“And if you can’t escape? What then? Will I steal you back again? It’s stark mad you are, Madra. The city’s gone to your head.”
The Pooka was charmed with his plan and argued it with cunning and passion. Yet Liam would not be moved. It was illegal, he said, immoral, and dangerous, and that was an end on it. All of which confirmed the Pooka in his opinion that Liam was no more suited for city life than a wild deer. Were the Pooka not there to look after him, he’d surely have been stripped of his savings and left to starve in a ditch before he’d so much as fully exhaled the ship’s air from his lungs.
West, the Pooka thought. He’d like it out west. Tomorrow I’ll think about getting him on a train.
A furious squeal interrupted the Pooka’s planning. Hackles rising, he turned to find himself nose to bristly snout with a big, ugly, foul-breathed sow.
A fight’s as good as a trick for clearing the mind.
The Pooka bared his teeth and growled. The sow’s amber eye glittered madly, and she wheeled and trotted back for the charge. The Pooka spared a glance at Liam, saw him surrounded by a handful of half-grown shoats, squealing and shoving at his legs. Liam was laying about him with his knapsack, cursing and trying to keep his feet in the mired street. If he were to fall, they’d trample him sure as taxes, and possibly eat him where he lay.
Fury rose in the Pooka’s breast, then, pure and mighty. Ducking the sow’s charge, he leaped into the melee around Liam, landing square on the largest of the shoats. The pig threw him off, but not before the Pooka had nipped a chunk out of its ear. Spitting that out, he fastened his teeth into the nearest ham. The shoat it belonged to squealed and bolted, leaving only four and their dam for the Pooka to fight.
He’d not endured a battle so furious since St. Patrick drove the snakes into the sea and the Fair Folk under hill. This fight he intended to win.
At home on his own turf, the Pooka would have made short work of the pigs. At home, even in his dog shape there, he was faster than a bee, mighty as a bull, and tireless as the tide. But weeks of iron-sickness and short commons, stuck in one shape like a chick in its shell, had sapped his strength.
The Pooka slipped in the slurry of mud and dung; a sharp trotter caught him a glancing blow. He felt the bright blood run burning down his flank, and a wave of pain and terror washed through and through him. Immortals cannot die, but they can be killed.
Instinct told the Pooka that he must shift to save himself. Fear whispered that he could not shift, that he’d lost the knack, that he’d been a dog so long, he’d forgotten what it felt like to have hooves or horns or two legs and a coat he could take off.
Seeing her enemy falter, the sow took heart and charged, squealing like a rusty hinge, her tusks aimed like twin spears straight at the Pooka’s soft belly.
Instinct triumphed.
Tossing his streaming mane, the Pooka screamed and aimed his heavy, unshod hooves at the sow’s spine. Quick as he was, she was quicker yet, scrambling out from under his feet at the last instant. The Pooka turned upon the shoats around Liam like an angry sea, striking with hoof and tooth.
The sow, seeing her shoats threatened, charged again, barreling toward the Pooka like a storm full of lightning. Wheeling, the Pooka reared again. This time, his hooves crushed the sow into the mud.
The Pooka stood over the bodies of his enemies and trumpeted his victory into the evening air.
An arm snaked across his withers and clung there. Liam’s voice, shaky with relief, breathed in his ear. “Oh, my heart, my beauty, my champion of champions. That was a battle to be put in songs, and I shall do so. Just as soon as my legs will bear me and my heart climbs down from my throat.”
The Pooka arched his neck proudly and pawed at the corpses piled at his feet. A shoat, recovering from its swoon, heaved up on its trotters and staggered away down the street, straight into the path of a bay gelding harnessed to a shiny black buggy driven by a man in a stovepipe hat.
Bruised and shaken as he was, Liam was no more able to leave a horse in difficulties than swim home to Eire. No sooner did he see the shoat run between the bay’s feet and the bay shy and startle and kick its traces, than he ran to its head and grabbed its harness.
The bay tossed him to and fro like a terrier with a rat, but Liam hung on, murmuring soothing inanities in Irish and English, until the gelding’s terror calmed and it stood silent and shivering.
Liam stroked the bay’s nose and looked around him.
The street was a shambles, with the corpses of his late assailants bleeding into the mud. A crowd of day laborers stood all around, goggling with their mouths at half cock. Off to one side, Madra the hound was licking the blood from a gash on his flank.
The gelding’s driver climbed down from the buggy, his cheeks as white as his snowy shirtfront.
“Thank you.” His voice, though flatly American, was kind. “That was bravely done. I take it you know something about horses?”
Liam touched his forehead with his knuckle. “I do so, sir.”
“Ostler?” the gentleman asked.
“Back in my own country, I was a trainer. Racehorses.”
The gentleman looked startled. “A horse trainer? I’ll be blowed! Do you mind if I ask your name?”
“It’s Liam O’Casey, if it please your honor.”
The gentleman laughed, showing strong teeth. “Honor me no honors, Mr. O’Casey. I’m plain William Graves, and I breed horses.” Mr. Graves produced a pasteboard card. “Here’s my card. I’ve a little farm up past the orphan asylum—Eighty-fifth Street, more or less. If you care to come there tomorrow, it may be that we’ll find something to talk about.”
Mr. Graves shook Liam’s nerveless hand, climbed back up into his buggy, collected the reins, and drove off.
“Well, that was a piece of luck and no mistake.”
It was Madra’s voice, but when Liam turned, he saw no dog beside him but a tall man in a black-skirted coat as filthy as it was out of fashion. His skin was pale, his crow-black hair was tied with a strip of leather, and his narrow eyes were set on an upward tilt, with his black brows flying above them like wings.
“You can be shutting your jaw now, Liam O’Casey,” the Pooka said. “I’m not such a sore sight as that, surely.”
“Madra?”
“For shame, and me standing before you on my two legs as fine a figure of a man as you are yourself.” The Pooka linked his arm through Liam’s and propelled him down the street. “Come away to Maeve McDonough’s and stand yourself a whiskey for a good day’s work well done. You may stand me to one as well.”
Looking back over his shoulder, Liam saw a pair of cart horses in thick collars pulling a piano in a wagon over the broken bodies of the swine. “My knapsack,” he said sadly. “My tin whistle.”
“The works of the late lamented J. J. Callanan were beyond saving,” the Pooka said. “The tin whistle, on the other hand … ” He held it out to Liam, dented, but whole. “I saved your purse, too.”