Free Whiskey and Water by Elizabeth Bear

of the half-dozen
or so and carried it to the window and daylight. "If you had any idea
what Faerie was, what it's done, you wouldn't be so eager to get down on the
ground and roll in it, kid.
    "You have your magic, Matthew
Magus," the Merlin said. "It's easy for us to forget mundanity. And there
are worse things than Faerie in the world."
    There was no shadow over her this time, no
scorch and hiss of the Dragon underlying her words. It didn't mean the Dragon
wasn't there; the Dragon was always there. That was what it meant to be the Merlin:
to comprehend the Dragon Whose Pearl Was the Heart of the World, to understand
the counsel of the selfish and violent mother of everything as the spoken word
rather than a mere savage trickle of instinct.
    Matthew never let himself forget it.
"'What do we do?"
    She glanced from him to the children and
tilted her head. A braid slipped over her ear. "Are you expected
home?"
    Jewels glanced at Geoff. "We haven't
got anybody," she said. "Why?"
    Carel showed her teeth. "Then no one
will miss you if you come with us to Faerie," she said, and a shock of joy
went through Jewels as hot and cold as liquor.
    "Morgan?" Matthew asked.
    Carel's senses weren't any more acute than
a normal woman's. But the Dragon smelled the fear rising cold and bittersweet
and appetizing through his coat, although it never showed in his expression.
"Scared of a little fire, Scarecrow? "
    "I wasn't planning on a day trip to
Annwn."
    The Merlin's lips pulled tighter.
"Not Morgan. Elaine." She reached for the phone. "But first, I have to call home and tell my girlfriend I'm missing dinner."

Chapter Five
    The Ballad of Thomas the
Rhymer
    H e was a gray cat with one white rear foot,
Rumpelstiltskin by name. A twenty-pounder, cougar-bodied, lean and soft, and
that one foot glimmered like a moth's wings in the half-dark as he picked his
way across a red and ivory carpet, intent on a single morning sunbeam that had
slipped between the drapes. He stalked the bright patch as he would have
stalked a mouse, not deigning to notice the three women and three men already
seated in or standing around the room.
    Only two of them noticed him. One was
Christian, splendid and silent with his curled red hair and his eyes like a
cat's, green and hazel and tawny all at once, who leaned in the shadows beside
the fireplace. The second was Autumn, whose house and whose cat it was, and who
watched Rumpelstiltskin's stately progression as she closed her cell phone and
sighed.
    Christian noticed that too, but Christian
noticed everything. He smiled at her with only the corners of his mouth and
eyes, shy commiseration. He cupped fine-boned hands around a steaming pottery
mug, and didn't speak a word.
    "Carel?" Moira asked, her voice
bright with sympathy, and Autumn nodded. "That woman does not appreciate
you."
    "Oh," Autumn said, "she
does."
    "If she came to circle we'd be eight.
One more makes nine. It would be nice to have nine."
    "If Lily showed up once in a
while." Jason, the high priest, crouched over a glass-topped coffee table teaching
tarot to a young woman by the decreasingly unusual name of Michael. He placed
another card, completing the cross, commencing the tower.
    "Carel's busy supporting me in the
style to which I'd like to become accustomed." Autumn folded the phone and
replaced it in its pouch on the outside of her leather daypack. Her skirt slid
between her knees and as she tugged the layers of gold and violet cotton gauze
smooth she smiled around the irony of being unable to tell a house full of
pagans that her lover was busy because she was the Merlin.
    "Wish I could find one of
those." Gary— Gypsy, he'd tell you—looked up from his seat behind a
card table in the corner. He'd laid silk scarves across its surface and was
methodically dipping crystals in springwater and wiping them dry before laying
each one on a scarf and winding it in two turns of insulating silk. He usually
wore flannel, ragged jeans, and unlaced boots, a