For a moment the music dwindled. "Everyone all right back there?" asked the driver.
"Just fine," Theo replied. The music came back up, throbbing mysteriously, sugared now with the faint chirping of some stringed instrument. If there were crickets in Heaven, Theo thought, then listening to them must be something like this.
Music really did mean something to him, he realized, and it always had. It called to him, although there were no words to describe what it promised. It was like a secret language he never forgot how to speak, a hometown he could always return to when he tired of what life was throwing at him. From the moment he had first heard himself imitating the sounds that came from his mother's radio, before he even knew that what he was doing was called "singing," music had seemed like a place only Theo knew about and in which he was always welcome. Now he listened with joy to this strange, new music — the first hint of an entire world full of music he had never heard or even imagined, an idea as inviting as a kiss — and as he did so he stared at the sky. As Poppy Thornapple had suggested, the stars, already insanely bright, seemed to be growing even brighter as the car rolled deeper into the countryside darkness. At the same time, their gleam did not turn the sky around them blue, but made it seem even more unashamedly black.
The dark sky got darker. The stars got brighter. The music surrounded him, lifted him, even seemed to teach him things about this world he hadn't understood before he'd heard it. After a time he could not compute, Theo found himself carefully disengaging himself from Poppy Thornapple, moving her head from his shoulder and propping it with his own folded jacket. He lifted himself from the seat, putting first his head and then his shoulders out through the moon roof until he could spread his elbows on the roof of the car. The air that lashed his face was warm and just a little damp; he found himself wondering absently if rain clouds here moved like they did in the real world, or had patterns as confusing as the inconstant towns of Faerie.
But sweet as it was, the fertile-smelling air was barely on his mind or in his senses: with the lights of the town now far behind them and only the silvery beams of the car's headlights smearing the road ahead, the stars seemed to grow even grander and more dramatic, to flame like novas. He could see both their living, burning, gaseous immensity and their diamond hardness, as though they were cosmic and magical objects simultaneously. They filled the sky in all directions, and even the smallest shone so clearly that for the first time in his life he truly felt the world beneath him to be something adrift in a spherical sea of lights. At the same time, as the strange fairy melodies rose up around him and the moist wind tugged at his hair, he could see that beyond doubt they were also gems scattered across the fabric of the sky, or even the eyes of gods.
It was only when he slumped back down in his seat half an hour later that Theo realized that his cheeks were wet, and that he had been crying for a long time.
He woke to find something brushing against his nostril and a sneeze building.
"Don't you dare!" Applecore said sharply.
"Then get off my face." He scratched his itching nose and tried to sit up, but discovered that the Thornapple girl was draped over him, lying on his arm. Outside the car it was quite dark; the stars framed in the moon roof, while spectacularly beautiful by any earthly measure, were vastly reduced from what he had seen before.
"We're not in what's-it-called anymore," he said groggily.
"Starlightshire. Not for hours. We're just cutting across the edge of Ivy. We'll be in the City soon." The sprite's wings buzzed briefly as she lit on his knee. From what he could see of her by the dimly illuminated panels over the doors, she looked strained and edgy.
But why wouldn't she? he thought. This hasn't been any easier on her than me. Still, he did not want to be conscious right now — it felt like he hadn't slept in days. "Why did you wake me up?" he complained.
"Because we're going to be there soon and I need to talk to you before she wakes up."
"She's not so bad, you know."
"You would think that, wouldn't you?" Applecore crossed her arms over her chest. "But that's neither here nor there. We have to decide where to get out."
"Aren't we going to that, what was it… ?" He ransacked his fuzzy memory. "Springwater Square? To see that Foxglove guy?"
"No. Not unless you want to find out what happens to bad mortal boys who don't listen to their elders."
"Elders? Oh, my God, how old are you?"
"Old enough to think with my head and not other parts of me, thank you very much. I don't care what Tansy says, we're not going to put ourselves in that Foxglove's hands. Those Flowers think they know everything, but I've been in the City lately and I've heard what people there are saying. That Foxglove and…" she lowered her voice, making Theo lean as far toward her as he could with Poppy's head in his armpit, "… and this girl's father are thick as thieves. And they're both chummy with Lord Hellebore, and that's about as bad as news can get."
"Who's Hellebore? I think I've heard the name before."
"We've time to talk about it later. Right now, you let me do the talking to your girlfriend here."
"She's not…"
Poppy was stirring. She lifted her head and brushed a strand of ink-black hair out of her eyes. She wore it cut short, shorter even than Applecore's hacked red bob, but without the hat her bangs seemed continually in her eyes. "Theo… ? Are we there?"
"Not yet," Applecore said shortly. "Go back to sleep."
She sat up, yawning and stretching. "Shade and stream, I must be a terrible sight! I'll have to ask the driver to stop somewhere so I can freshen up before we reach town."
"That's just what I wanted to talk to you about, Mistress," Applecore began, but the girl sat up straight on the seat and took Theo's hand.
"Look, we are here. I told you it wouldn't take long."
They were coming around a hillside bend and for a moment Theo, looking a bit stupidly at the smoked glass that separated them from the driver's seat, couldn't understand what she was talking about. Then he saw the first of the lights framed in the window beside him.
It was immense, so wide that it seemed to fill the entire horizon. At this distance he couldn't make out individual buildings but only the lights that filled the wide, flat valley between the hills, a monstrous wash of lights as though someone had spilled a wheelbarrow full of diamonds, emeralds, and sapphires across the ground, as though the stars through which he had flown earlier had drifted down from the sky and piled up like snowflakes.
"It's… it's big." He wasn't certain he'd ever seen any earthly city so large — it had to be in the range of New York or Tokyo or Mexico City, at least — but he also found he didn't care much about comparisons just now. It was majestic and stunningly beautiful and, because the lights were just a few tones off from what he was used to, more than a little alien. His heart was beating very quickly, and not simply from wonder: there was fear, too, at something both so monumental and so utterly indifferent to him.
He swallowed, staring in silence for what might have been half a minute, then at last began to sing in a quiet voice, "They say the neon lights are bright, on Broadway…" He gave the old tune a long, slow bluesy read, then, when no one objected, sang "I Left My Heart in San Francisco," and an old Journey song from his childhood about city lights, and finished off his impromptu urban medley with "New York, New York."