I gave her a tight smile and said, “Not you. Talking with myself.”
“Ah,” she said. She flicked her eyes down to below my waist and back, smirking. Then she took a step forward, drawing me into the ring of mushrooms, and the basement blurred and went away, as if the shadow of an ancient mountain had fallen over us.
Then the shadow lifted, and we were elsewhere.
It’s at this point that my senses pretty much broke down.
The darkness lifted away to light and motion and music like nothing I had ever seen before—and I’ve been to the wildest spots in Chicago and to a couple of parties that weren’t even being held inside our reality.
We stood inside a ring of mushrooms and in a cave. But that doesn’t really describe it. Calling the hall of the Tylwyth Teg a cave is about the same as calling the Taj Mahal a grave. It’s technically accurate, but it doesn’t begin to cover it.
Walls soared up around me, walls in the shape of natural stone but somehow surfaced in the polished beauty of marble, veined with threads of silver and gold and even rarer metals, lit by the same sourceless radiance the Jili Ffrwtan had summoned back in Chicago. They rose above me on every side, and since I’d just been to Wrigley, I had a fresh perspective with which to compare them: If Wrigley was any bigger, it wasn’t by much.
The air was full of music. I call it music only because there aren’t any words adequate to describe it. By comparison to any music I’d ever heard played, it was the difference between a foot-powder jingle and a symphony by Mozart, throbbing with passion, merriment, pulsing between an ancient sadness and a fierce joy. Every beat made me feel like joining in—either to weep or to dance, or possibly both at the same time.
And the dancers … I remember men and women and silks and velvets and jewels and more gold and silver and a grace that made me feel huge and awkward and slow.
There aren’t any words.
The Jili Ffrwtan walked forward, taking me with her, and as she went she changed, each step leaving her smaller, her clothing changing as well, until she was attired as the revelers were, in a jeweled gown that left just as much of her just as attractively revealed as the previous outfit. It didn’t seem strange at the time that she should grow so much smaller. I just felt like I was freakishly huge, the outsider, the intruder, hopelessly oversized for that place. We moved forward through the dancers, who spun and flitted out of our path. My escort kept on diminishing until I was walking half-hunched over, her entire hand covering about half of one of my fingers.
She led me to the far end of the hall, pausing several times to call something aside, in a complex, musical tongue, to one of the other Fair Folk. We walked past a miniature table laid out with a not-at-all-miniature feast, and my stomach suddenly informed me that it had never once taken in an ounce of nutrition, and that it really was about time that I finally had something. I had actually taken a couple of steps toward the table before I forced myself to swerve away from it.
“Wise,” said the Jili Ffrwtan. “Unless, of course, you wish to stay.”
“It smells fine,” I replied, my voice hoarse. “But it’s no Burger King.”
She laughed again, putting the fingers of one hand to her still proportionately impressive bosom, and we passed out of the great hall and into a smaller cavern—this one only the size of a train station. There were guards there—guards armored in bejeweled mail, faces masked behind mail veils, guards who barely came up over my knee, but guards nonetheless, bearing swords and spears and bows. They stood at attention and watched me with cold, hard eyes as we passed them. My escort seemed delightedly smug about the entire affair.
I cleared my throat and asked, “Who are we going to see?”
“Why, love, the only one who has authority over the curse upon Wrigley Field,” she said. “His Majesty.”
I swallowed. “The king of your folk? Gwynn ap Nudd, isn’t it?”
“His Majesty will do,” rang out a voice in a high tenor, and I looked up to see one of the Fair Folk sitting on a throne raised several feet above the floor of the chamber, so that my eyes were level with his. “Perhaps even His Majesty, sir.”
Gwynn ap Nudd, ruler of the Tylwyth Teg, was tall—for his folk, anyway—broad shouldered, and ruggedly handsome. Though dressed in what looked like some kind of midnight blue fabric that had the texture of velvet but the supple sweep of silk, he had large-knuckled hands that looked rough and strong. Both his long hair and beard were streaked with fine, symmetrical lines of silver, and jewels shone on his fingers and upon his brow.
I stopped at once and bowed deeply, making sure my head went lower than the faerie king’s, and I stayed there for a good long moment before rising again. “Your Majesty, sir,” I said, in my politest voice. “You are both courteous and generous to grant me an audience. It speaks well of the Tylwyth Teg as a people, that such a one should lead them.”
King Gwynn stared at me for a long moment before letting out a grunt that mixed disbelief with wry satisfaction. “At least they sent one with half a sense of manners this time.”
“I thought you’d like that, sire,” said the Jili Ffrwtan, smiling. “May I present Harry Dresden, magus, a commander of the Order of the Grey Cloak, sometime mortal Champion of Queen Mab and Esquire of the Court of Queen Titania. He begs to speak to you regarding the curse upon the Field of Wrigley in the mortal citadel of Chicago.”
“We know who he is,” Gwynn said testily. “And we know why he is here. Return to your post. We will see to it that he is safely returned.”
The Jili Ffrwtan curtsied deeply and revealingly. “Of course, sire.” Then she simply vanished into a sparkling cloud of lights.
“Guards,” King Gwynn called out. “You will leave us now.”
The guards looked unhappy about it, but they lined up and filed out, every movement in sync with the others. Gwynn waited until the last of them had left the hall and the doors boomed shut before he turned back to me.
“So,” he said. “Who do ye like for the Series this year?”
I blinked my eyes at him several times. It wasn’t one of those questions I’d been expecting. “Um. American League, I’m kind of rooting for Tampa Bay. I’d like to see them beat out the Yankees.”
“Aye,” Gwynn said, nodding energetically. “Who wouldn’t? Bloody Yankees.”
“And in the National League,” I said, “the Cubs are looking good at the moment, though I could see the Phillies pulling something out at the last minute.” I shrugged. “I mean, since the Cubbies are cursed and all.”
“Cursed?” Gwynn said. A fierce smile stretched his face. “Cursed, is it?”
“Or so it is widely believed,” I said.
Gwynn snorted, then rose and descended from his throne. “Walk with me.”
The diminutive monarch walked farther back into the cavern, past his throne and into what resembled some kind of bizarre museum. There were rows and rows of cabinets, each with shelves lined in black velvet and walls of crystalline glass. Each cabinet had a dozen or so artifacts in it; ticket stubs were some of the most common items, though there were also baseballs here and there among them, as well as baseball cards, fan booklets, team pennants, bats, batting gloves, and fielders’ gloves.
As I walked beside him, careful to keep my pace slow enough to let him dictate how fast we were walking, it dawned on me that King Gwynn ap Nudd of the Tylwyth Teg was a baseball fan—as in fanatic—of the original vintage.
“It was you,” I said suddenly. “You were the one they threw out of the game.”
“Aye,” King Gwynn said. “There was business to attend, and by the time I got there the tickets were sold out. I had to find another way into the game.”