whiteness—so fast, but not too fast to reach out and touch. They all did, brushing 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 shore 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 grass.

"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 grass 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 grass. "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 grass. "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 grass 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."

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 screen writing 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 passive, 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.