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1


The Mountain Top


Leaves whispered in a breath of breeze, as the early morning sun crept across the hills of San Francisco. A starling perched on the eaves of a four-story townhouse chirped in blissful appreciation of the sun on his back, the gentle breeze, the perfect Northern California morning. This house on a hill had a wonderful view of the Bay and the famous Bridge which was not being sufficiently appreciated by the two-legged being below him. There was still fog on the Bay, though it had crept down the hill just before dawn; the towers of the Bridge rose above the downy sea of fog like the towers of lost Ys. Sun shone out of a near-cloudless sky, making the pearlescent fog glow faintly.

Clank.

“SonuvaBITCH.”

The starling fluttered its wings in startlement and gazed warily down through the green leaves at the odd, blond-haired, pointy-eared creature that had made both noises. Korendil, Knight of Elfhame Sun-Descending, Magus Minor, Envoy to Elfhame Mist-Hold, and firstborn Child of Danaan beyond the Sundering Sea, let out another paint-blistering oath that frightened the starling above him into flight.

Korendil, Knight of Elfhame Sun-Descending, was not communicating well with the hot tub.

He considered kicking it, remembered that he was barefooted, and thought better of the idea. He leveled an angry glance at the recalcitrant object instead.

“I primed your pump,” he said to it, resentfully. “Thomas swore to me that your motor is repaired. I saw to it that the heater was working myself. So why will you not perform?”

It would all be so much easier if Beth and Eric would permit him to attend to these things by magic—there would be no need for pumps or heaters or other arcane mysteries of Cold Iron and electricity. The ancient (as these things were reckoned in California) cedar hot tub would be even now bubbling merrily away, heating for the housewarming/Faire Opening party tonight. But no, they had flatly forbidden any such thing, even so simple an act as kenning and reproducing a paltry few fifty-dollar bills to ease their way.

“We have to keep a low profile, Kory,” Beth kept saying. “The Feds are looking for us. There are things we can do, and things we can’t do—passing fifty-dollar bills with the same serial numbers and having appliances that work without being plugged in are a couple of things we can’t do. It wouldn’t surprise me to know that the Feds have caught on to the elven trick of money-kenning. If the Feds found L.A. bills up here, or heard about some strange people who don’t seem to need electricity, they’ll be on us like fleas on a hound.”

“But I do not understand why these Feds should be looking for us—” he had said, puzzled. “There was nothing for them to find in Griffith Park.”

“They don’t have an explanation for what happened to—to Phil,” Beth had replied, her voice breaking a little, as it always did when she spoke of the old animator who had been her friend. “They don’t have one for what happened to my apartment, either—or to Eric’s. They don’t like things they can’t explain. Eric and I are the common links to all three places, and right now they’d like nothing better than to trump up some kind of charge that all three of us were involved in a drug ring or something, just to get the mystery off the books.”

“And you know they were looking for Beth when the fight at the park was over,” Eric had put in, mildly. “I doubt they’ve given up on that. Especially if they have a warrant.”

Kory had shaken his head, unable to understand such blind thinking—but he had been forced to agree to abide by his friends’ rules. It had been hard, though, especially this past winter when it had become so hard to earn money, and Beth and Eric had gone about with long faces, sometimes quarreling out of worry. He had feared for all of them, then, and not from these “Feds.” He had feared that love would turn bitter in their hearts, that they must regret ever seeing him. It had been hard to keep from working magic then, and he had only refrained because he had known they must feel it was necessary, since they had gone to such elaborate lengths to keep their names from appearing in any official records.

Take this house, for instance. Officially, it belonged to Greg Johnson, a friend of Eric’s, and inherited from Greg’s maiden aunt who had lived here most of her seventy-two years. But Greg was something Beth called a “computer wizard,” although Kory had never once seen the glow of magic about him, and he was so wealthy by mortal standards that he already had a dwelling he much favored. This townhouse, although it had been lovely in its day, full of glowing woodwork, with a garden even an elven lady would have been charmed by, had become neglected over the years. Greg had kept it locked and boarded up—until a friend of a friend of a friend had directed Eric to him with their tale of woe, and their acute need for housing they need not furnish references for.

They lived here rent-free—the bargain they had struck being that they would restore the place to its former glory. And there were many, many things that Kory could do there that Beth and Eric had not frowned upon. Though why it should be a bad thing to reproduce a bill of paper money, and a good thing to reproduce a sheet of walnut paneling, he was not certain.

He had only to stroke a piece of the woodwork with his magic, whispering to it, instructing it to recall its beauty—

and gouges or insect-holes would vanish, carving reappear, forty years of paint peel away, and the wonderful carved moldings of seventy years ago would shine forth as if newly oiled and newly hewn.

Only. Hmm. Well, Eric understands that it is a strain for me, if Beth does not. Since he was not a major mage, the cost to him in terms of exhaustion, personal energy and stress was high, especially when working alone. But he was no longer working alone; Eric could use his Bardic magery to tap into deeper sources of energy, and feed them to Kory, and the toll was not as high as it would otherwise have been.

Beth didn’t understand what he was doing; Eric, in whom the magics of Bards ran deeply and strongly, saw it, but could not yet replicate it. That would come, in time, Kory had assured him. Eric had laughed, and retorted that he was in no hurry—what he could do already scared him enough!

It was simple enough, really. Every made thing held within it the memory of what it had been like when it was first created. Learning that was part of kenning, the means by which the elves (or Great Bards) studied a thing to replicate it. Once Kory had kenned something, he could not only reproduce it, he could repair it, by building upon that memory. That was how he had restored Eric’s boots after the Battle of Griffith Park—the boots that Prince Terenil had created for him—

Now it was Kory’s turn to swallow grief; Terenil had been more than liege, he had been that rarest of things among elvenland, who chose their bonds carefully, for they would bind for centuries. Terenil had been a friend.

Well, none of this was making the hot tub function.

He stared at the dark wooden tub with resentment. He had repaired the wood magically, after Beth had salvaged it from someone else’s discard heap. Thomas Crawford, who repaired appliances when he was not busking at Faires, had fixed the motor in return for a pair of magically-made boots like Eric’s. Kory had traded many pairs of boots and leather pants and bodices for other work done on the house—for Faire folk were an eclectic lot, and many of them, like Thomas, worked at the land of odd jobs that would have been the lot of a tinker in the old days. And all of them coveted Eric’s boots and leather trousers. Kory himself had seen to the heater, since it was of ceramic and glass, copper and aluminum, and not made of deadly Cold Iron. So why would it not work?

He was more than half tempted to turn his magic loose on it anyway, and Beth’s tender sensibilities be hanged. But he knew what she would say if she saw it. She’d already given him the lecture once.

“People are curious at housewarming parties. They prowl, they poke, they look into things and ooh and ahh. And if they see something that’s working without being plugged inthey’re going to talk. And when they talk, the Feds will hear about it.”

Well, perhaps if he made it look as if it were operating in a normal fashion . . . leaving it plugged in and not functioning correctly was dangerous. But if he plugged it into a socket that wasn’t working and then magicked everything, no one would know the difference. Not even Beth.

He found the end of the cord, and picked it up, intending to pull it loose and plug it into one of the outdoor sockets he and Thomas had determined was dead and not worth the reviving—

And it came up loose in his hand, the plug plainly lying in the middle of the path.

He flushed with embarrassment, glad beyond words that there was no one here to have witnessed his humiliation. The episode with the microwave popcorn had been bad enough; the encounter with the vacuum cleaner that he had mistaken for an Unseleighe monster was worse. He would never have been able to live this down.

Still blushing, he took the cord to a socket he knew very well was live, and plugged it in—and was rewarded immediately by the Feel of electric power flowing through the cord under his hand, and the hum of heater and pump beyond the screening evergreen bushes. When he returned to the tub, the eddies in the water told him that all was well, and the water would be ready for soaking when they returned from the Fairesite. He stood up, then, and basked in a little glow of self-congratulation. He was no Great Bard, but he had, by Danaa, done his share to make the house—and especially the gardens—into wonderful places. He had not restored the gardens to their former manicured state. He had, instead, created a miniature version of the kind of wilderness-garden often found Underhill; a place full of hidden bowers, little moss-lined nooks, home to flowers and birds in all seasons, and green in all seasons too. One could travel from the house to the hot tub without ever once coming under the neighbors’ curious eyes—which, given that Beth had insisted that this be a “clothing optional” tub, was no small feat.

Kory himself was looking forward to his first soak in this marvelous piece of human ingenuity. Beth had introduced him to the wonders of hot tubs at an odd meditation-place just south of here, in the city called “Santa Cruz,” and he had been an instant convert. Wonderful stuff, hot water . . . that marvelous invention, the shower, for instance—

A shriek from the windows above made him jump, as startled as the starling had been earlier. The shriek was feminine, and followed by a curse as paint-blistering as his own had been.

“Korendil!”

He looked up, guiltily; Beth leaned out of the bathroom window, head covered in soapsuds. “How many times do I have to tell you?” she not-quite-shouted, “The hot water runs out!”

He blushed as scarlet as he had earlier. Like Beth’s other maxim, “It works better when you plug it in,” he kept forgetting that. It was easy enough to forget, when he was always the first one awake because he needed so little sleep, and the hot water tank usually recharged long before either of the other two was awake enough to even think about showering. He shrugged and grimaced elaborately, then sent a tiny surge of power to the reservoir of cold water in the half-basement. Fortunately, the new hot-water tank (traded by a contractor for three pairs of boots) was not Cold Iron either.

A cloud of steam gushed from behind Beth, out through the open window, like a bit of fog that had escaped the rest down in the Bay. Beth’s head disappeared with a muffled exclamation; Kory waited a few moments to allow her to complete her shower, warm her body, and cool her temper. Then he returned to the house, following the tunnel he had created by asking the evergreens to interlace their branches above the path that ended at the lower entrance.

The townhouse was four stories in height, which had made Beth a little nervous in light of the recent earthquake. Kory had done his best to make the place as flexible as he could, given that he was working with materials and a plan that had been built nearly a century ago. He and Eric had removed every vestige of load-bearing brick and plaster, and had replaced them with conjured wooden siding on the exterior, and conjured wooden paneling within. He had worked on the supporting joists until they were supple but incredibly tough, gradually transforming them into something very like ancient briar; the whole dwelling should flex in a quake, but should not tumble down.

He really did not want to test that, however. With luck, they never would have to.

The bottom story was little more than a workshop and laundry room. The workshop was new; he and Eric had added it. Kory smiled, recalling all the hours he and Eric had spent here, readying the house. They had strengthened the bonds between them, working together silently, sometimes with magery, and sometimes only with their hands. Nesting, Kory thought fondly. Domesticity suited the formerly footloose Bard. Not that he’d ever admit it.

The second story was public rooms, entered from below by the interior stairs, and from the main street by a staircase to the front door. First from the front of the house was a huge room that Beth referred to as “the livingroom,” which had been the single change they had made to the interior layout. They had knocked down walls between what had been a room Greg called “the parlor,” used only to entertain guests, and a dining room, to make one huge room. It was a place Kory found very comfortable, full of light and air, and overstuffed futon chairs and sofas. Behind that room was the kitchen, which Beth had pronounced “hopelessly outdated.” It too had been remodeled. The only things he had not been able to ken and reproduce had been the appliances. Fortunately, after he had seen all the work they had done up until that point, Greg had willingly bought those. Opposite the living room, on the opposite side of the entrance hall, was the “media room,” with the overflow of Greg’s electronic toys: two televisions, a stereo, three lands of tape players and a VCR machine. In back of the “media room” was a storeroom, still packed with wood, aluminum nails and wooden pegs, and the rest of their building supplies.

The third story was all living quarters; four bedrooms, including one master bedroom; two bathrooms. The fourth story had been servants’ quarters in the days when the house had been built; once again he and Eric had removed walls to make bigger rooms, four of them. One was a library, with floor-to-ceiling bookcases. One held their music and musical instruments. One was Eric’s retreat from the world, and one was Beth’s. When Kory felt the need for peace, he generally went out into the garden. Rain, fog, chill—these things meant very little to one of elven-blood. More important was being able to Feel the power-flows, to tap into the magic welling up from the nexus-points into Underbill.

Those here in the north had never been walled away, as they had in the south, in the place the mortals called Los Angeles. But they were not as strong, either. The elves who had settled Elfhame Mist-Hold were a different sort; less used to wielding powerful magic and much more used to blending in with the human world. Kory’s cousin for instance—Arvindel—he who had been second-born to the elves who had settled here on this western coastline—he actually worked among the humans, and no one the wiser. He was a dancer in the Castro District, and many were the humans who yearned after him when seeing him dance.

And Arvindel—he of the varied and capricious appetites—often indulged those yearnings. And just as capriciously dropped his conquests, afterwards.

“Fickle,” Kory had teased him.

“Overfond fool,” Arvin had replied, and half serious, more so than Kory. There were no few of his own kind who looked askance at this close liaison with short-lived humans, may-flies, who would fade and die in the blink of an elven eye . . . 

Kory shuddered away from the thought. This is no day to worry about trifles like the future, he told himself. Particularly when a year ago you thought you had no future, and a scant few months before that you were spell-locked and Dreaming.

Time, which normally had no meaning for elvenkind, had set its seal on him, if he was thinking in terms of “months” and “the future.” Well, a pox upon Arvin, and upon anyone else who thought ill of him because of it!

He ascended the staircase, to emerge in the kitchen just as Beth, head wrapped in towels and body enveloped in an enormous white terrycloth bathrobe, descended from the bathroom above. She shot him a look, he spread his hands in apology. “I crave your pardon, my lady,” he said, bowing a little to her, as he would to a lady of his own kind, “I fear I am but an airhead.”

Her mouth quirked in a smile, despite her attempts to keep that same smile from emerging. Finally, she laughed. “Elves,” she said to the air above her head. “Can’t live with ’em, and there’s no resale value.”

Seeing that he had been forgiven, he shamelessly collected a kiss; a long, slow, sensuously deep kiss. She pushed him off—regretfully—a moment later, however. “No, you don’t,” she half-scolded. “We’ll never get to the Fairesite at this rate. Have you eaten?”

He nodded, then added, with a wistful expression, “But that was before dawn. I fear I may waste of famine e’er we reach the site—”

What he really wanted was to watch her work the microwave; an arcane creation that fascinated him endlessly—and which he had been forbidden to touch after popping all of their twenty-five packets of microwave popcorn in a single evening.

She raised an auburn eyebrow at him. “Where are you putting it all?” she asked, incredulously. “If I ate as much as you do, I’d look like the Goodyear blimp!”

Having no answer to that, he simply shrugged. She busied herself for a moment at the refrigerator, then put a plateful of frozen sausage-biscuits into the microwave. She set the machine, then stepped aside to towel her hair dry while they heated. Kory leaned back in his chair, admiring her. He liked her very much as a redhead; it was a good color for her. A pity that the change had been mandated by their attempts to fool those “Feds” that were haunting their footsteps. A pity too that she could no longer sport those “cutting-edge” hairstyles she had favored, as well. In an attempt to change her silhouette completely, Kory had told her hair to become auburn and curly, and had instructed it to grow—very fast. She now had a mass of red curls that reached to the middle of her back (which she complained about constantly), and she made him think of tales the older Sidhe told of Ireland and the fabled mortal beauties of old. He’d made a new Faire costume for her which included an embroidered leather bodice and boots to match, in black and silver, with a pure linen skirt and loose-woven silk blouse of lovely forest green. Since she had been well-known in Faire circles for only making the briefest of concessions to the dress-code, this should throw off hunters as well.

He had made Eric’s hair into a mane of raven black; for the rest, the changes the young Bard had wrought in himself were enough to confuse pursuers. He no longer indulged in drugs or overindulged in alcohol, and he had added muscle in rebuilding this house. The result was something quite unlike the vague-eyed, skinny, sickly-looking creature Kory had first encountered. And in his new Faire costume, which matched Beth’s except that the colors were burgundy and silver, instead of black, he was quite an elegant sight. Kory’s own garb was of a piece with theirs, in scarlet and gold. The embroidered patterns matched, as did the placement, making it very clear to anyone who saw them together that they were an ensemble. Since neither Beth nor Eric had ever worked in a formal group at the Faires, that, too, should help to confuse things.

When they went out street-busking—which was how they had been paying for items like food and other necessities—they all wore their Faire boots and shirts, with jeans. The effect was striking, and caught quite a bit of attention for them down on the Wharf. Kory was quite proud that he had contributed in a material way to their success as buskers.

Danaa knew that his playing certainly wasn’t outstanding enough to do so. He was competent with drum and bones, but nothing more. And his singing voice, while pleasant, was not going to win any prizes either. Beth and Eric outshone him completely in both areas.

And when Eric exerted his full power as a Bard—coins and bills leapt into their hat.

Eric, however, was inclined not to use his power in that way unless it were direst emergency—as it had been during the first month of their escape from Los Angeles. He felt that it was a cheat, that people were not rewarding his skill as a musician, they were being hypnotized into giving him largesse. Kory silently applauded such a decision; it said a great deal for Eric’s growing sense of ethics. Beth sometimes seemed exasperated when he said things like that, but she also seemed to be pleased, if in a grudging way. Kory wondered often about Beth—how she could be so honorable, and then turn to and display an equally high ethical callousness. Eric just said that it was her television background, as if that explained it all.

Beth shook back her wild mane of curls with a grimace. “I can’t get used to this,” she complained. “It’s just so weird, having all this hair—” The microwave beeped then, and she pulled an oven mitt over her hand and took out the plate of biscuits.

Kory grinned. “ ‘Tis that, my lady, or be recognized. Wigs, they might expect—and hair-dye and curls. But not such a length, and obviously yours. True?”

“True,” she sighed, and put the plate down on the table, snatching a biscuit for herself and biting into it. “Very true. And I’m the one who keeps harping on the fact that we have to be underground. I just wish I knew another way of making a buck without coming out of hiding besides busking—everybody in L.A. knows I’m a musician, and somebody is bound to have let it leak.”

“But they aren’t lookin’ for a trio,” Eric yawned, shuffling sleepily through the door, and enveloped in a robe even larger than Beth’s. “And they’re a lot more likely to look for you with a rock-group than with a busker.” With all his newly-acquired muscle hidden beneath the bulky cloth, he looked as frail as he used to actually be. He kissed Beth between yawns, and gingerly picked up one of the biscuits, juggling it from hand to hand until it cooled off.

“That’s true,” Beth acknowledged, hugging him, and then pushing him into a chair. Eric was not a morning person in any sense of the word, and had been known to wander into furniture until he actually woke up. He smiled sleepily at Kory, who mimed a punch at him.

“Are you going to be awake enough to ride?” the elf asked him as he ate half the biscuit.

Eric nodded, and reached for the cup of coffee Beth was handing him. “With enough of this in me, I will be,” he said, after a swallow. Kory sniffed the tantalizing aroma wistfully; one mouthful would have put him in a stupor; one cupful might actually kill him—but it smelled so good.

Beth handed him a mug of cinnamon-hibiscus tea, which smelled nearly as good, and did not contain any of the caffeine that was so deadly to his kind. “He’ll be fine, Kory,” she said cheerfully. “He’s ridden up behind me plenty of times, you know that. You’d be amazed at what a good grip he has when we’re going sixty-five.”

“I still wish those things had seatbelts,” Eric muttered, but Kory suspected that Beth hadn’t heard him. He took another biscuit. “Are we changing here, or at the site?” the Bard asked.

“The site,” she replied, trying to get a comb through her hair. “I’ve got passes for us through the Celts as ‘Banysh Mysfortune,’ the name we auditioned under. So don’t tell anyone your real names unless they’re somebody I already cleared, okay? Even if you think it’s one of your best friends and they think they recognize you.”

Eric shook his head, and knuckled an eye. “I think you’re being overly paranoid, Bethy, but if that’s the way you want it . . . ” He shrugged. “I don’t have any best friends but you guys anyway—and if any of my old girlfriends showed up, I’d just as soon have an excuse not to recognize them. Are we doing the Celtic shows?”

Beth nodded; one of the first people she had contacted after their initial flight had been the head of the Celt Clan, a very resourceful gentleman, as Kory had seen when he’d met them at a Berkeley hamburger place. Evidently people in San Francisco—some of them, anyway—took the appearance of fugitives from the law on their doorstep in stride. He had been their chiefest help—had “networked,” was the word Beth used—gotten them in touch with others, and within a few days they had been settled into this townhouse and began putting new lives together.

At first, transportation had not been a problem; the BART system ran everywhere they wanted to play, and Kory could ride in the metal trains and buses, even though it was sometimes less than comfortable. He had rather enjoyed walking home from the stores with his arms loaded down with bags. It had been an entirely new experience. And, at first, things had been too precarious for them even to think about doing Northern Faire—making the house livable was taking up all the time they had to spare from street-busking. But as Faire season loomed nearer for the second year of their tenure here, and Beth had realized that they could make a substantial amount of money if only they could get there, she had become increasingly anxious to find some sort of transportation that could take them outside BART’s magic circle.

Oddly enough, it was Kory who had provided that. He had reminded her that most autos were too painful for him to ride in. Then he had mentioned, wistfully, that it was too bad that horses were no longer common—he could have called up a pair of elvensteeds for them in a trice.

Beth had narrowed her eyes in sudden speculation, but it had been Eric who had said, as if a memory had suddenly surfaced, “Elvensteeds? But what about that white Corvette I saw Val driving? The one that was a horse, except it wasn’t a horse—”

“Elvensteeds can counterfeit anything,” Kory had said without thinking. “They will not stand up to much of an examination, but they can counterfeit the appearance.” Then he had hit himself on the side of the head, in a gesture unconsciously borrowed from Eric. “But of course! I can call us elvensteeds, and ask them to counterfeit us cars—”

Beth had shaken her head. “Too conspicuous—and there’s always the chance that somebody would try to mess with them in the parking lot, and then what?” She’d bitten her knuckle in frustration. “No, what I wish is that we had some way to get a pair of bikes.”

“Bikes?” Kory had said, as Eric blanched. “You mean, motorcycles? But the elvensteeds can counterfeit those, as well!”

“The parking lot—” Beth had protested.

“Well,” Eric had put in reluctantly, “we could leave them and get off and walk and they could go hide themselves. People would think we’d gotten rides or hitched, and the ones who saw us ride in would just think we’d put the bikes inside one of the Admin buildings or something. Then when we needed them, Kory could call them in again. And it wouldn’t be that conspicuous for us to have bikes around here, not like a car, anyway; I know lots of buskers that have bikes.” He’d gulped. “There’s just one thing: I can’t ride.”

Beth had shrugged. “So, ride behind me. Kory? You think you can pull this off?”

He had nodded. “I can copy enough of Thomas’s Ninja to make ours pass, I think. I know a way to keep them from being meddled with in public places. And I can conjure us leathers, easily enough.” Beth had rolled her eyes at that, but had agreed, taking safety as a prime consideration. Kory had taken advantage of the situation to conjure leathers in “their” colors: burgundy and silver for Eric, scarlet and gold for himself, and black and silver for Beth. She had made a face and muttered something about the leathers being anything but inconspicuous, but she wore them anyway.

So their problem had been solved; and if they always arrived dry even when it rained, that could be chalked up to the San Francisco weather patterns, which would have one side of the street drenched and the other bone-dry.

“Then let us wear leathers,” Kory said with relish. He loved the outfits; loved the way they felt, as if he was donning armor for a joust, or hunting garb for a wild ride. Eric sighed, ate another biscuit, and headed back up the stairs to change.

Beth took the time for another large cup of coffee; Kory finished his tea, reached for a bit more Power, and clad himself in his leathers between one sip and the next, planting his helmet on the table next to him with a muffled thud.

Beth shook her head. “I can never get used to you doing that,” she complained.

“Hazard of living with elves, lovely lady,” he said, standing up, and tucking the helmet under his arm. “If you’ll excuse me, I’ll go fetch the steeds from the garage.”

“Thanks, love,” she said, blowing him a kiss as she turned to run up the stairs. “For that, I forgive you for running out the hot water.”

He grinned, and trotted back down the kitchen stairs, taking another path than the one that led to the hot tub. This one wound around the edge of the privacy fence and ended at the tiny garage occupying an otherwise useless odd-shaped corner of the garden.

It wasn’t much of a garage; it would have been barely big enough for a sub-compact car. It held the two elven-steeds quite comfortably, with plenty of room for them to transform into their normal forms if they chose. Kory’s steed matched his colors of scarlet and gold; Beth’s twinned her black and silver. Kory had based them loosely on the Ninja models of what Beth called “murder-cycles,” but he had made up a style-name—“Merlin”—and a company—“Toshiro.” That way, if people thought there was something wrong with the way the bikes “should” look, they could blame it on the fact that they’d never heard either of the company or the model. The names were private jokes; a merlin was both a small falcon, and the use-name of one of the greatest of Bardic Mages, although few humans these days seemed to realize that Bardic connection. And “Toshiro” was for the human who had created many great movies of Japanese culture, movies that Kory had often watched in the long hours of the night when Beth and Eric still slept.

He wheeled them out one at a time, setting them up in the street in front of the street-side door, and waited for Beth and Eric. They came out quicker than he’d had any right to expect; Beth on the run, stuffing her hair down into the back of her jacket and with the bags containing her costume, his, and their instruments slung over her shoulder. Eric followed more slowly, locking the door behind himself and, as always, settled behind Beth rather gingerly. Although Kory couldn’t see his face, he had the feeling that Eric wore a look of grim and patient determination.

Poor Eric; he never felt safe on these pseudo-metal beasts. Kory wondered if he’d have felt any better if they had been in their proper horse-shape.

Probably not.

He looked over at Beth, her face hidden behind the dark windscreen of her helmet, and nodded. She handed him his bags; he stowed them safely in the saddlebags on the “flanks” of his steed. Although these elvensteeds needed no kick-starting at all, they always kept up the pretense that they were real bikes by going through the motions of starting them.

Of course, with an elvensteed, there was never any nonsense of struggling with a motor that wouldn’t quite catch . . . The bikes roared to life with twin bellows of power; Beth let out a whoop of exuberance, and shot off into the lead. Kory followed, grinning happily. Beth had needed this for some time: to get back into the Faire circuit, to see old friends without worrying if the mysterious “Feds” were going to catch them—and she especially needed the party tonight.

For that matter, so did he. He hadn’t had a celebratory party in—

Danaa, is it that long?

High time then.

An odd humming reached his inner ears, a musical sound that accompanied a trace of magic energy; he leaned over the handlebars of his bike and smiled as he traced it forward. Eric was humming—

So was Beth.

He laughed aloud, and popped a wheelie.

It was going to be a most excellent day.

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