Viv met Noah early Saturday morning at the streetcar stop near Market and Powell. He scanned her face: “Late night?”
“Not so late,” she said evasively. It was true that Auterre had brought her home at a decent hour, and kissed her again on her doorstep before roaring away on his bike. But she hadn’t been able to sleep after that, still thrumming with energies that might have been either supernatural or entirely mundane. She’d stayed up late practicing with Excalibur, but her mind had studied only the memory of Auterre’s dark-eyed face. They had not made plans to meet again. In the hazy light of morning she felt both ashamed and delighted with herself for the previous night’s escapade.
Noah scratched his beard. “So you went out with him,” he said, his voice carefully neutral.
“I did,” she admitted. “Listen, I know how this sounds, but I think maybe there’s some kind of...destiny? Around him? His name is French for Arthur. And he’s fighting for water rights. Like, the Lake?”
Noah fixed her with a dubious stare. “Destiny.”
“The name thing is weird. Especially since mine is a little like Vivian, the Lady of the Lake in the stories.”
Noah held up a finger. “One. His name is Auterre, not Arthur, and your name is not Vivian. It’s Viveka. That’s different.”
“It’s really similar!”
“Similar is not the same. Look, I do heraldry, I spend a lot of time studying the meaning and language of symbols. Very small variations carry huge differences in meaning. Your name is Swedish, right? It has nothing to do with the Matter of Britain. I bet you it doesn’t even come from the same language root as Vivian.” He unfurled a second finger. “And two. The Lady of the Lake has a lot of different names in the stories. It’s only sometimes Vivian. She’s also called Nimue, Niniane...those sound nothing like Viveka.”
“Because there was more than one of them! The Lady of the Lake isn’t a person, it’s—it’s an office.”
“Which brings us to three. What’s your theory here? Reincarnation? How could that work when the woman who gave you the sword was still alive?”
Viv shook her head helplessly. “I don’t know. I just think it’s...too much to be coincidence.”
“It’s really not,” said Noah gently, dropping his hand. “Arthur’s a pretty common name, in a lot of languages. And anyway, Lady Vivian never romanced Arthur. She took Merlin. Maybe you should be looking for an old guy with a long beard and a pointy hat.”
“Har de har har.”
“And fourthly,” he said, though he was no longer enumerating the points on his fingers, and in fact had turned his head away from her as he spoke: “That guy is an asshole, I’m warning you.”
Before she could respond to this, the streetcar—a shiny yellow vehicle, rounded at both ends—came rattling to their stops. Noah flashed his pass and Viv fed her two bucks into the till. They settled into a wooden bench well-polished by multiple generations of bottoms. Excalibur took up its own spot, but the other passengers only shifted to accommodate them.
“Oh and,” Noah said casually, “I don’t know you if you know this, but ‘Jennifer’ is the modern version of the name Guinevere.” When Viv glanced over at him, stricken, he added: “It’s also, like, the most popular girl’s name of our generation. Seriously. I think it’d be weird if you didn’t know at least one Arthur, and several Jennifers. And I don’t know why you’re focusing on Arthur anyway. Haven’t we figured out that the sword goes back farther than him? What about poor Fergus?”
“You’re just jealous that there’s no Sir Goldberg in the old romances,” Viv told him, and Noah shrugged.
“Maybe a little.”
The streetcar took them down Market, past the area that Viv recognized as the northern boundary of the Mission, and into San Francisco’s famously gay neighborhood, the Castro. “This is it,” Noah said, yanking the signal cord.
They trooped off the streetcar at the intersection of Castro and Market. Clustered around the intersection was a sidewalk café, mostly filled with young, very well-built men dining alone and together; a sparkly pink storefront advertising “Faerie Queene Chocolates”; a sex shop, its plate window filled with dildos and leather harnesses; and, on the fourth corner, an enormous rainbow flag stirring lazily above an entrance to the subway system. Noah pointed at a little side street veering off Castro, and Viv saw a sign for Orphan Andy’s, the diner where the mysterious Piper had told them to meet.
When they got there, she saw a narrow space, just wide enough for a long counter, a row of stools, and three little booths tucked against the wall. One of them already held the fey street musician. He was dressed casually, this time, in jeans and a plaid shirt, but his not-quite-human beauty was undimmed in the light of day: pale, perfectly even features, as smooth as if sanded from marble, marked by the thin slashes of his eyebrows and the brilliance of his long-lashed eyes. He had a friend with him, a buff young Asian man who in any other company would have been the most handsome boy in the room. But next to the Piper, his skin seemed sallow, his silky hair dull and lank.
Piper flashed them a friendly smile, and Viv slid into the bench across the table. She propped Excalibur at her knee, beneath the table, and kept one hand on the pommel. Noah took his seat gingerly beside her.
“Who is this?” Piper demanded at once, his sparkling eyes fixing on Noah.
“He’s No—” Viv started, but Noah interrupted.
“I’m nobody,” he said.
Piper laughed, and there was something harsh in the sound. “You think you’re clever,” he said, “but you give yourself an ill-omened name; if you become what you pretend to be you’ll lose yourself entire. Give me at least the name of your trade.”
Noah hesitated: Viv guessed Tech Guy didn’t make a very appealing name. “Hacker,” he said.
Viv looked over at him, startled. “Really?” she blurted out.
Noah kept his eyes on Piper. “It doesn’t mean what you think it means,” he said. “I’m a hacker in the original sense. I can take machines and networks and programs apart, and put them back together again.”
“Everything has an older meaning,” Piper agreed serenely. “All words have their secrets. Spells and gods are buried in the thicket of language. I salute you, Hacker Knight.”
“Thanks,” said Noah.
Piper waved a graceful hand at his companion. “This is Raven Park. Unlike most, he will have already noticed the sword you carry. He has a glimmering of the Sight. It’s not very common, not anymore.”
“Hi,” Raven said, reaching across the table to shake hands with Viv and Noah in turn. “Is this all as weird for you as it is for me?”
“You mean the whole thing with fairies being real? Yeah, it’s pretty weird,” Viv said. “How did you end up...together?”
A waiter came by to drop off a stack of menus, and the table fell silent. Viv noted with amusement that the cover illustration featured a wide-eyed urchin with a hobo’s stick slung over his shoulder, but he was drawn with furry pecs and a bulging crotch. As the waiter left, Raven answered: “He picked me up in a club a few months ago. It seemed normal, until it all stopped being normal at all.”
“What does it mean, that you have the Sight?” Viv asked curiously.
“It means that I saw him when he was sneaking out in the morning,” Raven said. “He meant to be invisible, I guess.”
“I was invisible,” Piper snorted. “And any other of my kind would have asked you which eye it is that you saw me with, and when you answered they would have plucked out the eye.”
“Why are you so different, then?” Noah interjected. “You told us Morgan le Fay has exiled you?”
“That bitch,” Piper assented, and volunteered no more.
“So she is—the fairy Queen?” Viv asked.
“Yes, of course.” Piper looked around impatiently, signaling the waiter with a low whistle. “I’ll have the apple pancakes.”
They went around the table with their orders—Viv asked for chicken fried steak—but when the waiter had left Noah returned doggedly to his questions. “Is there a King, then?”
“When she wants one. Not at the moment.”
“What about Irusan?” Viv cut in. “He’s a King. According to him.”
Piper’s bright eyes turned to her. “You met Irusan?” He seemed genuinely amused. “I hope you kept a civil tongue in your head.”
“Not exactly,” Viv admitted. “I think he wanted to eat someone, and I got in the way.” Her hand rose involuntarily to her temple, touching the fabric of the beret above her cut.
“You will pay for that,” Piper said matter-of-factly. “Irusan does not forget a slight. He has no sense of humor.” After a beat, he added: “Or any ear for music.”
“But does he serve Morgan le Fay?”
“He would have your head for asking that. The King of Cats serves no one at all—and in truth, no one serves him. Each cat is his own sovereign. But Irusan is the least of your worries.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean that he is capricious and vain, but your true enemy is le Fay, and she is implacable and full of every kind of subtlety. I promise you that even now she is working the threads of her web into this world, fraying the boundaries, extending her dominion. She is everything you must stand against.”
“And how do I do that?” Viv demanded. “Am I supposed to—to march into Fairyland and go and fight her?”
Piper looked alarmed. “You are very eager to exercise your mortal prerogative,” he said carefully, “but suicide is not the answer. You must simply be vigilant. Observe her threads as she weaves them, and cut them one by one. That is what the sword is for: to defend the borders of the human world, to keep the boundary clean and sharp.” His gaze slid to Raven. “What can you tell her of the magic of swords, my young magician?”
“I—well,” Raven said, a little apologetically, “I’m a shaman, actually. Seriously: I’m in the phone book, under S. In in my practice I mainly do Earth magic, especially native-based spirituality: cleansing rituals, medicine bags, dream interpretation, spirit journeys, that sort of thing. Though I’ve been getting more into Confucian magic lately. I have studied a little bit of tarot, but that whole branch of magic, you know, Aleister Crowley, the Hermetic stuff, it’s not really my specialty.” He took a deep breath. “But I can tell you that every Hermetic magician has a ceremonial sword, and even the Wiccans kept the practice, with their athames. Sorry, I’m babbling, I know.”
Piper gave him a fond look, and Raven went on: “The ritual use of a sword or knife is to—to define boundaries, like he said. In tarot the suit of swords corresponds to the intellect, the element of air, and the energies of conflict. But it tends to be the more sterile, destructive side of war, as opposed to, say, wands, which also deal with conflict but are generative.”
“There you are,” Piper said. “And the card called the Queen of Swords? Tell her what it means?”
Raven thought about it for a minute. “It represents idea and perception, but there’s also kind of an unlucky association. That card maps to the Queen of Spades in an ordinary deck, and she’s always the jinx card, the Old Maid. In the French deck she’s Joan of Arc.”
Piper turned back to Viv. “That’s your card.”
“Gee, thanks.”
He looked a little sorry, then. “What you must realize is that the sword is not magical as a thing, it is magical as an idea. As long as you bear it your thoughts will fly quickly; you will perceive the patterns that bind all things; you will be difficult to deceive, for you will see through disguise and glamor, although you may be misled by superficial truths, and frustrated by that which is deeper and filled with contradiction. You may begin to create patterns of order where there were none before. You will find yourself growing sharper and colder and more reckless the longer you bear the sword, and it will lead you to destruction if you possess it too long." He paused. "Unless of course, you discover the scabbard.”
“The scabbard!” Viv cried, loudly enough to turn a few heads in the diner. She dropped her voice. “The woman who gave me the sword told me ‘the sword is precious, but the scabbard is more precious.’ What did she mean by that?”
“I know,” Noah interjected, “why didn’t you ask me? I’ve been reading all the Arthurian stories. There’s one version of how he got Excalibur—not the sword-in-the-stone version but the one where the Lady of the Lake gave it to him—where it comes with a magical scabbard. And Merlin asks Arthur which is more valuable, the sword or the scabbard. Arthur says the sword, of course, but Merlin tells him he’s wrong, because as long he wears the scabbard any cut he takes will instantly heal, he’s invulnerable. But Morgan le Fay steals the scabbard and throws it in a lake, and it’s lost forever.”
“Well, why did the other lady even tell me about it,” Viv said crankily, “if it’s been gone for ages?”
Piper only lifted a perfectly sculpted eyebrow as their waiter returned, bearing hot platters of food and a pot of coffee. Viv’s fried steak came with a side of biscuits, and both meat and bread were slathered a thick, rich layer of gravy. She tucked in with an appetite.
“I have a question,” Noah said, after a decent pause had been given for everyone to attack their breakfasts. “How did British fairies end up in California?”
“Apple,” Piper said, around a mouthful of pancake.
“Apple...Computers?” Noah ventured, and Viv was about to laugh at him, but Piper nodded.
“Avalon,” he said matter-of-factly, “means the Isle of the Apples. The fruit of the first temptation, the vehicle, in your stories, by which your own immortality was lost. We dwell still in the eternal summerland that is the source of them all. But also we spread as they did, across the ocean, and following your Johnny Appleseed into the West. Now there is a connection between Avalon and everywhere in the mortal world that apples are significant. There are, for example, sizable fairy grottoes in China now—did you know that most of your world’s apples are grown in China? But the metaphorical apples draw us too. There are fairies in New York, the ‘Big Apple’—and fairies here, where your people care deeply, even worshipfully, for their Apples.”
Noah snorted. “Do you have an iPad?”
“I have nothing,” Piper said coldly. “Le Fay has stripped it all away, and still she sends her minions to harass me.”
“What did you do to tick her off so much?” Viv asked. “I mean, if you don’t mind me asking.”
Piper stretched a casual arm around Raven’s shoulders, fixing his boyfriend in his bright gaze. “I took an interest in mortal souls,” he said. “My involvement was against her wishes and orders.”
Raven smiled. “Exiled for love,” he said. “Old story.”
They ate in silence for a bit, and Viv nursed her coffee. “Can you give me an example,” she asked finally, “of one of these plots of the Queen, that you say I’m supposed to fight?”
“Certainly,” Piper said readily. “There is a full moon tonight. She will send her hounds to the park to hunt.”
“Hunt what?”
Again he looked at her with that expression of pity. “Hunting what fairies have always hunted,” he said. “You’ll see. If you take Caladbolg there tonight, it will show you. You should look for her means of ingress, and destroy it, to end her predations.”
Beneath the table, Viv wrapped her fingers around Excalibur’s hilt. “I’ll look into it,” she promised.
“Then I will give you a gift,” Piper said solemnly. “Can you whistle?”
Viv pursed her lips and blew a reedy note. “That’s about all I can do,” she said. “I can’t do it loud, and I can’t carry a tune.”
Piper reached over the table and, though she instinctively leaned back in startlement, touched his fingers to her lips. She felt a buzzing beneath her skin, as if she’d been to the dentist and the sedation was starting to wear off. She loosed the sword, touching both hands to her mouth in surprise. “Now,” Piper said. “Again.”
So she whistled again, and this time the sound came out clear and strong. Piper nodded.
“Th—thank you!” Viv stuttered in amazement. “Um, but I don’t see...how do I use this? Against the Queen?”
He smiled. “That was only the lesser part of the gift. This is the greater.” And then he whistled, a long note that rose and then fell again, a sound that reminded Viv of the haunting call of a mourning dove. “Remember that, and call me if you are in need. It’s my name. I will hear it.”
Viv repeated the tune. She found it easy, now, to replicate. Experimentally, she also tried whistling “Beautiful Ohio,” and found that came easily too. Grinning, she moved on to whistling Dixie, at which point Piper shifted impatiently in his seat.
“Yes, yes,” he said. “Waiter, check please.”
“Sorry,” Viv mumbled, but she was still grinning. Raven smiled back at her in a friendly way, but Noah looked troubled. She elbowed him. “What?” But he only shook his head.
Piper took no notice: he was making a show of accepting the check from the waiter. “On me,” he said grandly.
“Thank you,” Viv said politely, and even Noah echoed her.
When he’d finished counting out bills to cover the total, Piper merely looked at them. “I will see you then,” he said, “when you need to see me.” He slid easily out of the booth, and his boyfriend rose to follow him.
“It was nice to meet you,” Raven told them. “Good luck with everything.”
Viv and Noah murmured their goodbyes, but Noah made no move to rise, waiting instead until the pair had left the diner before turning to her with the same worried expression.
“What?” she demanded again. “I’ve never been able to whistle before, it’s totally cool.”
“In all the stories,” he said, “fairy gifts come with a price.”
“Well, I can’t help that,” she answered, a little testily, “he didn’t give me any choice about it.”
“You have a choice about using it,” he pointed out.
Viv sighed. “Okay. Fine. I’ll save it for emergencies. —You’re a worrywart.”
“I know,” he agreed. “But you’re much too trusting. Reckless, even,” he added significantly.
Viv rolled her eyes. “The sword’s not changing me,” she assured him. “I’m just not going to throw away a cool present from someone who wants to help. Piper saved my life, you know, and he’s not asked me for anything in return."
“Yet.” Noah finally slid out of the booth, freeing Viv to follow. She collected her sword, and nodded her thanks to the waiter. But as she glanced back, following Noah out the door, the stack of money on the table changed in her vision to a pile of dry brown leaves.
She grabbed Noah’s elbow. “Wait!” When he stopped, she held out the sword. “Touch this, and look back there.”
He did as she said, and his eyes went wide: then he sighed. “What did I tell you!”
She looked at him in chagrin. “I have enough for my part,” she said, “but I can’t cover them.”
“Fairy gifts,” Noah said grimly, as he pulled out his wallet.