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  I threw an ingratiating smile my companion’s way. There would be time to pay him back for his insult later. But at the moment, I needed to think. “The squall crow does not see us. Let us keep it that way.” Then I realized I’d left my Guinness, half-gone and presumably flat by then, in the basement. “We need a drink.”

  He nodded, and we left the band room and moved toward the bar.

  As I ordered two Guinnesses—my companion being once more cloaked and unable to order for himself—I observed three young men saunter through the front door and head for the dance floor. Their heads were shaved, and their bodies were covered with ancient marks I am sure they knew not the meaning of. They wore black tee shirts with death’s-heads and crosses on them and they moved as if they expected people to get out of their way. My companion stared daggers at their backs.

  More true believers, I thought. But not of the same faith as my companion. Or the band. Or most of the bar comrades. Orangemen at a guess. Or if not orange, at least not of the green, the green of patriots, the green of the Sidhe.

  A plan began forming in my mind as the skinheads marched into the band room. Not a plan my masters had ever thought of. Or maybe they had. They had sent me on May Eve, after all, and told me to move with the moment. That moment, I sensed, was upon me. But for what I had in mind I would need more power. A lot more power.

  I gave a concealed wave of my hand, unseen by any eyes, mortal or Sidhe. This opening was a very small spell, just a nudge really. Merely pushing the head-shavers to do what was natural. Natural—and ugly. But when the real casting came, I would be well gone from here. Necessary, of course. I had to be gone before the Powers were alerted to my presence.

  “Are you eyeballing me?” It was a loud and surprisingly tenor voice from the next room. One of the shaved-heads I presumed.

  I waved my hand again, and this time I heard the sound of glass breaking next door.

  That, I thought, should be enough to get things started.

  I was surprised to find my companion suddenly racing into the barroom. And not, I assumed, because of any love of music. Then I considered: If he is distracted by the fighting, that should make things even easier.

  The noises from the other room grew more violent and promising. I heard the sounds of blows given and received, insults hurled, threats offered, and immediately followed through on. The music came to a sudden halt as—I presumed—the musicians either fled or joined in.

  It was time. I smiled and spread my arms wide, letting the power born of blood and passion flow over me and through me. The bar had become a battlefield, a spinning turbine of broken knuckles and bloody noses, and I was a battery, drinking my fill. I was supercharged, I was industrial strength, I was growing greater by the second. I was drunk with power, engorged, enlarged, enlivened.

  And stupid. Stupid. Stupid.

  That kind of rapid growth, fueled by testosterone surges, fear, and anger, made me stupid for the moment. A faerie moment.Which is longer in human time than our time, of course.

  I forgot the missing cloaked man, my mission, my masters, and all as I soaked up the human conflagration.

  Human conflagration? What I was hearing was more than that. I dropped my arms and raced over to where I could see the action. The shaved-heads who had started things were down already, but the fight had spread like a fire to engulf the entire bar.

  And then I understood why. It was May Eve, and apparently most of the patrons weren’t human at all. They were Fey.

  I must have been too intent on spotting the Unseelie prince and then the Bean Sidhe to see through the elementary glamors they had dropped over themselves.

  As I said—stupid, stupid, stupid!

  Of course none of that mattered, as battle had been joined and all guises dropped. The dance floor was a heaving mass of Fey combatants, and I could not take my eyes off the sight.

  As I watched, a fachan hopped into the fray on his sole leg. One-handed, he swung a club hard onto the head of a squat brownie in front of him, splitting it open, then falling to the ground himself, elf-shot through his single eye. Before the elf could notch another arrow, he took a bone knife in the kidney, courtesy of one of the diminutive bogies darting around the edges of the conflict. An urisk, impaled on the horns of a giant bogey-beast, screamed like the goat it half was. Will o’ wisps shot overhead like tracer bullets. Even the band had joined the melee, leaving their instruments onstage. But I had been as mistaken about them as I had been about all the others. The bodhran player was in reality a redcap, that old malignant Border goblin, and he was laying about with a bloody axe and bodies were falling everywhere. The blond guitarist was clearly a phooka, his long hair covering his entire body, his feet turning to hooves, which he employed with zeal. Only the big Viking with the guitar was fully human, and he joined in with a kind of maniacal glee.

  I was about to head into the room myself when the doorman rushed by me with a pistol, yelling, “You fuckers, I’ve called the cops.”

  The Bean Sidhe began wailing and a shot rang out.

  Cold iron.

  Time to finish my business.

  THE PRINCE—who’d been in the midst of things, turned and saw me. “I thought we were to keep things quiet,” he cried. Or meant to. The last few words died before reaching his lips as I reached out with my mind and grabbed him by the throat. That surprised him, I know, for his eyes turned bloodred before closing forever. But he had touched me. And that I would not countenance for long.

  Oh, I had been warned by my superiors to play it safe. But they had always known my character. I expect they guessed something like this would happen. Hoped it would happen.Why else send me off on May Eve for a parley. In a pub? Of course, never having exactly told me what to do, they would have what the humans like to call “plausible deniability.”

  I laughed grimly and let the prince’s body drop. A dozen or so of the Fey had already been killed, with more to come. But the Unseelie Court had lost a great prince, the Seelie Court only pawns. My masters would be pleased. I wondered briefly if they were the ones who had sent the Bean Sidhe.

  And then I forgot everything in the whirlwind that lifted me higher and higher through the roof, as the bar collapsed in fire as if an explosion had rocked the place.

  The Irish would be blamed of course. Both sides. As they always are. As they always will be. I screamed with laughter as the whirlwind bore me home. If we did not have the Irish, we Fey would have to invent them.

  The Hermit and the Sidhe

  BY JUDITH TARR

  Bloody hell,” said the hermit.

  “Language,” Pegeen reproved him, slapping a dot of wool over the stinging wound and stropping the razor until it sent off sparks.

  Pegeen was a wild Irish rose, with skin like milk and hair as black as an Englishman’s heart. Her round white arm was as strong as a blacksmith’s, and her will was forged steel.

  She had arrived at the hermit’s tower that morning with his pail of stew and his loaf of bread and his jar of brown ale from her father’s cask, and informed him in no uncertain terms that she was making him fit for a mortal to look at. She had turned a deaf ear to his protests that a hermit should be wild and uncouth and unshorn, just as on previous visits she had scoured the old tower from top to bottom, and never mind the requirement that he live in sacred squalor.

  “Squalor is the Devil’s province,” she had said.

  Now she had determined to make him as presentable as his tower, and even his brief fall into the lower vernacular could not give her pause. She shaved him and clipped him and dressed him in a robe that mortified the memory of the old saints with its absolute cleanliness. It might have begun life as a woman’s Sunday gown, but judicious stitching, tucking, and patching had lent it a rather convincingly monastic air—except, of course, for its disastrous freedom from dirt, lice, and vermin.

  The hermit’s own carefully constructed colony thereof, wrapped in threadbare wool and hanging limply from the end of a broomstick, wa
s not even to die a noble death on the tower’s hearth. Pegeen burned it in the open air downwind of the tower, so that the wind carried the stench of it away. Then came the rain of heaven to scour the ashes. “And is that not living proof,” said Pegeen, “that the Lord has as keen a nose as any woman in Ballynasloe?”

  “The Lord is pure spirit,” the hermit said as stoutly as he could manage, “and as such, He can have no—”

  “If the Lord is a He,” said Pegeen,“then there is one part of a body that it seems He does have, and why not a nose, too, after all?”

  With that snippet of appalling theology and an air of solid satisfaction, she put on her cloak and hood and gathered up her empty basket and forayed out into the rain. It was a soft day in Ireland, and a little soaking never hurt a body, as she had told him often before.

  Long after the squelch and clatter of her brogues on mud and stone had died away, the hermit sat limply by the hearth. Pegeen’s presence was a great tax on his spirit. “And why,” he asked the air, “could I not have been sent a true and authentic angel to bring me my bread, and not that spawn of a publican and a harpy?”

  Once that sentiment had escaped him, he crossed himself quickly and promised the Lord a dozen lashes on his bare back for thoughts unbecoming a man of God. Nor was pique his only sin; for there could be no denying that Pegeen was a glorious specimen of Irish womanhood.

  He had come to this place, taking the white martyrdom, to escape just such a temptation. He had almost forgotten the beautiful Emme-line, with her plump white throat and her golden curls. Odes had been written to those curls, and sonnets to that throat—not a few of them his own, and in the humility of his new state, he could admit that some of them had been of less than sterling quality.

  “But I had a little talent,” he said. “I did. And twelve hundred a year. But she had a cashbox for a heart. She married six thousand a year.”

  He crossed himself again. Bitterness was a sin. So was memory.

  He was a hermit, a martyr to the world, a servant of God—the last in all of Ireland, and the first in many a hundred years.

  Yet a third time he crossed himself. Pride: that was a sin, too. Everything was a sin, sooner or later. One could simply atone for living, and hope it was enough to open the gates of heaven.

  The last hermit in Ireland lay on the floor of his tower and gave himself up to mortification of the soul—the flesh having benefited rather too thoroughly from Pegeen’s ministrations. It would be days before he could mortify it again with any conviction at all.

  FOR THE THOUSANDTH TIME in his thousand days of ministering to the parish at Ballynasloe, Father Timothy glowered at the doorstep of his rectory. For the thousandth time, a saucer of cream stared blandly back.

  It was not for the rectory cat, whose tastes ran more toward mice and the females of his species. That much Father Timothy had deduced some while since. Not long after that, he had confronted his housekeeper with the facts of the case. Mrs. Murphy had not even troubled to look up from the potatoes she was peeling. “And why would you be thinking it was for the cat, Father?” she had inquired in her genteel voice. “It’s for Them, of course.”

  “Them?” he had echoed.

  “Them,” she said, nodding, as yet another perfect coil of peel dropped into the basin. She reached for the next potato, as if the conversation had concluded.

  He was not ready to let it go, although it was all too clear by then what she meant. “Are you saying,” he said, “that you offer a nightly sacrifice of good cream to a pack of old and discredited gods?”

  “Hardly discredited,” she said, as serene as ever, “and more than useful, Father, for the little things that ease a woman’s lot in the world. A man’s, too, for the matter of that, and a priest’s if he will. Or were you dissatisfied with the mending of your boot that is your favorite in the world, and the sole half falling off it?”

  That was as much temper as she would show, in the thickening of the brogue and the shift to the speech of her countrywomen. He had judged it wise then to retire from the field, for a housekeeper in a dudgeon was a terribly uncomfortable thing, and one in a true rage could make a priest’s life a misery.

  He had brooded and he had pondered and he had studied. He had watched the people of the village. He saw how every gatepost carried some bit of something odd: a bundle of herbs, a garland of flowers, or a silver coin fastened with a silver nail. He marked how the women took a certain path at certain times of the month and certain phases of the moon, a path that led to the huge old oak tree that stood in a field somewhat apart from the village. He never saw naked rites there, but bits of ribbon and garlands of flowers or greenery and sometimes a silver penny—just as on the gateposts—would appear in the branches of the tree. Or one of the women would take her wash ing to the river at odd times—moonrise or first dawn or the dark of the moon—and sing while she did it, songs in the old language that he had steadfastly forborne to learn.

  Even the men were part of it. They plowed by the phases of the moon instead of by the calendar like civilized men, and the smith was known to quench his best knives in the blood of a bull calf. When black Paddy was hanged for stealing the squire’s prize cow, his corpse vanished in the night, but there was a fresh grave at the crossroad and suspicious marks nearby it, as if there had been a rite with nothing in it of Christian doctrine.

  That would have been cause enough to concern himself with the welfare of his charges’ souls. But he had seen things—heard things. Flickers in the corner of the eye. Faint voices where no human creature was, and ripples of wicked laughter. Tiny fingers would pluck at his cassock when he walked down paths to this cottage or that.

  At first he had told himself that it was just the wind, or a catch of brambles, or children’s voices carried oddly along a turn of the track. But he was never a man who could lie to himself, however odd or difficult the truth. There was something here, and that something had nothing to do with any Christian thing.

  And every doorstep, every one, had a saucer of cream somewhere on or near it, that the village cats were never seen to touch.

  He stared at this thousandth bowl on this thousandth morning, and knew in his heart what he would have to do. He must preach a holy crusade against the old but unforgotten gods. As to who should preach it with him, he knew just the man.

  “YOU WANT TO do what?” said the hermit.

  Father Timothy had not found the congenial colleague he had expected. The hermit was clean, for one thing. Without his saintly armor of beard and vermin, he looked distressingly like one of the young sprouts of the gentry who infested the hills in hunting season. He had the same accent, too, and the same bland expression.

  Nevertheless, Father Timothy persevered.Whatever this man had been before he elected the white martyrdom, he was a man of God now. “This village is overrun with pagan superstition.Why it was not scoured clean a hundred years ago, God knows.”

  “Maybe it was,” the hermit said, “and the scouring didn’t stick.”

  “That’s all too likely,” Father Timothy granted him. “These people are relentless in their determination to do as their distant ancestors did before them.”

  “And yet you think you can rid them of their pixies and nixies?”

  Father Timothy blinked, startled out of his fine fire of zeal. “I take it you don’t agree that the village would be more godly without them?”

  “Certainly I deplore superstition,” the hermit said, “but you act as if these figments truly exist.”

  “The villagers believe they do,” Father Timothy said.

  “Do you?”

  Father Timothy shifted on the hard wooden stool. He should be the doubter, man of the modern age that he was, and this relic of an ancient martyrdom should be frothing over the worship of pagan gods. But the truth was the truth, and he was an honest man of God. “I do believe,” he said, “that the old beliefs—and yes, the old gods—are still alive in Ballynasloe. It’s my duty as a priest and a Christ
ian man to remedy that.”

  “You’ve seen them? With your own eyes?”

  “I’ve heard them,” Father Timothy said, “and felt them. They are there, watching and mocking, laughing at our modern pretensions.”

  The hermit was obviously trying hard to keep his face expressionless. “I wish you good fortune,” he said.

  “You won’t help?” said Father Timothy in a bit of a dying fall, but he had to cling to hope.

  It was the hermit’s turn to be uncomfortable. That was gratifying enough that Father Timothy resolved to do penance for it later. “I—really don’t think—”

  “Not even for the sake of the villagers’ souls?”

  The hermit’s soft young mouth went thin and tight. “I’m not here to save anyone’s soul,” he said, “but my own. I’ll pray for them.Maybe God will listen.”

  “I’m sure He will,” Father Timothy said, but not as truthfully as he would have liked.

  THE HERMIT HAD been praying when Father Timothy interrupted him. When he tried to go back to it, he caught himself thinking instead. He had taken Father Timothy for a man of modern sensibilities and serious intentions. And here he was, obsessed with a bowl of cream on a doorstep.

  “Silliness,” said the hermit, whose obsession with a fall of golden curls was blurring into a fixation on neat black braids.

  He knelt on the hardest and coldest part of the floor, on his bare knees to be sure he suffered enough, and squeezed his eyes tight shut. He prayed in Latin because in his opinion a hermit should, and because it required a certain level of mortification of the brain.

  He still could not stop thinking of Father Timothy and the faeries. He gave it up at last and resorted to mortification of the flesh: a brisk hour in his meager bit of garden among the beans and the potatoes. No faeries there. No Father Timothy, either. By the end of the hour he was lustily intoning the Stabat Mater dolorosa, as happy as a hermit could be.