Applecore had slid down from the headrest and crawled across the seat to find a more stable spot to sleep off her headache, curled on top of Rufinus' coat. The young fairy lord had opened his valise, which seemed to be a sort of laptop computer or the equivalent, though what it looked like was a shallow box full of mercury that eddied and rippled but somehow never spilled over the edges. Tansy's cousin watched its sparkling movements avidly and closely, talking and even laughing to himself, waving his fingers above it.
"Reading my mail," he explained when he saw Theo staring.
The skies stopped merely threatening and began more active intimidation. The first drops of rain splattered against the windshield like fat rotten berries and within moments Heath had set the windshield wipers ticking back and forth. Outside whatever beauty made this Fairyland as opposed to just Any-Old-Land was obscured by gray light and swirling rains.
In other circumstances Theo might have wondered why a blind driver needed windshield wipers, but at the moment he was using all his energy just being miserable.
It was nothing so simple as homesickness, although he was feeling that in spades, or even simple terror, which was in excellent supply as well. Dolly's remark about his shallowness was working away in the pit of his stomach. Was it true? Even Applecore was so disenchanted with him that she wasn't going to cut short a visit with her folks to spend time with him.
So I'm supposed to be a hero, a diplomat, what? I didn't ask to come here. I didn't ask to have any of this happen. Just because I've got the brains to say, "This sucks" instead of pretending it's some kind of wonderful fairy-tale trip, does that make me a bad guy?
Cat's pale face hovered in his thoughts, her dogged determination to add to the legend of Theo the Useless even from her hospital bed: "It's always the same. You're thirty years old but you act like a teenager. The shit you start and never finish. Your going-nowhere job…"
He had to concede a few points, but he wasn't ready to give in completely. Besides, when people said you were acting like a teenager, didn't that usually mean they were jealous because you had more freedom than they did? Was having an all-consuming job you didn't like very much, like Cat's, somehow proof of being a grown-up, or proof of having given up on the possibility of better things?
Well, nobody has to worry about my own going-nowhere job, because I don't have it anymore. And as for going nowhere in general, I've certainly gone somewhere now, haven't I? He sighed.
The horselike face of Heath the driver surveyed him in the rearview mirror — or seemed to: it was hard to tell with no eyes there to meet his. "You're the mortal, aren't you?"
"Isn't it obvious?"
"Not really. You smell a little foreign, but that's true with a lot of people who've been traveling, if you get what I mean."
"Yeah, I guess." Desperate for something to alleviate his gloom, Theo seized on the age-old diversion of Talking to the Driver. Suicidally bored mandarins probably did this with the rickshaw guys back in ancient China, he thought. "So how does someone get a job like yours?"
"Ah, you know, it's kind of in the family. My dad and granddad were both hackies. That's what we do, a lot of us."
"Doonies, you mean? Have I got that right?"
"Yeah, exactly. We all used to be road-guardians — each family would have their own patch and they'd take care of it, live off small offerings, reward good or kind travelers and punish bad ones, like that. Then the Flowers up in the City decided to begin building the Interdomain Highway System and… well, we doonies fought it. Organized ourselves, pleaded our case in front of the Parliament, you name it. I suppose a few roads might have got torn up as well." He shrugged, a gesture that looked strange until Theo realized he didn't have the same kind of shoulders as a human. "Anyway, we lost. Now the roads belong to all of Faerie, they say. Whatever that means. It don't mean doonies, I'll tell you that for free. So we made the best of it — it was a while ago. A lot of us started driving, like my granddad. We do like being near the roads, still."
There was a note of loss in his voice that Theo recognized very clearly. "And how long have you been driving for Count Tansy?"
"Well, not for him as such, y'see, but for the Daisy clan. Pretty much all my life. My dad hooked up with them in the old lord's day, would have been… six hundred years ago? Give or take a few decades."
Theo had to swallow before he could say anything else. "And how… how are they to work for?"
Heath darted a quick if eyeless glance at the other side of the mirror. Rufinus was still chortling to himself over his valise. "Oh, fine, fine. Better than most. Treat you pretty good, almost like one of the family."
"Urgh," said Applecore. She levered herself upright and peered blearily from the folds of Rufinus' coat, then clambered slowly onto Theo's leg and up his sleeve, her wings waggling slowly. "I feel like a bugbear just shat inside me skull." From her new perch on Theo's shoulder she squinted out the rainy window at the wet country lane. "Where are we? We've gone way past Oxeye Station."
"We're not going there," said Rufinus without looking up from his shimmering valise. "Cousin Quillius thought it would be a bad idea — that if someone should be looking for us, they'd certainly be looking for any trains coming into the terminal from Oxeye — it is the Daisy station, after all. So Heath is driving us all the way to Penumbra Station. It should be usefully crowded because of the holiday. It's Mabon the day after tomorrow," he said to Theo by way of explanation. "The trains will be very full."
"Fairy trains," said Theo, still not quite used to the idea, even while riding in a fairy limousine. "And what the hell is a Mabon?"
"Stop the coach," said Applecore suddenly. "Quick!"
"What?" Rufinus frowned. "You heard what I said — Cousin Quillius wants us to go all the way to…"
"Stop the coach!"
"Why?" asked Theo, beginning to panic. "What's wrong?"
"I'm going to be bloody sick, that's why!" groaned Applecore, then immediately proved it.
As Rufinus hurriedly opened the window and began flapping his hand to get some air into the backseat and counteract the slight but acrid smell, Applecore wiped her mouth with her arm and looked at the small mess she had made down the shoulder of Theo's jacket.
"Sorry," she said sullenly. "It was those be-damned berries."
Theo sighed and tried not to look at it. He was in a car being driven by a green pony-man with no eyes, he was spattered with cold rain and pixie barf, and was about to be deserted by his only friend so he could continue on to an unfamiliar city with a companion right out of a Monty Python sketch. He tried to imagine a way the words "fairy tale" could be stretched to this meaning without destroying it entirely. He failed.
"Yeah, well," he told Applecore. "One of those days, I guess."
14
PENUMBRA STATION
"You should be grateful you weren't wearing anything nice," Rufinus said solemnly as Theo used the rainwater-dampened handkerchief to remove the last of the spot Applecore had made. The fairy frowned. "If something like that happened to one of my Acanthus suits, I'd be perfectly murderous." The handkerchief was Heath's — even the thought of his own being used that way had sent Tansy's young cousin into shudders.