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last year." She lifted as pretty a chin as he'd seen on a colleen for many a year. He'd seen a lot, and most
of them gave him even more of a crick in the neck than this one.
"For atmosphere."
"That doesn't just mean smoke, you know. That's what the shamrocks and green tablecloths are for.
And the music."
"Aye. The music is right enough."
This imitation of old Ireland would have been funny if it had been any less accurate or any more so.
The spirit of the music was dead on, somehow. It wasn't that the singers were all great or even
necessarily good or that some of the players didn't make a horse's butt out of the old tunes. But the
heartbreak and laughter in it were right. And this piece of earth had always liked his fiddling. Indeed, it
was a beautiful piece of earth, much like Ireland back in early days, when there'd been but one treeless
plain, for all that this place was on the cool southern end of Africa. The strip between the sea and the
Outeniqua mountains was cloaked in yellowwood forest and dense fern, hiding narrow gorges with
ale-brown, peat-stained rivers. There was only one major road across all of it, and the little hamlet of
Bloukrans one gas station, seven scattered, rundown houses, a general dealer, and the
Curragh straddled that. Once this had been a logger's town. Now it survived on travelers, tourists, and
people from the beach-holiday town of Plettenberg Bay driving nearly twenty miles for good beer, better
music, and a lack of municipal bylaws about closing time. But there'd always been a settlement, brewing,
and song here. Rúadan knew there always would be. The place they now called the Curragh loved the
music and the singing. The magic that leaked through from Underhill his reason for being (to put it
politely) "posted" to a place so far from the Node Groves of the New World was centered on this
spot. It needed a protector.
So he'd been told, anyway. To himself, Rúadan admitted it could have just been that the High Court
wanted to get rid of him. The problem was that the Lords and Princes of Faerie didn't have much of a
sense of humor.
He blew a smoke ring. "Of course no real shebeen in the old days had ever wasted aught on
'atmosphere' beyond a peat-turf fire and no chimney beyond a hole in the roof. Not a big hole, either. I'm
just making up for it. A good boozing-ken needs to be smoky and badly lit. It makes the lasses look
better."
He did not add, And nonhuman fiddlers have to work less hard on their seeming, although that was true
too.
"I always wondered what you smoked in that thing. All is revealed! Peat. What it smells like it, anyway."
She balanced used glasses onto her overfull tray. "We've made progress since then. We've got dimmer
switches."
"Generally speaking, progress is something I approve of," said Rúadan, as he shrugged on his tatty
maroon velvet coat. It was true enough. Progress meant beer with no lumps in it, and foam rubber, which
was a long step up on a pile of leaves for lying on. "But this is a misstep, I'd be thinking. The pub'll lose
money."
She shrugged. "Strange crowd tonight, Red. A lot of them weren't really drinking anyway, let alone
smoking."
That was the thing about barmaids. They had as keen an eye for the crowd as an entertainer did. "Aye.
And some of them didn't join in with 'Wild Rover.'" He shrugged, picked up his blackthorn stick from the
corner. Somehow, no one in the place ever noticed the skull on the top of it. It was a minor piece of
magic, really. "Well, it's a good night that I'll bid you, dear."
He picked up his fiddle case and pulled on his old hat. It had once been a rich burgundy hue, but, like
most of his working clothes, it was elderly. Red and old, tradition demanded.
She grinned tiredly. "You can put the accent away, Red. I'm not one of the punters."
He winked and walked out into the cool night air. Sure enough, the sky was beginning to pale over the
dark mass of the forest. It would be light in half an hour. Well, it wasn't far to his tree. He passed through
the parking lot, and into the forest that backed onto it. It wasn't much of a place, Bloukrans, even like
tonight when it wasn't raining. It rained nearly as much here as it did in the Wicklow hills. It was the
reason for the tall-tree forests here, and the blue-green mold on the buildings not that the folk around
here cared much for the painting of their houses, anyway. The scattered wooden houses were much the
same color as the tree trunks.
* * *
Moira watched him walk away. He was an odd one! The boss claimed they tolerated having a
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